In Order to Live Page 22
After the show aired, in January 2012, I jumped every time my phone buzzed with a strange number, hoping it would be a message from Eunmi in China. But days went by and there was no word from my sister.
• • •
I started classes at Dongguk in March 2012. The university was like a huge banquet of knowledge spread out before me, and I couldn’t eat fast enough. In my first year, I took courses in English grammar and conversation, criminology, world history, Chinese culture, Korean and American history, sociology, globalization, the Cold War, and more. On my own I read the great Western philosophers, such as Socrates and Nietzsche. Everything was so new to me.
I could finally think about something beyond food and safety, and it made me feel more fully human. I never knew that happiness could come from knowledge. When I was young, my dream was to have one bucket of bread. Now I started to dream great dreams.
Unfortunately, the more practical requirements of college life stopped me short. In my very first class, the professor divided us into teams to create a presentation. As soon as I met with my group, I had to admit that I had no idea what a presentation was or how I could contribute. The others took on the computer and design work, and they assigned me to “research.” I wasn’t sure what that meant. I was largely self-educated up to this point, and I realized that my academic career was going to be a disaster unless I immediately developed some computer and research skills. So in addition to my course work, I went online to teach myself the basics.
I had rented a tiny basement apartment in a neighborhood near the university, but I never spent much time in my apartment. During the school year, I practically lived in Dongguk’s modern, glass-walled library, with its stacks of tantalizing books and its high-speed Internet access. It became my playground, my dining room, and sometimes my bedroom. I liked the library best late at night, when there were fewer students around to distract me. When I needed a break, I took a walk out to a small garden that had a bench overlooking the city. I often bought a small coffee from a vending machine for a few cents and just sat there for a while, staring into the sea of lights that was metropolitan Seoul. Sometimes I wondered how there could be so many lights in this place when, just thirty-five miles north of here, a whole country was shrouded in darkness. Even in the small hours of the morning, the city was alive with flashing signs and blinking transmission towers and busy roadways with headlights traveling along like bright cells pumping through blood vessels. Everything was so connected, and yet so remote. I would wonder: Where is my place out there? Was I a North Korean or a South Korean? Was I neither?
Ironically, one of my most difficult classes was called “Understanding North Korea.” For the first time, I learned details about the political and economic system I was born into. I spent a lot of my energy trying to keep my jaw from dropping open in class. I couldn’t believe that the public distribution system used to give most people a 700-gram ration of grain every day before the famine. When I was a child, we would have been lucky to be able to buy that much food in a week for the whole family! The class taught that Great Leader Kim Il Sung killed or purged as many as 1.6 million people. I was in shock. I still had trouble trusting what I learned, although now some of it made more sense to me than believing that Kim Jong Il could control the weather with his mind.
Although I usually went out of my way to sit in the front of the class, take a lot of notes, and ask my professors for extra help, I never spoke to the instructor of this course. And I never told him that I was from North Korea.
I guessed correctly that almost nobody at Dongguk had seen me on the EBS segment about my life as a defector, and I never volunteered any information about myself. The students in my own department knew my background, but not those outside my major. And I had a lot of friends who didn’t know I was North Korean. I might have been able to keep up this make-believe life if I could have let go of my quest to find Eunmi. But that was not possible.
• • •
Shortly after the EBS broadcast, I received a phone call from the producer of a new cable TV show called Now on My Way to Meet You. She wanted me to make an appearance.
At the time, Now on My Way was a talk and talent show that featured a revolving cast of attractive young women who chatted with celebrities, sang, danced, and performed in comedy skits. What made this program different was that all the panelists were North Korean defectors. (It evolved to include men and older women.) The show was created to raise awareness about defectors and challenge the stereotypical image of North Koreans as grim, robotic, boring people. The sketches poked fun at some aspects of life in the Hermit Kingdom and also at the prejudices defectors had to overcome in the South. But it was run by the station’s entertainment—not educational—department, and its tone was as light and playful as its colorful, mod soundstage. A lot of the banter was silly, and the interviews were heavily edited, but that was part of its charm.
Now on My Way was quickly developing a huge following among South Koreans, who knew next to nothing about North Korea, and surveys showed that viewers had a more positive attitude about defectors after watching. At the end of many shows, one of the North Korean guests was given time to send a message to a loved one she had left behind. It was always an emotional, tearful segment that brought home the raw heartache beneath the smiles of all the lovely women onstage.
At first I resisted the offer to be on the show. I still held out hope that the EBS program would bring a response from Eunmi. But as the weeks and then months went by, I realized I needed to generate a bigger audience to reach my sister. Now on My Way seemed like the perfect choice. I was still worried that someone from my past would recognize me, but I put it out of my mind and moved ahead—which is something I’ve always been good at.
When I first arrived on the set, I asked them to disguise my real name, thinking it would protect my relatives in North Korea as well as help me keep my privacy.
The producers interviewed me about my life, and I told them how our fortunes had gone up and down, but we had been privileged at one time. I told them how I had seen videos and played Nintendo, how my father had been a party member and I had traveled to Pyongyang. Most of the other women the producers and writers had interviewed—this was only their third show—came from extremely poor families in the northern provinces, so they had heard terrible stories about starvation and suffering. To them, my life sounded super elite, and they needed somebody like that on the show to provide a contrast.
Because I no longer even thought about it, there was no reason for me to go into detail about what had happened to us after my father’s arrest, about the months my sister and I were left alone in our freezing house in Hyesan with very little food and no lights to banish the terrifying darkness. I didn’t need to mention the times my sister and I roamed through the hills, eating leaves and roasting dragonflies to fill our bellies. Or the bodies we tried not to look at when we walked to school. And certainly not what happened in China.
As they prepared me for the taping, I was transformed into Ye Ju, the privileged North Korean. I shook out my schoolgirl ponytail, put on a dress and high heels, and let the makeup artists turn me into a North Korean Cinderella. I learned the song and dance numbers with ease, and I was happy to chat with celebrities about anything they wanted to hear. I just hoped the sound of my voice would somehow carry all the way to China.
After that first show, the producers invited me back, and I became a regular guest for a while.
Before every taping, the producers and writers would e-mail each cast member with a list of questions about the show’s topic. Then, in the studio, we would read through a script that was based on our answers. In one of them, I was called the “Paris Hilton of North Korea.” I had to check the Internet to find out who that was. Later, when my mother appeared on the show, they projected some of our family pictures that showed her wearing some fashionable outfits. “It’s my mother who really is the Par
is Hilton,” I said. “My mother even carried Chanel handbags when she lived in North Korea!” Of course, I did not mention that those handbags were secondhand knockoffs from China. Or that our affluent lifestyle did not last for long. But my mother and I were trying to give answers we thought the audience wanted to hear. It was like echoing that pink was my favorite color to please my teacher.
Still, compared with some of the women on the show, we had led privileged lives. Even in our poorest days, we were better off than the street children who begged for crumbs in the train station, who had never used soap or tasted meat. Some of the others in the studio had lived through those nightmares and more. I don’t know if it was because I was still in denial about the wickedness of the Kims or about my own identity as a North Korean, but sometimes I thought my “sister” cast members were exaggerating their hardships.
“She thought the others were lying,” my mother told one of the show’s hosts in a segment that haunts me to this day. “Sometimes Yeonmi calls me after a taping and asks me, ‘Am I really a North Korean? I sometimes cannot understand what the other sisters are saying.’”
We were both caught up in our roles. But my mother was being truthful when she said I didn’t realize how much other people were suffering. And she was right when she said that being on the show changed me, because I “learned a lot about the reality of North Korea.”
Eventually I began to really listen to what the other women were saying. Their stories reinforced what I was learning in college. Like witnesses taking the stand, one by one, my sisters made a case against the heartless regime that treated all of us as if we were trash to be discarded without a thought. Each story awakened more of my own memories and slowly began to fill my heart with purpose. Kim Jong Il, who was supposed to be immortal, had died in 2011, and his pudgy young son, Kim Jong Un, inherited the family dictatorship. The Kims I had once worshipped as gods were now revealed to be criminals. And criminals deserve to be punished.
Unfortunately, being on a hit show in South Korea did nothing to help me find my sister. With tears streaming down my face, I had sent Eunmi a message at the end of one show, begging her to contact us if she could hear my voice, wherever she was. But all that returned to me was silence.
Twenty-three
Amazing Grace
Looking back, it might have been crazy to think I could keep my life as a South Korean college student separate from my identity as a North Korean defector on a hit television show. Because I used a pseudonym and wore a lot of makeup when I taped Now on My Way to Meet You, I somehow thought nobody would recognize me. But eventually most of my professors and friends at Dongguk figured out it was me on that show, and some of them were shocked and disappointed that I hadn’t told them who I really was. Of course, I still wasn’t sure who I was myself, or who I wanted to be. I was sometimes recognized on the street—which usually terrified me until I realized that the stranger was a fan and not a North Korean agent or someone popping up from my past.
Before long, the stress of being a full-time student, working on the show, and tutoring myself online started to wear me down. I was so busy that I rarely slept and often forgot to eat. The criminal justice department at Dongguk required physical and military training as well as academic course work, and when the semester first started, I had to run almost every weekday and exercise all the time. My weight dropped to below eighty pounds, and I was often dizzy. I couldn’t take it physically and had to stop the training. But I continued to lose weight, and during final exams I collapsed and ended up in the emergency room. The doctors told me I was suffering from stress and malnutrition. I was literally working myself to death.
Because I had to give up my physical training, my options in law enforcement were probably limited. But I thought I might continue to study the law. The more I learned about justice, the more it appealed to me. However, it was clear that whatever course of study I chose, I would need to learn English, and I wasn’t improving fast enough. So during the July and August break, I signed up for the summer program at an English language academy on the tropical island of Cebu in the Philippines.
I had saved my money from appearing on the show, and this trip was the first thing in my life I had ever done just for myself. At first I was reluctant, but some of my friends persuaded me to go. I was so excited to see more of the world and learn at the same time. But because the academy was filled with South Koreans, I didn’t get much practice in English. I made a lot of new friends who thought I was also South Korean. I ate a lot of mangos and sat in the shallow waters, watching colorful fish dart around my toes. I still couldn’t swim, but sometimes my new friends took me in the deep water piggyback, the way my sister used to do in the Yalu River.
I was starting to wonder if I would ever see her again.
• • •
My grades for the first semester at college were posted online. Out of nearly ninety students in my major, I placed thirty-third. It amazed everyone—including me—because criminal justice was the most demanding department in the whole university. My performance continued to improve over the next year, and by the end of the spring semester in 2013, my rank in class was fourteenth. Not only did this prove to the school administrators that a North Korean defector could compete with South Koreans—I proved it to myself. I was finally living a life with no limits.
• • •
In the summer of 2013, I decided to take some time off from both school and the TV show. My mother and I had resigned ourselves to the fact that Eunmi might be missing for a very long time, although we still held out hope that she was alive, somewhere. My mother had started seeing a very kind man with his own contracting business, and her violent ex-boyfriend finally dropped out of our lives. Now that her life was happier and more stable, I felt free to leave home for several months.
I had been reading the biographies of American civil rights heroes like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, and others who had sacrificed their safety and even their lives so that others could be free. I was drawn to their stories, and by the notion that living a meaningful life requires embracing something bigger than yourself. My mother knew this already. She had always told me that to be happy, you must give to others, no matter how poor you are. And she thought that if she had something to give, it would mean that her own life would have some value. Other than the sacrifices I had made for my family, my life to this point had been very selfish. Now, instead of just focusing on my own needs, working every hour of the day to improve myself, maybe I could become someone useful to others.
While I was attending the Seoul Heavenly Dream School, a team from Youth With A Mission, a Christian youth group from Tyler, Texas, came to preach to us. They told me about a five-month volunteer mission to serve the poor, which included twelve weeks of Bible study in Texas. Doing this work seemed like a way to repay some of the great debt that I owed to the missionaries who had sacrificed so much to help me escape to Mongolia. And it was a way to visit America and see some of the world without having much money or knowing much English. I still wasn’t a devout Christian, but I was excited to challenge myself working with this young and dedicated group.
• • •
I felt a little queasy as the wheels touched down at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, but this time it wasn’t because of motion sickness. I was suddenly in enemy territory. As we filed off the plane, my head was filled with images of big-nosed Yankee soldiers driving bayonets into helpless North Korean mothers. Propaganda from my childhood was still embedded in my brain, and the feelings I was trained to feel could still pop up without warning. What was I doing visiting these evil people? But as soon as I took one look around the airport, all my dread melted away. There were parents holding their children’s hands, people eating chips, packs of teenagers wearing team jerseys. The only difference between us was that we spoke a different language. It amazed me how quickly a lie loses its power in the face of truth. W
ithin minutes, something I had believed for many years simply vanished.
I changed planes and flew into Tyler, a small city about a hundred miles southeast of Dallas. The whole airport seemed about the size of a waiting lounge at Incheon, and I thought to myself, Is this America? I thought it was much bigger. A South Korean missionary picked me up and drove me through miles of farmland. Then we pulled through the gates at the Youth With A Mission campus, which used to be a cattle ranch, and kept driving. I was starting to realize what a big place America was, after all. It seemed even bigger just an hour or so later when I joined a group of students on a trip to a nearby Walmart Supercenter to buy some food. I thought it was the fanciest store I had ever seen, and I couldn’t believe how enormous it was. And all the products were giant, too. I grabbed a huge blue tube of oatmeal with a friendly-looking old grandpa on the box. I had to try some bright orange macaroni and cheese, which I had never seen before and which you could cook in a microwave, so that was very exciting. I bought a bag of tortilla chips that was almost as big as me. And I bought some work clothes and a pair of Adidas that I could never imagine affording before in my life.
So far, America was very impressive.
Back at the ranch, dozens of Bible students from all different states and places all over the world, like Thailand and countries in South America, had gathered for different programs, including my Discipleship Training Program, where we would be “learning about God, learning about the world, learning about ourselves.” I spent a lot of time with another young North Korean defector and several South Korean missionaries. So I had lots of people to talk to—unfortunately, not much of it in English. But I practiced it whenever I had a chance to talk to an American. What I discovered was that I really needed to be studying Spanish. After the initial training, about twenty of us were going on a nearly two-month mission to Costa Rica.