How I Became a North Korean Page 10

  It was the boy from the hut. He said, “I’m on your side! It’s me! Remember, the bun?”

  I saw the outlines of his face in the dark, then the black gaps between his teeth.

  He jumped up and down, warming himself up. “It’s your first time crossing, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “You came alone? With parents?”

  I shook my head. “I’m alone now.”

  When he saw that I wasn’t going to move, he said, “You can’t stay here. You want to get as far away from the border as you can, and you better learn the Han people’s language. Fast. The ganna saekki get everyone by the border, just wait. It’s my third time crossing. The first time I got picked up the morning after I crossed. They’ll send you back into the asshole of our country—you’re older than me, and you don’t want to know what they’ll do to you.”

  I didn’t care. I sank my head into my hands and stayed huddled. But Namil waited for me.

  The cave took us hours to reach. Namil said the group he’d stuck with when he crossed the last time had discovered it by following an older man. The man had left, vowing to walk all the way to a safe country if he had to.

  • • •

  At first I didn’t leave the cave. But I quickly realized that I needed to do my share and help the others, who spent their time in a hopeless cycle of collecting wood or working at small farmsteads or at logging sites that dotted the mountains for food with no pay. I cleaned myself as best I could, hoping that my height differentiated me from the other four boys, who were stunted in growth by their lean years of living. I began venturing out to the nearest town in search of work, food. Information. I was afraid of every single person I met, knowing what it would mean to be repatriated. Shadows scared me. A stranger’s voice, footsteps, all of it sent me on dizzying detours. I had never been so afraid of people.

  I forced myself to burrow through the nearest village dump to salvage what we could use. Sometimes I found canned goods. What people discarded in China amazed even me. I rinsed out a pigpen in exchange for eggs and potatoes, and back on the mountain I planted my first potato eyes. We rotated all-night guard duty in case our cave, which we had camouflaged with tin and brittle branches, was raided. I slept with my shoes on.

  Once I was beaten by an old farmer for no reason, except that he could. I was no longer a privileged Pyongyang man but a North Korean that you could abuse without punishment, and the locals knew it. I learned that a North Korean man in China was less than a man, less than the dogs or cats that every Han Chinese person seemed to raise. You could be murdered for working too slowly. Entire villages of our women were said to be held captive, slaves in bed and in the field, which made me think of my eomma and dongsaeng. Some of our people who I briefly met had lived in hiding for years. I had never thought of myself as an angry person, but I was getting angrier. I lived inside the mouth of a giant beast, and that beast was China.

  Hope was a distant island. The other boys only aspired to be like ghosts, invisible, and thought about how to get food and smoke and drink. They lived in the present tense, too afraid to desire more. But Daehan was different; he was educated and spoke in the future tense, and he gave me back a little hope.

  “You want to see something?” Cheolmin said to Daehan.

  He had ignored Daehan all week, like the others, but tonight Daehan had brought leftover meat from a town market over two hours’ walk away and started a small fire the size of a pear blossom for grilling. He trudged into town and coaxed vegetables to grow in the stubborn mountain soil, laboring at any job he could. As a Joseon-jok, he was safe from everything, it seemed, but loneliness.

  “Don’t let him show you,” said Gwangsu, who was a mere baby when his abeoji was taken away, maybe to the camps or to jail, for stealing food. His eomma had been seized after they crossed into China.

  “Keep your mouth shut, saekki-ya,” said Cheolmin.

  With a ballerina’s agility, Cheolmin leaned against a tree and pulled off a shoe a few sizes too large and two pairs of socks. He braced his foot up high so close to Daehan’s face that even in the dark, he must have seen that it was blackened with frostbite.

  Daehan studied the foot respectfully. “That’s rough. How did it happen?”

  Cheolmin told the same story he recounted each time he got drunk, but with every telling the number of guards at the river, the water’s depth and temperature as his foot broke through the ice, changed. I had told them very little, holding that terrible night close to me, though the others already knew about me because of Namil.

  I said, “We have to leave. And we will. Someday it will happen.”

  Cheolmin, the angriest, most unpredictable of us, poked Bakjun in the side. “You know what our dongmu from the great city of Pyongyang keeps saying? He says he’s going to find his eomma and dongsaeng. How’re you going to do that in China? This country’s as big as Mars!”

  “You can’t talk to him like that. He’s older than you! Don’t you have any respect for your hyeong?” said Daehan, when it was obvious that Cheolmin didn’t. He added, “If he says he’s going to find them, he’s going to find them.”

  • • •

  The next day, in the stubborn, practical manner I would come to associate with Daehan, he thrust at me a written list of possible steps to take, some that I hadn’t thought of and others that I wouldn’t dare attempt. He trailed after me when I went twig hunting and silently watched me kick the face of a granite rock slope until I was too tired to go on. We said nothing to each other and in the easy silence walked back together.

  A week later he said, “Why don’t we walk to the nearest city? I know it’s a long way, but there’s supposed to be a church there.”

  “A church?”

  “That’s where Christians gather.”

  “Christians? Those South Koreans that the boys say are generous with handouts?”

  “They’re not always South Koreans, and they’re far more than an easy handout.”

  From his lengthy monologue, I gathered that these Christians could help our people reach a safe country. I hadn’t known that churches were illegal in China and most Christians clustered underground in house churches; I hadn’t known much. The Chinese border of the Joseon-speaking people was an exception. Contact with Christians could mean death if I was caught by the police and repatriated, since my country feared Christianity, he said, so I could wait nearby while he met the pastor in charge.

  The next day, as the night became a vein of light rimming the horizon, we washed at the nearest icy brook the best we could and made the four-hour walk into the city together. He rambled on, as was his habit, through the valleys of bare trees and narrow dirt roads while circumventing the villages of mud huts and small towns. I didn’t mind. I was a quiet person and liked to listen.

  “Did I tell you about,” he would begin, and I would learn many things, interesting things, about animals I’d never seen such as orcas and emperor penguins, and robots that defeated any man at baduk. He was an educated Joseon-jok with more of a future than us, but in his rare pauses his smile turned south, as if his bright energy were a vast production of effort made to convince himself.

  As we passed in the distance a farmer working in a cornfield, Daehan said, “You have a hyeong, too?”

  “No.” I swallowed. “Only the dongsaeng you already know about.”

  I was grateful when he pressed no further.

  The crisp air and sunlight flushed through us, then the city was upon us. We walked in silence as the huts turned into towering apartments and the yeasty smell of a beer factory. There were so many cars that I was afraid to cross the street, afraid of being recognized as North Korean. Numbness spread from my heart to my hands as the words dongsaeng, eomeoni, abeoji rang in my ears like restless bells. Maybe it was the same for Daehan, for he had become quiet.

  When Daehan saw me hold back
, he said briskly, “Follow me!”

  He crossed the street at an even, steady pace with the cars.

  “Look at the budding trees!”

  He was himself again, pointing out the cloudless sky, the swinging pigtails of two girls in an apartment’s playground, his words fleeing darker subjects. Brown hills rose from behind brown apartments, and magpies scattered as we passed.

  “Straighten up and look like you belong here,” Daehan said.

  I realized I was hunching, trying to make myself invisible.

  “With your height it’s not hard.”

  I said, “You’re different from the other Joseon-jok kids on the streets.”

  He looked at me. “You must feel a whole world between you and the others—it’s like putting a beluga whale in with a group of panthers.”

  “Why do you stay? I can’t help wondering. You’re too educated and you have other options.”

  He looked wounded. “You mean you don’t want me here?” His hands mined down deep into his pockets.

  It was as I had suspected. He needed people, and for reasons known only to him, he had no one.

  • • •

  The redbrick church looked like a giant eye, a tower of sight. As we stood looking at it from across the street, I waited for Daehan to lead us.

  “Not to worry.” He patted my arm as if he were the older one. “I was practically raised in the church. You’ll be safe here.”

  “Let’s go, then.” I was grateful for his confidence, his vocabulary of hope.

  Daehan’s overgrown hair curled up at his collar, his skin was brown and flaky, and his black clothes a shade of gray despite our morning wash, but he strode inside as if he were entering his own house.

  I took one step forward, then another, and was blinded. Searchlights, spotlights, but it was only the sun beaming down through a skylight. The building was plain inside, and a painting of a bearded man hung on the wall.

  Daehan pointed to it. “That’s Jesus, God’s son.”

  What he said meant nothing to me. Still, the church was beautiful: Sunlight soared in through the high windows and cast its warm spell over the burnt-honey varnish of the long seats he called pews. I passed a large wooden cross hovering over the podium, seemingly midair.

  Daehan skidded down the empty aisles and approached the doors at both sides of the central platform. I followed. I was suddenly terrified. There could be a security patrol lying in wait behind the doors, or even the Dear Leader himself, though that was absurd.

  “Is anyone there?” He tried the door to the left.

  I was ready to flee when the door opened, Daehan jumped back, and a stooped man with a thick rug of hair ambled out.

  He looked us over. It didn’t matter that I had tried to wash in the icy stream or clean my wool coat and trousers; my new life must have marked me like a prison uniform.

  The man said, “What can I do for you?”

  Daehan propelled himself forward.

  “We’re looking for the leadership of this church. The pastor, preferably.” He sounded polite and educated.

  The man said he was the pastor and that we had caught him just in time; he was on his way out. His eyes were wide and frank, and I had no choice but to trust him.

  Daehan spoke rapidly, braiding together words so foreign that at first I wondered if it was a Korean dialect. Only much later did I understand that he was trying to gain the pastor’s trust with his Christian credentials.

  I couldn’t wait. “I heard that you help . . . people.”

  The man smiled, but the language of his body turned wary. His eyes, perfectly shaped black stones, stayed trained on me.

  As if he were afraid we would be seen, he quickly led us into the back to his office. Twenty young men could have slept in his office. I was starting to measure space by the number of people it could hide. The pastor’s books had outgrown their shelves and littered the room’s available surfaces. Across his desk were scattered a collection of pens and files piled like felled logs.

  The pastor pushed his eyeglasses up the bulbous slope of his nose and looked kindly at me. “Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

  Daehan studied the bookshelves and pretended not to listen. For the first time I tried to form a coherent narrative of who I was, where I came from, and what had happened to my family. It embarrassed me to talk about myself at such length, and my speech circled back on itself as I wondered if this was how it had actually happened and, especially, how much to reveal, whether I should change dates and places to protect myself. The discomfort of I, I, I. It struck me that, for the pastor, the most important thing about me was that I was North Korean.

  He listened patiently, his large head bobbing to indicate he understood. After I stopped speaking, he said to Daehan, “Was this your idea?” He said it as if he meant: What do you want from me?

  Daehan’s lower lip jutted out in a dogged way. “My eomma always taught me the church was for the poor and needy.”

  The pastor thought for a moment, then asked us to wait. “I have something for you.”

  When he returned, he looked serious and sad, as if my weight had become his, and I felt hopeful that this man could help me. He set a plastic bag down on the floor between us.

  “Son, I think these will fit.”

  They were clean clothes, including a worn, padded coat. He patted me awkwardly on the shoulder, then handed me a few boxes of rice cakes and an envelope. Money, I guessed, from the envelope’s feathery heft.

  “We collect regular donations for the North Koreans who come to us for help. Many donate, the community, guests, South Korean groups. This should aid you a little.”

  But I didn’t want supplies to sustain me for another mere week or two.

  “I need help. I need to find my family.” I clutched his hands.

  When he tried to pull away, I didn’t let go.

  “I’ve been told that Christians are good people.” I looked into his eyes. “You must know what it’s like for me. I have lost everyone I love. Everything was a lie, and everything here is new and foreign. I’m a university student surrounded by crass, ignorant kkotjaebi from our country—we don’t have a single cell in common. Imagine waking up to rats and eating food out of the garbage. All I’m capable of here is enduring each day, but it isn’t enough to endure. If you help me to South Korea, there are things I can do there, good things, and I promise you that I will—I will—” I couldn’t finish.

  “Please, child, don’t cry.” He offered me a clean handkerchief.

  “Please.” I began lowering myself to my knees, but Daehan forced himself between us and stopped me.

  “The answer’s self-evident,” said Daehan. “The only moral thing to do is to help him escape out of China.”

  “You think it’s that easy?” The pastor looked enraged, then discouraged. “When I was a university student, I used most of my modest funds to shelter and feed the first famine victims crossing the river. That was in the nineties, when the hunger was at its worst.”

  His eyes became sad and were no longer focused on me. I realized that I was just one of the thousands who had come to him since with swollen abscesses and scabby skin, clutching his hands the way I had held his.

  “My children, there have been massive crackdowns since then, you see.”

  One hand rubbed at his temple and he kept his chin angled to the ground.

  “We are here to preach and spread the word of God to the Han people, but if we help a North Korean, we’re expelled or, worse, the church is shut down, and all this effort, our life’s work, comes to an end. Many, many people are terribly hurt as a result. God is with you, my child, but for the sake of the church, it’s dangerous for me to be here with you like this. I’m afraid there’s nothing more I can do for you. You see, there are too many of you now.”

  • • �
��

  In an eatery I forced down an octopus ball with a second bottle of baiju. Why not? There were only four hours of walking ahead of us. I felt reckless, and wanted to be drunker than I had ever been.

  Daehan tried to steal my bottle away. “It’s an ideal time to go back home, don’t you think? You realize this isn’t very discreet.”

  I was so drunk, I walked through a crowd without fear for the first time. Rage churned in my gut.

  Still, I wasn’t drunk enough not to be afraid when an official-looking truck passed us and turned at the next corner. The kind of truck that might gather up our people and force us back across the river. The smoky octopus came up and invaded my lungs, and Daehan followed me as I fled the city, my hand tight around the plastic case in my pocket that held a razor blade, the one I had crossed the river with to use in case we were caught. I still had choices.

  When we reached a one-lane country road, it began to rain. We walked past houses sprinkled across the unfriendly land like an afterthought.

  Daehan was mostly quiet, but suddenly he said, “It must be freeing to be old. You know, to be so old someday that you’re too exhausted to feel. To be without dreams.”

  “You talk about age,” I said. “In our country most people are young and without dreams.”

  I looked at the peaks ahead and felt the long night descend. There were rumors that one of our people had walked down the paved road right into a patrol, giving them no choice but to arrest him. Poor, foolish man, the words came with each thundering beat in my head, and I wondered out loud what might happen if I walked blindly, right now, to the country that Daehan called South Korea, our Nam Joseon.

  “You know that’s suicide,” Daehan said fiercely. “Don’t give up.”

  “After I crossed, I learned that the stars in the sky are mere pictures. Something like that.”

  “You mean they’re real?”

  He stopped laughing after I heaved up my food, the sea scent of octopus scorching my tongue. He forced me to continue.

  When he spotted a hut inside the fold of mountains, we made a long arc around it. People were dangerous, and their grunting, barking animals more dangerous still. Brambles grabbed at my pants. The mountain was alive. The roots of its trees seemed to rise and snarl my feet and trip me. Mud sucked at my shoes and I sank into the mountain’s flesh. I would have lost my will, and my way, if it weren’t for Daehan.