Stars Between the Sun and Moon (17 page)

Chapter Twenty-six

A few weeks
later, some of the other prisoners and I snuck into the storage room to steal some food. One woman lifted the edge of a dark green blanket in the corner of the room, thinking it covered some rice. We were tucking turnip into our pants when she stifled a scream. We all came running.

In the light streaming in from the open door, we could see that the blanket concealed the body of an elderly man. I had seen the mounds outside on the prison grounds where the guards buried people. Perhaps they were waiting for more bodies to bury together, storing this one near our food.

This man's face was rigid, his body stone. He did not seem human anymore.

Then, with a jolt that shot through my body, I realized I recognized the dead man.

I had met him on one of my journeys into China to trade food. The man walked with a limp, and I was surprised he could keep up with me and the others who were crossing. He was so frail I feared he would collapse. But he made it, his face red, his cheeks puffing as he gasped for air. He wanted to trade some fish for medicine he said was for a grandchild.

I had seen the man again when we were both prisoners at Chongjin Jipgyulso. One morning, when we were both part of a group being marched to the train station, he whispered to me that he had smuggled 2,000 yuan into the labour camp. The guards, he told me, had already found 1,000 yuan and taken it. But he still had the rest, he said, for when he got out. Tears filled my eyes now, thinking that this man had never got what he was so desperately hoping for.

The other prisoners had left the storeroom by now, so I was alone with the body. It struck me, in looking at the man, that the purest part of him had departed. Only the shell he had borrowed to live this life remained. My mind mulled over what happens to us when we die. But my hands, as if acting on their own, searched inside his socks and then his pockets, looking for the 1,000 yuan. But someone else had already taken it.

As time went
by, those inmates who were strong enough were sent to farms each day to work the land. But my body was too weak from all the sitting, and from sharing so much of my food with others. My legs were crooked, and I walked like the old man had, with a limp, my back hunched over. The welts created on my buttocks by the pressure of my heels had become open sores. The only cellmates who remained with me during the day were the women who had been condemned.

One of the women was only nineteen. She had been sentenced to death for trafficking another woman into China. She usually sat quietly, gazing into her large bowl of wheat rice and vegetables. Inmates who were scheduled to be executed were given extra food.

Another woman I recognized from school, though we had never spoken as students. She and her mother-in-law had also been convicted of human trafficking.

“My husband, who cut lumber, wasn't getting enough food for all of us,” my former schoolmate told me. “And there were so many children, orphans turned beggars, streaming into the city from the countryside. They had even less food than we did. So my mother-in-law and I took them to China. We gave them better lives.”

“We received three hundred yuan for each child,” her mother-in-law added softly. “We sold them to the Chinese, and we bought food with the money.”

“What did the Chinese do with them?” I asked.

“Labourers on farms . . . the girls were married, I suppose,” my former schoolmate replied. “During the famine, everyone in the city left thinking there was food in the countryside. In the countryside, people left thinking the city dwellers had food.”

One afternoon in the hallway outside our cell door, we could hear a heavy object being lifted and then lowered. As it hit the ground, the floor reverberated. Moving them one by one, the guards were carrying the poles that the condemned women would be tied to before being shot. The nineteen-year-old rolled up into a tiny ball and sobbed.

“You did well,” I said to my schoolmate after the guards had moved off into the distance. “You saved lives,” I told her mother-in-law, wanting them both to go to their deaths without guilt.

My schoolmate nodded. “Many were girls who had been living on the streets,” she said. “We were assured they would be married off to good Chinese men, rich men who would support them.”

I didn't have the heart to tell her that all marriage brokers made that claim.

“Our interrogator appeared to be kind and understanding,” my schoolmate said. “He promised he would request leniency for us if I admitted to selling the street children. I believed him, but he tricked me. When my mother-in-law and I were sentenced to be killed, I cried for a week, but now I have accepted my fate.”

“When we die and go to the next life, the guards do not want us to be hungry,” her mother-in-law continued. “I receive more food in one sitting here than I have eaten since before our eternal father died. But what use is it to me?”

The old woman with the bald patches and the rash on her face spoke up, directing her words at me. “Promise me, when you go back to China, that you will not be caught again.” I nodded as she pinched my arm with her bony fingers. “Will you visit my family when you are released, on the way to your town?” she asked, her eyes searching my own. She held my arm tight, and I could feel the panic move through her.

“Yes,” I said, wanting to soothe her in any way I could. “Just tell me where I can find them.”

Her grasp loosened a bit as she told me the name of her town and of her son and daughters. “Let them know what happens to us here. Tell them what happened to me, and then encourage them to leave Chosun,” she begged. My own hand was shaking as I peeled her fingernails from my skin.

Scratching sounds came from the hallway: the guards were dragging shovels along the cement floor.

“They're digging holes for the poles now,” my former schoolmate said. I was amazed at her poise and calm.

“And then they'll dig our graves,” said the woman who had asked me to visit her family.

The nineteen-year-old was still crying as the guard opened the cell door and called out her name. Next the guard called for my old schoolmate, her mother-in-law and the older woman. The cell door was held ajar, and the women were ordered to walk out backwards in single file.

When the door had clanked shut, I ran to the small window in our cell and peered out. From there, I could see the women were being directed to a waiting truck. Some heavyset guards picked up the nineteen-year-old and tossed her into the back of the vehicle as if she was a sack of rice. Her hands—all of the women's hands—had been tied behind them with heavy rope. The guards threw my schoolmate and her mother-in-law in next. When all four women were in the truck, guards sitting on top of their prone bodies, the vehicle drove away.

Standing alone at the window, I began to wail. My tears stopped only when I heard gunshots in the distance, each woman shot four times. By the time the other inmates had returned from their farm duties, my suffering had left me with nothing inside except emptiness. I returned to the position the night guard would demand from us as the other prisoners entered the cell.

The condemned women's bowls of uneaten food still sat on the cell floor. The inmates who had been in prison the longest grabbed the bowls for their own and devoured the rice and vegetables that remained.

“Do you know
what they do with pregnant women here?” one of my cellmates asked me in a hushed tone.

Over the past month, the guards had become less strict. I had overheard some conversations in which they mentioned the president of South Korea visiting Chosun. The south was conceding to Chosun, the guards said. Perhaps because of that imminent victory, which the guards seemed to taste, we were allowed to spend time in our cells lying down now, talking without fear of being beaten as a group.

Nonetheless, talking about pregnancy would not be allowed. I remembered the pregnant woman I had met in the labour camp whose husband was in the next cell.

“No,” I replied in a low voice. “I met a woman once who was afraid the guards would make her abort her fetus. But I never imagined that to be true.”

“It is true,” my cellmate said, a look of horror on her face. “Four women in the last prison where I was were forced to abort their babies. One of the babies was still alive when it came out. It was placed on the cold floor until it died. The mother was hysterical, but the guards didn't care. They put the fetuses in plastic bags and stuck them down the hole in the latrine.”

My mouth went dry as I thought about Sungmin. I looked around the cell. How many of these women had lost a child like I had? My heart grew heavy.

The next day when I used the latrine, I looked down the hole and saw pieces of clear plastic poking up through the feces. I shuddered. I remembered the man I had been sold to in China and the pigs in his village that had eaten our waste. My own people were at least cleaner than the Chinese, I had thought at the time. But the famine in Chosun had changed so much. Now, or so I was being told, our feces and our dead babies were shovelled up once a week and taken to the farms to be used as fertilizer.

The fifteenth day
of the eighth month was national liberation day. That afternoon, the guards took us outside to sing revolutionary songs. I sat on the lawn with my hands folded in my lap, my legs crossed painfully.

Suddenly, a guard with a bellowing voice began calling out names and ordering the individuals to stand. Jung Sunhwa, he said last.

I rose silently, uncertain what was going on.

“Get your belongings and get out!” he shouted at us. “Do not ever commit your offences again. Through the generosity of our esteemed General, you are free to go.”

There was nothing for most of us to take. I left behind the pad I used for menstruation, my toothbrush, my spoon and my coat knowing another prisoner would claim them as her own. With the others, I exited through the big room we had once entered, grabbing a pair of shoes to put on my feet. My own shoes were no longer there. Some other freed inmate had taken them. So I picked a pair of reddish-brown ankle boots with a small heel.

I limped down the dirt road, the sun setting behind me. I breathed in the humid air and listened to the electric whir of the cicadas. Another woman from my cell came up beside me and took my hand. We continued on together. We were free. I squeezed the woman's hand. But so were those who had died, I thought.

“I will go back to China,” she said as we climbed over an embankment into a barren field. The trees had been cut down for firewood, the grasses clipped for food.

“So will I,” I replied. “But this time, we won't get caught. We'll never return to Chosun.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

My mother was
speechless when she opened the door to our family home and saw me there.

“Your brother has brought us some white rice and sea cucumbers,” she managed to say finally, her voice nearly inaudible. “Come.”

She hobbled ahead of me down the hall, her body overtaken with tremors. “Your brother has been feeding us,” she called over her shoulder, “but then on his way back from China, he was caught. He's in prison now.”

I closed my eyes to fight back the tears. “He'll receive an amnesty like I did,” I told myself, trying to be optimistic. I didn't want to imagine Hyungchul enduring what I had.

The walls in the house were grey, paint peeling off the plaster in some places. My parents no longer had the energy to clean; I could see that in my mother's decaying body. I looked around the room. Dust had settled on the few pieces of wooden furniture they owned. The floor coverings bore the marks of footprints, spilled liquids and dead insects.

The odour in the house was thick and suffocating: a mix of years of my father's cigarette smoking and the sickly sweet smell of my mother's demise. As I walked past the room in which my parents' bedding was folded, the ends of the blankets torn and frayed, the smell of her death seemed more pronounced. It is in sleep, after all, that the bridge into tomorrow is found. The span of her bridge was becoming shorter.

The framed photographs of our eternal leader Kim Il-sung and the General Kim Jong-il hung in their usual places on the wall. I approached them slowly. The frames had been dusted, the glass cleaned. The pictures were immaculate inside this house that was falling down.

My mother set
a bowl of corn rice in front of me at the wooden table. I had not bathed in weeks. Dirt lay deep under my broken fingernails. My mother shuffled over to the container carrying water, dampened a grey cloth, and then sat down next to me. She took one of my hands in her own and began to clean it, the way she had done when I was a small girl.

“I am not proud of myself,” she said, lowering her head, her lips trembling. “I haven't always done the right things.”

I remained silent, unsure where her words were headed.

“When I was in school, I was very smart,” she continued. “I became class representative in my final year. A Party official took notice of me, an official who knew my background. One afternoon, I was given a notice by my teacher to attend a meeting with the official at his office. I was asked to take a certain position in the Party, a secret position, a position I was not allowed to turn down.”

My brow furrowed. I had spent my life believing my mother was unable to hold any position within the Party. “Does Father know?” I asked.

“No,” my mother said, scrubbing the palm of my hand. “Every month, I had to submit five pages to the Party. Each page had to be about one person in our community who was doing something illegal.”

“You were a spy!” I exclaimed.

“Even if I had nothing to report,” she sighed, “I had to write something.” She paused. “I thought it was time you knew my secret.”

My body was stiff with shock. “What did you do?”

“I wrote about your friends,” she said. Her eyes drifted away.

“Like the cigarettes?” I asked. I remembered the time I had been at a neighbour's house and seen cartons of Chinese cigarettes piled in the corner. My friend had told me her mother was selling them. Her mother disappeared shortly after that. When she returned, she said that the Party had imprisoned her, accusing her of capitalism.

“Yes,” my mother admitted.

“And when I told you Sumi's mother was drying fish and had sea cucumbers and octopus . . . ” More memories came flooding back.

“All Sumi's mother had to do was write a letter of contrition,” my mother said, her eyes now fixed on mine. “She was taken to the police station and had to give up all the items. But she was safe. No harm came to her. And anyway, she was doing something illegal. She deserved to be . . . ”

“Did you have something to do with Daechul?” I blurted, not allowing her to finish.

My mother looked down at her lap.

“What did you get in exchange for your words?”

“Fabric, sometimes, for clothes. Extra food. Sometimes the agent came to the house to pick up my writings. You met him.”

“Who?” I demanded, thinking back to the adults I had met in our house as a child.

“You may not remember him,” she said. “I told your father he was a work colleague picking up my school reports. He once smiled at you and gave you a candy.”

I thought I remembered the man, but I wasn't sure.

“In the second year of the hunger,” my mother went on, “the security agent was promoted to a senior position in another part of the county. His successor asked if I would continue reporting. Everyone, including you, was now doing something illegal. I told him no. I was afraid all my children would go to prison if I pressed on with my duties. I thought they would imprison me for refusing. I was willing to risk that to save you. But they didn't care.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

She put the cloth down and, with a shaking hand, pushed the rice toward me. “At the time, I was doing what I thought was my duty. But now I believe I was wrong.”

“What other regrets do you have?” I looked at the food but couldn't eat it, despite the deep hollow of hunger inside of me.

“I'll heat up some water so you can wash all over,” she said, ignoring my question.

I watched her pick up a metal container and begin pumping cool well water into it from the faucet on the wall. Anger choked me as the water sloshed in the bottom. It was a long time since I had thought about Sungmin. I had pushed thoughts of him far away, since they pierced me like a knife. Now, however, I wanted my mother to acknowledge my pain and the role she had played in creating it.

I had bathed
and was towel drying my hair when my sister arrived at the house. She had brought some salt with her, so we could perform some of the rituals we'd learned as children to cleanse the house of negative spirits. I sprinkled the salt three times over the doorstep, along with some water from the river.

“That will fight off negative energy and the ghosts of ancestors who may still be walking on the earth plane and haunting us,” my sister said when we had finished.

Once we were seated at the table, Sunyoung trimmed what she could from my fingernails and toenails. “Wrap the trimmings in newspaper and put them down the latrine,” she advised me. “When you do so, make a wish that you will never have to go back to prison again.”

I nodded.

“And then eat some raw tofu,” she added. “That will ensure that negative events don't repeat themselves.”

My father joined us soon afterwards. He had been working in the shed behind the house, where he stored mechanical parts, nuts, bolts and wires he had fished from his factory's garbage bin before retiring. He now made machines and equipment, including ploughs for farming, my mother had told me, trading the items in the rural villages. My father smiled when he saw me. For the first time since I had married Myungin, I felt welcome in his home.

As we talked by candlelight, I learned that my family had not heard from Hyungchul in more than a year. My parents suspected he was in prison and recently their fears had been confirmed by a Party representative. My brother was in Jeongeori Kyohwaso, rumoured to be one of the worst prisons in the country. The news knocked the breath from my body.

After a few
weeks had gone by, I felt strong enough to accompany my father on his journey to sell a rice grinder he had made. We walked along mountain paths to a town where men from two families fought to see who could offer my father the highest price. In the end, my father chose the offer of a lesser amount of rice and fewer won, letting the grinder go to the man whose family's rice grinder had broken a few months earlier. “I'll make a new one for you for the spring,” he promised the man who lost the bidding. “You can manage until then on your old machine. This other family's need is greater.”

“Your father's inventions are sought after,” the first man's wife said to me as she gave us some water from a jug to drink. “We all save what rice we can, hoping that he'll visit. We would not have survived the hunger or the floods, the ground would not have been tilled as well as it was, had your father not come into our lives.”

As we walked back home through the mountains, I looked at my father with a respect I had not experienced before. His breathing was laboured on the steep hills.

“I think underneath your reserve, you care about other people,” I said to him.

He waved off my words. “You are not to return China,” he said sternly, returning to the father I had always known.

I remained silent, not knowing what to say.

“I can sense what you are planning to do,” he continued in his harsh voice. “You are not loyal to our great father.”

I felt as if my face had been slapped. For a moment, I had felt warmth in my father's presence. Now, as always, he felt very far away.

I knew I
couldn't stay in Chosun. My parents had less to eat than ever, now that Hyungchul was in prison and could no longer bring them and my siblings food from China. Staying in their home, I was a burden to them. My sister and my brother, Hyungwoo, lived nearby, but they both had families to feed. I had to return to China and find a way to send my parents rice and vegetables. My father would never accept my decision but I could not abide by his order.

I told no one I was leaving on a fall day when the leaves wove a red and yellow carpet for me to walk on. I departed with nothing but the clothes on my back, heading to the train station at dawn.

I stood on the platform shuffling my feet from side to side, hoping the guards would think I was waiting for a train to take me to work or meeting someone arriving from their night shift. But whenever I noticed the guards looking in another direction, my eyes scanned the station.

After half an hour, a woman of about sixty came toward me. Her body was hunched, her hair was grey and she walked with a limp. She moved up beside me and stood as if she too was waiting for the train.

“Would you like to go to the other side?” she asked, putting her hand over her mouth and pretending to cough.

“Yes,” I said quickly, not looking at her, fearing I might alert the guards.

As we left the platform, I took the woman's elbow. She leaned on me as if we were close relatives, perhaps mother and daughter. Her voice was raspy, as if her chest was full of water. I wondered how this old woman was going to get me across to China. A shiver ran through me, thinking this could be a trap.

But once we were well past the station, the woman stopped limping, and her back straightened. She dusted white powder from her hair. “We're going to my house first,” she said in a low, strong voice, all traces of her wheeze gone. She now appeared twenty years younger.

“When are we leaving?” I asked.

“In a few days,” she said. “There is something I need to take care of first.”

The woman's home was dark and damp, heavy with the odour of fried fish. As a human trafficker, she had money to buy bootlegged items, including fish. Sitting on the floor was a young woman with sad eyes who was feeding two young boys. I guessed they were about nine and seven, though it was difficult to tell. The children were thin, dirty-faced, eating their wheat rice with grubby fingers. In the woman's arms was a third child who was wrapped in a cotton sash and suckling on her breast. I wondered if she knew what she was doing, attempting to cross the Tumen River with two children and a baby.

“The boys are going back on the afternoon train,” said the trafficker, as if reading my thoughts. “She can't take the children with her to China. They are too young for me to sell.”

The room fell quiet, except for the sound of the baby.

When the two boys had finished their meal, a man entered from another room. He and the human trafficker pulled the baby loose from its mother and got the boys into standing positions.

“Give them the money,” the trafficker ordered the mother. She handed the boys some won she had wrapped into a tight ball and then some rice cakes for the train.

“We'll take them to the station,” the trafficker continued, as one of the boys clutched at his mother's waist whimpering.

“You're going to stay with Halmuni. Mommy will be home soon,” the woman said in a weak voice, unable to look directly at her children.

As the trafficker placed the baby in the arms of the older child, the infant began to wail. The cries of the three children grew deafening.

The mother moaned, a sound that came from deep inside her chest and escalated until it exploded. I had never heard such a sound before. Then I remembered Sungmin being ripped from my arms. I must have sounded exactly the same.

When the woman fell to the floor overcome by grief and remorse, I fell with her.