How I Became a North Korean (5 page)

My right hand was a feathery pressure on her hips; my lips memorized her eyes, her nose, her lips. And though she was a proper girl from a good family, she sensed the strangeness of the night and allowed my arms to embrace her collarbone like a necklace. She must have known we were saying good-bye. This first kiss would remind me, whenever my hometown seemed an impossible dream, of who I had been.

S
eongsik's daughter was eight years old, the same age I'd been when I quit school as the famine swept through our country. That first day when he tried to show me the bedroom, Byeol stretched her arms and legs across the width of the door frame and blocked me from passing.

“Where are you going?” she cried. “That's where Abba and I sleep.”

It was the only other room in the apartment. I was relieved, the dreaded inevitable moment postponed. Seongsik lifted his daughter up again from behind, so her arms and legs as round as Pyongyang dumplings spun in the air. He said, “Now, we've talked about this.”

The girl lurched backward as Seongsik struggled to hold her. I remembered being eight again and became afraid. I had licked the last of the ground-up cornmeal and bark from my bowl, then ate from my
eomma
's bowl as well. She had let me. My schoolteachers began stealing food instead of coming to school,
and our family cracked open like an egg. After Abba died, Eomma left our one-room row house and went to China for the first time, and I sulked behind my aunt's back so I wouldn't cry. I tried to hide how afraid I was of never seeing her again. I remember needing her. I remember loving her.

Would I be a good
eomma
? Was anyone ever capable of being a good
eomma
? The girl called Byeol—a strange name, a star in the night sky—had uneven bangs that her father must have cut for her, and those bangs touched me. I decided I would cut the girl's hair next time.

I gave her hair a light stroke, so as not to scare her.

“I had lice last week,” Byeol said. “Really bad. These tiny white bugs were crawling all over the comb.” I removed my hand.

Seongsik put her down. “You going to behave?”

She ran into the bedroom and flopped on the bed. “This is my room.”

“All right, we'll sleep together, just for tonight. I'll spread a
yo
on the floor.” He sighed. “Remember, she's only eight. You know what eight is like.”

I was grateful, and relieved, when Byeol jumped up and down on the large raised bed, refusing to leave us alone. The bed was lined with a hospital ward's worth of dolls, some missing an arm or a leg, one headless, another bald. She snatched the one intact doll with straw-colored hair and breasts shooting out like rockets and held the doll's lips to her ear. She peered over its head at me.

“She says she doesn't like you,” she said. “She says none of them like you. They were going to throw them out—they didn't have a home,” she sang as she jumped in circles around her
abba,
marking her territory. “I rescued them. Kind of like Abba rescued you.”

You couldn't say something like that to an
eoreun;
I was over twice her age. It was as if she had slapped me. I understood she was threatened by me, but I couldn't even reprimand her; I had no such power. All I could do was wait and see what my new husband would do.

Seongsik looked from me to his daughter. He combed his fingers through his hair so roughly it looked as if he would rip out what was left.

“I've got the money to buy her new dolls, I do, but the church insisted,” he said, and fled the room.

Once he left, a spring came loose and my body became alert and capable. The walls were only walls, the dolls only dolls. The girl flopped backward onto the thin mattress and pretended to sleep, but I squatted down to her level.

“If you make it difficult for me, it will also become difficult for you.” I kept my voice light, friendly. “But it doesn't have to be that way. We can get along. I can be a nice person, really. You might even like me.”

“You're not a nice person, I can tell,” the girl said flatly.

“You don't know me.” My eyes crowded with tears, but I didn't let them fall. “You don't know how I've suffered.”

“I am nice. Everyone says so. I look like my
eomma
.”

“Are you being nice to me, Byeol? What do you think? I'm not trying to replace your
eomma
. I want us to be friends.”

Byeol only made dizzying circles on her back, making a mess of the bed.

“Lots of people are nice to me, almost everyone I meet.”

I leaned in until our noses nearly touched and said gently, “There is always an exchange between people, and right now that exchange is between you and me. It's your choice. It can be easy or it can be hard, but I want it to be easy for both of us.”

The girl sat up, her lips pursed into a stubborn knot that mirrored her father's. “What about my
abba
and you? What does he get, when you're only a North Korean?”

I straightened. I was sure that men wanted only one thing.

“Don't worry about your
abba,
” I said. “He knows what he wants.”

 • • • 

Seongsik surprised me the next morning, tucking a dethorned red rose behind my ear. “A rose for a Rose,” he said, blushing like a boy.

He hadn't told me about Byeol's existence, but he was a romantic. He insisted on music to match the mood of the weather and the light of the day, and he announced Classical! Rock! K-pop!, changing the small discs as each piece startled me with its strangeness. I wondered how many months he had replayed these scenes to himself since his wife had left him, living alone with an imaginary woman he courted nightly in the dark. He was so eager to love me, this man, and I was prepared to use that love.

Before dinner he told me to fold my hands together while he conducted a conversation with someone who wasn't there. I finally found the courage to ask about the American bastard framed and hanging above the television, and he said, “That's
Jesus Christ,” with reverence in his voice. Only then did I connect his monologue to the air with the picture. “God's son who gave up his life for us.”

“Jesus Christ?”

“Jesus, Jesus,” said Byeol, suspicious. “You mean you don't know Jesus Christ?”

She pushed a plate of bean sprouts my way, then gave me a strange look when I pushed it back toward her. The smell was too strong for me. Seongsik retrieved a large black book and placed it in my hands as if offering me a letter signed by the Great Leader himself.

“It's the Bible,” he said. “It's the only book we need.”

I flipped the book open and traced the lines across the page.

He was so eager that he leaned toward me until his shirt touched his rice and told me that the son of God could walk on water and multiply five loaves of bread and two fish into a plentitude that fed entire villages.

I wondered if my new husband was sick or prone to imaginative spells.

“Has anyone seen this man do it—walk on water?”

He regarded me with fatherly amusement. “You'll grow to have faith.”

He lectured me on how unholy my country was. While he drew circles in his daughter's bowl of rice with chopsticks, he spoke of famine and poverty and what it did to people, as if he had crossed the river and personally witnessed it. He wondered out loud how we lived without technology. What he said wasn't
untrue, not exactly. Even after all the honest and rule-abiding ones had died in the famine, most still experienced winter hungers that gnawed at the stomach, then ate what they could in the summer. Too many of us knew violence and corruption and the addiction of homegrown
bbindu,
our medicine that I later learned was called opium, which helped you forget about food. But the way he looked at me as he spoke from some high-up place offended me. It was as if I were being branded as a North Korean, part of a mass of people who were all the same.

I said, “I've eaten meat more than a few times, and always had money to buy cold buckwheat noodles at the market.”

I took delicate bites on purpose, my mouth hardly moving, while his rotated from side to side like an ox's. Maybe I hadn't had much schooling, I added, but I knew my letters and had owned a cellular phone and a stiff silk
hanbok.
A friend had once given me a gold watch as a gift.

“Gold? Real gold?” He spat out a mouthful of rice onto the table. “Your friend's a man.”

The girl screamed, “A man?” as if her father was exempt from this category.

“If he treated you so great, why didn't you marry him?”

I wondered if his jealousy could be useful to me.

“It was my uncle,” I said at last.

He leaned in closer. “You can tell me anything.” He was testing me. I had been tested before. “You don't have to hide from me.”

I didn't forget to compensate him with a kiss.

His daughter and I shared the bedroom after her
abba
was called by “one of his associates” to guide a Christian group touring
through the Yanbian province and had to leave for a few days. Anything that delayed my first night alone with him was good news.

“I'm entrusting Byeol to you,” he said. “She never recovered after her
eomma
left.”

His guide work had forced him to travel around the region, leaving Byeol at the mercy of his local Christian friends. But now he had me. Our marriage was also practical.

I linked my arm in his. “You can trust me, I took care of my
abba
until the very end. I know how to take care of people.”

He crouched over the black and white tiles of the kitchen, digging up a book of recipes. “You know, I try to get the tourists to help your people at their hideouts. Some live for years in underground caves like moles.” There was sympathy in his voice but also a vein of satisfaction in telling me this.

 • • • 

My name is Jangmi now, I reminded myself the next morning as I made his prescribed breakfast for Byeol. But one bite of the salted mackerel that I had been craving sent me gagging to the bathroom. The girl noticed, how could she not? She watched everything I did. I told her I had a chronically weak stomach. That morning, I learned that unlike my
eomma,
I wasn't immune to morning sickness.

When the girl left for school, I tried to better understand the man I had married and went through his belongings—as his wife, I considered this fair—and saw the care that Seongsik had taken. He had set up a new life for me in the common room: a stack of Chinese language books and CDs with a note to me taped to the top cover, even a glass ball that rained snow on a
couple when you shook it. I had never seen an object so beautiful. I flipped through his shelf and, for a few hours, skimmed the books and magazines in our language—a language that was the same but different somehow, pages with words I had never seen and alien expressions. I looked up the many words I didn't know as I read, and was stunned at what they said about our Dear Leader—Japanese sushi the price of a car for a dinner party, women my age dancing naked in front of him—stories I dismissed as Western lies. I tried to study Chinese, but how could I when there was so much to discover in magazines and on television? I had a television for the first time in my life.

I wanted to buy everything. I learned there was an ink to make your eyelashes thicker and longer, and that this was supposed to be attractive. You could have your legs operated on and made thinner in South Korea, endless tubes of color could transform anyone into a beauty. I paid attention. I wanted a life beyond marrying a man who offered so little. I tried hard not to think about my
eomma
squatting at the market selling potato and corn cakes—how would she survive without me? Would the official report of my death keep her safe from questioning? Would Seongsik accept the baby as his, at least for the time we had together? How would I escape this marriage and find my way to Nam Joseon, a country that Seongsik called South Korea? Smuggled VCDs had showed me that in Nam Joseon, South Korea, whatever its name, scrawny women owned rooms heaped with clothes and cars with heated seats. A safe country.

By the afternoon, I found myself eager for his sour-faced daughter to return home from school.

When Byeol opened the door, bringing the early smells of
spring with her, I offered her baked sweet potatoes to snack on and asked, “Do you need help with your homework?”

Dots of red spread, like bloodstains, across her cheeks. “I never need help.”

Everyone needs an
eomma,
Seongsik had said with an expectant look, but the way the girl's face drained of sunshine when she saw me made it clear that she was not that kind of daughter. Still, an hour later as she read to her broken dolls, I thought, My baby must be a girl.

I tapped on her book. “Our lovely girl, what would you like for dinner?”

She smiled sweetly and asked for fish again.

“Wouldn't you like
bibimbap
instead?” I had seasoned and cooked mixed vegetables while she was at school, checking my reaction to the different root vegetables.

“I want fish. Abba told you my favorite food is fish.” She kicked her tiny schoolbag across the floor and looked prepared to kick me next. “All I ever want is grilled fish.”

So I made her the grilled fish, breathing through my mouth and hardly able to look at the gills and silver ribbons of skin that I had once hungered for. I turned the dead creature from one side to the other, expecting it to flop over and gaze at me with its bulging eyes. When I wouldn't eat it, she looked triumphant, though she clearly had no idea what she had won.

 • • • 

He was damaged goods; I should have known as much. At the time, it shocked me to see such misery even across the border.

When he returned home after several nights away, the dreaded
event happened. He bribed Byeol with sweets and successfully lured her to a
yo
spread out on the common-room floor, then he stood by the bed and stripped off his slacks and striped sweater, finally ready to claim his reward. Clothed, he had looked like the shabby men from my hometown. But naked, he was half man, half machine. His right leg was kept intact with a leather garter belt, and beneath the thigh, a metal leg ran down to a steel ankle and ended with a foot in the shape of a shoe. This wasted leg thrust forward in my direction like a challenge. I tasted the metal in my mouth. I shouldn't have been surprised; what kind of man married a fugitive from the country across the river, with no rights and no money, forced to live on his fickle mercy? The silence between us filled with what we thought we knew about each other.