Princess Bari

“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 anger he’d been suppressing finally exploded when Sook, the fifth girl, was born. That morning, Mother and Grandmother were in the main room off the kitchen, bathing newborn Sook in a tub of warm water, when Father returned home from night duty. He opened the door, took one look inside, and said: “What’re we supposed to do with another of those

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

“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

My family and I had no idea what was happening in the outside world, but we were able to guess what shape other parts of the country were in from looking at the changes around us. At school, the classrooms weren’t even half-full. Our homeroom teacher was nowhere to be seen, and the number of teachers who did stick around dropped to just four or fiv

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

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