Under the Same Sky (26 page)

I had a bit of a mystique now. All the other
Kkotjebi
my classmates knew were dead or under the control of the Saro-cheong, which made me seem like I was special. They never faulted me for becoming homeless; they were more mature now and realized it wasn’t my choice.

Not everyone was so understanding, however. The head of my school’s Saro-cheong division was one of my teachers, an aggressive guy who kept tabs on the students’ lives. He was an intimidating person who relished the power he had over us. On my fourth day in school, he saw me and walked over.

“So, you left the market?” he said with a smile.

I was a bit shocked. He was reminding me that I’d been a homeless castoff for three years.

I didn’t know what to say. I nodded.

I could see that some of the students—I noticed two pretty girls in particular—were watching us.

“Are you going to continue coming to school this time?” he demanded in a loud voice.

“Yes.” I grimaced.

“Good. Make sure you do.”

I felt my blood boil.

I continued my lackluster ways in school, but now I had the very good excuse that I was way behind. During the school day, I would hang out near the hearth, located in a back room behind the main classroom. Here a fire was kept going all day to heat the building (there was no boiler or central heating system). My pals shared their cigarettes and gossiped, not bothering to do their work, because in North Korea good grades without family connections meant nothing. The fireplace was hooked up to a chimney, and if we spotted any teacher walking past the door, we’d blow the smoke from our mouths into the fire. We had loose cigarettes that we passed around one at a time. But it was a cool thing, an adult thing to do, and we were addicted.

One day a teacher passed by the back room and the boy who’d just taken a drag stared at him in horror. He managed to flick the cigarette into the fire without the teacher seeing, but there was still the problem of the smoke in his lungs. The teacher walked in and studied him.

“Breathe it out,” he said calmly. Our friend only stared, his face growing redder and redder. “Breathe it . . .” With an explosive
pah!
the smoke came belching out of his mouth, right in the teacher’s face.

The teacher grabbed my friend by the neck and hauled him away. The rest of us just laughed. But the others would go back to class and earn A’s and B’s, while I was sure my report card would be a list of miserable C’s and D’s.

Did I think of my father and his love of learning? I did, but I pushed those thoughts away.
This is asking too much. I’m not superhuman,
I told myself.
Let me enjoy my little taste of life while I have it. It’s bound to be brief, like most of life’s pleasures.

I was right about that.

Chapter

A
FTER SCHOOL, I
would stay out with my friends, smoking in the streets or hanging out at one of their houses. I wouldn’t arrive back at my small grandfather’s until midnight. He’d be waiting for me, suspicion written all over his face.

“Where have you been?”

“There were extra classes,” I said. “I had to stay afterward to catch up.”

The first time I lied, he looked at me dubiously, but didn’t challenge me. But after I kept showing up at midnight reeking of cigarette smoke, he looked at me in a new way. Any trace of pity or sympathy, which had been hard to detect in the first place, was gone. Clearly I was a bad investment, a thing whose economic function had vanished.

“I have no hope for you,” he told me one night. “Tomorrow you must leave my house.”

The little idyll had lasted only a few weeks. Strange, it looms large in my memory now; I remember more details about that short time than I do about entire other years of my life. I was happy again. I’d been reunited with my old friends. I’d failed in Small Grandfather’s eyes, yes, but when you find happiness after so many years of misery, you want to savor every second. And I had.

Some days, I wonder what would have happened if I’d taken school seriously. I could have studied hard, made Small Grandfather happy, and he would have let me stay with him indefinitely.

As it happened, however, I was out on the streets the next day.

I returned to Sung Min’s house. Sung Min was kind enough to let me stay without asking anything in return. Since my mother’s so-called marriage was enough for me to call this house home, I waited there to hear news of her sentence, whether she would be sent to a labor camp.

I still had money from stealing part of Small Grandfather’s corn crop, and I spent it on food for Sung Min. We stayed in the attic, which was our secret place, and played a card game—famous in North Korea—called 44A. The game requires a great deal of strategy, and you can lose yourself in different theories of how to play it. We became obsessed, dealing cards for hours and inviting neighbors over to gamble with us. There was a guy next door, Chul Nahm, who’d been to China many times and made piles of cash, which, like most people who came into money, he had spent immediately. He was a funny guy, a talker who could meet a girl and five minutes later she would be his girlfriend. “Kwang Jin, money is like a drug,” he would tell me. “Once you have it, you can’t go back to a normal life.” But he was half starving now, just like the rest of us, eating maybe one meal a day.

Chul Nahm was planning another trip to China, where his mother lived. He described to me the meals she would make, including a beef stew, simmering in an enormous pot that she would stir continuously. As he described it, the meat gave off so much fat that the pot didn’t send up any steam. I thought about that a lot: a pot of meat as large as I was. I’d never seen such a thing. I told Chul Nahm that I would go with him to China. That was the first time I ever really considered leaving North Korea.

I was living day to day, with no conception of my future. When we ran out of money, I went to the liquor store and pawned my leather jacket, the one I’d stolen from a boy at the detention center, and bought three bottles of moonshine and some tofu. If I could eat and laugh a little with Chul Nahm, it soothed my mind and kept bad thoughts about Bong Sook away. The thought of escaping to China wavered like a mirage.

Then Chul Nahm disappeared. One day, I went to his house and he was gone. Perhaps he’d seen a chance and made a dash for the border. No one knew.

By early February 2006, I was out of money and Sung Min was broke too. I had to leave or I would become a burden to him. I had nothing to pack, not even a toothbrush. I started walking to a small town a couple of hours away, where a distant relative of mine lived. I called her Byeck Sung Aunt (Byeck Sung was the place where she lived), though she was really a fourth cousin. I had met her only once or twice before, but by now I had exhausted all my family options in Hoeryong City.

It was a raw spring day, with blustery sheets of rain sweeping along the road. I was miserable. As I walked, I saw kids and their parents holding their special Kim Jong Il birthday packages. Every year during his birthday week, all children below the age of ten receive gift packages to celebrate; each one has cookies, candy, and popcorn. The kids who had already gotten theirs carried them with great pride and anticipation of eating the boiled sweets. The holiday was two days away.

I arrived at my “aunt’s” and knocked on her door.
Won’t she be surprised,
I thought grimly. She opened the door and her face registered shock, but she welcomed me warmly into her home. This aunt lived with her husband and her white-haired mother-in-law, who was tiny and stooped and at least seventy years old. She also had a young boy and girl, who were dipping into their gift packages as I entered. They shared some of the popcorn and candy with me, and their mother gave me a half bowl of rice soup. My belly was grumbling and I accepted their gifts gratefully. I knew how much children looked forward to the packages, and to give even one piece of candy away was a big sacrifice. After we’d all nibbled on some of the treats, Byeck Sung Aunt put the packages on a shelf for safekeeping.

The next morning, I woke up and found her waiting for me. I had a shaky feeling in my stomach; I knew what was coming.

“Kwang Jin.”

“Yes?”

“You can’t stay here.”

I dropped my head. It had been only one night.

I gathered my things and walked out with the family. Her husband had left to go somewhere—perhaps to work, I don’t remember. At a crossroads, Byeck Sung Aunt and her children said goodbye. I waved to them and began walking back to Hoeryong. It was cold and gray outside, the light filtered through heavy, rain-bearing clouds.

After five minutes, I realized I’d left my gloves behind. I turned around, hurried back to the house, and pushed the door open without knocking. I saw Byeck Sung Aunt’s mother-in-law reaching up to the shelf where the children’s holiday packages were. I could see she was trying to get to the candy and popcorn. She turned with a stricken look on her face.

I stared at her in shock.

She scurried toward me and grabbed my left hand.

“Please, Kwang Jin. Please, you can’t tell my son.”

I was speechless. I looked around for my gloves. I didn’t know what to do—I felt pity for the old woman.

She was jerking at my hand, begging me to keep silent. I tried pulling it away, but her grip was fierce.

“I must tell you what happened before,” she said. “Kwang Jin, please allow me to tell you the story.”

There was an awful fear in her eyes. I stopped pulling my hand away and nodded. I would listen to what she had to say.

She bowed her head, her hand still holding on to mine. “A few months ago I was starving, and my grandson had candy he’d received for his birthday. When the family was out, the temptation grew too strong—I am old, but I must eat too!—and I took some of it. When my son came home, he noticed that a few of the treats were missing and he questioned me. I admitted I’d had some, and he went crazy.”

She looked up at me. She was crying now. “This son I cared for so preciously, do you know what he did? He took pliers and tried to pull out my teeth. He gripped my head and put the pliers in my mouth as I screamed. I was so terrified, Kwang Jin. Please,
please,
don’t tell my son.”

I turned to go. I didn’t care about the gloves any longer. I didn’t doubt her story for a second. To treat your parent in this way, in North Korea—it was unheard of.

The woman wouldn’t let go of my hand. She was begging me for something else. As I tried to release myself, I realized what she was saying. “Poison. Please buy me poison so I may join my husband.”

I left that place thinking,
The world is too awful.

I went to the railroad tracks and followed them to Hoeryong. I remembered someone I knew who lived in, of all things, a culinary school. The place was full of ex-soldiers who went there after doing their stint in the service. I’d visited him before and he was always glad to see me; he let me use his meal card so I could eat in the cafeteria. The food was terrible, corn noodles so soaked in water they were falling apart, but it was better than nothing.

I had run out of family and friends and had to depend on mere acquaintances to keep my heart beating. I thought of the candle flickering at the bottom of the mine shaft. Was there enough oxygen—enough food, enough shelter—for me to live?

It took me hours to get to the culinary school. On previous visits, when the guards at the front gate asked me whom I was visiting, I would always say “the uncle of Lee,” and they would let me in. But when I got there this time, the guards turned me away. I was confused until I recalled it was the week of Kim Jong Il’s birthday. Security was always at its highest in North Korea in mid-February. Even the most confident thieves would stay home, knowing that the police and soldiers would be everywhere on the streets.

This is ridiculous,
I thought.
Where am I going to sleep tonight?

I turned south and began walking again, tramping along the train tracks toward Hoeryong. It was a cold, gloomy day, around noon. A most ordinary day. I had no idea I was soon to be faced with the most important decision of my life.

Chapter

A
S I WALKED
, I remembered a friend, Dong Hyuk, whom I hadn’t seen in some time. He lived near the local maternity hospital, in a building set in front of a beautiful mountain range. I’d met him while working the farm during my stay at the detention center. When I cut my arm while harvesting, he treated the wound and drained the pus. I still had the scar, and it reminded me of how kind he’d been.

If I failed this time, I would have to sleep by the train tracks.

Finally I got lucky. My friend was at home and very happy to see me.
When will he ask me to leave?
I wondered. Together, we boiled up noodles on his coil heater. He had a bottle of corn whiskey, so we drank a few shots to celebrate my visit. I went to sleep that night knowing this was just another temporary fix of my eternal problem: the lack of a home. I couldn’t stay for the holiday. Though I was starving, I felt embarrassed to even ask.

The next morning, before he could ask me to leave, I said goodbye to Dong Hyuk and returned to the railroad tracks. There is something especially sad about wandering aimlessly around on the biggest holiday of the year. It’s a sign your life is going nowhere.

Again I started walking along the tracks, this time toward Manyang. I was wearing a dark coat and trousers. If anyone bothered me, I could say I was part of the track maintenance crew, who wore uniforms of the same color.

The sun was on my face. It was a warm day for February, and the countryside looked pretty and fresh. The mountains, my North Korea, were very beautiful. When the wind changed direction, I could smell the pine trees.

Suddenly a thought came to me. If I kept walking, I’d reach the Tumen River—which was off-limits to civilians—and the Chinese border. What if I crossed over? It was an idle thought, like, What if I found a gold bar on the tracks?