How I Became a North Korean Read online

  Ignoring him, Missionary Kwon turned to me. “I need a word with you, Daehan. That shouldn’t surprise you.” I was ready.

  I followed him down the exposed concrete stairs and out the front gate toward his car, my head a muddle. Who I was, what I believed, all the neat black-and-white boundaries of the map of my life no longer made sense. I rubbed at my hair, my cheeks, and wished I could strip out of my skin. The sun warmed my back after precisely ninety-nine days without direct sunlight on it and the foothills were finally a verdant green, but none of it mattered.

  He dusted off the boxy sedan’s windshield and windows with a soft mop from the trunk, taking his time. I waited a few steps behind him, my hands folded together. I realized that my ankles were peeking out from my pants, and that in the last months I’d outgrown Missionary Kwon. He got into the car and fiddled with the navigation system, then looked out at me. “Are you going to stand there all day?”

  So I lowered myself onto the hot prickle of the passenger seat, prepared to be kicked out of the safe house and be liberated.

  He tapped impatiently at the black screen. “Do you know how to make this work?”

  Of course I understood the psychology of machines, which was actually only the psychology of their maker. I watched Missionary Kwon from the corner of my eye, the smooth facade of his face, which was beginning to remind me of a salesman’s. What he’d said about discipline and faith in the safe house was probably mostly true, but it was also unjust and cruel and, worst of all, dangerous. I was thinking about the nature of God, and especially about how to confess, when Missionary Kwon started the car and I was suddenly off the premises with a man I’d accused of being a potential murderer.

  I prepared myself. “Missionary Kwon—”

  “Daehan, I want to tell you a story about a man,” he said. “This man is me.”

  Before I could stop him, he launched into how he had once languished in a South Korean jail, a no-good man abandoned by society. I became extremely uncomfortable, suffocated as I was by my own secrets.

  “I lost everyone—my wife, my brothers and sisters—to my ways. I lost my son.”

  He tapped a photo dangling from the rearview mirror, a grave young boy around six. I couldn’t imagine Missionary Kwon as a father, but then maybe no one ever really seemed like a father.

  “There wasn’t anything illegal I didn’t do. I did my time as a loan shark, I ran a gambling ring, I had my hand in everything until I got caught. My son would be your age now, you know. He’s in Cheonan, in South Korea. I get to see him a few times a year. That’s it. If I show up at any other time, my wife calls the police. The church saved me. God tested me, and I tested him, but now I know he reserved me for a greater purpose.”

  My North Korean friends, and the others before him, were the greater purpose.

  I asked, “Why are you telling me this?”

  He kept talking as if he were speaking more to himself than to me. I managed to stay quiet the way an older man would expect me to and kept my eyes fixed on that dangling family photo. My head was filled with his confessions, this family man, the man with a dark underbelly of a past, who helped and hurt the people entrusted to him. A man, in the end, who believed in God.

  Finally, we stopped near the river, a very different river in the summer heat with its banks overgrown with willow trees. There were smugglers openly working in some sort of cooperation with a border guard, sending their goods across with a car tire supporting a length of plywood. The village on the other side had gray walls surrounding peaked roofs and chimneys. Men were fishing, a woman was doing laundry in the river, and kids were playing on the bank. It seemed so safe, bucolic even.

  “Missionary Kwon—”

  “Pay attention. I drove here for you.” He lowered the windows. “Geogi, there’re journalists in that car ahead. Probably South Korean. There they are.”

  They were filming the fishermen across the river. The North Koreans, finally noticing the camera’s body jutting out of the tinted window, wearily thrust their fishing rods in the air as if they were used to being watched. Only one of the men threw his rod to the ground. The camera panned across them. It was as if a whole society was being watched and followed against its will. I wanted to throw rocks at the reporters in their cars and stop them.

  “We shouldn’t be gawking at them,” I said. “They’re people.”

  “Half of those kids’ll probably cross over as soon as the water warms up a little; they’ll beg and make some money for their family or keep eating whatever they find until they’re full or get caught. Most of them only care about food. You’d be that way, too, if you’d been hungry your whole life. I make it my business to know as many of the kids who cross as I can.”

  “You were looking for North Koreans the first day we met.” I recalled his disappointment when I told him I was a Joseon-jok. “Actually, that day—”

  “You ever thought about what happens to them after crossing? They take on a new identity and name. They invent a biography for themselves—at least until they have to be more truthful so that someone like me can double-check their story and give them shelter. If they’re ever lucky enough to cross into a third country, most reinvent themselves all over again. But they’ll always be North Korean. The way they talk and think, the things they know and the things they don’t, their history wiped out in a new country—it marks them forever. They go to South Korea with their fantasies and are ashamed when they’re looked down at, or shocked when people suspect them of being spies, or act wary, or, worse, stop caring. I’ve seen it hundreds of times. They don’t have a choice, you see. Unlike you.”

  My head snapped up.

  “All this time, I believed you were an orphan, like me. How long were you going to continue with that story?”

  He pulled a leaflet out of his jacket pocket and showed me the Chinese and Korean printing announcing a missing son, an image of myself mugging for the camera in a T-shirt printed with a bearded Leo Tolstoy. My palms became clammy.

  He ripped up the flyer and let the two halves of my face flutter to his feet.

  “I’m a man chosen by God to serve him, and by making a fool out of me, you’ve made a fool out of God.”

  I anticipated, even hoped for, a slap across the face. He only flicked up his hand to check his watch.

  The wind gusted in through the car windows, then stilled. It was as if God had come and spoken to us, but we didn’t know how to understand him. I felt the weight of what I’d put my parents through, my fear of facing them, and loneliness, the trough of turbulent feelings and fears that I couldn’t share with anyone.

  I buried my face in my hands. “I’ll pack my things when we get back.”

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  My head jerked up. “Aren’t you going to send me away?”

  “Not until we move everyone out. It’s for everyone’s safety. We can’t let you out now that you know where the house is.”

  “So I can’t leave?”

  I was still digesting this when he handed me a cell phone, one he used for general phone calls. I called my dad, as the missionary had instructed, and, because I had no choice, let my abba know that I was still safe and that I would be home soon enough.

  • • •

  That night I rolled closer to Yongju’s back than before, until we were touching. With my chin against the braid of his backbone, I felt the rise and fall of his breathing. My body’s heat must have been comforting, for he didn’t retreat. I lay there trying not to think about anything, when his shoulders began to shake and I realized he was crying. I didn’t know what to do. Shudders continued to move through him.

  I raised my hand and ventured to rub his back the way my mom used to do for me when I had the flu. I was electric with feeling. I was afraid of God. The pace of Yongju’s breathing slowed until he was asleep, but I stayed alert. How could I
sleep, curved so close to his body’s fetal position, afraid and grateful, and finally, despite everything, content?

  All sorts of black thoughts, and bright thoughts, continued their midnight invasion. I gave up on sleep and escaped to the common room. I didn’t know what to do, so I dropped to my knees in front of the hanging cross, closed my eyes, and prepared to embark on a great carpet of prayer for the North Koreans in their country to someday live free from tyranny. I wanted to pray that those responsible for countless crimes against their own people be punished, that the international community be more courageous, and especially that those hiding in China find the freedom they had risked so much for. I wanted to pray for Missionary Lee, for my family, my friends, and especially for myself. But the words wouldn’t come.

  I got up. I wanted to be near Yongju; I wanted him safe. I did have choices. I finally crept into Missionary Lee’s room and began searching. It was easier than I’d thought, since his snoring covered up my small sounds. I moved a foot a minute, it seemed, my hand creeping through his drawers, his shelves, his suitcase pockets. Then I saw the cell phone and the solar charger on the windowsill.

  The sky was at its darkest; in a few hours it would be day. From the common room I pressed in my mom’s number—the same one she’d had in America—before I lost courage. She might not know who to talk to or might not want to get involved; but with my hand cupped around my mouth, I did what I had to. I called.

  16

  Yongju

  It still hurts to remember how Jangmi was returned to us. When Missionary Kwon had proudly showed me the photos of his new women, I never dreamed Jangmi would be among them. But she was, and I persuaded the missionary to bring her to us. But then she entered behind him with her right foot in a cast and her eyes, dull as lumps of charred coal, gazing out as if there was nothing in the world left to look at. The heaviness she brought with her suffocated all my words. The woman who hovered behind Missionary Kwon like a harnessed ox was Jangmi but not Jangmi. The Jangmi I knew didn’t avoid your eyes but looked around defiantly, studying her surroundings and storing up information, the way the hunted do. The Jangmi I knew didn’t have a flat stomach.

  Questions welled up inside me. What had happened to her? Where had he brought the others from? What had become of my eomma and dongsaeng? My long hair prickled my neck, my armpits dampened with sweat. It was as if I had suddenly discovered my body. The story of her journey was written on hers: She limped ahead on a walking stick as if the floor was littered with nails. Her right leg was swollen above the plaster; mottled yellowed bruises banded around her forearm and disappeared up the sleeve of her baggy dress.

  Daehan dropped the Bible flash cards he was trimming into perfect rectangles, scattering them like paper rain. His finger pointing at her was as straight as an arrow. “You’re the one who stole from us!”

  He surged ahead with accusations, but it was as if she couldn’t hear him, couldn’t see any of it: the saang we ate on that wobbled on its fourth leg, the stacks of banseok we sat on to cushion the floor, the bookshelf lined with black Bibles and hymnals, our names branded on them. The others and me.

  Gwangsu got up so quickly that he fell and hit his head on the saang.

  “Pretty nuna.” Cheolmin’s voice was so sharp it could have honed knives. “When was the last time we saw you? Oh, I remember! When you betrayed us!”

  “What’s she doing here?” Bakjun chimed in.

  “Keep your mouths shut,” Missionary Kwon said. “Thanks to Jangmi, I was able to help a number of other girls to my shelters, but she needed special attention—medical attention.” He meant the Christian doctor he trusted who lived in the area.

  Her solitude was impenetrable; she didn’t once look at Missionary Kwon during this speech or when he told Missionary Lee, “It was one of our most expensive rescue missions.”

  Cheolmin looked as if he would take her apart piece by piece with his jagged teeth. “So there’s enough money to pay for a load of women, but not enough to get us out of China?”

  “Look here,” I said. “She’s one of us. She needed help. That’s what matters.”

  Cheolmin snorted, all residual respect for my age and status, all hope, gone. Only Namil smiled at Jangmi, showing the threads of lunch’s blanched spinach trapped between his teeth, then shrugged his shoulders.

  “She’s bad news,” Daehan pronounced in my ear, his voice full of worry. “You shouldn’t get involved in her affairs.”

  While the boys complained, Missionary Lee spread his arms like an eagle and gave her an awkward hug, surrounding her small frame. She shuddered and pressed back into the bookcase so hard that its skeleton must have imprinted itself on her back. No corner seemed deep enough for her.

  “I’m so sorry,” Missionary Lee stammered, and he clumsily dusted off her shoulders, her stomach, as if trying to brush away his fingerprints. She let out a small, raking scream at his touch, and I could only guess what must have happened to her.

  Missionary Lee said, “Is there something you want, my child? Is there anything I can do for you at all? Maybe some food?” His voice squeaked with alarm.

  She looked away. “I want to be without this body. I want to be air. Can you make that happen?”

  Missionary Kwon thumped the wall and addressed the boys. “I demand obedience. Who runs this house? Who gives the orders here? She is staying because I said she’s staying.”

  I promised to watch over her, and Missionary Kwon knew I kept my word. My words—I was embarrassed for those helpless, fluttering birds as adrift as I was.

  Once Missionary Kwon left, the others bowed together in a conspiratorial circle, touching.

  • • •

  After Jangmi had fled our mountain dugout, questions made fierce revolutions in my head. Now more questions. What had happened to her? Did I really care about her, about anyone, or were my expressions of interest merely a way of escaping myself? One thing was certain: No doctor could repair what was broken inside Jangmi.

  All afternoon, while she rested, I glued and painted the wood crosses that Missionary Kwon had us make for churches located overseas. I worked slowly, deliberately. There were so many fraught elements involved, and my own considerations daunted me. I saw walls that I shouldn’t broach: a nuna four years my senior who was once with child, my desire in search of an object.

  “She’s dangerous,” said Daehan, his words as wild as weeds. “Someone who’s stolen and betrayed us will do it again.”

  He wasn’t wrong. But she had done it for her child. I said like a fool, “I can be betrayed again.”

  “Sympathy is healthy. Sympathy I get.” His eyes darkened. “But someone like her couldn’t possibly be interesting to you.”

  He meant an uneducated, provincial woman, an ajumma knowledgeable in the womanly ways, all stories I had already told myself.

  His words provoked me. I chopped fresh ginger the way my eomeoni had once done for me and made her tea. As I walked to Jangmi’s room, a mighty hand seemed to seize a gun’s barrel and aim it at my chest. I saw the red leather jacket. The women I loved, their feet knocked against the ground like hollowed-out gourds as they were dragged away. I halted at the door’s threshold, memories lodged in my throat like a curved fish bone.

  July had turned the building into a greenhouse of trapped stale air, but Jangmi was balled up under a blanket, her arms shielding her head. As if I even knew how to be dangerous.

  As soon as I set the tray beside her, she flung the blanket away. The room tipped for me as her eyes touched mine. The melancholy of her eyes. They felt like home. She didn’t belong to the acidic stink of waste and urine seeping out of the bathroom and the brassy smell of our bodies in the boarded-up heat that made you gag if you breathed too deeply. The sole of her foot was as tough as animal hide, but her toes were somehow still perfectly formed, like cultured pearls. It moved me, her rough elegance.

&
nbsp; “What do you want? I don’t have anything to give you and you don’t have anything I need.”

  She was so direct, so different from Myeonghui, who already felt like another life.

  “Why do you think I want something?”

  “Everyone wants something from each other.”

  She wasn’t wrong, but I said, “I want to stay right here.”

  “Why?” She shook her head. “I’m capable of much, much worse.”

  She grabbed my knee, digging in. “Tell me, dongmu, what would you do to get out of this country? Would you kill, if you had to?”

  She raised those words to her lips so easily.

  I thought about the Dear Leader, the man in the red leather jacket. “Not everyone deserves to live.”

  “No, maybe they don’t.”

  I said, “You, dongmu, would you?”

  She told me to sit beside her, so I did. I would have done anything she told me to. My fingers tingled when she took my hands in hers.

  “You have such pretty hands.” Her smile was turbulent. “I’ve never seen such beautiful hands. Maybe hands like yours aren’t made for killing.”

  I thought about my eomeoni, pushed into a van. My sister, how they had lifted her up when she wouldn’t quiet down and dropped her into the van like a chopped-down tree. How I couldn’t do anything for them.

  “You can do anything.” I gazed at her. “You’re stronger than I am.”

  • • •

  It was Daehan who told me we were organisms of infinite hunger, born hungry infants before we are able to form permanent memories. There were as many different kinds of hunger as there were people. Change and stillness, love and solitude, freedom and tyranny, all of them to me were synonyms for hunger. To be beyond hunger, I thought, must be a place beyond desire.

  A colony of parasites nested inside Jangmi. She ate bowls of rice, soybean-paste stew, spicy pork when it was available, as if eating would stave off thinking. I began giving her half my portion; she reminded me of what it meant to be hungry.