The fact was, I’d messed up my own suicide. I couldn’t even get that right. The noose had gotten stuck around my chin, not all the way around my neck, so it couldn’t constrict my carotid artery. I could breathe slightly, but doing so was painful and laborious. And my body, or something in my brain—I don’t know—something struggled desperately to survive. Tears of pain and frustration streamed down my cheeks, and saliva drooled from my mouth.
And then I heard a shout behind me. It was Shin, one of my fellow charcoal burners.
I heard him run up, and suddenly he shoved his head up against my crotch. He hauled me onto his shoulders and pulled the noose from around my head. Then he collapsed, and we both fell to the ground.
I was still choking and writhing. I felt a wave of frustration and anguish that I hadn’t been able to kill myself. I clawed at the ground and cursed myself. I was crying. Shin was crying. “Why would you do such a terrible thing?” he yelled through his tears.
Born again.
Shin must have told my boss what I’d done, because that night, my boss said to me, “What on earth were you thinking? If you die, what’s going to happen to your family? If your children mean anything to you at all, you can’t just abandon hope like that!”
I burst into tears and couldn’t stop. I just kept sobbing.
“I guess I’m meant to keep crying,” I said.
He laughed at me, but kindly.
We drank till late that night.
About a year passed. And then one day I got a telegram from my wife, telling me she could finally leave her grandmother’s house. I decided it was time to go back. I asked my boss for permission, and he was very sympathetic. I felt as if I was returning from some kind of purgatory.
The day I left, all the guys saw me off. They were a taciturn bunch, but very kind. A swirl of mixed emotions ran through me. These men were the most honest people I’d met in a long time. We lived in a mutually agreeable silence together, in a realm that seemed somehow removed from the petty realities of daily life. But I had a family to attend to, and I felt some small seed of hope taking root deep inside. I was ready to go.
I returned to my father’s place in Dong Chong-ri, and my wife and baby daughter came to live with us. There were eight of us in the house now: my sister Masako, her two stepchildren, my son, my wife, my daughter, my father, and I. Eight! And my father was the only person who was working, as my new job hadn’t been assigned yet. It was practically impossible to get by.
It was the early eighties, and the food situation went from bad to worse. A common slogan at the time was “Communism means rice!” It was repeated all over. Farm laborers and students worked together to make terraced rice fields on mountainsides. But when the rainy season came, most of the fields were washed away due to poor planning. Even the fields that survived weren’t in good enough shape to grow anything properly. Oh, and we still had to plant the seedlings very close to one another so that, in the end, the plants just crowded one another out and couldn’t produce a decent crop. Despite knowing better, we all had to follow the ludicrous Juche system. If your farm didn’t meet its target harvest, the farm manager fudged the account to make it look as if the target had actually been met. But despite all the fairy-tale record keeping, the supply didn’t lie: the food ration distributed every autumn was growing smaller and smaller.
I asked an old lady who lived near the river with a mentally handicapped son if my family could stay in one of the rooms in her house. She agreed. So in the new year, my wife and I and our two children left my father’s place. I still didn’t have a job—I just couldn’t find one no matter how hard I tried—so we survived on mountain weeds and fish from the river.
I desperately wanted to build a house for my family, so I borrowed some tools and an oxcart from the farm. It was snowing pretty heavily, but I couldn’t stand it anymore. So I set off for the mountain. In the forest, the snow reached up to my waist in places, and it was a struggle even to walk through it. When I found a pine tree about eight inches in diameter, I chopped it down, put it in the oxcart, and hauled it back down the mountain. I did this again and again. It was exhausting work.
All I had to eat was some frozen corn rice I’d gotten from my father. Whenever I got thirsty, I shoved snow into my mouth. Every time I trudged up the mountain to chop down a tree, I sweated like mad. Then I shivered all the way back down. By the time I had enough trees, my tattered work pants were frozen with sweat and snow. When I walked, they rustled and sprinkled tiny ice crystals on the ground.
I peeled the bark off the trees with a sickle and piled all the logs near where I intended to build the house. I cut the trees into sections of the right length. Then I collected some stones by the river and dragged them back in the cart for the foundation. After laying the foundation stones, I put up the pillars. I used clay and mud to make a kind of plaster. If I’d been a party bigwig, I could’ve got hold of some cement, but that wasn’t an option for me.
I mixed the plaster with my bare hands and slapped it on the logs. My palms were bleeding, so my blood was added to the mixture. I built a fire to warm my hands so that I could continue working. But the skin was peeling off my palms and the heat stung. It was all excruciating, but I just carried on. Day after day, week after week.
After five months, the house was just about done. I made an arch roof and covered it with some thatch my wife had made. It was more like a shack than a proper house, but at least it would offer us shelter from the rain. After studying the structure for a while, I turned to my wife.
“‘Speed above all things’ hasn’t turned out so badly in this case!” I said.
“Speed above all things,” she replied with a laugh. It was another of the times’ ubiquitous slogans.
When we moved in, Ho-chol was seven years old; Myong-hwa was two. All we had was a box of apples and a rice pan my father had given us. Since I was no longer a farm laborer, I wasn’t entitled to a food ration. So every day, I went off to the village farm and stole some daikon radishes. The dish we prepared from those was simple: Chop up the radish, including the leaves. Mix it all with a few grains of rice you’ve scrounged up. Add a lot of water to make rice gruel. Except it wasn’t really rice gruel because there wasn’t ever a single rice grain to be found when you ladled the ghastly stuff out. But even though we were indescribably poor, it was the first time I’d had my own family together, and somehow I thought we could survive. So “rice” gruel it was, every single day. I didn’t feel bad about stealing the radishes. What choice did I have? My wife needed to eat in order to breast-feed our baby. My son had to eat, and so did I. It was simply a question of survival.
I developed a kind of “so what?” attitude. “Even if I could get a job, we still wouldn’t be able to eat properly,” I said to my wife. I decided we should live independently and not rely on the government. By the following spring, we were subsisting on dandelions, bracken, and mugwort. We boiled them with a paste made of acorns. Poisonous things, acorns, but there you go. The concoction tasted bitter, and our tongues went numb after eating it. But at least it had some kind of flavor, which seemed better than none at all.
In summer, I stole lots of thumb-size peaches, and we devoured them happily. Apples and potatoes too. I was not alone. Lots of other people were stealing stuff. I guess the police had given up.
Some of the food we ate had gone bad, and some of the weeds we consumed were poisonous. We often suffered from crippling stomachaches, but there was nothing we could do about it.
This kind of life went on for about a year until one day when my wife announced that she was worried about her grandmother. After that, she returned regularly to her house to see her and, often as not, she came back with a bag of rice. She told me her grandmother had given it to her, but I knew her grandmother wasn’t wealthy. I also noticed that my wife looked weaker every time she returned home to us.