Princess Bari

But once rumours started going around that the Soviet Union had collapsed some years earlier, the grown-ups began whispering about the poor shape the Republic was in. Chongjin had it better than other cities, though not as good as Pyongyang, of course; even so, there were times when rations were cut off for two months and then three months, and sha

With the start of autumn, starving people descended upon the banks of the Tumen River in droves. Those who had relatives in China crossed over in search of food and money; survivors who’d lost loved ones surged across the border along with workers from factories that had shut down, vowing to bring back money and save their families. No one dared to

Our mother’s brother never came back after crossing the river that day. That was probably the winter of 1994, so I would have been eleven years old.

Mother cried quietly to herself; then, after a little while, she picked me up and carried me out of the house to a patch of woods a long way from our neighbourhood where no one ever went. There she tossed me into some dry underbrush among the pine trees, and covered my face with the blanket. She probably meant for me to smother to death, or to free

“Elder Brother, I’ve been worried sick about you. But things will be better now … Look back there. There’s a shipment of food coming through customs.” The first thing he unpacked when he got inside was a box of moon cakes for us kids to eat, followed by a sack of rice, three bags of cornmeal, two cans of cooking oil and some wheat flour. Before any

“Watch your mouth! Don’t you know what kind of trouble we could get in if you start spreading that nonsense around?” “But when I married you, everyone in your village knew that your great-grandmother and your great-great-grandmother were powerful shamans before Liberation …” “Damn it, woman! Keep it down! We’re descended from poor farmers. That mea

He took my hand gently and stroked it. “I don’t know what this life-giving water is that you were hoping for, but we have to weep for each other in order to save ourselves. No matter what awful things we go through, we cannot abandon hope in the world or in others.”

The great kings of the otherworld called out my crimes each in turn, and at the very end the king with the round crown said: You are guilty of abandoning your starving kinsmen. Even if you spend the rest of your life offering food and reciting sutras to the spirits of these dead, you will never wash away your sin! The ten kings called out their jud

When I look back now on how I wound up crossing the ocean and coming all the way to England, I can’t help but blame my name. Grandmother told me the story of Princess Bari every night in our cosy little dugout hut, but it wasn’t until after I was on that ship that I thought about the princess going west in search of the life-giving water – out wher