How I Became a North Korean (11 page)

I couldn't wait. “I heard that you help . . . people.”

The man smiled, but the language of his body turned wary. His eyes, perfectly shaped black stones, stayed trained on me.

As if he were afraid we would be seen, he quickly led us into the back to his office. Twenty young men could have slept in his office. I was starting to measure space by the number of people it could hide. The pastor's books had outgrown their shelves and littered the room's available surfaces. Across his desk were scattered a collection of pens and files piled like felled logs.

The pastor pushed his eyeglasses up the bulbous slope of his nose and looked kindly at me. “Why don't you tell me about yourself?”

Daehan studied the bookshelves and pretended not to listen. For the first time I tried to form a coherent narrative of who I was, where I came from, and what had happened to my family. It embarrassed me to talk about myself at such length, and my speech circled back on itself as I wondered if this was how it had actually happened and, especially, how much to reveal, whether I should change dates and places to protect myself. The discomfort of I, I, I. It struck me that, for the pastor, the most important thing about me was that I was North Korean.

He listened patiently, his large head bobbing to indicate he understood. After I stopped speaking, he said to Daehan, “Was this your idea?” He said it as if he meant: What do you want from me?

Daehan's lower lip jutted out in a dogged way. “My
eomma
always taught me the church was for the poor and needy.”

The pastor thought for a moment, then asked us to wait. “I have something for you.”

When he returned, he looked serious and sad, as if my weight had become his, and I felt hopeful that this man could help me. He set a plastic bag down on the floor between us.

“Son, I think these will fit.”

They were clean clothes, including a worn, padded coat. He patted me awkwardly on the shoulder, then handed me a few boxes of rice cakes and an envelope. Money, I guessed, from the envelope's feathery heft.

“We collect regular donations for the North Koreans who come to us for help. Many donate, the community, guests, South Korean groups. This should aid you a little.”

But I didn't want supplies to sustain me for another mere week or two.

“I need help. I need to find my family.” I clutched his hands.

When he tried to pull away, I didn't let go.

“I've been told that Christians are good people.” I looked into his eyes. “You must know what it's like for me. I have lost everyone I love. Everything was a lie, and everything here is new and foreign. I'm a university student surrounded by crass, ignorant
kkotjaebi
from our country—we don't have a single cell in
common. Imagine waking up to rats and eating food out of the garbage. All I'm capable of here is enduring each day, but it isn't enough to endure. If you help me to South Korea, there are things I can do there, good things, and I promise you that I will—I will—” I couldn't finish.

“Please, child, don't cry.” He offered me a clean handkerchief.

“Please.” I began lowering myself to my knees, but Daehan forced himself between us and stopped me.

“The answer's self-evident,” said Daehan. “The only moral thing to do is to help him escape out of China.”

“You think it's that easy?” The pastor looked enraged, then discouraged. “When I was a university student, I used most of my modest funds to shelter and feed the first famine victims crossing the river. That was in the nineties, when the hunger was at its worst.”

His eyes became sad and were no longer focused on me. I realized that I was just one of the thousands who had come to him since with swollen abscesses and scabby skin, clutching his hands the way I had held his.

“My children, there have been massive crackdowns since then, you see.”

One hand rubbed at his temple and he kept his chin angled to the ground.

“We are here to preach and spread the word of God to the Han people, but if we help a North Korean, we're expelled or, worse, the church is shut down, and all this effort, our life's work, comes to an end. Many, many people are terribly hurt as a result. God is with you, my child, but for the sake of the church,
it's dangerous for me to be here with you like this. I'm afraid there's nothing more I can do for you. You see, there are too many of you now.”

 • • • 

In an eatery I forced down an octopus ball with a second bottle of
baiju
. Why not? There were only four hours of walking ahead of us. I felt reckless, and wanted to be drunker than I had ever been.

Daehan tried to steal my bottle away. “It's an ideal time to go back home, don't you think? You realize this isn't very discreet.”

I was so drunk, I walked through a crowd without fear for the first time. Rage churned in my gut.

Still, I wasn't drunk enough not to be afraid when an official-looking truck passed us and turned at the next corner. The kind of truck that might gather up our people and force us back across the river. The smoky octopus came up and invaded my lungs, and Daehan followed me as I fled the city, my hand tight around the plastic case in my pocket that held a razor blade, the one I had crossed the river with to use in case we were caught. I still had choices.

When we reached a one-lane country road, it began to rain. We walked past houses sprinkled across the unfriendly land like an afterthought.

Daehan was mostly quiet, but suddenly he said, “It must be freeing to be old. You know, to be so old someday that you're too exhausted to feel. To be without dreams.”

“You talk about age,” I said. “In our country most people are young and without dreams.”

I looked at the peaks ahead and felt the long night descend. There were rumors that one of our people had walked down the paved road right into a patrol, giving them no choice but to arrest him. Poor, foolish man, the words came with each thundering beat in my head, and I wondered out loud what might happen if I walked blindly, right now, to the country that Daehan called South Korea, our Nam Joseon.

“You know that's suicide,” Daehan said fiercely. “Don't give up.”

“After I crossed, I learned that the stars in the sky are mere pictures. Something like that.”

“You mean they're real?”

He stopped laughing after I heaved up my food, the sea scent of octopus scorching my tongue. He forced me to continue.

When he spotted a hut inside the fold of mountains, we made a long arc around it. People were dangerous, and their grunting, barking animals more dangerous still. Brambles grabbed at my pants. The mountain was alive. The roots of its trees seemed to rise and snarl my feet and trip me. Mud sucked at my shoes and I sank into the mountain's flesh. I would have lost my will, and my way, if it weren't for Daehan.

The rain stopped, but the moon and the stars were hooded by clouds and were useless guides. I scrambled in the dark behind Daehan, who took to the mountain slope the way I imagined a goat would. My hand groped around a prickly tree, then around boulders. I was so tired; I wanted to rest on the wild grass. It was soft under my hand, beaten down by the rain into a pillow.

The wind carried the smell of wilderness. I looked around; the musky smell was too close. The undergrowth of the bushes' dark outlines rustled, was set quivering, and then I saw it: the bristly shadow, a pair of eyes glowing faintly out at us.

“What's that?” I whispered.

“I don't know,” Daehan whispered back.

I lowered myself, kept to the ground. Maybe it was a squirrel or a rat. Please let it be a rat. But the eyes were too high up. A deer? It was large and seemed to grow larger in front of me, as if it wasn't an animal at all but some monstrous creature come to track me down. I waited, alert with fear, watching it watch me. But when the clouds blew in another direction and the moon was bright again, Daehan clapped his hands.

“No, no, it's a woman,” he said. “A pregnant woman, I think, from the silhouette.”

I saw her for the first time. Jangmi, her eyes wide and bright with fear.

T
hat April I woke up each morning in the cave as dark as a mother's womb. It was damp and smelled worse than a gym locker room, but the choir of breathing tickling my ears was reassuring. When I shifted, my back scraped against layers of stones and paper and my tarp, which I'd laid underneath us to keep the moisture out. The warm bundle beside me moved, too. It was Yongju. I made sure it was always Yongju beside me.

Everything changed when Jangmi came. The next morning, when I wiggled out from under the filthy blankets, there was a gap beside me where Yongju should have been. I crawled toward the morning light, one hand out in front as I tried not to wake anyone up. Outside I saw what I'd feared.

Jangmi was sitting on a boulder, her hands folded over her swollen belly as Yongju dusted off dirt and silvery threads of cobwebs from her hair. They looked as if they'd been up and talking for hours. He gently pulled her hair back into a loose knot as if to see better her heart-shaped face and skin carved out
of a perfect piece of marble. She clearly spelled trouble, and I found myself praying that he was only giving her hair a final cleaning. He murmured something and she looked like a queen speaking to her audience when she responded. That was when I squeezed in between them and slung my arm around Yongju's shoulders.

I said, “What are you two doing up?”

Yongju flushed as if I'd caught him kissing her.

“What are
you
doing here in the mountains with us?” she said, though the sweetness of her voice reminded me of blooming cherry blossoms. She'd learned the night before as we walked back that I was a Joseon-
jok
.

Yongju's eyes followed her hand stirring from her swollen belly to her too-perfect equation of a face. Mine did, too, for very different reasons.

Bakjun came out from our pit on his hands and knees. “How's our
nuna
doing?” He circled her like a hungry dog.

“Very well.” She looked at Yongju. “
Dongmu,
thanks to you, I slept perfectly well. It was such a terrible night in the rain—I didn't know where to go.”

Yongju flushed again. “You must be hungry,
dongmu
.”

She looked swiftly from the trees as gnarled as gnomes to our ragtag assembly emerging from the dugout. In that one sweeping glance that I would associate with her, she assessed how best to proceed.

Then she said quietly, “My baby is hungry,” which seemed impossible. When she had come back to the cave with us the night before, all she had done was eat. Over our breakfast of stale bread
and tiny potatoes that I had cajoled alive, I watched my friends go from trying to please her and making her comfortable to flirting wildly with her. I was confounded. It made no difference that she was years older than them or pregnant. Their comments got bolder, and Jangmi didn't discourage them. It was as if she wanted to keep her options open.

That was, until Cheolmin tucked his eggplant-shaped face over her shoulder and said, “Where's the father? When did he stick it to you?”

Her hands flew to her stomach as if to protect her baby.

“You little street beast!” Yongju cuffed Cheolmin across the head. “Don't ever talk to a woman like that again.”

A sound rattled in Cheolmin's throat and his eyes narrowed. I tried to do my duty and distract him, pointing up to a bird's half-completed nest cradled in a pine tree. “There'll be other babies soon.”

Everyone turned their full attention to the sparrow building a home, as if the nest was permanent.

 • • • 

I tried not to think about home or the past. And despite my stretches of guilt and gloom after I'd called my dad from the nearest village's public phone, reminding me of my messy life in America, the all-consuming task of securing the basic essentials was a topography so different from what I'd known that the past usually felt like a distant dream. I was also busy keeping up my part of an imagined bargain so that my friends wouldn't be tempted to get rid of me. I made myself chef, head gardener, wood collector. I started taking long solo trips to my former base
and, as a last desperate measure, began asking for Missionary Kwon at the café he'd mentioned. I led my friends to edible roots and berries, treated burns, scouted for danger, and became their unofficial Mandarin teacher. There were dozens of species of plants to be flummoxed by, a bounty of bird-watching opportunities, my mouth to censor so I didn't give away the American part of me. I was surrounded by allies, puzzles of new knowledge, and my dulled, depressed senses were pricked alive by discomfort.

One day I splurged, dug into my emergency funds, and brought back dozens of cheap lamb skewers from the market stalls in town. We were careful with fires, and it was late at night when we headed farther out from our dugout so that no one would discover us. I started a tiny fire, more embers than a fire.

Yongju sat on a layer of newspapers beside Jangmi as if he were her guardian. He said, mainly in her direction, “On nights like this, it feels as if we're the only people remaining on the planet.”

“No,
dongmu,
” she said. The way she gazed at him made me nervous. “It's more as if the entire world is elsewhere and we've been forced out. I'm not just a lump of flesh waiting to get arrested. I'll walk to South Korea if I have to.”

Yongju's eyes lingered on hers for a little too long. “I've considered it myself. But we don't have national identity cards if the police catch us on the way, and then there's the terrain we've never seen and the language, and so much more. It's impossible.”

“Others have done it.”

My mind raced for ways to wedge myself into their conversation. “You could marry for protection.”

The guys had often talked about how their women could at least gain a modicum of safety in China by marrying, and envied them for this.

As soon as I spoke, Yongju cuffed my head for the first time. “You can't call that a marriage—the reality's more often a kidnapping and selling.”

Before I could redeem myself, Jangmi made space on the flat-faced boulder that the others had taken to reserving for her and urged Bakjun to come closer to the fire. The next minute she said breathlessly, “You're wonderful!” when I fanned the fire from a sputter to a proper flame. I couldn't tell whether she was being sincere or calculating; it was hard to tell with her, and I wondered, even as she ruffled Namil's hair, then mine, what she was after. She was too sweet, too friendly; she reminded me of the girls at school who ignored me until they wanted tutoring before exams. But apparently everyone else was bedazzled by her.

In a word, I was jealous. She was naturally the center of attention, and it drove the rest of us out to the headlands of one another's sight, watering down our tight intimacy. At some moment that eluded me, Yongju and Jangmi had slipped from formal speech to speaking in
banmal,
though she was at least four years older than him and they hardly knew each other. And there was the way he looked intently at her, as if no one else was there but the two of them. He'd said that Jangmi reminded him of his mother. He'd said that he admired strong women. The way he made any excuse to be near her reminded me of me.

“You look like you need a drink.” Namil, who was drunk as often as possible, offered me the bottle of strong Chinese liquor
that was being passed around. The boys shared every scrap they had with one another; their generosity continually surprised me.

“You know I don't drink.” I was underage and liked to draw thick black lines between right and wrong. I had great faith in the stability of those lines.

“I know, that's why I'm telling you to drink. If you did, you wouldn't be so . . . so—”

“The precise word is
uptight,
” I said. “It's often been used to describe me.”

“That's it! That's the word!” Namil twitched with laughter. I'd come to see that his happiness was more like a constant buzz of fear, and he was even happier when he was drunk.

“I shot down a crow once, with a rock.” Gwangsu's pupils became so large and black that there was almost no white in his eyes. “This arm here's my lucky arm. Then I cooked up the bird and ate it. Really!”

“
Meojori!
You'd better pick juicier stories to tell than that. There's nothing to eat on a crow,” said Bakjun.

“How would you know?”

Cheolmin said, “I know. I killed one when I was a kid just for fun and I pulled it all apart. I tell you, nothing but feathers.”

I passed around a plastic bag of sunflower seeds given to me by a market vendor I'd run favors for. The boys had hands and maybe even hearts that made beef jerky look soft, but they were easily impressed when I made several throws in the dark and each time caught a seed in my mouth. Namil pulled out two packs of cigarettes that he'd bought with money he'd begged
from a South Korean tourist, a feat he regularly managed. A South Korean could have provided more important things, like help and information, but the boys passed the packs back and forth as if nicotine was all that mattered, blowing smoke rings at one another and sighing with each inhale. I was always halfway with them and halfway elsewhere, Danny and Daehan the orphan at once.

“Is it enough for you?” said Yongju. “A cigarette from a South Korean tourist?”

Namil grinned and blew a perfect smoke ring. “
Dongmu,
it's a full pack, and foreign, too! Back home, I'd pick stubs off the ground and smoke them.”

Yongju blew the smoke away. “Don't you want more? You can't live like this forever. You'll get older, and if the police catch you, as they inevitably will, you won't get a kid's treatment when you get sent back.”

Namil pulled up his canvas pants and scratched at his legs, the skin cracked into dry cobweb patterns.

“That's the future,” he said calmly, though he'd tensed at the word
police.
“I can't read the future.”

Jangmi said, “The future's the only thing that matters.”

I felt sick and surprised and guilty when, for a fleeting moment, I wished we had never met her. I nodded vigorously her way. “There must be all sorts of routes out, if you meet the right people.”

Cheolmin's spit landed near my shoe. “You think you're so smart, so why don't you tell us how we can find them?”

Watch this,
Namil mouthed at me, then scrambled behind the
trees. It was as if getting to a safe country was so impossible for them that he didn't bother to give it another thought.

Namil reappeared a few minutes later behind Bakjun and said in a deep voice in Mandarin, “Security!”

Bakjun leaped up and hung briefly in midair like a basketball player. Bakjun, who had grown up sleeping near electricity conductors in the winters and breaking into storage sheds for food, had been caught in China twice, sent back, and escaped again—his body was a web of scars from all the beatings. When he saw it was Namil, he grabbed the bottle from Gwangsu, who was balancing it on his thigh with two hands, one of which looked as if a dog had bitten through it. Bakjun held the bottle as if to smash Namil in the head, a sudden surge of the violence and anger that lurked inside them. Only the others pulling him away stopped him.

I was listening for something else.

That was when I heard it for sure, a noise outside of our circle. I stood up and listened to the forest. When pine needles crackled, I held up my hand.

“There's someone out there!” I pointed at the trees across from me. “Who's there?”

The others scattered before I finished my sentence, fleeing kidnappers, security, whoever might be after them. The underbrush thrashed, then two people stepped out into the light of the fire, an elderly couple who could have been our grandparents. Their faces were bruised purple and their hands so filthy that they looked half mole, half human. When the
halmeoni
let go of the lapels of her
coat I saw a wide tear across the front of her blouse. Apart from the homeless drug addicts in downtown Los Angeles, I had never seen elderly people in such a sorry state. Their shuffle forward was more an exhausted cringe, as if they expected anyone, even me, a mere kid, to unleash vitriol their way. Their animal smell grew stronger as they approached me and I soon saw why. The man was bleeding from the mouth, and when he opened it to speak, a thick sap trickled out. There were great gaps where his teeth should have been and one incisor hung from his gums by a fleshy string.

I didn't know what else to do except to hand the woman a soiled towel and promise her some lamb skewers.

“My husband can't eat them. He can't eat anything anymore.”

I was shocked, wondering whether her husband would bleed to death, and raced through my limited medical knowledge to see if there was anything I could do. From the shadows where they were watching, the others slowly returned.

Yongju took her hands in his. “Halmeoni, what happened?” His voice was velvet, as if she were actually his grandmother.

“We've been walking for hours.” The
halmeoni
clutched his hands. “The farmer we were working for was—he was being inappropriate with me. My husband tried to stop him, but the
ganna saekki
used a hammer on his teeth, and now the bleeding won't stop.”

She cried silently as if the sound itself had been beaten out of her.

Yongju gave them a tin of stream water he had collected that afternoon and had them sit close to the fire. But as the others
began to yawn, the couple hovered, waiting, until the
halmeoni
finally said, “If you have a shelter, and we could stay, just for the night . . .”

Yongju lowered his head. “We have no room. I'm sorry.”

I recoiled with shame. The
harabeoji
bled and the
halmeoni
cried, but wanting to agree with the others, I stayed quiet. And I called myself a Christian. I was beginning to ask myself what that really meant.