The Aquariums of Pyongyang (27 page)

The next evening's meal was as ample as the first. The guide's wife claimed it was just the usual fare, but what was ordinary to them was gargantuan to me: there were many different dishes, and several had meat! I couldn't believe my eyes. I felt as if I'd been invited to a feast for Party cadres. In the North, alcohol is very expensive; an average bottle sells for 10 won, one-tenth of a worker's monthly wages. The most popular spirit,
paï jou
(white alcohol), comes from China. It costs 60 won a bottle and is usually reserved for special occasions. Here it was being poured into our glasses as an ordinary accompaniment to an improvised meal! To get an idea of the Korean standard of living, it's worth noting that on the black market, 150 won buys $2 U.S.—the official rate is 15 won to the dollar—which is one-and-a-half times an ordinary worker's monthly salary, or exactly enough to buy one pack of Marlboro cigarettes. With that as my point of reference, China was like paradise, and I began to sense the huge gulf separating the universe as I knew it and the world as it might actually be.

There were more surprises to come. After dinner, our host suggested we walk to a nightclub in the neighboring village. We accepted the invitation—though I couldn't help thinking, Don't these people go to work? It was nearing midnight, and we were only now stepping out! Finally, I worked up the courage to ask, “Don't you have to wake up early tomorrow?” His answer left me stunned: it was “up in the air!” His next observation, though, is the one that really did me in. “In any case,” he said, “the important thing isn't work; it's to enjoy life.” I was speechless.

We walked to the next village, which was called Changbaekhyun in Korean. All along the main street, people stood out on their front stoops, talking and laughing. The streets were brightly lit, neon signs glowing. Across the river, on the Korean bank, everything was still, enveloped in darkness. The river separated two worlds. On one side, North Korea, “calm as hell,” as we say here, and on the other, the loud, luminous paradise. We stepped into an establishment where people stood drinking around a dance floor while couples slowly swayed to the music, holding each other close. I stared, wide-eyed. I'm sure I looked very out of place, but nothing like the unfortunate renegades one sees in that village today—haggard, thin, poorly dressed, and fleeing famine. My departure had been well organized; I wore Japanese clothes and looked more elegant than most of the Chinese people around me. A young lady came up to ask me for a dance. I was embarrassed and declined her invitation, explaining that I didn't know how. “That doesn't matter,” she said, smiling. “I'll show you.” I continued to demur. Disappointed, she left before I could change my mind. So I was now in a country where the women asked the men? Things were moving faster than I could keep pace. No girl in North Korea would dare make such a proposition. The young lady was very pretty, and I would have loved to have danced with her. I declined not only because I didn't know how to dance, but because I was overwhelmed. I watched as she sauntered over to a nearby table, where the next man accepted her offer. They danced and I watched, regretting my awkwardness and timidity.

I started in on another drink, trying to unwind. An-hyuk and our guide were deep in conversation. A feeling of great joy suddenly swept over me, a sentiment akin to hope. Here was life. . . . I felt as though I wanted to throw my arms around it, to embrace it as I should have done with that young lady. I was sure I was going to live
and encounter other chances. I was light-headed and felt something heavy and dull swell inside me like a wave. It was close to 1:00 A.M. when we left the club. Our guide walked us around the village, holding forth about recent changes in local commerce. We even discussed the general economic situation. I couldn't believe it: in the North, such freedom of speech is inconceivable. Citizens there feel they're under constant surveillance—which for the most part, they are. The monitoring is systematic. When it's not your identification card they ask for, it's your traveling papers. “In China,” said our host, “as long as you don't oppose the Party openly or act too suspiciously, you can do as you like. . . .”

It took me a long time to fall asleep that night. Images of the North and of my family paraded through my mind, punctuated by snapshots of the young Chinese woman who had asked me to dance. I began to wonder if I would ever meet her again and whether I would ever overcome my shyness. I felt like laughing: my first night out of North Korea, and here I was worried about how best to comport myself on the dance floor! This wasn't how I imagined my escape.

The next night we made the journey to Yonji with our guide, trundling over mountain roads until the wee hours of the morning. Though we were already in March, the temperature was down around–5˚F—which was not unusual for the mountainous region where many of the passes rise above six thousand feet. Arriving at our destination stiff and chilled to the bone, our guide took us to the home of his sister, who lived with her husband and mother-in-law. The extended family, which was also of Korean ancestry, gave us a warm welcome and offered to lodge us for a time.

We nevertheless began to worry for our safety. I was growing suspicious of our guide, a Communist Party member who had worked
hard to cultivate a reputation for meticulous legality. We also made a decision to tell our hosts, who inspired in us great confidence, the real reason behind our voyage to China. It was during dinner that I let slip the truth.

“We have something important to tell you,” I began. “We are neither tourists nor merchants. We're on the run and have no intention of going back to North Korea. Life there is very hard, and we are wanted by the police for having listened to South Korean radio.”

They asked us where we intended to go next.

“We don't really know,” I said. “Japan, or maybe the United States. . . .”

“Why not to the South?” they asked. “We've heard that life isn't bad there.”

Sure, why not, but how could we get there? And how could we explain our inherent fear of the South, instilled in us by a lifetime of propaganda? It was tempting, though—another taboo to break. What resistance we still had was much weakened by our hosts' manner of taking the South's superiority so completely for granted. Yet, when our guide discovered our true reasons for crossing the Yalu, he wanted nothing more to do with us.

“I don't want to get mixed up in this,” he raged. “If you don't go back to the North right away, I'm turning you in!”

His relatives intervened on our behalf and got him to calm down. Having twice given him fifty dollars—hefty sums by Chinese standards—I thought he was being very ungrateful. With tempers still running high, he headed back home, and to this day I don't know whether or not he denounced us.

An-hyuk and I were scared. We wanted to get away that very night, but to where? We didn't speak Chinese or even know exactly where in the country we were. Yet all was not lost. We had our
hosts, as well as a friend of our guide, a wealthy Yonji merchant who invited us out to a karaoke club.

“Come on, you're not risking a thing,” he said. “No one ever gets their papers checked. The police are on the club's payroll: they never bother anyone.”

It was my first time in such a place. An-hyuk and I sat down feeling very timid and ill at ease. The young Chinese women who served the drinks gave us very suggestive glances, which made me tremble slightly. The behavior of the Chinese men, too, was both fascinating and shocking. How could they kiss and caress these girls in front of everyone without feeling embarrassed? I was jarred by a China so willing to make a spectacle of itself. Crossing the Yalu River wasn't enough to flush out the propaganda seeped into us over so many years. I began to wonder whether the North Korean authorities weren't justified in fearing capitalism's nefarious influence on China! But I think what scared me was the prospect of enjoying life. The ideas to which I had sworn allegiance since youth—work, discipline, devotion to the Party and its Guide—were making their last stand.

All around me people laughed; the bottles and glasses passed from hand to hand; the girls were nice without being vulgar. Little by little, I began to relax. Soon we were drinking and singing with a couple of girls who mistook us for South Koreans. To make us happy, they regaled us with songs from Seoul, closing their private performance with “You Can't Imagine How Much I Love You,” a hit by the ever-popular Petty Kim. Her ex-husband, who was a composer, wrote the tune for her after her remarriage to a rich Italian.

A few days after our karaoke night, the merchant told us that our guide had strongly advised him that, unless he wanted to compromise
his social position, he would do well to put us aside. The man clearly liked us, but it was equally clear he would be relieved to see us go. Another denunciation was definitely something we could do without. We thus resolved to push our plans forward and, a few evenings later, took our leave of the home that had so hospitably taken us in. We spent our first night sleeping under the stars, but we couldn't do that forever. Bum around long enough, and we'd be sure to arouse suspicion. So the next day we walked over to another of our guide's relatives, a woman whose house on the outskirts of Yonji would have been a perfect hideout. At first, she was afraid our presence might bring her family trouble. Yet she was convinced of our honesty and felt sympathy for our fate, and in the end she relented to our pleading and allowed us to stay with her a night or two, just long enough to buy train tickets for Shenyang—or Moukden, as it was called during the Manchurian dynasty—where An-hyuk had a friend.

The ride from Yonji to Shenyang lasted about ten hours, during which we felt very vulnerable and alone. When a conductor approached us, I went pale. I was afraid he was asking me for my transit papers; but that wasn't it. Our neighbor, who spoke Korean, explained that he wanted to see our tickets. We handed them over, still trembling, forgetting to breathe until he was gone. Compared to North Korea, we were traveling in a free country. In the North, not speaking the language would have been enough to render us immediately suspect. I had heard there was freedom of movement in China, but to actually experience it was another matter altogether! Relieved and newly confident, we abandoned ourselves to sleep.

We arrived in Shenyang in the dark, early morning hours. We felt bitterly cold and as worried and tense as ever. We were all alone in
a city we could barely find on a map, ignorant of the language, and unaware of the police's habits. In the Korean-speaking province, apart from the karaoke episode, it was possible to forget we were in a foreign country. We now had the impression of truly being in another world. Even the buildings looked different. The large, teeming city intimidated us. We felt as if we'd crossed some other, invisible border. I was getting the jitters. I felt abandoned in an immense world, an orphan for all time. I could die now and no one would know. Fortunately, there were two of us. A few schoolboy jokes were enough to revive our spirits. What we really needed to do, however, was stop wandering the streets. It was too dangerous: police were about, and they occasionally checked the IDs of passersby. We managed to avoid them, but decided it would be safer to step into a movie house until dawn. The first theater we happened on was showing a Hong Kong kung fu film. We took our seats, exhausted, and fell asleep almost immediately. After the show, we somehow found our way to the home of An-hyuk's friend, a guy he had met on his first visit to China. We arrived at his place between 7:30 and 8:00 A.M. He was half asleep when he opened the door. He was hardly able to believe his eyes.

“An-hyuk, what are you doing here?”

They hugged each other, and the man asked us in. Then we got another surprise: he had a woman with him.

“You're married?” An-hyuk asked.

“No, she's just a good friend. We live together.”

In North Korea, it's not possible for an unmarried couple to live together. The young man spoke of love, but An-hyuk and I found the situation scandalous and quickly changed the subject. We told him our story, and he agreed to put us up for a while, then escort us to the South Korean consulate in Beijing. After a
month of postponements, we finally set out on the seven-hour train ride.

The Chinese capital impressed me as more Western and capitalist than specifically Chinese. Most striking were the billboards for Daewoo, Samsung, and Lucky Star, all featuring both Chinese characters and Latin script. South Korea may be a small country, I thought, but it seems to reign supreme in China. It was a shocking sight for someone who had grown up on doomsday depictions of a country rife with strikes, where legions of poor workers struggled desperately to survive from one economic crisis to the next. . . . I was also impressed by the width of the streets and the cleanliness of a city that was livelier and more modern than Shenyang.

Behind the big buildings and commercial advertisements, certain aspects of a more traditional China still held fast. Take the public bathrooms, for example. I remember my first experience with one of them: on opening the door, I found myself face to face with people squatting next to one another, chatting and reading their newspapers as they relieved themselves; I quickly closed the door. Was I dreaming? No partitions, no flush chains. Even in the camp, we had partitions and swinging doors to give us a little privacy! The public bathrooms would turn out to be one of the most difficult aspects of our sojourn; all the toilets we encountered followed the same basic model. Since I absolutely needed to go, I waited discreetly at the exit until the bathroom was nearly empty before entering.

Our reason for coming to Beijing was not tourism, however, and we quickly left the station and flagged down a taxi. As we climbed in, An-hyuk's friend nonchalantly commanded the chauffeur: “To the Korean consulate.” We arrived about fifteen minutes later. Just as we were stepping out of the car, we realized there had been a
serious misunderstanding. We were standing in front of the North Korean embassy! We turned tail and hailed another taxi. The South Korean consulate turned out to be the second floor of an ordinary-looking building. Upon entering the office, we were greeted by a young woman, who smiled at us from behind her reception desk.