often received extra food rations for their work. The Bowibu weren’t interested in the real crimes that affected people, such as theft, which was rife, or corruption, but only in political disloyalty, the faintest hint of which, real or imagined, was enough to make an entire family – grandparents, parents and children – disappear. Their house would be roped off; they’d be taken away in a truck at night, and not seen again.
I never noticed my parents’ silence on the subjects we were taught. This would only take on significance for me years later. Neither did I ever question their loyalty or doubt that they believed the selfless and superhuman feats of Kim Il-sung in saving our nation.
During a summer vacation from kindergarten, my mother took me on a visit to our family in Hyesan. That trip is memorable because I heard another myth that was to shape my childish idea of the world. It was told to me by Uncle Opium, the drug dealer, at the house of my grandmother.
Opium wasn’t hard to come by in North Korea. Farmers had been cultivating poppies since the 1970s, with state laboratories refining the raw produce into high-quality heroin – one of the few products the country made to an international standard. It was sold abroad to raise foreign currency. North Koreans, however, were forbidden to use it or trade with it. But in such a bribe-dependent economy, plenty of it found its way into the general population. My uncle was selling it illegally in Hyesan and over the river in China, where there was a strong demand. My grandmother used it regularly. Many people did – painkillers and pharmaceutical medicines were often hard to come by.
Uncle Opium had enormous shining eyes, much larger than any of my mother’s other siblings. It was years before the penny dropped and I realized why his eyes looked like this. He told me a lady came down from the sky every time it rained.
‘She is dressed in black,’ he said mysteriously, sucking on a cigarette of rough tobacco and blowing a ring of yellow smoke. ‘If you grab hold of her skirts she’ll take you up there with her.’
Back in Anju I waited days for it to rain. When finally I heard thunder I ran out of the house and looked up at the clouds. The raindrops splashed on my face. If the Respected Father Leader Kim Il-sung could appear in the east and in the west at the same time, it seemed quite reasonable to me that there would be a lady in black who flew among the clouds. I began to picture her realm up there in the sky. The thought of this lady scared the wits out of me, but I was too curious not to look for her. I held on to the steps in case she came down as fast as the rain and snatched me.
My mother quickly ruined the magic.
‘What are you doing?’ she yelled from the front door. ‘Get in here.’
‘I’m waiting for the lady in black.’
‘What?’
Then her expression changed, as if she were remembering something. She clearly had some recollection of this story from Uncle Opium, and then realized I’d completely fallen for it. Suddenly she was laughing so hard she was bent over with her arms wrapped around herself. Then she hugged me and I could feel her body shaking. She was still laughing hours later when my father came home and she was cooking the rice for dinner, dabbing her eyes with her sleeve.
Now I was confused.
Some magical stories I was supposed to believe in with all my heart and could never doubt. Others I believed in at a cost to my dignity. I had really wanted to believe in the lady in black.
The world inside the kindergarten was clear. The teachers had simple answers for everything good and everything bad. Outside the kindergarten, the world was more confusing. Uncle Opium could probably have explained it to me, if I’d ever been able to have a normal conversation with him.
At his house once I saw a solid gold bar on the table, and next to it a gluey lump that looked like tar. I asked him what it was and he told me it was opium.
‘Stick the end of your pencil in and take a bit,’ he said.
‘What do I do with it?’
He gave a breathy, hissing laugh. ‘Eat it, of course.’
I had a cold at the time and wasn’t feeling too good. The symptoms disappeared within minutes.
Anju may have been grimy and bleak but the hills surrounding it were beautiful. I enjoyed three idyllic childhood summers there, picnicking in fields of wild flowers. In certain months of the year the air would be buzzing with dragonflies. They hovered and flashed in iridescent blues and greens. We would chase them, running through the long grass. All the kids did this. At the weekend, my father would join in. Some kids bit off the heads and ate them, saying they tasted nutty.
On one outing we laid out our picnic mat in a copse of tall pine trees. My mother started hitting the trees with a long branch and suddenly it was raining pine cones. I ran around gathering them in a sack. We had never laughed so much together.
That scene is vivid in my mind as a moment of pure happiness just before a painful personal tragedy for me. We arrived home to find that my little dog had been killed. One of the trucks at the military base had run her over. I cried so much. My father told me there would not be another pet dog. They were too hard to obtain.
But it wasn’t that event that overshadowed my memories of Anju. There was far worse to come.
On a hot afternoon when I was seven years old, my mother sent me on some errand into town. It was unpleasantly humid. A fetid smell came off the river. There were flies everywhere. I was heading home along the riverbank when I saw the crowd ahead of me. A dense mass of people had gathered on the road beneath the railroad bridge. I had an odd intuition that this was something bad, but I could not resist going to look. I slipped my way into the crowd to see what was going on. The people near the front were looking upward. I followed their gaze, and saw a man hanging by his neck.
His face was covered with a dirty cloth sack and his hands were tied behind his back. He was wearing the indigo uniform of a factory worker. He wasn’t moving but his body swayed slightly on a rope tied from the iron railing of the bridge. Several soldiers were standing about, stony-faced, with rifles on their backs. The people watching were still and quiet, as if this were some sort of ceremony. The rope creaked. I caught a reek of male sweat. The scene confused me because people were watching but no one was moving and no one was helping the man.
The most random detail stuck in my mind. I remember how the man standing next to me lit a cigarette and held it down by his side so that the smoke gathered foggily in his fingers. There was no breeze. Suddenly it seemed like there was no air to breathe.
I had to get out of there. I almost fought my way out.
When I told my mother what I’d seen she went as pale as a fish. She turned her back to me and pretended to busy herself with something. Then she muttered: ‘Don’t ever watch those things.’
Over the next few days there was a spate of hangings across the city, and my mother became unnerved. One of the victims was someone she knew – a woman named Baek Kyeong-sul. She was accused of seducing a state bank official in order to steal money, and was sentenced at a people’s trial. My mother was there. These were not actually trials at all – the charges were simply read out and the victim executed on the spot. If the accused were to pass out from terror beforehand, the authorities were meant to adjourn to another day, so the victim was kept from knowing what was happening until the last moment.
It was near the start of the rainy season and the skies over Anju had been rumbling with thunder all morning, which further set my mother’s nerves on edge. She was pregnant with Min-ho, and not feeling herself.
The woman emerged from the back of a police van and found herself facing eight judges seated behind a table set up in a public square,