Princess Bari

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.

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

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

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

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.”

“Elder Brother, I’ve been worried sick about you. But things will be better now … Look back there. There’s a shipment of food coming through customs.” The first thing he unpacked when he got inside was a box of moon cakes for us kids to eat, followed by a sack of rice, three bags of cornmeal, two cans of cooking oil and some wheat flour. Before any

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

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

“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