Eventually, I couldn’t help but ask her how she was getting the rice.
At first, she didn’t say anything, but I pressed her until she admitted the truth. Apparently, when she said she was going to her grandmother’s house, she was really going to a blood-transfusion station in Hamhung City. She sold her blood to buy the rice.
I just gazed up at the sky.
Let me tell you what we were taught in school in North Korea. “People in South Korea can only survive by stealing things and selling their blood.”
The irony!
It was June 1982, and my wife was in the final month of her second pregnancy. She’d had little to eat for months, just the usual weeds and wild plants. I’d seen her doubled up with stomach cramps countless times, but somehow she’d made it to this point. She was about to give birth.
We didn’t have any money, so I couldn’t take her to a clinic. I was desperate to find her some nutritious food—seaweed for soup and pork and rice to celebrate the birth—but those were far beyond our reach. Somehow I got hold of some eggs, a bag of rice, and some daikon radish leaves. I wanted to take great care of my wife, but that was the best I could do.
Kim went into labor in the morning on the fourth of June. I told her we should go to the hospital, but she insisted that she could give birth at home.
I noticed that her forehead was damp with sweat. I needed a soft cloth, but I had only one set of underwear and my wife had only two. All I could find was a worn-out rag.
As I boiled some water, she started groaning more loudly. I rubbed her back, but it didn’t do much good. I got more worried as the hours passed.
“Shall I call a midwife?” I asked.
“I think the baby will come soon, so just stay with me,” she said.
She kept repeating that and didn’t want to listen to any of my suggestions. And I didn’t want to leave her. I sent the kids off to walk to my father’s place; Ho-chol had walked there many times, and I figured they would be safely out of the way there.
The room was scorching, with the boiling water, and I was sweating profusely. I could hardly imagine what it must have been like for my wife. She strained and writhed, but still the baby would not come. Before I knew it, the sun had set.
She clung to me and started to strain. Every time she strained, she lost a lot of blood. We were both covered with it. She was shuddering with constant pain, growing weaker by the moment. I poured some raw egg into her mouth to give her some energy, but it did little good. By ten o’clock that night, she was still bleeding and was practically unconscious.
“Come on, angel! You’ve gotta wake up! We need you. We need this baby. You can’t give up on us now!” I cried.
She clung to me and wavered in and out of consciousness. She dug her nails into my palms. There was more blood. Another hour passed, and her face went ghostly white. The sweat on her forehead disappeared. She looked like a corpse, and her breathing grew shallower and weaker. But then she suddenly opened her eyes and looked at me. I’ll never forget that stare.
Her face was a strange mixture of shock and joy.
I looked down. The baby’s head was coming out.
Kim gasped in agony.
“You’re doing great! The baby’s coming! Just one more push! You can do it!” I yelled.
But the baby’s face was turning blue. I had no idea what I was doing, but I put my fingers around the baby’s neck and tried to ease the little body out.
My wife cried out. She looked as if she couldn’t bear it a moment longer. I burned with guilt and shame. I couldn’t give her a decent life. But I couldn’t let her or the baby die.
As I kneeled there, not knowing what I was doing and trying to keep my wife and baby alive, I kept hearing the voices of those bastards from the League back in Japan. Paradise on earth . . . You’ll be happy there . . . Free from poverty at last . . . Independent. And I thought, Why should we die in agony in this hellhole of a place? Forget that! We can’t let those bastards win.
I whispered into my wife’s ear, “If you die now, it will have been for nothing. Stay with me, and let’s beat the lot of them!”
My wife bore down one last time. She let out a blood-curdling cry that seemed to come from the depths of the universe. And then, to my total surprise, the baby slid out in one swift motion.
Kim lay back, utterly spent.
I cut the umbilical cord and wrapped the baby in the ancient rag I’d found. I waited for him to start crying, but he didn’t.
“Please cry! Please!” I shouted. And then he did! I guess my loud voice startled him.
Once my wife heard the baby crying, she passed out. I put the baby next to her and dashed from the house. Our nearest neighbor lived about five hundred yards away. I raced over and banged on the door. The woman who lived there was shocked to see me covered with blood, but once I had explained the situation, she rushed out to help. When she entered our house, she stared at the scene in horror and started to cry.
“I’ve never seen anything so sad in all my life!” she said.
There was blood everywhere. The floor was awash with it. And all we could hear was the sound of the baby crying.
I asked the woman to watch my wife and baby while I ran to the clinic. I banged on the door and woke the doctor up. It was the man I’d beaten up so many years before, but I swallowed my pride, got down on all fours, and lowered my head to the ground.
“It’s very serious. My wife and our baby are in life-threatening danger. Please come with me,” I begged.
He didn’t say anything. Just turned and went back into the clinic. My heart sank. I might have known he would blow me off again.
But then I heard him say, “Let’s go.”
He emerged from the clinic, and we ran through the dark to my house.
When we arrived, he turned to me in horror.
“You have to get her to the hospital. Now.”
I carried her to the hospital on my back while the neighbor stayed with the baby. If anyone had tried to turn me away, I think I would have killed them. But the wardens could see the seriousness of the situation. Or the look in my eyes. They let me in, and I laid my wife on a bed. The dawn’s light began to filter through the darkness. The ward faced east, and sunlight soon streamed in through the windows. I’d watched the sunrise the previous morning, but a million years seemed to have passed since then.
I named the baby Ho-son. My wife had given him the gift of life, so I felt it was my mission to look after the baby’s health. But my wife was malnourished. She couldn’t feed Ho-son herself as she was still recovering in the hospital, so I had to ask around the village whether someone could breast-feed him, just as I had asked when my first son was a baby.
I made daily inquiries around the village, but people were very cold. In a way, I couldn’t blame them. The food situation was dire—far worse than when Ho-chol was born. People’s kindness had been ground out of them. They were struggling to survive themselves.
I nonetheless continued to beg on his behalf. But they didn’t listen. Some even swore at me. But the worst moment was when someone said, “Are you kidding me? You think I care if your baby lives or dies?”