Stars Between the Sun and Moon: One Woman's Life in North Korea and Escape to Freedom
Lucia Jang
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0393249220
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
An extraordinary memoir by a North Korean woman who defied the government to keep her family alive.
Born in the 1970s, Lucia Jang grew up in a common, rural North Korean household―her parents worked hard, she bowed to a photo of Kim Il-Sung every night, and the family scraped by on rationed rice and a small garden. However, there is nothing common about Jang. She is a woman of great emotional depth, courage, and resilience.
Happy to serve her country, Jang worked in a factory as a young woman. There, a man she thought was courting her raped her. Forced to marry him when she found herself pregnant, she continued to be abused by him. She managed to convince her family to let her return home, only to have her in-laws and parents sell her son without her knowledge for 300 won and two bars of soap. They had not wanted another mouth to feed.
By now it was the beginning of the famine of the 1990s that resulted in more than one million deaths. Driven by starvation―her family’s as well as her own―Jang illegally crossed the river to better-off China to trade goods. She was caught and imprisoned twice, pregnant the second time. She knew that, to keep the child, she had to leave North Korea. In a dramatic escape, she was smuggled with her newborn to China, fled to Mongolia under gunfire, and finally found refuge in South Korea before eventually settling in Canada.
With so few accounts by North Korean women and those from its rural areas, Jang's fascinating memoir helps us understand the lives of those many others who have no way to make their voices known.
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this for lunch!” I said to her. My grandmother leapt up, dropping her book on the floor. She stepped on it, crumpling a few pages as she rushed toward me. She pointed a shaking arm. “Sunhwa-ya, give me that.” “No,” I replied, taking a few steps backwards. A grin slid across my face as I pretended to open the lid. “I’m going to eat this,” I taunted. “Sunhwa-ya,” my grandmother pleaded, her eyes now teary. “Please stop.” Her legs collapsed, and she fell to the floor. I was contrite. “It’s a
breasts, felt our vaginas, peered into our mouths and ears. I shivered from cold and embarrassment. A woman who was crying had urinated on herself. The guards laughed at her. The woman who had been hit was forced to stand and undress as well. A guard ordered her to splay her hands on the wall. Then, after donning plastic gloves, he stuck his fist first up her vagina and then into her anus. My body trembled. I tried to look away. “Why afraid?” said the guard who spoke Korean. “You’ve spread
to die. “I don’t know.” My mind raced as I considered my options. “It costs many yuan to get rid of a young fetus,” spat Jungsoo’s mother. “More if the baby is further along.” “You must not give birth to that child,” Eunhee said, echoing her mother. “You cannot stay in China forever, and when you go, you will have to leave the child here. Jungsoo can’t care for him. He has Moonjae already. There are so many abandoned children in China with mothers from over there,” she said, tilting her head
between. “I’ve made arrangements,” I said finally, making it up as I went. “I’ve made arrangements for the child to be given away after it’s born.” Silence filled the room. I thought the interrogator was going to reach out and slap me. But I held my head high. If my child was going to die, I was going to die with it. That much I did know. “You two,” the interrogator yelled at the other women, “out that door.” He pointed to a back exit. “You,” he barked at me. “Back to your cell.” THE CELL WAS
remember my father as the quiet man who did not how to express love very well, but who I realize now always loved his family. I see him also as the man who made machines for people who had none and who designed the plastic bag that carried you, my son, to safety. I remember Hyungchul, Hyungwoo and my sister, Sunyoung; the games we played as children and the way our lives overlapped as we grew older. And, of course, I think of Sungmin. Maybe he’ll read these words one day, recognize his own story
