How I Became a North Korean Read online

  I waited to discover who the man was and if he had discovered all the usual illegal possessions: shelves of Western VCDs and music, foreign novels and poetry books that were available to select students, questionable gifts that foreign diplomat friends had given my abeoji on their trips to the West, and most of all the stacks of foreign currency hidden throughout the house that I had found by accident. When I discovered the false wall built into the closet a few months ago, my mind had begun to spin, uncertain of what else I didn’t know.

  “My abeoji is a loyal, powerful member of the party. There must be some mistake.” I picked my words carefully, imagining someone far away listening in. It seemed impossible that a few hours ago I had felt so safe.

  “Look at this,” I said, and I led him to a letter signed by the Great General. “This is addressed to my abeoji. And you know who my eomeoni is.” Everyone knew who she was.

  I anxiously showed him my abeoji’s honors and official party photos, a party publication spread out so the Great General’s photo was uncreased and turned faceup, and the Great Leader’s and the Great General’s gleaming portraits prominently placed and dusted daily with a padded stick. All the necessary evidence of a loyal life.

  He smiled at me, a thin, sympathetic smile, and I saw that he was afraid for me.

  “We have great love and respect for the Great General,” I said. “Our entire family does.”

  I began mourning what I sensed would be the end. Already the house no longer felt like ours. When our lives were dismantled and taken apart, I wondered who would take my abeoji’s grand piano. Or my eomeoni’s movie projector. Which anonymous bureaucrat was eyeing which appliance? What else had the stranger burned? I had so many questions that would never be answered. I could only trust him; I had no choice but to trust.

  “Of course, of course,” the man said. “I know all about your family.”

  I didn’t like that. A blanket of silence fell over us. I looked outside at the street, still icy where our building’s shadow fell, and wished my parents were home.

  “Look, I have a few questions for you. Again, no one’s in trouble. When is your sister coming back?”

  Had he read in a file that I had a sister, or was that something he had already known?

  He continued. “I’m sure you have studying to do. My son is a good student, he has a head for numbers. You?”

  I nodded, and some words fell out of my mouth as terror spread like alcohol through my body. All the abstractions I had seen as someone else’s life became real to me.

  He cracked the window open, letting the smoke and bitter embers and the scent of burned paper out. A trickle of cold crisp air entered, a girl’s thin high call.

  He asked me rote questions about my eomeoni and abeoji as if he was reading from a script. Then he wrote on a notepad and held it up. I’m here to help you, it read. Before I could be sure that I had seen it correctly, he rested the note in the still-smoldering ashes and it shrank and disappeared.

  • • •

  I ran past all that I knew and all that I would forget, past the security guard who suddenly seemed there to keep us in more than to keep others out. I ran, coatless, my fingers icy without gloves, fleeing the image of the man who had left before me. I ran from my brightly lit neighborhood and into the darkness of tram stops and building-size portraits of the smiling Great Leader, past the city’s statues and hotel towers, stopping only for a random checkpoint. Ran, feeling a giant beast bearing down on me, though when I turned back there was nothing there. I was afraid of staying in Pyongyang, afraid of leaving. I wished for a power outage to pitch the city into a great unfurling darkness. This was my home, the center of my world, and I couldn’t imagine myself banished from it.

  Dusk became evening, the time my girl and I had planned to meet at the Pothong River.

  I waited for Myeonghui. The wind chilled my sweaty skin as I watched the few out by the riverbank striding back and forth for exercise. This daily life was something that might no longer be mine. My hands knotted tightly together. I was impatient to see Myeonghui. I thought I loved her.

  I waited by our designated weeping willow and hummed a few bars of “Whistle,” the entire time listening for her. I heard her before I saw her, the way her school uniform made a fine woolen rustle, and her bob swished as she laughed a mild, honest laugh, and shook her head my way as if to say, Not tonight. Though tonight might be all I had left with Myeonghui, whose family had left Japan years ago to return to our homeland. I pulled her closer to my side before the moon could peek out from the clouds and illuminate us to the others.

  She swiftly put an arm’s width of space between us with her habitual modesty. “You’re usually so reasonable, dongmu.”

  I was as intimate with Myeonghui as I had ever been in the time we knew each other. Along the winding river path, I breached the distance between us to brush her wrist, as if touching her would help me recover the order that she was for me. Everything about her was what my family wasn’t: relentlessly formal, a clarity to her quietness that helped me hear her heavy skirt sway like a bell. I wonder what she meant to me, if she had mattered to me only because I knew her family’s ties to Japan would have enraged my abeoji, whose own abeoji had been murdered by Japanese colonialists. Anyone with Japanese associations was considered unsafe, suspicious.

  Again, she moved out of my reach. Only she was betrayed by her eager left foot skipping ahead of her eager right, her breath catching in a rhythm common to those who had come from Japan, the trace of the past echoing on her tongue.

  That night there was no family, no committee duties, no small group studies, and few words spoken between us, which meant fewer lies to protect each other and our families. There was only the time given us. We avoided the occasional passing bike, a drunk man stumbling home. The distant conversations of other strollers murmured around us like restless ocean waves, overlapped and blurred into each other, until for a moment I heard only our small voices ballooning in the emptiness.

  “You’re so lovely,” I said. It was true, though in the dark she was a faint outline, an occasional flash of skin so bone white her arms gleamed. You didn’t have to see beauty to know it was there.

  She said, “You’re so quiet tonight . . . so strange . . .”

  I turned toward her voice. She sensed the fine difference between my normal quiet and brooding, and knew me without knowing anything about me.

  “We’ve known each other so long now, and it seems wrong that we know so little about each other. You feel so unreal in the dark, as if you were never there.”

  “No, no, ireobseubnida.” She laughed, her hair flying in the air as she shook her head. “We have time.”

  She swung her slender arms from side to side, her faith in the future intact. Again that pause, and in it began the kinds of silent conversations that none of us dared to have with each other. In those imagined conversations, she told me what it meant to have Japanese soil in her. I confessed what I feared might be happening to my family.

  I watched her whirl and embrace the moon’s silhouette, and for the first time I thought she must carry with her an unlived life and the sadness of her family.

  I asked, “How did it feel on . . . on the last day of your life?”

  “Dongmu! You’re so morbid, thinking about death already.”

  “I don’t mean dying—not exactly. But when your family . . . left. Being dead, but not dead. Only . . . gone.”

  Her hands dropped and her voice took on a clipped formality. “I don’t understand you today.”

  I thought about all the things that could go wrong when you tried to cross into China.

  I said, “Too much of us can’t be measured. When Abeoji plays the piano, each time he plays, the phrasing is more or less the same. Recognizable, is what I mean. You can listen to one recording and compare it to another, but it’s the same composition. It’s
not like people—we’re so different from moment to moment that we wouldn’t be recognizable if we didn’t have this body and voice, these enormous fingerprints.”

  I kept speaking nonsense, anything to defend myself from my thoughts. Were traitors actually traitors, or were they wronged, betrayed, or just unlucky? My laugh grew into painful, unstrung sounds.

  Myeonghui pulled away. “Someone might hear,” she said with the same pleasant, even tone.

  Without warning, she added, “Dongmu, don’t do anything you can’t reverse. It’s best you not say anything more.”

  I weighed whether to return home or run away, though how and to where was beyond my ken. I thought of my dongsaeng, only thirteen, at home alone and waiting until I returned to have dinner. I was afraid. For the first time, I pulled Myeonghui close to me with my arm around her waist the way Jack had done to Rose on the sinking Titanic. Like a girl raised properly, she resisted this first embrace, then gradually gave in. Of course this must be love, I thought, giving my nostalgia and fear and longing for all I was about to lose a name.

  Much later I heard the stories of others: older women who recalled the seven years they dated their husbands before permitting a peck on the cheek; a receptionist at the Koryo Hotel who relived the illegal kiss she shared with an English teacher from Canada, who had, before he left forever, bequeathed her his final, stingy gift of loneliness. But that night there was only the way I cleaved to Myeonghui.

  My right hand was a feathery pressure on her hips; my lips memorized her eyes, her nose, her lips. And though she was a proper girl from a good family, she sensed the strangeness of the night and allowed my arms to embrace her collarbone like a necklace. She must have known we were saying good-bye. This first kiss would remind me, whenever my hometown seemed an impossible dream, of who I had been.

  5

  Jangmi

  Seongsik’s daughter was eight years old, the same age I’d been when I quit school as the famine swept through our country. That first day when he tried to show me the bedroom, Byeol stretched her arms and legs across the width of the door frame and blocked me from passing.

  “Where are you going?” she cried. “That’s where Abba and I sleep.”

  It was the only other room in the apartment. I was relieved, the dreaded inevitable moment postponed. Seongsik lifted his daughter up again from behind, so her arms and legs as round as Pyongyang dumplings spun in the air. He said, “Now, we’ve talked about this.”

  The girl lurched backward as Seongsik struggled to hold her. I remembered being eight again and became afraid. I had licked the last of the ground-up cornmeal and bark from my bowl, then ate from my eomma’s bowl as well. She had let me. My schoolteachers began stealing food instead of coming to school, and our family cracked open like an egg. After Abba died, Eomma left our one-room row house and went to China for the first time, and I sulked behind my aunt’s back so I wouldn’t cry. I tried to hide how afraid I was of never seeing her again. I remember needing her. I remember loving her.

  Would I be a good eomma? Was anyone ever capable of being a good eomma? The girl called Byeol—a strange name, a star in the night sky—had uneven bangs that her father must have cut for her, and those bangs touched me. I decided I would cut the girl’s hair next time.

  I gave her hair a light stroke, so as not to scare her.

  “I had lice last week,” Byeol said. “Really bad. These tiny white bugs were crawling all over the comb.” I removed my hand.

  Seongsik put her down. “You going to behave?”

  She ran into the bedroom and flopped on the bed. “This is my room.”

  “All right, we’ll sleep together, just for tonight. I’ll spread a yo on the floor.” He sighed. “Remember, she’s only eight. You know what eight is like.”

  I was grateful, and relieved, when Byeol jumped up and down on the large raised bed, refusing to leave us alone. The bed was lined with a hospital ward’s worth of dolls, some missing an arm or a leg, one headless, another bald. She snatched the one intact doll with straw-colored hair and breasts shooting out like rockets and held the doll’s lips to her ear. She peered over its head at me.

  “She says she doesn’t like you,” she said. “She says none of them like you. They were going to throw them out—they didn’t have a home,” she sang as she jumped in circles around her abba, marking her territory. “I rescued them. Kind of like Abba rescued you.”

  You couldn’t say something like that to an eoreun; I was over twice her age. It was as if she had slapped me. I understood she was threatened by me, but I couldn’t even reprimand her; I had no such power. All I could do was wait and see what my new husband would do.

  Seongsik looked from me to his daughter. He combed his fingers through his hair so roughly it looked as if he would rip out what was left.

  “I’ve got the money to buy her new dolls, I do, but the church insisted,” he said, and fled the room.

  Once he left, a spring came loose and my body became alert and capable. The walls were only walls, the dolls only dolls. The girl flopped backward onto the thin mattress and pretended to sleep, but I squatted down to her level.

  “If you make it difficult for me, it will also become difficult for you.” I kept my voice light, friendly. “But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can get along. I can be a nice person, really. You might even like me.”

  “You’re not a nice person, I can tell,” the girl said flatly.

  “You don’t know me.” My eyes crowded with tears, but I didn’t let them fall. “You don’t know how I’ve suffered.”

  “I am nice. Everyone says so. I look like my eomma.”

  “Are you being nice to me, Byeol? What do you think? I’m not trying to replace your eomma. I want us to be friends.”

  Byeol only made dizzying circles on her back, making a mess of the bed.

  “Lots of people are nice to me, almost everyone I meet.”

  I leaned in until our noses nearly touched and said gently, “There is always an exchange between people, and right now that exchange is between you and me. It’s your choice. It can be easy or it can be hard, but I want it to be easy for both of us.”

  The girl sat up, her lips pursed into a stubborn knot that mirrored her father’s. “What about my abba and you? What does he get, when you’re only a North Korean?”

  I straightened. I was sure that men wanted only one thing.

  “Don’t worry about your abba,” I said. “He knows what he wants.”

  • • •

  Seongsik surprised me the next morning, tucking a dethorned red rose behind my ear. “A rose for a Rose,” he said, blushing like a boy.

  He hadn’t told me about Byeol’s existence, but he was a romantic. He insisted on music to match the mood of the weather and the light of the day, and he announced Classical! Rock! K-pop!, changing the small discs as each piece startled me with its strangeness. I wondered how many months he had replayed these scenes to himself since his wife had left him, living alone with an imaginary woman he courted nightly in the dark. He was so eager to love me, this man, and I was prepared to use that love.

  Before dinner he told me to fold my hands together while he conducted a conversation with someone who wasn’t there. I finally found the courage to ask about the American bastard framed and hanging above the television, and he said, “That’s Jesus Christ,” with reverence in his voice. Only then did I connect his monologue to the air with the picture. “God’s son who gave up his life for us.”

  “Jesus Christ?”

  “Jesus, Jesus,” said Byeol, suspicious. “You mean you don’t know Jesus Christ?”

  She pushed a plate of bean sprouts my way, then gave me a strange look when I pushed it back toward her. The smell was too strong for me. Seongsik retrieved a large black book and placed it in my hands as if offering me a letter signed by the Great Leader himself.


  “It’s the Bible,” he said. “It’s the only book we need.”

  I flipped the book open and traced the lines across the page.

  He was so eager that he leaned toward me until his shirt touched his rice and told me that the son of God could walk on water and multiply five loaves of bread and two fish into a plentitude that fed entire villages.

  I wondered if my new husband was sick or prone to imaginative spells.

  “Has anyone seen this man do it—walk on water?”

  He regarded me with fatherly amusement. “You’ll grow to have faith.”

  He lectured me on how unholy my country was. While he drew circles in his daughter’s bowl of rice with chopsticks, he spoke of famine and poverty and what it did to people, as if he had crossed the river and personally witnessed it. He wondered out loud how we lived without technology. What he said wasn’t untrue, not exactly. Even after all the honest and rule-abiding ones had died in the famine, most still experienced winter hungers that gnawed at the stomach, then ate what they could in the summer. Too many of us knew violence and corruption and the addiction of homegrown bbindu, our medicine that I later learned was called opium, which helped you forget about food. But the way he looked at me as he spoke from some high-up place offended me. It was as if I were being branded as a North Korean, part of a mass of people who were all the same.

  I said, “I’ve eaten meat more than a few times, and always had money to buy cold buckwheat noodles at the market.”

  I took delicate bites on purpose, my mouth hardly moving, while his rotated from side to side like an ox’s. Maybe I hadn’t had much schooling, I added, but I knew my letters and had owned a cellular phone and a stiff silk hanbok. A friend had once given me a gold watch as a gift.

  “Gold? Real gold?” He spat out a mouthful of rice onto the table. “Your friend’s a man.”

  The girl screamed, “A man?” as if her father was exempt from this category.