How I Became a North Korean Read online

  “What business?” I asked.

  “Business, business,” the marriage broker replied, and looked offended.

  I thought of telling her about the baby I was carrying, how the man was a powerful local ganbu who had protected my growing smuggling business, and laughed out loud.

  The businessman could have strange sexual desires or be violent, the farmer could be as old as my grandfather. Rumors traveled through the markets, and I had heard of such marriages. But the harmless-looking man who had arranged our brief meeting a week ago on the frozen river, this sometimes tour guide with his seesaw limp and sun-beaten face, he was real. Even though my eomma was famous for not showing until her fifth month, I was afraid my body would start to betray me; leaving wasn’t a choice anymore. It was Eomma or my baby.

  After the broker that the Joseon man had hired bribed a chain of local officials, after I bribed still others to register me dead of tuberculosis to protect my eomma, I left while she was sleeping; it was safer for her not to know much. I packed the essentials, nothing personal, and passed the village walls without looking back. I believed I was good at not looking back.

  • • •

  Maybe it was two or four in the morning when I finally crossed, but all the hours feel the same when you’re terrified and ready to end your life if caught. Against the mountain peaks rising like dull knives, the moon stalked our half-naked group wading across the shallow river. The moonlight made us as translucent as ghosts; it was as if we were shedding our very selves to become someone else.

  “It’ll hurt,” the broker leading us out had warned. Hurt wasn’t the right word for crossing in early spring. Pain needled up my legs. I blew out white clouds too thick, too visible; I tried to stop breathing. Halfway across, I heard what sounded like a gun. We dropped deep into the water, and my hands rose up to beat away a bullet that never came.

  Like the thousands before me since the famine, I shadowed the broker’s exact watery steps to avoid the mantraps along the shore and the gaze of China’s cameras. I could only ask myself: Why didn’t I cross before the river’s sudden thaw? Finally, shivering, colder than I have ever been, I dragged myself up the muddy bank and kneaded my numb fingers and toes. When I found them still there, I felt light, almost happy. I looked for the man who would be my husband, for now. His thin arms, his chestnut-brown face, anything to reduce the scale of that country suddenly too large for me.

  • • •

  That was how it happened for me, the impossible dream of crossing.

  But the Dear Leader’s arm had vast reach, and even as I crossed the river and disappeared to marry the Joseon-jok man, we weren’t exactly married. We who entered China, and all the children created from these marriages, didn’t officially exist.

  The broker had received the extra cash that he demanded, and the Joseon man named Seongsik left me overnight at his friend’s house. “Only until our wedding,” Seongsik said, and blushed.

  I was too scared to sleep and too exhausted not to, and my throat was so tight that I couldn’t keep my food down. The next day, he returned to gaze at my pale face as if marveling that I was his.

  “We’re starting out on fertile land, for luck,” Seongsik said. I followed him out of the house, fearful that I looked like someone from across the river despite my new clothes. He was referring to the field set up for our wedding ceremony, but when we got there, it looked like nothing could ever grow out of it.

  “It’s farmed by my church deacon,” he said.

  The shoes he had me wear, more slender towers than shoes, threatened to send me tumbling into the mud.

  “Church?” I didn’t know what a church was yet.

  He caught me as I wobbled. “Don’t worry. Just do what I tell you to.” He held me tightly by the arm and pulled me along as if he were leading a cow.

  I didn’t like being told what to do, but he had paid too large a sum for me. Already twice that morning he worried out loud about the broker’s sudden last demands. And I was grateful. How could I not be? Seongsik was as slight as the orphans who snatched corn doughnuts from the hands of customers back home and ate as they were beaten—but he had saved my unborn baby.

  I’ve lived an unusual young life, some would say an extraordinarily difficult life, but I was a typical mother. I had all kinds of dreams for my baby. I had a name picked out if she was a girl and another name picked out if he was a boy, though I was sure she would be a girl. I worried about how her head would emerge from my small body unhurt, how to bathe such a fragile creature. It was the most important thing that had ever happened to me, my living, beating secret that I could share with no one. My baby, only a faint murmur in my belly, but already I felt less lonely.

  So I wasn’t as frightened as I should have been when the gathering clouds settled over us and Seongsik’s people pretended not to stare while they stared at me. Only a man the others called deacon greeted me warmly, clasping his hands around mine.

  “You’ve traveled a long way,” he said, though it was only across the river. “You must be tired.” Tears crowded my eyes at his hands, their warmth.

  A gray-haired matron who smelled of dried mushrooms clutched her purse to her chest as she walked my way, as if I might steal from her.

  She said, “It’s that awful one-child policy,” in informal Korean, as if I were a child she was speaking to or a work hand she had hired. “Perfectly good men like my son have no choice but to marry women like you.”

  “And what exactly is wrong with someone like me?” I smiled sweetly. The old rag of a woman wouldn’t have survived five minutes of my former life.

  “Eomeoneem, you promised,” Seongsik whined to his eomma, suddenly sounding like a ten-year-old. “She’s what I want, my Jangmi.”

  Like that, I was given my new name: Jangmi. Rose, a lovely, thorny name that suited me. So easily, one life ended and another began.

  He stroked his eomma’s hand, which was rough from farm-work, more in the way of a lover than a son. I didn’t like seeing that. No woman wanted her man beholden to his eomma, even if she did live far away. He said, “Anyway, she’s beautiful like I said, isn’t she? I know how to pick them.”

  “She’s too pretty.” Her lips pressed together. “Good-looking girls are too demanding.”

  When you have nothing, you grow up taking. You steal and cheat if you have to. What I knew was that you never got what you wanted if you didn’t take it, so I took the first thing I saw: I plucked the pink carnation from my mother-in-law’s buttonhole and held it to my nose.

  • • •

  That was the way I was. Not soft, though I looked like I would be soft. I was all gristle and bone and rage. All muscle and metal. I believed I had experienced everything, though I had never been in love.

  Numb to pain and fear was how I wanted to be as we drove afterward in a boxy red car to Seongsik’s apartment, passing concrete buildings that I couldn’t tell apart from one another. The skyline blinded me with its glowing signs—neon, he called it. But it was the hundreds of motorcycles flying past that I couldn’t stop staring at. I promised myself that I would become like one of those women who looked so fearless, so free, riding alone on the enormous steel machines.

  “Here we are!” Seongsik rushed to open the car door for me.

  Dusk reflected off his apartment building and made the windows opaque. This is where you belong, the building’s yellow facade seemed to say to me. This is all you’re worth, the puddle of urine we passed on the stairwell reminded me. We followed the smoke stains that wound straight up four flights of stairs. All at once the great, terrible China seemed to declare, I’m a building you’re unable to leave, and you, you belong to me. I pushed those voices away; I reminded myself that the grim walls only obscured the somewhere beyond. Beyond. It was another name for hope.

  I didn’t know how to read this world yet. So when Seongsik, still a rabbit-face
d stranger to me, opened the front door and the dark hall flooded with chanting, deep and otherworldly, I didn’t understand that this was choral music. In the swell of sound that ballooned out of the apartment, I heard the sadness of my eomma, my abeoji. The people and the past I had abandoned. I fled for the stairs we had just climbed up.

  “Where are you going?” He seized me by my hair.

  I ripped away from him, my scalp burning. A long coil lay limp in his fist. He forced me to the floor by the shoulders, straddled and pinned me to the cement.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he said again.

  I pleaded into his face that was tight with disappointment. I choked out, “Don’t you hear them? The voices of ghosts?”

  For a man like him, the sight of my retreating back must have been the history of all departing women. Only when I kept explaining did he understand that I was running, but not from him.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” He let me go.

  Inside the apartment, after he turned the music off and brewed a pot of jasmine tea, he broke the silence. “It’s Bach, choral music. I had it set on repeat, for your arrival. Don’t be scared.”

  “Choral music. Bach,” I repeated, trying to learn the new world as quickly as I could. One of my hands curved around my unborn baby who would never meet her real abeoji, an official, a married man who wouldn’t have let her live if he had known about her. I thought about my eomma and sank to the couch as far from Seongsik as I could manage. He was as nervous as I was and gripped his teacup as if it were a crowbar.

  He gulped down the tea. “Everything in here’s quality. I only want the best.”

  Looking at the man whose square teeth protruded over his lip as he smiled, I wanted desperately to reverse time. To be reborn into a ganbu’s family and go to special private schools. Eat red meat every week and enter the University of Pyongyang and never have to think about crossing into China. But my family’s lowly seongbun—my abeoji a coal miner and South Korean relatives staining my eomma’s side—meant I was barred from all opportunity. I knew this much: I would be sent to jail or, worse, the camps in the far north if I was caught. The authorities would assume my baby was of impure Chinese blood and murder her.

  I moved closer to Seongsik.

  He showed off the solid oak furniture and the kitchen counter he claimed competed with the most elite homes in Pyongyang, as if he had personally visited them. The indoor flushing toilet did thrill me, but it was the framed picture of Jesus Christ that I remember most vividly. Why was a white man hanging like a powerful politician in his house? I wondered. I was also intrigued, for this man with a tangled brown beard looked homeless, nothing like the dashing men in the smuggled VCD of An Officer and a Gentleman, or the cruel American soldiers in posters stabbing children with bayonets. Not powerful and kind, like the portraits of the Great Leader and the Dear Leader that hung in every house across the river, though even then I thought that a sack of rice was more useful than their portraits. This white man looked weak; he looked so ordinary. So this was the real American!

  Seongsik took in all his belongings, including me, and rubbed his stomach as if he were full. “And this is our drinking water,” he said in front of a plastic tank standing on four legs.

  “What else would you do than drink it—bathe in it?” I said, as if such a machine didn’t surprise me.

  But when he pressed the blue knob at the top, saying, “Red’s for hot, be careful,” I wasn’t prepared for the water shooting out in a remarkable, reliable stream. It was the promise of better things. My future would begin with this owlish man abandoned by his Chinese wife. My baby would start her life here, and more.

  “Your very first electronic piano.” Seongsik tapped at the plastic keys.

  “Electronic piano,” I repeated seriously as if it were new to me, though bands in our country had played the instrument for decades.

  “Credit card, sleeping bag, DVD player,” I repeated, naming the world that he said was now also mine.

  “Look at this, listen to this,” he said, and slipped a round disc into yet another machine. I was shocked that everything inside the apartment seemed to require electricity, and even more shocked that electricity continued to surge reliably, the machines buzzing without pause. I was used to black nights, trains idling for days. I began to exclaim when the music silenced me.

  The sound reminded me of autumn leaves, drifting currents. Nights while returning home with my goods, afraid of every man I met. There was no fear in that music. Just sadness, and beauty.

  “Chopin, one of his nocturnes. Not a scary note in it,” Seongsik said. “But you’re crying. Oh, why are you crying? I must have hurt you badly!”

  “No, it’s not that,” I said. “I’ve traveled so far to hear this music.”

  Another kind of conversation might have happened between us then. For weren’t there those cracks in time when life suddenly reversed itself and surprised, and anything became possible? Maybe even a temporary, but real, affection between two strangers who needed each other, for now? But the bedroom door flew open and a young girl emerged from the room, her pink flesh overflowing from the armbands of her nightgown rumpled with sleep.

  This girl, who shared Seongsik’s squat nose and his anxious, chewed-up lower lip, looked hungrily at him, and he scooped her up in his arms and held her high in the air.

  He glowed into her pinched, radish-shaped face. “Is my favorite lady still angry at her abba?”

  That was when my baby made a whisper of a kick, my stomach flipped, and the overfed girl gave me a murderous look, then wailed, “Abba, you promised!”

  4

  Yongju

  The morning of the last day of my abeoji’s life, even the streetlights in our neighborhood were blacked out. After dodging my abeoji and in this way proudly refusing the car and driver he made available to me, I walked to the tram in the dark, stopping to write a line of poetry as it came to me. I noticed things that I assumed he wouldn’t notice: the smell of burning coal and the grit of soot on my face, how some people wore the bleak dawn like a coat. How in the glass window of the trolley I looked as solemn and awkward as a contrabass, standing a head taller than everyone around me. I listened for the clang of the red and white trolley, watched the traffic girl with her blue and gold cap guide the thin weave of cars, the crumbling plaster of huts tightly packed together that hid behind a front line of apartment buildings. I heard the story of a city being constructed around me, them, all of us, making everyone a part of its story.

  I walked with my eyes drawn toward the stray weed, the cigarettes a vendor sold in single units, the older woman lingering alone alongside a bare, cracked wall. Crowds of people talking reminded me of a gaggle of geese honking at one another. I’ve always been a well-disguised solitary, preferring books to people and music to socializing and playing sports. I didn’t see myself as part of any group though I was part of the many that organized our lives, shuttled from place to place in packs, as we all were.

  That was how I began the last day of my abeoji’s life: dodging encounters with the people closest to me. I arrived at the university and retreated to the back of the class, where I was forgotten, the way I wanted to be. The temperature outside was higher than in the sunless classroom, and all of us were swaddled in winter coats, warming our fingers swollen blue with cold and breathing in the air that caught like glass in our throats.

  That evening I returned home from a parade drill, exhausted. For some it was a beautiful spectacle, a point of civic pride, but for me it was only another garish gathering I was forced to participate in. As I took off my shoes, I heard the traditional folk song “Arirang” playing, the kind of music that my modern parents would never listen to in private.

  At first I didn’t believe what I saw. A stranger was burning photos and documents in our kitchen, standing over a flame that made his cheeks glow yellow and red. �
�Arirang” continued to undulate through the room. The image enchanted me and from the door I watched the material curl in the wastebasket, until my father’s and mother’s glossy faces turned to ash and I began to understand. My stomach seized up. The stranger was erasing us.

  He looked so ordinary in his black wool coat and suit. He had the tidy haircut I expected for a man of his age, and his diffident air reminded me of someone in a cold office who typed up dull reports all day. I assumed he was half-alive, half-conscious in his environment, as I was, sleepwalking through the orders that had brought him into our house. He looked perplexed as he stared at the fire curling and rising, then looked up at me and pointed at the walls around us. The walls are listening, he meant. I understood immediately.

  He said, “You must be back from classes,” sounding official and uninterested, unlike his eyes. He made a bowl with his hands, then pointed at the fire. “Where are your parents?”

  I said, “I don’t know. Working?” I felt strangely calm, as if I were talking about another person in someone else’s house.

  I trusted that if you did what you were told, you would be left alone, so I went quickly, quietly, to the cabinet and withdrew a large steel bowl, then held the bowl to the faucet and turned the water on at low force so there was no noise. I brought some cornstarch as well. He smothered the fire in the cornstarch and only then drizzled what was left with water. As we watched, a cloud of smoke rose from the charred remains.

  “My parents—they . . . they’re coming back, yes?” I said. Had they been taken away? My head filled with thoughts and images that I hadn’t known were there: the camps farther north of us. The world suddenly much bigger, and lonelier, than I had imagined it.

  “Look, you should have a seat.” The man’s voice was calm, but his hands trembled. “I’m doing a routine inspection,” he explained as his eyes danced across the room, landing everywhere but on me. We were not the kind of family used to such inspections.