Hyejin Kim - Jia - A Novel of North Korea

She had big, flat, flesh-colored bandages on both eyebrows. I shot a sidelong glance at them, and she turned toward me, thrusting her face close to mine.

“I can take these off today,” she said. She pointed to her right eyebrow with her index finger.

“What happened to your eyebrows? Were you hurt?” I asked, leaning away from her face, which had come too near to mine.

She sat up and opened her small black bag. “No. I had plastic surgery. Actually, I got my eyebrows tattooed once several years ago, because drawing eyebrows on every day was too much of a hassle. They looked good at first, but then they began to spread out, like hairy bugs. So gross! I couldn’t stand them anymore. So, a week ago, a plastic surgeon cut the fleshiness under my eyebrows a little bit. Today I can take these bandages off. Isn’t that fast? The technology for cosmetic surgery is getting better. If you want to use the hospital, let me know. It’s so cheap and so professional. But there is a long wait, even for my simple surgery; I waited for two months.”

I listened to her blankly. She looked a little bit older than the other women there, owing mainly to her high, protruding cheekbones. She smiled and unpeeled part of the bandage on the right eyebrow to show me. “See! It looks fine. Even the wrinkles above my eyes are gone after cutting out that useless flesh. I couldn’t wait a week, I was always checking. It looks even better than yesterday.”

I blinked. There was really nothing in the place where her eyebrow should have been. Instead, I saw a scar stitched with a thread. It scared me, but I said, “Yes. It looks fine. But it would be strange not to have eyebrows.”

She replaced the bandage and looked at herself in the small mirror of her compact. “It’s okay. I’ll tattoo them on again. But a different shape than I had before. I was sick of those.” She picked up a magazine and murmured, “I’m searching for suitable eyebrows. Apparently, crescent eyebrows are in style right now.”

Soon, I noticed that every woman’s face around the room looked artificial. They spent so much time looking at themselves in their mirrors. Some of the women spoke Korean, and I could tell from their accents that they were from North Korea. I knew they’d noticed mine too, though they gave no sign. Others spoke Chinese and Korean together. Listening in on snippets of their conversations, I tried to figure out if my suspicions were true.

They slept during the day and worked every night, always wearing strong fragrances and showy makeup and dresses. It wasn’t hard to guess what my new job was to be. “Please be seated.”

When I entered the smoky office, the woman from the hill gestured to me to sit on a glossy leather sofa covered with a tiger skin. She was peering at me from behind a huge desk that made her small figure look somewhat absurd. I remained standing.

She got straight to the point. “So. What did you do over there?”

I stared at her. “I want to go back. You kidnapped me and shut me up here. I have a child I have to take care ofhe’s sick with a disease. As a woman, you must understand. Please, let me go.”

Her close-set eyes squinted at me for a moment, and she nervously stubbed out her thin brown cigarette in the transparent ashtray on the desk. “I know nothing about it, and I don’t care! I just heard about you from my brothers and bought you at a high price for my karaoke bar. We paid your friend on the hill. You saw it, too. Now you have to work to earn back what we paid for you.”

That day, she wore spectacles with transparent purple lenses instead of sunglasses. Her eyebrows, which started from behind her glasses, were long lines shaped like two round mountains. It seemed that eyebrows were a big deal here.

She told me to call her sajangtiim (boss) and took a sip of a tea from a transparent, round tea thermos. Inside the thermos purple flowers and green leaves danced languidly.

“Anyway, you’re here; you’ll work until you reimburse the price we paid for you, and then you can leave. Isn’t this much better than a cave swarming with bugs? Think about it: you are an illegal vagrant in China. You are not supposed to set foot in this land, but you did. If someone reports you to the police, they’ll come and drag you away within five minutes. We are protecting you. You don’t know how dangerous it is outside. You can’t imagine how runaways like you, especially women, usually end up.” She cupped her chin in one hand and looked up at me. “You’ll understand our kindness someday. The women working here all have good hearts; they’ll be good friends for you. If something makes you uncomfortable, let me know. We’ll do our best to take care of you.”

She took another brown cigarette from a box. Her red and silver lighter spouted a thin flame, and she lit the cigarette with a long draw. “If you really want to get out of here, work hard. That’s the fastest way. You can start after this weekend. I’ll think over what role you can play best.”

I got up to leave. “Remember, right now, you are a debtor,” she said, gravely. “You can’t leave before we’re square. As long as you’re here, your body belongs to me.”

I wasn’t Jia anymore, I was walking money.

The day after our arrival, I went outside with the deep-dimpled woman—I had learned her name was Mija—under the supervision of a man who haughtily informed us that he was going to turn us from country bumpkins into city women. The journey into town was my first glimpse of a Chinese city. The streets were so alive. The only thing I could compare it to was Pyongyang’s World Youth Festival, though much noisier and more chaotic. I couldn’t breathe very well because of the smoke. People and cars mixed together on the road; there were no traffic policemen. Vehicles moved wherever they wanted, and pedestrians rushed fearlessly in front of them, blocking the intersections. I was panic-stricken. The constant honking made me dizzy, and I couldn’t see the sky above the rows of neon signs, big and small, mixing Korean and Chinese characters. Several giant signs featured widely smiling Korean women wearing hanbok.

“This place has everything,” our warden said, beaming. “It has changed so fast. Look at those glittering signsaren’t they pretty? People who want to party come here to spend their money. That’s where you come in. I hope you appreciate how lucky you are.” He stroked Mija’s hips and leered. Seeing this, I gripped her hand tightly and pulled her to my side. She looked at me in surprise and smiled.

Her revelations to me the night before had brought us closer. We both realized that it was in our interest to leave our misunderstandings behind and try to become friends.

The previous night, as I tried to fall asleep, Mija had tucked her arm under her head and lain down, facing me. I looked at her in the darkness with barely concealed contempt; I felt she had aided in my kidnapping.

“I have nothing left,” she said.

The night air beyond the window was filled with laughter and music. Most of the women had gone, leaving behind only the noxious smell of cosmetics and perfume. I felt like vomiting.

“When I sent my baby down the river, my life floated away with her,” Mija said, abjectly.

I turned onto my back and looked at the ceiling. It was much higher than in any of the other rooms I had seen so far. I thought of the cave, with its low ceiling and its stench, which I had learned to ignore after a while; perhaps we can get used to anything. I still felt hostile toward Mija. Truly, I cared more about Sangwon than about some wretch and her dead baby.

Mija turned onto her back as I had and went on. “I don’t know why I said I would go with them.” As she spoke, her voice grew louder, spreading into the whole room. “I felt so empty after I lost her. My baby’s father was called my husband, but he never took care of us. He always flirted with other women. He told me he was starting his own business with another woman, and then they left, and never came back. I wonder if he even remembers our baby’s name.