The Aquariums of Pyongyang_ Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag - Chol-hwan Kang [48]
I found no more comfort returning to our hut at night. The atmosphere around our bowls of corn was so dreary and bleak. We seemed beaten, drained, wrung of all hope. It wasn’t anyone in particular, it was the entire family that was going through a rough patch. Grandmother—always the most loquacious of the brood—lamented her fate openly and blamed herself for the family’s misfortunes. She also talked a lot about Grandfather and with time grew ever more indignant that he was being punished because of some meaningless Party intrigue.
“Why not me?” she kept asking. “Why was he condemned and not me?”
According to some of our fellow prisoners, my grandfather had been arrested as part of a larger sting operation, which had nothing directly to do with either his remarks about the country’s inefficiencies or his general penchant for unwanted frankness. What his arrest apparently had sprung from was the Han Duk-su affair, the power struggle that raged for a time within the Chosen Soren’s political leadership in Japan.2 Many of the former Japanese residents living in Korea had also weighed in on the conflict, both directly and indirectly. Grandmother, acting with her usual verve, had been among those in the fray, but Grandfather hardly took an interest. “Politics was never his thing,” my grandmother kept saying. “But it’s still him they got.” I think she would have been content to take his place. She could never avoid feeling responsible for the family’s imprisonment and her husband’s condemnation. Poor woman. She had given everything she had to communism. For fifteen or sixteen years she militated for its ideas, believing she was realizing them in her beloved homeland. And this same country had taken away the man she loved and sent her and her family to a camp. She felt so guilty that she couldn’t stop asking for our forgiveness. Yet it was the lamentation and regrets—coming from a woman who was once so indomitable and strong—that really shook us to our core.
During this dark period, my uncle first confessed to having attempted suicide. It had happened during his first week in the camp, before the rest of the family’s arrival. I remember my grandmother listening to his story in complete silence and then just sitting there for the longest time, looking stunned and broken. When she snapped out of it, she stared straight into my uncle’s eyes and pronounced the following with a depth and solemnity that admitted no contradiction: “If anyone should die first here, it’s me, not you, but me. Don’t ever start up with that again.” Unsure whether she had succeeded in convincing him, she followed with another argument—or a cry, rather—asking, “How could I live if you died?”
My uncle tried to end it all again the following year. This time along with my father. When I got home from work my grandmother told me the two of them had gone up to the mountains with the intention of hanging themselves from a tree. I started to shake uncontrollably, then threw myself on my mat and thought about them as hard as I could, muttering, “Come back, come back.” I don’t know how long I had been this way when I heard the shack door creak open. It was them! I cried from happiness. They had thought themselves ready to depart the camp at any cost, to leave the hunger, the humiliation, the filth, the thrashings. In the end, the only thing that had stopped them was knowing their suicide would bring trouble upon the family.
Suicide was not uncommon in the camp. A number of our neighbors took that road out of Yodok. They usually left behind letters criticizing the regime, or at the very least its Security Force. They were heedless acts which virtually guaranteed that the letter writer’s family would be sent to a place worse still than Yodok. Truth be told, some form of punishment would await the family regardless of