Nothing to Envy (40 page)

The family reunion lasted two weeks. Both aunts came to China along with assorted relatives, ten people in all. As soon as they all laid eyes on one another, they realized that the DNA testing had been superfluous.

“We just kept on staring. We marveled at the backs of our heads, the shape of our hands, the way we talked and walked,” said Mi-ran.

“My father’s sisters thought they’d lost their entire lineage because my father was an only son,” Mi-ran’s brother recalled. “When Father’s sisters came to China and I saw them, my body was shaking. They were women, but they looked exactly like him.”

There was no turning back. Mi-ran’s mother had wanted to return to Chongjin to be with the two daughters who’d stayed behind and her grandchildren, but they feared that the North Korean government would discover they had met with their relatives from an enemy state while in China—a capital offense in itself. They had no place to go but South Korea.

Their aunts went to the South Korean consulate in Shenyang, asking to have the North Korean relatives flown to Seoul—the least they could do for the widow and children of a South Korean veteran held prisoner of war for so long—but the consulate balked at the request. Kim Dae-jung, who would later win the Nobel peace prize, had taken office as South Korea’s president in February 1998 and had launched the “sunshine policy” to ease tensions with North Korea. Relations between South Korea and China, too, were sensitive. The officials feared that bringing in Mi-ran’s family could have adverse diplomatic consequences.

The relatives fortunately had the means to take matters into their own hands. The sisters ran a small hotel, and one of their sons owned a bathhouse on the outskirts of Seoul. He flew back and forth between China and South Korea, rustling up plausible forgeries for the North Korean relatives. He got one for Mi-ran from a cousin of about the same age. Her photograph had been stripped out and replaced with Mi-ran’s. An aunt “lost” her passport so that it could be used for Mi-ran’s mother. These were illegal acts and, in fact, one of the cousins would later serve a month in jail for passport fraud, but they worked. Mi-ran, her sister, her brother, and her mother arrived safely in South Korea in January 1999.

With family to receive her, Mi-ran wasn’t perceived as an outsider so much as a South Korean who had spent her first twenty-five years somewhere else. She was North Korean enough to be a novelty, but not enough to scare South Koreans. At five foot three she was positively statuesque for a North Korean woman and a respectable height for a South Korean. She still had those high cheekbones
and the striking Romanesque nose that had stopped Jun-sang when he spotted her at the movie theater. She possessed that certain mystique North Korean women hold for South Korean men. Good looks, family connections, poise, and her natural intelligence made all the difference. She was quickly accepted into a graduate program in education. She was articulate, able to tell a story in a clear narrative style, and she was frequently asked to give talks and interviews about the North Korean school system

Just before she turned thirty, she was introduced to a strapping young man whose broad-cheeked smile and round glasses conveyed warmth. He had a good job as a civilian military employee. With the encouragement of both families, they married. In late 2004, she gave birth to her son. They celebrated his first birthday in traditional Korean style, with a lunch for nearly a hundred friends and relatives. The upper floor of a catering hall in eastern Seoul was festooned with blue and white balloons. Mi-ran, her husband, and the baby were dressed in colorful
hanbok
, the costume worn for ceremonial occasions. Mi-ran’s outfit was made of a shimmering ivory silk with embroidered bands of red and black around the neckline. She was radiant and poised, a gracious hostess. She had achieved the Korean dream, actually the dream of many women I knew—the handsome husband, the baby boy, the graduate degree practically in the bag.

In her dress and manner of speaking, she was indistinguishable from a South Korean. She had lost the guttural accent that is a telltale trait of a North Korean. She and her husband bought an apartment in Suwon, the satellite city for upwardly mobile families who can’t afford the $1 million home prices in Seoul. She lived in a housing complex that was a forest of identical concrete slabs, each high-rise distinguished only by the numbers stamped on the sides. As these compounds went, it wasn’t a bad place. The buildings were new and clean, the facades a pleasant cream color. Sunlight streamed through a picture window into the living room of Mi-ran’s second-floor apartment. It was bright and spacious inside, with a separate bedroom for the baby, a home office with a Samsung computer on the desk, and an open-plan kitchen with modern appliances.

When I came to visit, she cooked lunch as her son, by now a chubby toddler, watched cartoons in the living room.

“If I had him in North Korea, I’d have had to feed him rice milk with a little sugar if I could afford it,” she said.

We chatted about the turns her life had taken. She was juggling the competing demands of her graduate studies and her family. Her in-laws expected her to be a traditional Korean wife. Child care was expensive; she found it hard to finish her work. She was taking an aerobics class in an effort to shed her pregnancy weight. Her skin often broke out from the stress. Her problems appeared to be not so different from those of all the other working mothers I knew.

Deep down, however, Mi-ran was the same person who had occupied the lowest rung of North Korean society, the poor, female progeny of tainted blood. She had been shaped by a thorough indoctrination and then suffered the pain of betrayal; she’d spent years in fear of speaking her mind, of harboring illicit thoughts. She had steeled herself to walk by the bodies of the dead without breaking stride. She had learned to eat her lunch, down to the last kernel of corn or grain of rice, without pausing to grieve for the children she taught who would soon die of starvation. She was racked with guilt. Guilt and shame are the common denominators among North Korean defectors; many hate themselves for what they had to do in order to survive.

In Mi-ran’s case, the guilt was not merely an abstraction. It wasn’t until I’d known her for more than two years that she told me what had happened to the sisters left behind. During the summer of 1999, about six months after the defecting family members arrived in South Korea, national security police had arrested both sisters almost simultaneously at home. Mi-ran’s oldest sister, Mi-hee, the family beauty who’d married a military official and who had been so generous about providing food during the famine, and her sister Mi-sook had led blameless lives; they were loyal to their parents, their husbands, and their children, and loyal to Kim Jong-il. They were taken away in the middle of the night—the very same scenario of Mi-ran’s recurring nightmare, except that the children were left behind with the husbands, who were instructed to file for divorce. The sisters were
presumably taken to one of the labor camps for long-term prisoners. Given the severity of the food shortage in 1999, it was likely they were dead.

The fate of the sisters weighed heavily on the family, darkening every happy moment. Even as Mi-ran gave birth to a healthy baby boy and her brother, Sok-ju, was accepted at a university in Australia, the family couldn’t rejoice. It seemed especially unfair. Defectors who came a few years later were able to send money in, and their relatives back home lived free from retaliation and better than the average North Korean. Perhaps the sisters received especially harsh treatment because Mi-ran’s family had been among the first to leave and because of their poor class background. Mi-ran’s mother, the iron-willed woman who held everything together through the famine, fell apart after she reached South Korea. Although only sixty-two years old when she arrived, her health and nerves failed her. She hired a shaman, a traditional fortune-teller, who informed her that her daughters were still alive, but it only increased her agitation.

Mi-ran’s mother turned to religion. As a girl in Chongjin in pre-Communist times, she had attended a church, and now she rediscovered the faith of her childhood. She prayed constantly, begging forgiveness for betraying her girls.

Not being a believer herself, Mi-ran had no such solace. Her guilt troubled her sleep and intruded on a schedule that was so busy she wasn’t supposed to have time to think. Her sisters had paid the ultimate price so she could drive a Hyundai.

She also thought about the boyfriend she had left behind. She credited him for pushing her to resist the destiny of her low birth, of giving her confidence as a woman and as a teacher. He’d never once spoken a word to her against the North Korean regime, but he had taught her to think for herself, which in the end kept her mind open and clear.

Mi-ran spoke frequently about Jun-sang when we met. I suspected she enjoyed reminiscing about her first love—something she couldn’t talk about with her mother and certainly not with her husband. When she recalled how Jun-sang first spotted her at the movie theater, or how they walked all night in the darkness, the words
tumbled out like those of an excited schoolgirl gossiping with a friend.

“Can you imagine? Three years to hold hands, six years to kiss? Not even a kiss, really, just a peck on the cheek.”

We joked that unrequited, or in this case unconsummated, love affairs are the only ones that last forever. It seemed as though her longing was not so much for her ex-boyfriend as for the innocence of her earlier self.

I asked her if she knew what had happened to Jun-sang.

“I guess he’s married by now.” Her voice trailed off and she shrugged with affected disinterest. She didn’t regret that they weren’t still together, she told me—she loved her husband—but she was sorry she had left North Korea without an opportunity to say goodbye. She remembered that last day in Chongjin, when she thought she spotted him across the street but dared not approach for fear of blurting out her plans to leave.

“You know, he and I, we have a special bond. I think someday we will meet again.”

We had that conversation in mid-October 2005, shortly after her son’s first birthday party. Three weeks later, Mi-Ran called, her excitement palpable through the receiver. She announced the news:

“He’s here!”

WE MET UP FOR
coffee a week later at a Starbucks in Seoul, a few blocks from my office.

The way Mi-ran had described him, I had imagined a big, handsome man, larger than life. Here instead was a skinny fellow in jeans and glasses. And yet there was something extraordinary about him. His teeth gleamed white like a movie star’s. His flat cheeks and flaring nostrils gave him an exotic Tatar look that reminded me of Rudolf Nureyev. When our cappuccinos were ready, he jumped up to retrieve them from the counter. He moved lithely; he was comfortable in his body. Mi-ran, on the other hand, was visibly nervous. She wore a short denim skirt and more makeup than usual.

I was about to remark that he seemed oddly at ease for somebody
who’d just arrived from a country without coffee shops, but it turned out that Jun-sang had been in South Korea for almost a year. When he learned that Mi-ran was married—from a National Intelligence Service agent he met during his debriefing—he decided it would be best for both of them if he didn’t reach out to her. It was not for lack of interest. In fact, he had been devastated by her departure, far more than she had imagined. Her defection triggered a major crisis of confidence for him. He was tormented by the absurdity of their situation. Why had they been so secretive with each other? How was it that they had both nurtured a desire to defect but didn’t tell each other? On top of that, he felt cowardly for not defecting earlier. His pride was injured not because she’d left him, but because she had proved herself the braver one.

“I’d always thought I was ahead of her in my thinking, but I was wrong,” he admitted. Mi-ran interrupted, for a moment, to soothe his ego. “I had doubts and mistrust of the government back then too, but he had more information than me about the outside world.” She smiled at him, then allowed him to continue his story.

After Mi-ran left, he buried himself in his work at the research institute and was offered a permanent job and a chance to join the Workers’ Party. His parents and siblings encouraged it. This was about as good as it could get in North Korea. His life in Pyongyang was comfortable. His rented room was warm and he had enough to eat. But he resisted settling down. He didn’t date the university girls who would have made suitable matches. He didn’t attend the extra lectures that would have boosted his chances of party membership. Every night after work, he came home and drew the curtains tight so he could watch South Korean television.

In 2001, Jun-sang asked permission to quit his job at the institute. He told his boss and his colleagues that his parents were in poor health and that as the oldest son he needed to care for them, a plausible explanation. The truth was that he wanted to be back in Chongjin, where his activities would be less monitored and where he’d be that much closer to the Chinese border. He did odd jobs and worked briefly at the nursing home near where he and Mi-ran used to walk at night. Rather than squander his money, he spent most evenings at home with his parents, even though it meant he had to
endure the reproachful silence of his father, resigned now to disappointment in his once-promising son.

Despite all the deliberating and planning, however, things did not go as smoothly for Jun-sang as they had for Mi-ran.

Jun-sang spent three years saving money for his escape. He was a methodical person who weighed the consequences of his every word and action. He meticulously planned every detail, right down to what he would wear for the occasion—an expensive shirt with a pattern of bubbles that his uncle had sent from Japan. It was too loud to wear in Chongjin, and he figured that if he wore it in China nobody would think he was a beggar from North Korea. He put his best Japanese trousers and a backpack in a plastic bag. The crossing was set for June, when the river ran high. He had picked one of the deeper stretches, since it was less guarded. The broker who was escorting him across brought along empty plastic bottles to use as floats. Jun-sang and another defector, a forty-year-old woman, stripped down to their underwear, modestly turning away from each other even though it was pitch-dark. Jun-sang wrapped his clothing in plastic bags to keep it dry.