The Girl with Seven Names. Hyeonseo Lee
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Название: The Girl with Seven Names
Автор: Hyeonseo Lee
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007554867
isbn:
‘… She had a photo of you in her purse and showed it to him. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at it for a long time, then he slipped it into his pocket before she could stop him, and walked away. So he has your picture.’ My grandmother’s eyes drifted to the window and the mountains. ‘After that, I wrote to his sister the actress to ask what had happened to him. She told me he had remarried soon after the divorce and had twin girls, one of whom he named Ji-hae, after you.’
Ji-hae, my birth name.
A shadow passed over my grandmother’s face. ‘He shouldn’t have done that.’
There is a superstition in North Korea that if someone remarries and gives a child of the second marriage the same name as a child from the previous marriage, the second to receive the name will die.
‘When the girl was young, she fell sick and died.’
I left my grandmother’s house in a daze. I felt hollowed out, tearful and numb at the same time. She’d said nothing about keeping this a secret, but I knew I would never mention it to my mother or my father or anyone. I was too young to know that talking about it is exactly what I should have done. Instead I buried it inside me, and it started to gnaw at my heart. I was still utterly confused. The only thing I kind of understood was that it explained the coolness of my father’s parents toward me, and their generosity toward Min-ho. He had their blood. I didn’t.
When I got home Min-ho was sitting on the floor drawing a picture with coloured crayons. What he’d drawn stunned me, and I felt tears again. And something like anger. It was crude and charming and showed stick figures of me, him, my mother and my father, all holding hands together beneath a shining sun. Inside the sun was a face of a man wearing glasses – Kim Il-sung.
Min-ho was now five years old. He was growing up into a good-natured boy, who liked to help our mother. He had a very cute smile. But now I felt as if a glass wall had gone up between us. He was a half-brother.
Our relationship changed from then on. I became an older sister who provoked him and started fights with him that he could never win. I feel so sorry about that now. My mother would say: ‘What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you be more like Min-ho?’
It would be years before I could process maturely the information my grandmother had given me, and reach out to him.
At dinner that evening I said nothing. My mother chatted about some business venture of Aunt Pretty’s; Min-ho was told not to hold his chopsticks in the air; my father was calm as usual, as if nothing had changed. Eventually he said: ‘What’s up with you? You’re as quiet as a little mouse.’
I stared at my bowl. I could not look at him.
In North Korea family is everything. Bloodlines are everything. Songbun is everything. He’s not my father.
I began to push him away and withdraw from him, thinking I had lost my love for him. The pain I was feeling was making me think this.
I began to avoid him.
I joined the other children assembling on the street. No one was ever late. We straightened our red scarves, and got into formation. The class leader, who was also our marching-group leader, held up the red banner, and we fell in step behind him, swinging our arms and singing at the tops of our voices.
Who is the partisan whose deeds are unsurpassed?
Who is the patriot whose deeds shall ever last?
In September 1992 I had started secondary school in Hyesan, and marched there each morning at eight. We knew all the songs so well that we’d fall into harmony spontaneously.
So dear to our hearts is our glorious General’s name,
Our beloved Kim Il-sung of undying fame!
By now the red scarf I’d longed to wear had become an irritation to me. From my mother I was acquiring a distinct care for how I looked. I didn’t want the drab North Korean clothes. I wanted to look different. I’d also grown more conscious of my body after an incident earlier that year, in the spring.
My mother had come to my school to have lunch with me. We were sitting in the sun just outside the school building, eating rice balls on the riverbank, when a boy shouted from my classroom window on the second floor, so loud they would have heard him in China: ‘Hey, Min-young, your mother’s ugly. Not like you.’ There was laughter from other boys behind him. I was only twelve but my face was scarlet with fury. I’d never thought my mother was not pretty. I felt far more humiliated than she did. She actually laughed and told me to calm down. Then she pinched my cheek and said: ‘Boys are noticing you.’
We had classes in Korean, maths, music, art, and ‘communist ethics’ – a curious blend of North Korean nationalism and Confucian traditions that I don’t think had much to do with communism as it is understood in the West. I also began to learn Russian, Chinese characters, geography, chemistry and physics. My father was especially strict with me about learning Chinese calligraphy, which he said was important. Many words in Korean and Japanese derive from ancient Chinese, and although the languages have diverged over time, the people of these nations often find they can communicate through calligraphy. I did not see much point to this, when I had clothes and boys to think about. I did not know that a time would come when I would thank my father in prayers for making me study Chinese. It was a gift of great good fortune from him. One day it would help save my life.
Again, the most important lessons, the most deeply studied subjects, centred on the lives and thoughts of our Leaders Great and Dear. Much of the curriculum was taken up by the cult of Kim. The Kim ‘activities’ of elementary school became serious study in secondary school. The school had a ‘study room’ devoted to Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-il’s mother, Kim Jong-suk. It was the most immaculate room in the school, made of the best building materials, and had been paid for with compulsory donations from parents. It was sealed shut so that dust did not settle on the photographs. We took our shoes off outside the door, and could only enter if we were wearing new white socks.
History lessons were superficial. The past was not set in stone, and was occasionally rewritten. My parents had learned at school that Admiral Yi Sun-shin, a naval commander whose tactics had defeated a massive Japanese invasion in the sixteenth century, was one of the great heroes of Korean history. By my day, his heroism had been downgraded. Admiral Yi had tried his best, we were told, but society was still backward at that time, and no figure in Korean history truly stood out until Kim Il-sung emerged as the greatest military commander in the history of humankind.
Lessons were taught with great conviction. The teacher was the only one to ask questions in class, and when she did, the student called upon to answer would stand up, hands at their sides, and shout out the answer as if addressing a regiment. We were not required to formulate any views of our own, or to discuss, or interpret ideas in any subject. Almost all of our homework was simply memorization, which I was good at, and often came top of the class.
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