Princess Bari

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

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

Keep your guard up from now on. Even in this town, people aren’t as friendly as they used to be. Do you know why? Money. No matter where you go in the world, it’s always the same. The electric lights go on, money comes in and kindness vanishes. All the young guys from the North that I used to trade with have become pimps.”

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.

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

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

Later, after our family was dispersed in all directions and my grandmother and I were living in that dugout hut on the other side of the Tumen River, she told me a story she’d heard long, long ago from her great-grandmother. It was the story of Princess Bari, whose name meant “Abandoned”. She would always finish the story by singing the last lines