Under the Same Sky (20 page)

The boys were going nowhere, and my stomach was burbling with its demand for food. I decided to wait them out. After a few minutes, one of them spotted me and said something to the others. They all began walking my way.

Dirty faces, shirts with many holes poking through. Surely this was a gang. I knew they were going to ask me for a cigarette. I didn’t have any. Which meant they would probably beat me up or steal my shoes. The problem with getting beaten up when you’re starving is that not only is it humiliating, it’s dangerous as well. One broken bone can end your burglary career for a week, which is plenty of time to begin a descent into starvation.

They came closer. I let go of the sewer cover and it rocked back into the hole with a loud noise. I stood up, brushing some of the mud from my hands.

A short one, a tall one, and one with a stupid face. Their eyes were cool, contemptuous.

“Hey, brother, you got a cigarette?” one of them said.

“No, I’m afraid not,” I said.

“You don’t have a cigarette?” They moved closer. “Or you don’t want to give us one?”

“I don’t have one.”

Silence. There was a choreography to these things. It was almost as if the lines were written somewhere in a gang handbook. I couldn’t run. I waited for the first blow to fall.

Their faces turned harder. But as I watched the tall one, something about him struck me. He didn’t look familiar, but his voice nagged at me.

“Hyo Sung?” I said finally. “Is that you?”

He was startled, but then his expression warmed.

“Kwang Jin?”

“Yes!” I said. It was my childhood friend, the sly one, from July 8th.

I felt so relieved. The other two looked on, wondering what was up.

Hyo Sung seemed very different from my childhood memories of him. His hair was long, curly, and unkempt; it looked like it hadn’t been washed or cut in months. His clothes were almost identical to mine—holes in his shirt the size of pennies, the hems of his pants in ragged strings from being dragged along the road. But he obviously had some other scheme going on in his life. I’d never seen him begging at the market or sleeping rough at the train station or anywhere else. He at least had a place to stay.

He asked what I was doing, and I said stealing manhole covers.

“Are you some kind of idiot?” he blurted out.

My face crumpled. I thought I’d found a friend, and here he was chastising me in front of the others.

“I know, I know.”

“They’ll execute you,” Hyo Sung said loudly. He wasn’t angry that I’d become a thief, but at how stupid a thief I’d turned out to be.

“I have no choice!”

Hyo Sung said nothing, just gazed at me and nodded. We were standing in the street, staring at each other while the other two gaped at us.

“This is dumb, Kwang Jin,” he said finally. “You’re risking your life.”

“What else can I do, Hyo Sung?”

He shrugged. “Well, you could join us.”

I didn’t know who “us” was, but secretly the thought of belonging to a group of friends thrilled me. I looked at the other two. Their faces were hardly welcoming, but they didn’t argue with Hyo Sung. They were obviously not impressed by my sewer-grate idea, but they’d allowed their friend to make the call.

And that’s how I became part of the Association for Redistributing Wealth in Hoeryong.

Chapter

T
HE ASSOCIATION WAS
a brotherhood of thieves. They’d started out stealing on their own, mostly from what passed for rich people in Hoeryong—that is, anyone who had more than enough to eat. But that presented a problem. A poor person’s house you could pretty much bust into with your bare hands. Rich homes had better locks, higher walls, bigger dogs. Often you needed help if you were going to get inside the place of someone who had things worth stealing. So the three of them had banded together under the noble motto “Making things balanced.” They told themselves they were improving life in Hoeryong by stealing from the rich and giving to the poor—themselves.

The famine had made normal people into bandits. I soon found out that even Hyo Sung’s mother was part of the Association.

I thought about Hyo Sung’s offer. I was a little scared about what it involved. Maybe the Association was into evil things: kidnapping homeless kids or robbing merchants and beating them up. How should I know? When you met people you hadn’t seen in a long time, you could be fairly certain the famine had done bad things to their character. I’m sure that’s how Kim Il’s brain was working when he saw me. He’d just assumed I was a criminal.

So I hesitated. But what choice did I have, really? Hyo Sung was right. I was probably one or two sewer grates away from a firing squad.

“OK,” I said.

Hyo Sung nodded and we began walking toward town, talking all the way.

The three members took me back to the apartment where they stayed. I greeted Hyo Sung’s mother as I walked through the door. She was about four feet tall and talked a mile a minute, just as I remembered. I wasn’t too surprised that she had become a den mother to the Association. What else was she supposed to do?

When we’d settled down with some soup, Hyo Sung told me his story. His father, the giant man who’d been our family friend in July 8th, had died of starvation, just like mine. And there were more similarities between our lives. Amazingly, his sister had also gone to China under mysterious circumstances that I knew not to ask about. He hadn’t heard from her since. I told him about Bong Sook and his face took on a mournful expression.

Hyo Sung introduced the others to me. There was Moon Ho, who was maybe eighteen or nineteen years old, shorter than me, with big, widely spaced eyes. His shirt had more holes than it had material and his face was dirty. But I noticed something about Moon Ho immediately: he had presence. He looked capable; he had that calm that men who know what they’re doing in life have. I sensed that he was the brains of the Association.
This man is cunning,
I said to myself.

The other guy was named Dae Ho. He’d been abandoned at five years of age and nearly died of exposure while sleeping on the street his first spring as a
Kkotjebi.
He had curly hair and, like the others, an unwashed face, which usually wore a kind but dumb expression. He often served as the butt of our jokes and never interrupted when the rest of us were arguing about something.

I got along with Moon Ho quite well. I felt he had things to teach me. I could tell that he’d traveled around more than Hyo Sung. He told me he’d been left on his own at an early age—maybe ten or eleven—and I realized we had things in common. Hyo Sung always had his mother, and that made him a little softer than Moon Ho and me. If we didn’t make it on our own, no one was going to rescue us.

The next day, we went to the market, which I knew was controlled by a group of older homeless teens known as “the gangster brothers.” They ran the place. They decided when you could graduate from begging to pickpocketing. They decided who could steal where. Some orphans were restricted to the vegetable market. Others could work only in the household goods section. You might get away with wandering outside your assigned zone once or twice. You could always say, “I was following a guy and he walked from one area to another. What am I supposed to do, give him up because he wanted a bite to eat?” That might work a few times, but if you did it too often, the gangster brothers would hurt you in front of everyone.

In Hoeryong, to be a gangster brother meant you were at the top of the heap. They had each earned their spot: either they had beaten three guys at once in a fight or they had refused to give up while getting pummeled. The first result meant you were uncommonly strong, the second that you were stubborn. Both were very good qualities.

When we went to the market to buy things, the people there saw Moon Ho and nodded respectfully at him. I noticed the gangster brothers, who were always so aggressive, avoided any kind of confrontation with Moon Ho. I’d never seen that happen before.

“Why are they avoiding him?” I asked Hyo Sung.

“Have you seen Moon Ho fight?”

I shook my head.

“He’s really fast,” he said. “And really crazy.”

I had been around the market a lot but had never seen Moon Ho in action. Perhaps he never really fought at all. Perhaps it was how he looked that got him his reputation. This is the ultimate power, I thought: to earn respect just by the fierce expression on your face.

We began to go out at night, the four of us, stealing. We picked locks in apartments and stole the entire contents, cleaning out the places of pottery, food, and firewood. If we couldn’t pick the lock, we smashed it open. My first night out, we hopped a fence and plundered a field planted with ripe onions. Dae Ho kept a lookout for the owner while the rest of us ripped the onions out of the ground and stuffed them in a bag. In fifteen minutes, we filled our bags. I immediately saw the advantages of being with the Association. If the owner burst out of the house, we’d each have only a twenty-five percent chance of getting caught.

After we filled up our bags, we hopped the fence and headed back to the fifth-floor apartment where the Association members lived. Here I met the Association’s manager, a thin, elegant man in his thirties named Yoon Chul, who had been away the afternoon I arrived. The group handed over all of their takings to Yoon Chul, and in return he provided food, shelter, and alcohol.

Hyo Sung detailed my qualifications for Yoon Chul: I knew a lot of people in the market, I was big for my age, and I’d been on my own for many months. Also, I had gotten as far as sixth grade in school, further than most orphans. I was, all in all, an above-average recruit. My qualifications and Hyo Sung’s word were enough for Yoon Chul to accept me into the Association.

Every day we would lounge around the apartment, singing songs and drinking. We played round after round of cards, hooting and laughing. The loser would have to go out and buy North Korean moonshine, very bitter and strong. How terrible that stuff was! I’d never really been a drinker before, but it was like a rite of passage with the Association. When Yoon Chul handed you the glass, you had to gulp it down in one swallow. If you tried to sip it, he would fill the glass to the top again and hand it back with a smile. To be a thief was a man’s job.

We had to watch out for three groups: the owners of the homes we raided, the police, and soldiers. Thieves with a lot of money (unlike us) could buy off the police with a bribe, but the soldiers were different. Growing up, I had always wanted to be one, and I’d seriously considered joining the army before realizing that, with my family background—a sister missing in China, a mother known to be a smuggler—I would never be able to become an officer and make good money. My childhood dream of being a spy and fighting the Yankees had ended. I felt a trace of sadness over that.

But by this time, the reputation of North Korean troops, once so high, had begun to suffer. I knew soldiers assigned to poor rural areas who were malnourished and frail (while those in Pyongyang and along the border with China often lived very well). This was shocking to me, having grown up believing the slogan I saw on the cement billboards: “Soldiers first!” Now I heard stories of troops whose eyes bulged from their sunken faces; even though the government wasn’t feeding them, they were expected to march and burn calories as if they were still living in the glory days.

When soldiers came out of the army, they began robbing ordinary people. There was nothing anyone could do. You saw them in the mountains or on the roads that connected one small city to another. They set up roadblocks and shook down everyone who came by. If you didn’t have money, they beat you. We stopped going to the mountains after nightfall because you didn’t want to walk the roads by yourself.

Even real soldiers could turn dangerous. These young men were mostly eighteen or nineteen years old, and the collars of their uniforms hung loose on their scrawny necks. In normal life, they would have been pathetic—I could have beaten one to a pulp. But with soldiers, the fight is never the end. If you beat up a soldier, he would come back with his squad and attack your whole family. It was once a glorious thing to wear the olive-green uniform with the bright red collar. But during the famine, we had a name for those uniforms: “tiger skins.”

The soldiers were insatiable. We learned to avoid them. But staying free in North Korea was easier said than done.

Chapter

I
WAS HAPPIER THAN
at any time since I became homeless. Depending on how successful we’d been that day, I had food and drink. I had somewhere to sleep every night. I had my childhood friend Hyo Sung and the cunning Moon Ho to teach me how to be a better thief, and I had Yoon Chul, who showed me something else: how to be an optimist. “If your mind is strong,” he told me, “you can survive anything.” I was luckier than ninety-five percent of the
Kkotjebi.
I didn’t aspire to anything higher, and never thought of leaving North Korea.

Being in the Association was like having a full-time job, with assigned hours. Our day would begin at about 8 p.m. We had to be in position by 8:45, at the house we’d scouted the night before. That was the hour when North Korean television broadcasts the dramas and homemade tearjerkers that the whole country watched. Movies and TV series had become even more important for those people still affected by the famine. When you spent all day hunting for food, bent over in the mountains or crouched in supplication in the market, this was the only time you could sit down and have a rest. Really, the entire nation shut down at 8:45 for at least an hour. If you ever wanted to invade North Korea, that would be the time to do it, because half the country would be at a neighbor’s house waiting for a show to begin.

The third night I went out stealing with the Association, we waited for the sound of a soap opera’s opening theme before breaking into someone’s accordion house. After a few hard smacks, the lock snapped open and we were inside. We found a bag of uncooked rice and a few small vegetables. There was also some cooked rice that had just been prepared. Perhaps it was for the next night’s dinner, but in any case we descended on it like wolves. I took a spoon and bent over my plate—we were so confident that the occupants wouldn’t be back, we decided to eat the rice right there in the house—but as soon as I dug into the food my hand began to shake. I relaxed my fingers, then gripped the spoon again. But it was no good. My hand was shaking so violently the rice wouldn’t stay on. I had to drop it back onto the pile.