All Woman and Springtime Page 3

  But I have nice ankles, she thought. Maybe there will be a delivery today.

  Her bedroom opened into the large, plain kitchen, and as she left her room she was pleased to see that the girls were already making breakfast. She spoke her approval, causing several of the girls to beam. She had learned that having the girls take responsibility for themselves not only eased her work load but helped them gain needed confidence. She performed her morning rounds delivering praise, or a mild rebuke when necessary. Few of her girls had behavior problems.

  She passed Gyong-ho and Il-sun as they were heading out the door on their way to the factory. They would soon be leaving the orphanage to live on their own, when their paperwork cleared, maybe in a couple of months. She felt both proud and heartbroken when girls flew the nest, but these two in particular had a special place in her heart and she would be sad to see them go. Il-sun was a success story of sorts. She had been the bad apple to spoil the bunch when she first arrived, and the mistress had feared her crossing a dangerous line. It was so easy to do. But now she stayed, mostly, within a safe margin of behavior, largely because of her friendship with Gyong-ho. She was ripening into womanhood in the way some girls do, like a bomb exploding, and the mistress hoped she would get plucked into marriage soon, before the world of men could leave its stain on her. A young woman with Il-sun’s thirst for trouble was safer when married, in Chosun.

  The orphanage ran without hiccups, which was a testament to the mistress’s competence. When she had taken it over six years earlier, it was in complete disarray. The girls were filthy and the grounds unkempt. Violence was commonplace, and several of the older girls were openly prostituting themselves, perhaps even to the profit of her predecessor. The food shortage had been worse in those days: Many of the girls were sick, and all were malnourished. She could not have been successful if she had allowed herself to get attached. There was no time for coddling or mothering. She was the only caretaker for twenty-five girls, and she understood that routine and structure were more important than pampering, given the limited resources at her disposal. Besides, if these girls were going to survive, they needed to be tough.

  The Home for Orphan Girls had been a factory during more prosperous times, but was hastily transformed into an orphanage during the outset of the food shortage in the 1990s. It was a blocky, two-story concrete building with large rooms and few homey embellishments. In the foyer were the obligatory framed portraits of the Great and Dear Leaders. The upper floor was a large, open room where the girls kept their sleeping mats and their few personal possessions. The building was wired for electric light, but most of the time the electricity did not work and they had to use oil lamps and candles. Even those, they used sparingly. Similarly, the building had at one time been plumbed, but the water system had long been shut down. Water had to be hauled daily from a spigot two blocks away, which worked only intermittently. As part of her shared responsibilities, each girl was required to carry two buckets of water every day to a large storage tank on the second floor of the building. As an example to the girls, the mistress did not exclude herself from the duty.

  Once the girls had all left for school or work, there was an endless pile of paperwork to attend to. The mistress had to run the orphanage completely on her own, and her superiors preferred to remain ignorant of its operations, lest they should ever have to fill in for her. They viewed it as a problem better left ignored, and complained loudly if they were ever asked to do anything more than sign the necessary requisition forms and ration requests. Chosun, they said, was founded on the juche ideal, the idea of self-sufficiency, and she should lead by example. She wanted to remind her superiors that juche was meant to be self-sufficiency for all of Chosun, a nation built on the foundation that all citizens work together for the common good, but she thought better of it. Besides, her autonomy had unforeseen benefits.

  Midway through her pile of morning paperwork there was a loud knock on the kitchen door. The mistress’s heart missed a beat and her cheeks flushed red. She wondered at how biology took precedence over rationality: A knock at the front door would never excite her blood in such a way. Perspiring now, she checked her hair in the mirror, made her way to the kitchen door, hopeful in spite of herself, and opened it.

  4

  GYONG-HO WAS EIGHT YEARS old. She had always looked forward to the private meetings with Comrade Uncle Kim. He came to school every few months with his kind eyes and his bottomless bag of sweets. He told funny stories and liked to ask questions.

  “Good morning, Gyong-ho!” he said brightly.

  “Good morning, Comrade Uncle Kim!” she responded.

  “Would you like a sweetie?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “I hear you are almost old enough to join the Children’s Party. You must be very excited.”

  “Oh, I am.”

  “That will make the Dear Leader very happy.”

  “Will you come to the ceremony, Comrade Uncle Kim?”

  “I certainly will! Will your parents be there?”

  “I think so.”

  “You’re not sure? Wouldn’t your parents want to see such an important event?”

  “They are so busy. They go to meetings all the time.”

  “But don’t you think they would make an exception this time?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Me too.” Comrade Uncle Kim paused thoughtfully for a minute. “Gyong-ho is a boy’s name, isn’t it? Why did your parents give you a boy’s name?”

  “My parents wanted to have a son, but they got me instead.”

  “I see. I thought people stopped doing that a long time ago. Do you think your parents love you?”

  Gyong-ho sat quietly. She had never wondered about that before, and suddenly she was worried. Her parents seemed to love her, but the way Comrade Uncle Kim asked the question put a shadow of doubt over her heart. “I think so,” she said timidly.

  “Tell me, Gyong-ho, do you have a portrait of the Great Leader hanging in your apartment?”

  “Yes, we do! I love it very much.” She was relieved to have something else to think about.

  “I’m sure you do. You are a very good little girl. Tell me, where is the portrait now? Is it tucked away on a shelf somewhere?”

  “No. It is on the wall.”

  “I see. Well, is it on a wall with other pictures, or is it on its own wall?”

  “It is on the wall next to the picture of the Dear Leader. They are the only pictures we have hanging in our apartment.”

  “Well, that’s very good, indeed. So who takes care of the portraits of the Great Leader and the Dear Leader? Do your parents take care of them?”

  “No.”

  “No? Are the portraits all dusty, then? Is the glass spotted?”

  “Oh no, definitely not! My grandmother cares very much for the portraits. She maintains them perfectly.”

  “Your grandmother must be a very good citizen.”

  “Yes, she is!”

  “Do your parents ever bow to the portrait of the Great Leader?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Only sometimes? Not every time they walk in the door?”

  “Well, most of the times when they come in the door. Sometimes they are so tired that they just fall on their sleeping mats and go to sleep.”

  “Oh, I see.” Comrade Uncle Kim scribbled something on his notepad.

  5

  AT THE END OF the day, a whistle blew and the seamstresses began to tidy their workstations. At each station there was a pile of trousers to be inspected and tallied, the resulting numbers to be graphed and recorded in a file. Each day’s number was added into the mysterious equation that determined the quality of a worker’s citizenship. The consequences for being deemed unworthy were dire—people disappeared and no questions were asked. Occasionally falling short of a quota was not the worst possible offense—they were often set unrealistically high; but consistently falling short of them could be seen as unpatriotic. That is why the whist
le at the end of the day brought on a wave of tension for the seamstresses.

  “Hey, Gi!” Il-sun whispered urgently.

  Gi raised her eyebrows in Il-sun’s direction.

  “Gi, I’m five short!” There was rising panic in her voice. Being short by five pairs of trousers would not go unnoticed. “How did you do?”

  Gi knew that the question was really a plea for help. She felt tempted to ignore her and let her suffer the consequences of her own irresponsibility. She also knew that she could never be so heartless.

  “I’m three over.”

  “Could you . . . ?”

  “Here,” said Gyong-ho, scowling as she handed four pairs of trousers to her while the foreman was looking the other way. “Now we’re both only short by one.”

  “Thank you, Gi. I owe you one.”

  “Actually, you owe me thirty-two.”

  “Why do you have to be so damned precise?”

  The foreman shuffled painfully over and tallied Gi’s and Il-sun’s trousers. Exactly five of the lines on his disapproving face were angry-looking scars. One scar began above his left eye and continued below it, though leaving his eyeball intact—a fortunate near miss. Did he feel lucky to still have his eye, or just embittered to have the scar? Gi guessed that it was probably the latter.

  “You are both under the quota by one.” His raspy voice sounded painful, and Gi unconsciously touched her own throat in sympathy. “I am very disappointed in you, especially, Comrade Song.” Gi flinched at her name. “I would think that you of everyone would want to make a good impression. Do better tomorrow.”

  “Yes, comrade foreman. I will do better tomorrow, sir.”

  The foreman walked on to the next station, but his powerful body odor weighed the air down like a damp blanket around them. With heads down and breath held, the girls made their way to the workroom door.

  After work, the seamstresses attended “voluntary” continuing education classes. The meetings were not considered strictly mandatory, but it was well known that not going would invite inquiry, which would lead to trouble. Classes were held in the cafeteria and, as with most events, began with a patriotic song. Il-sun and Gi took seats near the back of the room. At the front stood a smartly dressed woman in her early thirties, in a white blouse and ankle-length beige skirt with matching dress shoes and nude stockings. She was considered a loyal expert seamstress and she taught at the White Butterfly garment factory once every week. She always spoke through a forced smile, and Il-sun admitted to Gi that she would have been happy to slap it off with a large, dead fish.

  The evening’s lecture began with a parable about the Dear Leader’s honorable mother, Kim Jong-suk. Kim Jong-suk was an inspirational revolutionary woman whose self-sacrifice and purity of spirit any good Chosun woman should do her best to emulate. As a guerrilla fighter, Kim Jong-suk supported her husband, the Great Leader Kim Il-sung, tirelessly, even in the frigid mountain winters of their remote revolutionary camp. She raised their son, the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, while they were cold and hungry, with the juche ideal as her guiding light. Juche was the cornerstone on which the great Chosun nation was founded. It was a philosophy of self-sufficiency and cultural superiority—the ideal socialism.

  During the anti-imperialist war that divided the Korean peninsula in half, depriving their southern neighbors of the utopia that was developing in the north, the honorable guerrillas, fighting under the flawless leadership of Kim Il-sung, captured an imperialist Yankee soldier. At the last moment, as he was about to be executed, the great mother of the country stopped the firing squad because she could see in the Yankee’s eyes that he could yet be educated in the ways of juche. She took the prisoner in and, with a minimum of language between them, was able to convey the absolute superiority of the juche ideal over any other way of life. The soldier begged forgiveness for his imperialist ways, which Kim Il-sung saw fit to grant. The soldier was later allowed to serve in the war against the Americans, who had been his own people, in which he fought savagely and passionately. The soldier was killed in battle, and his last words were, “Long live juche! Long live the Great Leader Kim Il-sung!”

  They had heard the story before. The girls were bored.

  “The way she always smiles like that drives me crazy,” Il-sun whispered into Gi’s ear.

  “I have a theory about that,” replied Gyong-ho.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. I think that she pulls her pantyhose on so high that they force the corners of her mouth to rise.”

  Il-sun chortled loudly at the image this created, and heads turned toward the commotion. She loved Gi’s unusual sense of humor. The presenter continued with her oratory unfazed, as if nothing had happened.

  Embarrassed by her outburst and surprised that the teacher kept talking in spite of it, Il-sun was struck with an uncontrollable urge to giggle. For some reason, though she did not know why, it was all unbearably funny: the lecturing seamstress, her story, the factory, all the women in their silly uniforms. The strain of trying to hold in a giant wave of laughter was causing her belly to hurt, which made her want to laugh all the more. Unable to control herself, she snickered through her nose, louder with every effort she made to quiet it.

  The presenter suddenly stopped speaking, and the whole room turned toward the two girls.

  “Is something funny?” asked the presenter, still holding her frozen smile.

  Gi was horrified. It was bad enough to disrespect the presenter’s authority, but to disrespect the important and honorable history of the Dear Leader could have serious consequences. The blood drained from her face and she shifted away from Il-sun in an effort to escape the fallout of guilt by association.

  “I’m sorry . . . It’s just . . . I can’t explain . . . ,” Il-sun said, trying to pull herself together; but looking again at the presenter’s smile and remembering Gi’s comment, the wave broke through and she began laughing in earnest.

  A nervous tension filled the room. No one knew how the presenter would respond to such an insolent outburst. There was no punishment that was beyond her reach. It could be as light as a mild rebuke; or, if she were wanting to make an example, could be as heavy as—

  It was better not to think about that.

  To Gi’s relief—she was becoming increasingly afraid of the outcome—the forced smile on the presenter’s face softened and her eyes relaxed. She even began to chuckle.

  “Young lady, your laughter is contagious,” she said. “I don’t see enough of that.”

  Obediently, as if on cue, the other seamstresses started laughing. It came timidly and forced, but then picked up speed, like a boulder rolling down the side of a mountain. Faces turned red and tears glistened on cheeks. It seemed strange to Gi that everyone laughed, and yet nobody knew why. Perhaps it was only relief.

  After a while the laughter began to die down, but some of the women forced their laughter to continue in spite of the natural lull, as if to show off their dedication. As they did this, more and more women forced their laughter, in a chain reaction, so that what was a room filled with hearty laughter at nothing in particular was now a room of forced and compulsory laughter upheld for self-preservation. Everyone was looking around the room, wanting to be neither the first nor the last one to stop. No one wanted to take that chance.

  In an attempt to end the cycle, an elderly seamstress stood up and walked to the framed photograph of the Dear Leader on the wall. She kneeled and called out to the picture in gratitude. Then another woman did the same. Then another. Only after prostrating oneself to the Dear Leader was it truly safe to stop laughing. Now that it had started, it would not stop until every person in the room had gone to the photo of the Dear Leader. Not even the presenter could interrupt a person’s display of devotion without fear of punishment. Once it had started, anyone not seen doing it would be considered suspicious. People had disappeared for as much.

  “This is going to be a long night,” Il-sun said to Gi.

  6

 
; THE ORPHANAGE MISTRESS OPENED the box slowly—restraint was a quality she prized in herself. It was just an ordinary box, like so many others she had seen. She could guess at its contents: several kilos of rice, some kind of dry beans, perhaps a few onions, canned vegetables if she was lucky, maybe some aging root vegetables, and possibly a little bit of soap. Whatever it was would be enough to keep them all from starving. It was the extra thing in the box, the more personal inclusion, whether or not it was even there, that caused her chest to pound. She scolded herself: The food is more important. For the girls.

  She removed bags of rice and beans from the box and set them on the counter. She was pleased to find several large carrots, only slightly wilted, and two whole cabbages with more green leaves than brown. There were about a dozen tin cans, all with the labels torn off, presumably to hide their foreign origin. If anyone bothered inspecting the cans closely, they could see that they were not manufactured in Chosun; but nobody would be checking them. There was no way to know what was inside the cans until she opened them, but that hardly mattered. There was a small stack of forged ration coupons, neatly banded together. She would have to check them against her legitimate ones to see if she could risk using them, but on first glance they looked passable. For a moment her breath faltered. The box was empty. She brought her hand to her cheek in an unconscious gesture to make sure her face was still there, and not a plate of glass. It was only a small comfort when her fingertips met warm flesh.

  Then she saw it. It would have been easy to miss the flat package, wrapped in plain brown paper the same color as the box. She reached in and gingerly lifted it out, relishing all its properties of weight, texture, and color. She brought it to her nose and mouth and inhaled. It smelled vaguely like onions and cardboard, but in her mind it was both sweeter and earthier—a little bit like tree bark, leather, fresh sweat, and ground spices. It was the same aroma still clinging to the air around her from the brief visitor who had come and gone only moments before, delivering the box. Bringing her a gift. She let the package drag at her bottom lip as she lowered it from her face.