How I Became a North Korean Page 8

  “From the day after you brought her home.” Byeol frowned. “And she doesn’t eat bean sprouts or spicy tofu or pickled lotus, either. All of them make her run to the bathroom and throw up. If you have to marry, why don’t you marry someone healthy? She’s sick all the time!”

  She made her best exasperated expression. Seongsik forgot to close his mouth and gochujang trickled out and stained his chin a dark red.

  I said quickly, “I’ve never liked fish.”

  I rested my hand on the bridge of his clenched knuckles and made my first silent prayer: Please let this man weaken at my touch.

  • • •

  He didn’t weaken. Instead he stopped speaking to me for the rest of the evening and didn’t come to bed. I couldn’t sleep. The bed might as well have been made of stone.

  Outside, Seongsik and Byeol moved around like red-eyed rats. When I shifted from right to left, the electric blanket beneath me crackled and the blanket above chafed against my skin like pumice. I curled up with dry heaves, but nothing came up, not even my fear. How could I be afraid when I had always taken care of myself with so little help? But I found myself jumping at a branch tapping against the windowpane.

  After what felt like hours, Seongsik switched on the light. I shrank from the walls covered with pictures of Byeol, his spiteful face, all of it bathed in an antiseptic yellow.

  “You know how much yuan I’ve spent on you?” He limped to the foot of the bed, his fists positioned on his hips. “Whose baby is it?”

  I tried to get up, but he pushed me down by my shoulders. That was what I had become: a woman prostrate before a man. There was no love in his look, no credit earned in the weeks we had spent together. I was owned, and my owner was distraught and capable of punishment.

  “I trusted you,” he said. I begged him to calm down, but he threw aside the blanket, exposing me.

  “It’s the past—it has nothing to do with us.” I clutched the edge of his trousers. “Please, I’m completely yours.”

  “You’re using me,” he said as if he hadn’t heard me. He bit down on his knuckles, leaving teeth marks. “All that money and time, and you’re going to leave me.”

  “I won’t. You must believe me.” I slapped at my forehead. “Where would I go?”

  “You’re such an actress—you’re evil, another Jezebel! A Salome come to see my head on a silver platter!” He shouted insult after insult.

  “And what about your past and everything you hid from me?” I felt reckless, myself again, able to finally say something true. “I’ve been a good woman for you. I’ve been a good eomma to Byeol.”

  He banged his head against the wall twice, three times, making an angry red dent on his forehead.

  “We were supposed to be happy,” he said.

  How easily the idea of happiness, the possibility of it, slipped from his lips.

  “You cost me a lot of money. I had plans for us.” His agitated fingers spun through his hair. “You don’t deserve to be saved.”

  “You think you can save me, don’t you? You think you’re some kind of savior?”

  “You’re talking back to me? A North Korean woman?”

  He punched the heaped-up bedspread with his fists.

  “You’re going to leave me anyway, so why don’t you leave now and wait for the police to do their sweeps? Everyone knows where you people hide—they feel sorry for you, until they don’t. Let the police take you to the detention center and send you right back so your government can do what they want to with you, and you know best what they do to an unmarried woman with child. Then you’ll wish you had been nicer to me.”

  I covered my eyes. “Please, just stop.”

  I was unable to breathe.

  He turned to leave. His retreating back, his thin, tuber neck. This man was all I had.

  I closed my eyes as one person, opened them as another. Somewhere inside me there was another self hidden from sight. She was watching this other woman pull him to her, gather his chapped brown hands together, and take his index finger between her lips.

  “Don’t leave me,” that other woman said. A thin trail of saliva still connected her lips to him. “Don’t leave your wife.”

  • • •

  A person can get used to almost anything to survive. That was what China taught me. But I never got used to the fear. The next morning Seongsik claimed that he forgave me and that nothing had changed for us, but that wasn’t true. He didn’t turn mean, not exactly, but distant, as if I had failed some unspoken test and was no longer worthy of his attention. That day he didn’t once step on my heels like a clumsy mutt, and he left the room each time he made a phone call, speaking in a low whisper. At night, he left a wide gap between us on the bed, and forbade me to come any closer. His cold gestures alarmed me, and I began to wake up late at night clawing at the air, trying to escape the truck repatriating me. I was desperate for him to enforce his rights, make my body laundry scrubbed against a wooden board. I was ready to sacrifice my body to keep my baby safe. My baby.

  I was sitting on the floor one morning, a textbook on the Han language spread open on my lap, when Seongsik came in and covered the pages with his hands.

  “You’re learning Chinese to leave me. You were never planning to stay,” he said as if he had just realized this. “That’s all you’ve ever wanted, to get to South Korea.”

  “No, never. Why would I want something so dangerous?” I tucked my trembling hands between the pages of the book. It was the first time he looked at me directly since he had found out.

  “Everyone warned me about trusting a woman from your country. I’m such a babo! I never listen.”

  His words churned deep in my lower stomach and sickness overwhelmed me. The world tipped from one side to another, then righted itself again. I needed Seongsik. But how to convince him that he needed me?

  We withered.

  “You aren’t eating,” Seongsik said at breakfast the next day after Byeol had been packed off to school.

  I tried to meet his eyes across the bottles of soy and oyster sauce that he had moved into the center of the table.

  “Why aren’t you eating? It’s perfectly good food!” He was so agitated that his words ran into each other.

  “I don’t feel very hungry.” Overwhelmed by the fishy, beany smell, I had pushed the pungent dwenjang stew far from me.

  I rested my hand on his thigh. He pushed it off and went to the common room.

  “You think I’m stupid, don’t you?” He pressed his face against the window. “Some kind of bank account to use up?”

  I didn’t know what a bank account was yet. The loneliness of the new geography, and language, my new body that demanded sleep day and night, overwhelmed me. I began to cry. It wasn’t hard to cry as I thought of my baby and how much we needed Seongsik. Need. I wanted to be free from it. The body that demanded food and shelter, that traded safety for sex, how pregnancy weakened it, all of this disgusted me. To be free of your body’s needs, I thought, that is true freedom.

  He covered his ears with his hands. “Don’t cry,” he said. “You don’t deserve to cry!”

  As if someone had pressed a button, my tears stopped. I pressed a cool glass of water across my cheek. “Who’s crying?”

  He tallied up all my betrayals and pounded his palm with a balled-up fist. When I tried to hold him from behind by the waist and calm him, he threatened to report me to a North Korean official that he said he was secretly friends with. Then he cried and said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  I was relieved when he left the next morning to guide some Christian tourists. But as the tension stitched into my body began to ease, around noon the doorknob turned and someone called out shrilly, “You! You North Korean girl!”

  The voice pricked me. It was his eomeoni, who had let herself into the apartment with a spare key. As soon as I g
reeted her, the doughy-faced woman grabbed me by the hair and yanked me toward the door. The burning went tingling down to my knees, and I just managed to stay on my feet.

  “You witch! How dare you stay here!” She let go of my hair. “You don’t deserve my son. I’m tempted to call security and ship you straight to a repatriation center.”

  Terror quickened my heart and a flash of guilt was swallowed up by more terror. How could a woman with child survive alone in this country?

  “Eomeoneem.” I lowered myself to my knees, enraged and afraid. “Eomeoneem, I have nowhere to go. I’m so sorry. I had no choice.”

  “Don’t soil the word eomeoni on your lips. Get work in another city or something, anything.” She shivered. “How do you expect my son to look at you anymore?”

  “If you want me gone so badly, you could send me to Nam—South Korea.” I said it quietly. “I hear they give you resettlement money and I will repay you, I promise. You will be doing a good thing, saving two lives.”

  That was the wrong thing to say.

  She tugged at the front of my shirt with her strong, veiny hands until my shirtsleeve ripped. A button popped off. Her bun came loose and her hair hovered like a thatched roof above her shoulders.

  “That’s what you always wanted, wasn’t it? I won’t see my son abused this way.”

  My hands went to protect my stomach. My ears were ringing when I said, “No, he married me. I’m his wife. The past is the past—I can explain. I had to survive.”

  “I don’t want to hear it! You’re not his wife. You’re a North Korean, you’re nothing.”

  She pulled her purse open so quickly that she tore the zipper. As my baby moved inside me, I vowed to bear it all and wait until Seongsik returned. He would fix the situation. With time I could make him love me again. I told myself this before she withdrew a handful of yuan and threw it at me.

  “Take it before I change my mind.”

  I tried to follow her into the kitchen, but my legs wouldn’t support me. She came back with a bag heavy with what she said was food.

  “Take what’s here. It’s more than you deserve.”

  “Please, you don’t know what I’ve lost to get here! I’ll be a better wife to him than you could ever hope for.”

  I continued to beg. I considered beating her head in with a heavy pan.

  Byeol was at her piano lesson. If she had been at home, maybe she would have pleaded for me, maybe the possibility of yet another new woman in her life would have finally driven her to me. But she wasn’t there and I was as alone as ever.

  “You forced us to this,” she said. “I want you gone before my son gets home. If you don’t leave now, I’ll call right now and report suspicious behavior in the apartment complex and have you sent back. They don’t care, as long as vermin like you are gone. Is that what you want?”

  “Think of my innocent baby.” I backed up against the bookcase. “And your son, your son will get in trouble.”

  “I am thinking about my poor son.” She crossed her arms, her legs spread out broadly beneath her long skirt. “There are ways. I promise you, there are ways.”

  What choice did I have? I took what I could carry and left.

  • • •

  I stuck close to the side of the apartment complex, avoiding the eyes of suspicious strangers, passed the towering telephone poles plastered with advertisements. I was no longer anyone’s wife, or a North Korean, or a Jangmi. That’s what I believed. Only a stranger with a sack of food bulky under her coat.

  I walked away from the building. Just then a patrol car pulled into the parking lot and I had a brief view of two men in dark green uniforms before I swiveled back around the side of the building, concealing myself. The cigarettes between their fingers, their relaxed demeanor, made them look so ordinary. That was the way it was with these men who casually destroyed lives after a cigarette.

  The time it took to pass the apartment’s security camera felt like a crawl. Slow, slow, I told myself. But once my feet were out of the camera’s range and far from the officers, I dropped the heavy sack of food and broke into a run. I was terrified and couldn’t stop. I slowed only as the fog rolled in. I had never been so unprepared. The fog erased the people, the buildings, erased everything, until I could have been anywhere and anyone. It was the perfect weather for thieves. And lovers.

  Under the safety of darkness I found a street of my country’s restaurants that Seongsik had pointed out on our first drive in. I saw a few bowls, plates, and chopsticks strewn across green plastic tables in the window of one eatery. The floating islands of leftover noodles and rice they held, all that waste, still shocked me. There were two tin signs, one in Chinese and one in our language, and inside, laminated photos of food were taped to the wall. Its drabness had more in common with my hometown than with the dazzling Chinese cities I had seen on television.

  There was also a woman alone. She stretched out her bare feet from under the table and wiggled her fingers in the air with an ease I envied. I pressed close enough that my reflection disappeared. Someday I would be like this woman in her own eatery, surrounded by all that couldn’t be taken away. There would be my child beside me in a sunflower print dress, who would never know cold or hunger or suffering. There would be no denouncements, no fear, only my baby girl’s feet tapping and the endless sun that would never set. I saw it through the window, the vision that sustained me: my future.

  The woman rose and began counting her cash. Her heavier lower half billowed out in a flowery skirt and white pantaloons underneath, and her bucolic shuffle contrasted with the industry of her quick hands. She reminded me of my mother.

  I entered into the amber light.

  “Please.”

  I gestured at the bowl of half-eaten noodles on one of the creaky plastic tables. I wanted to save Seongsik’s mother’s money, the little I had.

  “I just want something—anything—to eat and then I’ll go.”

  The woman’s eyes met mine and became unfriendly. “You’re from across the river?” she said. Whatever kindness in her was gone.

  “What you have left over, anything.”

  “You people,” the woman said, and again I was struck by the feeling that I was no longer a person, but one of many, to her. “After you beg for free food and clothes, you’re always coming over and stealing eggs and rice from the same people who helped you. A whole cow disappeared in the next town. And now you want my noodles.”

  I gazed beyond the woman’s shoulder to the bowl. “But I’m not like that. The food will go to waste anyway, so I thought—”

  “They say an old granny was killed by one of you. She was always helping your kind, then one of those she’d helped robbed her and took everything she had in the house, which wasn’t much.”

  I hadn’t robbed or stolen from these people; I was sure I could never kill anyone. “Even the broth—that’s all I need. That’s all my baby needs.”

  The woman picked up a bowl of leftovers from the table. My hands were outstretched and waiting when cold noodles hit my face.

  “Not for your kind.” The woman wiped her hands on her apron. “I’ve had enough of you. Get out before I report you and they haul you back to where you came from.”

  9

  Danny

  The border between the two countries was long, and on the winding road heading south for the random town I’d settled on, all I saw from the bus were the mountains veiny with snow. In fact, there was nothing left to distract me from my fear. I’d turned off my cell phone from the outset. The idea of my mom with another man made me shiver with shame, and I didn’t know what to tell my dad. Returning home meant facing school and Adam, but going back to my mom’s wasn’t an option, either. I wondered why God was testing me.

  I arrived at dusk, the Tumen River as thick as a blanket in front of me. The lights in the storefront windows of the tow
n went out like dominoes in slow motion; the lights of cubicle-size residences lit up one by one. I stared up at those low-rise apartments, convinced that no one could possibly be as unhappy as I was. I wandered aimlessly with my backpack, the hallway lights tattooed across my mom’s face in my mind.

  By late evening I knew too well the dusty stores along the main strip with dusty products and the ubiquitous red neon signs advertising everything from adult entertainment to car parts. I wore layers of new clothes I’d bought from a local store to disguise myself and kept a cap low over my face and ducked away anytime I saw someone who looked remotely like my mom. When a bundled homeless granddad rattled a can in my face, I told him, “No, I’m like you,” and the man shot me a venomous look as if he were deeply insulted. I tried to check into a run-down motel, but the manager insisted on taking down my identification card or passport number as was the law, which would help my mom track me down and lasso me in. I checked into a bathhouse instead. Only then I finally gathered the courage to call my dad.

  I lay down across the common room’s heated floor in the corner, flipped open my cell phone, and used my phone card to call home. On the second ring, my dad picked up.

  “Daehan? Where are you? Your poor eomma is nearly dead from worry. Do you have any idea what you’ve done to her? I was about to fly out and look for you.”

  “Dead from worry? She’s perfectly fine. Believe me, she’s more than fine.”

  As I realized all that I could never tell him, I felt the distance between my dad and me growing into a big fat canyon.

  “I’m fine, too. I’m just checking in so you won’t worry about me.”

  “Go back to your eomma now, wherever you are. We just want you home.”

  “I’d rather stay where I am. I need time.”

  “Time for what? Did something happen?”

  “Dad, I need time on my own to figure things out.”

  “None of this would have happened if your eomma hadn’t suddenly changed phones without telling me. She never tells me anything. Don’t do anything to yourself, please! Daehan, for us!”