Under the Same Sky (3 page)

My father thought the reason my mom was often ill and depressed was that she had no home of her own. Or rather, he must have
hoped
the solution was so simple. In any case, with the great risk of building a house, he was taking care of her. The new place wasn’t only a statement of how far he had risen from his humble beginnings. It was also, I’m sure, a message of silent concern. Of love.

Yet the July 8th house would witness great suffering soon enough.

Chapter

W
HEN WE MOVED
the following spring, the house wasn’t fully finished. There were more than a few things that needed fixing: pieces of flooring missing, a window with a missing pane. My father would come home in the evenings and work on the house, singing sentimental North Korean songs. When he was done, he moved on to making furniture: beautiful cabinets went up, and fine dressers made of Korean pine for our clothes. When I went to my neighbors’ houses I realized that the furniture they’d bought from the store wasn’t nearly as nice-looking or strong as what my father had made with a few simple tools.

Everything went well in the beginning. Bong Sook was as kind and quiet as ever. My mother’s illness seemed to lift, and my father was as delighted with his new house as if it was a second son. I managed to come to terms with the people in the graveyard. When the wind from the mountain blew toward our house, I could hear the sounds of mourners. Sometimes I heard three crisp gunshots above the houses, the sign that a soldier was being buried. Instead of being horrified, I would think,
Someone actually got to fire a gun!
I was becoming obsessed with firearms and the military around that time.
Three shots,
I thought.
Lucky guy.

All in all, when it came to the cemetery I surprised myself. Instead of always asking my father to hold my hand and take me to the outhouse, I would run there alone just before bed. When the moon was out, you could see the sloping face of the mountain and the small bumps of graves. North Koreans are very superstitious: they believe in haunted places and ghosts and omens. I wasn’t afraid of the dead people beneath the mounds, but sometimes on those short walks, when the moonlight lay on the graves in a certain way, my mind would stumble across the thought,
What if you were no longer in the world, Kwang Jin? What if you stopped being?
Then I would get scared. If it got to be too much, I would call my father and he would take my hand and lead me back. He never refused.

I made friends. My best pal in July 8th was named Bae Hyo Sung. He lived a few doors down from me and we played every day. Our main game was called
Ddakji chigi,
where you compete to own beautiful strips of paper that look like origami. We were completely mad for this game. Later, many of us would rip up our school notebooks—even our textbooks—to get paper to make the intricately folded squares that we would then try to flip over with a hard slam. Kids put tiny bits of steel in the pieces of paper to make them harder to flip. I even tore up my father’s copy of Kim Il Sung’s memoir, which not only infuriated him but was also a crime against the state.

Hyo Sung and I were about the same height, but he was more confident than I could dream of being. Some of this probably came from his father, a city official, who was a giant: six feet at least, which made him taller than almost anyone I knew. His mom, who was kind and chatty, looked like a dwarf next to her husband.

My friend’s cocksure talk electrified me. I was beginning to change from the obedient boy my mother bragged about to her friends in the street.

I started kindergarten that year and met my first school friends—and my first mean kids, too. In North Korea, when you go to school, you aren’t ranked academically, but by your ability to fight. Literally. I can tell you who was the number-one boy in my first-grade class, and the number seven—and the numbers refer to only one thing: how good a battler you are, as judged by your classmates. The schools encouraged this kind of thinking: for example, when a child fails to show up for class, the teacher doesn’t call the parents and ask about the absence (to begin with, there are no phones). Instead, she sends a group of the toughest students to yell at the kid. Sometimes they even beat the boy until he agrees to come back. I don’t know where this mania for toughness comes from. Perhaps it’s my country’s history, which is full of pain and oppression.

In kindergarten no violence was allowed, but I knew that in one year the bigger kids would be sizing me up. It was in kindergarten that I acquired my first nickname outside the house: Gang Duk Gee, the name of a character in the espionage movies we all watched. Gang Duk Gee was a South Korean spy, which made it a horrible thing to call someone. Later, in grade school, I got a second nickname that was only slightly better: Yeok Do San, which referred to a big-boned Korean-Japanese wrestling champion and meant “fatty.” But I wasn’t fat. It was my round face, like my mother’s, that earned me that name.

In any case, I knew I’d have to fight people because of my nicknames. It was inevitable.

When I went to kindergarten, I learned more about Kim Il Sung. I knew a lot about the Great Leader before I ever went to school, of course. He was our grandfather; he had magical powers; he was the smartest man in the world; and he often flew around the countryside keeping watch on all his children. Like all North Korean families, mine kept a shrine on our wall to the Great Leader and his wife. The first thing my father did in the morning, even before he washed up or ate his breakfast, was to take a cloth and carefully dust both of their portraits. Kim Il Sung looked very handsome, his face glowing with a dazzling and benevolent light, his eyes kind but also determined.

You could be sent to a prison camp for allowing dirt to gather on Kim Il Sung’s portrait, or for putting it behind cracked glass. But my father cleaned the pictures out of reverence, not fear.

Kindergarten changed my view of the Great Leader. In the first few days of class, our teachers, their faces solemn and still, brought out a set of drawings and showed them to us. We crowded around to see: a group of American soldiers with big eyes, even bigger noses, and flashing white teeth were stabbing Koreans with razor-sharp bayonets. The picture was so terrifying I thought I would faint. But I already fancied myself a soldier and would not turn away. I held my breath as the teacher explained that Americans had come to our country to massacre Koreans for no other reason than they liked to. The Americans
enjoyed
killing Korean people.

I felt a thrill of dread travel the length of my body. It came as a physical shock that there were such people in the world. We’d known that the Americans were bad. In the spy movies, it was always them or the Japanese who were trying to steal North Korea’s secrets, but here was evidence of just how awful they truly were. My teacher showed us a new picture from the back of the pile. I blinked in disbelief. American soldiers were shoving pregnant Korean women into a room filled with fire. I stared at the drawing as my teacher explained that the Americans loved to roast Koreans alive or put them into gas chambers. The gaschambers killed them faster.

Tears welled up in my eyes.

The only people who stopped the Americans from coming to my country, our teacher said, were Kim Il Sung and the soldiers of North Korea. I nodded. The Great Leader was so much more than I had ever known.

That summer, Hyo Sung and I became secret agents. We tossed our bows and arrows onto the trash pile and begged our fathers for guns. My dad had always bought me toys when I asked, but now he looked at me strangely. “Things in the market cost more these days,” he said quietly. “But I’ll carve you some guns out of scrap wood. How would that be?”

I felt my skin flush with annoyance. Why couldn’t my father earn more money to buy me toy pistols? I began to complain, but one look at my father stopped me. I detected a sadness in him that was new.
He’s worried about something,
I thought.
I wonder what
.

My father was as good as his word. He supplied me with an unending number of hand-carved pistols, revolvers, and rifles. My popularity soared. When my father carved me a gun that shot small pebbles with an elastic band, my new friends nearly died of envy.

I was a clumsy boy, always tripping and falling over exposed roots or little holes in the ground. Or I would stuff a gun in my pocket like a bandit and jam it against a doorframe when running into my room, smashing my toy to pieces. It gave me a mournful feeling to lose a gun.

When this happened, I would run to my father and say, “Could you . . . ?” The first few times, he only laughed and began fashioning a new one. But eventually he got mad at my astonishing ability to break everything in sight, and handed me a toy with no details on it, just a wood block carved into the shape of a gun. I looked at it. This was my punishment for being such a thoughtless boy. I brooded for a while, but even my father’s worst pistol was better than what my friends had.

I loved those guns so much. I slept with them, and when I woke up in the morning, the first thing I would do was feel around my bed for my latest sidearm. When I touched the smooth wood, a feeling of peace would come over me. When I grew up, I was sure I would become a spy or soldier who saved his homeland from the big-nosed people.

I was very patriotic. I believed Kim Il Sung would take care of my family and me. Everyone believed this. Which is what made what was to come so hard for us to accept.

Chapter

H
YO SUNG AND
I spent our free time chasing dragonflies. As a transplanted city boy, I became obsessed with the sight of their dark glinting wings. We hunted them day after day. The bugs’ favorite place to land was on the green corn stalks in the fields next to our houses. They liked the top parts of the stalks; they sat there buzzing in the heat. We snuck up behind them and clapped them in our hand-prisons. We even created our own equipment, a sort of tennis racket made out of corn stalks with spider webs draped across the middle. If you swung this in the buzzing air, the dragonfly would get caught and become your prisoner.

Just before you got to the graveyard near our house, there was an irrigation canal that supplied all the fields with water. We ran along this ditch chasing particularly beautiful dragonflies, venturing out beyond the houses, with the mountains on our right, sunlight spilling over their rounded shoulders. So long as there was sunlight, we ran and leaped and stalked our prey.

One summer day, Hyo Sung and our other friends switched to chasing frogs, which we found in the irrigation canal. The water wasn’t very deep, maybe a foot, but it stretched to eternity. Despite the miles I walked that summer trying to spot the green frogs, I never got to the end of that canal.

When it crossed under a road, the water sped up and flowed down into steel pipes that angled beneath the road. My friend Chul Min and two of my other pals were hunting frogs one sweltering June day when Chul Min jumped in the ditch—he’d spotted a toad perched on a rock. The water was running fast and Chul Min lost his footing and soon he was shooting along in the fast little rapids, screaming for help. I ran after him, my heart knocking in my chest. I knew Chul Min couldn’t swim, and if he went down into the pipes he would get trapped below the road. When he got to the mouth of one of the pipes, he gripped the rim and screamed, “Help me! Help me!” The water rushed over his face, distorting his features. I didn’t know what to do.

I rushed to the nearby cornfield. There I grabbed a stalk, ripping it from the ground with frenzied strength. I ran back to Chul Min. We could see the rushing current pulling him under with a giant sucking sound. On the grassy bank I lowered the stalk down to him and yelled, “Grab it!” Chul Min reached up one hand and tried to snatch at the stalk. On the third try he caught hold and we pulled until our backs ached. With a
whoosh
the water let him go and the top half of his small body collapsed onto the grass, his feet still trailing in the ditch. He was alive.

It was the first time I had felt death come close to me. And my friends and I had outwitted it. It felt wonderful.

Everyone in the neighborhood called us heroes that day. When they heard what we’d done, they actually came outside their doors and applauded us, as if we were soldiers returning from war. I became famous in July 8th as the boy who rescued Chul Min with a corn stalk.

Dinnertime was 5 p.m. in the summer. Bong Sook would be sent out to call me home. Sometimes I’d run from her, too caught up in a war game to think of food. “But it’s my turn to play spy catcher!” I’d cry. I’d beg her for just a few more minutes. Other times, I would tramp home after her, hoping for
kko Jang Dduck,
a kind of corn pancake that was my favorite thing to eat. For me, those hot pancakes meant security; they meant love.

To make
kko Jang Dduck,
my mother took corn powder and mixed in saccharin (sugar was very expensive), some soda powder, and water, making a thick dough. Meanwhile, she cooked white rice in a separate pot. After thirty minutes, the rice would be almost ready, the water having boiled away. My mother then divided the dough and shaped small pieces into circles and placed them in the rice pot, slapping each pancake to the side wall. After ten minutes, the pancakes were ready. It was a simple recipe, but easy to ruin: if you put the pancakes in the pot before all the water had boiled away, they would come out soggy.

One day that July I was out playing with my friends when Bong Sook called for me, her “
Poppppp-eeeeeeee
” coming to me over the fields. I looked at the sun; it seemed too high in the sky for dinnertime. I said goodbye to my friends and headed home.

As I passed the houses on my street, I noticed that each of the rare television sets was turned on. This was nothing less than shocking. Normally, the national programs wouldn’t start until five o’clock in the evening, and there would be nothing but static until then. But now I could hear the same voice coming from all the houses with TVs. And the streets, which should have been filled with people hurrying home for their lunch, were empty. It was strange; I had a queasy feeling in the bottom of my stomach. What was going on?