Chosen

DAUGHTER OF RIGHTEOUSNESS-1

DAUGHTER OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

“May the groans of the prisoners come before you; by the strength of your arm preserve those condemned to die.” Psalm 79:11

“Guess what I heard?” my friend Mee-Kyong whispered in my ear. “Officer Yeong sent his office maid away yesterday.”

“Prisoners!” shouted Matron Sung, the guard in charge of our fifty-woman unit in the garment factory. When I first started working in the cutting line, I was terrified by her whip, but I quickly learned that Matron Sung was more interested in keeping her hair free from lice than she was in punishing us prisoners. Matron Sung rarely left her scent-proof box. She supervised our work from behind glass and spent her shift barking orders through a megaphone.

It was no secret that a position in the garment factory was the most lenient of all the labor jobs in Camp 22. My companions and I were still forced to work twelve-hour shifts, we were still subject to the strict 300-calorie-a-day ration, but we nevertheless felt ourselves fortunate. We were out of the Chungbong coal mine where nearly all the male prisoners were sent to work. We were spared the most abhorrent tasks, like scooping out the filth from underneath the prison toilets and carrying it to the marsh in small handle-less buckets. The fifty of us in Matron Sung’s unit weren’t even beaten very regularly.

Four years had passed since my mother and I first arrived at Camp 22 the morning after Father was shot. Surprisingly, Father hadn’t been killed, although we were told that the bullet came dangerously near his left lung. Mother and I were sent ahead of him to a large prison camp in the rural wilderness of Hoeryong, North Hamyong Province. Three days later, Father was transferred directly to solitary confinement in Camp 22’s underground detention center.

I was also held in a solitary cell where my Father’s personal guard came to torment me several times a day. “Your father, Song Hyun-Ki, must despise you,” Agent Lee told me as he jammed sharp pieces of bamboo underneath my fingernails. Every day I resolved to endure, but within minutes I started screaming, begging my torturer to stop until Agent Lee sometimes laughed outright.

“You can blame your father’s arrogant pride for your suffering,” Agent Lee crooned as his cow-skin whip cracked open the skin of my bare back. I howled in pain which only encouraged Agent Lee even more.

After one especially brutal beating, Agent Lee took out his camera. “Now smile,” he taunted. After blinding my eyes with the flash, Agent Lee studied the picture that came out of the boxy machine. “Song Hyun-Ki will be delighted to see this one. Of course, we want your father to know how well we are treating you here.” With that, Agent Lee shook his head and clucked his tongue. “If only your father didn’t refuse to hold on to his delusional faith. Then we could release you from detention.”

Each time he came in to my cell, Agent Lee gave me an update on Father’s condition. “Song Hyun-Ki was a little disoriented after his water treatment this morning,” he stated with a smile. I tried to ignore his words, but I couldn’t shake the image of Father suffering pathetically at the hands of such a wicked man.

And I hated Father for it.

Of course, I would be a prisoner in Camp 22 for the rest of my life; that much was never in question. Even as a twelve-year-old I knew that my future was sealed. But I also knew that there was a life outside the detainment center where young children attended school, where families slept together in small huts, where in many ways life might continue on for us as it had in Hasambong.

“If only Song Hyun-Ki were not so foolish,” Agent Lee goaded, “you and your parents could live together again. You could even attend classes and finish middle school. Wouldn’t you like that?”

“Yes, Sir,” I answered. Any future that included the chance to see the sunshine would be better than weeks locked in this underground torture chamber.

“Unfortunately for you,” Agent Lee continued, “your Father needs a little more persuasion before we can release you into the main camp.” And with that he forced water down my throat until I choked on my own vomit.

“Song Hyun-Ki is a traitor and a fool,” Agent Lee insisted while I lay on the floor, praying for this nightmare to end soon. “If I had a daughter as bright and capable as you, I would never permit her to suffer this way. What kind of father would allow his little girl to endure such trauma just so he can hold on to his stubborn faith?”

I refused to confide in Agent Lee that these were the same questions that haunted me during my sleepless nights in my cell.

I wasn’t allowed to see Mother, but Agent Lee told me that she was already adjusting to prison life as a laborer in Camp 22’s furniture factory. Since Mother signed a statement denouncing any affiliation but that of the Party, the National Security Agency didn’t keep her in the detention center.

Unfortunately, Father refused to sign the same statement regardless of what they did to him … or to me. As each day brought even crueler punishment from the hands of Agent Lee, I despised my father’s obstinate religion more and more. But when the screams of tortured prisoners kept me awake at night, when my entire body ached from beatings and starvation, I longed to hear Father’s voice, to be in his presence, to remember the words he spoke before he was shot.

Each day I would ask Agent Lee for permission to visit Father, and each day he smiled at me. “If your Father wanted to see you,” Agent Lee sneered, “he would have signed the statement of ideological conformity by now. Unfortunately, he loves his little Western god more than he loves you. It truly is a shame. I’m sure you didn’t do anything to deserve such harsh treatment.” After this proclamation, Agent Lee scalded my sides and my palms with fiery iron prods, now laughing at my cries, now shaking his head and proclaiming, “If only your father weren’t such a fool.”

Four years later, my physical wounds were healed over, leaving relatively few scars when compared to the crippled bodies of many of the older prisoners. Some individuals wasted away as forced laborers for decades; others were actually born within the confines of Camp 22’s large electric fence.

My friend Mee-Kyong was one of the children who was never outside Camp 22, who was bred in captivity. We met in my eighth-grade class, which I was allowed to join after my unexpected release from the detention center. Children prisoners could attend school until they were fourteen, and I spent my first two years at Camp 22 as Mee-Kyong’s classmate and friend.

Mee-Kyong’s mother and father were both prisoners at Camp 22. Her mother was chosen by a National Security agent as a bride for her father to reward him for exceptional labor in the Chungbong mine. Arranged marriages between prisoners were not uncommon at Camp 22, Mee-Kyong told me. Since there was no other permissible form of physical contact between a man and a woman, marriages ordained by the National Security Agency were seen as one of a prisoner’s highest possible honors. Mee-Kyong’s parents were allowed to spend three nights together in a private hut, during which time Mee-Kyong was conceived, and for the rest of their lives they lived as single prisoners in the segregated dormitories.

At least that’s the story Mee-Kyong’s mother told her. Mee-Kyong had a slightly more colorful version of her birth history, which she shared with me one day when our class was ordered to the outskirts of the camp to collect firewood. “A National Security agent fell in love with Mother,” she whispered, all the while looking over her shoulder to make sure that our teacher wasn’t watching us. Once I thought my instructor from Hasambong was strict, but that was before I met the school mistress at Camp 22.

“They had a relationship,” Mee-Kyong continued, stressing the word and gauging my reaction. Of course, whatever I didn’t know about intimacy after living in a one-bedroom cabin with my parents in Hasambong, I figured out pretty soon after I moved into the dorms at Camp 22.

“The guard was scared,” Mee-Kyong’s eyes were wide and twinkling, and she spoke about her supposed illegitimate birth as though it were the most romantic love story ever imagined. “He didn’t want to get in trouble, so he picked a male prisoner at random and gave him my mother as a bride.”

I watched Mee-Kyong with both envy and awe. Mee-Kyong was beautiful, with smooth skin and sparkling eyes. She even had laugh lines. I could never figure out how my friend avoided becoming vacant and lifeless as the majority of the other prisoners. She spoke of Camp 22 as if it was her home, as if there wasn’t truly a free world out on the other side of the electric fence. She seemed proud of her fantasized heritage, as if the idea that her biological father might have been a National Security agent put her on a level above her peers. Mee-Kyong nodded at a guard standing in a hut on one of the watch posts that surrounded the camp. “See him?” she asked me with a wink. “Maybe he’s my father.”

It was Mee-Kyong’s dramatic imagination and her determined spirit that helped me survive my first few years at Camp 22. When I was initially released from the detention center, Mother and I lived together in a cramped and dilapidated hut made of clay. After I told my mother about Father’s fate, she and I came to an unspoken agreement to never talk about him again. Unfortunately, that silence soon became all-consuming, and within a week or so, Mother stopped communicating at all. She came home from her shift at the furniture factory, smelling of pine and cedar, and handed me my small dinner ration. A little bit later, she left again for her self-criticism session without saying anything.

At these self-criticism sessions, as I found out when I started attending them myself, the guards stood and laughed as laborers pointed fingers, blamed their peers for exaggerated sins, and made up stories of accusation against one another. These daily trials were one of the National Security Agency’s many tactics to keep prisoners constantly wary of each other. Some nights the guards wouldn’t release their groups until every single individual accused somebody else of wrongdoing, whether that was humming or hunting rodents or stopping to stretch in the production lines. If the guards weren’t too tired, they punished the prisoners who seemed most deserving. Once the guards were finished amusing themselves, they sent everyone out. After her sessions those first few weeks of camp, Mother crawled back home and lay down on her straw mat on the floor without even looking at me.

The guards began to call Mother the “Silent One” after she stumbled and fell backward into the coal furnace one day, scalding her forearm. Even though the burn was so bad it blistered over and left red oozing welts across Mother’s skin, she didn’t even cry out in pain but went back to resume her soundless labor. The guards at the furniture factory found her unnatural lack of reaction so humorous that they tormented her regularly during her shift, dumping a hot coal down her back, or placing embers under her bare feet for her to stand on as she worked in the production line.

Because Mother refused to speak, even to me, I didn’t know at first what was happening at the furniture factory, or why Mother came home smelling like a half-decayed corpse. Some nights she was unable to even walk, so she crawled to and from her self-criticism sessions. At first I tried to connect with her. I sat on my knees and begged her to look into my face. I knew terrible things were happening to her in the factory, but she wouldn’t talk to me. Even if she had, I was so withdrawn after my time in the detainment center that I had very little comfort or encouragement to offer anyone else, no matter how closely we were related.