How I Became a North Korean Read online

  Late that night after we had our first baths, he took another set of photos of us cleaned up and told us to smile. The camera—the first time I’d seen such a camera—spat out squares of glossy white paper that turned into our ghostly images within minutes. The boys crowded around to see themselves, the same way they had after Missionary Kwon had taken photos of us in the mountains. Namil was grinning in nearly every shot, but his eyes stayed mournful, and Cheolmin’s skin was flaky and reptilian, but my image alarmed me most. My gaze was gaunt, ashen; loss had passed over my face and I had become a different person.

  • • •

  In the safe house the clock showed me what time it was, the calendar I marked off each day told me the date. I saw time passing as spindly leaves formed on the oak trees surrounding the building. The sun and the moon swept into the room where the dozen yo we slept on were folded and stacked in the corner, still bearing the imprint of our bodies. I tried to think of the sun as a promise, a daily present that broke through the trees. I dreaded the rising moon, a time when all the people I had lost returned to me.

  In the safe house there was always Missionary Lee and occasionally Missionary Kwon. Kwon was the actual God that filled our days. He had our rotten teeth pulled and ragged fingernails cleaned up, the loamy smell thick on our skin scrubbed away, until he disappeared to manage another dozen shelters. I knew power, had grown up around its black suits and unhurried air and tinted car windows. This somber man never strained to get our attention; we moved according to his wishes. I began hearing the measured rhythm of his voice in my dreams.

  There was so much to do in the safe house, and so much that had been invented for us to do. There was the hall to sweep every morning after sunrise prayer. We took care not to snag our house slippers on the unfinished cement floor and gazed out the door’s eyehole, fearing a stranger’s eye would meet ours though no one was ever there. We tried that door a dozen times a day though we knew it was locked from the outside—to protect us, they said—and collected trash since most of it could be reused. We recycled leftovers from breakfast for lunch and what was left from lunch for dinner.

  We, we, we—that was what I had become.

  Still I felt attached to this little nothing—the square of light, the faint comfort of meat bone soup, the freedom from the dank cave—this remote promise that someday my life would matter again, just a little, to me.

  We were finally safe.

  13

  Danny

  I woke up before the sun was out, surrounded by boys’ bodies twisted together like pretzels. Most important, Yongju’s back was inches from me. Like every morning during our month in the safe house, his warm, nutty smell enveloped me before I opened my eyes.

  Sure, you could have built another Mount Sinai with the total sum of our discomforts. But I’d gotten used to the bucket for a bathroom, the lack of electricity, Missionary Lee’s two-tiered snores that drilled straight through the wall, and the random scream and gnashing of teeth from the boys. But I was still surprised when I woke up to Missionary Kwon’s broad chin and the waft of his pine needle soap. His weekly appearances at the safe house fell on random days, and when his looming shadow shook me by the shoulder, I wasn’t prepared and I slapped away his hand.

  It clamped down on mine. He said, “Wake up, there’re supplies, and I’ve set up the bath.”

  I crawled upright, wanting yet dreading the bimonthly bath ritual, myself knuckled into the first floor’s pink tub pulled out from beneath cardboard boxes. There I would be, folded into what had probably held a frothing vat of kimchi.

  When he moved away to wake up Yongju, the room became musky again with the scent of boys. It brought me to my senses, and I immediately bowed my head until the other boys were awake. I’d practically grown up in the church and I was determined to stay inside the maps I understood, reliable black-and-white ones of Christian and heathen, the right route and the wrong. My maps didn’t include school or family anymore.

  I followed the others down the concrete steps slick from last night’s rain. The air choked with pollutants was still a welcome contrast to our room, which smelled like you had your nose up an armpit. None of it bothered me much. I was awed by their uncomplicated, generous acceptance of me. Shut up in that hermetically sealed building, I expected nothing less than to be reformed by the missionaries.

  But all I saw were the constellations of goose bumps across Yongju’s exposed neck.

  The half-moon highlighted the fine hairs standing up on his neck and the triangle of his back hunched through the padded coat. He had been feverish since the night before, his upper lip beaded with sweat, and I had to resist reaching out and touching that vulnerable arch of his back.

  “Careful.” He tilted his head my way, though I was taking every precaution and gripping the cold stair rail with both hands.

  “Stay still, hyeong.” I wrapped my striped scarf around his neck as he had once done for me, then tugged my ski hat over his head. Only this much. I was still innocent. “We lose nearly ten percent of our heat from our head.”

  From behind me, Cheolmin muttered, “Ten percent, my ass.”

  It was no secret that only Cheolmin had his reservations about me. You had to push back with people like that, I’d learned, so I said, “We can test it out on you, if you like.”

  Missionary Kwon said in a warning voice, “Boys, keep your voices down.” He opened the trunk of the car parked in the yard.

  He could have bellowed out if he wanted to; no one was around to hear us for at least a mile. There was a charisma about his quiet confidence, which was the way I imagined Jesus addressing his fishers of men, and I found my voice dropping to the decibel of moving grass. He awed me, from his old-fashioned three-piece suit to his hair parted in the middle that made him look like an itinerant nineteenth-century Methodist pastor.

  We knew the weekly routine by now. Without further instruction we carried the boxes of food and sacks of ice up to our supply room and half the plastic containers of water to the first floor. The others moved slowly, gazing at the moon, the clouds and trees, the outlines of hills, as if they’d forgotten what the world looked like. Yongju and I, who Missionary Kwon had decided were the most detail-oriented of the group, carried the burners and the largest steel pots downstairs to the first floor. We heated up our precious water supply for the bath, using equally precious gas canisters.

  I insisted, as I had the time before, on being the last to wash. I knew they appreciated it. Naturally the water wasn’t changed, so by the time my turn came the bath was a muddy soup that was at best lukewarm. I, a self-declared clean freak, skimmed off the film of dead skin and dirt floating on the surface, then immersed myself in the swampy water, curled up knees to nipples. I found myself thinking of my mom and how she scrubbed my back when I was a kid, still only a mom to me then and not a woman. My stomach cramped up as I thought about my parents, though I’d called my dad to tell him about my general plans before following Missionary Kwon. I should have returned home, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I didn’t want to.

  How could I when Yongju squatted beside the tub and began wordlessly scrubbing my back with a sandpapery ttaeh sugeon, stripping off layers of dead skin?

  • • •

  That morning when we sat for sunrise prayer with Missionary Lee, I was at my customary spot on the floor beside Yongju. We had become an inseparable pair at the two lacquered saang that were our only tables, like Batman and Robin. The Monkey King and Monk Xuanzang. I played the sidekick perfectly, and no one suspected anything. I tried my mightiest to focus on the posters of Noah’s paired-up zebras and giraffes, Jesus feeding bread and fish to hundreds. Even the plastic dotjari that covered up our cement floors, usually used on picnics, was printed with an image of David and Goliath. I should have been at ease, surrounded by familiar stories and knowing I was the only one who would truly be safe if the police discovered us. Even Missionary L
ee, who risked a long prison sentence if he was caught harboring North Koreans, grabbed the arm nearest him and dug in with his fingernails whenever Missionary Kwon opened the front door. But all I felt was turbulence.

  Immediately after prayer, Missionary Lee set his hands on the shelf of his belly, his eyes open so wide that the cholesterol deposits in his sclera bugged out. “Why didn’t Missionary Kwon wake me up? Why didn’t any of you tell me he was here? There are important things we have to discuss.”

  His multiple chins tucked into his chest. The shaggy-haired sheepdog of a man who looked as old as Abraham was appallingly bad at hiding his hurt feelings. There was also something ancient and severely good about this retired schoolteacher from South Korea, the kind of man I imagined God would entrust with a tablet of commandments. He could have lived comfortably on his pension, cycling and fishing with his family and doing whatever else retired people do, but his faith had brought him to this hazardous work. I longed for a simple, if arduous, map of life like the one he followed.

  “Apparently Missionary Kwon didn’t want to disturb your sleep.” I found myself checking for Yongju’s reaction. I added, “He knows how hard you’ve been working.”

  Cheolmin drummed his chest with his fingers and snorted, but Yongju nodded, approving of behavior that might improve our standing. Missionary Kwon had promised to send them to true safety in a third country within a few months, as soon as funding became available.

  The missionary flushed and thumped the saang’s enameled cranes. “God is watching us, so you should keep your backs straight”—meaning a respectful ramrod—“your legs crossed and tucked”—under our numb thighs—“and your hands flat on the saang as we start our lesson.” He was full of empty threats.

  We weren’t twenty minutes into the lesson when Cheolmin slumped onto the table and erupted into snores. I wasn’t surprised when the missionary said gently, “Let him sleep.” He patted Cheolmin’s buzzed hair, recently doused with lice-killing chemicals like all of ours. “He probably didn’t get any rest last night.”

  “I don’t understand.” Namil flicked away a balled-up gray mass he had picked out of his navel. “Where’s this God? Where’s he live now?”

  “Live?” Missionary Lee blinked rapidly, his window dressing of eyelashes almost white in the light.

  I felt a little sorry for him.

  He continued with the lesson without answering. His voice was as dry as a communion wafer, and his teaching style could turn Daniel and the lion into a run-in with a kitten; it wasn’t the most impressive of sailings. But I admired his unwavering sincerity.

  Me, I was wavering. I made monkey faces whenever Yongju caught me looking at him, slipped on the dotjari and fell at his feet so that he would pull me up, and made shadow puppets with my hand in front of the candlelight before bed. I turned myself into a fool. Anything at all to stay close to him.

  Other times, I dangled facts and names off a fishing pole and waited for him to take the bait. My one reliable strength was the computer chip of my head. He would ask me throughout the day, “What’s the Pentecost?” or “Who is this Steven Pinker?” and most recently, “What’s string theory? You don’t need to tell me where you learned these things—you don’t need to tell me anything about yourself you don’t want me to know, but I need to know the world we weren’t allowed to know . . . just in case.” He swallowed, the diamond of his Adam’s apple dancing.

  At lunch the next day, I raced between the kitchen and the common room and, being twice as fast as the others, ended up doing over a quarter of the prep duties. “You’re a rocket!” Yongju said, which made me sprint even faster.

  The two saang were heavy with vegetable dishes that we had seasoned the day before, a pot of steaming white rice, an equally large pot of dwenjang stew with soybeans and tofu bobbing at the top, and spicy pork that had been kept on ice. The boys couldn’t take their eyes off the fatty curls of pork. Their swallows made hard punctuation marks during the grace.

  “Amen!” said Namil, and shoved a tower of rice into his mouth by the spoonful, then another.

  “Namil, I’ve been meaning to tell you,” I said. “I thought you might like to know, in all probability, you’re wearing a woman’s sweater.” He was also wearing bobby socks, but I let that one go.

  He grinned, showing the clumps of rice stuck in the gaps of his teeth. “Really?” He rubbed at his chest with two hands. “So that’s why it felt so good.”

  The others hooted. Missionary Lee gasped and Yongju, blushing, said, “This isn’t the streets,” with the sharpest look he could manage, which sent Namil diving back into the cheap ceramic bowl.

  The sound of scraping chopsticks and spoons could have blocked out a marching band, but I still heard what was on their minds: When would the missionaries send them to South Korea?

  Missionary Lee poured water into his bowl at the end of the meal, as if he were a Buddhist monk doing gongyang bari. After he drank the remains, he held the bowl close to his face with both hands and licked it clean, his sad bloodhound’s eyes saying, How can I waste when so many go hungry?

  Yongju kept his gaze on Missionary Lee as he scraped the last grain of rice out of his bowl. “It must be nearly time for us to leave,” he said, as if it were an afterthought.

  Missionary Lee flushed. “Missionary Kwon will know.” It was his go-to answer for all of Yongju’s many questions. Then he heaved himself toward the storage room, the room rumbling under his weight.

  I wondered if the missionary knew more than he was letting on.

  The others stretched, barely awake after their heroic struggle to stay seated all morning. The only motive for their good behavior was food. Namil’s and Bakjun’s palms were already cupped and waiting for the South Korean Choco Pies that Missionary Lee occasionally gave them if they behaved. The cheap fifty-cents-a-pop snack made me long for industrial-strength toothpaste, but as soon as the missionary came back and handed them out, even Yongju unwrapped the bright red packaging as if the chocolate-covered marshmallow cream pie was an archaeological find.

  Bakjun held his up like a squirrel guarding an acorn in winter. “I remember the first time I had one of these after crossing. Never had anything so good.”

  If junk food was the height of their pleasure, I wondered if it was truly possible to imagine their world across the river. I tried to participate. “I heard that Choco Pies are hot on the Pyongyang black market—the jangmadang,” I corrected myself, and used their word for it. “Companies give them out to people from your country working in Kaesong for South Korean companies, then the sweets leak out and get resold. Some higher-ups are making a lot of cash.”

  “I don’t understand a word you’re saying.” Namil cheerfully licked his fingers one by one. “It’s all Han characters to me.”

  “Of course your government wouldn’t tell you about Kaesong.” I explained that a small group of their people worked for South Korean companies but were not allowed to leave the special district within Kaesong again. “All governments, ultimately, are in collusion with one another.”

  “Collusion? What’s collusion?” said Namil.

  “We would never work for those American lackeys!” Cheolmin the Troublemaker—my private moniker for him—said angrily in front of South Korean passport holder Missionary Lee, though his front teeth were streaked with the Choco Pie made in that very country.

  Bakjun, who had slowly gone from listless to angry with his supply of cigarettes and alcohol cut off, smacked the table. “I don’t care if they give good handouts and make good snacks. I’d cut my balls off than work for an American lackey.”

  The missionary’s hands flapped to his mouth. “If you don’t stop, I’ll have to discipline you! Remember, whatever you say is always in the presence of the Lord.”

  “Maybe I got it wrong,” I said.

  I focused on the gooey marshmallow. I tried to understand wh
at it must be like for my friends to be inundated with so much new data. I suddenly missed my mom, and myself, the person I was with her, even with my parents’ messy, soiled marriage. Then Yongju smiled and roughed up my hair, and everything else fell away, and I only felt shame and longing.

  • • •

  A few days later we had our first visitors, a couple wearing the brightest shades of spring between them. Their church meant something to me. When I was fourteen, Salvation Church had sponsored a trip for disadvantaged youth to South Korea—that was my family!—and brought me to Seoul, a city that was dotted with neon red crosses. My breath had stopped when I saw the church’s vaulted ceiling, which seemed to rise higher than a canopy of redwood trees straight into the arms of God. But these representatives supporting the safe house were the last people I wanted to lay eyes on; the Christian leadership diaspora was tiny, and with my luck, they might know my mom.

  We’d been scrubbed and polished before noon, our hair trimmed and nails cut. Our jerseys, shorts, and rolled-up jeans had been swapped for checkerboard button-down shirts and tan slacks. The other guys had their radar on the cake box cradled in Mrs. Bang’s arms, but you could have cut through Yongju’s tension with a knife. I hung back behind Missionary Lee, who was hovering in the rear. I wished I knew what he thought of this exhibit A we’d been turned into.

  Missionary Kwon handed his jacket to Yongju after taking out the three cell phones he routinely exchanged for others. “It’s for your security,” he’d first explained in his ever-grave voice, impressing me with the serious nature of his mission. I got that the missionary needed those phones to juggle his humanitarian, religious, and gang contacts, which were required for everything from fake I.D.s to crossing the border, but I didn’t feel comfortable when he began directing us like a CEO with his employees in front of the couple.