How I Became a North Korean Read online

  “The whole shitty town knows you’re a fanatic. Hard not to, when you stand on street corners screeching God’s name.” He grabbed a hockey stick and with it poked me in the crack of my butt. “My dad expects Princeton, at worst. You have any idea what you’ve done?”

  He pushed the stick upward, nearly lifting me off the ground. “Get the recorder running,” he said. “Insurance he’ll keep quiet.”

  They forced me to strip off all my clothes and hump the hockey stick, fondle myself in front of them, and worse, until they became bored and left for a party.

  • • •

  On Monday I got as far as ten yards from the school’s chain-link fence. Those ten yards might as well have been the Pacific Ocean. A sea of students milled in front of me, all potential enemies and not a single ally in sight. I was sure that everyone knew what had happened to me. Gauzy-skirted Anna Hunter passed me, everyone’s object of lust who didn’t know I existed; then came cliques that treated the prom—a night on which girls across the nation wiped out their savings to resemble a cream puff—as if it were a national security issue. Somewhere, there was Adam. Harvard didn’t matter anymore, my parents’ hopes didn’t matter, nor did a future banking job that would reward me with a handsome vacation home in Hawaii for preying on global markets. Confined in that small space of high school, no camouflage would ever be thick enough for me. I didn’t belong there.

  For nearly a month I left the house every day and made as if I were going to school. I told myself I was coming up with a plan B, some grand scheme concerning my life, but what I actually did was run away from myself. I skimmed through science journals and comic books in the local library and took long bus rides to the beach and stared out at the brutal ocean, falling back on familiar fantasies about the remarkable life I would have surely led if I hadn’t left China. That is, until the day the school contacted my dad.

  My dad’s complexion went from peach to pomegranate after we left the principal’s office, but he didn’t say anything in the car. He merely stroked the pocket watch in his palm, one he always kept with him as if it were a beloved aging pet. He was a clock-store manager and the ticktocking surrounding him seemed to satisfy his need for conversation. He took great pride in his job—he called it a “vocation”—and often told strangers that he had once repaired a 1902 Audemars Piguet.

  There was no order or reason to the way he drove. We were up in the San Bernardino Mountains one moment, then bordering Fresno the next before backtracking. The gas tank dwindled. Waste was my dad’s way of letting me know he was angry.

  “You know what happens to people who let go of their routines?” he said, as if I weren’t a believer of routines myself. “They end up sucked into the chaos around them. You and I, we’re not so good at blending in. But an I.Q. of 150 is your way out. It’s a gift from God, if you want to think of it that way.”

  I managed to stay quiet for once. There wasn’t an honest word I could share with him.

  When he finally did look at me, he was angrier than I’d ever seen him. He was a good dad. He never hit me or raised his voice. He had also probably never broken a rule in his life. “What you did was wrong. Your only job is to go to school. We don’t ask much of you.”

  I felt, suddenly, very tired. “Abba,” I said. “You know sailors used to study maps studded with dragons, mermaids, and sirens, and pray not to fall off the edge of the world. I think I understand how they felt. Did you ever consider there might be a reason I don’t want to go to school?”

  “Who wants to eat medicine or raise children? You do it because it’s the right thing to do—it’s good for you.” He pulled up in front of our house. “I’m sure you had your reasons, and they were probably very good reasons. But—”

  “I know. There are two kinds of people in this world: people with excuses and people without,” I said. “You’ve been saying that since I was in the cradle.”

  “We never had a cradle.”

  “Not everything is literal.”

  He said uncomfortably, “We can fix the problem together.”

  But there was nothing I could tell him. I agreed to attend school on Monday if he insisted, which sent him into platitudes about the importance of education. The conversation went predictably downhill from there. I didn’t know if it was us or our culture or both, but we were always speaking from two different shores, unable to hear each other.

  • • •

  My mom always insisted that my dad and I were exactly alike, but I didn’t think we had much in common. One meeting point I was willing to concede was our fondness for habits. I relied on habits to rein me in. I prayed first thing in the morning, then studied five new English vocabulary words before getting out of bed. A breakfast of orange juice and some form of protein always followed. To structure the week, I did a sudoku puzzle daily and read a book every three days. Once a week, I maintained my beloved collection of survival gadgets that my parents augmented each birthday.

  The routine that gave my life its most definite shape was being a Christian. Thanks to my mom, I’d been baptized before I could call my parents Eomma and Abba. Compared with my immediate environment, the Bible felt like a known world.

  My dad was visibly relieved when he shipped me off that Friday to Big Bear Lake for one of the many church retreats that dotted my yearly calendar. He hadn’t known what to do with me since Mom took off for China a few months ago for her first-ever missionary effort, and my skipping school had only made it worse.

  But camp was like a shirt buttoned wrong from the start. By the time I arrived I had developed a pimple the size of a wart on my nose. Then the counselors, some of whom I knew from other church retreats in other locations, served us dry pancakes for dinner due to a catering catastrophe. The downhill of my day escalated when I delivered a humiliating, full-throttle solo of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” after everyone else stopped singing following the first verse, and, despite the counselors’ machinations, was picked second-to-last for Bible Jeopardy, a game everyone should have known I excelled at.

  I’d never acquired the mysterious talent for making friends, but that weekend my usual thick skin felt flayed and raw, and without Tobias Lee, my Christian fellow-in-arms who usually kept me company on retreats, the cafeteria felt dreadfully vast. There, despite all our brother, brother, and sister, sister to one another a few hours before, the tired social order asserted itself. The usual predictable groups sat at long tables, from kids with haloes hovering over their heads to kids wearing motorcycle jackets and hiding stashes of pot. Even one of the P.K.s (also known as pastors’ kids) was a dealer. There were the cool Christians in preppy shirts and dresses at a table far from the others and a gaggle of colorless personalities crowded grumpily next to them, laughing each time the “cool” ones cracked a joke. It might as well have been a school lunchroom. Some of the nicer ones waved at me when they passed, but I knew I wasn’t their first choice or their second or even their seventh. I slid onto a wood bench and sat alone.

  I was relieved when Grace Lee came up to my table with a small group behind her. She had a sleek skein of hair and an expression as cheerful as a roll of Life Savers. I’d been in awe of her for all seven years of my life in America, and though she was perennially nice to everyone, including me, her sentences directed at me invariably began with “You’re so funny” and was said in a way that suggested “You’re so strange.”

  I pulled together my splayed-out, gangly limbs and sat up straight, trying to appear as normal as I could.

  She studied me. “That’s the first Noah’s ark T-shirt I’ve ever seen.”

  “You can get them silk-screen-printed by mail order, if you sketch it first.” I spread the shirt out wide so she could see it better. “Isn’t it great? It’s got all my favorite animals on it.”

  My elbow knocked into my tray, but a guy with lopsided biceps caught it before it fell.

  “Hey, chi
ll out there.” He gave me a friendly pat while frantically scanning the room.

  What can only be called an awkward silence descended. I had a knack for creating them.

  “Plenty of seats.” I patted the spot beside me.

  “I promised Kate,” Grace said apologetically, and I saw her friend waving her over to the end table. “You want to join?”

  I knew I wasn’t wanted, but I picked up my tray and joined them. That was me, a nutty brown-skinned, elephant-eared guy with God and a collection of finger puppets as companions. A guy more at ease with objects than people. As the others swapped stories and strained to be likable to one another, I spooned up some of the rubbery lasagna. I reminded myself that God was with me and that I was never alone, but I felt like Robinson Crusoe on a deserted island surrounded by bright, chirping parrots.

  • • •

  There were certain myths that I lived by. One of them was that I was fearless. I believed I wasn’t afraid of pain or being socially ostracized—that is, until we walked down to the lake the next day. To someone who can’t swim, Big Bear Lake might as well have been the Pacific Ocean.

  I didn’t even like bathtubs, maybe because my father’s idea of teaching me to swim was to toss me into the local pool when I was five years old and watch me promptly sink to the bottom. I excelled at all the other survival skills I’d picked up from years of Boy Scouts, but despite a whale’s weight of effort I could only paddle for about two minutes before sputtering downward.

  The ground on the way to the lake was as hard as an overbaked brownie and crackly with pine needles. I walked behind everyone else, wishing I was heading in the opposite direction, deep into the mountains, past deer tracks and dried-up creek beds, to retreat like Moses and become renewed. I craved the courage to walk away from my life, from Monday, when I would have to face Adam and his friends and find a new map to live by. At the very least, I wanted to return to China, where my life had made more sense to me. As we approached the water, I listened for the omnipresence of God in the dim roar of the motorboats and the water lapping at the lake’s shore. I almost heard it.

  A blond kayaking instructor straight out of a Scandinavian magazine dumped a set of life jackets near my feet, as if he somehow knew that I needed one the most. The others, who had stepped straight out of a J.Crew catalog in their polo shirts and shorts, talked nonstop to one another without receiving strange looks or offending anyone. These people born with a social finesse I lacked started partnering up, grabbing paddles, and helping each other with their life jackets.

  “Okay, kids!” said one of the older youth leaders with a tug to his ginger-colored mustache. He extended his large hands out to each side like race car flags. “Don’t be stupid out there—God’s always watching.”

  There were already people rowing out into the lake’s endless silver gray, bobbing up and down with each slap of water, no bigger than twigs. The kids ahead of me waded in and pushed off in double kayaks until it was my turn. My hands felt as thick as winter gloves. Finally my single kayak’s plastic belly scraped against the sandy bottom and I floated away from the shore.

  The other kayaks paddled ahead. I watched a blue heron dip low, thrust its needlepoint beak into the green water, and burst back up with a tiny fish. My fear magnified everything on the lake. A bird’s shadow was the size of a baseball field, the murmuring water around me resembled the voices of people. Entire civilizations seemed to be speaking, but not to me. There was a disturbed motion from deep down in the water, and I thought of the Loch Ness monster, of Grendel’s lair. I felt a desperate hope that the bright cerulean sky would split apart like a badly stitched bedspread as the Lord and his procession of trumpeting angels marched through, with Michael the archangel in the lead, making his stunning entry. They would clarify my life.

  I was leaning over when a motorboat zipped by, the kayak’s bow jumped, and I was pitched out. Water plunged up my nose and into my mouth and lungs. I flapped my arms and clung to the straps of the life vest.

  “Isn’t that Danny?” said some faraway voice. “What’s he doing this time?”

  Air bubbles rose in front of my stinging eyes. The sun became a distant spot. My arms flailed for the paddle, but it was already floating away. I descended into the dark. All sound was sucked down deep into the lake, and I was seized with the certainty that someone was waiting for me. It became silent.

  Only then I blinked, astonished to find myself conscious again. Fish were investigating my dream legs, my dream body that had landed in their watery garden. I bounced in slow motion across a bedrock littered with broken glass and cigarette butts. I vaulted across a path—if a moving mass of dead and living matter can be called a path. I wondered if this was the path to heaven, and I leaped buoyantly from a bed of waterweed that was kissing the bottoms of my feet.

  My delusions grew. The algae gave way to a podium and a man behind it barely visible in the murkiness. Someone was waiting. The plants hushed, the fish arced away. The shadow closed in on me. Tiny pieces of coral scraped against the soles of my feet. I was fearful, ecstatic, and reached for the hand of salvation, but suddenly there was no shadow, no water, no peace. Only rough human hands came pumping down on my chest and a mouth over my mouth, in a long, unwelcome kiss.

  3

  Jangmi

  In late February or early March, I walked across the frozen Tumen River toward a man from China, ready to give my unborn child a different life. Of course my crossing had actually started much earlier, maybe with the Great Hunger or even before I was born. The China beyond the river that day was as dried up and brown as my country. I walked with the eyes of men and women following me from both sides of the shore. I remember being hopeful though the riverbanks were still hoary with the remaining snow.

  A border patrol who the man from China had bribed followed me across. There were broad, dark patches where the ice looked as thin as glass, but I was from a border town. I had smuggled goods in and out since I was fourteen and knew how to read the river. I looped around where the ice became dangerously clear until I was standing in the center of the frozen river and facing the man from China: a Joseon-jok, so he spoke our language. He had an eager smile and a small head—he was small everywhere, it seemed—and he limped slowly forward as if needing my permission to come closer. With every step his left leg swung out rigidly in a semicircle until we faced each other. He was nervous; his right foot kept making circles on the ice behind him like a ballerina.

  This man named Seongsik said, “You really do believe me now, don’t you? I’m a person who can make these kinds of meetings happen. I know everyone, and everyone knows me. Money? Who needs money? You need connections.”

  He tore skin from his lower lip with his teeth. He wanted my approval, the way he repeated himself made that clear. But we didn’t have much time so I interrupted him.

  “I learn fast,” I said. “I’ll learn anything you want.” I shut my eyes tight so I wouldn’t have to look at him.

  When I opened them, he was still shyly taking me in. The shy ones were the worst, hard to read.

  “Why do you want to leave?” he asked, as if half my country, the country of his ancestors, didn’t dream of living differently.

  I was so nervous that my fingers dug arcs into my palms. “There are no good men in my country.”

  He brightened as I’d intended. “I’m a good man, I promise.”

  While the border guard smoked an imported cigarette from the many cases I’d given him to keep him happy, the Joseon man and I hurried through the ten minutes of time we had to talk—the courting time that he had bought for us.

  Money was a symbol, a disease that infected our country. It was all the money I had earned after quitting school during the Great Hunger, my life savings you could call it. I was eight when the famine changed everything. After the government rations stopped and the crops were flooded and destroyed year after year, my eomma m
ade several trips into China’s border towns to find work and food to feed us. Our government had disappeared and everyone who had followed the rules, including my abba, died. I didn’t follow rules; I stole and bartered and learned quickly, and I survived. But when the government devalued our money and made our savings worthless, all my work became nothing at all. There was no present, and the future looked even worse. Then my monthly bleeding stopped, and I realized I was pregnant.

  • • •

  After that brief meeting, I continued talking with the Joseon stranger on a Chinese Telecom–wired cellular phone that I used to smuggle goods between the two countries. I delayed making decisions while I continued to work and earn yuan. Foreign currency was the only kind I trusted anymore. The same dust clouds blew behind me as I walked to the Chinese border. It opened its large mouth to receive and release dried fish, iron ore, pine mushrooms, and other goods that we floated over in plastic sacks to our Chinese partners across the Tumen River after paying our bribe. Unless we were pretty and poor—then we could pay with our bodies. I stared across the narrow bend of river at the cars and the blue- and red-tiled roofs bright in the sun and imagined who, on the other side, I might become.

  There was no dream possible on our side of the river, and a child with only a mother would be a second-class citizen. But I didn’t rush and made contact with a broker trolling our border towns for prospective brides to marry unwed Chinese men. This woman with leathery hands approached me at the market, then quickly pulled me away so that we could talk in private and out of danger. She made me offers: “This man they say has one of those wobbly, not so strong hearts, but he’s a meek one—so you can do what you want!” “That one’s a farmer living in the countryside and owns a lot of livestock.” “A landowner—you know what a landowner is, right?” “And this one, this one’s a businessman.”