Travail d'invention: "The Escape"

Essay: The escape

I grew up in Kim Jung Suk, a city named after the Kim Il-Sung’s wife they were one of the early presidential couple and are still the most important for our people. The city is located on the Yalu River, which runs between China and North Korea. It is the coldest part of North Korea, with temperatures plunging to minus -15 degrees at certain seasons on the year. Even though my origins forged the person I am today, life as a child in a such politically strict is complicated. In fact, we are taught to hate the enemies of the state with a passion, our schools and our textbooks were completely forging this idea of America or other countries as being horrible. We would be shown full images of American executing their civilians, they would only want to show us this imagined horrible image of the world. Sometimes during lunch, we would be asked beat dummies dressed like occidental soldiers, telling us that it is the best ways to defend ourselves against these ‘monsters’. School was just this huge propaganda that would twist our mind in a way that we would see Kim Jung Un as “the great successor” as he is called. As my grandparents would tell me: “Life only gets better if the state helps you. But these days, the state doesn’t help. We’re on our own.” This way of thinking was and still is totally against the state, like many things which makes life here so dull and meaningless. I remember as a young child, having no choice but to watch and choose from a very small selection of movies that all had the same goal: to enhance our vision of how great and wonderful our leader and his ancestors are. I recall hearing about these wonderful Hollywood movies and the colorful Bollywood movies that my friends at school would watch secretly with their family and telling myself how could these people be as horrible as my teachers were trying to make me believe they are. The government was all but a help for the community, I remember during my very young age during the great famine when the economy was collapsing, I was piggybacking on my mother’s back until she suddenly stopped and pushed me into a small alley so that I couldn’t see what was happening. But my inquisitiveness of my younger person was to strong. I found the eager need to look over my mother’s shoulder that was protecting me from the unknown and something that I should have never known. I fact I saw a man being dragged by two officers, because he was proven of being guilty of killing and eating a cow because of starvation. The government mainly these two officers did not seem to be interested in the ‘why’ of his actions they just knew that cows were the property of the government and were not to be killed. They brought him against a wall and pressed heartlessly on the triggers of their riffle, the sound of the ongoing bullets ringed in my head for the following months. The image of this pierced lifeless body stayed in my head during a major part of my childhood, I just couldn’t quite understand how the life of an animal could be more important than the life of human. Although very rough, I learned to accept this style of life I was forced to adopt. However, as time went by, I learned that I was not trapped in this place forever. In fact, after my father’s arrest due to a misunderstanding of orders during a forced military service, my mom made a promise to get her, my sister and I out of this country that she could just not support any more. She paid a smuggler to take me and my sister across the Yalu River into China, she wasn’t able to ask the smuggler to get her out of the country at the same time as us, because he said that once in at the Mongolian border it would be too suspicious if many people looked very alike. But, she promised me that on my nineteenth birthday she would be by my side on country of her dreams Paris. We indeed had fake identities during this escapade, I was given a French name, after a very non-surprising demand from my mother, Jean. We joined a group of people that would be crossing the border and possibly trying, without being caught and surely killed, arriving in Mongolia. We arrived in China without many difficulties, our guide clearly knew what he was doing. Once inside China we didn’t have many difficulties, the road to the Gobi Desert was just very long. Once at the desert we would have to start walking because it would be too dangerous because a car is just too noisy in an open space like a desert. Our guide took us to a tiny town in the middle of the Gobi and thought us how to use a compass and gave us flash lights. He told us that we should only travel by night and stay silent and discreet to avoid any problem. This was the last time we saw the man, I couldn’t understand why a man would risk his life to save some strangers, this way of thinking was new to me I had to get used to it. He left us in the coldness of the falling night with no place to hide we only had this abandon village in the middle of nowhere, and the indication that we had to head North-East. Once the sun completely gone, our bodies started shivering from the cold air, my sister grabbed me in order to have a form of heat. I told her not to and that we were almost there that we were finally going to be free. As the sun rose behind us, casting our shadows across the desert floor, and my sister grabbed my hand as we walked in direction of the now very visible barbed wires that marked the delimitation between China and Mongolia, it was the first time that I could actually figure what freedom looked like, this state of being became a visual image to me joy was the only emotion in my heart at this exact moment. Minutes later, the border fence took shape in the half-light. As we fought ourselves through, the barbs ripped my coat as if they were trying to take me back into China. My sister helped me tear myself loose, and we were free.

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