“Take off your clothes!”
Under the blinding white light, I took off my tattered clothing piece by piece.
“Bend over!” shouted the officer.
I was completely naked and being subjected to humiliating torment. I bent my knees, crouched down, and then got back up again. I did this repeatedly until I was out of breath. Nothing was to be hidden, not even the most intimate areas of our bodies. After making her way through this group of naked women, a female officer in uniform grabbed me extremely hard. She shone a flashlight in my ears and then in my mouth. She inspected my teeth and then reached behind my gums. She dragged her hand down my chest. I started to shudder. Then her hand reached my stomach. She didn’t stop there: a little farther down and she continued to search my body by pushing her fingers inside me. I clenched my jaw. Everything had to be removed, even tampons.
* * *
Mom and Keumsun were subjected to the same degrading treatment. It was what everyone who escaped from North Korea and got sent back had to go through.
“When did you betray your country, you fucking cunt? With who? Where did you go, you worthless piece of shit?” screamed the interrogating officer.
The violent and abusive interrogation continued. I didn’t answer his questions. That only infuriated him all the more.
Then I was thrown into a cell where some sixty other women were already crammed like cattle. The cell was tiny and was hardly built to fit sixty people. On one side, there were steel bars preventing us from escaping. On the other side, there was a simple hole in the ground where we could go to the bathroom, right in front of everyone. There wasn’t enough space to lie down or stretch. At night, we slept next to one another, with each person’s head against someone else’s chest. It was impossible, however, to sleep for very long. In the middle of the night, my little brother appeared to me in a terrible nightmare. In my nightmare, he screamed as he was being boiled alive in a pot of water. He was just fourteen months old when I left him. What would happen to him at the hands of his inhumane father?
That night, for the first time in my life, I began to feel anger toward my country. Up until then, I’d never felt any hatred toward North Korea. We only left for China in order to survive, because we didn’t have any food. We didn’t have anything against Kim Jong-il, nor did we have anything against the system—we were apolitical. But in that prison, for the first time, my eyes were opened to the horrors perpetrated by the Kim regime, and I felt my anger begin to build.
* * *
Only once, when I was very little, had I already started feeling the seeds of doubt about our country. One morning in primary school, the teacher told us that we would attend an important event in our education: the execution of a man who was guilty of committing “serious crimes.” The playground started to fill with commotion.
“I know who is going to be killed! It’s your father!” taunted some of the meaner boys. I stayed quiet, worrying silently.
Before lunch, the teachers took us downtown in order of rank. The crowd gathered near an empty lot, right next to the bridge. Since we were little, we were positioned on top of the bridge so that we could have a clearer view of what was happening, so that we wouldn’t miss this important pedagogical lesson. Some privilege that was.
Then a car with heavily tinted windows appeared. Policemen dragged out several men whose heads and faces were covered with headscarves. The crowd started to shiver. After one final symbolic interrogation, the accused men pitifully admitted their wrongdoings. Afterward, they were tied to wooden poles planted along the river. I didn’t understand how they managed to remain so emotionless when they knew they were about to die.
And then suddenly, we heard a deafening noise. I jumped, startled. The gunshots seemed to last an eternity. After a while, all was quiet again. Through the plume of smoke that was dissipating into the air, I could make out gigantic puddles of blood, littered with pieces of flesh mixed with a white liquid. It was there that I learned to feel compassion for others; I felt an immense outpouring of pity, a feeling of fraternity toward these men who had been slaughtered so heartlessly.
I was wondering what would happen to their remains—the last vestiges of their existence—when all of a sudden a strange-looking man emerged from the crowd and started sniffing the shredded pieces of bodies. Such was the nature of a hungry animal. He took the gray, gelatinous pieces of flesh and looked at them hungrily before devouring them in front of everyone. I was terrified. We were told that this crazy man thought that eating a human brain would cure him of his maladies.
As everyone left to get lunch, I stood still, horrified.
After this first terrible ordeal, I became used to these public executions, which were a routine occurrence. Even so, each time, I still had my qualms. I remember a man who was sent to the execution pole for having “insulted our Great Leader” Kim Il-sung. His crime? He had snatched some bronze letters off an official inscription of our Great Leader. No doubt the man had just hoped to ameliorate his living conditions during the famine by selling the metal to the Chinese for a bit of cash. It was a crime punishable by death. When I heard the shots being fired, I felt that I was witnessing a great injustice.
It’s just bronze. It’s not fair to die just for a bit of bronze, I thought to myself. For the first time, I was revolted. But I kept all these thoughts to myself, because I knew that I would have been seen in a very bad light by my classmates and teachers if I had vocalized these opinions. In North Korea, everyone kept tabs on his or her neighbors. Even among friends, people could not be trusted. Starting from a young age, I noticed that my parents agreed with things publicly that were quite different from what they said at home. One day, a group of men were executed for stealing rice from the army reserves. After the execution, my parents commended the men’s courage.
But only after our front doors were firmly shut.
* * *
All of these memories came back to me while I was ruminating in that nauseating North Korean cell, from which we would soon be taken out for one last interrogation.
There was no delay in giving us the verdict: as we had all betrayed Kim Jong-il and the tenets of socialism, we had to be “reeducated” before being sent to prison.
Thus, one morning, handcuffed and escorted by guards, we left to cross the countryside, by foot, until we reached the reeducation camp. Once we were inside, we were finally relieved of our handcuffs, but the relief was short-lived. We found ourselves in the middle of an immense esplanade, surrounded by a chain-link fence, with some barracks in the middle where we would be tossed to spend each night. The men lay against one side, the women against the other. But we could never sleep for long. We were there to work for the state. It was part of our “socialist reeducation,” an intermediate step before we were to be sent to prison in my hometown of Eundeok.
* * *
From dawn until dusk, Keumsun and Mom worked the fields. I, alongside the other children and adolescents in the camp, cleaned the barracks, sorted the corn kernels and protected them from the rats that prowled around. Then at night, we had to attend daily brainwashing sessions. Seated in a circle, we read out loud from the works of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. We would mindlessly repeat them until we had them memorized. For twenty-five days, we followed the same ritual, which was always exhausting, especially when our stomachs were empty. We were barely fed anything … once again, I was hungry.
* * *
One morning, the guards came to take us to Chongjin like we were livestock. There, we would be transferred to the Eundeok prison. Back to where we came from. It was so humiliating to be sent to my grandparents’ hometown like we were dirty criminals. How were they going to treat us in this prison? Here we were again, nearly four years after we’d first left, and this time returning as criminals, guilty of committing “grave crimes.” We knew what sort of penalties were reserved for those kinds of criminals. Even if it seems crazy, given that we had just been captured from China and that we’d suffered so much abuse while we were there, Mom had only one idea in mind: we had to get out of North Korea again.
Alas, it seemed that now, our chances of escaping had been reduced to almost none.
* * *
And it was then and there that fate gave us a little break, just when we least expected it. A man was sent from Eundeok to escort other prisoners from the same district. At the last minute, the administration realized that we were also from that district, and they decided to add us to the convoy. The man was reluctant, but we convinced him that he had no other choice. The Chongjin prison authorities were eager to get rid of these inmates that they had to monitor, and for whom daily rations of food were an extra burden. The food shortage was so severe that even the policemen and junior military men put their own survival above all else.
Surely, we knew, our escort wouldn’t want to share with us his already low supply of provisions. And so, after we had just left the reeducation camp, we exploited the situation. Mom proposed a deal with the man in charge of escorting us: we would travel to Eundeok through our own means, so he wouldn’t have to take care of the costs of transporting us or feeding us. Since we had been added to the convoy at the last minute, there were no documents listing our names that obligated our escort to hand us over to the authorities—he wouldn’t be taking any risk by letting us go. After a few minutes of persuasion, he agreed, and we were free!
It was a miracle.
But what were we going to do with this fleeting newfound freedom? Between our homeland and us, a link had been broken forever. We had no money, and we were, under the eyes of the law, considered criminals, fugitives even.
We didn’t hesitate about our destination, not even for a moment. We refused to be considered exiles in our own country. The only thing we had in mind: flee, once more, to China, despite all the risks.