How I Became a North Korean Read online

  I transferred onto a second bus, then later a third. I kept my feet a safe distance from my seat partner’s chicken, which was squashed into a cage. “I’m going home,” I whispered. “I’m finally going home.”

  • • •

  My hometown wedged in a forgotten corner of China felt like it belonged to another self. After six years away, its buildings seemed to me as plain as the people, worn out like saggy granny panties. On the main strip there were song rooms, bars, and clubs with Korean signs in neon displayed above the scarlet-red Chinese characters. It was hard to imagine my bow-and-arrow-gripping ancestors roaming these stark mountains and plains, a fact that China tried hard to ignore so that it could claim the land had always been theirs. Or to imagine North Korea’s so-called Great Leader journeying through the land with his bandit group of rebels and first wife in tow, on his way to Russia. Those times must have required desperate courage.

  I hitched up my belt, heavy with emergency rations of dried tofu and nuts, bought a chunk of fresh tofu from a vendor, and bargained with a cyclo driver. When he tried to rip me off, I began walking toward my mom’s apartment through the landscape of comforting faces that looked so similar to mine.

  I headed down a ventricle of paved streets in the town—there were more than I’d expected—and mapped a grid of old apartments in my head as I walked. I passed snack stalls, corners where kids might target the ones in uniforms from better schools and, just maybe, target me. I sampled dumplings, spun sugar, and grilled chicken on a stick until my mouth flooded with the tastes of my childhood. The crowd thickened and thinned around me like oil. I passed twelve people treading by slowly, nine trotting onward rapidly, approximately one out of five of them wearing lace-up shoes. I dodged a car that rumbled onto the sidewalk and had to dart into an outdoor market when I saw the owner of a Han Chinese restaurant that my family knew. Inside, I observed a moment of silence for seven slaughtered carcasses of pigs. Finally, I felt it: the thrill of being out of my time line, in China, a body returning to the past to escape the past.

  After asking for directions from a few people, sometimes in Mandarin and sometimes in Korean, I arrived exhausted at my mother’s building.

  The low-rise apartment building was covered in dirty yellow tiles and laid out in a Soviet-style grid. I walked past men playing mahjong in the lobby, their syllables like music to me, up to the fourth floor until I was standing at her door that was covered with bright scarlet and gold ads. All my rehearsed speeches morphed into uncertainty. Chances were high that my mom wouldn’t be happy with me. After all, I was half the reason they’d left for America in the first place. I pressed the buzzer and waited. I was desperate for simple solutions. My mom, keeper of the family flame, our rainmaker and solution seeker, chair of all committees, would diagnose what was wrong with me.

  She called out from the apartment, “Who is it?”

  I called back, “A hundred-and-fifty-pound surprise in his favorite military fatigues!”

  Feet battered the floor behind the front door, other doors opened and slammed, as if a dozen people were moving under my mom’s orders. When the door finally opened and I presented myself to her like a birthday present, my mom squinted through the gap in the door as if trying to decide who I was.

  She still looked as old-fashioned as an apple but had changed somehow. It was as if the geography had renewed her. Her short hair had grown out long and feminine, her nails were polished, and the perfume of honeysuckle instead of rice crackers wafted from her. I became worried as frown lines deepened between her eyes. Only when she threw her arms open wide did her mom face—there were no other words for it—finally assert itself.

  “My Dumbo! My Daehan!” Her smile was bright, her voice loud enough to wake up statues. “Naeh ahdeul!”

  Naeh ahdeul. My son. Those words made me ache. She tugged at my ears. “My wonderful Dumbo, you must be a ghost because my ahdeul is in America. How did you get here? How did you ever find me?”

  “The miracle of technology and a little tenacity,” I said. It was clear that Dad hadn’t been able to reach her yet.

  As we walked inside, words came tumbling out of me. I rattled on about the horrific airplane food, how I’d learned to make four new sailing knots on the flight over, how I’d lost my map and didn’t know what to do with myself anymore. I told her about my epic journey to her door and that I couldn’t bear the inanity of school anymore and wanted to figure things out. I said that Dad kept forgetting to water the plants so even the cacti would have died without my intervention, that I was sorry but I’d stopped practicing the violin the day she left for the airport.

  “Lots of high schoolers are still stuck at the id stage of development,” I said. “The word cool should be banned from the dictionary.” I told her I missed her.

  She gave my ear a hard, loving tug. “Did you eat? You need some stew, or dumplings. There’s nothing good here. But your favorite eatery—Songbokui’s—is still open. And the same woman’s there, the one with the dyed red hair you were always trying to learn recipes from when you were too small to reach the stove.”

  “All I’ve been doing today is eating,” I said. “But I’d give up a kingdom for some juice or milk.”

  I didn’t add it up, her quick, nervous speech, the way she’d blocked the door until I squeezed in past her, and the jittery way she steered me into the kitchen, rushed me through a glass of orange juice, then steered me right back to the common room. Not yet. I was too busy taking in her pale pink slippers, the table with cat claws for legs, a purple vase on top of it. The space with its feminine airs was so different from the darkness that I’d left behind. I was happy to see her well settled and devoted to her work, but I also resented how she had managed to make a bright, cheerful life without us.

  “How is your father, that silent, no-talk man? Still all laughs?”

  The way she said it—as if he were some man from her distant past, a silly man safe to mock—made me feel protective of him.

  “He’s doing all right. Still discovering the universe in a stopwatch. He misses you, you know.”

  “Daehan, now, you know what I’m going to ask you.” She pulled on a down jacket. “It’s dangerous, the way you are. Why are you suddenly here in the middle of the school semester and how did you get here? How could your abba not tell me you were coming?”

  “It was Abba’s idea.” I told her it wasn’t exactly his fault and that he had tried calling her several times after he’d bought the ticket, which was when I learned that she had suddenly ditched her cell phone.

  “There were work problems.” Her jaw went tight. “How can that man pull you out of school one day and send you across the globe without checking with me first?”

  So much had happened in the few days we hadn’t talked and I didn’t know where to start. The suicide attempt that wasn’t actually a suicide attempt didn’t seem like a good place to begin, and I wasn’t ready to tell anyone about Adam. She ruffled my hair as if I were a surly poodle that required humoring. She knew me better than anyone else and normally would have questioned me with a sushi knife’s precision, sensing that something was wrong.

  Instead she said, “Let’s get something to eat,” and didn’t listen when I told her once more that I’d already eaten a camel’s weight in food.

  “Come on, put on your shoes,” she said. “What if I hadn’t been at home? I can’t believe your abba.”

  The unfamiliar helium in her voice left me dazed. Her behavior, flying from one world and landing in another, all of it unsettled me.

  “How rash of him.” She began to sniffle. “Something terrible could have happened to you.”

  “I won’t go back, Mom.” That one sentence came out in English.

  “After a few weeks here, you’ll come to your senses. You can do anything with that wonderful brain God has given you—I won’t let you ruin it,” she said, and slipped into bl
ack flats. “Goodness, I have so much to do and now I’ll be worrying half the time about you.”

  That was when I heard a cough.

  It was a small apartment; there weren’t many places to hide. I headed in the direction of the cough and opened the bedroom door, but there was no one there.

  “Who is it?” I said. “Who’s here?”

  My mother seized me by my shoulders, trying to pull me out of the room, but I had shot up in the past year and I pulled away and flung open the wardrobe doors one by one.

  Behind one of them was a man. Deacon Shin from our church in California, folded up like a broken chopstick and squeezed in between my mom’s dresses. The severe-looking, graying man with round eyeglasses didn’t look so different from my dad, but he was crucially not my dad. A man who was talkative and sang solos in the choir, who was the first to rescue a cat stuck in a tree and volunteer to flip burgers at church barbecues. A man not my dad, but a man who had somehow become closer to my mom than my dad. Nearly five thousand miles closer. An arm’s length closer. The other life beyond the missionary work.

  Deacon Shin released a long, painful breath. He said, “Daehan.”

  “I can explain,” my mom said, as if there were any possible legitimate explanations for our church deacon hiding in her closet.

  I ran out of the bedroom. The hypocrisy, it was too much for me.

  I don’t remember how I wiggled out of my mother’s grip and spun past her. I don’t remember where I struck her to get away or in which exact moment I understood that the read-a-book-in-bed companionship that my dad offered wasn’t enough for my mom. I remember Deacon Shin immobile in the closet, his lips kissing his knees, how my mother’s voice cracked as she called out my name. I remember how the walls and door of my mom’s bedroom seemed to part for me but not how my hiking boots magically appeared on my feet.

  She reached for me, saying my name. I fled down the stairs, skipping steps as the patter of my mom’s feet followed me down.

  7

  Yongju

  Even back then I had a vague understanding that our country was no stranger to hunger. I knew that some hungered for what was known: noodles in steaming anchovy broth, the food rations that had stopped for most people years ago, the security of orderly routines. Others hungered for things they’d seen in bootlegged South Korean television shows: heating in winter, glamour, chocolate cream pies that came individually wrapped like birthday presents. Then there were hungers that I hadn’t dared to hunger for. Freedom to travel. Freedom from surveillance, from fearing that what you said and did was being watched and that someday you would be questioned about it. Now a strange new hunger invaded me. Where, I wondered, as we drove past bare blue mountains in the Toyota truck that picked us up outside the city, where was Abeoji?

  “Mr. Rhee is going on a business trip north, and he is kind enough to take us where we need to go,” Eomeoni said, as if it wasn’t four in the morning.

  My dongsaeng’s teeth chattered so violently she couldn’t speak. Her face matted with dried tears made me feel even more helpless; I could do nothing for her. Instead of our abeoji, the stranger I had found in our apartment was driving us up as far north as he was able, where, I guessed, we would be met by another car. This man, who had swiftly arranged this late-night disappearance over the last few hours, was more powerful, more resourceful than I’d thought.

  I knew and Eomeoni knew and the man knew that his name wasn’t Mr. Rhee and that this business trip was a lie so extravagant it wasn’t worth telling. I wondered who had been paid off and what fortune exchanged for our escape, and how the man had managed to extricate Eomeoni from wherever she was being held. Most of all, I wondered what had happened to our abeoji.

  The man didn’t turn to glance at us, either so intent on the dirt road ahead or afraid to let us see his face, as if his expression would betray too much. But to my eomeoni he said, “Are you warm enough?” with such tenderness, it was as if his voice were stroking her hand and trying to calm her. It didn’t matter to me that she responded to his quiet anguish with distant, measured gratitude. I knew then that they cared about each other.

  It was too much: the sudden flight, the amorphous shape of the future, the revelation of my mother’s lover. Or at least a man who loved her enough to pay enormous bribes and put himself in danger, a man she might have loved back if she weren’t a married woman.

  I leaned over the passenger seat up front. “How do you know each other?”

  Eomeoni turned back to me, her face hidden beneath a rough woolen hood I’d never seen before. “We were childhood friends,” she said. “You shouldn’t even know that much.”

  “Does that mean you’ve been in contact all this time?”

  “He’s helping us at great risk when no one else can! Don’t ask an older person such questions. I didn’t raise you that way.”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “The poor kids.”

  And just as I was about to ask what I really wanted to know, her voice broke as she said, “Ask the Great General about your abeoji, not me. I can’t answer your questions.”

  I became afraid, and withdrew into silence.

  • • •

  The cement roads outside Pyongyang and my Pothong River and the red splash of flags had long turned into a stretch of solitary villages and sentry posts, where Mr. Rhee prepared to flash what must have been forged travel documents. He never had to, because of his special license plate. We passed a group of prisoners relieving themselves by the road, mountain after denuded mountain. The countryside frightened me; it always had. The landscape was another country; not my Pyongyang of tree-lined boulevards, a world apart from my youth spent playing sports with the other children at the chandeliered Children’s Palace. I tried not to think about my abeoji, though my mind was filled with him, or about this man risking his life to save ours. Years later I would hear other stories of people like him.

  After a private farewell that I tried painfully to ignore, we got out of the car, and the man spoke to the burly driver of a battered white truck before disappearing into the darkness. It was one of the many private buses that plied the country, one emblazoned with red lines that I would learn was an old Red Cross ambulance. Such symbols meant nothing to me yet. From the back of the truck where only hinges were left of its doors, crouched figures stared out at us. I shrank from their stares, their canvas coats and coarse scarves and, especially, from my growing fear that the differences between us were becoming less important. I’d traveled through the countryside on trips to visit less fortunate relatives, but I hadn’t really seen it.

  “We’re lucky to be here at all.” Eomeoni sent me a warning glance from under the scarf and hood veiling her. “Don’t forget that.”

  “Once you wake up, we’ll be in China,” I whispered to my dongsaeng, though saying those words made it too real for me. Smoke exploded from the truck’s exhaust pipe, and its engine grunted into the barren rice fields.

  “Will we really?” she said, and held on tighter to my hand.

  My dongsaeng heaved with dry sobs. She had no more tears left—she had wept all night in the security van and the man’s sedan that had intercepted it. I kept an arm around her, angry that I could do no more for her. She watched the men who jumped on and off after slipping the driver payments of cigarettes or liquor, and sucked in her breath each time the monotony of the pothole-filled road behind us suddenly revealed a boy shouldering squirming chickens in a sack or women traveling with A-frames on their backs. Shriveled objects in the landscape of harrowed farmland. At each sentry post we flashed our forged papers.

  When the truck suddenly lurched and sagged backward to a stop, the driver got out and slunk over, a cigarette hanging from his lips. “Men push, women out.”

  It was just a pothole, but my spirits lifted. The organizing, the discarding of my coat, all of me focused on pushing against the hard metal back of t
he truck. The joints of my fingers popped dangerously, my shoulders made a cracking music, and the fact of the body helped me forget the body.

  “A bit of the old back-and-forth,” a man said once the truck was on firm ground, and he thrust his hips in and out, laughing with the other older men.

  “There are women present,” I said, so quietly that no one but my sister could hear.

  My sister might have grown into a lovely woman. She might be tall and graceful like my mother but with a sweetness all her own. Even then she was like a deer, quick and easily spooked and so sensitive to others, always knowing when you longed for a book or a Choco Pie and hurrying up to you with her offering. But when Eomeoni handed each of us a sweet potato and said, “I’m so ashamed of myself, but this is all I have to give you for dinner. We need to ration our supply,” my sister squeezed her face into a tight ball and refused to accept hers.

  Our eomeoni turned away. Look at me, her posture said. I’ve failed as your eomma.

  She must have felt the failure deeply. She was the kind of eomma who stayed up late at night helping us with our projects and skillfully handled a schoolteacher who had slighted my dongsaeng. She had no compunction about using bribes and coercion for us, when necessary. Her family mattered most to her. I was angry at her, grateful and confused, and wondered how much I really knew about her. I weighed a sweet potato in each of my hands.

  “Eomeoni, sweet potatoes are filling,” I said. I would never be able to eat another sweet potato again.