The Aquariums of Pyongyang_ Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag - Chol-hwan Kang [73]
Though I was happy about being released, the prospect of leaving the place that had been my universe for so long filled me with anxiety. Ten years. It was a big chunk of life! What would be waiting for me when I got out? Besides joy, I also felt a certain moroseness. I had seen the same complexity of feeling among earlier departing prisoners, naively believing that I would be different—happy—that the joy would be written all over my face and overwhelm every other emotion. Now that my liberation had arrived, my thoughts and emotions were as confused as theirs had been. I had grown up nourishing myself on rats and frogs; I thought of this as my life, and it was. I had grown accustomed to it; changing worlds, from one moment to the next, was strange to me. For the adults it was different, because they had other references in their lives, but they weren’t aglow with joy, either. Grandmother, for one, was not at all expansive. “Ah, well, I guess I won’t die in this camp after all,” she declared flatly. “So in the end I will get to see my other children.” What I didn’t understand at the time was how angry she felt—along with my father and uncle—about the ten years she had lost at Yodok, about the impossibility of ever rediscovering a satisfactory life.
These reactions were on the affective order: I was going to miss the places, the people, the friendships, the shared moments. But the day-to-day struggle for life at camp number 15 was no cause for nostalgic sentimentality. It had taught me very little over the years. Some veterans of the Soviet gulags speak of the camps as having been their university, but it wasn’t so for me. The only lesson I got pounded into me was about man’s limitless capacity for vice—that and the fact that social distinctions vanish in a concentration camp. I once believed that man was different from other animals, but Yodok showed me that reality doesn’t support this opinion. In the camp, there was no difference between man and beast, except maybe that a very hungry human was capable of stealing food from its little ones while an animal, perhaps, was not. I also saw many people die in the camp, and their deaths looked like that of other animals.
Before leaving, we gave our tools as parting gifts to the friends and neighbors who were staying behind. These rusted, twisted things were among the only belongings we were allowed to treat as our own.
Liberation day finally arrived. It was toward the very end of February 1987. Several prisoners accompanied us as far as they could, waving good-bye. It was a very sad scene. We knew we would likely never see them again, but we tried to be reassuring, to affirm that their day would also come and that they should take good care. They nodded in agreement, without showing how slim they thought these hopes and how ludicrous this advice. We left in the same kind of truck that had brought us to the camp ten years earlier. When it started up, I was taken back to our departure from Pyongyang, and to my mother’s tear-lined face as it receded into the distance. The vision struck me with new and unexpected force—for I had all but forgotten my mother. Her memory had become so faded and distant it hardly seemed real. Now, as the truck slowly spat and rattled into motion, her image raced back to me in a flash. In an instant I understood that leaving the camp had finally made a reunion possible and that from now on I could start thinking of her again without it being simply painful and absurd.