How I Became a North Korean Read online

  “Don’t give up, nuna.” His voice was as fervent as his grip. “It’s a mistake to give up. I promise I’ll get us out of here.”

  Fatigue overwhelmed me. I wondered if my baby would have been like Daehan, always feeling too much. Or calm, like her abeoji, who would always have his way.

  The murmurs became shouts.

  “This is my life’s work. Don’t waste my time any longer. Get out.”

  “Listen—”

  “Get out. Get out!”

  Missionary Lee entered my room and, with a faltering smile, kissed me on the forehead. Then he grimaced, as if a hand had reached in and squeezed his heart, and toppled sideways to the floor. I drew back from his straw-colored flesh; Daehan shouted for help and the others rushed to the missionary’s side.

  Missionary Lee murmured, “I’m fine, it’s just a little dizziness.” His breath was shallow, his forehead sticky with sweat.

  Daehan said, “He needs a doctor!”

  “I’m perfectly fine, no need for the fuss.” The missionary rubbed at his chest.

  Within minutes I heard the front door open and the stairs echo with footsteps.

  • • •

  My window was sealed with wood, and slivers of light came in through the slats by the time I woke up. I longed for the sun-covered hill of my village, for the way my eomma and I peeled hot potatoes in winter. The heat, I told myself, was responsible for how weak I had become. I crawled out from under the blanket, trying to believe that yesterday was merely the past and everything before that even more distant from me. When Yongju leaned toward me, his face as slender as candlelight, I drew back onto the yo.

  “Have you been sitting here watching me all night?” I was sure of it.

  “Only till this morning.” He flexed his feet as if they were numb.

  “What happened to Missionary Lee?”

  His hand brushed gently across my eyelids, closing them. “I don’t know, but, nuna, I’ll be here, if you need me.”

  “I don’t need anyone.” I pulled the thin blanket over my head. But I listened for his movements.

  When I dared to look out again, Yongju was slouched against the wall, his fingers picking precisely through the Bible’s pages as if they were the taut strings of a gayageum. But he wasn’t reading; his dark eyes were resting on me. I turned away. Caring about someone was another weakness and I couldn’t afford to be weak again.

  I hobbled out of the room alone, avoiding the arm he offered me. Daehan darted in once I left, as if he had been outside listening.

  The briny smell of the common room made me gag. The others were sprawled and tense in the stifling room. Their every sentence concerned what would happen when Missionary Kwon returned and whether they would finally be sent to a safe country. Their tension shocked me awake, and I flipped through some books from the shelf, the words just pictures to me as I thought about the few choices I had left. Until voices rose from talking to shouting, and Cheolmin slapped Gwangsu across the head.

  “Get out of my sight,” he said. “You make me sick.”

  Gwangsu cringed and crawled away on his knees.

  Bakjun said, “If I don’t get out of here, I’m gonna lose my mind. I’m gonna kill someone. Or maybe I’ll jump out of the window.”

  He looked alarmed as he glanced my way, as if he’d forgotten I was there.

  They huddled together, speaking in low voices, until Yongju came out.

  Yongju said, “What is it?”

  Cheolmin stuck a wad of gum under the saang. “Nothing, nothing.”

  “Just waiting for Missionary Kwon,” Bakjun said, “like everyone else.”

  Yongju stopped in front of them and gave them a long look. “Are you boys hiding something from me? Troubles already multiplying.”

  “Now we’re not even allowed to talk?” A tear ran down Cheolmin’s cheek before he angrily wiped it away. “What is this place? Missionary Kwon, and now you?”

  When Missionary Kwon returned the following day, I took in his rumpled linen trousers and his shoes still caked with mud, and became anxious. Yongju took the garment bag and suitcase from him, then beat the shoes against the door with his free hand.

  “You boys been good?”

  Cheolmin said, “What else is there to be here?”

  Namil said, “Where’s Missionary Lee?”

  “It was a heart attack, not Missionary Lee’s first, it seems. He had to have double bypass surgery. He’s very lucky to be alive.”

  “You mean Missionary Lee isn’t coming back?” Yongju dropped the shoes.

  “No, probably not. But that tough old snail will be okay. God was watching out for him.” Missionary Kwon patted Yongju on the back. “You could say his heart sent him a stern warning.”

  “What will happen to us?” Hope flared in Yongju’s voice, but I knew better than to hope.

  “You’ll be moved to new safe houses in the next few weeks where my people can be with you full-time,” Missionary Kwon said. “In the meantime I’ll be completely available to you here.”

  In front of me was another safe house, another bare cell of a room. Like a rock, I would be worn down by the wind and the sand in this country that had taken everything from me. I thought of my eomma. Maybe she blamed my abba, then me, before retreating into a medicated haze. I thought of how easily I had left her, how I could never take that back.

  Cheolmin hurled a slipper at the plastic-covered window. “What kind of scam is this?”

  “This is my establishment and my rules.” Missionary Kwon unlocked the door and swept it open. “If any of you want to leave, anytime, feel free. You’re not a prisoner here.”

  The boys’ voices rose in protest, but no one walked out.

  The missionary looked fiercely at us. “How do you understand God’s will? You can’t understand, you merely accept.”

  The will to live is stronger than hope, and I made my decision before I knew there was a choice to be made. Maybe I would have decided differently if Missionary Lee had been with us.

  The day I was to have my cast removed, Missionary Kwon drove me to the doctor’s house, an hour’s drive away. It was the first Western-style house I had ever seen.

  I had visited this confused house that first terrible time, but only now was I able to see it. Missionary Kwon’s hand curved around my waist, his touch an electric shock. “Come,” he urged, and steered me into the house.

  The back room where I’d been treated before was cluttered with reproductions of paintings and souvenirs from the doctor’s travels. Travel, something beyond my understanding. The doctor directed a blur of questions at me, then told me to sit on a long raised bed. While he cut open the cast with an angrily buzzing machine, he kept flashing his pink, fleshy gums and gold fillings at me as if a smile could make everything better. I had lost my family, my country, my unborn baby. Where were the smiles in that? I thought of Yongju’s face, how it carried its sadness so plainly, how it comforted.

  “All this big country,” Missionary Kwon said afterward in the car. The wind carried his words out the window into the green hills. “How do you feel?”

  “I feel safe with you.” My words came automatically. I knew what men needed to hear.

  I knew he needed to be needed by us. And we did need him, he who put food on our table every day and had paid for my escape, who decided when we would be allowed to make the last dangerous crossing. But he couldn’t bring my baby back. In that sense there was nothing he could give me.

  But that wasn’t true, either. When he said suddenly, “Your child is with God,” I was filled with gratitude.

  I asked, “Is that your son?”

  He nodded at the photo hanging from the mirror.

  “How old is he?”

  He smiled briefly. “Only fourteen, and he already speaks better English than I ever did. He’s
taking English, taekwondo. And he’s already a black belt.”

  “And your wife?”

  His eyes lingered on my face, and I felt his interest rise.

  “He’s with his eomma in Seoul. We’re no longer married. Let’s just say it’s a difficult situation.”

  On the drive back, he stopped in town to pick up a carton of ice cream from a small corner shop. When he got out, his eyes darted left and right as if he was the hunted one.

  Once the road became an empty road to nowhere, soybean fields on both sides, he kept glancing my way. His clean, earthy smell reminded me of newly churned farmland. He had desirably pale skin and wasn’t a bad-looking man, though he was thick in the waist and had large yellowed teeth. I took stock as I dipped into the carton of mint chocolate chip, its sweetness so bruising that it stung my tongue. Holy men were still men.

  Then he said, “I recently got someone to South Korea.” As if he knew precisely what to say to me.

  “To South Korea.”

  “Yes, through my people. I’m capable of doing that, and more.” He seemed awed by who he had become.

  “Why did she get to go?”

  He slowed the car. “What makes you think it’s a she?”

  I considered his hand, that mighty hand that I swore would be the last in the sequence of hands in my life. I wished all those hands to be dismembered, strung up, hung on a laundry line to dry and shrivel in the sun.

  Instead I drifted my hand to his thigh, and waited. I did what I had to do to live.

  • • •

  I didn’t know then that Daehan had called his mother and that people outside of Missionary Kwon’s organization were starting to move and work for us. I was too used to thinking of myself as alone.

  It happened the way I expected. The next night Missionary Kwon walked quietly into my room. He was dressed the way he always was, in a dress shirt, jacket, and slacks. The man seemed to sleep in uniform, so determined to preserve this upright image of himself. He had me follow him to the front door, turned the key, and led me outside into the monsoon rains. I ignored the large umbrella he held out and descended the slippery steps, letting the rain cleanse me. The mud sucked at my slippers and water turned my nightdress into a river. I was alert and ready until I smelled the sweetness of my breasts becoming moist with milk, and my weak leg buckled despite the walking stick. He gripped me by the shoulders and helped me into the backseat of the car. Water pooled under me. As he unzipped his slacks, I prepared myself.

  “It’s a solitary life, a hard life for any man, even a religious man.” His face was half in shadow. He tossed his tie over his shoulder. “You seem to understand that about me.”

  I tried to remember what my former self would have done and said, and let her guide me.

  As he undressed me, my teeth began to chatter. The nub of the seat belt dug into my back, and our breathing steamed up the windows.

  He said, “For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may show his mercy to all.”

  He prayed for God to forgive his weak flesh as he pulled down my underwear with his thumbs. His mouth tasted of tart tangerines. The car smelled like a wet towel. My other self, my old self who knew how to survive, kept her eyes fixed on the roof of the car above her and thought about how she might benefit from this exchange. Tried to visualize a future. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me at all.

  But it was me when we walked up the stairs, my arms and legs heavy, my back bruised by the seat-belt buckle. I tried to focus on the present. Left, right, left, right. One mossy step at a time.

  Until I saw Yongju pacing across the common room. His slouching shoulders, the delicate outlines of his worry, were excruciating to see.

  “I checked on you, dongmu, and you weren’t there!” He rushed up to me, relief on his face. How did you—”

  As he grasped my hands, Missionary Kwon came in and locked the door behind him.

  Yongju’s breathing became fast and shallow. Or was it mine? I was wet and chilly, but my cheeks flushed with heat.

  “There was a medical emergency.” Missionary Kwon folded his arms together. “Everything’s fine now, so you should go back to your room.” His voice stayed even.

  “Dongmu,” I said, but Yongju didn’t stay to listen.

  I followed him to the supply room, too anxious to keep a careful distance. I could have touched him if I’d reached out, but I didn’t.

  “I do what I have to do,” I said.

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  But I needed him to know what time had done to me. I wanted someone, finally, to know me. “You don’t know how it was for us. At the worst of it, my abba continued to go to work at the shoe factory though it stopped paying its workers. All the machines were turned off, but he kept going until he died. My eomma? She would boil soup thickened with bits of bark and weeds. The doctor had no medicine for her pneumonia. Then she started taking bbindu and the eomma I knew disappeared.”

  I watched his bowed head and told him how afraid I had been, traveling across the country in boy’s clothes, hiding from train conductors and sneaking across the border and walking for hours to trade and sell the scraps I had. How my father died from the Great Hunger and left us. “One thing sustained me: the dream of leaving. Now it’s the only thing I have left.”

  I had never spoken so much about myself. Fierce, clipped words tumbled out. I was exhausted, but I didn’t know what he would say once I stopped speaking.

  His head was still bowed, his fists clenched. It made me sad to look at him for too long.

  I said, “I hear my eomma’s voice in the rain.”

  What hurt the most was the way he gazed at me: with understanding. He stepped closer and his lips brushed across my hair. Almost a light kiss, as if a breeze had passed across it. How could he, knowing what he knew. He uncrossed my arms that were tight around my torso and wiped the corners of my eyes. Tears, another weakness. I looked at the other country that he was for me, at his outrageous idealism. At his innocence.

  18

  Yongju

  The oppressive rains that night would be imprinted on my memory. My nose was full of the ripe bouquet of our rank smells and I tried to escape it, attempting to escape from myself.

  The windows were misted over, distorting the trees into swollen, distended shapes that swayed in the wind like naked bodies. Rain stippled my perspective, but I thought I saw a human smudge and pressed my face against the plastic. It was Jangmi, kicking up puddles of water with her feet, holding her nightdress up high from the sludge. I was alarmed and amazed that she had somehow freed herself. She hadn’t been broken after all, only hoarding her strength. Maybe her mouth was open, drinking the rain. Maybe she was thinking of me. I thought she was alone.

  The moment the door opened, I saw Jangmi’s wet nightdress reveal her like a clear glass of water. She was soaked, her water-logged skirt hiked up to mid-thigh, and so thin she looked like she might shatter if you held her. But when I saw Missionary Kwon behind her, his granite hand on her hip, I was the one who cracked.

  I tried to forget the way Jangmi’s nightdress had revealed her. The way Missionary Kwon looked at me as if he were peering through a microscope.

  During the next day’s morning service I willed myself not to think, to disappear, when we sang the words “As the deer panteth for the water so my heart longeth after you. You alone are my heart’s desire and I long to worship you . . .” and then a half hour later, as Missionary Kwon intoned, “It is impossible to please God without faith . . .” But I resented the gleam of his leather shoes set parallel to each other by the door, his scrubbed smell of pine soap. His white collar, his skin pink and glowing with health like a middle-aged baby, when the skin under my arms was red and prickly with heat rash. There was no calm to be found in a woman turned into a pillar of salt. A man’s head served on a platter. An ark floating while all o
f humanity drowned.

  When the rest of us sat down for lunch, Cheolmin stood like a soldier and announced, “I couldn’t memorize my verse.”

  Bakjun stood up beside Cheolmin. “I couldn’t, either.”

  Namil raised himself to his knees. “I didn’t, either.”

  Cheolmin and Bakjun looked angry and uncertain, as if this was as far as they had planned their rebellion. They looked at Missionary Kwon.

  “All of you?” Missionary Kwon set down his chopsticks. “All three? And the rest of you let this happen? Do the Lord’s words mean anything to you? Do you know why you’re here and not out on the street?”

  “It’s August. We’ve been stuck inside for months.” Cheolmin scraped at his cheeks and flicked away the dead skin. “We’re living the same day over and over again and nothing’s changed. You haven’t kept your promises.”

  “Listen to that rain.” Missionary Kwon ran his fingers through his gelled hair in one even, controlled motion. “There’s a lesson in that rain. It’s a sign, another Noah’s ark, God has sent another flood.”

  “Noah’s ark?” Namil frowned, our early lessons already forgotten.

  I said, “Who do you think he’s cleansing?”

  Missionary Kwon stood up and lifted the saang high above our heads so that our chopsticks hovered in the air. He had the audacity to look smug. “Today we’ll skip lunch together and pray on an empty stomach. It will give you clarity.”

  We hadn’t crossed and risked our lives for this.

  I wasn’t surprised when Cheolmin punched the air with his fist. “I don’t want anything to be clear—I want to eat!” He looked ready to kill. He snatched Missionary Kwon’s Bible from his side and hurled it across the room. A thud resounded; the paper tore.

  Missionary Kwon gasped, and his hand flew up to protect his heart. “Gwangsu, Daehan, the rest of you, cover the dishes and store the banchan in the icebox for now.” His voice was trimmed of feeling and he avoided Jangmi and me, as if we didn’t exist.