Princess Bari (8 page)

I looked at the spirits, clumped together and wavering like dark smoke in the courtyard and on the threshold of the gate. I thought of what my grandmother would do and took the
gaetteok
I'd made before leaving from my knapsack, pulled off little pieces, and began tossing them into the courtyard. I tossed some to the woman and her two kids inside the house as well.

Eat up, everyone. Eat, eat, before you go. You have some too, and you, and you.

The shapes vanished at once. I gave a piece to Chilsung and had a small bite for myself before slipping into a deep sleep.

In the morning, we walked to the station. There were no employees, and no sign that anyone had been there in a while. I was squatting outside the station building when an elderly woman came tottering toward me.

“I've never seen you before. What neighbourhood are you from?” she asked.

“I'm from Musan.”

“Why'd you come here then? You should've crossed the river instead. My son and daughter-in-law left the country that way a long time ago. Said they were looking for work.”

“Grandmother, if I need to get to Puryong, should I take a train from here?”

“Train? Do people still take those? The train stopped coming here ages ago. Everyone who was still alive ran off as well. Let's see. I suppose it would only take a day for an adult to reach Puryong on foot.”

The old woman let her basket drop. It held some pine bark and a few scraps of bellflower root.

“This stuff has been keeping me alive. You hurry on home now. Or go to the station at Chongjin like the other urchins. That's the only way to survive, by begging and stealing.”

I reached behind to pull another
gaetteok
from the plastic bag in my knapsack, but the old woman snatched the whole packet from me. I would never have guessed from her slow shuffle and the way she'd spoken that her hands could've moved that fast. She stuffed two of the
gaetteok
in her mouth at once and started to chew. Her molars must have fallen out, because she nibbled futilely with her front teeth before trying to swallow them whole. I could tell from looking at her that the dry cakes were stuck in her throat. I offered her the bottle of water, and she hid the plastic bag behind her back before taking a long swig. Then she seemed to come to her senses. She let out a long breath and sat down for a moment before handing the bag and bottle back to me. “You should eat too,” she said.

“Please have the rest, Grandmother.”

She slowly ate them, one at a time. When the bag was empty, she offered it to me again. I stood to leave. Chilsung read my intent and started heading toward the tracks. “Run off now,” she said. “There's no one left here anymore.”

On the way to Puryong, I ran into countless ghosts wandering the fields and villages every night. Each time they brushed past me on those empty village roads, I heard a low, spooky
woooooo
, like a heavy wind blowing through giant trees. Later, when I travelled to other parts of the world and saw numerous cities and glittering lights and the vitality of those crowds of people, I was struck with disappointment and disgust at how they had all abandoned us and looked the other way.

*

Ah, now we come to that awful day. The day of the inferno.

Chilsung and I were lost somewhere between Chayu Peak and Mount Goseong, outside of Puryong, when we smelled smoke. Chilsung started barking wildly. We were about to head down the mountain, but a strong wind suddenly gusted over us, and smoke rose up all over the ridge. When we went around a bend in the path, we saw that the lower half of the mountain was on fire. No, not just the mountain: all of Heaven and Earth was aflame. The air filled with the smoke of live trees burning, and the crackling of branches and popping of sparks sounded close at hand. The fire was still down at the bottom, but the flames were climbing fast.

I turned and headed uphill. Walking downhill hadn't been too difficult, but the path back up left me breathless and my legs weak. I glanced back to see the blaze leaping up and being swept forward on the wind. The flames seemed to lap at a hillock on the other side of a narrow ravine. The smoke surrounded us and made it impossible to find our way. I climbed as fast as I could, but the fire was faster. Chilsung kept pausing to look back at me, his tongue lolling out of his mouth. By the time we made it to the top of the ridge, the flames had already reached the spot where we'd stopped to change direction.

I looked down at where we had been headed. The fire seemed to have started at the foot of the mountain: the flames skirted the hem and appeared to be climbing their way up through the folds. White smoke rose from the lower slopes that jutted out between the narrow ravines and long stretches of open field. Something was moving fast through the underbrush: several roe deer and water deer were on the run. They stopped at the top for a moment and glanced at us before springing over the ridge. A line of flame reached the western ridge and began to climb upward. Luckily, as there weren't many trees, it had only weeds and small shrubs to feed on. But once it was joined by the rest of the flames coming up from below, the fire would spread to the summit in an instant.

I followed the deer over the ridge with Chilsung and sat down on the grass and dried leaves so I could slide down the steep slope of the mountain like a playground slide. The slope ended abruptly, and my body was aloft. I slammed into a tree branch, ricocheted off it, and hit the ground. My body was soaked with sweat, and the pain in my side from where I had collided with the branch made it hard to breathe. It turned out that smoke was coming up from below on that side as well. Chilsung pressed his ears back and began to growl and snarl. A family of wild boar came bounding down the slope after us. They balked when they saw us, turned tail and vanished downhill, the babies scrambling to keep up with their parents. Chilsung growled and took off after them.

Stupid dog!
They won't hurt us! They're trying to escape too!

I stood up to try to follow them, but couldn't draw a breath. I must have pulled a muscle in my side, or possibly broken a rib. The pain went away after a few days, but even after I made it back across the Tumen River, it was another month before I stopped getting a stitch in my side every time I walked. I planted my hands on the ground and crawled on all fours through the underbrush, like the boars. The ground turned rocky, and I came upon a ravine where a stream of water was burbling down through the rocks.

Acrid smoke carried on the wind began to fill the ravine. The flames were now at the upper reaches of the slope. The crackling of dry branches catching fire sounded very close. I crouched down behind a large boulder where the water had pooled. The small puddle held no more than about two large bowls' worth of water.

The flames zigzagged down the slope, following the trees and the curve of the mountain, while the ravine acted like a chimney, channelling the wind and narrowing the approaching column of smoke and fire. Already I could feel the heat pressing down, and it became harder and harder to breathe. Though I'd never been taught what to do in a fire, I dunked my clothes in the water, wrapped my wet jacket around my head and lay as flat as I could behind the boulder. The trees directly overhead shivered and shook and caught flame. Despite the wet clothes covering me, my back burned like I was standing too close to a campfire. The smoke, the smells, the spattering of pine resin and tree bark as they burned and the whoosh of the flames buoyed by the strong wind soared up through the ravine. I squeezed my eyes shut, but my face still wound up covered in tears and snot, and I could not stop coughing. When I finally raised my head the fire had passed, and only small embers were floating around; smoke rose from what was left of the trees. It was starting to get dark. We were on the north side of the mountain, so the sun would set even faster. The ground was spotted red with glowing embers, and burned-out stumps illuminated the ashes around them like blocks of charcoal inside a furnace. Small columns of smoke rose from the ground, and as it grew darker I felt as if I was standing in the middle of Hell. I could still hear some trees burning. A tall larch on fire stood on the slope like a giant torch, its flaming branches spreading out in all directions.

“Chilsung-
ah
! Chilsung-
ah
!” I called out as I limped down the ravine.

My voice echoed all around. Just as I had done once before, I focused my mind on trying to picture his location. He wasn't far. I wandered among the rocks, looking for him. I finally spotted his body collapsed on a patch of grass, not far from the water's edge. When Chilsung saw me, he wagged his tail weakly.
Are you hurt?
I said.
Can you get up?
But it seemed he no longer had the strength to communicate his thoughts to me. His white fur was streaked with ash, and I saw then that blood was pouring out of an angry red gash in his belly. The blood had turned the underside of his fur red, and was soaking the ground. Who would be stupid enough to go after some wild boars who were only trying to get their babies to safety?! Maybe he'd thought he was protecting me from them. Of course the mother and father boar would have defended themselves to the death against this intruder. The boar's sharp tusks had ripped open Chilsung's belly. Then, to make matters worse, the fire had passed right over him. I cradled Chilsung's head in my arms and stifled the sound of my crying.

You're all the family I had left in this world
,
and now I have to go it alone
.

For the next few days, as I made my way back to Musan, the mountains continued to burn and send up smoke. I didn't find out how the wildfires had started until after I'd crossed the border again and was in Yanji. They said there were many forest fires all over the world that year. In North Korea, the land was so parched that some of the fires happened on their own, but others were started deliberately. As the famine swept through the country and more and more people starved to death, no one could be stopped from setting fires in the mountains. All the crops had already been harvested from the collective farms and rations had been cut off, so people resorted to creating small slash-and-burn plots for themselves in the mountains. They would slip a pack of matches into their pocket, find a slope or a ravine where no one could see them and drop a lit match before making a quick getaway.

Even with wildfires blazing so close by, none of the villages had the manpower left to do anything about it. Once a fire began, it would burn for several days, sometimes as long as a week, until all the mountains nearby had burned too. When the dense forests were reduced to ash, people scrambled to stake out their plots and dig up the burned tree stumps to create open fields. There they planted corn and potatoes. Those who cultivated these slash-and-burn fields survived the following year.

I made my way back across the Tumen River, back to where I'd started my journey, pausing at every peak to look behind me at the smoke rising from mountains both near and far. It looked like distress signals sent to distant passing ships from people trapped on desert islands in the middle of a boundless ocean. The smoke rose to the sky in silent, ominously thick clouds, and the sound I'd heard, the whoosh of air rushing past on a night thronged with ghosts, seemed to lay heavy across the land.

After I failed to make it all the way to Puryong in search of my parents, and then lost Chilsung on top of that, I returned to the dugout hut in silence. When I stepped inside I discovered that a disgusting old badger had taken up residence. I searched for a long stick that I could use to try to drive it out, but he was a ferocious little guy: he kept blocking my stick with his paws and lunging at me in fury. His shrill cry was terrifying, but I was no less tough, having already faced certain death and prevailed more than once. I chased out the badger, cleaned up the little hut, dug up the cache of grain that I'd buried in the woods, and proceeded to hunker down for the next month or so, until one day I heard someone moving around outside. It was the farmer. He pulled back the piece of vinyl covering the door and poked his head in.

“
Ya!
Look who's here! You're still alive!”

His eyes reddened with tears, and he clasped my hand tight. I went with him back to the farmhouse. The family already knew about Hyun's death and Father's departure. I told them all about Grandmother dying, my going back to North Korea to search for the rest of my family, and losing Chilsung. The farmer's wife and his mother turned their backs and wept.

“See,” the farmer's mother said, “you have to carry on for your family's sake. Someone has to survive to tell the story.”

I stayed with them for nearly a month. My cheeks plumped back up, and my hair regained its lustre. The farmer contacted Uncle Salamander, who said he would find work for me, and then he personally escorted me all the way past Helong to downtown Yanji. There, we waited in a teahouse for Uncle Salamander. His potbelly had grown bigger since the last time I'd seen him, and he was wearing a baggy windbreaker. He told us that after the famine started the authorities had cracked down on cross-border trade, so he'd started a small travel agency for South Korean tourists with someone instead. The three of us went out to eat. Uncle Salamander and the farmer bought me food while they filled each other in on everything that had happened. Uncle Salamander downed several shots of
soju
before turning to me.

“I'm sorry I wasn't there for you. That's how it goes, I guess. I kept telling myself I would check in on you guys, but easier said than done. In any case, think of me as your family now. Don't hesitate to come to me anytime you need my help.”

I finished eating and decided to risk a question while the men were still drinking.

“My sister Mi crossed over before the rest of us. If she's still here, I'd like to try to find her.”

“Ah yes, I remember. I know some people who might have leads. I'll see what I can find out.”

Uncle Salamander found me a job working for a Han Chinese family. The parents were both teachers. I spent six months as a live-in housekeeper and babysitter before moving on to Paradise, the massage studio where I would later work. While living with the family, I learned a little Chinese. The woman gave me a primary-school textbook and helped me learn how to read and write. When I moved out, she patted me on the back.

“You're a clever one, Bari,” she said. “You'll do well wherever you go. I've never seen a student learn as quickly as you do.”

The job at Paradise was also thanks to Uncle Salamander – except I wasn't supposed to call him that anymore. I said it to his face without thinking, and he rapped me on the head with his knuckles and gently scolded me: “Little cheeky to call your uncle by a nickname, no? Your father's the only person left who gets to call me that.” It made me sad to hear that.

He told me that if I wanted to make a lot of money without too much risk, then I should learn a trade at a business run by one of his younger friends. I was well aware that most North Koreans in my position weren't paid for their work – they were grateful if they got so much as room and board. The police were not yet actively hunting down defectors, but they did show up if complaints were made. Regardless of the type of work they did, North Koreans earned no more than a third of what a documented Chinese resident might earn; but I was lucky, and earned half, and that was for doing mostly small errands as an apprentice.

Paradise, which specialized in foot massage, was surrounded by bars and karaoke parlours. There were massage studios nearby that doubled as saunas and gave full-body massages, but they charged more than us and were rumoured to offer more than just a rubdown. Our place was frequented mostly by tourists and business travellers. Married couples also came by sometimes to get foot massages together. Paradise was where I met Xiang. There were around twenty masseuses in total, with Korean-Chinese working alongside Han Chinese. Most were young, unmarried women who'd come from distant rural villages to earn money in the city. Of the six who were married, only two actually lived with their husbands. The married women were no different from the rest in that they'd left their hometowns and come to Yanji in search of work, either alone or with only their children in tow. Xiang was one of the two who lived with her husband. She must have been around twenty-five years old at the time. The oldest was Qinqin, who had her kids with her and claimed she was thirty, but according to Ms Kim, the old Korean-Chinese auntie who took care of the cooking and cleaning, she was closer to thirty-four. The owner of the studio would show up around closing time to dole out everyone's daily wages, while his wife ran the business the rest of the time.

Our biggest rush was always right after lunch or late at night. During the slack hours of the late afternoons and early evenings, the masseuses would gather in the lobby and pass the time snacking and watching television. Sometimes Ms Kim and I would throw together a simple dish for them. We minded the owners, but the ones we really had to be good to were the masseuses, because they would sometimes split their tips with us.

*

One day, while cleaning the showers, I found a gold ring. I'd just sprayed detergent on the tiled walls, given them a good scrub and was rinsing the suds off with the handheld showerhead when I noticed something shiny in the drain trap. I bent over to take a closer look. The sizeable gold ring had a square face with a lotus flower engraved in the middle. I slipped it on. The ring spun loosely around my finger. I wondered who'd lost it. Given the size, it would be worth a lot if I sold it in the night market. I stashed it in my apron pocket. The following morning, after everyone had arrived for work and I was carrying trays of food back and forth to serve them their lunch, I paused for a moment and asked for everyone's attention.

“Excuse me, did one of you lose something?” I asked.

The Korean-Chinese women translated what I'd said for the Han Chinese women sitting next to them. They looked at each other in silence, and then Xiang raised her hand.

“Did you find my ring?” she asked me in Chinese.

I answered in Chinese: “What does it look like?”

“Well, it's gold … and it has a lotus flower engraved on the front.”

I smiled and pulled the ring from my pocket. A few days later, Xiang slipped a bill, folded neatly into a square, into my hand after one of her massage appointments. I went to the kitchen and unfolded it. It was a twenty-
yuan
note. I'd received one-
yuan
and five-
yuan
tips before, but never so much at one time. When Xiang finished with a difficult massage and was resting in the lobby, I brought her some warm, sweet jujube tea. That's how we became friends.

One Sunday, when she had a day off, Xiang got permission from the owner to take me to her house. She lived in a small flat with a front room and a kitchenette near the Eastern Market. Even before we reached her door, I could smell food cooking. As soon as we stepped inside, I saw a man standing at the kitchen counter with his back to us. He was dressed in a sleeveless undershirt and was stir-frying meat and vegetables in a wok.

“I'm home!” Xiang called out.

Xiang's husband kept flipping the food in the wok and said, without turning to look at us: “Welcome back. Did you bring Bari with you?”

We sat down in the front room, which was furnished with only a table and four chairs. When he brought out the food he'd prepared, I stood and introduced myself timidly. I tried to help him with the food, but Xiang tugged me back by the hem of my shirt. She seemed to be saying that, in their house, whoever started a task had to finish it. They were Han Chinese, so of course the food was Chinese too. There were two types of stir-fried vegetables, pork and fried fish. They were chatty and talked fast, but I was only able to manage a few simple words.

Xiang's husband, Zhou, listened as she told him my story, and then he told me how they'd left their hometown in Heilongjiang Province together. He had worked there as an assistant to a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine while learning acupuncture from him, and recently he'd been taking classes at a private institute to get certified as an acupuncturist. Then he would be able to move to a larger city and make more money. Each time he smiled, his sparse facial hair made his mouth look huge, and his eyes, which were much smaller in contrast, looked like two lines drawn in pencil.

“He taught me the meridian points for the feet,” Xiang said.

“Meridian points?”

“They're not visible to the naked eye, but every part of the human body is connected to a point on the bottom of your feet.”

Xiang poked her husband and told him to stick his foot out. He reluctantly offered up his dirty foot, and Xiang pointed to different spots with a ballpoint pen, identifying meridian points for the heart, stomach and liver. It was hard for me to understand all of it.

“You should learn this, Bari. You could make good money giving massages.”

“I would like to.”

Xiang and her husband talked amongst themselves for a moment.

“Let's see if we can get permission from the owner for you to come home with me on Sundays,” Xiang said. “There's so much to learn about feet. In the meantime, I'll teach you foot massage techniques whenever there's downtime at work.”

I'd never told anyone outside of my family about my strange gift. I'd never even told Uncle Salamander, who was practically my legal guardian, about having talked to ghosts while searching for my parents in Puryong. I wanted people to see me as a normal, ordinary girl. Of course, I also never told anyone that I was from North Korea, and even at work, if anyone so much as alluded to it, the boss scolded them: “Bad enough if she gets caught and taken away, but we'll also get shut down and fined. Which means you'll all be out of work too!”

Every Sunday, I went to Xiang's flat and learned meridian points on the foot from Zhou. Xiang would sit down and prop her feet up, and Zhou would point out different spots on the bottom of her feet and explain them to me. He had three different short, wooden sticks that he used to massage feet: one had a rounded tip, another looked like a small chisel and the third was pointier. But most of what I learned was with my bare hands. He taught me how to use the flat of my thumb as well as the tip; how to use the whole length of my fingers; how to make a fist and lightly punch or press my knuckles into the sole of the foot; to press and slap with the palm of my hand; to use both hands to knead the foot; and to pinch, rotate and loosen the muscles in the ankle and the joints of the toes. Zhou told me that while the wooden tools made the job easier, using your bare hands to give a foot massage was much more effective.

“See, just as the rest of the body consists of different parts, the foot is divided into three sections: the sole, the instep and the heel and ankle. It's the same with the hands, so it's more effective if you start with a light hand massage before working on their feet. The meridian points for the internal organs are clustered in the sole and the heel, and the points for the head are in the toes. The arch of the foot, here, is the kidneys. The padded part just below the fourth and fifth toes of the left foot corresponds to the heart. On the right foot, it's the liver.”

Zhou demonstrated all of this on Xiang's feet and explained it to me again using my own feet. Then he had me practice on him. Whenever I made a mistake, he lifted up his foot to explain again before having me continue. I did this every Sunday as I studied the meridian points on the feet. I memorized the ten steps for relaxing the hands, and the fifteen basic moves for massaging the feet before moving on to the main meridian points for healing illnesses. Zhou taught me everything by example. “A customer comes in drunk,” he would say. “What do you do?”

“The meridian points for the head are concentrated in the big toe, so I would start by applying acupressure to each toe in turn to relieve his headache. Then I would rub the sole of the foot, which corresponds to the intestines, and the heel, to help stimulate the liver and kidneys …”

After eight months at Paradise, I became a masseuse. As I was not a documented resident with a Chinese family registration, I wasn't officially licenced to practise massage; it was my skill alone that qualified me to take customers. I also wasn't given a commission the way the other masseuses were, and was paid only in whatever tips I received; but the tips were much better than what I'd made before from running errands and helping out with cooking.

After becoming a masseuse, I realized that I was able to tell what was wrong with a person just by studying their face and touching their feet. It began with my very first customer, a Chinese man. He was husky and a little overweight. After stripping down to his undershirt and rolling up the legs of his suit trousers, he sprawled out on the massage table with his legs dangling over the side. I washed his feet with a mixture of lukewarm water and salt and vinegar, and then let them soak in a bowl of hot water steeped with mugwort while I slowly massaged his calves. I dried his feet off with a towel and started with his left foot. I began by applying pressure to the meridian points on each toe in turn, just as I'd been taught, but his heel had a strange red glow coming from it: I knew at once that something was wrong with his liver and intestines.