and the three women-could make arrangements to flee the country. They couldn’t obtain a passport-those were husbanded carefully by Pak Chung-hee’s military regime-but she could obtain a fishing boat.
I tried to talk her out of it.
She took me by the hand and stared into my eyes.
“My mother was an activist for labor unions,” she said. “So was my father. In the eyes of the people running South Korea at that time, joining a union was the same as being a Communist. The more well known my father became, the more danger he was in. He was assassinated by the Syngman Rhee regime. The leaders of all unions and the leaders of the Workers’ Party, the ones who survived, fled north. But they never forgot me. A North Korean agent operating here in the south contacted the Buddhist nuns and gave them enough money to send me to school. It was because of him that I was able to become a doctor. It was because of him that I am now able to help my people. And it is to him, and the Communist Workers’ Party of the north, that I owe my allegiance”
“But you can’t go up there,” I said, tightening my grip on her hands.
“My ancestors are in North Korea,” she told me. “I’m going to take the photograph of my mother and return to our home village of Simsok-ni. There I can pray at our ancestral burial mounds.”
“But the North Koreans will arrest you,” I said. “In their minds, you’ve been tainted by living down here. The commissars will throw you in a prison camp.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. They need doctors. Anyway if I stay here, I spend the rest of my life in the monkey house.”
“I won’t tell anyone. Neither will Ernie.”
“Someday Captain Kim will find out.”
She was right. Captain Kim was a smart man and a good cop. And now that the case had become public, and both the Korean and the U.S. government were demanding justice, Captain Kim was bound to provide it. Eventually. Still, I tried to give Doc Yong some reason to stay.
“South Korean prisons,” I said, “beat the hell out of North Korean prisons.”
She looked at me with that look again, as if to say I wasn’t too smart.
We spent our last night together. I couldn’t sleep. Before dawn I woke her and promised her again that I would tell no one what I knew and that I would do everything to make sure that she was never punished for her crimes.
She patted me on the cheek and told me to go back to sleep.
The next morning, I saw Doctor Yong In-ja and her five compatriots off from a rickety wooden pier on a wharf at Kangnam Island. They were bundled warmly against the cold air and wore rain slickers to keep dry. She squeezed my hand as she climbed down into the skiff. The women unfurled a sail and the two men started heaving at the oars. They pulled away from the pier, confident that in the heavy fog they’d be able to slip past the South Korean coastal patrols and make their way into North Korean waters.
She waved to me one last time. As I waved back, she pointed at her belly, cupping it tenderly with splayed fingers as if embracing something precious. Then she smiled.
I watched helplessly as the smooth complexion of her face was enveloped by the cold morning mist.
