The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story (34 page)

‘They leave tomorrow,’ he said, nodding to my mother and Min-ho. ‘They will be guided early in the morning over the border. Into Laos.’

Where?
‘No, we’re going to Vietnam.’

‘That was the plan, but two days ago a group of North Koreans was caught in Vietnam and sent back to China.’

I glanced at my mother. She wasn’t following the Mandarin, but she could see the alarm in my eyes.

‘The Vietnamese used to allow you people to go to South Korea,’ he said. ‘We don’t know why this has changed, but it means that route is not safe now. We can’t risk it. We’re switching to Laos.’

My head was spinning. ‘Where’s Laos?’

‘Next to Vietnam. Same distance from here. Seven hours away.’

‘Is it safe?’

‘Safe?’ He gave a snort. ‘Nothing is guaranteed. But we’ve been doing this a long time. We can get you across the border and to the South Korean embassy in Vientiane.’ He saw another blank look on my face. ‘That’s the capital. I’ll get your mother and brother there.’ He took a final drag on his cigarette and flicked it through the open window, trailing orange sparks.

‘Well, I’m going too,’ I said.

‘No, you’re not.’ He shot me a look of glinting suspicion, as if I were trying to steal his trade secrets. ‘You’re going back to Seoul.’

‘I’m not leaving them. They need me.’

‘They’ll be in safe hands.’

‘They don’t speak Mandarin and they don’t know about anything outside of North Korea. I’m staying with them.’

‘Too dangerous. You’ll be a liability, little Miss.’

My fists clenched.
If he calls me that one more time …

‘Everything we’re doing is illegal,’ he said. ‘With a South Korean passport you can enter Laos for fifteen days without a visa. They don’t even have passports.’ He gestured casually at my mother and Min-ho. ‘If you’re caught with them you’ll be arrested for helping illegals. They’ll think you’re a broker and put you in jail. You’ll be no help to anyone there. They need you to arrange things for them in South Korea.’

‘I could travel on my Chinese ID,’ I said.

The moment the words were out, I knew this was a bad idea.

He seemed to read my mind. ‘And if something goes wrong, do you want to get sent back to South Korea, or to China? If the Chinese figure out you’re a defector, too …’

The thought was left hanging in the air.

He had me. There was nothing I could say.

Every hour of the day for the past week, I had been my family’s sole lifeline. But now control was being taken from me. I would have to leave them in the hands of a man I absolutely did not trust
.

At dawn the air was already humid and noisy with the cries of unfamiliar birds. The alley smelled of rotting garbage. It took us just minutes to prepare ourselves. My mother would take only a small bag, and gave me her winter clothes. I went out to buy toiletries for her and Min-ho. I checked the remaining cash in my wallet. I did not have much left, and still had to buy my plane ticket to Seoul.

I went with them to the coach station. I gave Min-ho 1,000 yuan ($150). I wrote my South Korean cellphone number down for him and my mother and told them to memorize it.

We said our goodbyes. I did not want to let go of their hands, but Min-ho gave me his grin and said: ‘Nuna
,
we’ll be all right.’

I watched the coach until it had turned the corner and disappeared from view.
Please be safe.
The dice were rolling again. Now it was all in Fortune’s hands.

I stayed behind in Kunming until I’d heard from Min-ho, who called that evening. They had arrived at the border without incident. They would cross at dawn, when Mr Fang would bribe the guards. At 5 a.m. he called again.

‘We’re in Laos.’

Relief washed over me like warm spring water. The end of the journey was in sight. For days my nerves had been wound to breaking point. Now, as the tension drained from my body, I was so tired I could barely move.

I found a post office and mailed back the two borrowed IDs. Then, with some hesitation, I called my boyfriend Kim in Seoul. I hadn’t spoken to him for more than a week, and had told him nothing about what I was going to do. I had not answered his worried text messages. When I told him where I was, however, his shock was greater than his hurt.

‘
Where
?’

In the background I heard the business meeting he was in go quiet.

I briefly told him what I’d done, and that my family was now in Laos, heading for the South Korean embassy.

There was a stunned pause on the end of the line. Finally he said: ‘I don’t know what to say.’ Then I heard that gentle laugh. ‘Come back quickly.’ He thought I was insane, he said, but I heard the note of admiration in his voice. ‘I’ve got to hear all about this.’

I sat in the back of the taxi satisfied that I’d accomplished a difficult mission. And I couldn’t wait to get out of the grime and humidity of Kunming. We were approaching the departures terminal when my phone rang.

It was Mr Fang. I didn’t hear him at first because a plane roared so low overhead I could see the streaks of rust on its fuselage. All I got was the word
problem.
My stomach turned to stone.

‘Problem?’

I was staring at the back of the taxi driver’s head, with the phone at my ear.

‘The police picked them up.’

I screwed my eyes shut.
This can’t be happening to me.

‘Which police? Chinese?’

‘Laotian.’

‘Where? When?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know?’ My voice rose to a shout. ‘Where are they and what are you going to do?’

‘There’s nothing I can do, little Miss,’ he hissed. ‘They were stopped at a checkpoint by police. We could have rescued them. You didn’t give me enough money.’

‘I gave you 50 per cent – as agreed.’

‘We were working with police and one of the guards at the checkpoint. If you’d given me a hundred per cent of the money, I could have paid to have them let go. But you didn’t.’

With a tremendous effort I kept my anger under control. Anger would only cloud my thinking, and I had to think.

‘All right. OK. Where do you think they are?’

‘Probably Luang Namtha.’

‘Luang Namtha?’
Where the hell is that?

‘The first town, about twenty-five miles from the border.’

I ended the call, and covered my face with my hands.

Until two days ago, I hadn’t known Laos existed. I had never even heard the name. Or maybe I had forgotten it. Laos was one of North Korea’s few remaining allies in the world, and still communist. The Lao People’s Democratic Republic, to give it its official name, would have congratulated the Dear Leader on his birthday each year, and this would have been reported in the media. Pyongyang makes headline news of diplomatic pleasantries – the regime’s attempts to suggest that the ruling Kim is loved and admired the world over.

Laos.
I couldn’t even picture it. Just a dark place on the far edge of China that had swallowed my mother and my brother.

The taxi pulled over. There were people everywhere wheeling luggage.

All the strength had gone out of me. My voice sounded wan. ‘Please take me to the coach station.’

‘You said the airport,’ the driver exclaimed.

‘I know. But now I’m going to Laos.’

He turned and peered at me as if I needed a psychiatric ward, not a coach station.

‘All right,’ he said slowly, starting the car again.

I called Min-ho but his battery had died or the phone had been taken from him.
How can I contact them now?
Somehow, I would have to find him and my mother by myself.

I felt so weak when I reached the coach station I could barely lift my backpack. I removed all the cold-weather clothing and gave it to the taxi driver. He was grateful, and again looked at me oddly.

My journey ended at noon the next day, at the last station in China. My mother and brother had been here twenty-four hours earlier. During the long ride, and with some dinner, my energy had started to revive. I asked for directions, hoisted my backpack, and walked toward Laos.

The Chinese passport control was in a modern building surrounded by low hills dotted with tropical trees. The sky was a beautiful, washed blue, I noticed, clearer than anything I’d seen in Shanghai or Seoul. Vast white clouds sailed over the hills.

About twenty people were waiting in line to have their passports stamped. A few were backpacking white Westerners in high spirits. I looked at them with envy. They were inhabitants of that other universe, governed by laws, human rights and welcoming tourist boards. It was oblivious to the one I inhabited, of secret police, assumed IDs and low-life brokers.

Standing apart from them was one white man no one could miss. He was in his early fifties, strongly built, and extremely tall, looming head and shoulders above everyone else. He had that pinkish skin and sandy-coloured hair that North Korean kids would gawp at on the rare occasions they saw a Westerner. He and I seemed to be the only lone travellers.

We crossed the border. The contrast with modern China was stark. The Laotian passport office was a squat, mud-colour building. It was clear at once that this was a poor country. We filed on board a sputtering twenty-seater bus. The tall white man got on also, folding his legs awkwardly between the wooden seats.

Bouncing through the hilly countryside on this boneshaker, I stared again at the clean turquoise sky. It made the vegetation seem extravagantly lush – hardwood trees and rubber trees, by the look of them, and fields of sugar cane, and wild flowers everywhere, enormous purple hibiscus and golden jasmine hanging down from the canopies of the trees. In a more relaxed frame of mind I probably wouldn’t have noticed such things so keenly, but in my anguish I was seeing all this as beauty denied to me. I would not have any chance to enjoy it.

Laos is one of those big, small countries, like Korea. It’s a little larger than both Koreas combined, and much longer than it is wide, about 650 miles from north to south. It is landlocked and poor and surrounded by better-known countries – China, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma and Cambodia. I had entered the country at its northernmost tip and was heading south.

The journey to Luang Namtha took an hour. When I got off, the tall white man and three or four others got off too.

Luang Namtha is the capital of the province of the same name. There were many Westerners about, wandering the markets, and lounging on hostel verandas. Apart from the police station and one or two guesthouses the town was made up of single-storey houses, with telegraph wires crisscrossing every street. I had to find a local who could help me, so I asked directions for the local Chinese restaurant. The owner was a tubby, friendly family man, who reminded me a little of Mr Ahn.

‘I’m looking for two North Koreans who were arrested yesterday,’ I said in Mandarin. I gave him a big smile. ‘If you can help, I’ll eat my meals here every evening.’

He laughed. ‘Well, start at the immigration office,’ he said. ‘There’s a holding cell there.’ Straight away he offered to take me there on the back of his scooter. His name was Yin, he said.

The immigration office was closed and looked deserted. I stood outside, tilted my head back, and shouted: ‘
Omma-ya! Min-ho-ya! Na-ya!
(Mother! Min-ho! It’s me!)’ Nothing.

‘Let’s try the police station,’ the man said.

The police shook their heads when we asked them. No North Koreans here, they said. Our last stop was the prison, some distance away. The police told us this place was for real criminals. I didn’t expect my family to be here. It was a compound of single-storey buildings surrounded by a high mud wall. Again, I yelled as loudly as I could: ‘
Omma-ya! Min-ho-ya! Na-ya!
’

Outside the main gate, off-duty guards were sitting around with some local girls. They had taken their uniform jackets off and were drinking beer from bottles and laughing. ‘No North Koreans here,’ they said, ‘just drug dealers and murderers.’ They added that this was not the sort of place someone like me should be visiting.

Darkness falls fast in the subtropics. Yin offered to take me to my guesthouse, saying it was dangerous for me to walk alone in the street. I thanked him and told him I’d be fine. I was clinging to any hope now. I thought there might be a chance that my mother and Min-ho had escaped and were wandering around. As I approached the lights of the town, the traffic increased – tuk-tuks slowed down beside me; the drivers shouted and whistled at me in Lao and stirred up clouds of dust and exhaust fumes. I walked around for hours, looking at every face I saw.

It was a Friday night. My search could not resume until after the weekend. I had no choice but to stay in town.

On Monday morning I went straight to the immigration office. A group of men in dark green uniforms were sitting about on the benches outside. The place seemed sunk in torpor. I sensed straight away that nothing here happened quickly. They eyed me with suspicion. I introduced myself as a volunteer from South Korea who’d come to Laos to help two North Koreans. I showed them my passport and the visa.

None of them stirred. I thought no one had understood me.

Then one said: ‘Yes,’ in Mandarin, and swatted a fly from his face. ‘Two North Koreans were caught at the border and brought here.’

At last I was getting somewhere.
‘Can I see them?’

‘You’ll have to make an official request. At the police station,’ the man said. ‘There’s no point doing that until we’ve completed the paperwork.’

Nothing about the attitude of these men suggested that paperwork was given any priority. But I was finally on familiar ground.

I spent the next seven days going back and forth between the police station and the immigration office, establishing relations with the officials, working on them to build a rapport. I knew I would have to bribe. I tried to think how my mother would have dealt with this – with a combination of charm, persuasion and cash. I was friendly. I flattered them. I learned their names and their foibles. I went to the immigration office early each morning, before anyone else, and waited on the bench outside, so that mine was the first face they saw. I took packets of cigarettes for everyone. If I didn’t do that, if I just sat and waited until I was called, I knew I could be here for weeks, or months. Here, an administrative matter that could have been dealt with in minutes would stretch to hours, or days. The humidity of the afternoons sapped the life out of everyone. But each day, I felt I was inching closer towards my goal.