The Starlet and the Spy Read online

  The two men give Joseph looks, and he sits me down again, guiding me by my shoulders. “Alice, do you know about radio propaganda? Usually women fluent in the language of the enemy broadcast propaganda to the other side during war. For example, during World War II, a Japanese woman known as the ‘Tokyo Rose’ was on Radio Tokyo and was a big hit among American soldiers. The North also broadcast during the Korean War to demoralize American soldiers, and they had an American woman do it. People called her ‘Seoul Crybaby,’ because she read the list of American casualties in a weepy voice. Maybe she really was crying. It’s likely she was forced to do these broadcasts. We didn’t know who she was at the time. She somehow sounded both young and old. After the war, we discovered she was a church official and an active missionary in her late thirties. She turned out to be a member of a wealthy East Coast family that had searched for her in vain. We didn’t know where she was and she didn’t show up during the exchange of POWs, but finally we have located her. She’s in Pyongyang. We are making plans to bring her here. But we have a problem with the person who is supposed to help her escape. You know Lim Pok-hun, don’t you?”

  Seoul Crybaby—what a lovable and pathetic nickname. Seoul is teeming with countless babies who are so sick from hunger and loss that they are no longer able to shed tears.

  “What about him?” I ask.

  The men study my reaction intently.

  Lim takes up very little space in my memory, but he emits a more powerful force than anyone else. I can’t believe Lim is the reason Joseph has come back to see me. What an awful bond Lim and I share. The dark, skinny Communist spy with a snake’s face and short legs was unlucky enough to be recognized by me on the Ocean Odyssey and was caught.

  “Wasn’t he arrested?”

  “No, he escaped as soon as he got to Koje Island and went back north,” one of the agents says. “You can’t help but be impressed. He stole our field truck and drove over the mountains of Kangwon Province.”

  Going back north alone as a guerrilla—it sounds like something he would do. “What does he have to do with Seoul Crybaby?”

  The agents study me warily. “Lim’s position in the North became precarious because of his arrest on the ship. He was suspected of being an American spy. So he approached an informant we are working with and proposed that he bring Seoul Crybaby here. In return he demanded safe repatriation to another country and a huge sum of money. But now he’s missed several meetings and we can’t get in touch with our informant. And nobody knows what Lim looks like.”

  I feel Joseph glancing at me. “How exactly am I supposed to help you?”

  “We need you to describe him to us.”

  I manage to stifle my laughter. Unbelievable. American spies are supposed to be the best of the best, but sometimes they are pathetically buffoonish—it reminds me of what I heard about brave young Korean country boys, selected from refugee camps and sent to a secret training site run by Americans in Saipan. They were dispatched north for a poorly planned mission and never came back. Perhaps they are still hiding in an underground tunnel in Hamgyong Province awaiting orders, hunting wild rabbits to survive. “I don’t remember.”

  They don’t believe me. One of the agents points to the pen and paper on the table. “Can you draw his face?”

  The other agent steps forward, his expression growing dangerous.

  I look at Joseph, who remains stone-faced. I have no friends here. I begin babbling nervously. “He was a little taller than me, maybe by a couple of inches. He had a sharp nose—like a pen nib. His lips were thin and bluish and—oh, he had a small scar under one eye.”

  The agent smiles and pushes the paper toward me. “There you go. Just draw what you remember.”

  Everyone looks at me expectantly, and I have the impression that the pen and paper are equally expectant. I sit down, take the pen, and then boldly draw big diagonal lines on the white paper.

  The agents gape at me. Joseph stands up and gives them a look—they’re now getting irritated—and sends them out. It’s just Joseph and me in the room again. Now that I know what he wants I’m in the position of power. Whether in a game or in love, the one who reveals what he wants always loses. The space between us fills with hostility—all coming from me. I glare at him. He didn’t come here to see me. He’s here to save some other woman. That idol of the American military is more important to him than me. I now recognize my true emotion toward Joseph: sorrow.

  “Alice? Are you all right?”

  Tears course down my cheeks. I feel free and unburdened. “I don’t draw anymore,” I say in Korean.

  “You don’t have to. We shouldn’t have asked you to.”

  “You knew war was coming. I heard that planes were waiting at the Kimpo Air Base to evacuate Americans. Now we know how you were all cowards. You told us that war wasn’t possible, while all the time you were preparing to evacuate and mobilize emergency communications. I mean, I guess Korean politicians and the rich were worse. They hid their yachts off the coast of Pusan and held drunken parties before fleeing to Japan. Only the nameless soldiers and ordinary Koreans were caught in the middle.” I am enraged. “I hated you when I discovered who you really were. I thought you could have saved me if you really wanted to. But then I realized it didn’t matter. You followed your fate, I followed mine, and Min-hwan followed his. None of it matters. In the end, the only difference is who ends up dead first.”

  Min-hwan’s name flies out of my mouth, ambushing him. We’re both startled. We glance at each other furtively, our shared taboo binding us together.

  “Now I know why he didn’t like you,” I continue. “He knew this was who you are. He knew you would interfere with us and run away like a coward.”

  Joseph stiffens. Everyone has at least one person they have wronged, whose name makes them quake. For both of us it’s our romantic Communist—my lover, his friend.

  “Did you hear what happened to him?” I ask bitterly. “He vanished. Just like you. I don’t know how or when he was abducted by the North, but I heard he was one of the people they purged last year. For being an American imperialist spy.”

  I wipe my tears hastily. I don’t want to cry. Complacent tears can’t wash away past mistakes.

  “He—” Joseph swallows the rest of his words. “I’m sorry,” he says instead. “Not a day has gone by that I didn’t think about you. I thought you were safe, especially since your uncle worked for the government. When I came back to Seoul that September after UN forces reclaimed the city, I found everything was bombed. I went all the way north to Pyongyang and saw horrible things. The People’s Army left piles of corpses in every air-raid shelter before retreating. The only thing we took for ourselves were vodka bottles left behind in the Soviet embassy. I kept searching for you, but all I heard was that you were probably dead. But I knew you would survive somehow.”

  Joseph looks at me sympathetically, benevolently, forgetting who he is. But a gaze, no matter how kind and warm, can’t save someone.

  “Alice—what happened to you?”

  That’s a really good question, one that I might be asking myself for the rest of my life. Even if I find the answer, I might never cease asking myself. “I don’t know. I don’t remember all of it. You both disappeared and the People’s Army rolled in on Soviet tanks. People ran out into the streets, waving the North Korean flag. I went out to Chongno and saw portraits of Kim Il Sung and Stalin draped on Hwasin department store. It was even worse at the end of the summer. UN forces bombed the city, and we heard rumors that they had successfully landed in Inchon and were advancing. I don’t remember much after that. I recall being shackled to other people and walking north. They shot you on the spot if you stumbled or couldn’t walk straight, so I walked and walked until my feet started bleeding. And then—then I was in a POW camp in Huichon. People called me the crazy girl with gray hair.”

  I’m struggling to catch my breath as the memories flow over me, and Joseph looks alarmed as I cover my face with my han
ds. I’m like an actress in a tragedy, playing a character created by a famous playwright. The person I’m talking about isn’t really me, but an insane woman I am embodying. I can’t be myself. That’s the only way I can live with myself. I can only exist if I act out all of my truths along with all of the falsehoods.

  IT’S TRUE THAT SOME OF MY MEMORIES ARE FUZZY. I DON’T remember anything from that autumn. A B-29 bombed my brain and my soul, rendering them into a heap of ash. It was as if napalm rained down one day and incinerated my mind. I kept falling and crying and losing consciousness; my eyes were open but I couldn’t see anything. A nun abducted alongside me kept pulling me up and nudging me along. I came to and I was in a prison. I opened my eyes and I was walking. I looked up and I was on a train. Someone whispered that we might be sent to Manchuria with the POWs, but I ended up at a camp with American POWs in Huichon. I drooled and said nonsensical things. I was tasked with meal preparation and odd jobs. There was no kitchen in that sty, so women in a nearby village cooked at home and brought the food into the camp. I sat in the mud and collected kindling, forgetting I was alive. I didn’t dare dream I would survive.

  One day, I stuck my hands in the furnace, into flames that looked like orange flowers. The woman next to me pulled my hands out in horror. She brought medicinal herbs every day and tended to my burns. As I wandered around, doing my chores, I discovered that she was acting strangely; she would slip something to the American soldiers as she doled out their meals. One day I dashed after her, dove into her skirts, and found small bits of cloth fastened to her undergarments with a pin, designed to slip out easily. The strips were made of thin fabric and printed with instructions to write one’s name in order to prepare for repatriation. They were signed by the commander of the UN forces. She clapped her hand over my mouth in alarm and whispered to me that she had been won over by agents working for the South and was on a secret mission to obtain a list of American POWs to prepare for armistice negotiations and POW exchanges. Even in my delusional state I understood that this could be my opportunity to get out of the camp. I asked her to let me help. She told a South Korean agent about me, and beginning the next day I helped her gather names. The soldiers didn’t trust me at first when I cautiously approached them, but gradually they began to cooperate. Despite the danger, they wrote down their names. Many were hard to read; some were written with a broken pencil, while others were scribbled crookedly, as if under a blanket. Over the course of a month we collected a hundred names. If we had been caught we would have been tortured and shot.

  In December we finally received word. I snuck onto a munitions truck in the middle of the night and rolled off as we rumbled along the mountain roads. When I found my way to the designated village, a southern agent disguised in a People’s Army uniform was waiting for me with my coconspirator and her family. Her husband was suffering from tuberculosis; it looked hopeless for him. Their young granddaughter had lost her parents in a recent bombing, and she stood there, holding her grandmother’s hand. That was Chong-nim. The agent hid us in a military truck and drove us to Hamhung, a journey that was fraught with danger. Not long after we arrived, the woman’s husband coughed blood into his blanket and lost consciousness. Realizing they couldn’t go on, she asked me tearfully to take care of Chong-nim. Of course I agreed. She had saved me from the darkest corner of the universe and I would never forget her—although I knew we would never see each other again in this lifetime.

  The agent put the child and me on a train to Hungnam. We left at two in the morning and arrived at Hungnam Port three hours later. Already there were a hundred thousand screaming refugees fighting for a place on the boats. US forces were preparing to pull out as the Chinese army pushed south, and we had all heard the rumor that America was going to detonate a nuclear bomb over Hungnam. The desperate clamor of the refugees shook the sky and the earth and the ocean. The dark hair of all those people, stretching to the horizon, made my heart pound. I didn’t have the will or the confidence to shove through them; my knees gave way and I sank to the ground. Everything began to grow faint. I was more afraid of the ferocious will of the masses than I was of the bombers flying above our heads. I couldn’t breathe. My eyes rolled up into my skull. Chong-nim dribbled water from our canteen into my mouth and massaged my frozen legs with her tiny hands, blowing on them, trying to warm me up.

  The First Division of the US Navy had already left Hungnam and was on its way to Pusan. When the transport ships to evacuate the military began arriving, the terror of the refugees on the wharf surged. People didn’t sleep or eat as they waited anxiously for the soldiers to board the ships. Cattle yoked to carts were bellowing, infants were wailing, and a weeping father was using his few words of English to show American soldiers his Bible as proof that he was not a Communist, begging them to take his family along. Finally, civilians were allowed to board. People shoved and leaped into the cold water to get on the ships. A couple holding hands were split apart by the crowd; siblings who lost their parents wailed in terror; and an old man who had given up trying to get on board was waving to his son on the deck, exchanging final goodbyes. People threw their precious belongings into the water to reduce the weight of the ship. Sewing machines, vanities, violins, puppies, and ceramic vases floated in the water.

  Nobody was going to help us; we were just a crazy woman and a tiny girl. The ships were so crammed with people that it was a miracle they were still afloat. We were nearly trampled to death as we tried to get in a line. We could feel the Chinese army advancing on us. The US Navy planes that had taken off from the aircraft carriers dropped bombs; it was as if they were planning to leave all their shells in Hungnam. From time to time I felt silence, as if my ears were stunned by the explosions and had fallen off my head. The smell of the burning city paralyzed me. Chong-nim gripped on to my hand, trying her best not to cry. Her small hand was drenched, as if she were crying through her palms. I looked around, befuddled, and saw some American soldiers stoking a fire as they waited to get on a ship. They were burning a heaping mound of food and munitions that wouldn’t fit on board. I dragged Chong-nim over.

  “Help us, she has to live,” I babbled in English. “This girl has to live.”

  They stared at me before opening a can of tomato soup and giving it to us. “Calm down,” they said.

  “I worked in the American military government,” I went on. “I have American friends.”

  A redheaded soldier listened sympathetically before heaving Chong-nim on his back. “Follow me,” he said.

  A new cargo ship had entered the wharf and was being moored. People were swarming toward it, but our new friend took a different route and ran toward the middle of the ship. He shouted up at the men on deck and asked them to let us on. They quickly let down a net, and the soldier climbed it like a ladder, Chong-nim on his back and pulling me along. My legs quaked and my palms burned, but I climbed as if my life depended on it. Once we got onto the deck, the soldier rummaged in his pockets and took out a Hershey’s bar. He handed it to us and scrambled back down the net. I called out my thanks and asked his name. He just smiled and said, “Bon voyage.” He saluted and went off.

  That ship was the Ocean Odyssey. The crew ran around, talking in worried tones. The ship’s maximum capacity was sixty people and there were no weapons on board. A sailor gestured for us to go down the ramp to the cargo bay. In English, I desperately told him that we needed fresh air because of illness. He let us stay and went toward the gangway. Soon people began swarming onto the ship. The crew members hid their concerns and sent the refugees down to the cargo bays. Even though they couldn’t communicate, everyone followed the crew’s orders. The ship was filled from the bottom, from the fifth to the fourth to the third to the second levels. People found spots in the narrow passageways. Only the deck was left, but there were still so many people on the gangway. I didn’t think the ship would ever leave. I would end up as a pile of ash, along with the supplies burning on the beach.

  But the captain and
the crew continued to load people onto the ship with a sense of mission, as if they were Noah’s descendants. A ship that wasn’t supposed to carry even a hundred passengers ended up filled with thousands. It took all day just to get everyone on board. Night fell. Chong-nim and I watched as bombers embroidered the sky, and fire and smoke enveloped the dying city. Families with bundles dangling from them were on the deck with us, quietly praying for survival. Hope propelled the ship forward. The Ocean Odyssey left for Pusan, escorted by the Third Division of the US Navy, which guarded Hungnam to the end. I knew it was very possible that we would be blasted by one of the mines blanketing the waters of Hungnam.

  Perhaps something worse would have happened had I not spotted Lim Pok-hun on the deck among the laborers. I’d spoken to the North Korean agent only once in Seoul, when he approached me at the Art Association to comment on my drawings of Stalin. But I knew that face. I remembered his quiet, meticulous words, and the way they had sent a shiver down my spine. There had been rumors that North Korean spies were disguised as civilians and were moving among the refugees, plotting attacks, and so male refugees were under constant scrutiny. Yet Lim had somehow made it onto the ship. I grabbed a crew member as he passed by and whispered, “That man over there, he isn’t a civilian.” The crew quickly grabbed him and dragged him to the captain’s cabin. I had to go with them to give them my statement. Our eyes met for a moment and he revealed his white teeth and smiled. He eventually gave up resisting when his various IDs were discovered hidden in his clothes. He was tied up and watched closely in the cabin for the rest of the journey.

  The wind grew stronger as we entered the East Sea; fear and hunger reached a peak. Sailors gave out water and cans of food and even the gum from their pockets, but none of it was enough to fill all of those bellies. People who ended up sitting down weren’t able to stand back up because of the crowd; they had to soil themselves where they sat. Many hadn’t had a sip of water in three days. Death danced with wide-open jaws just beyond the ship.