ID passbook and ticket and told her to wait.
My mother’s face fell into her hands. Now we had a problem. She would have to get permission from Hamhung again before we could buy new tickets. That would take time and she had two children in tow, and luggage. We were stranded. Min-ho was crying loudly. My mother took him off her back and held him and together we slumped onto a bench inside the station. I held her hand. We must have looked a desolate bunch, because a middle-aged man in the grey cap and uniform of the Korean State Railway came up to us and smiled. He asked what the matter was. My mother explained, and he went to the ticket inspector’s office. The woman was not there, but he brought back my mother’s ticket and ID passbook, and gave them to her.
In a low voice he said: ‘When the train stops, jump on. But if she comes looking for you, hide.’
My mother was so grateful that she asked for his address so that she could send him something.
He held up his palms. ‘No time for that.’
The train was creaking into the station, bringing with it a reek of latrines and soldered steel. It screeched to a stop and the doors began flying open.
We boarded. The carriage was crowded. My mother quickly explained our predicament to the passengers and asked if we could crouch down behind them. Sure enough, a minute later we heard the voice of the ticket inspector, asking people on the platform about us. Next thing we knew she had entered the carriage.
‘Have you seen a woman with a baby and a little girl?’ She was shouting. ‘Did she get on the train?’
‘Yes.’ Two of the passengers in front of us said this in unison. ‘They went that way.’
The woman got off, still looking left and right for us. We heard her asking more people on the platform. We were holding our breath. Why wasn’t the train moving? A minute seemed to pass. Finally we heard the shrill note of a whistle. The train shunted forward, couplings banging together. My mother looked at me and finally exhaled. She’d been terrified Min-ho would start bawling again.
Kindness toward strangers is rare in North Korea. There is risk in helping others. The irony was that by forcing us to be good citizens, the state made accusers and informers of us all. The episode was so unusual that my mother was to recall it many times, saying how thankful she was to that man, and to the passengers. A few years later, when the country entered its darkest period, we would remember him. Kind people who put others before themselves would be the first to die. It was the ruthless and the selfish who would survive.
Our new home in Hyesan was another house allocated to us by the military. Our neighbours were other military officials and their families. The accommodation was good by North Korean standards. It had two rooms and a squat toilet. The heating in the floor was piping hot, making the glue beneath the reja – a kind of linoleum – give off a smell like mushrooms, but the building was poorly insulated. In winter we’d have warm backsides and freezing noses. We had to boil water when we wanted a hot bath.
My mother did her usual makeover, replacing the wallpaper and the furniture. She didn’t mind. She was thrilled to be back in Hyesan and reconnected with our family social circles. We felt settled.
Hyesan had been booming in the years we’d been away. The illicit trade coming over the border from China seemed greater than ever and my mother wanted to get in on some deals. She had found a job with a local government bureau, but her salary, as with all state jobs, was negligible. She wanted to make serious money, like Aunt Pretty, Uncle Money and Uncle Opium.
It seemed that everything was available in Hyesan – from high-value liquor and expensive foreign perfume to Western-brand clothing and Japanese electronics – at a price. Smugglers brought goods from the county of Changbai, on the Chinese side, across the narrow, shallow river for collection by a Korean contact, or across the Changbai–Hyesan International Bridge (known to locals as the Friendship Bridge). Illegal trade across the bridge required bribing the North Korean customs officials; smuggling across the river required bribing the border guards. When the river froze solid in winter smugglers crept over the ice; the rest of the year they waded across at night, or in broad daylight, if the guards at key points had been bribed and were in on the deal.
We could see the prosperity. This would not have been at all obvious to outsiders, since North Koreans are poor and do not wish to draw the state’s attention. Anyone looking across from China would have seen a city in deep blackout at night, with a few kerosene lamps flickering in windows, and a colourless, drab place by day, with people cycling joylessly to work. But the signs were all around us. The special hotel for foreigners, where our parents sometimes took Min-ho and me for an overnight stay as a treat (the manager was a friend of my mother’s), was always full with Chinese business people. In the morning we’d join them for breakfast but never talk to them, in case any informers or Bowibu agents were listening. The city’s dollar store, opposite Hyesan Station, had plenty of customers spending hard currency on goods not obtainable anywhere else, and certainly not through the state’s Public Distribution System. Going there was like being admitted into a magical cavern. I couldn’t believe how brightly the goods were packaged – foreign-made cookies and chocolates in wrappers of silver and purple that made them irresistibly tempting, and fruit juices – orange, apple, grape – in clear bottles marked with Western letters, that came from some faraway land of plenty. Outside the store, a few illegal moneychangers hung about like flies. My mother walked straight past them and would have nothing to do with them, saying they swindled people by wrapping newsprint into a bundle and putting a few genuine notes on top, knowing that anyone illegally trying to change money couldn’t complain. The state beauty parlour was always fully booked, with women having their hair permed (not dyed, which was prohibited), and the state restaurants were doing a roaring trade. Most significantly, business was brisk and busy at the open-air local markets.
Markets occupy an ambiguous place in North Korean society. The government tried several times to ban them altogether, or narrowly restrict their opening times, since Kim Jong-il, who was now effectively running the country for his father, declared that they were breeding grounds for every type of unsocialist practice. (He was right about that.) But he couldn’t abolish them while the Public Distribution System kept breaking down or failing to provide people with sufficient essentials. Occasionally, during some crackdown ordered by Pyongyang, the markets would be closed without notice, only to sprout up again within days, like sturdy and fertile weeds. The rules for market traders changed as often as the wind. For many years it was illegal to sell rice because rice was sacred and a gift of the Great Leader. But when I went to the markets, quite regularly with my mother, rice was for sale, along with meat, vegetables, kitchenware, and also Chinese fashions, cosmetics and – concealed beneath mats at enormous personal risk to vendor and buyer alike – cassette tapes of foreign pop music. Goods from Japan were considered the best quality. Next were South Korean products (with the archenemy’s labels and trademarks carefully removed), and lastly Chinese.
My mother wasted no time. Soon she had made contacts among the Chinese traders just across the river in Changbai and was arranging for goods to be sent over, which she would sell on, and make a nice profit. Her chief trading partners were a Mr Ahn and a Mr Chang, both Korean-Chinese, who had houses on the Chinese side of the riverbank.
It was in connection with my mother’s thriving business activities that she took me to a fortune-teller in the second year after we arrived back in Hyesan.
We
