Behind him was a flickering orange light, and everywhere a sharp reek of aviation fuel. We saved nothing from the house but the clothes we had on and the portraits my father had snatched from the wall, just seconds before the roof collapsed. All my picture books, my novels, and my beloved accordion and guitar were destroyed.
But there was something else I treasured that was also destroyed by the fire. Something so dangerous to possess that it could have got us sent to a prison camp. Looking back, the fire may have been a mighty stroke of luck.
A few months before the fire one of my best friends had gathered a close-knit group of us together in the schoolyard. I tended to make friends with older girls, from similar backgrounds. This friend was the daughter of the city’s chief of police. She’d heard that cassette tapes of illegal South Korean pop music could be bought, very discreetly, from certain dealers.
Soon we were in possession of some of this red-hot criminal contraband. We were among the first in North Korea to hear these new hits.
A small group of us began secretly meeting up on the weekends in the houses of one of us, and when parents and siblings were out we’d dance and sing along to the music of the South Korean singers Ju Hyun-mi and Hyun Chul, twirling around and jiving our hips, keeping the volume low. We made up our own moves. In truth we had very little idea of how people danced to pop. We knew we were not supposed to enjoy the archenemy’s music, but we did not realize quite how grave our crime was until news spread around Hyesan that some local women had been sentenced to a prison camp for partying to South Korean pop. One in their group had denounced the others.
After that I listened to the tapes alone at home, lying on my bed.
My favourite was a song called ‘Rocky Island’ by the singer Kim Weon-joong. The rocky island of the title referred to a woman he loved, and the chorus went:
Even if you don’t like me, I love you so much,
Even if I can’t wake up, I love you so much …
I adored this mush. It was about teenage love, and touched my heart in a way that filled me with longing. It was changing me, making me feel I was growing up. I got nothing like this from North Korean music. Our country had pop music of its own, but with songs called ‘Our Happiness in our General’s Embrace’ or ‘Young People, Forward!’ I cringed to listen to it.
I taught myself to play ‘Rocky Island’ on my accordion. I took care to play quietly, keeping the door and windows shut, but one morning while I was practising a hard knock sounded on the front door.
I froze.
One of our neighbours was on the doorstep. He was on his way to work. He told me he had heard me playing.
A pool of cold fear gathered in the pit of my stomach. Was he going to denounce me, or just warn me? But to my great surprise he smiled and told me that hearing that song made him emotional and gave him energy. Then he got back on his bicycle and rode off. It was such a weird thing to say. I wonder now if he knew full well it was a South Korean song and was reaching out to me, giving me a signal, like a secret handshake.
A few months later, by the time the illicit pop cassettes had gone up in flames with the house, I knew all the songs off by heart. The melody and lyrics of ‘Rocky Island’, especially, would be a great comfort to me in the times ahead.
The South Korean pop songs had given me a vague awareness of a universe beyond the borders of North Korea. If I’d had more awareness in general I might have spotted clues indicating that the world outside was undergoing dramatic changes – changes so great that the regime was being put under stresses it had never experienced before. I was oblivious to the fact that the Russians had allowed communism to collapse in the Soviet Union, ‘without even a shot fired’, as Kim Jong-il would put it. But this was affecting our country in ways that were starting to become impossible for the regime to conceal. My parents’ jobs and business dealings meant that we had enough food. I had not yet noticed that the rations of basic food essentials provided by the Public Distribution System were dwindling or becoming irregular, nor had I paid attention when the government launched a widely publicized campaign in 1992 called ‘Let us eat two meals a day’, which it said was healthier than eating three. Anyone who hadn’t yet figured out a moneymaking hustle of their own was still depending on the state for essentials, and they were beginning to suffer.
As it happened, our next move as a family took us to the very edge of that world outside, as close to it as anyone could go, as if fortune was contriving to make us look outward. Our new house faced directly onto the bank of the Yalu River itself. I could throw a stone from our front gate over the water into China.
Our new neighbourhood was a cluster of single-storey homes separated by narrow alleys. The house was larger than previous houses we’d lived in, painted white, with a tiled roof, and surrounded by a white concrete wall. It had three rooms, each the width of the building, so that we had to go through the kitchen area to the main room and through that to the back room, which is where the four of us slept.
My mother had paid a lot of money for it. Officially, there is no private property in North Korea, and no real-estate business, but in reality people who have been allocated desirable or conveniently located housing often do sell or swap them if the price is right.
The location of this house was perfect for my mother’s illicit enterprises. She could arrange for goods to be smuggled from just a few yards away in China, straight over the river to our front door. For security against the rampant thievery she had the wall around the house built higher, to about six feet, and bought a fierce, trained dog from the military. The entrance was through a gate in the front wall, that we kept heavily locked. We had to pass through a total of three doors and five locks just to come and go. In front of the house was a path that ran along the riverside, five yards from our front gate, along which the guards patrolled in pairs. Uncle Opium and Aunt Pretty dropped by and congratulated my mother. The location couldn’t be better, they said.
Min-ho was extremely excited about this new home. It was a warm, mild autumn and the day we moved in he saw boys his own age playing in the river, mixing with Chinese boys from the other side, while their mothers washed clothes along the banks. To most North Koreans, the borders are impassable barriers. Our country is sealed shut from neighbouring countries. And yet here were five-, six- and seven-year-old boys splashing and flitting between the two banks, North Korea’s and China’s, like the fish and the birds.
The next day my mother went to introduce herself to the neighbours. What they told her made her heart sink to her stomach. She returned to the house looking angry and pale.
‘The house is cursed,’ she said, slumping to the floor and covering her face with her hands. ‘I’ve made a terrible mistake.’
A neighbour had told her that a child of the previous occupants had died in an accident. My mother thought she’d been lucky to find the place, but in fact the occupants were selling in a hurry to escape the association with tragedy and bad luck. I tried to comfort her, but she shook her head and looked tired. Her superstitions ran too deep to be reasoned with. I half-believed it myself. Many of my mother’s beliefs were rubbing off on me. I could tell she was already thinking of another expensive session with a fortune-teller to see if she could get the curse lifted.
My mother quickly furnished the house, once again doing her makeover. People who could afford