Under the Same Sky (30 page)

Grandma wasn’t the usual seventy-five-year-old Chinese woman. She lived with her son—a kindly man of few words whom I called Uncle—but was very independent. Grandma even had a boyfriend. His name was Mr. Lee, and he was at least six feet tall and handsome, with white hair; he was about eight years younger than Grandma. Mr. Lee spoke some English and Russian. It was this elderly gentleman who, on first meeting me, saw my ragged clothes and went out and bought me a red jacket and a couple of pairs of jeans and sneakers, clothes that any Chinese teenager with a little money would wear.

I was so moved by his gesture, I sat on my bed with the jeans in my hands, their creases sharp and fresh, and tried to hold back my tears. It was another stage in my becoming human again. All teenagers want to look cool; somehow Mr. Lee knew that. I quickly shed my old outfit and tried on my new clothes, turning this way and that as I studied myself in the mirror. After a few minutes, my happiness faded. I realized I couldn’t wear my new jeans outside, trapped as I was in Grandma’s spare room. This depressed me. I undressed and put my old clothes on again.

I was still far from being able to function in normal society. I wasn’t free, I had no real home, and my confidence was gone. When Grandma’s granddaughter visited, she was cute and very sweet. She brought bananas, which I’d told Grandma I’d never eaten. It was obviously a gift for me. “Hi, Joseph, how are you?” she said. Grandma smiled and left the room.

I shook my head. To talk to this dazzling creature—it was unthinkable. She’d never seen the degradation I’d seen; she’d never been a scavenging animal as I had been. I felt that I was another species almost. I couldn’t make small talk or tease her.

“Hi,” I said shyly, then turned and retreated to my room. It wasn’t just the difference in our backgrounds, but also my secret, that I’d left North Korea in part to help my mother and still hadn’t returned. The guilt was something that accumulated every day, growing heavier.

For the first week, I never left the apartment. Grandma insisted on this. She’d kept a North Korean refugee before and the experience had broken her heart. All she would say about him was that he was in his thirties, very religious, a heavy smoker, and a good and gentle man. (I, too, was a smoker, though I tried to hide this from her, knowing she disapproved.) The mystery refugee had been snatched off the streets by Chinese police and she’d never seen him again. Grandma was afraid the same thing would happen to me.

Grandma worked with a South Korean church, which paid some of her rent and reimbursed her for any North Koreans she took in. But still, had she been caught, she would have had to pay a five-thousand-
yuan
penalty. That was big money for her. She was taking a risk by even allowing me to visit her.

I was safe and had plenty of food to eat; in North Korean terms, I was a great success. But my state of mind was very unsettled. I kept seeing my mother in my daydreams. I wondered if she was expecting me to visit her with enough money to buy her freedom. Did she say to herself, “My son will come tomorrow”? That thought kept sleep away many nights.

I also thought of Bong Sook. Now that I was in China, I was closer to my sister. But I had no idea how to find her. I didn’t know if she had a new name or what prefecture she was living in. I didn’t have the power yet to search for her. To ask about a missing North Korean girl would be reckless in the extreme.

To find Bong Sook, I first had to free myself.

Chapter

O
NE EVENING, GRANDMA
called to me that she was going out. I heard the click of the front door and waited a few minutes, listening in case she returned for a forgotten purse or something. When I was sure she was gone, I got up from my bed, walked down the hallway, and turned into her room. Days before, I’d watched her from the hallway as she stuffed something beneath her mattress. I knew what it was: money. Like so many older Chinese people, Grandma didn’t trust the banks and kept a good amount of cash at home.

Her room was neat and plain, with a cross on the wall and an electric blanket on the bed, covered by a pink duvet with little flowers on it. I lifted the mattress and saw three or four hundred
yuan
(about fifty U.S. dollars). I didn’t want to pick up the money and count it, thinking Grandma might have a system, piling the bills a certain way so she could tell if they had been moved. I was suspicious of everyone, and assumed Grandma was too.

So I stood there staring at the stack of wrinkled cash. Should I take it and go back to Hoeryong? Was there enough to redeem Mother? I had no idea. Three hundred
yuan
was a small fortune in North Korea, but I didn’t know how much it took to bribe a guard. (Later, I realized it wasn’t nearly enough money for what I wanted to do.)

My arm began to ache from holding up the mattress, but I barely felt it. My mind was a buzzing cloud of thoughts. Mother and North Korea, a country I still loved, were competing with this other world I’d found, a world represented by the rich variety of food I saw every day, food that I could eat anytime I pleased. That meant a lot to me.

If I took the money and disappeared, Grandma would be heartsick. I didn’t want to hurt her. She’d been good to me. She had even thrown a small party for my birthday. Mr. Lee and Uncle had come, and we’d eaten kimchi and chicken and fried pork, and I’d had three glasses of wine. Though that amount of alcohol barely got me tipsy, I’d pretended to be half drunk, to Grandma’s delight. At the end of the meal, she’d emerged from the kitchen with a vanilla cake topped with pineapple and orange slices, candles blazing. It was the first real cake I’d ever tasted in my life.

How could I betray her trust?

A voice inside my head said,
You can’t go back. You won’t make it, you’ll be caught, and it will be another miserable chapter in your life.

But I knew I was making excuses. I couldn’t admit the truth: I wanted to stay. I had plenty of food here. I had a few people who took care of me. I had encountered new things—unconditional love, ethics, Christianity—that I wanted to experience.

I set the mattress back down on the money without touching it.
Let’s wait and see what happens,
I thought.

Did every day I resisted stealing the money mean another day closer to death for my mother? I didn’t want to think about it. I became an expert in not thinking about such things.

Slowly, I saw that Grandma really cared for me from the bottom of her heart. She treated me as her blood, as her own grandson. Eventually the name Joseph would lose its bitterness for me. I would accept the name as my own, in tribute to the new life I’d found and to Grandma’s true heart. Joseph Kim. That was me.

One day Grandma came to me and said, “Put your new clothes on, Joseph. We’re going to the market.”

“Yes, Grandma,” I replied calmly. But I was very, very excited. It would be my first time out of the apartment.

I took the new jeans down from the top of the clothes pile, put on a fresh white shirt and my red jacket. Sneakers, too, tied perfectly with the loops of equal size. Grandma told me we were going to the grocery.

I’d observed that North Korean refugees who’d been in China a while looked different. Their faces are different. Smoother. Lotioned. North Koreans tend to hunch their shoulders and walk stiffly, but after a month or so in China they walked faster while appearing more relaxed. Their shoulders unclenched; their posture improved. Their clothes, of course, looked smart and modern.

I was terrified that despite my red coat and the Nikes, my face and my body were going to give me away. I didn’t have any lotion, but I put on some of Mr. Lee’s gel to give my hair a nice sheen, hoping that would help me blend in. Still, I was almost shaking with nerves.

The police can come for me anywhere,
I thought.
This wall I sleep next to is no protection against them. I might as well go outside and be a person.

We walked out of the apartment, down the stairs, and out into the street. It was spring and there were crowds everywhere. The noise, after being cooped up in my room for so long, was like the blast of a ship’s horn. I held Grandma’s arm like I was guiding this old woman around, but that was only for show. Really, I was clinging to her.

We made it to the bus stop and joined the line of people there. Suddenly a woman turned to me and stared. I froze. My pulse went slam-slam-slam in my ears. Grandma turned to look at the woman, and the stranger spoke to her, keeping her eyes on me.

Grandma said a few words, then turned to me.

“She says my grandson is very pretty.”

I was offended. “Pretty?” But I smiled at the woman. Grandma nodded and gave me a look. She was quite proud of me.

Next to the woman was an attractive girl about my age. The woman whispered to her.

Oh, God, please don’t let her play matchmaker,
I thought.

We got on the bus. Grandma paid the fare and she found us seats. When an elderly man got on, short and stooped, I stood up and gave him my seat and he thanked me profusely. By now Grandma was beaming.

The grocery market was another wonder. We walked the aisles and I stopped to touch some of the goods. The broccoli fascinated me. Soft miniature trees. White broccoli cost more than green. Why? Grandma didn’t know.

“What do you want to eat?” she asked. But it was too overwhelming. I pointed to some things—tomatoes, shrimp—and she gathered them up, along with the items on her list. How did she know which products to choose from the thousands stacked on the shelves? Had she memorized where they were placed in the never-ending aisles? I thought I would never master the market.

We went home on the bus, and when the apartment door closed behind us, I felt relieved. But I knew I’d be venturing out again soon.

I ate constantly. When I finished breakfast, twenty minutes later I would be nibbling on a banana or popping a few grapes in my mouth. I wanted to know the food was still there, always available. It’s like a brother you left in the park one day and almost lost forever. You keep going to his room to check on him.

Two days later, I asked, “When are we going out again?”

She took me to her church. It was an underground church, meaning it had no official certificate allowing it to operate, unlike the ones that paid bribes to government bureaucrats. There were only thirty congregants. The pastor was from South Korea, and he introduced me to his three daughters. They were each blindingly pretty. I, on the other hand, was as talkative as a rock.

“Say hi.” Grandma nudged me.

I couldn’t even make eye contact. I’d never been exposed to the Western way of flirting. I had no idea what they wanted from me and was sure that if I said anything, it would be the worst possible thing I could have done. So I stayed quiet.

The next week, we went to a super-church, the biggest one in the province. There were at least a thousand people jammed into a huge building. It was the evening service, and a youth chorus sang hymns from the stage.

I spotted a young man walking up the aisle wearing a bright white suit with white shoes. I’d never seen anyone dressed all in white before. The thought of doing that in North Korea—you would be covered in mud in half an hour. His skin looked so fresh and smooth against the white. I was mesmerized.

“You like his suit?” Grandma whispered to me.

I nodded.

“One day I’ll get you one just like it,” she said. “And one day you’ll come here and talk to anyone you like.”

That day will never come,
I thought. To be like this young man? Impossible.

As time went by, Grandma grew more confident that I wouldn’t be spotted on the street and taken back to North Korea. She began letting me go out alone, handing me two
yuan
to take the bus. Sometimes I saved the money to spend on cigarettes and walked wherever I was going. When I took the bus, I sat in the back and spoke to no one, but the feeling of being out on my own was precious to me. At first I didn’t know how to tell the driver I wanted to get off. I went to the bus depot and waited for the bus to turn around, watching the other passengers. Finally I caught what they were saying:
Xiàchē,
which meant “I want to get off.”

Each of these little discoveries was rewarding for me. You don’t recover your humanity all at once. It’s like climbing out of a deep pit, one shaky handhold at a time.

Chapter

E
VERY NIGHT GRANDMA
and I read from a well-used Korean Bible with a scratched and worn black leather cover. We sat together in the living room, which had tall windows looking out over a busy street. We sang hymns together and talked about the meaning of proverbs. I was still lost. To begin with, the concept of B.C. and A.D. was alien and confusing. I didn’t yet know Jesus’ story, so I couldn’t figure out what those terms meant. I felt my head spinning.

Grandma arranged for a young man from the church to come read the Bible with me. We went over many passages and I puzzled out what they meant. All these strange names: Joshua, Moses, Noah. To me, they were like characters in a foreign mythology. Just penetrating to what they were actually doing in the stories required a great deal of effort. What it all meant was beyond me.

But the young man told me something I never forgot. “If you pray to God for something selfish,” he said, “he won’t hear you. If you ask him for a Mercedes-Benz to drive fast and catch girls, it will never arrive. But if you want the car to drive old people to the doctor, if you want to do good, he will hear that prayer.”

Everything about Christianity was backward. What I’d learned in life was that if you didn’t constantly put yourself first, you would die.

I had food and shelter now, but as the days went by, I grew more and more depressed. I felt lonely and so filled with fear that I thought of sneaking back into North Korea again, though it meant risking starvation. I decided I would start collecting as much money as I could for the trip back. You can even yearn for a prison, so long as it contains the people and places you love.