Kim was released from the hospital after a month, but she was still in very poor condition. She couldn’t breast-feed Ho-son properly, so he cried all the time. The rickety shack I’d built in Hamju was cold and inhospitable, so I asked my father if my family could stay with him in Dong Chong-ri. Then I swallowed my pride and submitted an application to the central party. Ever since fire destroyed our first house in 1964, I’d never lived in a state-owned property. Although the government was supposed to provide all workers with a house or apartment, there were so many people looking for places and so few places available that you didn’t stand a chance of getting one unless you had close links to the party.
Still, I gave it a shot. I explained in my application that I was married but couldn’t live with my wife and family because I worked a long way from our home. We desperately needed a place to live. Blah blah blah. I didn’t think much would come of it, but six months later, a man came from the housing department to assess my situation. At first I thought that meant we might have a chance. But as usual, my hopes were soon dashed.
After looking around, the man turned to me and said pompously, “You’ve submitted the correct documents for obtaining accommodation, but why didn’t you submit them to the rural district office? Why did you send them to the central party? You’ve insulted us and wasted my time. Don’t you know your place? Behave yourself!”
Behave yourself? I couldn’t believe my ears. Did he think I was a child? But I had to be careful. I couldn’t take any chances by insulting the party. I apologized meekly and felt that familiar swell of despair.
I couldn’t put a proper roof over my family’s heads, I would not be able to keep my job, and I wouldn’t ever be able to lead a decent life. But shortly after that, I heard that a tractor driver was needed in the forestry-machine factory in Hamhung. I told them I had a tractor driver’s license and somehow got the job. It was strictly off the record since, officially speaking, the job didn’t exist, but I didn’t care.
Hamhung is an industrial city with terrible pollution and the most appalling smog I’d ever seen. The factory I went to work in had apartments for its workers, but there weren’t any vacancies. Not that it would have made any difference if there had been since my job was off the record. How would they have accounted for my family in their paperwork?
After staying with my father for a while in Dong Chong-ri, my wife and the younger children went to live with her parents in Hamju. Ho-chol stayed with my father. I hated that we were all split up, but we had no other options. It seemed to me that, whatever I did, I always let my family down. I just wanted us all to live happily together.
I decided to commandeer a room in the factory in Hamhung without permission. When dinnertime came around, I made sure there was no one about, and I took some fuel from the tractor. I used it to cook rice on an oil stove. Juche in action again. Autonomy, independence, self-sufficiency. It kept me alive, but it was a miserable existence. Sometimes, I felt so lonely at night that I sobbed like a child.
One Thursday, there was a power outage. This was a regular occurrence, and Thursday had become a kind of unofficial day off. This particular Thursday, I lay on my futon dozing when someone started hammering on my door.
“Are you there?”
I leaped up and opened the door. One of my colleagues who knew where I was hiding was standing there. It turned out the police had been in touch with the factory. Something to do with Ho-chol.
I ran to the police station in Hamhung—and there he was, sitting on a chair with his head bowed. As soon as he saw me, he rushed up to hug me.
He’d been on his way to school, but for some reason, he really wanted to see me, so he’d hopped on a train without buying a ticket. When he got off at Hamhung, he didn’t know where to find me, so he ended up wandering about aimlessly. He reminded me of my younger self, so many years ago, searching the streets for my mother in Tokyo. Thieves had assaulted him and stripped him of his shoes and clothes and left him sprawled on the ground, practically naked.
He couldn’t stop crying.
“Don’t cry! You’re a man! You need to be strong!” I said, but inside I ached for him.
I gave him my jacket and took him back to my father’s house in Dong Chong-ri.
I got to know a man who managed an electric lightbulb factory in Hamhung City who offered me a job as a driver—off the record, of course. He said if I accepted his offer, he could fix me up with a place to live. I hauled myself over to the factory that very day. I moved in with two single men who worked in the factory. It wasn’t my own place, but things seemed to be improving. The manager promised he’d fix up a place for me by the coming winter.
He said I was an “outstanding worker.” I don’t think I was outstanding at all—just average—but that was enough. But that’s the thing. People in North Korea spend so much time in study meetings and calculating the number of hours they’ve worked that there’s no time to do the actual work. The result? Raw materials don’t arrive in factories, the electricity doesn’t work, and farms are overrun with weeds. But as long as people can get their food rations, they don’t care. Since my job was off the record, I had no study meetings and was not forced to put in countless hours for pointless bureaucracy. So I could work properly. Or normally, as an ordinary, average worker, as I saw it. But in the manager’s eyes, I was outstanding.
It had been a year and a half since my family was split up. But I was pleased to think I would soon secure a place in Hamhung City where my wife and I and our children could all live together again. I put everything into my work.
Several months later, it came time to distribute the Chinese cabbage rations. In winter, each workplace received a supply of Chinese cabbages for the “winter storage battle.” Given how hard it was to survive the winter in North Korea, “battle” was an appropriate term.
If you were important to the party, you got more than everyone else. But if you were a factory worker, the number of cabbages you got depended on the size of your family. My job was to label the cabbages with the names of the people they were destined for. I finished the job as quickly as I could and went into the office.
“You told me that you would have a place for me by winter. It’s now winter,” I said to the manager.
“I just said I’d think about it,” he said. “I didn’t make any promises.”
Think about it? That’s not what he’d led me to believe before.
He looked very awkward and uncomfortable, and started scrutinizing his paperwork.
I figured it was pointless to start a fight, and turned to walk away. But then I noticed my muddy hands. Handling all the Chinese cabbages had made them filthy. Suddenly incensed, I turned back. “Do you actually enjoy screwing people over?” I asked.
I grabbed him by the collar and hauled him out of his office. Some workers tried to hold me back, but I couldn’t control my anger. We both went flying headfirst into the cabbages.
The next day, the manager came up to me. “Use the room next to the development section,” he said bluntly.
It was little more than a shack. It had no kitchen and was constantly throbbing with the din of machines. Even so, I was happy to have a place in Hamhung City to bring my family, so I started making a Korean stove under the floor and cobbled together a kitchen range.
After a few days, it was just about habitable, so I asked my wife and three children to move in. It was small and noisy, but at least we would be together. By this time, Ho-chol was beyond school age and spent his days looking for work. Myong-hwa was in junior high, and Ho-son was in elementary school.
The factory recycled glass bottles and turned them into lightbulbs. But some of the bottles were colored and couldn’t be recycled, so I’d take them back home and use them to decorate the place. I viewed them as our treasure.