occupy an ambiguous place in North Korean society. The government tried several times to ban them altogether, or narrowly restrict their opening times, since Kim Jong-il, who was now effectively running the country for his father, declared that they were breeding grounds for every type of unsocialist practice. (He was right about that.) But he couldn’t abolish them while the Public Distribution System kept breaking down or failing to provide people with sufficient essentials. Occasionally, during some crackdown ordered by Pyongyang, the markets would be closed without notice, only to sprout up again within days, like sturdy and fertile weeds. The rules for market traders changed as often as the wind. For many years it was illegal to sell rice because rice was sacred and a gift of the Great Leader. But when I went to the markets, quite regularly with my mother, rice was for sale, along with meat, vegetables, kitchenware, and also Chinese fashions, cosmetics and – concealed beneath mats at enormous personal risk to vendor and buyer alike – cassette tapes of foreign pop music. Goods from Japan were considered the best quality. Next were South Korean products (with the archenemy’s labels and trademarks carefully removed), and lastly Chinese.
My mother wasted no time. Soon she had made contacts among the Chinese traders just across the river in Changbai and was arranging for goods to be sent over, which she would sell on, and make a nice profit. Her chief trading partners were a Mr Ahn and a Mr Chang, both Korean-Chinese, who had houses on the Chinese side of the riverbank.
It was in connection with my mother’s thriving business activities that she took me to a fortune-teller in the second year after we arrived back in Hyesan.
We woke extremely early, while it was still dark. My father and Min-ho were asleep. It was spring, and vivid green shoots were starting to sprout along the empty dirt streets. We hurried to the station to catch the first commuter train for Daeoh-cheon, the village where the fortune-teller woman lived.
My mother knew a number of these mystics and spent a lot of money on them. I was irritable about being woken so early, but she told me that the channel to the spirits is clearest at dawn. ‘She’ll be more accurate.’
My mother also wanted to beat the queue. Sometimes she’d arrive to find the fortune-teller out. A neighbour would say she’d been driven away in a Mercedes-Benz with tinted windows, for a discreet session with a high-ranking Party cadre. North Korea is an atheist state. Anyone caught in possession of a Bible faces execution or a life in the gulag. Kim worship is the only permitted outlet for spiritual fervour. Shamans and fortune-tellers, too, are outlawed, but high cadres of the regime consult them. We’d heard that even Kim Jong-il himself sought their advice.
The fortune-teller’s house was very old. Single-storey, and wood-framed with walls of mud and a thatched roof. I hadn’t known that such houses still existed. It was at a tilt and smelled damp. The lady was elderly, with thick, dishevelled hair. She was raising a granddaughter on her own.
‘I have a question about trade,’ my mother said in a whisper. ‘My Chinese partner has goods. I wish to know when to receive them.’
In other words, she wanted to know the best day to smuggle and not get into trouble. Sometimes, if the date was already fixed, my mother would pay for a ceremony to ward off bad luck.
The lady spilled a fistful of rice on the tabletop and used her fingernails to separate individual grains into portions. She examined this little pile intensely, then she started to speak in a rapid patter. I couldn’t tell if she was addressing us, or the spirits. She spoke of the day on which it was most propitious to receive the goods.
‘When you leave the house that morning, you must step out with your left foot first. Then spread some salt around and pray to the mountain spirit for good fortune.’
My mother nodded. She was satisfied.
‘This is my daughter,’ she said, and told her the time and date of my birth. The fortune-teller looked straight at me in a way that unnerved me. Then she closed her eyes theatrically.
‘Your daughter is clever,’ she said. ‘She has a future connected with music. She will eat foreign rice.’
As we walked back to the station the sun was coming up and the air was beautifully clear and crisp. The crags at the tops of the mountains were etched sharply against the sky but a white mist lingered in the foothills among the pines. My mother walked slowly down the dirt track, holding my hand. She was thinking about the prediction. She interpreted ‘foreign rice’ to mean that I would live overseas. Then she sighed, realizing she’d probably wasted her money. No ordinary North Koreans were allowed to travel abroad, let alone emigrate. That’s how it was with fortune-tellers. They told you things and you chose what you believed. But despite my scepticism about predicting dates for smuggling, I was more accepting of what the woman had said about me. I too thought my future was in music. I had been learning the accordion from a private tutor and was good at it. Accordion playing is popular in North Korea, a legacy from the end of the Second World War when our half of the peninsula was filled with Russian troops of the Soviet Red Army, although the Party never acknowledged any foreign influence on our culture. I thought the old woman’s prophecy meant that I would have a career as a professional accordionist and marry someone from another province. Maybe I would live in Pyongyang. That would be a dream come true. Only privileged people lived there. I fantasized about this for weeks until an event occurred that obliterated my daydreams and cast a shadow over my whole childhood.
A few months after the visit to the fortune-teller, during the summer school vacation, my mother had taken Min-ho somewhere and had left me at my grandmother’s house for the day. She was a fascinating woman, intelligent, and always full of stories. Her silver hair was pinned back in the old Korean style, with a needle through the bun. On this particular visit, however, she told me a story that devastated me.
To this day I’m not sure why she did it. She wasn’t being mischievous. And I don’t think her mind was weakening, making her forgetful of what should stay secret. The only explanation I can think of is that she thought I should know the truth while I was young, because I’d find it easier to come to terms with as a girl than if I discovered it later, as a grown woman. If that’s what she was thinking, she made a terrible misjudgement.
It was a warm Saturday morning and the door and windows were open. Outside in the yard, jays were chirping and drinking water from a bowl. We were sitting at her table when she began looking at me with an odd intensity. She said softly: ‘You know, your father isn’t your real father.’
I didn’t take in what she’d said.
She reached across and squeezed my hand. ‘Your name is Kim. Not Park.’
There was a long pause. I didn’t see where this was going, but I might have smiled uncertainly. This could be one of her jokes. Like my mother, she had quite a sense of humour.
Seeing my confusion, she said: ‘It’s the truth.’
She stood and went over to the glass cabinet where she kept her best bowls and plates. It had a small drawer in the bottom. She bent down stiffly. At the back of her neck I could see the string on which she kept her Party card. She retrieved a cardboard envelope, and handed it to me. It smelled damp.
‘Open it.’
I put my hand inside and pulled out a black and white photograph. It showed a wedding party. I recognized my mother at once. She was the bride in the centre, wearing a beautiful chima jeogori. But the scene didn’t make sense. The groom next to her was not my father. He was tall and handsome with slicked-back hair, and dressed in a Western-style suit. Behind them was a vast bronze statue of Kim Il-sung, arm outstretched, as if giving traffic directions.
My grandmother pointed to the groom in the suit. ‘That’s your father. And this lady …’ She pointed to a beautiful woman to the