The following morning, my father and I went to see some of the very officials who’d enjoyed our hospitality the day before and asked if the party could help us out. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, they’d happily eaten our food and gotten drunk on the alcohol my father had bought. Now they totally changed their tune. “What are you talking about, you Japanese bastard? Why should we house you? However, we will grant you special dispensation to cut down some trees so that you can build a new house for your family. That is the party’s pronouncement,” they said, clearly pleased about what they considered to be a great act of generosity. Their hypocrisy made me sick.
We went straight to the foreman of the maintenance division to borrow an oxcart. My mother retrieved some rice and the woodstove from the wreckage of our burned-out house and made two big rice balls for us. My father and I trudged off to the forest, which was about five miles from the village. A policeman told us where we could cut down some trees, and we quickly got to work. After felling twelve trees, we took a lunch break.
“Eat both rice balls,” my father said to me.
I felt very awkward as I tried to hand one rice ball back. I was not used to him being kind or thoughtful.
“No, no, no,” I said. “Let’s share them.”
But he pushed me away. I lost my balance and fell. The rice balls slipped from my hands and careened down the slope. My father chased after them and retrieved them. They were covered with mud, but my father handed them to me anyway. “Your mother made them for you, so just eat them!” he said. And to my amazement, he burst into tears. I’d never seen him cry or show much emotion. So of course I started blubbering too. Somehow, my father showing his feelings made everything seem that much worse. But I sure forced down those rice balls. And that small kernel of love for my father, planted when we first arrived, began to grow.
There was one person in the village who was kind to us. His name was Mr. Chon, and he was a smith. He tried to cheer up my mother, who had hit rock bottom. Whenever we thanked him for a bit of extra food that he had scrounged for us or expressed our gratitude to him for stopping by to check on us, he just said, “Hey, next time, you’ll be the ones helping me out!” But most of the villagers ignored us; some even seemed glad that our house had been destroyed. They’d been jealous of us ever since we’d arrived, and they now clearly felt vindicated. “Oh! Why do those la-di-da Japanese bastards get to live in a better house than we do? How come returnees get to live in such a nice house?” Our shack of a house was no better than theirs, of course. It just had a tile roof. But that was enough to invoke their anger. They said the same thing about our Japanese clothes. They were cheap and increasingly tattered and not remotely fashionable, but to the locals, they were luxury items. While we were clearing up our burned-out wreck of a house, some villagers walked past and openly sneered at us. I couldn’t help but notice that they were the very same people who’d wolfed down my mother’s dishes and guzzled my father’s booze just days before. That’s when I started calling them “natives.”
When we got to work building our new house, Mr. Chon was the only villager who helped us. First, we took the trees we’d cut down in the forest to a sawmill for processing. Then we laid down the foundations using stones we’d gathered by the river. My mother and sisters dug mud that would be used for the walls. A few weeks later, we thatched a straw roof to keep the rain out. Though we felt some relief when the house was complete, we still had no household goods or food or clothes. My father had to spend most of our meager household budget to procure some basic foodstuffs from the farmers’ market. We didn’t have enough money for clothes, so we each had just two outfits, and were forced to go without underwear.
Through it all, my mother said over and over again, “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!”
“I’m sorry too. I always make your life so hard,” my father said. Again, I was shocked by his words. He seemed to have become a different man. I felt conflicted. It was the first time I’d seen my father look after my mother, which was obviously a welcome development. But at the same time, I thought, Is this what it takes to get my father to care for my mother? Total ruination? Seemed he’d taken an awfully long time to get there.
Even now, I sometimes wonder why my father was so different in North Korea from the man he’d been in Japan. I used to think it was related to his physical strength. In Japan, that was the thing that had given him real power. But in North Korea, his strength was meaningless. In fact, it was more of a liability than an asset. But I think the issue was more complicated than that. In Japan, he faced endless bigotry, prejudice, and discrimination. The only way he could express his feelings and fight back was through violence. But back then, as he saw it, he was fighting to defend his Korean brothers.
After we moved into the creaky shack we’d built, my father gradually started talking more about his past.
He kept mulling over the same old resentments. And who could blame him? “It’s incredible. I really tried to fight for my compatriots in Japan. I’d have died for them. And what was my reward?” Then he’d gesture at our surroundings. “This!”
Sometimes, he couldn’t contain his anger and frustration. “I can’t believe the way those people deceived me! Masaji, if you ever get back to Japan, tell them what I think of them!”
Oddly enough, I never heard him complain about or blame the political system of North Korea. I finally realized that he’d never experienced true freedom. He’d been born under Japanese colonial rule and then shipped off to a life of slave labor. So he’d never known anything else. That might explain why he seemed to grow milder and more accepting over time.
My mother, however, became more frightened by the day.
Soon after we moved into our rickety shack, a young police officer came by. According to this fellow, our family register was defective. My mother’s nationality had been recorded as Japanese, and her name had been recorded as Miyoko Ishikawa.
“You must change your name!” he shouted, glaring at my mother.
“She’s Japanese,” I said. “She doesn’t need to change her name.”
“You’re living in North Korea. You must change your name!” he cried, bellowing into her face. “You must use a North Korean name!”
“Don’t you touch her!” I said, running over to defend her. “If you so much as lay a finger on her, I’ll kill you!”
He seemed to wilt a little at that.
My mother couldn’t understand a word he was saying, but even so, she looked very scared.
The police officer threw back his shoulders and stuck out his chest in a totally unconvincing attempt to look big.
“Well,” he blustered, “change your name . . . for next time!”
Whatever that meant.
And with that, he stomped out of the house.
I turned to my mother and told her not to worry about it. I didn’t want to say more for fear of worrying her.
She sighed and pulled on her frayed rucksack. She looked so frail and weary, as if she lacked the energy anymore to even be afraid.
“I need to go forage for food for dinner.”
And with that, she plodded wearily up the mountain to search for bracken, ferns, wild mushrooms—anything remotely edible. She wore baggy work pants covered with patches and ragged shoes. I wanted to cry like she sometimes did. She often broke down and sobbed for hours at a time. I tried to console her, but I could never find the words. They didn’t exist.
When I was in high school, I really believed that if I only studied hard enough, I could find a way out of my situation and save my family. Despite the house-fire catastrophe and the discrimination we faced every day, I was genuinely convinced that if I put in enough effort, I could escape this awful predicament and find a way forward into a better life for myself and my family. As graduation approached, I studied harder than ever.
One day, three months before graduation, the teacher handed out a form. We had to fill in what we wanted to do after graduation and describe our future dreams. It was a cruel exercise since we had no real choice in the matter. But I didn’t know that yet. Physics was my best subject, and I wanted to study physics at university and then become a researcher. I wrote dutifully:
I want to go to university and study physics.
Someone asked me what I’d written, so I told him. Some of my classmates overheard what I said and started laughing at me.