Under the Same Sky (19 page)

There are two kinds of manhole covers in North Korea: one weighs about fifty pounds; the other, massive ones the size of a large bicycle wheel, a hundred pounds. I probably weighed about ninety pounds at the time, so my only chance was to steal the smaller size. One night, I waited along a main road until it was clear in both directions, then ran into the street and pounced. By pulling at the small gaps in the cover, I got it out of its hole and rolled it to the bushes at the side of the road.

But now that I had the thing, what was I going to do with it?

The reason there were any manhole covers left in Hoeryong at all was that they were state property, and the penalty for stealing even one was public execution. (Also, they weren’t worth that much, which made them less attractive to thieves.) If the police caught you stealing someone’s vegetables, they might beat you for not giving them a bribe, but for state-owned items, you faced death in front of a firing squad.

The iron dealers wouldn’t buy manhole covers; if they were caught with one, they too would be executed. You had to break the covers down into pieces in order to get rid of them. So once I had the cover out of its hole, I rolled it to a back alley where no one was walking, hoisted it as far as I could into the air, and dropped it on the ground, where it shattered into dozens of pieces. The covers were made of a low-grade iron that couldn’t withstand much stress if you dropped them on their ends. I then crushed the larger pieces with a rock until I was left with chunks of iron about the size of a big marble. These I swept up, placed in a cloth bag, and took to the scrap dealer.

This man studied the iron carefully and gave me a suspicious look. I knew that he knew the stuff came from a sewer grate, but he could always mix my pieces with iron from other sources. He handed me 250
won,
less than half what the iron was worth. I immediately ran to the market and bought two pounds of noodles. It was enough to live on for a day or so.

I was happy. I went out the next night and stole another grate, smashing it to the ground under a thin sliver of moon.

Over time I branched out, stealing anything that could help me survive. Peppers were expensive, and you could trade them at the market for cornmeal or noodles. If you could fill up your shirt with the shiny green vegetables, that was a good night. But stealing peppers is also more dangerous, because the farmers watch their fields closely and the plants only come up to your waist. You can’t go running into a field and start picking off peppers like you can with corn. Anyone standing guard can spot you, outlined by moonlight, and give you a severe beating. Even if he doesn’t spot you right off, you have to be careful not to jerk the peppers off their stalks, because that causes the whole plant to shake, giving away your position. Stealth is very important.

What you have to do is crawl in at the edge of the field, never poking your head above the level of the tallest leaves. You slide along on your knees and elbows, pushing yourself down the rows until the plants hide you from the road. You feel in the darkness—if there’s no moon—for a ripe pepper; you don’t want to waste your time cutting leaves. When you touch the cool, smooth skin, you feel for where the stem is attached to the plant. One swift twist and the pepper drops into your hand. If you do it right, a man watching the tops of the plants won’t see even the slightest shiver from the plant.

Snatching corn isn’t easy either. You have only so much room inside your shirt or in the bag you carry, and corn in its husk is bulky. What you really want is the ear itself, but peeling off the husk makes a lot of noise. So you crouch down and slice the ear off, then cut away the husk, letting the leaves fall to the ground. But there is a price to this method: an ear of corn without its husk marks you as a thief at the market, and the plant is less valuable because it holds its sweetness for a shorter time. When you’re alone in the cornfield, you have to think like a trader.

I began sleeping in abandoned trains during the day and stealing at night. Hoeryong is a small city. After a week or two, everyone knew I’d become a thief. They could have easily deduced this from my clothes, from the fact that my family was gone, and from the fact that I was still alive. Without a family, either you lived with rich relatives or you stole, or you died. Really, those were your only options. Begging alone kept just a few
Kkotjebi
alive.

One day, I decided to look up Kim Il, who had been my best friend in Manyang. When you are all alone, your heart feels empty and you get these sudden whims:
Hey, whatever happened to so-and-so?
I suppose by going to see my old friends I was convincing myself I was still a person who had a past. My life had changed so much that sometimes I had to go and touch my memories to make sure they were real.

I knew where to look for Kim Il: at his mother’s restaurant. It was the only place in the area that served Korean barbecue and was still thriving. I walked the half mile to the restaurant and, sure enough, there he was, tall and commanding, leaning against the cinderblock front of the building.

I hadn’t seen Kim Il in several years. He seemed happy to see me, and we started talking about old times and old friends. It was pleasant; I felt the emptiness in my heart fill up a little. And yet things weren’t the same as they once were. Whenever we’d met as boys, Kim Il would invite me to the restaurant so that his mother could say hi and we could eat. But now the minutes ticked by and there was no invitation to eat.

After ten minutes, I took out a cigarette. “Do you have a lighter?”

I knew Kim Il didn’t smoke. He was a good boy. But if he didn’t have a lighter, I hoped he would invite me inside to get one, where I could greet his mother and perhaps have a meal. It was an obvious ploy on my part, but it was all I had.

Kim Il looked at me. “Wait here,” he said, and went into the restaurant.

Oh, how clever you are, Kim Il,
I thought. He’d handled the situation so well! I was a known thief, and so he’d kept me from entering while at the same time appearing not to offend me. I understood his reasoning: Who knows how far I’d fallen since I’d seen him last? Maybe I was desperate enough to swipe something valuable from my friend’s mother’s restaurant—a fancy lighter, money set aside for bills. I respected Kim Il for being a man about such things. The probability that I would have actually stolen something was very low—I can’t say zero, because when you become a thief, it’s hard to stop. But quite low. Still, Kim Il hadn’t taken the chance.

Sadness came over me and I wished I had never sought out my old friend. Why had our lives changed so drastically? Why couldn’t we still be buddies?

But Kim Il’s life hadn’t changed; mine had. I felt a surge of bitterness. At that moment, I hated the world for what it had done to my family and me.

Kim Il came out with a lighter and bent toward me and lit my cigarette. I nodded my thanks. I knew I would never see him again. This reunion had turned out to be more painful than I had expected.

I felt my heart begin to shrivel and harden.
Is friendship really nothing?
I wondered.
Will I never have another pal?

Chapter

A
S A THIEF
, it wasn’t the police I was afraid of. They mostly ignored the
Kkotjebi.
And when they weren’t ignoring us, they were helping us steal. Criminals would give the local police chief a carton of cigarettes or some money at the end of the year for not arresting them.

No, what I was most afraid of was the Saro-cheong.

The Saro-cheong was the North Korean Department of Youth, which was in charge of young adults between the ages of fourteen and twenty-eight—their welfare, their schooling, their behavior. In every major city you went to, there would be a large building, usually made of brick, four or five stories high. This was the Saro-cheong building. Even if you went into the army at age eighteen, you still “belonged” to this organization; it was just lending you out for a certain number of years. The Saro-cheong was your real master.

You can imagine what a disaster the
Kkotjebi
were for the Saro-cheong administrators. The department was supposed to control the youth of the nation and mold them into fine and dependable citizens. But here were thousands of young people who had no family, no job, no loyalty to the state, and no love for the Saro-cheong. We were dirty, thieving affronts to the department.

Every so often, the Saro-cheong’s officials would conduct a roundup of us orphans. They would sweep the streets clear of the
Kkotjebi
and herd us into abandoned apartment buildings, where they would feed and watch over us.

You might think this would be a blessing. Free housing and food! But the meals at a Saro-cheong facility were awful: watery soup or maggoty cornmeal, and not enough of either. Many times, kids weren’t given enough to survive and, trapped behind boarded-up windows, faded away to nothing. You weren’t allowed to leave the apartment to go and look for extra food at the market. You were restricted to however many calories the Saro-cheong gave you. What the government promoted as saving the youth of North Korea was really enforced starvation. They wanted you to die out of sight of everyone else.

At least on the streets you had a chance. So when you saw a Saro-cheong official coming, you ran.

The other part of the department’s program was to send you to a regular school. This the orphans hated much more than the food. By the time you’re officially a
Kkotjebi,
you’ve descended into an awful state. Your clothes are ragged and smelly. Your face is unwashed. Your hair is dirty and clumped with twigs and dirt. If you walk into a school, the normal kids will treat you like an alien.

I knew this because when I was in fourth grade, before my father got seriously ill, a
Kkotjebi
kid had come to our school. We treated him terribly. No one spoke to him. No one invited him to play games with us. The worst times for him were the four “sports and activities” events. On those days, days that kids looked forward to all year, there were all kinds of contests and races and games to play. You wore the closest thing to athletic gear you could scrounge up; North Korean mothers put aside a little money throughout the year so their kids would have decent clothes for these all-important social events. And the moms made goodies and treats for their kids to bring and share with their friends, or they bought snacks at the local shops.

The
Kkotjebi
boy showed up at the first “sports and activities” day with his old ragged clothes on. He had no food to share, so each of us had to take a spoonful of ours and put it on a plate for him. He looked down at the ground as his plate made its way around our class, all of us begrudgingly spooning out a portion for the boy. It sounds like nothing, but most North Korean kids would rather risk starvation than go through that embarrassment.

We knew our lives were disasters. But we didn’t want to be pitied.

The Saro-cheong in Hoeryong didn’t operate out of the goodness of its heart. Its “humanitarian” mission was actually a cover for a much less innocent activity: a labor racket. Its officials made money by the use of free work. Ours.

If you were too old to go to school, or even if you weren’t, the managers at the Saro-cheong house sent you out on work crews. Sometimes you’d be assigned to fix up the department’s headquarters. (If you ever have a chance to see the building in Hoeryong, some of the exterior is my handiwork. I once spent many days hauling concrete and helping to patch up holes in the front of that horrible place.) But mostly you were sent out to work for a friend or a cousin of the local Saro-cheong boss. Instead of hiring real laborers, who expect a real wage, the friend tells his contact, “Send over ten
Kkotjebi.
” At the end of the week, the official, not the
Kkotjebi,
gets paid, and the friend has a new addition to his house.

We knew we were being exploited, but really, the term “exploited” doesn’t exist in North Korea. It’s simply the way things are. If you were unlucky enough to be caught in a Saro-cheong raid, the “friend” jobs were the ones you wanted to go out on. If you were sent to a school or a government factory, you went in a large group watched over by five or six guards. Escape was nearly impossible. But if you were part of a small, black market work gang, you’d go to the site with maybe one guy watching you. Your chances of running away were much greater. And if you decided to actually work, the food at the black market jobs was much better. You might get a full meal: a bit of meat, some rice, and a vegetable, depending on how rich and generous your employer was. The government lunch was always the same: half a handful of corn noodles or some soup that was three-quarters water.

So we were eager to be exploited.

Sometimes our residences were on the upper floors of old hotels that the Saro-cheong rented to house homeless kids. I was told that
Kkotjebi
often tried to escape by tying together bed sheets and shinning down from their windows. I knew of one boy who jumped from a high window and broke both his legs attempting to flee, and I’d heard stories of other boys and girls dying in escape attempts from higher floors. These made us street
Kkotjebi
even more determined never to go to a Saro-cheong house.

On the third or fourth night of my manhole-cover spree, I was lurking by the side of the road on the outskirts of Hoeryong, waiting for the last people to get off the street so I could steal a cover I’d had my eye on for a couple of hours. My belly was aching, rumbling like long, rolling peals of thunder sweeping through. I was impatient, but the thought of the firing squad kept me from being too eager. There was a half-moon out.

Finally the street was empty from one end to the other. I stepped out of the darkness, ran to the sewer cover, and grabbed the edge of it. It was then that I noticed a shape at the far end of the road. It was a cluster of young men, not striding home purposefully, but loitering like me. My throat tightened. I didn’t like what I saw. The boys looked like me. Thieves. Gangsters. Normal kids with parents wouldn’t be out at one in the morning.