Hwang Sok-yong - Princess Bari

Hell of Water,

Hell of Earth,

through the sufferings

of eighty-four thousand hells,

all the way to the ends of the Earth

where the sun sets in the western sky.

What new hell awaits you here?

Bitter souls, hungry souls,

souls burdened even in death,

endless and innumerable.

Return to life! Return!

My spirit felt as if it was being sucked down off the branch. It swirled around in the air, circling my bones several times as if being coaxed back into place, and then I was in one piece again. New flesh grew. I couldn’t stop touching my arms and legs and stomach, like a person who’d just recovered from a long illness.

Okay, okay, time for you two to go.

Grandmother gestured to Chilsung and me to go back over the dark river.

Grandma, where are you going?

This world is the liminal zone for those awaiting rebirth. I can’t stay here. I’ll come find you in your dreams.

Grandma, Grandma! Don’t leave me!

Grandmother vanished like a bubble popping. Chilsung and I stood together next to the river. I walked back and forth through the grass, searching for the bridge that was no longer there, when I finally remembered the last remaining peony in my pocket. I took it out and threw it into the river as hard as I could. A five-coloured rainbow appeared and arced over the water. Chilsung ran ahead of me, tail wagging, and we crossed over together. The river was calm; I did not hear any shrieks this time. When I got to the other side and looked behind me, all I saw was blackness. But under my feet, the path forked. Chilsung hung back and waited for me to choose. I thought about how Grandmother had warned me to avoid the blue and yellow paths and follow only the white path. I placed my foot on the white path that glowed like the moon was shining down on it. Only then did Chilsung race ahead of me. When the path ended, and I was standing in front of another dark wall, Chilsung took several steps back, stared at me and slowly wagged his tail. I knew this was goodbye again. I heard his voice inside my head.

No matter where you are, I’ll come find you.

I put my hand out to try to pet him, but he, too, suddenly vanished.

When I arrived in that far-off distant land, I was sixteen years old, and it was autumn.

Our paths split there. I wouldn’t find out until a year later that Xiang had stayed in the house we were taken to on our first night in London. I had no memory at all of how we got there, probably on account of the strange talent I had for separating my spirit from my body. Even the ten days or more that we spent inside a shipping container while the ship sat in the harbour, waiting to clear customs and be unloaded, came to me as nothing more than a vague dream when Xiang told me about it later — after she herself had recovered, of course. She was no longer as talkative as she used to be. She put it to me simply:

“We almost died.”

“How?”

“Not enough air.”

She told me we’d managed to find air by lying flat against the floor of the double-plated container and pressing our mouths to coin-sized holes drilled into the base. I remembered what happened once we were off the boat. We were driven for hours in the middle of the night and dropped off on some London street in front of a tiny warehouse. The men were taken away first.

The following day, Xiang and I were led to a house in a back alley not too far away in Chinatown. We went up a narrow stairway and down a hallway lined with rooms on both sides. The doors opened, and big women with blonde and brown hair peeked out. We were guided all the way down the hallway and into a room with a sofa. A white woman who was so overweight that she huffed and puffed with each breath came into the room and said something in English. The man who’d brought us there told us to strip. The three of us — Xiang, the woman who’d been on the boat with us, and I — hesitated, then slowly began to take off our clothes. The man cursed and yelled at us to move faster. I covered my chest with my arms and hunched over. The fat woman yanked my arms open and regarded my flat chest for a moment before sniggering at me. Xiang and the other woman stayed behind while I was taken alone to another location.

They took me to a small alley behind a street lined with Chinese restaurants. Waiting for us at the back door of a place called Shanghai Chinese Restaurant was Uncle Lou, the head chef. He took one look at me and shooed me inside. He called out someone’s name and told her to take me upstairs and get me showered and changed.

For the first couple of weeks I didn’t speak to anyone else who lived there. I ate all my meals alone in the prep room at the back of the kitchen. When the doors were locked at one a.m. and everyone else had gone home for the night, I was left behind to clean the kitchen and the front of the restaurant on my own. It usually took me until well after two a.m. to finish. Then I would cover the prep table in the back with a plastic sheet and sleep on top of it with only a single blanket.

Those were unbearable days. I never got more than a few hours of sleep all night, and I was on my feet working all day. My job in the prep room was to clean and chop the vegetables and wash and scrub the dirty dishes that never ever stopped coming. I would scrape off the leftover food, scrub the plates and bowls with dish soap and stack them neatly in the dryer, only to find more endless stacks making their way in. And when lunchtime ended, I had to clean the entire place front and back again, and get it ready for the dinner rush.

It was several months before I could manage simple conversations with the young employees who worked in the front, and finally saw the face of the man who had purchased me from the snakeheads.

The restaurant was closed for three days at Christmas when Uncle Lou showed up unexpectedly. He told me he was meeting someone there. He handed me a sandwich that had been pressed flat and grilled, and asked for the first time where I was from. I told him I was an ethnic Korean from China. Most of the people who worked there were from southern China, so as long as I said I was from the northeast, my accent wouldn’t arouse any suspicion. Lou told me he had come to London illegally from Hong Kong on his own over twenty years earlier. He’d stowed away on a ship like the rest of us. Then he let out a long sigh and shook his head.

“I could never do that again. Took me eleven years just to get a residence card.”

He asked about my smuggling debts. I had no idea how much had been paid before I left China, or how much still had to be paid.

“What kind of work did you do in China?”

“Foot massage. But I didn’t have a licence for it.”

“That licence would be useless to you here anyway.”

Uncle Lou told me there were others in the neighbourhood who employed people like me, people working to pay off their smuggling debts. He also said that the boss liked me. Based on what he’d seen of other people my age, my zest for life meant I’d have my debts paid off within a year or two of hard work.

“If I were you,” he added, “I’d find work at a foot massage shop. With tips, you’d be making a lot more per week.”

I shrank into myself and muttered in a small voice: “I don’t know if I’m allowed to change jobs as I please.”

“No, of course you’re not.” He looked determined. “As the boss is giving your wages directly to your creditors.”

That year, there were non-stop fireworks and firecrackers for a week all around London on account of the twentieth century coming to an end. Chinatown was relatively quiet, as everyone there observed Lunar New Year, but the restaurant was even busier than before with tourists and other out-of-town visitors. The quiet days returned after the first of January, and Uncle Lou started dropping by the prep room where I worked to have a smoke.