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‘Don’t ever watch those things.’
    Over the next few days there was a spate of hangings across the city, and my mother became unnerved. One of the victims was someone she knew – a woman named Baek Kyeong-sul. She was accused of seducing a state bank official in order to steal money, and was sentenced at a people’s trial. My mother was there. These were not actually trials at all – the charges were simply read out and the victim executed on the spot. If the accused were to pass out from terror beforehand, the authorities were meant to adjourn to another day, so the victim was kept from knowing what was happening until the last moment.
    It was near the start of the rainy season and the skies over Anju had been rumbling with thunder all morning, which further set my mother’s nerves on edge. She was pregnant with Min-ho, and not feeling herself.
    The woman emerged from the back of a police van and found herself facing eight judges seated behind a table set up in a public square, which was surrounded by a cordon of police and a large silent crowd. Her hands were bound behind her back and her face so blackened and puffy from beatings that my mother hardly recognized her. She was disorientated and stared about with an animal terror in her eyes.
    In a hail of static, the charges were read out through a loudspeaker.
    The woman fell to her knees and began to whimper, saying she was deeply sorry and ashamed for what she had done. My mother knew that the woman had a son who was a police officer; the woman must have believed that her son’s connections would save her.
    ‘The sentence is death by hanging.’
    The woman’s head jerked upward in shock. She looked around at the crowd as if appealing to them. Behind the police vans was a tall wooden pole with a noose hanging from it that had been kept hidden from her view. Police grabbed her at once and frogmarched her to the pole. She struggled and kicked out and wailed, but the noose was over her head in an instant. The rope was yanked taut, lifting her up into the air. She writhed and twitched for a few seconds before going limp.
    When my mother returned home, the rain was coming down in lead rods. She had an odd, vacant stare in her eyes. She said she hadn’t realized until then that it was as easy to kill a person as to kill an animal. The corpse had been thrown roughly onto the back of a truck. She’d asked one of the court officials where it was to be buried, and was told it would be taken to a garbage pit and covered in ash.
    That was the detail that unhinged my mother.
    Without an ancestral grave for her descendants to honour, the woman’s spirit would find no rest. It would haunt the living.
    That summer my father’s work had been taking him to military bases all over the country. Without his reassuring presence, my mother was having problems sleeping after the hangings. At breakfast she’d be hollow-eyed, saying she’d seen the ghosts of the victims in nightmares. She couldn’t concentrate on the simplest task. She was badly spooked and wanted to get out of Anju. I’m not sure whether it was after pressure from her, or simply an extraordinary coincidence, but she was immensely relieved when my father announced that we were relocating – to North Korea’s second-largest city, Hamhung.
    We left Anju, but did not go immediately to Hamhung. My parents wanted the new baby to be born in our home city, Hyesan, so that his birth documentation would be registered there, the same as the rest of the family’s. So it was in Hyesan that my little brother was born. North Korean families have a tradition of naming children with the same first syllable, so although I was Min-young, my brother became Min-ho. I was seven years old, and feeling peevish at all the cooing and adoring the new arrival was receiving, and the stream of family visitors – Aunt Old, Aunt Pretty, Aunt Tall, Uncle Opium and Uncle Cinema – coming to see him, with congratulations and armfuls of gifts,