Xia of Tumen

Chapter 2

Xia sat up and looked around hoping it had all been a dream. But no. There was her father laying beside her, and instead of waking up in her bed excited for her beach adventure, she had woken up sore and muddy, on the side of the Tumen river.

Though everything seemed so bad then, she never even dreamed that being on the North Korean side meant that she could never go back. But she knew enough to dread her mother coming back for her. What if her mother dove into the river to rescue her, and got killed also?

Xia was living a nightmare here, but she knew what would happen to her mother if she saw her here. Xia had to think quickly. She dragged her father into an abandoned grassy place, and started digging with her bare hands. She needed to bury her father, and then hope her mother would stay on the boat and not jump off and look for her and be trapped here.

She kept digging as fast as she could, hoping that would make her not think about her parents. But digging couldn't keep her brain from going over the same thoughts endlessly.. She wouldn't ever see her father again. And she would probably never see any of her family again. She started crying. The tears were coming out so fast she couldn't see. But she kept on digging anyway. What else was she supposed to do?

A shovel came down into the ground beside Xia. She looked up and saw a man with a shovel beginning to dig with her. He had a friendly look, And Xia was sure he understood what was going on.

They finally got a hole deep enough, and they put Xia's father in it, while Xia cried. She pushed the dirt in, wondering if it would turn into mud from her tears. She tried to wipe the tears off her face, but she just made dirt streaks. She peeled some bark from a tree and tried to carve in it with a rock.

The man who had been digging, handed Xia his pocket knife. She scraped in her father's name, and birthday. She was sure she must have misspelled it, but she did her best. She set it on the grave.

The man started walking away. Xia, unsure what else to do, followed him. Soon they came to a house. The man walked inside and Xia wasn't sure whether to follow him in or not. The man opened the door and said something. Xia just looked at him. He said something in a different language, but she felt like he wanted her to come inside, so she followed him in.

The man finally caught on to the fact that the little girl couldn't speak Korean, so he decided to try the language his parents spoke, Chinese.

"My name is Chung-ae. You do not speak Korean?"

"No, I can't speak korean. My name is Xia."

"You are not from North Korea. You are Chinese? "

"Yes, I'm Chinese. Thank you for helping me." Xia said.

"How did you get here?"

"I fell off a boat, and my father jumped after me. We tried to swim across... and then... and then..." She couldn't continue. But that was enough. Just saying that her father had tried to swim across told Chung-Ae what happened. She was lucky to have made it back to shore with him.

"You need somewhere to stay. You can stay here."

"Thank You." Xia said. She was trying to put the wonderful life she had been living behind her, and prepare for the new life ahead. Nothing said it would be worse than how she had lived before. Chung-Ae seemed nice.

"You can go to school, And I can teach you Korean. You will learn what you do not say here. You will be my daughter."

Xia smiled at him.

This was going to take some getting used to, but Xia didn't really think it would last long. Her mother would come back for her any day now. And as long as Xia swam to her mother instead of the other way around, her mother would not get killed also. Her mother was smart enough to come up with a good solution.

What Xia didn't realize was that her mother was looking for her from the edge of the boat at that moment. If only Xia had stayed on the beach, she and her mother would be reunited. Xia's mother observed that children could cross freely, but adults were soon stopped. If only Xia would show up... But it was 7:30. Xia's mother knew that she couldn't stay there any longer. Xia's father had said 7, and it was 7:30, she had to go. But life would be so different without Xia and her father.