Under the Same Sky (25 page)

I had arrived in the mountains in late August but couldn’t begin harvesting the main crop until late September, when the corn turned ripe. I spent the late summer looking forward to the days when the harvest was in and I could go to the village and trade for goods. In the city, an armful of corn was valuable; it might earn you two bowls of noodles. In the country, everyone grew corn, so you couldn’t get very much for it. But an armful equaled ten pieces of candy, and that’s what I wanted. I was still a kid at heart.

When September came, I anxiously checked the corn each morning, looking for stalks in the outer rows that got more sun and so ripened quicker. When I found a couple that were ready for picking, I snapped off the cobs and hustled down the mountain, heading straight for the store.

I marched into the little place, dumped the corn on the counter, and walked out with my boiled sweets. Instantly one was clacking around between my teeth and the others were deep in my pocket. I had to be careful: the road my small grandfather came in on ran right next to the store. I sucked the candy while keeping an eye out for his gray-haired head approaching down the road. I’d eaten nothing but vegetables for months, so the candy tasted like alien food. My body tingled from the sugar and I felt my spirits lift.

Small Grandfather was using me: he didn’t pay me for my two months of work, apart from the corn I ate. So I began using him. I took a bit of the crop and stashed it away for myself. It gave me a warm glow inside to know I was stealing from him. My bitterness at what he’d done hadn’t diminished. I even involved the ex-convict in my little plot. Since I couldn’t hide all my corn near my tent, I went to him and said, “Please hide this for me until I can come for it.” He knew the story of my family, and he had no loyalty toward a city slicker like my small grandfather. The ex-convict did as I asked.

I didn’t hate Small Grandfather, exactly, but he treated me like a stranger. I was a piece in an economic system; I never felt he considered me his blood. So I treated him like a rube at the Hoeryong city market.

One of the hardest parts of being homeless was the constant risk of embarrassment. When I was working as a thief or a beggar, I often forgot what I looked like. It didn’t matter how dirty your face was or how many holes your shirt had or if you had shoes or not, because everyone else around you was in the same boat. But when I saw someone I knew from my old life, I felt a rush of shame and despair. I saw myself as they saw me, as a kind of half man, half bird of prey. I had felt the same way about others who became homeless. They weren’t their old selves anymore. They were poisonous insects, only human-sized.

So when I saw my old teachers in town, my face flushed. I’d run away so they couldn’t see me. The same with my ex-classmates.

In the countryside I thought I was invisible to others, but even in the small towns there were schoolchildren, and some days they would march by when Small Grandfather and I were out walking. I would see long lines of children in their uniforms heading down the road. Sometimes they carried a large school flag and sang patriotic songs. When they saw me, they stared. You don’t see as many
Kkotjebi
in the countryside, since they tend to flock to the cities. So I was a novelty.

One time, we were leaving the mountain, pulling a cart back to the city with a load of corn inside. In North Korea, pulling a cart means you are taking the place of oxen. It’s something poor people do. It means your family is so desperate it cannot even spare you to go to school.

That day, more schoolchildren came by, and their looks were pitying. I was their age, but here I was, sweating like a horse. I felt the shame crawl over my face like maggots. My small grandfather saw my reaction, or sensed it—how much in North Korea depends on sensing rather than seeing!—and he told me something I’ll never forget.

“Are you embarrassed?” he asked.

“Of course I am,” I snapped.

“You shouldn’t be.”

We were silent for a moment, the axle of the cart squeaking and grinding as we pulled it over the uneven road.

“I once read this Japanese book,” he said. “Very good book.”

I snorted. I didn’t want to hear about any book, Japanese or otherwise. I was steaming.
I have a job,
I wanted to yell at the children.
I’m a shepherd! I’m just like you!
But I said nothing.

“It was about three thieves who were stealing from people in the countryside,” he continued. “They were caught and sentenced to prison, a prison located on a faraway island. They stayed there for many years. Finally it was their time to be released, and a merchant ship came and picked them up and the thieves made their way through the island channels back to the mainland. Although the thieves had eaten three meals a day, they had learned nothing during their imprisonment—there were no classes or workshops to learn anything—and so they went back to their old ways. On the ship they robbed things from the seamen’s quarters, and the sailors caught them. What do you think the sailors did?”

Why is he telling me this story?
I thought. “I don’t know.”

“They threw them overboard! And although these men had been on an island for years, do you know they hadn’t even learned to swim? So they drowned.”

I looked at Small Grandfather, but he just kept walking along, his eyes facing straight ahead. This, apparently, was the end of the story.

For years, I dismissed his little tale. It was a simple one of wrongdoing and punishment, and my small grandfather was a great fan of people getting what they deserved. (How much mercy had he shown my mother? Or me, for that matter?) But I think I did him a disservice. He wasn’t so clear-cut a character, in retrospect, and his mind was deep if not particularly kind. When I think of the story now, I believe he was telling me that my predicament, living as a shabbily dressed teenager with nowhere to call home, was not my fault. The government hadn’t educated the three thieves, or given them a trade, but instead pitched them back into the world with only one option: to steal. In my most charitable interpretation of the story and his reasons for telling it to me, my small grandfather was saying: Don’t blame yourself. Your torn clothing and your matted hair are not who you are. Take heart.

It was a very unusual thing for him to say. He’d been a supporter of the government, but he was telling me subversive stories about how officials didn’t take care of their people. It made me think of Small Grandfather as a sad person. Perhaps he didn’t feel right about what he’d done to my mother and me.

Maybe I misunderstood this old man. I sometimes believe that, deep inside, he felt remorse. Maybe.

Chapter

I
N
2004 I turned fourteen, and when the harvest came in we stored away the crop for the new year. It’s traditional in North Korea at this time, September 12 to be exact, to go to the cemetery and pour alcohol on the graves of your ancestors, thanking them for the good harvest. Then you take a portion of the new corn and make a meal.

It’s like Thanksgiving in America in many ways. A celebration. The whole family gathers from all parts of North Korea; the roads are clogged with people on their way to join their kin. Only the rich go by motorcycle; everyone else forms parallel lines on each side of the roads, heading to their home place on foot. Once they get there, kids escape from their parents and play with their cousins for hours at a time. Everyone eats well. It was always one of my favorite holidays.

But this year, September 12 only served as a reminder that my family had been thrown to the winds. I went to my father’s grave alone with a small bottle of homemade liquor that Small Grandfather gave me. It’s traditional to say some words over the grave, such as “Father, I’m here. Thank you for your sacrifice over the years.” But those words were merely ritual. I couldn’t think of anything from my own life to say. Despite Small Grandfather’s story, I was embarrassed by what had become of me, and felt there was nothing to be thankful for. I couldn’t say what I felt inside: “I’m tired and I don’t know what to do.” That wouldn’t have been right. So I just stood there quietly, my mind drifting through memories of my family, the sad times and the happy times.

The fall hadn’t brought a bounty. All I had was what I’d managed to steal from Small Grandfather. My mother was living with another man, my sister was in China and in unknown circumstances. When you are alone on Thanksgiving, far from the ones you love, with nowhere to call home, the holiday is empty and painful.

When my work for Small Grandfather was done, I went to Sung Min’s apartment. He was working as a security guard at a hospital, not making much money. He would steal a box of nails or some lumber from his job, and my mother would go and sell it in the market. But they were losing weight; their skin hung on their bones in dry, loose ridges.

I stole at night and slept during the day. One morning I returned to the apartment and found my mother gone. “She’s been arrested again,” Sung Min told me mournfully. She’d gone to see a broker about smuggling her into China, and he had informed on her. My mother was sitting in a jail in Manyang, on suspicion of plotting to escape North Korea.

My heart dropped. This was the third time my mother had been arrested. The authorities were sure to give her a long sentence.

I knew Manyang, of course. I went to see my mother, bringing some cornmeal powder and two aspirin that I’d bought. The guards wouldn’t let me see her, so I left my little gifts and asked them to pass them to her. I left with a heavy heart.

Later, my mother wrote Sung Min that she had cried when shed’d been given the aspirin and told I’d brought it. She was seriously ill at the time, and the medicine helped her recover. When I heard that, I wished I’d spent all my money and bought her a dozen. But perhaps it wasn’t just the aspirin that gave her strength; it was knowing that I was thinking of her.

Time went by. I lived on the street. That year was the same thing repeated day after day, with no weekends or holidays. Get up at noon. Wait for dark. Steal. Eat. Sleep. There are entire months that are blank to me.

The summer of 2005 came and Small Grandfather hired me again to watch his corn. After we had harvested the last of the shucked ears, gathered wood for the coming winter, broken down the camp, and organized everything for next year’s planting, my small grandfather surprised me. “Do you want to go to school?” he asked.

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“Then you will come live with me.”

That was all. Suddenly I was readmitted to the house I’d been exiled from three years before. Perhaps this was the lesson Small Grandfather had been teaching me: you’re not a thief at heart, you’re a schoolboy who’s had bad luck.

I was so excited to be a student again, a high school junior. I was fifteen now, and this was my chance to return to a beloved place that had become a vague memory to me.

Chapter

M
Y FIRST DAY
at school, I showed up bright and early. It was the same place where I’d been a student when I was ten, a one-story building of painted white brick. The classrooms had big windows with small square panes, dark green desks with yellow chairs, the paint fading after years of use. I felt as if I’d walked back into a world that had gone on seamlessly without me. Here were the same kids I’d known back in fourth and fifth grade, the same boys I’d wrestled and had adventures with years before, the same girls I’d played with (though Hyang Mi, my boyhood crush, was going to a different school). Everything was the same, as if I’d walked out the school doors only a few weeks before. But of course this was an illusion. Things inside all of us had changed.

I was wearing a new uniform, dark blue trousers with a five-button jacket. I was carrying a fresh new notebook in my bag. And I quickly found a few of my old friends: Ahn Jin Hyuk, Kim Goom Hyuk, and Kim Myung Il.

I had known the three in elementary school, and they were now in the cool group. The girls I’d known as awkward, lumpy-faced eleven-year-olds had blossomed into poised and beautiful creatures. I was shocked. Some mysterious change had occurred inside them. Their hair was combed. Their figures were full. I had been away for three years, so it appeared this had happened overnight.

School was strange to me. Myung Il, who’d been a bit of a clown in elementary school, was now known as Ax, because he was supposedly a scary guy. I said, “But it’s Myung Il. He’s not scary at all!” Ahn also surprised me: he challenged me to an arm wrestle one day and I scoffed at him. “Are you kidding me? I’ve been working on farms and fighting on the streets.” But finally I agreed, and I couldn’t believe it when he won. I realized he’d been eating well for four years, while I’d been subsisting on one or two meals a day. It was shocking that this boy was stronger than me.

The first class I walked into was English, and I immediately sensed trouble. I could speak at that time perhaps three or four words: “Hi,” “OK,” “no,” and maybe one other. My brain was frozen in place as a twelve-year-old. Of course all the other students had been attending school regularly, and as soon as I walked in I heard this odd buzzing, the clipped sounds of English in Korean mouths. My classmates were so far ahead of me. I stared at my old friends and realized that the world had passed me by.

The teacher spoke indecipherable words. My friends, a little bored, began to write things down in their notebooks. I just stared at mine, an expanse of white that would never be filled up. Academically, I was doomed the first day I came back. There was no way I would ever catch up; North Korean schools don’t have any remedial classes. If you’ve dropped behind, you’re lost.

But socially I was in heaven. All the things my friends and I had dreamed of doing when we were twelve years old we could do now. When I walked out to the schoolyard after classes, my friends turned to me, cigarettes in their hands. I started smoking, which in North Korea is a symbol of adulthood. Then we flirted with the girls.