Under the Same Sky (22 page)

I looked around. No one on the streets, just wind blowing the electrical wires and moonlight above.

Go on, Kwang Jin,
I said to myself,
you have to find something.

I found a big rock next to the foot of the wall and climbed up on it. I put my hands on the top of the cinderblocks, took a breath, and hoisted myself up. Trying not to make much noise, I stood on the wall’s narrow ledge and looked up at the nearest balcony. It had about three armfuls of firewood stacked on its raw concrete. But there was a six-foot gap between the wall and the balcony, and a big drop if I missed the jump, enough to break bones.

I ran along the wall, trying not to stumble off. When I was close to the balcony, I launched my feet toward it. I grabbed the edge of the balcony and pulled myself up.

Immediately I knew something was wrong.

“What are you doing there?” A voice from below.

I crouched on the balcony, saying nothing.

Louder now. “Hey, you, what are you doing? Do you want me to call the police? Come down here.”

Damn it. Damn these interfering people. It wasn’t even the owner, just a tough guy passing by. Maybe he’d been robbed before and wanted to take revenge. If I didn’t talk to him, he would wake up the whole building and I would have real trouble.

“OK,” I said, standing up. I jumped down, landing next to the tough guy. He was thirty-five or forty years old, squat, a face squeezed up in anger and confusion.

“What’s going on?” he huffed.

I mumbled something. I was frightened.

“What?”

“Forgive me this once and I won’t do it again,” I said. There was no point in lying. I could feel the desire for violence coming off him like the smell of sweat.

“So you
are
a thief!” He struck me in the face, hard. I felt a trickle of blood like a hot spurt against my skin, but that warm feeling was lost in pain from the rest of my body. The man seemed to be hitting me everywhere at once. I tumbled to the ground. That turned out to be a mistake, as he began kicking me with his dirty boots. I thought he would kick my head off.

“Please!” I yelled. “Please don’t!” I couldn’t get to my feet. He was so strong, I wondered where he got the energy. I felt my right eye swelling, my lips ballooning. I was bleeding from two or three places, mostly around my face. My ribs were aching from his kicks, and my breath came in short bursts.

He beat me for what seemed like a good ten minutes, grunting and sucking in breath. By the end, I didn’t have the strength to cover my head anymore, and he kicked it freely.

Finally he leaned over and shouted, “Don’t ever try this again.”

I curled up, waiting for the next kick. But he was gone, stomping off down the street, having expended all his rage on me.

I pulled myself up bit by bit. Blood slid from my mouth onto the dirt. I spit more out. I felt hot licks of pain up and down my side. I thought he’d broken some ribs.

I managed to get on my feet and staggered off to my stepfather’s apartment. I felt that if I fell, I would black out.

When I knocked on the apartment door, my stepfather swung it open. I thought he would say “What happened?” or “Are you OK?” Instead, he stared at me and said in shock, “Why have you come back empty-handed?”

I tried to explain. An apartment, a stranger, a beating. But I was mumbling, my lips too thick to make sense.

He slapped me sharply across the face. “How dare you come back with nothing,” he said. He stalked away and left me standing at the open door.

Tears spilled from my swollen eyelids. Why did he hit me? Wasn’t I out stealing for him and his daughter?

I’m sure my mother heard his outburst and felt terrible for me, but still, I felt a suffocating sense of persecution. Was anyone ever so unloved and misunderstood? My belly ached with emptiness, and each part of my body contributed its screaming to the din. I crawled to my mat and tried to sleep. My tears dripped onto the wooden mat.

That night I gave in to despair. To be cut off from the ones you loved was one thing. To be oppressed by their companions was worse.

I have to do something,
I thought.
I have to find a new way to live.

Chapter

T
HE NEXT DAY
, I left the apartment early. I wanted to scout out places farther from the train station where perhaps thieves hadn’t hit yet. It seemed like a normal day, except there were no kids on the streets. This was one of the early-summer weeks when the schools emptied and sent all their students to the fields outside Hoeryong to weed the corn and soybean fields. Since I hadn’t been in school for three years, I hadn’t gone to the countryside.

What I didn’t realize was that this work made the Saro-cheong’s job much easier. Instead of having to figure out who was going to school and who wasn’t, the officials knew, by process of elimination, that any kid found on the streets wasn’t going to school and was therefore a
Kkotjebi.

A man in a suit came up to me as I walked. His face was calm, almost bored. I knew immediately: Saro-cheong. He blocked my path, and I saw another man over my right shoulder, blocking my retreat.

“Why aren’t you in school?” the calm man asked.

“I’m sick,” I said, thinking on my feet.

“OK, then tell me who’s the Saro-cheong master for your school.”

Every schoolchild knew the master’s name. But I’d been absent from class for years, and my mind was a blank.

“It’s . . .”

I could picture the master’s face but couldn’t remember his name.

I stammered out breath, but no words. One of the men grabbed my arm.

“You don’t go to school. You are delinquent!”

What the hell, I wanted to yell. It’s not that I didn’t want to go. I couldn’t go!

The Saro-cheong men dragged me down the street past startled pedestrians. They took me to the headquarters—a squat brick building—then shipped me off with some other kids to a rural area near rice fields.

I found myself at an old school that had been turned into a detention center. It wasn’t only for
Kkotjebi
but also for other youths who’d broken the law. You could be sent there for as little as three days (for not wearing your Kim Il Sung badge, say) or a week (for fighting in the streets). Wearing your hair long like a South Korean pop star would get you seven days. My sentence was more severe: three months.

The building was about three hundred feet long by one hundred feet wide and held about one hundred fifty boys and girls at any given time. I knew the place when it was the Song Chun School, one of the best arts academies in Hoeryong, but that was a long time ago. As I walked in, I could see the length of the central hall. It looked like it had been through a tank battle: there were huge holes punched through the walls and broken cement everywhere. Shouting and screaming echoed from the inner rooms.
This place is full of evil.
I was afraid.

An inmate came over to me and started barking questions—what was my name, where was I from, what was I doing before I got arrested? Then the other new prisoners and I were ordered to change. We couldn’t wear our street clothes inside, because it would make it easier to run away. I had on a nice shirt and cotton pants that my mom had gotten me, but the team leader, an inmate in his early twenties, snatched them away. He would either keep them for himself or barter them for a bottle of moonshine. In return, I was given some old clothes they found in a corner, a dirty school uniform that was way too big for me, including a ragged blue jacket with four buttons that covered my body down to the knees.

The Saro-cheong Detention Center was a brutal place. The first day I was there, I saw a group of men surround a thin teenager, just as Hyo Sung and the Association had surrounded me, except these men were taller and more muscular. The teenager’s face was frozen in an expression of animal fear. One of the men shouted, “Are you stupid?”

“Yes,” the teenager said. “I’m stupid.”

He’d been in detention for some time, I realized later. He knew how to answer properly. But the men only came closer to him.

“Why are you so stupid?”

“Because—”

Fists holding bricks and stones descended on him. I heard a sharp crack—was it a bone breaking?—and the teenager fell to the floor, his figure lost behind a blur of sleeves and legs. He was beaten unmercifully. No one tried to help. I stared in disbelief. I’d never seen anyone attacked like that before. It was a competition to see who could hit him hardest. The boy’s skull was their favorite target. They smashed at it with all their might, and I saw a smudge of scarlet blooming on the cement floor near his face. I turned away. I didn’t want to see the blood and brains on the floor.

If that boy survives,
I thought,
he’ll never be normal again.

The guards stood by and watched this happen. I soon learned that they didn’t run the prison; the older inmates did. There was a group of inmates in their late twenties who dealt out punishments and made money off the younger ones.

The boys were held in one room and the girls in another, larger room, where everyone ate their meals and sang songs at night. The boys slept side by side on the wood floor with no space between them. Everyone lived and ate together.

During the day we worked hard. We were sent to a factory where huge rocks were piled in front, and we had to break those rocks into smaller ones, and those into smaller ones still, until we had a pile of pebbles the size of corn kernels. Or we were sent to the fields for fourteen hours a day to tend the rice crop.

Within a day or two, the gangster brothers knew your story. They would see if any family members came to save you, and if not, they knew you had no place to go and no one to protect you. Such orphans became their first victims; we had no one to stand up for us or to complain if we disappeared. Later I learned that on my second day at the detention center, my mother had come to find me, but she went to the building in the city center and not the one where I was, out in the country. The guards had told her there was no boy of that name there. I had lost my chance for a quick release.

The kids in the detention center outnumbered the gangsters five to one. We should have banded together and fought them. But the kids from normal families were terrified of their fellow inmates, and the rest of us, the
Kkotjebi,
had been street people for too long.
Kkotjebi
were used to surviving on our own; we didn’t trust anyone, not even our partners in crime. So to bond with a bunch of strangers was impossible. The gangster brothers knew this. They knew that thieves would not join in common cause.

The good part of being at the rural detention center was the fresh air and the fact that I could ask for more soup or noodles and usually received them. Sometimes the Saro-cheong hired a local family to provide food for us, and these good people allowed some of us to have extra portions. This gave me hope for tomorrow.

But at night, Bong Sook’s face came to me again and again. I missed her so much that the pain of losing her was stronger than my hunger. In my Association days, I’d seen her face only when I dreamed, but now I thought about her constantly. And perhaps this was why: her love was unconditional, completely different from what I saw inside the detention center.

I felt a deep despair, like I was slowly sinking into black water.
I want to save my family,
I thought,
but I can’t even save myself.

Chapter

T
HE DAYS BEGAN
at 5:30 a.m. with the guards shouting at us to get up. We would go out into the field in front of the building and sing for fifteen minutes. Since the gangster brothers ran everything, you could forget about political tunes. Instead, we sang old songs that the kids had been taught in high school. Having been a
Kkotjebi
in the market and having spent my time drinking with the Association, I’d never really learned the songs, so I moved my lips silently while trying to pick up the lyrics. I was afraid if I messed up, I’d be beaten. But honestly, the gangsters didn’t need that excuse.

After the singing, we’d walk to the nearby river and wash our faces and hands. Arriving back at the center around 6:30, we’d eat a meal of corn mush and soup, which consisted mostly of water and salt. At 7:00 we’d go out to work and not come back until well after dark—around 9:30 p.m. We’d eat our dinner and gather in the girls’ room for a round of
orak heh,
or musical performances. We sat in a big circle, and one boy or girl would get up and sing while a few others would shuffle around in a dance. Like everyone else, the performers were so exhausted they could barely stand, and they had to catch themselves from collapsing on the floor. Anyone who stopped the
orak heh
was set upon by the gangster brothers and thrashed.

The first night, I desperately wanted to sleep. Blackness kept stealing over my brain. If I slept, though, I was afraid I wouldn’t wake up. We had to keep singing for the team leaders, who wanted to show that their members had spirit. But most of all, the older inmates wanted to demonstrate that they owned us. So they had us perform these ridiculous songs.

I was shy and apprehensive. I willed the brothers not to pick me to perform. Of course, I was the first one chosen that day. I stood up, my hands shaking, my throat hot and dry. I didn’t know any cheerful songs and instead began croaking out the first thing that came into my head, a mournful dirge about a son and his dying mother. I’m not a very good singer, and I watched the faces of the gangster brothers as I forced out the words. They looked confused at first, their mouths hanging open, but this confusion quickly turned to anger.

“What the hell is that?” one of them yelled. “We don’t sing songs like that here. Sit down!”

I sat down, my skin burning with embarrassment. It turned out that sad songs were forbidden at the detention center because they “disturbed the good atmosphere.” That is, they made everyone depressed.

I was never chosen to perform at
orak heh
again, which was fine with me.