All Woman and Springtime (2 page)

“We are falling short of our quotas. Each of you must work harder, sew faster, and make no mistakes. Errors have become quite a problem on this floor. Every time you have to restitch an inseam . . .” He paused, looking to the dirty ceiling for words that seemed to be eluding him. “For every stitch you have to redo, a good
Chosun
man or woman pays for it with blood.” He laid heavy emphasis on the word “blood,” probing the room with heartless, accusing eyes.

The room was captivated in breathless, guilty silence. Gyong-ho felt as if she were solely to blame for the imperialist scourge and wondered how she could possibly work any harder to rout it out. She stole a glance toward Il-sun, whose eyes were closed with her head pitching forward. It could have been humble introspection in response to the foreman’s speech, but Gyong-ho saw it for what it was: sleep. She was amazed, offended, and, in spite of herself, impressed by the way her friend could so casually flaunt her disrespect for authority. That she could fall asleep standing up was impressive in its own right. Il-sun was always on the edge of trouble, just skating by without suffering any real consequence for her insubordination. Gyong-ho felt deeply fearful for her safety. For Il-sun, the dangers lurking around every corner and under every rock were impotent, imaginary shadows; for Gyong-ho they were real. Il-sun did not understand what she was risking by being impetuous, rebellious, and unique.
If only she knew what I have been through
.

With that thought, Gyong-ho bumped into an unspoken boundary of her consciousness, treading accidentally into an area where she dared not go. A memory flared in brilliant colors, growing on the dry tinder of her fear, and the factory began to fade around her. Suddenly she was hearing again the footsteps she had been evading. They were catching up with her swiftly from behind: hard soles echoing down a long, bare corridor, muffled voices, rough laughter, the light of a naked bulb, cold, wet feet, an electric shock.

In desperation, to fight off the sensation, she began counting things. Anything.

She counted needles in a pincushion—
forty-eight
.

She counted bare lightbulbs—
sixteen
.

She counted buttons on the foreman’s shirt—
seven
.

She multiplied lightbulbs by buttons, and then divided them by needles—
two point three, recurring.

Two point three, recurring, multiplied by itself is five point four, recurring.

Five point four, recurring, multiplied by two point three, recurring, is twelve point seven zero three seven zero three, recurring . . .

With each number her mind gained ground, her demon receded, inky black thoughts fell further and further behind. She was once again ahead of the echoing footsteps, could hear them falling back.

The square root of twelve point seven zero three seven zero three, recurring, is three point five six four two—

“Comrade Song!” the foreman barked loudly, shocking her back into the room. He was standing toe to toe with her, bathing her in a cloud of sour kimchee breath. Kimchee was a luxury of his rank that the times did not afford for the likes of Gyong-ho. “Comrade Song Gyong-ho! Is there something you would like to say?” It was more of a threat than a question.

She looked around to see that the other seamstresses were already sitting at their machines, looking fearfully at her. She had been lost in counting and had missed the command to sit. She felt very much like an errant nail in a wooden deck that had worked its way upward, standing out, begging to be struck with a hammer until its head is again flush with the wood. In any moment of uncertainty, she had learned, there is only one safe course of action. As if by reflex she brought her hands together in front of her chest, hoisted a gleaming tear into her eye, and, with a catch in her voice, said, “I am so very grateful, comrade foreman, sir. It is by the grace of the Dear Leader that I am here. I am not worthy to be here. I am lower than mud. Lower than pond silt. Even so, our Dear Leader has had the grace to allow me to work in his garment factory. I am just so grateful.” She bowed her head, but remained standing.

“Very good, Comrade Song,” rasped the foreman. “I hope that the others here will learn from you.” He turned to address the room, seeming to relish the pain shooting up his damaged leg. “You see? Comrade Song knows that she was given a rare second chance. She knows that she is unworthy. This makes her grateful. You may sit, Comrade Song. Everyone, get to work!”

Relieved, Gyong-ho sat and began sewing.

2

W
HEN IL-SUN FIRST WALKED
through the front door of the Home for Orphan Girls, she sneered at the portrait of the Dear Leader. His frozen smile only confirmed for her that his omnipotence was a lie—he was only made of paper. Either the orphanage mistress did not see the offense or she chose to ignore it. Il-sun had certainly made no attempt to hide it. She was thirteen years old and had just watched her mother crumble, piece by piece, before her eyes, and she was in no mood to be placatory.

Il-sun had grown up in relative luxury, with extra food rations, almost new clothes, and in a nice apartment in the middle of the city. These were her birthright, handed to her through her father’s good
songbun.
She did not belong in the orphanage; not with lowly girls who had no home—that was not her. Her mother had been doting and kind, her greatest ambition being to raise her children well. Her social position afforded her the ability to do just that. Less fortunate women had to trudge off to the factories and farms each day, leaving their children to raise themselves. Il-sun dearly loved her mother.

Il-sun’s father had been in the army, and his military uniform hung in the small family closet throughout her childhood. It was the only thing she knew of him. He had been an old man when he married her mother, and then died shortly after Il-sun was born. Some days, when she was in a particular mood, she would glide her fingers on the fabric of the uniform, and smell it for any trace of the man who had worn it. Sometimes she thought she could detect a masculine scent around the collar, but other times it was only mildew.

Her father had been loyal to Kim Il-sung, had fought for him in the war, and had been decorated with medals. These were kept in a special box on a high shelf, and Il-sun would sometimes ask to hold them. They were a comforting weight in the palm of her small hand, and they were a tangible reminder of her own privilege and duty. For his dedication, her father had been awarded the apartment in the center of the city and enjoyed an elevated social standing. His first wife had died of something; of what, Il-sun did not know or really care. The children from that marriage had already grown and had families of their own. She never even knew their names. As soon as Il-sun’s mother reached marrying age, her father took her for his second wife. Even though he was already an old man, his excellent
songbun
made him a desirable husband, at least from the parents’ point of view. Il-sun hoped no one would make her marry an old man, when her time came.

It was generally known that times were hard, and yet a person could disappear just for saying so out loud. That had happened to Il-sun’s older brother; or at least she believed so. She could never be sure. He had been an angry young man who tended to say whatever dangerous thought was on his mind. Their mother tried punishing him, reasoning with him, and then finally pleading with him to change his thoughts; or, at the very least, to keep his heretical ideas to himself. He never listened. One day he simply did not come home. During Il-sun’s more upbeat moments, she liked to think that he had made a run for the northern border into China. Late at night, when their mother was asleep, he had whispered tales of people who braved crossing the frozen Tumen River, risking their lives for the opulence and endless feasts awaiting them on the other side. Il-sun had idolized her brother, even if she thought his ideas were a little crazy. He was the only person she ever heard speak that way. It was known that
Chosun
was the wealthiest, most prosperous nation—the envy of all the world. Why would anyone want to leave it? In her more realistic moments she knew that her brother had been picked up by the police and taken away forever, as so many other people had, and nobody ever talked about it. Why else had the authorities not come asking for him when he did not show up for his Party Youth meeting? She missed him terribly.

Her brother’s disappearance had been too much for her mother to bear. It first broke her spirit, and then it broke her body down. It was not the grief of losing him that did it; it was having to pretend that he had never existed. It was having to get up the same way each day, doing the exact same routine, trying to convince herself that she had never had a son, had never suckled him, had never watched him grow handsome and strong. Neighbors and friends likewise pretended, as if by unspoken consensus, that there had never been a son, a brother, a friend. They never asked about him, never offered consolation, or even a knowing nod. To acknowledge him would be to acknowledge some guilt by association. Such smudges were hard to polish off a person’s badge of loyalty.

Il-sun watched it all with the clear eyes of childhood.

Shortly afterward, her mother became ill. It came on gradually. At first she became clumsy, dropping things and tripping over nothing. Over months it became increasingly difficult for her to stand up and walk across the floor, which she eventually had to do using a cane. Then her body trembled uncontrollably and she could no longer operate chopsticks, or even a spoon. Il-sun had to feed her, and help her bathe and use the toilet. A doctor came and went, shaking his head and avoiding Il-sun’s eyes. A year and a half after the symptoms appeared, her mother could no longer move from her sleeping mat. She could not speak, but only roll her eyes and make helpless grunts. Her mother ached, and Il-sun tried with all the force of her imagination to bring the affliction into her own body instead. Her mother suffered all the same.

The hardest part was knowing that her mother was still aware inside her broken and useless body, looking through the scuffed and milky windows of her eyes, aware that it was the futile end of her life. The
Chosun
were not allowed an afterlife—it was against the law—and nor was there any solace given to the survivors. Life was service to the Republic, and nothing more. Life was service to the Dear Leader, and everything outside that was forbidden. The very words for those things were rubbed out of the language until all that was left of them were impressions under the eraser marks where the first pencil had originally scratched them into being. Only the brave or the stupid dared to exhume them. Truth was an agreement, in
Chosun
, not an absolute
.
For the first time Il-sun fully understood her brother’s anger.

One by one, her mother’s organs shut down. Her skin became a sickly, pale green and her breath came in short gasps. Her body jerked in uncontrollable fits, with less force each time. She was a tire deflating. In one moment she took her last breath, and then gave up the thin tether of control over her lungs. Il-sun watched, powerless, as her mother slowly suffocated.

The jerking stopped. Il-sun had thought they had been fighting a disease—an unseen, unknowable enemy—but then realized they had actually been fighting against death itself. Unavoidable, inescapable death. It was then she realized that, no matter what, death would always triumph; and that death’s victory, after the struggle of life, is liberation. Il-sun had not allowed herself to cry since her mother had fallen ill: She had needed to stay strong. Sitting in front of her mother’s empty shell, as understanding came to her in waves, she wept—not from grief, but from relief. The sweet release of death. An insupportable weight had been lifted from her, and, in spite of herself, she was glad that it was over. And she hated herself for being glad: It felt like betrayal. With nowhere else to cast her blame, she blamed . . .

No. There would be no talking about who she blamed.

T
HE
H
OME
FOR
Orphan Girls was not a comfortable place to grow up, especially after having lived in a private apartment with her family in a nice part of the city. Still, it was better funded and less crowded than its counterparts outside the city; and even if she did not recognize it at the time, she was lucky to be there. It was set up specifically for orphans from good families loyal to the Party.

Il-sun did not adjust well to life in the orphanage. She developed a reputation for being vindictive, sly, and cunning in her abuses. Many girls tried to befriend her, but she shunned them all. She had been accustomed to better food, cleaner conditions, a doting mother, and more privacy. Now she was just one of many girls in the care of a lone, overworked state employee. She had been told all her life that, with her excellent
songbun,
she would be able to find a good husband high in the Party ranks, that she would always enjoy greater comforts and privilege than most. All that was gone now. Now she was a castoff, a throwaway, a burden to the Republic—an undesirable.

Her pique found its sharpest focus on one girl in particular, who had arrived at the orphanage under mysterious circumstances a few months after her. To Il-sun, Gyong-ho looked more like a half-starved rodent than a thirteen-year-old girl. She was a skeletal wisp with long arms and a lopsided posture. Her spine was twisted and her left arm hung lower than her right, as if she were perpetually carrying a heavy sack of rice over her shoulder. Her wavy hair was matted and dirty, and she made no effort to straighten it. Her skin was pale and cold, made all the more so by the contrast with her black hair. Her wretchedness was exacerbated by her name: Gyong-ho was a boy’s name, a souvenir from a bygone era when parents, wishing for a boy, gave their girls masculine names. Gyong-ho refused to speak, instead only shaking or nodding her head. She had a wide, blank look in her eyes that seemed a permanent part of her features.