She had no money and no options. She started stealing food. And then she started walking—pregnant, with two kids, age nine and seven, in tow—all the way back to our village. It took them three weeks. No wonder she was such a wreck. I felt full of despair and sadness for her—but also helpless to make her life better. I prayed to God and begged him to help her.
One month later, Masako gave birth to a boy, whom she named Gang-ho. She was too weak and thin to breast-feed him, so we gave him some rice water, but it didn’t do any good. Soon, his feces turned black, so I took him to the clinic. The doctor was a nice man, nothing like the doctor I’d punched before, but there was nothing he could do. “I’m really sorry,” he said, “but you’ll just have to wait and see if he gets better on his own.”
Autumn descended, and the weather began to turn cool. The baby’s cries had grown very feeble by then. And then one night, he died. He was just shy of three months old. My sister wept and wept. She cried until she was utterly exhausted. Then she fell asleep, and when she awoke, she started wailing again.
I wrapped the baby’s body in a cloth and carried him out into the night. Loud thunder and heavy rain soon followed, appropriately enough. I walked past my mother’s grave, past the fruit farm, and climbed the mountain, his pitiful corpse in my arms. Rainwater gushed down the side of the mountain, washing away the earth and sand.
I kept stumbling and slipping on the muddy ground. Finally I stopped and placed the tiny body on the ground. I started digging with my bare hands. I tried not to think about anything as I dug and dug in the darkness. Whenever the lightning flashed, I could see the baby’s body beside me. A ghastly, tragic sight. It was the last straw.
I stood up and shouted into the void, “Why do we have to bear such suffering? What did we do to deserve this?” Hot tears coursed down my already soaked face.
I buried the baby and headed back down the mountain, bellowing like the lunatic I’d become.
After my nephew died, I kept asking myself the same question again and again: Why did my mother and an innocent baby have to die? What point was there to a life that consisted entirely of pain? Ever since coming to North Korea, I had experienced only cruelty, starvation, and despair. I was done with people.
So I decided to stop working on the cooperative farm and become a charcoal burner deep in the mountains. As a charcoal burner, I would be able to work completely on my own and live like a hermit. Of course, I thought of my son, my father, and my sisters. But I was in such a bad state of mind that I feared it might be worse for everyone if I stuck around.
I didn’t have the right to choose a new job just like that, of course. I needed to get permission. If you wanted to be transferred to another job, you had to be issued a party job-transfer permit, a ration-transfer permit, and a military job-transfer permit. Your food ration came from your workplace, so if you stopped working, you simply starved. Then again, as in any totalitarian state, some people just dropped out of society completely. But if you did that, you had only two choices. You could become a homeless vagrant, or you could become a bandit.
There was, however, a loophole in all this bureaucracy. If it was decided that you were not worth monitoring, you could end up completely ignored. The party figured you weren’t worth the trouble. That’s how I ended up when I left my sanctioned job. The party didn’t seem to care whether I was alive or dead. To them, I ceased to exist altogether.
By most people’s standards, being a charcoal burner was one of the worst jobs. It was as tough as being a farm laborer or coal miner, a job for the lowest of the low. If you chose to stop working as a tractor driver to be a charcoal burner instead, people thought you were crazy. But that worked in my favor, you see. As soon as I handed in my application to be a charcoal burner, it was accepted immediately. A first! “A charcoal burner? Nobody wants to do that!”
My father and sister were both resigned to my decision. They seemed to realize that I wouldn’t change my mind no matter what they said. They could sense I was barely keeping it together. So when I asked them to take care of my son, they didn’t protest. He was six years old at the time. Every day he used to come home from school and tell me all about the things he’d learned, who said what and who did what and so on, wide-eyed with his child’s sense of wonder. His sweetness was utterly heartbreaking. I also felt sorry to be leaving my wife, who was still looking after her grandmother, but it heartened me that I wouldn’t need to communicate with anyone from now on. It would be better for them, and for me—at least that’s how I thought about it at the time.
On the morning of my departure, my father and sister stood together awkwardly to see me off, looking forlorn. Just as I was about to leave, my son said innocently, “I’ll take care of Grandfather and Aunt. Please make lots of money.”
As I hugged him close to me, I felt my heart breaking. I started to walk away from them, and I didn’t look back. I knew that if I did, I would fall apart.
I walked from early morning until dusk, getting lost several times along the way. Eventually, I arrived at the work station.
The work station consisted of three kilns and tents for the workers to live in and an ox for transport. There were only seven or eight workers, which suited me just fine. All of their faces were deeply lined, their wrinkles and scars telling the stories of all the trouble in their lives.
I started work the next day. As instructed, I cut down a beech tree, chopped off the branches, and cut it into twenty-inch lengths. Then I took them to the kiln. I packed the kiln with the cut-up branches and lit a fire in the center. After making sure the fire took, I covered the kiln entrance with soil. Soon after that, smoke began rising out of the chimney. I was told if the smoke was yellow, then the fire was strong enough and that the fire had to burn for three days inside the kiln. When the smoke stopped coming out of the chimney, you had to wait another three days before retrieving the charcoal, so the whole process generally took about a week.
The work was supposed to be done by two people, but in reality it was usually done single-handedly. That suited me just fine. When my first batch of charcoal was ready, I broke the soil around the entrance and crawled into the kiln. It was the first time I’d ever done it, so I wanted to check whether it was successful without anyone else around. I wore a wet towel over my mouth, but it fell off inside the kiln, so a lot of charcoal powder got into my nose and mouth. And it was so hot, I began sweating profusely. I was shocked at how quickly my energy drained away, but I loaded my basket with charcoal and crawled back out.
Kim, the leader of the group, looked concerned when I emerged. “Be careful! There’s poisonous gas in there,” he warned.
I didn’t know it at the time, but it was unusual for someone to speak out like that. Everyone at the work station had troubled backgrounds, and no one was inclined to make conversation, even about mundane things. Silence was the rule.
My meals consisted of corn rice, which I brought from my encampment every day, together with some mountain weeds, which I picked and boiled. Apparently, alcohol was essential to this job. God knows if this is true or not, because I’ve found absolutely no medical evidence to support this theory whatsoever, but I was told that if I didn’t drink alcohol, I’d suffer from lung disease. I’d never really drunk much alcohol before, but I sure got to know its taste quickly. If alcohol wasn’t included in our rations, all hell broke loose. “No alcohol, no work!” some of the laborers chanted. So the supply remained remarkably steady.