How I Became a North Korean Read online

  While the driver had a cigarette, I spread a handkerchief across the fender and stripped the skin from both sweet potatoes one long layer at a time.

  “Don’t you want dinner?” I asked.

  My dongsaeng shook her head. “I’m so tired and dirty—I can’t eat like this.” She eyed me cautiously as if expecting punishment. “How can I eat when Abba’s nowhere?”

  “It’s what he would want. If he were here, he would tell you in his politician’s voice what it took that farmer to plant that sweet potato.”

  I conjured up Abeoji on our way to a mountainside holiday, how he would make a curt, careless gesture toward a farming collective. The way his free hand would half-curl as if catching the wind, then open again and release it.

  “And he’s not nowhere—he’s just not here, with us.”

  “Obba,” she said, and started to cry. “You don’t have to lie to me and pretend everything’s fine. I’m not a baby.” She took a sweet potato as if it were a baseball and hurled it into the dark.

  A collective gasp roiled from the truck. My dongsaeng had never been so fierce or so coarse, and I was paralyzed, unsure whether to be her obba and play the disciplinarian or to let her grieve, strike out at the darkness that had swallowed our abeoji.

  As the sweet potato arced into the dark and became waste, a young eomma’s expression brittled with anger. With her baby hanging from a white strip of cloth across her back and neck, she scrambled out and, like a rice farmer, knelt and began hunting. This hunger was everywhere and in the end would belong to all of us, but I only cared about my poor dongsaeng, who was hungry for other things.

  Eomeoni, who had been shrouded in silence for most of the day, now held my dongsaeng tightly to her. She said into the darkness, “Let the farmer keep his sweet potato! My daughter doesn’t want your miserable fare.”

  Night passed into dawn into day then back into darkness. Clouds grouped together, broke apart, formed a claw. Our numbers had dwindled into the group that would cross, and at each checkpoint nearing the border the driver handed out money, alcohol, cigarettes, and packets of powdery bbindu to keep the security guards high. All around I saw the broken infrastructure and law of our country; there was nothing that couldn’t be bought, evidently, even our safety. All the while our eomeoni stayed as still as a frozen movie screen, unapproachable in the folds of her hooded coat.

  The eomma’s baby began wailing. He opened his tiny mouth and bellowed our misery. My fear was cold and rational. I wanted the baby quiet. I wanted the eomma to smother the crying lump of flesh hanging from her neck with the white cloth until it couldn’t make another sound, or to feed the baby another sleeping pill. To put to rest those desolate cries that made hope seem impossible. My dongsaeng was so tired that she slept through it all. I’m becoming half human, I thought.

  “Shut it up or I’ll stuff it with rags!” screamed a man.

  “Someone will hear us,” another said.

  Salt filled my mouth. The baby’s cries became two slender arms that curled around my lungs, and my breathing slowed and thinned.

  Only then did I ask Eomeoni what I couldn’t forget, the only question that mattered to me. “I’m his son. I need to know. Tell me: What happened to Abeoji?”

  • • •

  Mr. Choi appeared first as a voice in the dark. The beam of a flashlight aimed toward his own wide, flat nose was the first thing I saw at the border overlooking China. He had us hide from patrolling guards for two nights, waiting for the tightened security to lapse while we rationed our dwindling food supply, until he said it was safe to cross the Tumen River. I would remember the shaved head and the birthmark the shape of a smashed spider across the man’s left cheek, though not whether the man had been short or tall. Time has been generous that way, releasing me from one detail, then another.

  As we were herded into a van that smelled of timber and wet paper, all I could see was the bullet tunneling into my abeoji’s heart.

  “They killed your abba,” Eomeoni had whispered under the truck’s rumble, her lips pinched white as she told me what had happened that night. She spoke with her chin resting on the crown of my dongsaeng’s sleeping head. “Maybe they would have killed me, too, even if I didn’t know anything about his foreign bank accounts. But the Dear Leader considered our good relationship.”

  I don’t know if she told me the truth that night, or her version of the truth, a story more dramatic than the truth. All I have are her words. I wanted to know who was this “they” that my eomeoni’s many alliances had saved us from. Who was always this “they”? My head filled with thoughts of Abeoji and the endless tomb of distances between us.

  Still, how quickly I got into the van, as if afraid it would leave without me. A boy intent on living even if his abeoji was dead.

  • • •

  After we crossed the freezing river and dried off, we were taken by another car to a hut at the edge of a village. My first thought was: Too close. If we sneeze, the villagers will wake up. A car jutted out from the hut’s shadow. The blue metal of its door flashed open and a stranger jumped out. He looked at Mr. Choi, then lugged a lumpy sack out of the trunk and dumped out shirts and sweaters that flapped like ghosts in the dirt.

  The stranger’s red leather jacket made me wary. It didn’t look like something a sane man should wear. The man counted us off out loud. Whatever he saw pleased him, for he smiled, flashing a gold filling, and said something in Chinese to Mr. Choi as he withdrew a fat envelope and slapped it into his waiting palm.

  “The women first,” Red Leather Jacket said in our language this time. “Come on, you want to be buried here? Slower than cattle, these people!”

  When my dongsaeng’s nails dug into my palm, I said, “This place looks too exposed to be safe.”

  Red Leather Jacket considered me.

  “You’re from the south. Pyongyang? You’ve got the accent, the attitude. Young man, you better learn this quickly: You’re in China; now you’re nobody.”

  The man directed the women to take turns climbing through the break in the wall where they would change into local clothing. We were sent in only after the women reemerged in their new garments. Inside, I tasted dandelions and dried fish and urine in the air. As motes of dust misted down from the roof, I gagged at rats with tails as long as rice stalks rattling in the dark corners.

  “Others were here before us,” someone said.

  In the light shooting through a crack in the roof, I saw plastic bags and empty bottles and flattened squares of straw and tarp for bedding. The hut, filled and emptied many times with the fleeing and the hiding, held the story of our people in its smells. But I didn’t think of myself as one of them yet.

  I dressed slowly until one by one they left and I was alone again.

  “Your first time crossing?” A boy’s voice, whistling through a gap between his front teeth, carried in the dark. “You’d do good to stick with me. I know my way around.”

  The boy I would later call Namil hiccuped and came closer so that I smelled the alcohol on him. I saw his slight silhouette and his smile, so wide it was as if both sides were being pulled apart by strings. He pulled out a bun from his jacket pocket and tore it in half. “Here, you can have some.”

  “Where did you get this?”

  “The trash is high quality here, not like back home. You get fat off what they throw away, really! You’ll find out. And the Christians—the good ones—they’ll practically give you their house if you look young and sad and tell them you’re an orphan.”

  But I wasn’t an orphan. I still had Eomeoni and my dongsaeng, one more long journey awaiting us from China to the safety of another country. The boy tucked the piece of bun in my hand though I wasn’t going to reduce myself to feeding off garbage. The rats stilled and became attentive. I stared at the stale bread, repulsed, but was touched by his kindness and pretended to take a bite o
f it.

  At a rattling sound outside, the boy instantly turned wary. When a voice spiked in through the crack, he sank behind a couch with filling springing out of its seats. His speed, his animal intuition, made me feel soft, my brain padded by dull fatty layers that didn’t know how to read any of the signs around me.

  Outside, I saw that Eomeoni had chosen only white clothes, the traditional color of mourning. Her knuckle was locked in her mouth, and I wondered if she was thinking about Abeoji. Or was she crying for our home, our lost lives? Only then I noticed, in the way that time became slow for me, that some men as large as sedans were now positioned behind Red Leather Jacket.

  It was as if one of my mother’s film reels played in slow motion, the way our men lined up in front of the women. The way some of us were already turned sideways even while standing in front of our women, prepared to run. I stayed behind in the back with my eomeoni and my dongsaeng, and my hands found theirs without my knowing. A man was shouting, his face inches away from Red Leather Jacket’s droopy left eye.

  “What are you doing with the baby?” he said.

  One of the men trained a gun on him. He stepped back.

  They had wrenched the baby from the eomma, and the eomma had collapsed at Red Leather Jacket’s feet, her hands curled around the tops of his shoes. A cry gurgled out of her as he kicked her away from him—I will never forget that sound.

  One of the large men turned to Red Leather Jacket. He pointed at a girl with heavy bangs, at the woman collapsed on the dirt, then at my eomeoni and my dongsaeng. His associates broke easily through my grip, through the barricade of our men’s bodies. Some of us protested as the women were herded to one side, but more quietly now, their minds on the gun.

  Nothing was as real as the gun the short squat man pointed at us. Nothing I did could make a difference, but to do nothing was to admit that nothing could be done, and to be alone in the world was to be less than nothing.

  All I needed was the gun.

  I rushed ahead until my hand brushed against the dull steel. A shoe bore into my spine. Though there was always fighting at school, I had managed to stay beneath the attention of violence, but this time I forced myself up. We struggled, arms confused and tangled with each other. The leaden gun gleamed each time the moon struck it; the man’s finger stayed locked into the barrel. How much power was in that hand. It was so close, it was almost mine. But there were too many of them.

  Eomeoni screamed as they pinned my arms behind me. The red leather sleeve arced slowly, then it was over. The black butt crunched down on my nose and the burning spread across my face. Coppery blood perfumed the air; I tasted it on my tongue. It will swell, I thought, it will be hard for me to sleep without rolling over, though none of this mattered anymore. Laughter seeped from me at the absurdity and the horror, and I wondered who I would have to become to survive this, until the gun struck down on my nose again.

  “You Joseon people,” Red Leather Jacket said. “You’re too emotional.”

  The sobbing women were herded past us to a van.

  So this was the enemy. The finger curled around the trigger. And this was the enemy: the clouds breaking up, the moon above looming too brightly and exposing us. The blank face of China that made us the hunted. I gazed at the men who were destroying our lives; they looked the same. A swift blur of red leather passed me.

  The man opened the back door to the van and invited the women to step up. He looked tired but satisfied that his day was nearly over. Abeoji, Eomeoni, and my dongsaeng . . . my mind went silent, into a cool, dark place.

  “The women will be taken care of,” the man continued. “You do what you’re told, then it’s not so bad. Some women even like it.”

  “May I . . . please say good-bye to my son?” Eomeoni spoke quietly, as if not to startle anyone.

  “I’m a reasonable person,” Red Leather Jacket said, “and you ask like a reasonable woman. Keep it short.”

  She released my sister’s hand. Her loose white pant legs swished as she approached me. I tried to reassure her and tell her, I’ll find you, I promise, if it takes my entire life, but my lips wouldn’t move. When she took my clammy hands into hers, tears dimmed my sight, turning her features so vague and delicate that I feared I would forget what she looked like.

  But I remember so much: her dancer’s body leaning into me and her smell of wet pine needles and the promise of spring weather, her gaze that lingered on my face, memorizing. Her bright, fearful eyes as she squeezed my hands and said, “My love, you must be brave.”

  Part II

  The Border

  8

  Jangmi

  In new clothes with a new man and a new name, I thought I could finally leave my country behind and become someone else. I made Seongsik happy. I worked hard to make him happy; I was determined to maintain my devotion until my baby was old enough for us to leave safely. Or maybe we would stay forever with this man, but there was the constant danger of being discovered, and my baby would live as a shadow child who couldn’t be registered and officially exist. All through our second week together I made sure that when Seongsik woke up, my soap-scented face was pressed close to his. He craned up to touch me, seeking the son he must have wanted. He would have a baby soon enough. I waited for a safe number of days to pass until I could make my announcement.

  Meanwhile, Seongsik followed me to the common room, which was always a remarkable late-spring temperature due to the heated floors, then to the bathroom. When I reemerged, he was waiting by the door to follow me to the kitchen, his movements shy but eager as he walked at my heels. I tried new hairstyles to charm him, laughed helplessly to make him feel more capable. I strived to be a beloved, pleasing wife.

  It could have worked. I knew that many women had crossed and married Joseon men for relative safety and given birth to children, and some of them must have escaped capture. Worked, in the only ways that a refugee’s life could work. Like those women before me, I was becoming familiar with many things. The camouflage Seongsik’s presence gave me in the nearby city’s shopping mall, as if I were unafraid of each person who passed us, the smell of pork and beef seeping from everyone’s skin. The towers of glistening pastries and watermelons bigger than babies, the soaring plates of food that people in restaurants left half-eaten. Kitchen gadgets that squeezed, ground, separated. So many bewildering freedoms, if you had the money for them.

  Memories came back to me, images of my abba feeding me what he could find while he starved, my eomma’s freckled arms rising up to the sun while she hung the laundry. These thoughts weakened my knees and once forced me to sink to the tile floor, fruit knife still in my hand. My body ached with phantom pain. This, I thought, is what it must be like to lose an arm or a leg.

  Still, I felt the eyes on me everywhere. The women on the stairwell when I went to throw out the trash. The building security guard who did nothing but sleep and keep watch, not so different from the guards posted across the river who monitored our villages. In the car on the way to church, Seongsik said, “Stop checking in the mirror. There’s no one back there.”

  But of course there was the security camera at the building’s front entrance watching me, a stranger’s casual glance. Then there was his daughter.

  In those first few weeks in China, Byeol and I had learned that I couldn’t eat fish. Or bean sprouts. Or spicy fried tofu. So she demanded that I make these for her every day and made me ache with tension. In front of Seongsik, I feigned having a delicate stomach and counted the days until it was safe to let him know that he had become an abba. Would I say it was a premature birth? I decided to worry about that later. The days went by slowly, and as he was often not there, I was left with Byeol and her relentless questions.

  “Why can’t you eat fish?” or “Why can’t you eat bean sprouts?”

  “I told you, my stomach is sensitive.”

  “What is ‘sensitive’?” �
��Why do you like my abba?” “Why don’t you know how to draw?” “Why can’t you speak Chinese?” Then she would look suspiciously at me. One wrong word from a child could get me sent back.

  She brightened up each time the doorbell made a rusty ring, which made me freeze, until she remembered that since my arrival she was no longer allowed to answer the door. If her abba wasn’t home, she would flop in front of the television and prop her chin on her fists and watch cartoons for hours, smiling again.

  “Why does the moon change color?” she asked me. “Why do the planets look still when they’re supposed to be moving? Why do we have last names? Where is my eomma? When is she coming back? Why do boys look so different from girls? Why can’t I see God?” Why, why, why? And on and on.

  I admired and feared her questions. I wondered if all children were like this.

  I patiently answered what I could. But on the evenings when her abba was home, she only turned to me and said, “I wasn’t asking you. I was asking Abba.”

  I almost told him in time. I was starting to show despite my mother’s genes, but he assumed it was because I often ate three bowls of rice, though I knew that there was always more, and because of my unbearable cravings for the fruit and sweets that were everywhere around me. I ate, then felt overwhelmed by the desire to sleep all day.

  “Believe me, there’s always more in this country,” he would say, laughing, and even I wasn’t sure whether it was my greed or my growing baby that drove this hunger.

  It happened after he came back from a three-day tour, at dinnertime. I had planned to tell him that night. When my body refused the stew I made with the dried pollack he had brought home, Byeol pointed at me with her spoon and with her mouth full of the bukeo stew said, “She doesn’t eat fish. It makes her run to the bathroom and throw up.”

  My throat tightened; he bit into a fresh green pepper dipped in spicy gochujang, looking concerned. “Are you sick? When did this happen?”