How I Became a North Korean (18 page)

M
aps are borders that keep people in and others out. My brand-new U.S. passport, which the immigration officer stamps for me at the Yanji airport, a modern surveillance tool. I made it past twenty and am several inches taller than my parents now; I'm half a semester away from a degree in sociology at Harvard, and only occasionally lapse back into supersonic leaps of speech. There are other changes, too. For example, it only takes me a few minutes in China to discover that my Chinese isn't what it used to be. In any case, after my digital fingerprints and photograph are taken for the first time, I step through the arrivals gate and into an old map, the topography of my past.

I look for my mom in the crowd of anxious faces. The airport echoes with the singsong seesaw of our Joseon language, which is so different from the rat-tat-tat of American English. I'm tired out from the flight, and the fluorescent blue chairs seem to beckon. The deacon spots me before I can dodge him and migrates through the curtain of noisy reunions, then stretches
his hand my way as if we are in America. Next thing I know, he'll try to act like a father to me.

“You're all grown up, Daehan.” He seems determined not to acknowledge our most recent encounter, when I found him six years ago curled up boomerang-style in my mom's wardrobe. “We're so glad you finally came.”

I stay civil but I don't smile. That would feel like a betrayal of my dad, though from the way my old man reacted to the divorce, you would think that nothing has changed. He's still devoted to his timepieces, still plays
baduk
weekly with the same two friends. Worst of all, he still lives alone, with only me to call him once a week to make sure he isn't surviving solely on microwave meals. The only times I know he is affected are when by necessity my mom's name comes up on my visits home and his eyes mist over as he polishes his spectacles.

“Call me shameless.”

I hide my irritation even though my mom has broken promise number one: to leave the deacon at home. I've gotten better at forgiving.

“I'll go anywhere if someone else is paying for the plane ticket.”

She comes up behind him in a hunter-green down coat and coordinating red scarf. A veritable Christmas tree, though my boyfriend would say that I don't fare much better in the fashion department.

“My Dumbo!” She looks elated and cautious all at once.

“Mom!”

We suffocate each other with hugs as if she hadn't just visited me in Boston four months ago, and in her arms I immediately
feel more at home. She squeezes my cheeks with both hands. “I'm so, so happy you're here.”

“Mom! I'm a little too old for public demonstrations.”

“You're my
saekki
.” Her smile is framed by crevices that seem to deepen by the month. “You're never too old.”

She aims up to kiss me, but I dodge it by stretching to my fullest height.

“How was the flight?”

“The way it always is. Uncomfortable.”

She tugs at my ear. “Did you read many books?”

I take her hands in mine and feel how dry and flaky they've become after the long Chinese winter. “I thought you were coming alone,” I say, my voice lowered.

She pulls away. “I—I need the bathroom before we go.” She dashes off, leaving me alone with the deacon.

I scoot my suitcase out of the way of passing travelers and plant myself on one of the plastic chairs. All of the airport's surfaces are coated in early spring's film of yellow dust. The deacon trails after me.

When he leans down to make eye contact, I fiddle with my luggage tags.

“You're not going to avoid me forever, are you? I'm part of your family now.”

“I already have a family.”

“Don't blame your
eomma
. She wanted me to stay at home.”

Home.

“I imagine you don't want to see me.”

I finally look up. “You are responsible for my parents' divorce.”

“I had to come out since you refused to see me. I wanted to . . . apologize.”

I clap for him. “And now you've apologized.”

“I'm a hypocrite, Daehan. I'm a sinner. We all are.”

“I've figured out that much myself by now.”

“This isn't easy for an adult to do—apologizing.”

“What's your apology going to do—repair my parents' marriage? It doesn't change anything—it only makes you feel better.”

He draws back as if I'd punched him. “Your
eomma
tells me you stopped going to church. It's my duty—my responsibility—to say this one thing: Don't rebel against your faith because you've lost faith in other people. I'm asking you, for the sake of your soul, don't confuse God with man.”

Waves of fatigue wash over me. I think he's wrong about rebellion. Every day I mourn the loss of God, which also equaled the loss of my childhood. My faith was the greatest, most reassuring map of my life. But my doubts certainly aren't his business, so I say, not entirely untruthfully, “I've been on two flights for a total of over sixteen hours. I'm trying my very best to be civil.”

I watch the rusty wheels of suitcases scrape past us and, in the silence, wait.

 • • • 

After saying our good-byes to the deacon, my mom and I drive through the smog and traffic that personify the new China, then along the border. She switches on an air freshener that smells of dried apples, and when she pulls off her sun hat before we leave the motel where we spent the night, the new sprays of gray hair shine in the sun. She notices me looking and says she'll
dye it as soon as I leave for the States. Even her last name has changed.

As she drives now, she puckers her lips, soundlessly forming words and sentences the way she does when she's trying to find the right words. Finally she says, “I know you really wanted to go back to that house, but returning there doesn't seem such a good idea. Why not just visit the mountains and my hometown?”

“I need to face it.”

Six years have passed, but in some ways time has stayed still for me. I know where I have to go.

“You're certain about this.”

I nod, afraid my voice will crack if I say anything.

“A lot has changed, hasn't it?” She charges ahead. “There's a surplus of missionaries here now looking for Han people to convert. I've decided to return to California once the year's out, since I'm no longer needed here.”

“With that man.”

“Dumbo, he's my husband.”

I tell her to veer right out of the city on the next road, which she does.

She says, “You're still not going to church.”

“No, Mom.”

“And you won't reconsider.”

I give myself a moment to think. “It would be dishonest.”

“So . . . when do I get to meet this girlfriend of yours? Maybe the next time I'm in America?”

“We've dated for less than two months. It's very present tense—it's not like we're getting married.”

“Will you at least be on the same coast after you graduate? She sounds so nice . . .”

Meaning, she sounds like good wife material. I refrain from telling my mom that my girlfriend isn't exactly a girl. Or telling her that I don't know where I'll end up or what I want to become, or whether I'm made for a traditional wife-and-two-kids kind of life or something radically different. Leaving the church was bad enough and I don't have the courage yet.

“I haven't thought that far,” I say. “You know I applied everywhere—law school, master's in sociology, management. Whoever gives me money.”

“You still don't know what you want to do, do you?” Her fingers tighten around the wheel.

I shrug. “I'm okay with not knowing. It's not like you can perfectly navigate your way through life.”

Everything is smaller at the border than I remembered it. The houses, the trees, the river itself. March isn't as cold as the March in my memory. The Tumen River is narrower. More puddles of water in the dry season than a river. The long stretch of border looks mainly peaceful despite the new surveillance cameras, where there weren't cameras before, and now much of the river is lined with barbed wire like cake icing and the new concrete holding centers that imprison North Koreans before they're sent back home to certain danger. In any case, it's hard to believe this river was the site of the claustrophobia, the fear, and the violence that the border has come to represent to me. We drive by the river-hugging small huts that my mom says are mainly owned by crooks trafficking North Korean women. The guard posts have now given way to camouflaged dugouts. The men
still fish in the shallow water, a woman is doing laundry, and kids are skipping stones during what should be school hours.

I was there. I was a witness.

“But, Danny, you're okay, aren't you?”

Smugglers trundle their goods to one another across the river, using a rope and pulley system. She knows almost nothing about what happened to me in China no matter how she tries to wrangle it out of me; all she knows of that time is that I lived in a cave dugout with North Koreans, who later, in groups of twos or threes, were met at locations assigned to them at the last minute by human smugglers, arrangements she had made with great difficulty, jeopardizing her evangelical work with the Han Chinese. She knows that I'd witnessed the violence done to Missionary Kwon but didn't call for medical help until my friends were out of his reach.

I keep my eyes on the divided country across the river. “Mom, do you think the North and the South will ever be unified?”

“Your friends will meet their families again someday. If it's God's will.”

“Was it God's will that they lived in a cave? Even in March, it gave a new definition to the word cold.”

She looks guilty, pained. “I'm sorry, Daehan, I'm so sorry for everything.”

I want to tell her it isn't her fault. To say that I'm now fairly confident that I'll live a fairly happy life, whatever that means. That I finally understand the impossibility of orchestrating the future or who I am. That I sometimes dream of rivers of floating eyes. That all of those eyes are Missionary Kwon's. Instead I massage her shoulder. “I've had a break,” I say. “I can take over the driving now.”

We finally arrive. I had assumed that images would come rushing back to me as soon as I faced the building, like in a movie, but nothing of the sort happens. Shredded, weather-worn Bubble Wrap hangs from the windows, the building's walls are streaked green with water stains, and the stairwell is rusted orange to the point of looking dangerous. In the building's shadows, the ice is still hard and stubborn.

My mom stays in the car as I walk toward the building. The yard's the same tangle of knee-high weeds. I think about the little I learned about my friends through my mom's contacts. Gwangsu out-Christianed the zealous South Korean church community, and after a couple of years in Daegu working odd jobs, he got a scholarship to seminary school. Namil was placed with adoptive parents through a Korean American church in Fairfax, Virginia. Bakjun ended up in Seoul, but after brawling in the kimchi factory he worked at whenever someone called him a spy or a dirty North Korean, he successfully applied a second time for refugee status in England, citing discrimination in the South, and settled in a New Malden boardinghouse. No one knows what happened to Cheolmin. Then there's Yongju. And Jangmi. I haven't heard from either of them since receiving a single phone call through the broker, letting me know they had reached safety. Halfway up the stairs, I stop. It's better not to continue.

As we drive back, my mom says, “Your friends, I hope they're doing well, wherever they are.”

My eyes fill with the brown, bare landscape. “They're survivors,” I say. This far north, it's as if winter never quite ended.

A
t first there was loneliness. Then there was loss. And then there was a greater loneliness, the loneliness of freedom. Freedom: Once I am truly safe, I see that there is too much of it. Freedom means you are free not to care about anyone or anything. Freedom shows me that all that matters to the free world is money.

Before I understood what freedom meant, Jangmi and I blindly followed the broker through Chinese terrain ranging from bare plains to semitropical cities, then made that final jungle crossing from Laos into Thailand, where we sheltered each other for months in the crowded Bangkok detention center. The ground had shifted beneath me, becoming yet another new country, and the only stability was this primitive desire to live, and Jangmi. But in South Korea Jangmi and I were separated by a mosaic of men from their National Intelligence Service, who put me through weeks of lengthy security interrogations. Then I was finally admitted into the Hanawon resettlement center for the
three months of required reeducation. I grieved, but I couldn't hold on to anger; it moved through my hands like water. I didn't feel trapped like the others, who were impatient to start a new life outside of the brick building's lecture rooms and routines; I was looking for Jangmi.

That first week I discovered her after a talk given by one of our people who had resettled in the South years ago.

The man at the podium had a face shiny with moisturizer and wore his collar flipped up like Elvis. He said, “I was you once,” with the flat cadence of someone from Seoul, most of his Pyongan region accent rubbed out. He gave us warnings I didn't understand yet as he relayed his experience of resettling, and proudly mentioned having a South Korean wife. His exertions were wasted. I was in the back, and in front of me rows of heads hung heavily like a field of sunflowers.

I saw Jangmi in the corridor after I left the lecture room.

Though we all wore the same orange jacket and black pants, I recognized her from her feline movements and the drag of one foot. Her arms were linked with the arms of two other women heavier-set than she was, and I sprinted forward until I got ahead of them and confirmed that it was her. The same harmonious proportion of eyes to nose to lips, tension alive in her every gesture. She was laughing, her smile as bright as the cheap rhinestone pin in her hair. My family's background had slowed down my interrogation, and I later learned that she had been in Hanawon at least a month longer than me. It was as if she had moved so fast that the past couldn't catch up with her. She was already blooming in this new country.

“Jangmi!” I said.

All the light in her disappeared and her arms dropped limply to her sides. We had hidden, pressing together in filthy train bathrooms and clawing our way through suffocating jungles, trusting whatever the broker told us to do. She was the only person in the country who knew me. Her eyes clouded over and she swerved away from me as if I were a distant, unpleasant memory, uncoupling herself from her friends.

I grabbed her wrist. “Jangmi,” I said again.

“You know I wouldn't go by that name anymore,” she said. “It's old-fashioned, anyway.”

A bright smile overwhelmed her again as if she was determined to cover up the past. I wanted to reach her, but I didn't know where to start, and the oppressive wall of her face seemed a kind of plea.

I said, “I just arrived. They kept me longer than I'd imagined, cross-referencing and checking and double-looping my words back to me, until I couldn't have lied even if I wanted to.” Except about Missionary Kwon. Always about Missionary Kwon.

“I'm leaving here soon enough. I didn't have your kind of family,” she said.

“Have you seen the others?”

“Why would I want to?” She cupped her hands together as if to share a secret and said, “You should keep your eyes and ears open here—there's a lot you can learn outside the classroom, if you pay attention.”

I took her chin in one hand and made her look directly at me. “I know you. You don't have to pretend with me.”

“You're always living in the past. I belong to the future, I always have.” She stepped back. “It's dangerous to live in the past.”

She turned away from me, and I understood that the ghost of Missionary Kwon was standing between us.

I knew how to wait. I knew how to be patient.

 • • • 

In South Korea, I meet a few of our people who have become brokers themselves and forge new routes out of China to bring our people to safety. I meet a South Korean Christian couple who sold their house and used that money to get people out. But I am no hero. I am one of the lucky ones. I studied for the college entrance exams and then matriculated into a famous university in Seoul. I work part-time for the South Korean government as a source of information on the North. I write for the university newspaper, hand out flyers about the human rights crisis in our country to impervious crowds, help release giant helium balloons with supplies and information north across the thirty-eighth parallel toward home. Home, a country that feels more like my country the longer I live in the South, which will never let us forget. I am a model North Korean refugee; I testify in front of churches, to the National Assembly, to anyone who will listen. I make endless inquiries into my family's fate, striking back in my small way at the gated mansion that took my
abeoji,
at the man in the red leather jacket. I have returned to China several times on my South Korean passport that has my new name, following tendrils of rumors about my
eomeoni,
my
dongsaeng
.

I haven't found them yet, though I did meet one woman who described my
dongsaeng
perfectly; the woman had been married off
to a farmer, then fled the village during a crackdown. I did not give up. I tried dating strangers who remained strangers. And I did find the public housing apartment unit assigned to Jangmi. Two years passed before I dared write to her the first letter, then the second. A third. When she doesn't respond, I understand. Sometimes the memory is as much as you can bear.

On Saturday I enter the empty church and slide onto a darkly stained pew as I often do, and force myself to return to the border that haunts my sleep. I return to Missionary Kwon, his image burning into my sight. To the Dear Leader, crossing borders in a green Soviet train with its curtains lowered so that no one can see in or out. To signboards of blood-red Chinese characters. To boys living in a cave, so gaunt that their cheekbones strain out of their skin. To the gun aimed at my
abeoji
's heart. To the last sight of the women in my life. I carry my other countries inside me.

As I wait for the bus back home to Kunsan, Seoul's Saturday night crowd is awakening. Teenagers dressed like American rap singers pass, the girls with the same reproduced narrow, tilted-up nose, flaunting skirts that are more slips of fabric than clothes, flash the logos once coveted by my
eomeoni
's peers. A middle-aged woman waits in a ruffled miniskirt, as if she couldn't bear parting with an image of her twenty-year-old self. The café in front of the stop is lined with books, its ceiling as high as a church steeple. You could buy a kilo of rice back home for the price of an Americano. I am often bitter; I am always nostalgic.

I find Jangmi's letter in my neglected mailbox. The plain white envelope is the sort sold in twenty-four-hour convenience
stores, and my address, a smudge of blue ink, as if she half-hoped that I would not receive it.

In the apartment nearly as empty of possessions as the day I moved in, I wait as long as I can bear. I open the window and let in the early spring air, face its chilly fingers and try to stay calm. It might be a cursory note directing me to never write to her again. A colorful declaration of disgust at my epistolary rituals. She might mock my certainty that she is the only woman who can ever really know me, brand me as a man stuck reading the past. Which I am. My hands shake as I cajole the envelope open, careful not to rip it.