Jia: A Novel of North Korea Read Online Free

political concentration camp. His
behavior was said to be against the government; his family
didn't have the preferred background, so his sentence was
compounded.
    My father tried to find Sungwoo, appealing to the central government about the local government's unfair treatment, but to no avail. Sungwoo was simply erased from his
community. After that, my father became increasingly cynical. He publicly criticized the research conditions and lack
of funding at the college, and he complained that school
staff members were busy using the money to curry favor
with their superiors. He dismissed the political science
classes, which taught the ideology of Kim 11 Sung. "What
department am I in, science or politics?" he would say.
Eventually, he was dragged away by two soldiers and taken
to the Investigation Bureau. His worst offense was the possession of foreign science books from prohibited countries.
Nobody knew how he got the books; he had sought them
out on his own.
    The scandal brought trouble to my family. My father
cursed the investigators dispatched from the government.
He disappeared several days later; the charge was political treason. People said he would be sent to one of the strictest political concentration camps, a place in the mountains,
where no one could find him. My mom looked for him,
running from village to village, begging her parents for
help. At the time, she was pregnant with me: a little sister
for her eight-year-old daughter.

    Her parents, however, cared more about their status
than for their only daughter. Both sets of parents asked her
to get a divorce so she wouldn't be soiled with my father's
crimes. But my mom also was obstinate, and she refused
to leave my father's family. Several days later, a military
truck took my mom, my sister, and my father's parents and
dropped them in a political offenders' village. They were
not allowed to bring any belongings. Their crime was their
relation to my father.
    The village was located right next to a political concentration camp. My grandparents and my mother worked
for the camp, serving the guards. They hoped to run into
my father, though they had no confirmation of his whereabouts. The first words they exchanged after returning from
work each day were "Have you seen him?" They were not
allowed to talk to prisoners; they could only check their
faces as they passed.
    That is the story of why I never saw my father and spent
my childhood in an isolated compound. My mother believed her parents had prevented our family from actually
being sent to the camp, and she hoped that someday they
would help us return to our regular lives. The girl who
could have anything she wanted had now lost everything.
    I don't blame my father. I understand why he remained
so steadfast. How desperate he must have been when he realized he couldn't live out his passion for study and research! What had he learned from his own father's history? My
grandmother said my father respected my grandfather with
his whole heart. They had different interests, but they both
believed in being true to their passions.

    Life hasn't changed so much since their time. Just as they
did, I must do battle with capricious political winds in order to survive each day.

     

A Stranger's Visit
    ---here we lived, the temperature rose and fell with
the wind. Fall was slipping into winter; leaves were
falling from the trees, which themselves were becoming
shorter and skinnier as the ground grew softer and taller.
Piles of leaves meant that it was time to prepare for winter.
The cold pinched at our flesh; sometimes the snow was as
deep as I was tall. No matter how cold it got, however, I
still pressed for my sister to take me outside. My grandparents were worried I might get another disease from exposure, but being stuck inside only made me sicker.
    One typical day, I was nagging my sister to take me
outside to play while she ate lunch. I often dictated the
day's plan to