that has remained with me all my life.
Ryanggang Province is the highest part of Korea. The mountains in summer are spectacular. Winters are snowy and extremely cold. During the colonial period (1910–45), the Japanese brought the railroad and the lumber mills. On some days the air everywhere smelled of fresh-cut pine. The province is home both to the sacred revolutionary sites surrounding Mount Paektu, North Korea’s highest peak, and, conversely, to the hardscrabble penal region of Baekam County, where families that have fallen foul of the regime are sent into internal exile.
When I was growing up Hyesan was an exciting place to be. Not because it was lively – nowhere in the country was noted for its theatre scene, restaurants or fashionable subcultures. The city’s appeal lay in its proximity to the narrow Yalu River, Korea’s ancient border with China. In a closed country like North Korea, Hyesan seemed like a city at the edge of the world. To the citizens who lived there it was a portal through which all manner of marvellous foreign-made goods – legal, illegal and highly illegal – entered the country. This made it a thriving hub of trade and smuggling, which brought many benefits and advantages to the locals, not least of which were opportunities to form lucrative partnerships with Chinese merchants on the other side of the river, and make hard currency. At times it could seem like a semi-lawless place where the government’s iron rule was not so strong. This was because almost everyone, from the municipal Party chief to the lowliest border guard, wanted a share of the riches. Occasionally, however, there were crackdowns ordered by Pyongyang, and they could be brutal.
People from Hyesan were therefore more business-minded and often better off than people elsewhere in North Korea. The grown-ups would tell me that we were fortunate to live there. It was the best place in the whole country after Pyongyang, they said.
My earliest memory is from Hyesan, and it was very nearly my last.
Strangely, I remember the dress I was wearing. It was pretty and pale blue. I had wandered alone down the grassy bank behind our house and was sitting on a wooden sleeper, gathering stones into my lap. The dress and my hands became filthy. Suddenly there was a noise so loud it split the air and echoed off the mountains. I turned and saw a vast, blackened mass the size of a building coming around a curve in the track between the pine trees. It was heading straight at me. I didn’t know what it was.
I have a series of confused images – blazing headlights, screeching metal, a sharp, burning smell. Voices shouting. The horns blasting again.
The black mass was in front of me, over me. I was underneath it. The noise and burning smell were tremendous.
The train driver later told my mother that he’d spotted me on the curve, about a hundred yards up the track, too short a distance to brake and avoid hitting me. His heart nearly stopped, he said. I crawled out from under the fourth carriage. For some reason, I was laughing. There were now many people on the bank. My mother was among them.
She picked me up by my arms and yelled: ‘How many times have I said it, Min-young? Never – go – down – there!’ Then she clutched me to her waist and began weeping uncontrollably. A woman in the crowd came over and told her that this was a good omen. To survive such a disaster so young meant that I would have a long life. For all her common sense, my mother was a superstitious person. Over the years she would repeat this woman’s saying. It became a kind of deliverance myth, and I would remember it in moments of danger.
My mother was one of eight siblings – four sisters and four brothers – all of whom possessed the characteristic Hyesan stubbornness. They were to have curiously diverse careers. At one extreme was Uncle Money. He was an executive at a successful trading company in Pyongyang and could obtain luxurious Western goods. We were very proud of him. At the opposite end was Uncle Poor, who had sunk in the songbun system after marrying a girl from a collective farm. He was a talented artist and could have been one of the elite few permitted to paint the Leaders, but instead lived out his days painting the long red propaganda placards that stood in fields, exhorting tired farmworkers to ‘unleash the transformative phase of economic growth!’ and so on. The other brothers were Uncle Cinema, who ran the local movie theatre, and Uncle Opium, a drug dealer. Uncle Opium was quite an influential figure in Hyesan. His high songbun protected him from investigation and the local police welcomed his bribes. He would sit me on his knee and tell me fabulous folktales of the mountains, of animals and mythical beasts. When I remember these stories now, I realize he was probably high.
Family was everything to my mother. Our social life took place within the family and she formed few friends outside. In that way she was like my father. They were both private people. I would never see them hold hands or catch them cuddling in the kitchen. Few North Koreans are romantically demonstrative in that way. And yet their feelings for each other were always clear. Sometimes, at the dinner table, my mother would say to my father: ‘I’m so happy I met you.’ And my father would lean towards me and whisper, loud enough for my mother to hear: ‘You know, if they brought ten truckloads of women for me and asked me to choose someone else, I would reject them all and choose your mother.’
Throughout their marriage they remained smitten. My mother would giggle and say: ‘Your father has the most beautiful ears!’
When my father was away on military business, my mother would take me to stay with my grandmother or with one of my aunts. The eldest sister was Aunt Old, a melancholy and solitary woman, whose tragic marriage I was not to learn about until years later. The youngest was a generous woman known as Aunt Tall. The most beautiful and talented of my mother’s sisters was Aunt Pretty. As a girl, she’d had hopes of becoming an ice-figure skater, but after a slip in which she’d chipped a tooth, my grandmother put paid to her dreams. Aunt Pretty had a real head for business – a talent my mother also possessed – and made a lot of money sending Chinese goods for sale in Pyongyang and Hamhung. She was tough, too, and once underwent an appendectomy by candlelight when the hospital had neither power nor enough anaesthetic.
‘I could hear them cutting me,’ she said.
I was horrified. ‘Didn’t it hurt?’
‘Well, yes, but what can you do?’
My mother was a born entrepreneur. This aspect of her was unusual for a woman of high songbun. Many such women during the 1980s and early 1990s would have regarded making money from trade as immoral and beneath their dignity. But my mother was from Hyesan, and had a nose for a deal. Over the years ahead she would run many small, profitable ventures that would keep the family alive through the worst imaginable times. ‘Trade’ and ‘market’ were still dirty words when I was growing up, but within a few years attitudes would change radically, when it became a matter of survival.
She was strict with me, and I was brought up well. She had high standards for everything. She taught me it was rude to bump into older people, talk too loudly, eat too quickly, and eat with my mouth open. I learned that it was vulgar to sit with my legs apart. I learned to sit on the floor with my legs folded and tucked underneath, Japanese-style, and my posture bolt upright. She taught me to say goodbye to her and my father in the mornings with a full, ninety-degree bow.
When one of my girl friends dropped by once and saw me do this, she said: ‘What d’you do that for?’
The question surprised me. ‘You don’t do it?’
My friend became weak with laughter. I was teased after that with extravagant, mock-formal bows.
In the house my mother hated untidiness and could be obsessively orderly. In public she always looked her best – she never wore old clothes and had an eye for the fashion trends, although she was seldom satisfied with her appearance. In a society where round-faced women with large eyes and almond-shaped lips are considered beautiful, she bemoaned her narrow eyes and angular face, usually in a way that made fun of herself: ‘When I was pregnant I was worried you’d look like me.’ I acquired my liking for fashion from her.
I was expecting to start kindergarten in Hyesan, but it was not to be. One evening in December my father returned home from work grinning broadly. It was snowing hard outside and his cap and uniform were powdered white. He clapped his hands together, asked for some hot tea, and told us he had