How I Became a North Korean Read online

  “Dad, I promise I won’t do anything stupid. Double promise, in front of God. I just need time.”

  He didn’t understand. “Don’t do this to us. You’re a good boy; there’s nothing to figure out. You need to come home.”

  I apologized and apologized, then hung up.

  I wanted to be far away from my parents and from everything that had happened. To know that I was capable of surviving on the streets because I was one hundred percent masculine. That was probably mainly behind my move to the streets a few nights later, though I told myself it was to save my yuan for emergencies. It was as if I was onstage and Adam and his friends, the kids at Bible camp, were my audience.

  After walking through the whole town I took up residence in a half-abandoned building made of cubicles of shops. I used my canteen to sprinkle water on the floor and wiped it down with toilet paper, stacked up my worldly goods, and pondered what God was trying to tell me.

  • • •

  I was shaken awake and blinded by a flashlight. I scrambled up, wishing I had my slingshot and marble in hand and ready to shoot, until I saw they were kids around my age. I became excited; I was lonely for people. But these guys had mean looks.

  One with Chinese characters tattooed down his wrist spelling out “Of the Universe” said, “Don’t you see the lines drawn showing what’s ours and what’s yours?”

  “Lines, what lines?” I strained my eyes at the floor.

  A stocky kid pushed me down to the slab of cement. “Still can’t see it? The line I’m about to make on your face.” He told me to leave.

  “There are so many other rooms,” I said. He didn’t look convinced. “I’ll just move to another room.”

  “Every one of those rooms are ours.” He spat on my foot. “This is our territory.”

  I was groggy, frightened, and my thoughts returned to my mom’s apartment, a place I finally decided was worse than the cold and the grime. After much searching, I found an apartment building complex at the edge of town left in mid-construction, as if the developer realized that there would be no buyers around by the time it was finished. Rusted wires poking up as high as bamboo shoots from the cement floor and the concrete pillars made it a pretty bleak obstacle course. Lying down, I saw sleeping pigeons above me roosting on the skeletal roof.

  I prayed daily and tried not to lose my way. I washed in the public bathroom and reminded myself, as I stepped around puddles of urine, that at least I wasn’t in high school. I approached restaurants and collected the day’s leftovers in exchange for running errands. Hurt and anger rattled in my head like loose marbles, so I disciplined myself with a regimen of push-ups. I willed the asphalt into packed dirt, the town into a state park, the food scavenging into foraging in the forest, reimagining this as a familiar Boy Scouts trip. I added details to my map of the town in my notebook. Maps help you find your way and guarantee that if you’re careful you won’t stray off course. I was sure that with a map I could avoid future suffering.

  The next week I began collecting cardboard for a few coins from the recycling center, but during a bathroom break someone stole the entire day’s stack from me, along with my precious parachute cord, the most durable of ropes. I reminded myself that though Job had been enslaved for seven years I’d had less than two weeks of setbacks. I found work in an eatery instead, where the severe thin-lipped lady complimented me on my system of washing and stacking. My diet improved dramatically. At night I set the alarm on my watch for an early wake-up, which reminded me to call my dad the next day. I tried not to think about my mom.

  • • •

  I was lonely. A few weeks passed with only the sour-faced owner of the eatery for company. She liked how I worked but more than once said, “You talk more in an hour than I do in a week.” I can’t pretend I didn’t think of home.

  At night I reread the same two books: Three Kingdoms and a book on baduk-playing strategies. I became a fountain of speech for myself, a delirium of quotations and epiphanies. I talked to God. I began to hear God everywhere: in honking cars, the beating of pigeon wings, a water fountain’s bubbling, the whoosh! of a school swing. He was north, south, east, and west for me. He was the boy peeing against a wall, the umbrella pines fanning mightily in a private conversation, and I was the sky and the earth and they were me, and the night wasn’t so scary anymore once the roofless building filled with the Word, the Word being God. One night, in that deep peace I would never feel again, I heard footsteps.

  I thought, finally, I was meeting God.

  Before I saw the man, I saw his feet. His black shoes, laced so tightly they looked as if they were about to snap, stepped through the hole that was my door. Next his black suit that made him look like a typical gray-haired businessman, then his round face as serious as the Bible and so unlined that he must have never smiled or frowned. He walked steadily, even with the rusted wires shooting up from the floor, as if he was the kind of man for whom there were no obstacles, only a destination.

  “Is anyone there?” he called out in Korean.

  I recalled my mother’s warnings about organ thieves thirsty for my juicy liver or kidneys and Chinese mafia that carved out a person’s lungs for the fun of it. He might be a Joseon-jok like me, maybe one who sold boys into some seedy industry. I scrambled to get away, but my leg caught in my plastic wrap. His eyes focused on me as I heaved up again, praying for the superhuman strength of action-movie heroes, but I fell forward, more Marx Brothers than Superman. I probably would’ve broken my nose and more if the man hadn’t caught me in his arms. He did so gingerly, as if he disliked intimacy.

  I flung myself backward and in a flash I had my slingshot and polished stones ready.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I’m not a bad person.”

  I kept quiet. He pulled away the rest of the plastic until it surrounded me like wilted flower petals, and I was inches away from his pencil-sharpened eyebrows. His hair, his pupils, and the shadow above his lips were the color of ash. His eyes flashed across me while I considered whether it was sinful to slam him in the groin and run. He looked puzzled, and disappointed, and he repeated what he had just said in Chinese.

  That I couldn’t abide. I didn’t appreciate being mistaken for one of the Han people, and told him as much in Korean.

  “A Joseon-jok.” He said it in Korean this time. “What are you doing here, then? Where are your parents? I could’ve been someone you wouldn’t want to see.”

  “I don’t know where my parents are.” I didn’t see it as a lie, not exactly. Burdened with a distant father and a mother who had gutted the core of the seventh commandment, I viewed myself as a kind of Christian orphan.

  His bland expression softened. “My own parents were killed by the Japanese in the war. I was young, too, but the church took care of me. You shouldn’t be out alone like this. There are organizations for orphans and other kids like you.”

  I was pretty sure that those organizations would lead me right back to the deacon and my mom.

  “I don’t like institutions.”

  He sighed. “Many of you don’t. You don’t live here like this all the time, do you? You’ll get pneumonia.”

  I said nothing.

  He assessed my clothes, my bag, the corner I had scouted for myself. He put his hands together as if in prayer.

  “All Christians are friends,” he said.

  I reached up for the cross that was now protruding over my shirt collar.

  “Can I bring you food, a blanket? Help you in any way?”

  “I have friends. They’re coming for me.”

  He had an impassive face, like a rocky cliff, and I could only guess at his intentions until he drew out a piece of paper and scrawled a basic map and the name of a restaurant on it.

  “I often eat here,” he said. “She’s a good woman. Whenever you need something—anything—ask for me. You can call me Kwon
ajeoshi.”

  • • •

  That early spring evening as I was leaving work, two men pulled me into the shadows of an alley. I tried to break away, but they slammed me against the brick wall. It happened so quickly that the shock only hit me when an arm jabbed into my chest.

  “Hand over your bag,” said the man with a bald spot exposed like a medieval tonsure. He was a Han Chinese and blew out cold puffs of air as he spoke.

  “Here’s my wallet and my watch.” I offered up my wrist. My passport, which I considered my life, was tucked into the bag’s deepest compartment.

  “I said your bag.” The man straightened, his voice louder. “You think I’m asking?”

  I fumbled with the backpack, but I finally managed to get it open. “You’ll see that most of what’s in there is of no value to anyone but me.”

  “You think I’m joking, kid?”

  I shook my head.

  That was when the tonsured man flipped open a jackknife and twirled it until it sliced through the air and rested against my Adam’s apple. Within seconds, the two of them stripped me of my possessions, taking even my waterproof boots. The knife stayed by my neck, and it sparked the same strong desire to live that I’d felt when I’d nearly drowned. I was fearful, my heart and head racing at the prick of the cold blade, when the sound of glass cracked behind me and someone shouted in warning. The criminals turned and ran deep into the alley.

  Apparently I had been rescued. I slumped against the wall, weak and grateful and ashamed. Rescue reminded me of desperate maidens stuck in towers and sleeping beauties stretched out on beds of vermilion roses, waiting for their prince. Nothing made me more uncomfortable. I wanted to be the kind who did the rescuing.

  I was also strangely at ease. The tall one with grave looks and a pensive droop to the corners of his eyes approached me under the streetlight, calming the breakneck speed of my heart. He shouldn’t have; he was clenching the neck of a soda bottle, an image incongruous with his fair, Asian pear skin and out-of-focus features. I had never seen such a beautiful man. He set the bottle down before facing me.

  “Are you all right?” he said with such concern that I pretended that I was better than I felt.

  “They took my bag, they took everything.”

  I had lost my passport, my identification cards, my tools, everything except the cash tucked into my underwear and the inner lining of my pants. Daniel Daehan Lee, a citizen of the People’s Republic of China and a permanent resident of the United States of America, was now paperless, undocumented, as if I had never existed. I rubbed where the cold knife had pressed against my skin, feeling strangely free.

  “Look, hyeong, they even took his shoes,” said the other, much smaller kid, sounding impressed. His cap was pulled down low over his face, and his voice crackled with the same awkward change I had suffered a few years ago.

  The young man I’d call Yongju considered me, then told me to lift up my foot. I did as he said. He ripped his scarf in half with one great pelican motion of his long arms, then wrapped the two halves around my feet.

  I didn’t know what to say. It was April and still chilly, and it was clear from their straggly hair and pants stiff with dried mud that they didn’t have many choices, though maybe I didn’t look so different from them by then. Yongju’s slender neck was now exposed. And still he had given me his scarf, he had risked himself for a stranger.

  “That’ll do for now,” he said. “You’ll have to find a pair—”

  “Or steal one later,” said the smaller kid.

  We mutually assessed the situation. The soft modulation of Yongju’s voice and the draping of his hands made me long for those mysterious friendships that I’d watched from the sidelines back in America.

  “You have anywhere to go?” Yongju finally asked.

  “Not really.” I found myself whispering though the city had long shut down, and at its fringes, where we were, there was no one else in sight.

  “You wouldn’t like where we are.” He jerked his head toward the mountains. “It’s primitive. And far.”

  “You’re a Joseon-jok, aren’t you?” The smaller one I’d learn was Cheolmin lifted up his cap to have a closer look at me. I saw that part of his forehead and cheeks had been burned, giving his skin an uneven, blistered texture. His inflamed gums showed when he smiled.

  “My name’s Daehan,” I offered. “Yeah, I’m a Joseon-jok.”

  “The burn happened at a lumber mill in your country,” said Yongju. I’d been caught staring at Cheolmin’s face.

  Cheolmin said, “Maybe Joseon-jok. Or he could be a spy from down South.”

  Yongju made a small noise, something between a quiet chuckle and a sigh. “Our country’s in bad shape, but not that bad. You think anyone can be a spy?”

  I said, “I know how to start fires from practically nothing, I can build huts and know the difference between good and bad mushrooms. And I’m practically a compass. And there’re lots of other things I know how to do. I’m pretty useful.” I stopped, surprised by myself.

  “Meojori, that’s a big mouthful of bragging about yourself,” said Cheolmin, frowning.

  I didn’t know what meojori meant, but it didn’t sound pleasant. The modus operandi in East Asian cultures was modesty, but I’ve never gotten the game of humility right, or its opposite, what I call the American swagger. I tried correcting myself. “I’m just trying to say . . . I wouldn’t be an absolutely terrible burden to have around.”

  Though our accents were more or less the same, by then it was clear to me that these two were not Joseon-jok. For one, there was their peculiar diction. And from the onset Yongju was too vigilant and tense, making broad sweeps of the scene with his eyes. Cheolmin was no different, his neck jerking to look behind him like a tic, his hands flexing and bunching together with his breath.

  “Come on, we have to keep moving,” Yongju said.

  He retreated from the alley. Cheolmin followed, a sour smell trailing behind him. No one outside my family had ever put themselves on the line for me; I wasn’t about to let them walk away. When we turned the corner I found my plastic cover that the crooks had tossed, ignorant of its usefulness even with a hole in it, and my books. No one ever seemed to want books. I dusted them off.

  The two moved steadily toward the mountains. I continued following them.

  Cheolmin lurched at me, his fist raised in the air. “There’s no space for you!”

  I halted midstep.

  Yongju said, “There could be space. You heard what Namil said last night, it would help to have a Joseon-jok with us.” He turned to me. “You’d be a good scout?”

  “How can we trust him?”

  “My eomma was born across the river in Hamgyong-do, actually. We crossed back into China early.”

  “Really? Your eomma was from our country?”

  Cheolmin looked suspiciously at my clothes.

  “That must’ve been really early. You’ve got Chinese papers, I.D. card, everything?”

  “I did, but . . .” I waved my hand at the alley that was no longer behind us. I didn’t mention my next crossing to America—considering what America meant to their country, I assumed they wouldn’t accept me if they knew.

  Yongju said to Cheolmin, “You know a group’s the only way you survive, Joseon-jok or not. His kind can help out—they can scout ahead and approach people without any danger. Let’s take him with us.”

  “It’ll be crowded, meojori.” Cheolmin spat as he cursed but began walking anyway.

  “Come on.”

  Yongju rested a hand on my shoulder.

  “Come with us.”

  10

  Yongju

  This was my China: a mountain dugout opening into a cave several meters deep. The drip of water during rain, the scratchy music of the trees outside. A bed of stones and paper to keep the cave dry. Blan
kets, clothes from the city dump, and donation bins we would break into, anything to create heat in the chilly underground. A small cry, a young, pebbly voice floating alone in the dark, then silence.

  Each morning I woke up in the hollow full of orphans who had crossed out of hunger, to the music of misery in their arrhythmic breathing, the grinding of their rotten teeth. The morning cold burrowed into my bones and made its home there and my hands and knees became slippery on the cool earth, and my eyelashes thick with the loose soil that trickled down. It was so dark that the word dark was inadequate. So dark it was as if I was dead. The cave was full of haunted life and the stink of urine, and the only relief was to close my eyes and pretend that the darkness wasn’t there.

  When the truck drove away with our women, I had collapsed into the beveled tire tracks, stared down at my useless hands, and searched for words to comprehend how I felt. Grief. Wretchedness. Disbelief. But there were no perfect words. The men left behind began to talk. There was some heated discussion between us, a little pushing.

  Someone said, “We’re too close to the border. This place is crawling with surveillance.”

  Another said, “We have to make our own way.”

  One man gripped his chest as if to hold his heart in.

  Soon they scattered under night’s sheath. Some must have headed for the mountain ranges nearby; the bold or lazy ones followed the winding paved road or looked for a sympathetic farmer who might hire them and give them a corner to sleep in. Maybe a few had relatives, a phone number, a lead. It didn’t matter to me then. All I could do was stare. Sound subsided. I sat crouched for so long that matter melted and my legs grew roots into the dry packed ground. I became the trunk of a tree. I no longer felt cold, heat, sadness, or fear.

  Maybe I would have lapsed into sleep and frozen that night and died peacefully. But something moved in the periphery of my sight.

  I ripped a branch off a rotting tree and clutched it between us. Splinters embedded in my palms, but I didn’t feel them until later.