After an absence of twenty-five years, I returned to the newly-founded Federal Republic of Korea (FRK) this past January, 2025. At eight o'clock in the morning after an eight-hour flight from New York, my plane touched down at Chung Ju Yung International Airport in
Pyongyang in a driving Siberian snowstorm.  With me was my wife, Yu Mi Youn, clutching my elbow with two iron-fisted claws from take-off to landing. It was difficult enough for me to remain calm, but it seemed as if the pain in my elbow was throbbing in rhythym with my own palpitating heart. When she stepped into the ladies' restroom in the terminal, I was relieved to regain use of my arm.

After an interminable period of time standing sentry in front of the shiny, metallic restroom portal, bobbing my head, grinning, and mumbling greetings to curious Korean bystanders, Mi Youn emerged, scowling, "they still have the damn Japanese toilets!" Surveying the crowded waiting areas teeming with Korean families, she whispered, "I hope the hotels have better crappers."

Instantly, I felt a twinge of conscience. It was all my fault. I had wanted to return to Korea, to teach English for a year. Maybe it was a
mid-life crisis. Maybe boredom. My wife and I had met in Seoul twenty-five years ago, while I was in the U.S. Army, and I had taught
English for one year in Seoul. We married on June 1, 2000, in my parent's home in New York. We now had three children, two girls and
a boy, and ten years ago Mi Youn's mother had emigrated from South Korea, to live with us. I had convinced my wife, or, rather,
cajoled, lobbied, and harassed her, to come to the former North Korea, to look for her mother's relatives in Pyongyang. There was a
mystery in her past. Her great-grandfather, a outspoken, popular Presbyterian minister in Pyongyang, had committed suicide in 1948, but
some of his siblings insisted it was murder. She could research the incident, and bring peace to her soul. I had endured two months of
cold dinner, snide relarks, and full-scale pitched battles, replete with flying dishes and biting, just to wear my wife down. I had taken a
leave of absence from my comfortable job in a computer firm. I had even left my children with my mother-in-law, kissing them with
teary eyes and cliches on my lips. I was returning to my youth, teaching English, hygiene, and computers to children recently liberated
from seventy-five years of authoritarian mismanagement. I would be teaching in a small village outside Sinuiju on the Yalu River south of
the Chinese border, near the place where my grandfather had been injured, resulting in an amputated arm, during the First Korean War.
My wife would live and teach hygiene (she is a nurse) in Pyongyang.

Two days later, I caressed my wife's dry cheek and mechanically boarded the electric transport to Sinuiju. I was the only non-Korean,
and one of the only men. I reeled as a cacophony of Korean voices in an indecipherable northern dialect hit me like a wall of shattering
glass. Odors both human and foodborne seized me by the nose hairs, and ten memories rushed instantaneously into my eyes. I had some
sinusitis already. I made small talk for the two-hour trip to the border, straining to comprehend a dialect I had previously viewed as
sinister. I ate kimbab and kimchi and painfully swallowed soju, that tasted even more like moonshine than the poison I remembered from
Seoul, and offered by grinning grandmothers in quilted pantaloons and jackets. All the while children screamed, cried, and quarrelled. It
was like riding a storm inside a ship sealed in a tiny bottle. 

I arrived in Hanin-dong a little before noon, head aching and stomach bloated. A bitter wind seized me and shoved me backwards as I
stepped down from the transport. A bespectacled Korean man grabbed my elbow firmly, giggling, and said, overpronunciating, "You
OK?" Then I saw the little girl in flowing, multi-hued, traditional Korean gowns, hair tightly held in a bun atop her head. She was about
five or six years old, the same age as my youngest daughter. She approached me cautiously. "If you need a hot towel or a shower, you
can go to the Daewoo Hotel near the hospital!" I looked at the man, incredulously.

"No, yes, fine. I left the better part of me in Pyongyang."

"You can work today still?"

The little girl interjected, "You can buy food at the Daewoo Supermarket!"

"Sure."

I pried my hand from the frozen, metallic shell of the transport, and noticed a large, blue Daewoo logo where my fingers had just been.
Dazed, my eyes settled on the Korean man's hooded, quilted jacket and the Daewoo logo on his breast, like a mechanic's insignia. The
logo on his baseball cap was only a little more stylish. The little girl smiled, revealing two rotting front top baby incisors and six shiny,
silver caps.

"I am Mr. Kang. You will live with me in my home. Welcome to Hanin-dong!"

"Annyeonghashimnikka! I'm Saul Massey."

"Ah, you speak Korean, yes?"

"Yes, my wife speaks it better. She's Korean."

"Ah! Don't speak Korean in classroom! First we go to eat, then we go to store, then we go to school. Good?"

"Lovely. Yes!"

The little girl excused herself, and resumed her solicitations. Just walking away I heard her mention three separate Daewoo places for one woman to visit. I would see her often in the next year. In a way, she was an angel, leading me back to my family, my home. But, for that next hour, my eyes were saturated with a multitude of Daewoo signs, some in Hangul, some in Roman letters, in many hues and scripts. I forgot the little girl. The mystery of the omnipresent Daewoo logo jumpstarted my groggy head, and Mr. Kang volunteered answers to my insistent queries graciously. There were Daewoo outlets for farming equipment, appliances, groceries, even beauty parlors and pharmacies. The hospital and the bank were both Daewoo subsidiaries.

At 3:00 of a fatiguing, bone-chilling afternoon, we finally arrived at Mr. Kang's house next to the public building, where the elementary and secondary schools were located. The streets were unpaved and covered in mud and frost, and there were neither sidewalks nor trees. Just patches of frozen mud soon to be barley fields in the spring. Mr. Kang's house resembled a bombed shell plastered with colored wallpaper and standing on scaffolding. As I looked further into the distance, I saw explosion craters and rusted, burnt, and twisted metal wrecks that used to be tractors and trucks. And, then, I saw the shiny metal scaffolding strung with green mesh nets. A driving range seemed incongruous for this locale. But the western-style, blue and yellow A-frame house with red shutters looked even more out of place. Again, I noticed the blue and white Daewoo sign on the lawn, a green pool in a desert of dull brown. Mr. Kang observed my stunned curiosity. "That is where the little girl lives. You know, the girl from the bus station." 

"Is that a Daewoo golf range? Where's the sign?"

"No! That is where she practices baseball and golf for exhibitions."

"She plays baseball! And golf? Five years old?"

"Six! She is drilled very well!"

I spent the next few weeks acclimatizing to work and life at Mr. Kang's home. It was a traditional family setup, and I only had to learn the names and personalities of the many characters, in order to slowly feel comfortable. I had grown accustomed to that lifestyle in our own home in New York. I felt both welcome and content, even blessed at times. The grandmother would even make me makkoli, to drink on long, lonely nights. Sometimes she, the widow of a war veteran, would join me. Other times I would play baduk on a home-made wooden board or on-line with my wife, with whom I daily conversed. Mr. Kang enjoyed practicing his English with her, also.

I half-heartedly asked him after two months, "May my wife come here from Pyongyang and work with me?" 

"No! Pyongyang is Samsung town; this is Daewoo town! She can work in Man'po, maybe."

I was not too despondent. My wife longed to see me, as I did her, but she had made progress researching the events of her father's life. She had interviewed over forty family members, kindly relaying their addresses to her mother and logging their recollections. A vague pattern was forming, she said. But she would not say more. I sensed that she was in the midst of her own dilemma. I talked about the little girl with her endlessly, nay, obsessively, though.

The little girl lived with three guardians in the western-style house painted in traditional Korean hues. Her name was Cheong Ah, but she had no family name. She had been born in Ichon in Kyonggi Province, but her father and brothers had been killed defending the family farm three years ago. Her mother had been murdered by NKA troops, but the little girl had hid in a latrine, and was rescued by UN soldiers on their final northward advance to Seoul. Like many young children, she was an orphan. The large companies, like Samsung and Daewoo, had survived the war by temporarily relocating their most important capital to Japan six months before the hostilities began. The people did not receive advanced warning of an NKA invasion, but the chaebol knew almost instantly. Orphans, like Cheong Ah, became wards of the companies, little spokespersons for the new enterprises established by their respective "benefactors". They learned Korean, Japanese, and English. Daily drills in baseball and golfing made them proficient showpieces at exhibitions, to resurrect the various sports leagues, and encourage ordinary people to patronize the parks and ranges and buy merchandize. 

Cheong Ah arose at five every morning, practicing tae kwon do, attending classes in history, science, language, and maths, and then hit
the streets. By 11:00, she was soliciting patrons at locations determined by her boss, a Mr. Yun. Somedays, it was a bank, others a
restaurant. Everyday, seven days a week, until noon. After lunch, she attended English classes at the institute, once, for a month with
me. Then, it was golfing and batting practice, followed by singing concerts after dinner. Finally, she studied. On the weekends, she also
performed on traditional korean instruments.

I pieced this itinerary together from months of observation and, because Mr. Yun liked to brag endlessly about her as he drank soju in the local bar, where he was the leading patron. Every night he treated the pub-crawlers with fancy, Western scotches and expensive soju. Her "mother" was a stolid matron, Ms. Kwon, who looked like Mr.Clean, only without the grin. She kept a bag of candies in her dress pocket, to reward the little girl when she finished an assignment or convinced a customer to buy an item. The other "Uncle" was Mr. Kim, who walked around adjusting his eyeglasses and logging numbers and shorthand in a ledger. He never spoke, and was generally disliked. He also purchased the "family's" foodstuffs and supplies at the Daewoo store for all to see. Only the most expensive delicacies, and always with cash. It  was rumored, that the "family" never ate the same item twice.

Needless to say, the little girl had bewitched me. She became a surrogate image for my youngest daughter, Sarah, but also all my children, in a way. She became the walking, breathing, and smiling personification of child-ness, youth, and the gnawing sense that what is lost can never be regained. She may have resembled a "girl", but she was neither young or feminine. She was robotic, a drone. I longed to go home, to protect my Sarah from the ravages of age and time. 

I had taken to call the village, "Matewan". Most of the men mined bauxite or worked in the aluminum plant. The women became the
"Friends of Daewoo", a society to re-inculcate the traditional virtues of Korean womanhood and family. The village was over-populated
in children, stuffed for hours in the public school and the institute. Most of the adults, aged 18-35, had perished in the war, because the
draft had conscripted women also. I taught an English devoid of culture. A multiple-choice question, a cartoon, a song, these were my
tools. And candy.

The chidren were given coupons for candy and games, if they passed a test. They were exhorted at public assembies to rebuild the old Korea, and praised as the best generation ever produced on Korean soil since Tan'gun. Their daily regimen was gruelling, as consuming and empty as Cheong Ah's. I knew this, because I saw them in the back alleys hooking class. They played games and exchanged candy and coupons. The older, bigger boys bullied the other children into gangs and acted as lords. In English class, they kicked, punched, bit, spit, cried, screamed, cursed, vandalized property, and flirted like adults. A few had started to experiment with sex and alcohol. But, always, in the presence of Koreans, they recited, bowed, laughed, smiled, and sang.

One day in class, Cheong Ah bit me. As she tried to bear down on my shirt sleeve into my arm, she cracked her rotting teeth. Blood oozed from her trembling mouth, as she spasmodically sobbed. Her gown was streaked in blood. I walked with her to the restroom, careful not to attract more attention. Fortunately, everyone was in class or in an office. It was easy to clean the gown, as it as made of polyester. One tooth had fallen out from the root, but the other one, cracked and oozing black pus and thick blood, jutted from her whitish gums. I just smiled, and joked with her, until she stopped sobbing. I then placed her fingertips on the ragged remnants of her tooth and slowly moved her hand back and forth. She started to cry again, but the the motion of her trembling mooth and the firmness of my hand squeezing her fingers, dislodged the tooth. She recoiled, especially seeing and feeling the blackish blood on her fingertips. But, then, she laughed, uncertain at first, but then with more gusto.

She daintily wiped the blood from her lips and chin, and I gave her my clean handkerchief to staunch the oozing fluid in her mouth. "That was easy!" Then, she traipsed daintily out the door, leaving the water running in the sink. 

That night my wife and I completed a game of baduk on-line. During the final sequences I had been consumed, feversihly informing her
of the incident with Cheong Ah. Obviously, Mi Youn had won the game. 

"So! What do I get?"

"How 'bout a ticket for two to the States?"

"Let's go home!"