No Space for Love (eBook)

CHAPTER 2

North Korea

Ha-na always knew that her father loved her older brother more than he loved her, but that had never bothered her. After all, they lived in North Korea, where men and boys were always more prized than women or girls. Her brother, Chang-hee, was two years older than Ha-na and had always protected her. They had shared their chores and their deepest secrets. Chang-hee was always exceedingly kind to her and had never allowed the neighbor kids to say one bad or derogatory statement to Ha-na. For this, Ha-na loved and looked up to her brother.

“Here, Ha-na,” my mother said as she scooped over half of her meager portion of rice onto my plate, “I am not so hungry tonight, and we cannot waste the food. You eat what I can’t eat.”

“NO!” My father angrily shouted at my mother as he reached for the plate. “If you can’t eat it, give the food to Chang-hee. She is nothing but a girl.”

But Mother surprised me this time when she pulled the plate back and softly said, “But Ha-na is my daughter, and I love her too. It is my food, and this time I am giving it to Ha-na. Chang-hee has gotten it every night so far this week.”

Father surprised me even more when he did not object and only grunted as he got up and left the table, letting me have the rest of Mother’s food. Such a small thing, and yet it simply demonstrated once again how little my father regarded me. I was, after all, “just a girl” and was clearly inferior to my brother’s status in the family. In a highly patriarchal North Korean society with deeply entrenched Confucian values, a woman’s principal role is to maintain a family’s household and since I was not yet a woman, I was of even less value. Father had always doted on Chang-hee and he was the new favorite child, holding all the hopes and dreams of the family. My parent’s firstborn was a son who had unfortunately died in infancy. I never knew why he died but knew that my father blamed Mother for depriving him of his son. Mother accepted the blame (rightly or wrongly placed) and was deeply apologetic and remorseful, even though she knew there was nothing she could ever say or do that would right this wrong with Father. Mother did, however, partially redeem herself when the next year Chang-hee was born. I called it “partially” because while Chang-hee was the beloved boy, he also had a club foot, which meant he was considered disabled. Under Kim Il-sung, all disabled veterans enjoyed a high social status if they said their wounds were the result of American aggression in the Korean War, but it had not been so good for disabled children. It was widely whispered down through the years that when a baby of either sex was born with physical defects, he or she was quickly put to death and buried. But my parents had worked hard to have a boy and did not see Chang-hee’s deformed foot as all that bad. They did not want him to be sent away from Pyongyang, the showcase capital, for any reason, and they were afraid that Chang-hee might even be taken to an area camp for the disabled and they would never see him again. Secretly, Father paid a local man handsomely to make Chang-hee special shoes that concealed the fact that his left foot pointed inward and was shaped oddly. At home, Chang-hee wore a special, handmade brace that forced him to walk normally even though he claimed it was extremely painful. He dutifully always practiced walking in proper form so that his shame would never be discovered. Our family never spoke about this disability or ever revealed this fact to anyone for any reason. Both Chang-hee and I had made up a story that explained why he would never swim with us kids or remove his shoes. We both claimed that he had nearly drowned one time and that he was simply terrified at the prospect of getting close to water. So far, this story had always worked for us, but we were all scared that our secret might someday be revealed.

I was always glad that Chang-hee had been born before me to help ease all the pain of losing our older brother before I arrived. But I also knew that being a girl was not such a good thing and that my father barely tolerated me. He was not shy about showing that he would have liked it much better if it had been me who had died and not my oldest brother. He would then have had two sons to be proud of and to carry on his legacy, instead of a girl that he was obligated to feed and who would only cost him money. This is the way our Chinese culture in North Korea has always believed, and it is a burden that every girl in North Korea knows and feels daily. I did carry a small secret in my heart though, and that was that I knew my mother loved me without conditions or any reservations at all, and for that, I was eternally grateful. It was this knowledge about her love that would sustain me through the coming years of hardship. You can imagine the pain I felt when I learned and understood that, by giving Chang-hee and me half of her food so often during those desperate years, she had weakened her immune system so much that it caused her death. I know now that when she said she could not eat more, she was making sure that my brother and I survived at her own expense. Sure, deaths from diseases were common in North Korea, and every family experienced it, but maybe if she had been stronger…

Even though they had an arranged marriage, I do believe that my parents were happily married. It had been the cultural norm and was not so difficult to accept. After the Korean War, my mother’s father and my father’s father worked together when they served in Kim Il-sung’s, “The Great Leader” army. They had been good friends, or at least knew and respected each other enough to pledge that they would marry their children to each other if they had children. And that is exactly what happened. My parents personified the values of North Korea, with the woman being considered inferior but still responsible for all household duties. We lived in the capital city, Pyongyang, and later moved to Hyangsan, where my father, like his father, was in the military while my mother worked at the food distribution center not far from our house. Our home was a small, modest house that looked just like everyone else’s. Chang-hee and I took turns dusting the portraits of Kim Il-sung and later his son, Kim Jong-il, which were hung so that they were the first and most important thing you saw when you entered our home. I loved my older brother, who always seemed to have a special place in his heart for me, and together we would trot off to school. I thought in my small child’s mind that we had a rather good life.

It was not until I was about nine or ten years old, in about 1996, that I noticed that food was in desperately short supply. Before that, we had never had food to spare, but after the hailstorms, flooding, and the extremely cold winter of 1995, we had even less. Mother went every day to the place where the government gave out daily food rations. The Public Distribution System (PDS) was the system by which every person received a certain amount of food as payment for working on government farms or in some other government capacity. I did not understand it well at the time, but “The Great Leader,” Kim Il-sung, originally envisioned North Korea as being self-sufficient, requiring no outside help from any nation. This policy had worked without major problems until the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s when the Soviets favored China over North Korea. After the breakup, they gradually reduced the amount of oil, fertilizers, and equipment they supplied to North Korea. Without enough oil, our debt gradually increased. These shortages were coupled with several natural disasters, and the outcome was a widespread and severe famine. My brother would go out hunting for scraps of paper or wood to burn to keep us warm, and Mother did all sorts of things to keep us well-fed. At the time, I did not think about it, but little treasures of Mother’s began to be “put away,” or so she said. I now wonder if Mother was starting to engage in “jangmadang.” Jangmadang was a form of black market or bartering that was becoming more common because workers (even the military) were not receiving money or food as they had in the past from the state’s Public Distribution System. And the wages that they did receive were becoming worthless, forcing people to trade on the black market. “Frog markets” could sometimes be seen down some side streets. Frog markets were what they called black market traders who would leap up and then disappear like a frog only to reappear behind you. How else could Mother have provided us with food sometimes?

One day, when Chang-hee was sixteen years old, he did not return from his daily forage into the streets looking for fuel. That day, we had walked most of the way home together when Chang-hee sent me on without him, telling me that he had seen a pile of trash in the block behind us and that he would be home with some fuel shortly. When it grew dark and near dinner time and Chang-hee had not returned, Mother and I went in one direction, and Father went in the other direction, searching and calling for Chang-hee. We did not eat dinner that night but spent the whole time looking for him and knocking on doors. Father blamed both Mother and me, and we were both crying, sick with worry and so tired. In the morning, after a whole night of frantically searching for Chang-hee, Mother and I returned home and fell into bed exhausted. Father continued his search and went to the police station. No one had seen or heard of Chang-hee, and we never saw him again or learned what could have happened to...