Under the Same Sky (15 page)

After my father’s funeral, my mother, Bong Sook, and I had to move out of our house. My father’s friend, who had given us small amounts of money when my father could no longer work, informed us he was taking the space as reimbursement. Mother and Bong Sook thought this was cruel, but I didn’t blame the man. He’d spent cash on us, and now he was getting it back. I was thankful that he had lent us the money, so we could afford aspirin and a little food to make my father’s final days comfortable.

We spent our last few days in the house trying to think where we could go. It was during this time that Small Grandfather came to see us.

“You can live with me,” he told my mother. We were surprised and a little mystified by the offer, but very grateful. We took our belongings—they fit in a small bag—and followed him to his big house in Hoeryong, in a nice part of town with widely spaced unattached houses. We had gotten lucky, we thought; a place like this in a time of hardship. It was the best house we had ever lived in.

The memory of my father lingered. I would be playing in the front yard of Small Grandfather’s house and for a moment I’d forget that he was dead, and then some memory of him would prick my heart, and I would remember,
Oh, yes, he’s gone
, and want to cry again.

Small Grandfather and his wife had adult children, so none of them lived in the big house. He’d retired almost a decade before, and had put away enough money to survive ten years. Or so he thought. Now the rampant inflation that had doomed so many families was eating into his savings. Still, we had food, and so we began to relax. Small Grandfather was nice to me; he even let me ride his bicycle, which was a big deal in those days. We had long ago sold our family one.

But after we’d been living with Small Grandfather only a few days, he grew concerned about his shrinking savings.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked my mother one morning. “Do you have a plan to support yourself?”

My mother was taken aback. What could she do? There were no jobs, and no one had money. People were abandoning their children because they couldn’t feed them.

“I don’t know, Small Grandfather.”

His brow furrowed. “Listen, I have an idea,” he said, not unkindly. “You should take Bong Sook to China and live there.”

Though my mother had her own mind and opinions, we were living in Small Grandfather’s house. I’m sure she thought that she couldn’t defy him. She stood there, her head bowed, and nodded slightly.

“You must be thinking about Kwang Jin,” Small Grandfather said, seeing her hesitation. “Don’t worry about that. I will take care of him. Just make sure to send us money every month—once you get settled, of course. Money is easy to make in China.”

I didn’t know it, but this was the moment that determined the rest of my life. This, far more than my father’s death. My father wasn’t able to protect us; the famine had taken him as it had thousands and thousands of others. And
his
brothers and sisters could offer us no protection. An epidemic had killed his siblings when he was just a boy, which meant that there were no paternal relatives nearby to save us now. Small Grandfather and my uncle were the only ones. It’s strange to think that your fate was written before you were born, in a tiny virus that swept through a village where your father had lived as a child.

The deal was quickly done. If we ran out of money, my mother would take Bong Sook to China. They would earn money there, sending back a small portion of their earnings to pay for my keep in Hoeryong. When they had enough money to set up a household, they would return. I didn’t think of what my mother and sister would do to make all this cash. To me, China was a land where no one was ever hungry and where people had everything they needed. I wasn’t completely naïve; I didn’t believe the streets were paved with gold or that cash fell out of the sky. But I believed there was money there, more than we had ever seen in our lives.

When the time came to leave, my mother and sister would make their way two hours north to Sambong, where they would hire a broker. The broker knew some of the soldiers who regularly patrolled the Tumen River and would bribe one to let them cross. Their journey would still be scary and dangerous. There were many other soldiers who might challenge them and even fire on them. But this was the safest option.

In the meantime, to support us my mother got involved in fish smuggling. Many Chinese believed that fish from across the border tasted better. So North Korean fish were a popular commodity in Chinese towns. My mother began buying fish in the Hoeryong market, then smuggled them across the river. She even snuck into the border towns to arrange the transactions. “China isn’t like the government says,” she told us when she came back, and I felt hope rising in her. “The Chinese are much richer than North Koreans, and they’ll pay for delicacies.”

My mother was making good money. We ate white rice every day, and she thought of buying me a bicycle—a Japanese bicycle!—so that I wouldn’t have to use Small Grandfather’s all the time. My mother was always happy to spend money, unlike my late father, who was very cautious.

We were doing well, so the move to China was put off for the moment. Our fears receded. My frame filled out again and I put on weight. I hoped Mother had finally learned how to succeed, and that she wouldn’t have to take Bong Sook away. The longer it went without her leaving, the more hopeful I was.

But always inside me there lingered the fear that the only real family left to me would be taken away.

Chapter

I
T WAS AROUND
this time that I discovered three things in rapid succession: smoking, girls, and fashion. Smoking was easy to pick up in North Korea, where people rarely worry about living into old age and so light up every chance they get. My friends and I thought it was an adult thing to do. We bought cheap North Korean cigarettes one at a time, smoking them until the ash singed our fingers. When the smoke hit our lungs, we coughed as though we’d been doing this for years.

Fashion and girls came next. Those discoveries were intimately related to each other. One day I announced to my mother that I wanted a new school coat, a black one that was of better quality than the one the school had provided. A black coat would disguise the mud that vehicles splashed on me as I walked the unpaved roads of Hoeryong. I would look cleaner, sharper, more like one of the boys from rich families who bought their clothes in China, even if they were knockoffs. I begged my mother incessantly. I desperately wanted new shoes, too—I’d always loved having a clean, new pair, so much so that when my father would buy me shoes as a boy, I’d tell him, “I don’t have to have dinner tonight, this is enough!”—but the coat was all-important.

I needed to look good to impress the kids at school, like Hyang Mi, the smartest girl in my class, with a round face I found irresistible. When I looked at Hyang Mi, I felt a longing to be with her, to make her laugh. A decent outfit was, in my mind, the first requirement in getting her attention.

My mother bought me the wool coat and I wore it to school proudly. I began to brush my one pair of trousers and clean my only pair of dress shoes before leaving for class every day. I was becoming a typical teenager, I suppose.

A few weeks later, after my transformation, Hyang Mi whispered to me that she wanted to give me something. The next day she slipped a small object into my hand, cold and smooth. I looked down. It was a plastic figurine, brightly colored, a toy of some kind. She must have stolen it from her little brother. I didn’t need a new toy, but the figurine meant a great deal to me because it was from Hyang Mi. I gripped it tightly in my hand on the way home.

From that day on, I felt proud getting ready for school, putting on my new black coat and the school uniform that my mother had bought in the market. Knowing that Hyang Mi was getting dressed too, and thinking of me, made my head feel light. The pain of my father’s death receded slightly.

Of course, this being my mother, the good times couldn’t last. I suspect she overreached again and got stuck with goods she couldn’t sell. Within four months, my mother had no more money. This time my father wasn’t there to cover her debts. She wore the clay mask of false confidence again, and I grew depressed, knowing that bad times lay ahead.

Small Grandfather? There was no chance of help there. My mother was too afraid to ask him for a loan. She went to him in his room and told him she would be taking Bong Sook to China. They set the departure date for the early fall. On September 12, the day when it is traditional to visit the graves of your loved ones, Mother, Bong Sook, and I went to my father’s. We were all feeling melancholy, and Bong Sook sobbed so much at the graveside that her body shook. I thought she was still grieving over my dad.

Why didn’t my mood sensor, which I was so proud of, tell me the true reason for her tears? I felt nothing strange, but clearly Bong Sook was thinking about her future. She was in torment, and I knew nothing about it. This has always bothered me, these signs that I missed again and again.

After the visit to the grave, we went to Sambong, a two-hour train trip north of Hoeryong, where the broker lived. We stayed at her house while my mother prepared for her crossing into China. There is a hill in Sambong that is the highest point for miles around. When you climb to the top and look southwest across the Tumen River, you can see another hill on the Chinese side. Just beyond it, visible only from this one spot, you can see a small Chinese city, Kai San. The day before she and Bong Sook were scheduled to leave, my mother took my sister and me for a walk to the top of the hill.

My mother scanned the horizon, shading her eyes. Finally she found what she was looking for and pointed. “Look, do you see that house?”

The air was clear in Sambong. There was no industry to pollute it. You could pick out individual streets, the shapes of the bigger houses, even the kind of tile used on the roofs.

“Where?” I said.

“That one, two stories, light stone, dark orange tile.”

“Yes!” I said. “Who lives there? Do you know them?”

“In this house live two men,” my mother said. “One is eighty years old, the other only fifty. I know them well; I’ve stayed at their house. If anything happens to me, they will know where I am.”

I looked at it in wonder. I had no idea that my mother had made friends across the river. (I later learned that the fifty-year-old was the partner of the North Korean broker, and sold everything she brought to him from our side of the border.) To have a Chinese friend is a big deal—both a big risk and a big opportunity. I had a new respect for my mother: she had waded across the cold river that flowed at our feet and made contacts in a foreign city. It was impressive.

“And behind this house lives a very good woman,” my mother said. “Her name is Cho Hee. To me, she’s like a second mother. I even call her that.” She had cleaned Cho Hee’s house and listened to her stories. The old woman’s daughter was working in a faraway city, so Cho Hee had practically adopted my mother.

Like my father with his stories of the
sangju,
my mother had a reason for taking me to the top of that hill, but it wouldn’t be clear until later. Then I would understand the motive behind that leisurely afternoon walk.

My mother and Bong Sook got ready to leave the next evening. I watched them pack, thinking this was just another trip, one of many my family had made to survive. When it came time to say goodbye, we stood in the foyer of the broker’s house. Bong Sook was wearing a dark red sweater, and her hair was tied up in a ponytail. I can’t recall what my mother was wearing.

“Goodbye, Kwang Jin,” Bong Sook said.

I thought I would be seeing her again in a few weeks, two months at the most. She would go to China and earn lots of money and come back. I was calm and unemotional.

“Bye,” I said.

I remember the moment before she turned and walked away. In my mind, her face is dark and the air around her head is dark, too, as if someone smudged the space behind her with a thick pencil. I can’t make out her features; everything except the shape of her head is obscured. I can’t tell you what her face looked like, if there were tears in her eyes. Did she know the truth of what was happening?

My memory is infused with a feeling of foreboding and sadness, but at the time, my mood sensor was turned off. I had said goodbye to my family members many times, and this was no different.

I wished my mother a safe journey and turned away.

Chapter

I
STAYED IN SAMBONG
for two weeks, until my mom sent her first batch of money. It was six hundred
yuan;
after the broker took her fee, I set off for Hoeryong with four hundred in my pocket. I’d never held so much money at once; it was enough to buy basic supplies for four months. When I got to Small Grandfather’s house, I gave him the notes. He was satisfied.

Small Grandfather left me alone for the most part. I went back to school and played with my friends. I brushed my dark coat every time mud splashed on it and did the best I could with my old shoes. I had crushes on girls and resumed my love affair with movies.

I was twelve now, almost a teenager. My life was my friends. I tried not to think too much about my mother or Bong Sook, dreading the unhappiness that would cloud my heart.
I’m doing better than most,
I told myself.
I mustn’t complain.
One day, I stopped by one of the two rivers that run past Hoeryong (not the Tumen, which bordered China and was off-limits to civilians), sat on the rocks, and dangled my feet in the water. I stared at a distant hill on the Chinese side and thought of my family. On the top of the hill was a Japanese-style pagoda, a familiar landmark to me since I was small.
Somewhere over there are Bong Sook and Mom,
I thought.
I wonder what they’re doing right now.

My youthful innocence came to an abrupt end when my mother was arrested by the Chinese authorities and sent back to Hoeryong. I found this out when a friend ran up to me as I was walking near the market: she’d seen a group of defectors being marched through the streets, their hands tied together. (The police did this not so much to humiliate the escapees; they simply had no cars to transport them.)