감자

Bok-nyeo was a girl raised strictly in a poor but honest farming family. At fifteen, she was sold for eighty won to a village widower twenty years older than her, and married him. Her husband was terribly lazy; even when someone found him a field, he would sow the seed and never tend it. Having lost all trust in the village, the couple moved to Pyongyang, but they could not keep work there either. The place they were finally pushed to was the slum outside Chilseong Gate.

Most people in the slum lived by begging, but few would give food to a young woman like Bok-nyeo. "Why is a young woman begging?" people said, and the couple often went hungry.

That summer, the city of Pyongyang hired women from the slum to pick caterpillars off the pine trees. Bok-nyeo climbed the ladders and picked caterpillars more diligently than anyone. Strangely, though, a few young women who did no work and only played around were paid more. One day, the overseer called Bok-nyeo behind the trees, and she followed him, red-faced, with her head bowed. From that day on, she too was one of the "workers who do no work and get paid more." From then on, the morals Bok-nyeo had kept began to crumble, little by little.

When autumn came, the slum women went to a Chinese farmer's fields every night to steal sweet potatoes and cabbages. One night, after Bok-nyeo had stolen a basketful of sweet potatoes, someone grabbed her arm. It was Wang, the owner of the field. "Come to my house." She went with him, and about an hour later she came out holding three won. After that, Wang came to her house often, and each time her husband quietly slipped away. Before long, the couple were among the richest people in the slum.

The next spring, Wang paid a hundred won for a young bride. Consumed by jealousy, Bok-nyeo burst into Wang's bridal room on the wedding night with a sickle hidden in her clothes. In the struggle, the sickle ended up in Wang's hands, and Bok-nyeo never got up again. Three days later, money changed hands between her husband, Wang and a doctor. Bok-nyeo was carried off to the public cemetery with a certificate that said she had died of a stroke.