The Beloved Daughter (5 page)

“Wake up!” Mee-Kyong hissed in my ear.

Disoriented and exhausted, I turned toward my friend. She held her finger over her lips and nodded toward the prisoner on night duty. As my blurry vision began to focus, I saw that the young girl who was assigned to keep watch was asleep in her chair. Prisoners in the dorm were required to serve one night shift each month. They had to stay awake and report everything that happened: which prisoners slept, which prisoners stayed awake, which prisoners complained before going to bed. They even reported sleep-talking, so every night I begged myself not to utter something incriminating while I slept.

The fact that the prisoner on night duty was asleep meant two things: that she would get a beating if another prisoner reported her, and that I could talk to Mee-Kyong about her sudden change of mood. A month ago, as if overnight, Mee-Kyong’s effervescent smile gave way to a constant moody pout. I suspected Agent Pang was somehow responsible for Mee-Kyong’s sullenness, but our twelve-hour shifts in the cutting line and nightly self-criticism sessions that could last for hours left little time for conversation. 

“What is it?” I asked Mee-Kyong in a hush, trying not to wake up any of the other girls nearby.

Mee-Kyong rubbed her hand in a circle over her abdomen and widened her eyes.

“Pregnant?” I mouthed, trying to conceal my surprise. I never thought that Mee-Kyong might one day conceive, probably because I didn’t want to admit that I might find myself in the same situation one day. How could a starving teenager possibly bear a child in the squalor of our prison camp? Mee-Kyong nodded and bit her lip.

“Does he know?” I inquired, wondering what fate might befall Mee-Kyong if Agent Pang found out about her condition.

Mee-Kyong shook her head. “What should I do?” Her question surprised me. Mee-Kyong was my teacher and guide in the camp. She never asked me for advice about anything. I wanted to repay my friend for her years of kindness toward me, so I forced my foggy mind to think through Mee-Kyong’s options.

She could tell Agent Pang about the pregnancy and trust that he would keep her out of trouble. Yet Agent Pang was so volatile there was no way to guess how he might react. The camp administrators generally ignored what went on at lunch breaks between the factory guards and their office maids, but Mee-Kyong explained to me that an officer who became too indiscreet in his relationship with one of the prisoners risked a shameful demotion. Agent Pang might assess the situation calmly and bribe a comrade in exchange for a pill Mee-Kyong could take,
no questions asked. Or he might explode and take out his wrath on Mee-Kyong herself. I’m sure Mee-Kyong keenly remembered our fellow prisoner who vanished a year ago when she was discovered to be pregnant by a camp guard.

With Agent Pang’s assistance, Mee-Kyong might receive permission from the National Security Agency to marry another prisoner. Then at least her pregnancy would appear legitimate. After a one-month maternity leave from the garment factory, Mee-Kyong could continue working with Agent Pang’s baby strapped to her back. But there was no way to arrange a wedding for Mee-Kyong soon enough since prisoners were only allowed to marry on major holidays. We just celebrated the birthday of the Dear Leader’s father in April, and the next possible wedding day wouldn’t come until New Year’s, which would be much too late into the pregnancy to protect Mee-Kyong at all. Besides, I doubted that Agent Pang would agree to let Mee-Kyong marry someone else. It was more likely that any prisoner who wed Mee-Kyong would find himself at the other end of Agent Pang’s revolver before the bridal days were over.

I thought about Officer Yeong who hired me as his office maid last winter. Our relationship, though mutually beneficial, didn’t involve anything of the intimacy and passion that Mee-Kyong shared with Agent Pang. I didn’t dare broach the subject with him. In the four months I served as Officer Yeong’s office maid, he didn’t even take the time to learn my name.

Another prisoner in Mee-Kyong’s situation once tried to sneak into the medical clinic to find an abortive pill but was caught and publically executed as a warning to all of the young women. I was still in middle school at the time. It had been one of my first lessons about the origins of pregnancy.

Every option I thought through seemed equally impossible. Mee-Kyong never shied away from any trial or hardship, especially if it involved the dramatic. I watched her hugging her knees and realized I couldn’t help my friend. I shrugged and offered a weak smile. “I’m sorry.” I hated myself for not having any advice to offer.

Instead of deflating like I expected, Mee-Kyong raised her chin. She shook her long hair and opened her mouth in a melodramatic yawn. “It’ll be all right.”

“What are you going to do?” I wondered.

“Do?” Mee-Kyong pretended to laugh under her breath, but ended up coughing instead. We held our breaths for several minutes to make sure none of our neighbors woke up. The prisoner on night duty remained slouched in her chair. Finally Mee-Kyong scooted closer to me. “I have time. It’s not like I’ll be gaining any weight the way they feed us here,” she joked. “I’ll make sure Agent Pang doesn’t get suspicious. It’ll work out.”

I wanted to believe that Mee-Kyong was so resourceful she could find a way out of this dilemma, but I had seen too much in the past four years at Camp 22 to have any hope left for my friend. Even if Mee-Kyong managed to conceal her pregnancy for the entire gestation, that still didn’t solve the more difficult problem.

“What will you do when the baby’s born?”

Mee-Kyong shrugged her shoulders again. “I’ll let you know next winter,” she promised.

Playing off of Mee-Kyong’s forced confidence, I smiled. Then for the first time in several years, I prayed.

As I asked God to watch over Mee-Kyong, it never occurred to me that I should be begging the Divine to protect me as well.

Daughter of Truth

“If an enemy were insulting me, I could endure it … But it is you … my companion, my close friend, with whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship …” Psalm 55:12-14

Through the rest of the spring and into the summer, Mee-Kyong never mentioned her pregnancy. Apparently, Agent Pang didn’t suspect that Mee-Kyong carried his bastard child in her womb even as the leaves changed color and an early autumn chill settled in the camp. I didn’t know how Mee-Kyong managed to keep her secret from him for so many months, but I never asked for detailed accounts of her lunch breaks in the back office.

In some way, I secretly envied Mee-Kyong and the relationship she shared with Agent Pang.

Of course, it was miserable being used by any camp officer, no matter how many extra rations you received. But at least Agent Pang cared about Mee-Kyong, even if he was violent and possessive in his passion. Because Agent Pang and my employer, Officer Yeong, worked in the same part of the factory with only a small partition separating their workspaces, I could usually hear what was happening between Mee-Kyong and her lover. They fought fairly often, Mee-Kyong daring to raise her voice and Agent Pang accusing her of falsehood and working himself into a fit until he beat her. He would then spend the next half an hour apologizing to Mee-Kyong and telling her how much he loved her. Then other times I heard sweet whispers, moans of pleasure, even laughter coming from Agent Pang’s office in the back hallway.

How different were my lunch breaks spent with Officer Yeong. When Matron Sung blew her whistle, those of us girls who served as office maids in the factory went to the rooms of our respective guards, usually to the hostile stares of the other prisoners. When I entered Officer Yeong’s work space, I didn’t distract him from his business but applied myself quietly, fulfilling some of the basic cleaning duties that he assigned me my first day on the job.

When Officer Yeong finished whatever he was doing, he summoned me over, sometimes with nothing more than a grunt or a nod. For the rest of my lunch break, I did whatever I could to find something to occupy my thoughts, to deaden my senses, to remind myself that I was lucky to be here with Officer Yeong because, after all, I needed food to survive.

While thus engaged, I would hear the laughter of Mee-Kyong next door with Agent Pang and inwardly regret that my afternoons with Officer Yeong were the closest I had ever come to experiencing true love or romance. Unlike my naïve friend, however, I had no delusions about my employer. I knew that in a matter of weeks or months, Officer Yeong would tire of me and find his next replacement.

Mee-Kyong, on the other hand, clung to the desperate notion that somehow she and her agent would break free from their political destinies. Mee-Kyong was convinced that Agent Pang loved her as much as she loved him, and she imagined that their devotion to one another would somehow enable them to forge a future together. Her passion made Mee-Kyong so blind that she couldn’t even see the high-voltage fence that surrounded Camp 22. As much as I envied my friend’s idealism, as much as I fantasized about the kind of passion she and Agent Pang shared, I pitied her blind lack of reason. For her own sake, I dreaded the day when Mee-Kyong would find out once and for all what the cruel and unsympathetic world was really like.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realize soon enough that Mee-Kyong’s need to cling to Agent Pang would not only cost us our friendship, but jeopardize my very life.

On a cold September afternoon, I was in Officer Yeong’s office, polishing his framed photographs of various higher-up officials from Pyongyang. Officer Yeong was an ambitious, not yet middle-aged politician, who looked toward a future in Pyongyang as a high-ranking government executive. I learned from Mee-Kyong that our respective employers were political rivals, both competing for the same position as Camp 22’s Chief Officer of Productivity, an obvious catalyst into a Pyongyang career. I knew nothing of Officer Yeong’s family life, though I guessed he was probably married. While Mee-Kyong’s Agent Pang was charming and flirtatious, my Officer Yeong rarely displayed any emotion whatsoever. If he did have a wife, I imagined she must be bored married to a man whose only passion was for the Party and his own career advancement. Due to the nature of my relationship with Officer Yeong, however, I tried to avoid thinking about his wife at all if I could help it.

During one lunch break, Officer Yeong brooded over a thick file. The autumn rain beat against the garment factory’s steel ceiling, partially drowning out the conversation between Mee-Kyong and Agent Pang in the next room. I polished Officer Yeong’s portrait of the Dear Leader, wondering if I might be fortunate enough to make it through the entire lunch break without having to interact with my employer. On the other side of the partition, I heard Mee-Kyong scream.

“You filthy whore!” roared Agent Pang. I forced myself to wipe my rag across Kim Jong-Il’s portrait, as if my sole purpose in life was to rid the Dear Leader’s face from dust specks and fingerprints. “How long were you going to wait before telling me?” Agent Pang’s voice exploded from the other side of the partition. “The whole blasted nine months?”

“It’s not my fault!” Mee-Kyong cried out. I winced when I heard the sound of something crash.

“You lying dog!” Agent Pang snarled. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Officer Yeong raise an eyebrow slightly as he studied his notes. “When did you stop taking your pills?” Mee-Kyong was crying. “When did you stop?” Until then, I didn’t know Mee-Kyong was taking contraceptives. Agent Pang must have been supplying them to her surreptitiously. I couldn’t hear Mee-Kyong’s answer, only her sobs.

“You disgusting prisoner! How long have you known?”

“Two months,” Mee-Kyong lied. Another thud was followed by Mee-Kyong’s groan.

“You refuse to take care of things with pills?” Agent Pang questioned. “That’s fine with me. There are other ways to prevent problems like this.” His voice now sounded disturbingly calm. Mee-Kyong’s grunts came at regular intervals. With trembling hands, I dusted the ornate frame that held yet another copy of the Dear Leader’s adipose profile, but I froze immediately when Mee-Kyong mentioned me by name.