“I’m sorry to have bothered you,” Gi said and hung up the phone.
“Is there anything else I can do for you?” asked Erik.
“No, thank you for your helping.” Gi bowed and turned to the door.
80
G
YONG
-
HO
LEARNED
QUICKLY
HOW
to thrive on the streets. In many ways it was simpler than survival in North Korea. Food was easy—cast off but still edible from garbage cans and dumpsters. There were no strict rules of behavior that had to be adhered to, no pins that had to be worn or meetings that had to be attended. Hygiene was a more difficult issue to resolve, but as long as she went regularly to the women’s shelter she maintained a comfortable level of cleanliness. Whenever she could not sleep at a shelter, she stayed with Sam under the freeway.
Days passed, and then weeks, and then months. Instead of being worn down by the passing of time, Gi felt as if she were being built back up by it. It was empowering to be on her own and making a life, even a meager one, in the city. She felt herself becoming stronger every day. She still searched for Il-sun at the various intersections and nodal points of the city. She inquired about her with all the homeless people and prostitutes she encountered, hoping for some clue. Nobody had seen her. Searching for Il-sun gave her purpose, even if she was starting to doubt that she would ever find her.
Seattle was full of interesting shapes and colors. Some buildings were little more than boring block towers made of concrete and glass. Others were designed to pull the eye skyward and lift the soul. Some looked as though they had been made to intimidate the other buildings around them, with imposing height and darkened glass, their windows topped by sinister brows of stone. For Gyong-ho there was much time, and on nice days she enjoyed walking and looking at the sights.
There was one marvel in the city that, for Gi, topped all other marvels, and she first happened upon it two months after her escape from the brothel. She often stared at it in wonder. It was, of all the buildings she had ever seen, a miracle of design. It was an intersection of mathematics and the human soul, and whenever she came near it, she was compelled to walk all around it to study it from every angle.
It was not the tallest building, nestled as it was between skyscrapers, and somehow that made it all the more grand. It was made of triangles of glass and steel, and within its rigid physical confines it seemed to undulate and ripple. It reflected light off its many angled panes, like a polished and faceted gem. It was oddly geomorphic, being both a natural megalith and a microscopic crystal. It was the thousands of chemical bonds of a complex molecule contorted by nuclear masses and the sharing of electrons. It was a building that had struck a deal with gravity, neither boastful of its vertical conquest nor cowed by Earth’s constant tug. The sign on the door read Seattle Public Library.
Could she dare go inside? Would they even allow it? It took weeks for her to gather the courage to try. Gi stood at the door for over an hour wondering if her
songbun
was good enough. Finally she opened the door and walked in. A bored man in a blue-and-white uniform stood at the entranceway. He took no particular notice of her, so, with her head down, she walked past him.
The building was no less magnificent from within, and she quickly lost her apprehension. It was quiet and cathedral-like, in spite of a certain amount of bustle and conversation. It was clearly a building designed to catch and hold the light.
Maybe this is what it is like to be inside a grain of salt,
she thought. There was no regularity to the space that could be described in terms of blocks or symmetry, but it did have order and pattern. She let her feet take her of their own accord. She rode escalators and traversed floors. She walked between rows of desks and along balconies. She observed all the angles, and was awed by the interior distances. It was a monument to collective human knowledge—the structure itself gave the definition for the word
library,
and Gi did not have to wonder what it was. It was a dream come true.
Central to its function was a slow helix of books rising from the floor to the ceiling. It was a spiral of information on a gradual incline around a center. Gi walked the spiral, touching the books, smelling the volumes, buffed by the light coming through the triangular panes. So much information in such a small space! She could almost feel it in her lungs when she breathed.
The library became the center point from which all of Gi’s activities sprung. It was her favorite place, and she would spend long hours, whenever she was not actively searching for Il-sun, perusing books under the slanted glass roof of the reading room. She discovered the mathematics and physics sections and pulled books off the shelves at random to read them. She learned the common methods of notating concepts that she had already intuited but did not know how to write. She learned whole new ideas that she had not considered before but that made perfect sense. She even uncovered a few things that she could not readily understand or that she outright disagreed with. The language of mathematics, she discovered, was learned in much the same way as the English language. There were rules of syntax, vocabularies, whole concepts distilled down to symbols, and even punctuation. Mathematics, at a point, transcends mere numbers and enters a conceptual realm. Whenever Gyong-ho opened herself into that realm, she entered a kind of euphoria, a deep state of bliss, and she wondered if that was the state of mind Il-sun was trying to achieve when she smoked the sugary
hiroppong
from her glass pipe.
Gi found a yellow notepad, and she filled its pages with the things she learned from books and the ideas they inspired in her. So far away were the Dear Leader and the many rules to please him.
81
S
PRINGTIME
ON
THE
STREETS
of Seattle was truly spectacular. Trees seemed to be in bloom everywhere, showering the sidewalks in pink and white petals, and it reminded Gi of home. Gi had lived through the winter—the time of greatest trial for the homeless, when the weakest died in semifrozen lumps, according to Sam, in alleys and forgotten gullies.
“If you can make it through your firs’ winter, you’re gonna be okay,” he had told her.
Gi arrived at the shelter late and they almost did not let her in. Donna had taken a liking to her, however, and sometimes bent the rules for her. Gi went to one of the small beds and closed her eyes to sleep. It was the usual chorus of creaking springs and random babble, and she had gotten quite used to it.
“I didn’t mean to do it,” she heard a voice say in Korean as she was drifting off to sleep. She opened her eyes. Had she started dreaming already?
Then the voice came again, several minutes later. “Where do we go from here?”
Could it be? Gi got out of bed and padded her way in the direction of the voice. The lights were dimmed but not blacked out, and she could see clearly. She scanned the room.
“I hit him on the head.”
Gi zeroed in on the source of the sound and crept closer.
“I hit him but I hope he didn’t die. I didn’t want him to die.”
“Cho!” Gi exclaimed loudly. It was definitely her, lying wide awake on her bed and talking to herself.
“Shhhhhh!” someone hissed.
Cho pulled the blanket up to her eyes and remained quiet. She looked frightened.
“Cho, it’s me! Gi—Gyong-ho!”
“Shut up!” someone shouted.
“Gi?”
Gyong-ho threw her arms around her friend and sobbed with relief, and with guilt for having left her behind. But Cho was alive. Cho held her tightly.
“I was so worried about you,” said Cho.
T
HE
NEXT
MORNING
Gi helped Cho find a pair of faded blue jeans and a green cable-knit sweater in the free box. The only passable shoes for her were a pair of cloth-bottomed Chinese slippers. They would not last long, especially if it rained, but they were better than the high-heeled sandals she had escaped in. Improvisation was critical to living on the street—it was the one thing Gi’s life in North Korea had prepared her for—and Gi was confident that, with keen eyes, they would find better footwear for Cho within a day or two.
Gi had learned that it was important to manage her look. She was likewise dressed in blue jeans, seemingly the American uniform, but with a heavy gray cardigan over several layers of undershirts. She had found a pair of almost new sneakers in a dumpster, and they fit perfectly, but she had to intentionally scuff them up: If she arrived at the shelter with new clothes, they might not let her in. But if she allowed her appearance to get too shabby, there was the danger of being hassled by the police or attacked for sport by aggressive people who preyed on the meek. Her aim was to blend into the background, to find the look that could pass for legitimately homeless and rebellious youth alike. With that line blurred, people left her alone.
Gi led Cho to a bench at a public garden where they could talk and eat the rolls provided to them by the shelter. Cho looked the same as when Gi had left her: too thin and high strung, but at least not any worse.
“Things got really bad after you left, Gi,” Cho began. “Several of the bouncers were dead. Word got out that the brothel had been shot up and customers stopped coming. Mrs. Cha was meaner than ever.”
“What happened?”
“The police came, but they have some arrangement with Blue Talon. They didn’t close us down, but business was bad and Uncle Lyong moved the whole operation across town. Then they started running me on the street. I had to stand on the corner and service men in the alley.”
“How did you get away?”
“One night some drunk kid approached me. I took him into the alley, but he passed out before we got into it. My bouncer wasn’t watching, so I left the kid and ran the other way. If they had caught me I’m sure they would have killed me. I just had to get away. I kept running and running. I didn’t have any plan. I slept in some bushes. That was four nights ago. I walked toward the tall buildings. Then I met a
Hanguk
lady, and she helped me get to the mission. And now here I am, talking to you. I wish I had a cigarette.”
“I’m sorry I left you.”
“You did the right thing, Gi. You did what you had to, and I probably would have done the same thing. Have you heard anything about Il-sun?”
“Nothing. You?”
“No.”
“Jasmine?”
“Not her, either.”
They sat quietly for a time. Cho fidgeted constantly.
“What do we do now?” asked Cho. Gi was unsure if she was truly asking or if it was part of her babble, but she decided to answer anyway.
“We live. We eat, we find shelter, and we persevere. I have done pretty well, so far.”
“You look . . . better than ever, actually.”
“For the first time in my life I am making my own decisions. I do what I want to. We’re free, Cho!”
“Free? What does that mean? I’m scared out of my skin. We don’t belong here.”
“We don’t belong anywhere. Not here, not in
Hanguk,
and not in
Chosun
. Not anymore. I don’t even want to go back. We’ll take care of each other. We’ll make ourselves belong.”
82
G
YONG
-
HO
ORIENTED
C
HO
TO
surviving on the street. With the warmer weather, they spent most of their nights sleeping outside in the parks, or under the freeway with Sam. Most days they spent at the library, Gi scribbling notes and Cho looking through magazines. It was becoming clear to Gi, however, that if they were going to rise up out of the street, they needed to find a way to start making money. Though she had learned how to stay alive by scrounging food out of the rubbish, it was a life fraught with dangers and discomforts, and it was obvious that most people in Seattle did not have to resort to that. Also, the organizations that ran the women’s shelters frowned on long-term reliance on the shelters, and pressured the regulars to seek employment and independence. Gi’s goal was to find some kind of living arrangement before the onset of winter.
One of Gi’s regular stops was in the alley behind a Chinese restaurant in the International District where, on occasion, one of the cooks would offer her a small bowl of congee. She never begged for it, but would linger in the alley until he came out for a cigarette break. He normally offered. One day, the owner of the restaurant came into the alley looking for the cook while Gi and Cho were sitting on boxes and eating from the restaurant’s ceramic bowls. She was an ancient and stony Chinese woman with a deeply creviced face. She saw Gi and Cho, then lit into the cook with rapid-fire scolding in Chinese. The man shrank from her, and Gi thought he might be reduced to tears. Finally, she turned her attention to Gi and Cho, and began screeching at them as well. The cook timidly interrupted her to tell her something, presumably that they could not speak Chinese, then she turned back and glared at Gi.