“South and North …” Uncle Salamander held his thumbs up next to each other. “Face to face.” “That is even less likely than Heaven being a real place.” “No, it’s true. I saw it on Chinese TV.” “As if those Big Nose Yankees will ever let us be.” “If North and South worked together instead of fighting each other, then everyone would be better off, and

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

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.

A short distance away from the body, I saw his spirit sitting on the branch of a pine tree. He looked like a puff of smoke emerging from a chimney on a cloudy day. Where ya going? he asked. To find my parents. No point in that, he muttered. They’re all dead.

Grandmother confronted Father out of the blue. “Why doesn’t that baby have a name yet?” Father slowly ran his eyes over the children clustered around the table, as if counting us one by one. “Well,” he said, “I know there are enough girl names for twins, all the way up to sextuplets … but what am I supposed to do after that? I only know so many cha

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

Chongjin had always been known as the best city to live in. The high mountains that surrounded the city like a folding screen blocked the cold north winds and kept us in firewood, wild greens, and all kinds of fruit; delicious rice grew in fields fed by the Suseong Stream, which never dried up even during the worst droughts; and the waters were ric

The smoke began to fill the large hollow; each clump bore the face it had worn in life. I saw the woman and two children I’d met in the village near Gomusan, as well as the old woman I’d come across at the train station. Countless other faces I’d never seen, and did not know crowded around me. There were three or four little urchins who’d slept und

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