Dear Leader (42 page)

Taking out the phone, I flipped it open and turned it on. My hands were shaking wildly, and I could feel my pulse thumping in my neck.

The phone rang immediately. I answered, ‘I found it!’

‘Yes. It’s great to meet you, sir. We already know who you are.’

We?
As in South Korean spies? Or journalists?

‘We’ve been trying to reach you, and it’s wonderful to meet you at last. Please listen carefully now. You are in great danger. The Chinese authorities have not only sent out their border guards and police, but have also mobilised agents of the Ministry of State Security. And North Korean agents arrived at their Embassy here in Beijing a couple of days ago.’

The Chinese Ministry of State Security? That was their secret police. What crime had I committed against the Chinese Communist Party?

‘So for the safety of us all, you must do exactly as I ask you to.’

‘Yes, I understand.’

‘First, I’d like to ask you something. When you were in Shenyang, did you provide the South Korean journalist with any information in the form of documents?’

‘No, we only spoke on the phone.’

‘I see. Good. Please make your way quickly towards the main road and flag a cab down. Call me back when you’re in the cab and I’ll tell the driver where to go.’

I did as I was told. I went out to the main road and I waved down a cab coming towards me with its light on. For a moment I thought
the driver had not seen me. But then he stopped maybe ten metres ahead of where I was standing and reversed the vehicle until the car was right in front of me. When I got in he said something to me in Chinese, but I signalled for him to wait and called the South Korean man again.

‘Hello? I’m in the cab,’ I said.

‘Good. Now pass the phone to the driver.’

Maybe the driver was annoyed by the soft foreign voice on the phone, because he responded roughly. He didn’t even look back as he passed me the phone, and took off in a hurry.

As the taxi made its way to our unknown destination, I kept looking behind us. I was not so much concerned that hidden eyes were watching me but, rather, I was afraid that at this breakneck speed we might get too far ahead of my minder. I sat in anxiety and even gestured at the driver to slow down when he accelerated too hard for my liking.

The phone rang again. ‘There’s 2000 yuan in the plastic bag,’ the voice said.

‘Where?’ Only then did I realise that the other object in the plastic bag was a bundle of cash.

‘Give the driver 100 yuan when you get out. He can keep the change. After turning into the next street, the taxi will stop.’

When the taxi pulled up I found that we had come to a hotel, but I didn’t have time to register its name. The voice on the phone guided me straight to the café in the hotel lobby. It instructed me to order a coffee and even told me how I should sit.

‘Well, that’s it from our end,’ the voice concluded. ‘In five minutes, a man will come to sit at your table. All you have to do from now on is whatever he says. Goodbye.’

When the call ended, my lifeline was gone too, and the mobile phone became an ordinary object again. I felt a rush of impending disaster. I feared that the man’s words, ‘from now on’, were an
instruction to forge a new life as a fugitive with the 1850 yuan that remained after the cab fare and cup of coffee. Why else would they have given me so much cash?

As each minute passed on the mobile phone’s tiny screen, my breathing grew louder. I had experienced more despair than I could ever have imagined when I lacked one yuan with which to make a phone call, or ten more yuan with which I could have shared a drink with Young-min. Yet the possession of 1850 yuan gave me no consolation. It lay heavy in my hands, and I clutched it because there was nothing else to hold on to.

‘Mr Jang?’ I started at the sound of a man’s voice behind me. I made a move to stand but felt his hand on my shoulder. His arrival after exactly five minutes seemed to confirm his trustworthiness, and when he finally stood before me, his physical presence was as solid as a mountain. He was a smartly dressed man in his early fifties, dapper in his freshly pressed suit and gleaming glasses.

‘Thank you! Thank you so much for coming here,’ I said.

‘Please stop looking round. Look only at me,’ he muttered quietly as he took a cigarette from a red pack. ‘I wanted to meet you, Mr Jang, in person,’ he continued, ‘so I asked a friend to guide you here. It’s a relief that you two were able to connect at the station.’

‘Thank you for organising that. I had no trouble getting here.’

He nodded. ‘I have a contact in the Chinese authorities. About two weeks ago, he mentioned you. You crossed the river with a friend, is that right?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Why did you separate?’

‘We were looking for a place to stay the night, and we thought there was nowhere that would let two men into their house.’

‘I understand. Just for routine verification, do you have your identification documents with you?’

‘Yes, I do.’

I reached into my inside pocket but hesitated before taking them out, and put my empty hand slowly back on the table. My other hand, with which I had been rubbing my knee, I also placed on the table.

‘And what if I don’t have my papers?’ I found myself saying. The man flinched, almost imperceptibly, and I saw something in his eyes that clashed with his suave façade. I looked into them as I spoke my next words: ‘If I don’t have my identification documents, will I be denied asylum? I’m speaking Korean right now. Is that not proof enough that I’m one of you? You said you learned of my situation from your contact in the Chinese authorities. Since then – as a matter of fact, only a couple of days ago – my friend committed suicide. He and I, we’re not the only North Koreans being pursued on Chinese soil. There are thousands of us who are fleeing from North Korea. If we don’t have our papers, do we all have to die like him?’

My voice had risen. The man looked quickly round the café and said quietly, ‘If your friend hadn’t made that decision, we would have rescued him by some means or other. To be honest, my colleagues and I, we’re very sorry for your friend’s death. Mr Jang, I understand what you’ve been through, and I won’t ask you for your identification documents again. It’s time. Let’s go.’

I was surprised by the man’s gentle response to my outburst. He even took the trouble to remind me not to forget the bundle of money, which had indeed completely slipped my mind.

We walked out of the hotel through the main entrance. A black sedan immediately pulled up in front of us. It must have been waiting. The man opened the back door for me and then sat in front with the driver. We had only been moving for about two minutes when the car pulled into an alley. Before I could register what was going on, both back doors opened and two other men slid in on either side of me, trapping me into the middle of the seat.

Their brute strength was in line with the viciousness of agents from North Korea’s Ministry of State Security, whom I had constantly
feared coming up against since crossing the Tumen River. I suddenly remembered the warning that Mr Shin had repeated several times as we left Yanji. He had explained that in a large Chinese city, it was not uncommon to meet a broker with connections to North Korea who might decide to betray a refugee in his care.

A faint whimper escaped my mouth and I coughed to hide it. Had South Korean spies really known all along about the details of my escape with Young-min, and even about his suicide? Why had I trusted so easily? My chest tightened with painful regret.

The two big men sitting on either side of me were probably carrying out the standard procedure used by North Korean agents to escort a criminal. I leaned slightly towards the man on my left, wondering if I might smell something distinctively North Korean about him, such as North Korean cigarettes or aftershave. If I did, I would put up a struggle. But neither he nor the man on my right smelled of anything. I noticed a scuffed patch on the knee of the man to my right. A man from a developed country such as South Korea wouldn’t wear such scruffy trousers, I thought, and I shut my eyes in despair.

I remembered something I’d been told by a friend whose father worked in North Korea’s Ministry of State Security. When their overseas agents brought home a criminal considered a flight risk, they would first break his limbs and then put him in a coffin for transport over the border. I started to believe that this car was headed not for the South Korean Embassy but for the North Korean one. There, these two men would break my limbs and my helpless body would be shipped back to North Korea in a coffin. I began to ache at the joints. I even envied Young-min, who had been able to kill himself quickly. As our vehicle hurtled towards what I was sure was hell, I considered whether I might now kill myself by biting my tongue and bleeding to death.

Perhaps fifteen minutes later, one of the men spoke to me. ‘Mr
Jang, you are safe now. You can smile. Look over there – at that flag. It’s the South Korean flag.’

I looked blankly towards the voice and then ducked my head to see where he was pointing. It was the national flag of South Korea. I could really see the flag with the white background against a sky turning blue, flying from the roof of the South Korean Embassy.

I looked in disbelief at the men in the car. They were all grinning.

I cannot describe in these pages how I was able to enter the Embassy compound safely. Neither can I say how I passed through the front gate without a passport, while Chinese officers stood guard. In fact, there are many things I cannot yet explain in this book, for the sake of all North Koreans seeking freedom after me.

But what I felt when I set foot in the Embassy compound, that experience is not mine alone to savour. It belongs to freedom, and I must share it for freedom’s sake.

‘Mr Jang, you’re on South Korean soil. You’re a free man now.’

As the embassy official embraced me with those words, I asked him to please repeat them again. Even after hearing him speak the words twice, I asked again. My desperation was never so intense as at that moment, before I was really sure that I had made it through.

As I stood there nervously, glancing at the backs of the Chinese officers at their posts just outside the gates, the embassy official hugged me tight and told me again, ‘You have set foot on South Korean soil. Mr Jang, you are standing on South Korean soil.’

Only then, knowing that where I stood marked the end of my escape and the beginning of my life as a free man, I burst into tears. I had no words, only endless tears, both for myself and for Young-min.

The embassy official tried to calm me down and patted my back. But these were not my tears alone, and not for me to hold back. I cried from my heart in silence:
Long live freedom. Long live freedom. Long live freedom!

TODAY, I LIVE
as a South Korean citizen. It wasn’t easy to move into this world from a life that was dictated from above, and institutional in every detail.

When I was formally told that I was now a citizen of South Korea, my heart felt like bursting because I had been recognised as one among a nation of equals, rather than a subject who served one man alone. In North Korea, loyalty was the point of life; disobedience led to death. That was all.

My first day of freedom is fresh in my memory. I had spent eight months being debriefed in a safe house in Seoul, and set out on my own as a South Korean citizen on 17 December 2004. That night, I wandered the streets of Seoul into the early hours, taking in my newfound freedom.

Then, suddenly, a car screeched to a halt and a man cursed at me out of the window: ‘Fucking son of a bitch! Watch where you’re going!’ It was a taxi driver who had had to brake hard for me as I crossed on a red light. The glow of freedom I’d been basking in was dispelled in an instant. The taxi driver gestured at me and cursed some more before driving on. As the shock subsided, I could only grin as I realised that I was now truly confirmed as a free man, no more or less entitled than anyone else. On that first night out on my own I tried to call Mr Shin, but his number was no longer listed. I hadn’t been able to contact him immediately following my arrival in South Korea because I was in the safe house. Although I had no means of contacting him other than that number, we must have been destined to meet again, because three years later I ran into him
unexpectedly in a public sauna in a northern Seoul district. When his North Korean refugee wife was granted asylum in South Korea, he too had been allowed to settle here. He was living in a government-sponsored flat for refugees in Seoul with his wife and two sons. He, a Korean-Chinese, and I, a North Korean, became very close: our friendship remains deep for we both live without an extended family in a foreign land.

Mr Shin didn’t have Cho-rin’s number any more. Although he couldn’t help with that, he had good news to share about his uncle, Chang-yong. With the $700 we had given him (less the $100 I had taken back from his wife), he had eventually bought not the cultivator he’d talked so excitedly about, but two fine cows.

When I got a passport the following year, I made a trip back to Shenyang, where everything had become unrecognisable. I couldn’t find Cho-rin, her uncle or her fiancé to thank them for their help. But I did meet the owner of Kyonghoeru, and was able not only to pay back my fare but to repay his kindness properly. I returned to the house of the old man in Longjing, but the building had been replaced by a modern construction and a new family had moved in. I was also able to enjoy a warm reunion with the Beijing correspondent of the South Korean newspaper. Recounting the experience, he said that he would never have dreamed of a North Korean defector reaching out to him like that, and I joked that the newspaper was very naïve.

In January 2005, I became a senior analyst at the National Security Research Institute in Seoul, which falls under the auspices of the National Intelligence Service. A former specialist on South Korea for the North, I was now in the opposite role.

While intelligence was my profession, in 2008 I decided to renew my career as a poet. This time, though, I was a free man and a poet in exile, no longer a poet of the state. My first publication was a book of poetry titled
I Sell my Daughter for 100 Won
, published under my pen-name, Jang Jin-sung, and based on the manuscript I had brought with me from Pyongyang. Perhaps through the grace of its having
been rescued and protected by Young-min during our escape from North Korea, the book immediately became a bestseller, taking the number one position on the lists of major bookstores. The title poem of the book has been adapted for television, as a song, and as a play that was performed in South Korea’s largest theatre at Seoul Arts Center.