HARD RD OUT EB

Jihyun Park, Seh-lynn Chai, Sarah Baldwin-Beneich, Sarah Baldwin

• Publisher: HarperNorth
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780008541446
• eBook ISBN: 9780008541422
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: History

The harrowing story of a woman who escaped famine and terror in North Korea, not once but twice.

'A gripping, suspenseful and cathartic memoir that tells a story of pain and perseverance and makes the moral case for asylum.' David Lammy MP

North Korea is an open-air prison from which there is no escape. Only a handful of men and women have succeeded.

Jihyun Park is one of these rare survivors. Twice she left the land of the 'socialist miracle' to flee famine and dictatorship.

By the age of 29 she had already witnessed a lifetime of suffering. Family members had died of starvation; her brother was beaten nearly to death by soldiers. Even smiling and laughing was discouraged.

The first time she ran, she was forced abandon her father on his deathbed – crossing the border under a hail of bullets. In China she was sold to a farmer, with whom she had a son, before being denounced and forcibly returned to North Korea.

Six months later guards abandoned her, injured, outside a prison camp. She recovered and returned China to seek her son, now six, before attempting to navigate the long, hard road through the Gobi Desert and into Mongolia.

Clear-eyed and resolute, Jihyun's extraordinary story reveals a Korea far removed from the talk of nuclear weapons and economic sanctions. She remains sanguine despite the hardship. Recalling life's tiny pleasures even at her darkest moments, she manages to instill her tale with incredible grace and humanity.

Beautifully written with South Korean compatriot Seh-lynn Chai, this compelling book offers a stark lesson in determination, and ultimately in the importance of asylum.

CHAPTER ONE

‘Mummy, why did you abandon me?’

One afternoon in 2012, sitting beside me on a bench in a Manchester park, Chul asks me the question. I search for an answer but can’t find one. Where to begin? What does he remember? Chul was very young when I left him in China to save him from going to prison in North Korea. But I did go back to get him a year later, and since then I have obtained asylum for him in England. Today, here we are, safe and sound. And happy.

We are happy, aren’t we?

While these questions swirl in my head like leaves in a gale, the word ‘abandon’ sparks fear inside me: my heart races, I’m flooded with guilt. I realise that this question has just breached a world I’ve created out of things unsaid, a world whose apparent calm was merely a façade, a precarious world in which I’d overcome the pain of the past by covering it up. My heart aches at the thought that Chul hasn’t dared to ask this question since 2004, the moment of our separation. My eyes fill with tears. To think that he has endured eight years of silence, eight years during which he has preferred to keep everything to himself, crushes me with pain. I can’t keep covering up the past. I must tell my son why I can’t simply say, ‘I didn’t abandon you.’ I must tell him why I can’t find the words, why no sound will come from my throat.

I must tell him my story.

The distant past comes back to me like a murky dream, a lost world that collapsed before my eyes, swallowing up the people and places that had been most dear to me. The place I will never go back to again is Chongjin, a city in North Hamgyong Province on the east coast of North Korea.

Chongjin is a rectangular city built on a plain, on one side nestling up against the base of a rocky mountain range and, on the other, looking out over the water that separates Korea from Japan. Koreans call this body of water Donghae, or East Sea, while to the Japanese it is the Sea of Japan. Being near the sea made summer’s heat bearable, but the winters, when temperatures generally fell below zero, were bitterly cold. It had once been a small fishing village, but given its strategic location between Japan and Manchuria, it turned into a boom town during the Japanese occupation, from 1910 until 1945. By the 1970s, it was a dynamic, thriving industrial port, thanks to the steel and synthetic textile mills built along the coast. Japan and the Soviet Union had chosen the city as their preferred trade partner, and with a population of more than 500,000, it had fast become the third-largest city in North Korea.

I can still see myself as a little girl of four in a tiny, 16-square-metre apartment in a suburb to the south of the city, in a district called Ranam. At the time, Ranam was known both for its chicken farms and for its newly built housing for Chongjin’s factory workers.

My father, Park Seong-il, was a tractor-excavator operator. My mother, Ro Eun-sook, had worked in the same factory as him, but after they married she chose to become an ajumma, or housewife; North Korean law allowed her to stay home, and she took advantage of it. My father had spotted her early on, not long after she’d started working at the factory. She drove a small forklift with gusto, and seeing that, he said to himself she’d be the perfect wife for him. He had an elderly mother, two younger brothers and a sister to take care of: he needed a hard-working, devoted wife. He just had to keep her identity a secret from his mother, since he knew she would not approve of a future daughter-in-law who was not a member of the Chosun Rodongdang, or Korean Workers’ Party, and who was therefore a member of the lower class.

When I was born, my older sister, Myeong-sil, wasn’t around. My parents vaguely explained that she had gone to live with my grandmother, and I didn’t ask questions. My brother, Jeong-ho, was not born yet, so at the time it was just the three of us at home. Our apartment was located on the fourth floor of a faded red-brick building. There were ten apartments per floor and they were all numbered; those with even numbers had only one room, while odd-numbered apartments contained two. Ours, which had been assigned to my parents when they were married, was number 4. It was located at the end of the hallway, next to the door that led to the roof, which I was forbidden to open. The buildings were named according to where the residents worked, such as ‘Steelworks’ or ‘Shipyard’. Ours was called ‘Mechanical Department No. 2’ after the car factory where my father serviced cars. Everyone worked at the same place, everyone lived in the same lodging, everyone earned the same amount of money. It was ‘the Workers’ Paradise’. Each building represented an Inminban – inmin meaning people, and ban meaning class. It wasn’t surprising that the word inmin appeared so often in everyday language: everything belonged to the group, nothing to the individual. In the entryway of the building there was a glass-enclosed booth where the building manager, or Inminbanjang, was on duty. That position was held by one of the female residents, usually an ajumma. I remember Mrs Choi, our Inminbanjang, very well. She was the most important woman in the building: a member of the Party, she embodied Juche, the ideology of self-reliance developed by North Korea founder Kim Il-sung in the 1960s. About thirty, she terrorised the building with her booming voice. She was the type of cold, authoritarian woman who ordered everyone around and was always in control. Mrs Choi had a whole network of agents – usually the building’s vulnerable inhabitants – who spied on the other residents. She gathered information, then passed it directly to the Department of National Security.

Facing the glass booth was a large bulletin board covered with handwritten announcements about cleaning crew rotas and air raid drills. The Americans, you see, might attack at any moment, and drills had become a daily occurrence. In the evening, vehicles fitted with loudspeakers drove around on patrol to ensure that all the lights were out. At the faintest glimmer, the loudspeakers would blare, ‘Apartment 3, lights out!’ If you were unlucky enough to be the culprit, you were doomed: the authorities would cut the electricity in all three buildings as a collective punishment, and you would be cursed by your neighbours to the end of your days.

The staircase that led to our apartment was at the end of the hallway. Was it ever clean? As a little girl, I watched my mom energetically wash and scrub the steps; the following day, it was my neighbour’s mum’s turn. Thanks to all the scouring, that staircase became more dazzling every day. The inside of our apartment was whitewashed. As in all Korean homes, a shoe cabinet sat just inside the door. The only room was straight ahead, with a window overlooking the street. To the right was the kitchen, and to the left a small toilet cubicle. There was no flush, so we had to add water by hand. For washing up, there was a water bucket, a small bar of foul-smelling soap, and salt. There was never enough toothpaste for all of us, so very early on I got in the habit of dipping my finger in the salt and rubbing it on my teeth to clean them.

Past the toilet was the one room. There was nothing in it but a wooden cupboard containing blankets and clothes – one of the only pieces of furniture in our home. In keeping with Korean tradition, we all slept on the floor. It was covered with linoleum and was warmed underneath by hot air from the wood stove, a typical Korean heating system known as Ondol. At night, we would take our quilted cotton mats out of the wardrobe and open them out on the floor. The next day, we would carefully fold them up again and put them back in the cupboard. There was one blanket for the three of us. This was how the typical North Korean family lived.

In the evening, the room was lit by a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. You had to be careful; light bulbs were rare, a gift of Kim Il-sung, and not available to everyone. They were rationed, so people burned candles to conserve their bulb. We lived in the dark most of the time and spoke little, since the apartment walls were paper-thin. There is a Korean proverb that says, ‘Words in the day are heard by birds; words at night are heard by mice.’ And then there was the picture, framed in pale wood that hung on the wall facing the wardrobe. It spoke to me, watched me, heard me; it even read my mind. This was The Portrait. The Portrait had a beautiful smile and a kind air. Eomeoni – which is what I called my mother – and Abeoji – my father – carefully cleaned The Portrait every day with a special cloth. They took great care of our beloved father, Kim Il-sung.

I was born on 30 July 1968, but in North Korea we don’t celebrate children’s birthdays. Only the birthday of Kim Il-sung, on 15 April, is celebrated. But every 30 July, I was entitled to a bowl of rice, and it was a huge luxury not to have to share it. A big bowl of rice, just for me: now, that was a gift!

Even though Eomeoni was an ajumma, she didn’t have time to play with me. The mothers in the building were also responsible for keeping the walls gleaming white, and they spent their time whitewashing them. They may have been housewives, but they were never really home. They were always out, cleaning the stairwells, the streets, the buildings. We children played by ourselves in a sandlot that must have been there since the building was built in the sixties. Much of the housing had been created for soldiers completing their military service and who were going to work in the steel mills of Chongjin. The street I lived on was crawling with kids whooping and messing around. Our shoes had holes in them and our toes stuck out, but that didn’t keep us from running all over the place and having fun. These were the kids with whom I learned to play hide-and-seek, catch tadpoles in the river, and pretend to fight the Americans.

One day, Abeoji announced that I was to go and live with Halmeoni, my father’s mother. Just as my big sister Unni (I never call her by her first name, Myeong-sil, out of respect, since she is my elder sister) had gone to live with Halmeoni when she was four; now it was my turn. It did not occur to me to ask why. To the little girl I was, this was normal. Every child in the world went to live with his or her grandmother at the age of four and came home at seven, when they were school age. To prepare me, Abeoji warned me that Halmeoni was difficult to live with. OK, I said to myself, I’m about to take my first train ride, and for that I can put up with a difficult Halmeoni! Getting official authorisation to travel to another region was difficult, but after a long wait it finally came, and all that was left was to pack my bag. I remember feeling so happy to be taking a trip with my father for the first time that I left without even saying goodbye to my mother.

To get to Pukchong, where Halmeoni lived, we travelled south by train along the east coast of Hamgyong Province. The ride lasted three hours. At Pukchong, we took another train to Sin-Pukchong, then walked half an hour to the house Abeoji had grown up in until he was fourteen, when he began his military service. By then, Halmeoni was a very poor widow. It would mean one less mouth to feed, my father thought as he enlisted, lying about his age. After about ten years with the Jonyon regiment of Kumgangsan, in Kangwondo Province, he was sent to Chongjin, where he operated a red tractor-excavator in the Second Mechanical Division of the car servicing factory – his first and only line of work, the work he would do for the rest of his life.

The dirt roads leading to Halmeoni’s house followed the ups and downs of the mountainous countryside. Everywhere I looked, I saw collective farms. There was very little farm machinery. I didn’t hear a single motor. Oxen-pulled carts, or soorye, passed by. They were full of corn and Korean cabbage, used to make Kimchi, fermented cabbage with salt and chilli powder – the national dish. By the side of the road, a few women were hard at work repairing the roads that had been eroded by the rain, with shovels as their only tools.

Abeoji stopped at last in front of an old, one-storey house situated in the middle of some barren fields at the foot of a dirt-coloured hill. The tiles of the roof came in every shade of grey: the newer ones were coal-dark, while time had turned others greyish-green with mould and still others were the colour of stone. The faded hues signalled the house’s age, while the walls, white as chalk, stood out in startling contrast against a desiccated landscape drained of colour.

My grandmother Halmeoni, my sister Unni and my father’s older brother Keun Abeoji were waiting for us outside. Jagueun Aboeji, the youngest brother, and Gomo, his younger sister, were at work and missing that afternoon, as well as my father’s other younger brother, who happened to be in the army. Grey-haired, her face and hands wrinkled, Halmeoni must have been about sixty. She frightened me: her back made a right angle with the rest of her body, which placed her eyes at the level of my own. Even when she stood, she couldn’t straighten up. That day she was wearing a white blouse and a long black skirt. She had ...

Table of contents

• About the Authors
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to Readers
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Chapter Fifteen
• Epilogue
• Postscript
• Acknowledgements
• Book Credits
• About the Publisher