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sympathetic, but unhelpful. She explained that only students with better
songbun
could secure placement in performing arts schools.
    Mi-ran didn’t have any particular artistic or athletic talent like her older sisters, but she was a good student and she was beautiful. When she was fifteen years old, her school was visited by a team of serious-looking men and women in somber suits. These were the
okwa
, members of the fifth division of the Central Workers’ Party, recruiters who scoured the country looking for young women to serve on the personal staff of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. If selected, the girls would be sent off to a military-style training camp, before being assigned to one of the leadership’s many residences around the country. Once accepted, they would not be permitted to visit their homes, but their families would be compensated with expensive gifts. It wasn’t exactly clear what jobs these girls did. Some were said to be secretaries, maids, and entertainers; others were rumored to be concubines. Mi-ran had heard all about this from a friend whose cousin had been one of those chosen.
    “You know, Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung, they’re just men, like any others,” Mi-ran’s friend whispered to her. Mi-ran nodded knowingly, embarrassed to admit she was utterly mystified. North Korean girls her age didn’t know what a concubine was, only that whatever you might do to serve the leadership would be a tremendous honor. Only the smartest and prettiest girls would be selected.
    When the recruiters walked into the classroom, the students sat upright at their desks and waited quietly. The girls sat two to a desk,in long rows. Mi-ran wore her middle school uniform. On her feet were canvas exercise shoes. The recruiters wove in between the rows of desks, pausing from time to time to take a closer look. They slowed down when they came to Mi-ran’s desk.
    “You, stand up,” one of the recruiters commanded. They beckoned her to follow them to the teachers’ lounge. When she got there, four other girls were waiting. They looked over her files, measured her. At five foot three, Mi-ran was one of the tallest girls in the class. They peppered her with questions: How were her grades? What was her favorite subject? Was she healthy? Did anything hurt? She answered their questions calmly and, she thought, correctly.
    That was the last she heard of them. Not that she really wanted to be taken away from her family, but rejection always stung.
    By then, the children had come to realize that their family background was the problem. They began to suspect that their father had come from the other side of the border, because he had no relatives in the North, but under what circumstances? They assumed he must have been a committed Communist who had heroically run away to enlist with Kim Il-sung’s troops. Mi-ran’s brother finally forced the truth to the surface. An intense young man with permanently furrowed brows, Sok-ju had spent months cramming for an exam to win admission to the teachers’ college. He knew every answer perfectly. When he was told he had failed, he angrily confronted the judges to demand an explanation.
    The truth was devastating. The children had been thoroughly inculcated in the North Korean version of history. The Americans were the incarnation of evil and the South Koreans their pathetic lackeys. They’d studied photographs of their country after it had been pulverized by U.S. bombs. They’d read about how sneering American and South Korean soldiers drove their bayonets into the bodies of innocent civilians. Their textbooks at school were full of stories of people burned, crushed, stabbed, shot, and poisoned by the enemy. To learn that their own father was a South Korean who had fought with the Yankees was too much to bear. Sok-ju got drunk for the first time in his life. He ran away from home. He stayed at a friend’s house for two weeks until the friend convinced him he had to return.
    “He’s