Free A Thousand Miles to Freedom by Eunsun Kim Page B

under the careful watch of the farmer’s old mother. On the morning of the first day at the farm, we were already put to work, picking out weeds and planting rice, potatoes, and beans.
    For the first few weeks, we tried to just go along with it, and we did the best we could in the fields. We were rather disappointed that we had ended up in such a depressing and backward area, but we didn’t have any other options. It was the only way we had been able to improve our living conditions, the only way we could leave the world of begging and avoid getting arrested on the streets. And so we did our best to integrate ourselves into this family and to try to reach a mutual understanding between us and this man. At first, he tried to do the same. He tried to defend us against his irascible mother. We were allowed to move around on the farm, and the four of us could sleep together in one of the three rooms while the man’s old parents occupied the room the farthest away. But whenever the man’s brothers came back home, we had to return to the stable. Priority went to family, of which we were clearly not a part.
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    The house was dirty and dilapidated. There was a heating system that was a little like the ondol used in Korea but that used firewood instead—it was so archaic you would think it was from another century. We had to heat it up using the fire from the kitchen, the only source of heat in the house. And since the walls were dotted with holes that let in cold air from the outside, it was absolutely frigid during winter, a winter which, in this area in the northeast of China, was just as bad as our winters in North Korea. Snow didn’t fall all that frequently, but when it did, the ground stayed white for weeks on end.
    The old mother was clearly our enemy, and she started making more and more derogatory comments about us and imposed chores and punishments on us that were often absurd. For her, we were just slaves, and she treated us as if it was already an enormous honor for us to even live under the same roof as her. One day, she drew a line on the ground near the entrance of the house that we, the Koreans, were not allowed to cross. This ridiculous and arbitrary new rule meant that we had to detour around the building to the back whenever we wanted to go out. It was her way of making sure we understood our inferior status.
    The man also started imposing more restrictions, quickly forgetting his earlier efforts to help us during the first few weeks. For example, one night, after a long day of hard work in the fields, he refused to let us turn on the TV to watch a show, claiming that it would drive up the electricity bill. Often, after dinner, we would try to assert ourselves and turn on this archaic TV anyway. It was our only time of rest and distraction from a long day of labor. And in response he would get up and turn it off.
    â€œYou’re going to use up all the electricity if you watch it this much!” he would say without the smallest hint of irony.
    After a few months, we started to learn a bit of Chinese, which let us respond to him tit for tat. But that also meant that we started having vicious arguments nearly every day, and that the atmosphere soon became unbearable.
    Fortunately, my “stepfather”’s nephew and niece were nice to Keumsun and me. Despite the language barrier, we quickly became friends. First we started playing hide-and-seek on the esplanade in front of the farm. They taught me a Chinese game called jianzi , like Hacky Sack, that I really enjoyed. Using our feet, we juggled a small shuttlecock decorated with feathers. I played for hours on this muddy terrain with my friends, whenever I didn’t have to work in the fields.
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    The farm was located on a promontory and we had an excellent view of the road down below. If a police car was coming from Yang Chang Chon, we could spot it from afar and neighbors would