The Target(31)

She was one of the few patrons here, and all the others were westerners.

She ordered a hamburger rare, fries, and a vanilla milk shake.

The waiter looked at her severely as though silently admonishing her for eating this Western garbage. When she showed him her government ID he bowed perfunctorily and hurried away to fill her order.

She had chosen a seat with her back against the wall. She knew where the entrances and exits were. She noted anyone moving in the space, whether it was toward or away from her. She didn’t expect trouble, but she also anticipated that anything could happen at any time.

She ate her meal slowly, chewing her food thoroughly before swallowing. She had endured starvation for well over a decade. That hollow feeling in your belly never left you, even if you had ample food the rest of your life. Her diet at Yodok had consisted of whatever she could find to eat, but mostly corn, cabbage, salt, and rats. At least the rats had given her protein and helped to stave off diseases that had killed many other prisoners. She had become quite adept at catching the rodents. But she liked the taste of the burger better.

Chung-Cha was not fat and never would be. Not so long as she was working. Maybe as an aged woman living somewhere else she would allow herself to grow obese. But she did not dwell on this prospect for long. She doubted she would live long enough to grow old.

She finished her meal and paid her bill and left. She had one place she wanted to go. Something she wanted to see, although she had already seen it before. Everyone in North Korea probably had.

It had been recently moored on the Botong River in Pyongyang to become part of the Fatherland Liberation War Museum. This was so because it was a ship—a truly unique ship. It was the second oldest commissioned ship in the U.S. Navy, after the USS Constitution. And it was the only U.S. naval vessel currently held by a foreign power.

The USS Pueblo had been in North Korean hands since 1968. Pyongyang said it had strayed into North Korean waters. The United States said it had not. The rest of the world used twelve nautical miles out to sea as the demarcation for international waters. However, Pyongyang did not follow what other countries did and claimed a fifty-nautical-mile boundary. The Pueblo was now a museum, a testament to the might and bravery of the homeland and a chilling reminder of the imperialist intentions of the evil America.

Chung-Cha had taken the guided tour, but she did so with a perspective different from other visitors. She had read an uncensored account of the sailors aboard the Pueblo. This was an unheard-of thing in her country, but Chung-Cha’s work often carried her out of North Korea. The sailors had been forced to say and write things that they did not believe, like admitting to spying on North Korea and denouncing their own country. But in a famous photo of some of the seamen, they surreptitiously had been giving the finger to the North Korean cameraman and symbolically to their captors while seemingly just clasping their hands. The North Koreans did not know what a raised middle finger meant and asked the sailors about it. To a man they said it was a Hawaiian symbol of good luck. When Time magazine had run a story exposing the truth of the gesture, the sailors were reportedly severely beaten and tortured even more than they already had been.

When they were released in December 1968, eighty-two of them walked single file across the Bridge of No Return in the DMZ. One sailor had not walked across. He had died in the initial attack on the ship, the only fatality of the incident.

Chung-Cha finished the tour and made her way back to land. She looked back at the ship. She had been told that the Americans would not decommission the ship until it was returned to them.

Well, then it would never be decommissioned, she thought. North Korea had very little. And so they never gave anything back that they had taken. After the Soviets had left and North Korea had its independence it was as though it was this little country against the world. It had no friends. No one who truly understood it, not even the Chinese, whom Chung-Cha considered to be among the wiliest race on earth.

Chung-Cha was not a religious person. She knew no North Koreans who were. There were some Korean Shamanists, others who practiced Cheondoism, some Buddhists, and a relative handful of Christians. Religion was not encouraged since it could be a direct challenge to the country’s leaders. Marx had had it right, she thought: Religion was the people’s opium. Yet Pyongyang had once been known as the Jerusalem of the East because of the Protestant missionaries who had come in the 1800s, with the result that over a hundred churches had been erected on the “Flat Land.” That was no more. It was simply not tolerated.

And to her it did not matter. She did not believe in a benign higher being. She could not. She had suffered too much to think of a heavenly force in the sky that would let such evil walk the earth without lifting a hand to stop it.