Under the Same Sky (16 page)

“Your mother has been caught!” the friend told me.

Conflicting emotions surged through me—shame at my mother’s embarrassment, eagerness to see her, hope that she had earned enough money to buy us all some nice things in the market. But most of all, I was desperate to ask about Bong Sook.

We had to wait twenty days for my mother to be released from custody. Since she hadn’t gone to the interior of China, she was regarded as a trader. The North Korean government had let her off with a warning. But if it happened again, she would go to prison for many years.

I returned home from school one day and found my mother at Small Grandfather’s. She was sitting on the floor eating a bowl of steaming soup when I arrived. I was shocked at her appearance. Her hair was matted and her cheekbones protruded from her flesh. Her clothes were stained and smelled of sweat. My mother had been tortured in jail, forced to sit cross-legged for hours, and beaten if she moved so much as an inch. When I sat down next to her, she didn’t even notice I was there. She continued hungrily slurping the soup out of the bowl.

Bong Sook was nowhere to be seen.

She’s starving,
I thought. I’d always looked on my mother as a kind of god—all children do, I think. She was bigger than me and stronger, and I always feared her moods. It never occurred to me that the world could hurt her. But here she was, so famished that she couldn’t speak.

I took some soup from Small Grandmother—my great-aunt—but I could hardly eat. I felt my sorrow deepen with every passing moment. My mother didn’t acknowledge me, let alone turn to hug me. She looked unnerved, wizened, and poor. The food in North Korean prisons was known to be rancid.

As I watched her eat, my small grandfather arrived, having heard the news. He was furious, as angry as I had ever seen him. He knew the dream of surviving on Mother’s wages was over. He slammed his hand on the table.

“I don’t know this person!” he shouted. “Who are you? I know no widow of my nephew!”

I looked at him in shock. He was disowning my mother, freeing himself of all claims to help her.

“Small Grandfather, how can you say this?” I wanted to yell. But I was frightened of him and said nothing. I had so many questions for my mother—What had happened? Where was Bong Sook?—but before I had a chance to ask them, Small Grandfather had thrown everything into confusion.

“You’ve dishonored this family!” he continued shouting. “You must leave this house. And take your good-for-nothing son with you.”

I stood up, shifting from foot to foot. Small Grandfather was so commanding, but I felt my fists clench with rage. “But you told her to go to China in the first place,” I wanted to scream. “You lived off the money she sent you!”

Small Grandfather stormed away, tossing angry words back over his shoulder.

It was then I realized why Small Grandfather had sent my mother and sister to China: he didn’t want to work. That was all. He had retired from the government many years before but his savings had run out. He didn’t want to go out and do something else, like work in the fields. Small Grandfather needed to eat, of course, and he wanted to stay in his big house. Many people in Hoeryong did the same, living off relatives who had gone to China and sent back money.

Small Grandfather may have cared for us, but for him, my father’s death was primarily a business opportunity. And now our business with him was over.

After that outburst, my great-aunt came in carrying something. Her face was filled with pain and sympathy. She was very different from Small Grandfather, a kind and quiet person.

“Here,” she told us. “Take this.”

It was a small plastic bag with two looping handles. Inside was food: some cooked rice, green vegetables, corn. My great-aunt looked from my mother to me. Her eyes said,
I wish I could do more.
But they didn’t say,
Forgive him.
Or
Let me fix this.
We had to leave their house.

This was the way things were in North Korea. Kinship melted away in the face of hunger. Why didn’t I see that after so many times? Why did I expect each new episode to end differently?

My mother and I left Small Grandfather’s house, our heads bowed, our minds swimming. What would become of us?

Chapter

W
E WALKED TOWARD
the center of town, trying to formulate a plan for our lives. I finally had a chance to ask my mother where Bong Sook was.

“She’s still in China,” she said. “She’s living with a man.”

I nodded, not comprehending. Had she found a husband?

Later I would realize that my mother hadn’t taken my sister to China to find work. She had taken her to China to sell her.

The Chinese towns and villages near the North Korean border have lost many of their young women to the factories in Shanghai and other industrial cities, and many farmers and small businessmen are looking for wives. Not wives in the Western sense—these are not romantic relationships. The woman is there to cook and clean and have sex. These are the “bride slaves” of North Korea, sold for about 1,500
yuan
(around $240). Seven out of ten refugees who leave for China are females; eighty percent of them become bride slaves.

It’s a sad fate, but not uncommon. My mother, who had no money to feed Bong Sook, must have felt she had no other choice. Perhaps she was trying to save me by letting go of my sister. And being a bride slave is not the worst thing that can happen to North Korean girls. Others cross the border, led by Chinese or North Korean guides, and become sex slaves.

The guides tell the girls they’re going to earn good wages in a factory in the interior, where there will be plenty of food and money to spend. Instead, they’re sold to brothels and forced to become prostitutes. Often their introduction to China is to be beaten for days and left in a room with no toilet, until they’re broken. Then they are raped repeatedly and violently. When they go out into town, a minder watches over them at all times.

I didn’t know—and I still don’t know—which of these lives Bong Sook was living. I asked my mother, but all she would tell me was “We will talk about it later.” With my small grandfather forcing us out on the street, and my mother so ashamed and depressed, it wasn’t a good time to delve deeper. But it was also that North Korean attitude: the world is going to hurt you eventually. There’s no one to blame but life itself.

I always thought we would sit down one day and she would tell me everything I wanted to know about my sister. But that time never came. The truth is, my mother didn’t know where Bong Sook was. She’d had to turn her over to the broker, the fifty-year-old Chinese man in Kai San who had paid her way across the border. She didn’t know where her daughter had ended up.

Bong Sook was gone. That was all there was to say.

My mother decided to take me to her younger sister’s house in Undok—the same “small aunt” who had gone to the humiliating birthday party with us years before. We got a ride in a truck, and two and a half hours later we found the house. I knocked on my aunt’s door around dusk. She answered and said my name with concern. Then she saw my mother and invited us in.

At first my aunt was sympathetic. She found old sleeping mats we could use and fed us her simple dishes. We were safe for the time being.

As the days progressed, the relationship between my aunt and me became kind of like that of high school sweethearts: one day we’d be super-close, gossiping and laughing, and the next she’d be angry with me, for what reason I didn’t know. She would shoot me angry glances and refuse to speak to me. Food was at the bottom of this, of course. The family was rich now, by North Korean standards. My uncle had gotten a visa to visit relatives in China, and he’d come back with televisions, clothing, and other consumer goods and sold them at a great profit. I could see that my aunt wanted to take care of my mother and me, but as a survivor of famine, the fear of hunger never left her. Often she compromised by splitting the available food, which just meant that none of us got enough. My stomach bloated with malnutrition, and the overstretched, shiny skin became painful to the touch.

I, too, was facing a dilemma: Should I steal some of my aunt’s white rice and risk her wrath? Or should I accept what I was given and hope it got me through? I had no real loyalty to my cousins; they were merely competitors for food. That’s how I felt. The same heartlessness that my relatives had shown to me I now felt for them.

Eventually the urge to eat became too much. One day while my aunt was away gathering firewood, I stole an uncooked turnip from the bag where she kept her vegetables. I estimated that I had a good hour to eat the whole thing. I bit into it hungrily, ignoring the bits of dirt clinging to the skin.

But five minutes after I took that first bitter bite, my aunt suddenly pushed in the door. I quickly hid the turnip behind my back. We stared at each other.

My aunt’s eyes filled with tears. “Kwang Jin!” she cried out. “You’re my nephew! You should have just asked me.”

I handed the turnip to her, my eyes cast down. I felt shame, and anger at my shame. At least Auntie still had a human side. As for me, I was like a starving rat; my hunger controlled me. I felt brutal and nasty.

I didn’t have the advantage of long experience with people in normal times. The idea that most people are good if you give them enough to eat and a warm place to sleep was foreign to me. I had mostly seen people’s evil, jealous sides. I tried to tell myself:
It’s just the famine talking. She really is a good person.
But I’m not sure I believed it.

I hated it when people were selfish. When I was selfish it was even worse, but it’s hard to act like a human being when no one you see is doing the same. You feel like a dupe. Your good heart will take your life.

I didn’t want to die. I was determined not to. I really was different from my father, who had been too honorable to steal.

Chapter

M
Y AUNT’S HUSBAND
was a miner. For years he had held down a job in a state-run company until the economy collapsed. The electricity at his work site had stopped one day, and the workers were forced to go all over the countryside and dig random holes in the ground, straight down, which only a North Korean would call a mine. They used equipment they’d scavenged from their old jobs. Despite the money he’d earned trading Chinese goods, he still worked at the mines to support his family.

After a few weeks, my aunt suggested I go along and work in the coal shafts, to pay for my keep. “At least do
something,
” she said. I agreed immediately. I’d never had a real job, and the thought of having money for snacks and other things was exciting.

The job of a miner is the lowest in North Korea. Even
Kkotjebi
who are in the last stages of starvation will refuse to go down into the tunnels. “I’ll wait just one more day,” they’ll say, “maybe I’ll get lucky begging at the market,” when they hadn’t found a thing to eat there in a week. There was something final about the mines. Dying there is ugly. Many men are caught by cave-ins in the tunnels, where few beams hold up the ceilings. When their bodies are pulled up, their mouths are so tightly packed with dirt it seems like some underground monster did it out of malice. The mines are the last stop before the graveyard.

We walked two hours to the head of the tunnel, where about a dozen men were gathered around, preparing to go down. My uncle and I approached the miners and he told them I wanted to work with them. The men studied me carefully. I remember those looks very well: horror, but a kind of wonder, too. “This child,” one miner said, turning to the others, “has come to
us?
” The black-faced men said I’d made a mistake. They told my uncle to take me away. When I stood my ground, they tried chasing me off, but I always returned. My uncle didn’t intervene: if I wasn’t tough enough to get into the mine, I wasn’t tough enough to do the work.

When the miners realized I wouldn’t give up, they waved their hands at me in exasperation. If you want to kill yourself, their expressions said, be our guest.

I climbed into a large metal bucket and a man at a hand-operated winch began lowering us into the earth. I was very afraid the first time I went down. The shaft was so narrow, I could reach out and touch the soil as I was lowered, and the air around me turned black and ferociously hot even before I reached the bottom. Once the bucket knocked against solid earth, about one hundred yards down, I got out with my tool, a heavy iron crowbar. I stooped down, following the other miners into a horizontal passageway cut into the earth. When the man in front of me stopped, I heard the ringing of iron against the walls. I turned and began to slam my crowbar into the coal seam.

There were no lights in the mine, only the small lamps attached to our plastic hard hats, the kind with a strap that went under your chin. There were no beams or supports along the passageway that I could see. I didn’t want to think of what would happen if the earth gave way and came down around my ears.

I pounded at the coal flashing in the little beam of my light, and I didn’t stop for twelve hours, except for a short lunch break, noodles and a small cornmeal cake. The good thing about risking your neck in the mines was that the work was so hard they were forced to give you a decent helping of food.

By the end of the day, I couldn’t feel my arms or upper body. When the man next to me tapped me on the shoulder, I bent down and gathered up the coal I’d chipped away, put it into a large bucket, and carried it to the light that shone down from above. It felt like my spirit was walking alongside my body, so complete was my exhaustion. When I got to the surface, I saw that my pile of coal was tiny compared to those of the men around me. My wage was the lunch I had eaten, plus a small share of the coal in my bucket. I took my portion back to my aunt’s house and saved it. Every day I added another bucket to the pile, dreaming of the morning I would go to the market, sell the coal, and buy an armful of food for my mother, along with several delicious snacks for myself. I lingered over those fantasies for hours at a time, especially while sweating and laboring deep in the mine pit. I felt I was working toward a little bit of happiness.