Under the Same Sky (11 page)

Despite that painful setback, my status was rising. But nothing helped like the time I finally beat Choon Hyuk.

It was another dirty, nasty fight. By fifteen minutes in, my ribs felt like they were broken and poking into my lungs. My mouth was filled with dust, and blood ran into my eyes. At thirty minutes, I stood up after a wild bit of wrestling and found that Choon Hyuk had stayed down. More than that, he was crying. My arms felt like lead weights as my friends came and pumped them in the air. I only felt relief, but my friends were transported with happiness. Their long investment in me as a fighter had paid off.

This was a rare good day at school. I didn’t realize it, but the training I was getting in those schoolyard brawls would be worth far more to me than the little geometry I learned. It was far better preparation for what lay ahead.

Chapter

F
IGHTING WASN’T MY
only vice. I had other bad habits that tormented my father. I liked to gamble, for example. There was a game at school where the other boys and I wagered with house nails. One day I came home with my pockets full of them. I’d had an amazing run of luck and couldn’t wait to show my father as soon as he walked through the door. He gave me a stern look. “You shouldn’t gamble,” he said, but he, too, grew excited as I poured my winnings into his broad hands. He flashed a smile and his eyes turned warm as they ran over the heap of black nails. “But look how well you’ve done! With these we can start to build an addition on our house. Put them in my toolbox, and when the time comes, those will be the first nails I use.”

It was always about houses with my father. They were his greatest achievement. His one and only son? I didn’t come close.

I grew so excited by my father’s newfound pride in me that day that of course I went back to school and kept gambling, against his strict orders. And of course I lost, and of course I borrowed nails from other boys to keep going, hoping to get enough for the addition my father dreamed of. And of course my losing streak went on and on, and I couldn’t win a single round, and then one night I crept back home very much in debt. It was such a small amount, a matter of twenty or thirty cents perhaps, that it appears ridiculous to me today. But that night, when no one was around, I went to my father’s toolbox, filled with his hammers and wrenches, and stole the nails I’d given him. I did so without a thought of what would happen if he found out.

When he noticed the nails were gone, he didn’t scream at me or beat me; in fact, he never beat me at all, unlike many North Korean dads. But the look on his face made me wish he had. It was one of bewilderment and deep, deep sorrow. His eyes said,
What have I done to deserve a son such as this?

My biggest mistake that year was taking a loan from one of my schoolmates who, unknown to me, was really stingy. One day, two of my good friends were going to the snack store. I was flat broke, but I wanted to go. So I found this older boy I didn’t know well and he gave me five
won.
I had no idea he was a maniac when it came to being paid back right away. I learned later that he didn’t have a father and was known for being very rude; sadly, I was to learn this the hard way.

When I didn’t give the money lender the cash back the next day, he showed up at my house, yelling, “Joseph’s father, give me ten
won.
” He had added one hundred percent interest to the loan in twenty-four hours! And he wouldn’t go away, screaming for everyone to hear that I owed him money.

I was out playing somewhere. My father went outside to shut the boy up and they got into a tussle, fighting there in our front yard. Finally the lender left without his money. But my father was humiliated by the whole experience.

When I came home that day, he said to me, “You are no longer my son.”

Those words! How they stung me! I didn’t know what to say. I retreated to my sleeping mat, where I cried until I fell asleep. The next morning on the way to school, the words spooled over and over again in my mind. “No longer my son . . . no longer my son . . . no longer . . .” It was something he could never take back. I felt like an orphan, misunderstood and unwanted.

Despite my father’s disappointment and shame, I still didn’t find the motivation to study or stop gambling. Maybe I improved for a week or two, poring over my books at night so that he would see me, but there was no lasting change. I just didn’t see the point of it, and my father’s insistence that I get good grades only made me more defiant. I was going to be a soldier fighting for North Korea—why did I need to know trigonometry? The bad grades continued.

Thank God my parents had Bong Sook. She was a good student, very organized and detail-oriented. Bong Sook never once caused my parents any trouble. Even in the worst times she was cheerful. Other teenagers were rebellious. They would say things like, “Why do I have to go to the farm instead of hanging out with my friends?” My sister was never that way. In a house filled with three headstrong people, she was the one who accepted what life gave her.

I think back and wonder about what was going on behind that kind, pretty face. What were her dreams of life? What did she want to be? (My guess is a teacher, but it’s only a guess—we never talked about it.) Did she have a crush on a certain boy in school? Whom did she like? Who liked her? It haunts me to this day that I know nothing about these things.

I didn’t even know the name of Bong Sook’s favorite book. She had very few to choose from; most of the titles in our house were about the North Korean Communist Party. Like every family we knew, we had a copy of Kim Il Sung’s memoirs. They came in an eight-volume set, and Bong Sook liked the one in which the Great Leader described fighting the Japanese in Manchuria. There were many action scenes and battles, and illustrations of Kim Il Sung and his brethren bayonetting the enemy. It’s a very good book. Whether it’s true or not is another story.

Bong Sook would read to me from one of the volumes. I spent many nights curled up in her lap on the heated floor of our house, listening to her soft voice. Kim Il Sung’s story was full of dramatic and vivid scenes, and I asked her to read our favorite chapters over and over again. At one point, as the Japanese crackdown on Korean rebels intensifies, Kim Il Sung is forced to flee into China:

Avoiding the watchful eyes of police, I walked away from the ferry pier to Jul-mok. The river Yalu was frozen there and I would be able to walk across. The Yalu was less than ten feet wide at that point . . . My feet refused to get on the ice because I might not feel the soil of Korea again. I turned around and picked up a small pebble and held it tightly in my hand. I wanted to take a piece of Korea with me . . . That moment at the Yalu bank was one of the most heart-wrenching of my life.

I was thrilled by scenes such as these. But now I ask myself: Were these really Bong Sook’s favorite chapters too? Or did she read these passages just because I liked them?

I don’t know where my sister’s love for me ended and the real Bong Sook began. I depended on her as grass depends on the sun.

I wish I hadn’t been so selfish with Bong Sook. It never occurred to me to ask myself, “Does she really want to wash my socks today?” or “Why is Bong Sook giving me her food?” I was the boy. It was simply her role to serve me, or so I thought.

Our only entertainment on these long nights was my father’s stories. He was a wonderful storyteller. He would begin his tales when the lights flickered and went out at night and there was nothing to do but lie on our mats and stare at the painted white ceiling above us. My father had a light baritone voice, and for an hour it would take us away from our worries, bring us to places far from Manyang.

One of my favorite stories was about Kim Il Sung’s return from a visit to Moscow. It was the Great Leader’s habit to circle an airport three times before landing, to make sure everything was OK with the approach. When he flew back to Pyongyang one afternoon, assassins had planned to shoot down his plane with some kind of missile. As he neared the city, Kim Il Sung, sitting in the back of the plane, ordered the pilot to circle only twice. The assassins, waiting for his third loop, missed their chance, and the Great Leader landed safely.

“How did he
know?
” I asked my father. He just smiled at me and raised his eyebrows. The Great Leader was an extraordinary person who’d saved North Korea from slavery; tricking some assassins was all in a day’s work for him. But he was gone now, I reminded myself. Such miracles were in the past.

My favorite stories of all were about my dad’s time in the Special Forces of North Korea. He told us how, as an eighteen-year-old, he and his fellow soldiers were ordered to cut a hole in the ice of a frozen river. They then stripped off their uniforms, dived into the numbing water, and swam a certain distance before breaking another hole in the ice with their rifles—this time from underneath! Another time, during parachute training, his instructors told him that if his parachute got tangled with another recruit’s, one of the two should cut his own lines and fall to his death to save his comrade. “The things we had to do were very hard,” my dad said. “During our training, one piece of candy had to sustain me on a twenty-five-mile march!” A few years into his ten-year service, he lost his hearing in one ear during an ocean dive and had to leave the army.

My father signed a paper when he left the military, promising he would never use the skills he’d learned there in civilian life. He took that oath so seriously that he would never teach me how to fight. His only piece of advice in this area was “Never close your eyes,” because that shows you’re scared and also hampers the accuracy of your punches. I always remembered that.

When my dad told his tales, we were transported aloft to a North Korean air force plane, or we joined a mountain march where men stumbled through the darkness, nearly asleep on their feet. His stories gave us courage; we were no longer sick and hungry creatures, but comrades of these dashing men. When I heard my father’s voice in our dark house, it would feel as if his arms were around me again and all was right with my country.

I would soon come to miss those nights very much.

Chapter

I
N THE FALL
of 2000, our “good year”—really, it was just six months—came to a sudden end. Inflation shot up again, and a kilogram of rice that had once cost forty or fifty
won
now cost two hundred. The rest of the country was recovering, but my father had become sick. Hunger had taken a hard toll on his health, and he had contracted cirrhosis of the liver (though he’d never been much of a drinker).

We went back to our “farm” in the country, two and a half hours away on foot. By then, we’d realized why the government had given the land away—it was at the base of a mountain where the trees had been cleared by burning, and the soil wasn’t very good. Year after year, our plot yielded fewer and fewer vegetables. We ate string beans and the first corn, which came in around August 15, Korean Independence Day. But soon we were back in Manyang, starving and worried. The famine returned to our home, and it was like an animal that had grown up and gotten stronger. It began to devour us.

Home was bleaker than ever. My mom took out loans and was unable to pay them back. There was no more rice or grain. We subsisted on weeds and wild grasses, scavenged from the fields that bordered the mountains. My father warned us about mushrooms. He was worried we would be so hungry that we’d be unable to wait to bring the mushrooms home for him to identify and mistakenly eat a poisonous one. We’d heard whispers that entire families had been found sprawled around their dinner pots, where the bad mushrooms still sat in lukewarm water.

Hunger sucked away our energy. We entered a kind of brownout, a time of slow starvation. Your mind is partially numbed but your stomach is racked with pain, and each day is lived on the wire between the two: when it glows hot, the scraping in your stomach is almost unbearable and you want to scream. Your mind turns against you, flashing images of lavish meals in front of your eyes. When the connection grows dim, you slip into a half slumber. You feel irritable. Your heartbeat is shallow and fast.

As the weeks went by, Bong Sook looked weaker and weaker. She would sit unsteadily on her sleeping mat, as if she was going to topple over. One day, my mother asked Bong Sook to pass a plate of cabbage leaves so that she could dump them in the cooking pot and boil them. The leaves sat on a table five feet from Bong Sook. She turned to get up, but her limbs wouldn’t support her and she collapsed back on the mat after rising only an inch or two. Then she attempted to crawl, but again her body betrayed her: the left arm buckled and she sank down on the mat like a building that had partially imploded. Once Bong Sook was tilted over, she didn’t have the strength to straighten up, so she stayed there, slumped at a steep angle.

It was the first time I ever saw terror in my sister’s eyes. Bong Sook looked at me, then at my mother and father. Her eyes were loud with fear.
What’s happening?
they cried.
Why is my body doing these strange things? What does it mean?

My parents struggled to their feet and pulled her up straight. I couldn’t move. It felt like I was watching through the kind of haze a fire throws off.
This is how it happens,
I thought.
How families are found dead.
If my parents didn’t have that last reserve of strength, we would have watched each other topple into unconsciousness, barely realizing it was real and not a dream. We were close to the precipice.

My mother’s pellagra returned in full force, and my father grew more ill as the weeks went by. Hunger caused his stomach to swell, and the cirrhosis darkened his skin and caused intense, jabbing pain. The skin above the liver became hot and painful as the organ swelled and scarred. We had no money for a doctor, so beyond the initial diagnosis, my father was never really treated, and we never found out what caused the disease. But the fact that both my parents were weakened by their illnesses worried them terribly. They dreaded Bong Sook and I becoming
Kkotjebi.