How I Became a North Korean (17 page)

I tried to remember what my former self would have done and said, and let her guide me.

As he undressed me, my teeth began to chatter. The nub of the seat belt dug into my back, and our breathing steamed up the windows.

He said, “For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may show his mercy to all.”

He prayed for God to forgive his weak flesh as he pulled down my underwear with his thumbs. His mouth tasted of tart tangerines. The car smelled like a wet towel. My other self, my old self who knew how to survive, kept her eyes fixed on the roof of the car above her and thought about how she might benefit from this exchange. Tried to visualize a future. It wasn't me. It wasn't me at all.

But it was me when we walked up the stairs, my arms and legs heavy, my back bruised by the seat-belt buckle. I tried to focus on the present. Left, right, left, right. One mossy step at a time.

Until I saw Yongju pacing across the common room. His slouching shoulders, the delicate outlines of his worry, were excruciating to see.

“I checked on you,
dongmu,
and you weren't there!” He rushed up to me, relief on his face. How did you—”

As he grasped my hands, Missionary Kwon came in and locked the door behind him.

Yongju's breathing became fast and shallow. Or was it mine? I was wet and chilly, but my cheeks flushed with heat.

“There was a medical emergency.” Missionary Kwon folded his arms together. “Everything's fine now, so you should go back to your room.” His voice stayed even.

“
Dongmu
,
” I said, but Yongju didn't stay to listen.

I followed him to the supply room, too anxious to keep a careful distance. I could have touched him if I'd reached out, but I didn't.

“I do what I have to do,” I said.

“You don't have to explain.”

But I needed him to know what time had done to me. I wanted someone, finally, to know me. “You don't know how it was for us. At the worst of it, my
abba
continued to go to work at the shoe factory though it stopped paying its workers. All the machines were turned off, but he kept going until he died. My
eomma
? She would boil soup thickened with bits of bark and weeds. The doctor had no medicine for her pneumonia. Then she started taking
bbindu
and the
eomma
I knew disappeared.”

I watched his bowed head and told him how afraid I had been, traveling across the country in boy's clothes, hiding from train conductors and sneaking across the border and walking for hours to trade and sell the scraps I had. How my father died from the Great Hunger and left us. “One thing sustained me: the dream of leaving. Now it's the only thing I have left.”

I had never spoken so much about myself. Fierce, clipped words tumbled out. I was exhausted, but I didn't know what he would say once I stopped speaking.

His head was still bowed, his fists clenched. It made me sad to look at him for too long.

I said, “I hear my
eomma
's voice in the rain.”

What hurt the most was the way he gazed at me: with
understanding. He stepped closer and his lips brushed across my hair. Almost a light kiss, as if a breeze had passed across it. How could he, knowing what he knew. He uncrossed my arms that were tight around my torso and wiped the corners of my eyes. Tears, another weakness. I looked at the other country that he was for me, at his outrageous idealism. At his innocence.

T
he oppressive rains that night would be imprinted on my memory. My nose was full of the ripe bouquet of our rank smells and I tried to escape it, attempting to escape from myself.

The windows were misted over, distorting the trees into swollen, distended shapes that swayed in the wind like naked bodies. Rain stippled my perspective, but I thought I saw a human smudge and pressed my face against the plastic. It was Jangmi, kicking up puddles of water with her feet, holding her nightdress up high from the sludge. I was alarmed and amazed that she had somehow freed herself. She hadn't been broken after all, only hoarding her strength. Maybe her mouth was open, drinking the rain. Maybe she was thinking of me. I thought she was alone.

The moment the door opened, I saw Jangmi's wet nightdress reveal her like a clear glass of water. She was soaked, her water-logged skirt hiked up to mid-thigh, and so thin she looked like she
might shatter if you held her. But when I saw Missionary Kwon behind her, his granite hand on her hip, I was the one who cracked.

I tried to forget the way Jangmi's nightdress had revealed her. The way Missionary Kwon looked at me as if he were peering through a microscope.

During the next day's morning service I willed myself not to think, to disappear, when we sang the words “As the deer panteth for the water so my heart longeth after you. You alone are my heart's desire and I long to worship you . . .” and then a half hour later, as Missionary Kwon intoned, “It is impossible to please God without faith . . .” But I resented the gleam of his leather shoes set parallel to each other by the door, his scrubbed smell of pine soap. His white collar, his skin pink and glowing with health like a middle-aged baby, when the skin under my arms was red and prickly with heat rash. There was no calm to be found in a woman turned into a pillar of salt. A man's head served on a platter. An ark floating while all of humanity drowned.

When the rest of us sat down for lunch, Cheolmin stood like a soldier and announced, “I couldn't memorize my verse.”

Bakjun stood up beside Cheolmin. “I couldn't, either.”

Namil raised himself to his knees. “I didn't, either.”

Cheolmin and Bakjun looked angry and uncertain, as if this was as far as they had planned their rebellion. They looked at Missionary Kwon.

“All of you?” Missionary Kwon set down his chopsticks. “All three? And the rest of you let this happen? Do the Lord's words mean anything to you? Do you know why you're here and not out on the street?”

“It's August. We've been stuck inside for months.” Cheolmin scraped at his cheeks and flicked away the dead skin. “We're living the same day over and over again and nothing's changed. You haven't kept your promises.”

“Listen to that rain.” Missionary Kwon ran his fingers through his gelled hair in one even, controlled motion. “There's a lesson in that rain. It's a sign, another Noah's ark, God has sent another flood.”

“Noah's ark?” Namil frowned, our early lessons already forgotten.

I said, “Who do you think he's cleansing?”

Missionary Kwon stood up and lifted the
saang
high above our heads so that our chopsticks hovered in the air. He had the audacity to look smug. “Today we'll skip lunch together and pray on an empty stomach. It will give you clarity.”

We hadn't crossed and risked our lives for this.

I wasn't surprised when Cheolmin punched the air with his fist. “I don't want anything to be clear—I want to eat!” He looked ready to kill. He snatched Missionary Kwon's Bible from his side and hurled it across the room. A thud resounded; the paper tore.

Missionary Kwon gasped, and his hand flew up to protect his heart. “Gwangsu, Daehan, the rest of you, cover the dishes and store the
banchan
in the icebox for now.” His voice was trimmed of feeling and he avoided Jangmi and me, as if we didn't exist.

He said, “Thanks to Cheolmin, we'll fast and pray for a few days and begin our relationship with God over again in the right
state of mind. For ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'”

He instructed me to take the storeroom's boxes of canned goods to the front door, then began emptying out the kitchen drawers: dumplings freshly rolled for the night's dinner, a tub of kimchi we had seasoned together, a shelf of vegetables and another of fruit, all the cartons of
banchan,
packages of dry noodles. All of it was deposited into large plastic bags that he ordered Daehan to help carry to the car. He said, “There are others who will appreciate this.”

“You mean we won't be eating at all, when there's food?” Bakjun's knuckles scrubbed at his face as if to erase himself. He looked confused and hostile and sorry all at once. “All of us, for days?”

Daehan's hand only passed over his face like a fan, and he lugged the heavy sack out, his feet as heavy as flagstones. I didn't move.

When Missionary Kwon had his nose in one of the drawers, Cheolmin spat on the floor and in one swift movement rammed him with his head, pushing Missionary Kwon into the wall. It was as if my wishing had made it happen. Bakjun took the cue and grabbed the missionary by the shirt with two fists. “You liar!”

Cheolmin said, “Come on! We'll get
goryangju
with his money.”

Namil and Gwangsu followed as they clamped themselves on the missionary's legs. I could have stopped them, but instead I let them sabotage months of patience. When Jangmi limped in the missionary's direction, I blocked her behind me. I said, “He deserves worse.”

“How dare you raise your hand to me? To God's representative?” Missionary Kwon ripped Bakjun's hands away from his shirt and pulled him up, dangling him in the air. “We're giving you an opportunity! And you can't stay still for five minutes to draw strength from his words when there's hundreds of thousands of your people who live on garbage every day!”

Cheolmin bit the missionary's hand and forced him to release Bakjun. Cheolmin said, “One! Two! Three!” and they tipped the missionary over as if he were a pine tree.

The missionary shouted, threatened. “Yongju! Yongju!” he pleaded. I didn't let anyone help him. Sweat rimmed his lips and the bridge of his nose, soaked his collar. His limbs jolted like an epileptic's. The boys were as excited as a pack of dogs, and their movements shook the lantern on the
saang
. Their hands had finally found an object for their anger and they kicked and punched and tore, communicated in a language they understood.

Their hands were my hands. Because I now knew hands blistered and feet cracked white by the weather. How to sleep with rats the size of rabbits, how to endure the slow crawl of lice. How drinking helped you live with unlivable fear. How you could wake up with frozen icicles in your hair, not knowing if one of the boys would be frozen dead, forever fourteen. How being locked in was a kind of daily death. I understood what it meant to be a North Korean in China. Because I was one of them.

Jangmi flew out from behind me and pried Bakjun's hands from the missionary's chest, but Cheolmin pushed her away and she fell. She limped in a fretful semicircle around them like a stray cat. She clutched her stomach, her phantom child.

I felt helpless. There was nothing I could do for her or for any of the people I had lost. When I closed my eyes, I saw Missionary Kwon's dirty hands on her body. The cycle was as clear to me as a simple sentence; I wanted to break it.

“Is this your plan? Simply to hurt him and release your anger, then wait for your punishment? Tie him up,” I said. “Make him call a broker and get us out of this country. One of us can stay and watch him while the others leave—maybe Daehan?

“Or I'll stay.” My thoughts spun beyond me.

I came back from the kitchen with the laundry cord and the kitchen scissors, and instructed the others to hold down his arms and legs. I sawed the rope into two with the scissors and used half to strap his arms so tightly back that the white shirt buttons strained against the convex curve of the missionary's stomach.

By the time Daehan returned, my work was done. When he saw us, his hands rammed into his crinkly hair and raised it into a bush. “Oh no, no!” he said. “You've got to stop!”

I didn't want it to stop.

“How dare you? Boys, calm down! Let's discuss this!” our overthrown ruler said. His muddled roil of thoughts were more a trail of panic than sentences. He pleaded, threatened. “Lord, why have you forsaken me?”

“Do something!” Daehan screamed at me, assuming it was the work of the others. He hurled himself at my back; I shook him off.

He said, “You're sabotaging yourself! I'm getting you help, I promise!” It sounded like another futile Christian promise.

“Watch this.” Namil checked to see if we were watching,
then grabbed the scissors from me and slashed the window's covering, which was sticky with the cicadas, and wrapped it around Missionary Kwon's head.

The missionary shook his head wildly, trying to shake off the plastic. “It doesn't get better—your lives will feel like a dream and no one will ever understand you again once you cross. But I understand. God understands. You North Koreans are always so ungrateful.”

The legs of his chair lifted and thudded against the floor as he struggled. The boys looked at one another for what to do next.

I withdrew one of the cell phones from Missionary Kwon's jacket pocket and scrolled through the list of names. “Which one leads us to a broker?”

The missionary sat up straight in the chair and his arms went limp in their binding. He took a deep breath, and panic and anger eased from his face until his glacial gaze went right through me.

“You think I care about this body, this mere shell?” he said. “You think that God is so weak, for you to threaten me?”

“All you have to do is get us out of here. You drove us to this.”

“I saved you, all of you. Without me, you're nothing. Less than vermin.”

Cheolmin spat on the floor near the missionary's feet. “What did you say?”

The missionary didn't stop there. He compared us to germs and parasites. Black spots danced in front of my eyes.

“If I made a phone call tomorrow, you'd disappear. Another call, you cross the Thailand border. I'm the one who decides.
Don't you see?” His mouth twisted upward into a mournful smile. “Who's going to know about you if I'm gone? Or care?”

My hands reached for the hard knob of his throat. The escaping air whistled from his pressurized pipe. No one, finally, was there for me. It wasn't Missionary Kwon facing me anymore but the darkness pursuing us. People crowded my eyes, voices knocked against one another. I was pushed back, backward, across the river. They were back, it was back.

I was surrounded by men, by hunting dogs. The ice gleamed silver moonlight as we crossed. The riverbed cut into my feet, and the mantraps lining the river opened and closed their mouths. There were traps everywhere, and mouths, and eyes. The eyes and mouths moved across us. I was there, we were there. I struck out at the Dear Leader, the red leather jacket, at the hands that pulled me down. Water surrounded us. We were drowning together.

Then I was dragged back from drowning. I gagged. The kitchen scissors were in Jangmi's hands and my hands were around hers. Our hands were dark and wet and smelled of fresh liver. Voices erupted. The missionary was on the floor and the boys were kicking him. The blood trickling from the missionary's eye glowed in the lantern's light. His gurgled screams filled the air; his shirt was a river of blood. That severed voice, those tattered ribbons of sound, were the only sounds he managed. As if his tongue was mourning his eye. I stared at his bruised arms and chest, his punctured eye socket. At my hands. They had held but not stopped Jangmi.

Daehan walked backward, leaving pale red tracks on the
cement floor. He held his stomach. “I want to go home,” he whispered.

“
Meojori!
” Cheolmin looked impressed. “A
woman
did that?”

“Let him bleed to death.” Bakjun's voice was small and unconvinced.

Namil gnawed at his fingernail, staring down at the missionary.

Gwangsu began to pray.

“Did I do that?” Jangmi's pupils were dilated.

From somewhere distant I heard Daehan say, “He needs help. He has a son.” He wiped the blood from Missionary Kwon's face with the edge of his shirt. “Where's his phone? I'll call that doctor.”

“You'll get us sent back!” Cheolmin punched Daehan in the stomach. “You're not calling anyone.”

Jangmi clutched the bloody kitchen scissors to her shirt, shivering. Her hand ripped at her hair as if she were trying to wake herself up with pain.

Now we would never leave, I thought. “We need to call someone, anyone. We need to get out.”

“Help is coming.” Daehan made a sound between a sniffle and a moan. “Help was already coming. Give me the phone.”

 • • • 

For forty-eight hours we waited in the thick of the missionary's mortified flesh that only Daehan approached and fed, as flies buzzed and laid their eggs in the submarine heat. We simmered in our fear until at the designated time we crossed the small stone bridge that led to a muddy country road, took several turns
as instructed, and eventually, behind an abandoned village school, we met the brokers that Daehan's
eomeoni
had hired. I didn't know who Daehan was. It didn't matter anymore.

This is how it happened. We fled in the brokers' footsteps. We scattered into small dark spaces in the backs of buildings, trains, and buses, through the great mouth of China. Our feet made fresh tracks as we weaved through mountains and made unreliable allies of the moon and the night and the stars. Every shadow a soldier, a border guard, an opportunist. Each body of water reminded us of the first river, the river of dreams and death, where we saw the faces of people we knew and would never know frozen beneath it. The children who had run and been caught and sent back. The pregnant women repatriated to our country and thrown in jail, forced to run a hundred laps until they aborted. The women who gave birth in the same jail and saw soldiers bash their new infants against a wall to save bullets. The countless others whose peaceful lives ended when an enemy informed on them—ours was one small story in all the other stories. We stumbled across the jungles and deserts of Southeast Asia, seeking safety and freedom. We would look and look. A few of us would find it.