‘If they’d found the cards, the Americans would have shot us,’ she told me.
Her safekeeping of the cards ensured the family’s high songbun. Those who destroyed their cards as the Americans approached were later to fall under suspicion. Some were purged violently and sent to the gulag. For the rest of her life, my grandmother wore her Party card on a string around her neck, concealed beneath her clothing.
After their twelve months of courtship my parents should have been married. But that was not how events turned out.
The problem was my mother’s mother. My grandmother refused to give permission for the marriage. She was unimpressed with my father’s prospects and his career in the air force. She thought my mother could do better, and marry a man who could provide her with a more comfortable life. For all her education in Japan and her progressive communist credentials, my grandmother belonged to a generation that saw love as a secondary matter when it came to a suitable match. Financial security came first. With luck, the couple could fall in love after the marriage. She saw it as her duty to find my mother the best candidate. In this, my mother could not go against her will. It was unthinkable to defy one’s parent.
My mother’s blissful year began to turn into a nightmare.
Through connections my grandmother had met a glamorous woman who had a career as an actress in Pyongyang’s booming film industry. The woman’s brother was an official at the National Trading Company in the capital, and it was arranged for my mother to be introduced to him. My mother could not believe what was happening to her. She had no interest in this official, pleasant though he was. She was in love with my father. Before she knew it a marriage was being arranged for her.
My mother suffered an emotional breakdown, and for weeks her eyes were sore from crying and lack of sleep. Her pain took her to the edge of despair. She was made to break off relations with my father. When she wrote to tell him the news, he said little in return. She knew she had broken his heart.
My mother married the official from Pyongyang on a bright cold day in spring 1979. It was a traditional wedding. She wore an elaborately embroidered red silk chima jeogori, the national Korean dress – a long skirt wrapped high on the body, and a short jacket over it. Her groom wore a formal, Western-style suit. Afterwards, wedding photographs were taken, as was customary, at the feet of the great bronze statue of Kim Il-sung on Mansu Hill. This was to demonstrate that however much a couple might love each other their love for the Fatherly Leader was greater. No one smiled.
I was conceived during the honeymoon, and born in Hyesan in January 1980. My birth name was Kim Ji-hae.
It would seem that my mother’s future, and mine, was sealed.
Love, however, was setting a course of its own, cutting through my grandmother’s best-laid plans, like water finding its way to the sea.
My mother was born and brought up in Hyesan, the capital of Ryanggang Province in the northeast of the country – a mountainous region of spruce, larch and pine. There is little arable land there, and life can be rugged. In Korean folklore, the character of Hyesan people is tenacious and stubborn. They are survivors. A proverb has it that if you drop them in the middle of the ocean, they will find their way to land. Like all such sayings they are simplifications, and yet I recognized these traits strongly in my mother. In time, Min-ho and I would display similar characteristics – especially the stubbornness.
My mother could not live with the official, my biological father, and left him just after I was born. In the Korean way of measuring age, a child is one year old at the beginning of its first year and not, as in most countries, at the end of the first year. I was age one.
A divorce came soon after. Now it was my grandmother’s turn to suffer sleepless nights. A divorced daughter was shameful enough, but a divorced daughter with a baby on her back would make her chances of making a successful match with someone else almost impossible. My grandmother insisted that I be given up for adoption.
One of my mother’s brothers succeeded in finding a young highborn couple in Pyongyang who were seeking to adopt. The couple made the long journey to Hyesan to meet me and to take me back with them. They brought with them a box of toys and good-quality clothes.
There followed a terrible scene at the house. My mother tearfully refused to give me up. She would not let my grandmother wrest me out of her arms. I began to wail loudly. The couple from Pyongyang watched aghast as my grandmother vented her fury at my mother, then began to panic and implore her. Soon the couple became angry themselves and accused my family of misleading them.
Not long after this, my mother travelled to the military base of my father the officer. In an emotional reunion he accepted her straight away. Without even hesitating he also accepted me as his daughter.
They were so much in love that my grandmother conceded defeat, and she changed her mind about my father from then on. He had an air of authority that struck everyone who met him, yet he was gentle and kind. He never touched alcohol, or lost his temper. The strength of my parents’ feelings for each other, however, was a worry to my grandmother. She warned them that if a couple loved each other too much it would condense all the affection that should last a lifetime into too short a period, and one of them would die young.
My mother and father were finally to marry. But now they had a new problem – this time, his parents. They would strongly have disapproved of the match if they’d known that my mother already had a child by another man, so my parents attempted to keep my existence a secret. In a city like Hyesan, however, where so many people knew each other, such a secret was not easily kept. Word got out, and just a few days before my parents’ wedding my grandparents learned the truth about my existence. They withdrew their permission for my father to marry my mother. My father implored them with passion. He could not bear it if his marriage to my mother were thwarted a second time.
With great reluctance, therefore, my grandparents gave their consent, but on one condition: that my name be changed altogether to symbolize my joining a new family. In North Korea, as elsewhere, it was common for a child’s surname to change if a mother remarried, but it was highly unusual for the first name to change, too. My mother was given no choice in the matter. And so, I was four years old when my identity was changed the second time, just after my parents married. My new name was Park Min-young.
The wedding was a quiet affair in Hyesan. This time there was no elaborate chima jeogori. My mother wore a smart dress suit. My father wore his uniform. His parents made little effort to hide their disapproving faces from my mother’s family.
I was too young to be aware of these tensions. Nor was I aware of the truth of my own parentage. I would not discover the secret until several years later, when I was at elementary school. There is a part of me that still wishes I had never found out. In time, the discovery would have heartbreaking consequences for me, and for the kind and loving man I’d known until then as my father.
The city at the edge of the world
For the first four years of my life, I grew up among a large extended family of uncles and aunts in Ryanggang Province. Despite the nomadic life that was to come after my parents married, moving with my father’s career to various