Under the Same Sky (34 page)

I returned to Virginia inspired by their example, but I was still flailing in most parts of my life. My report card came that May: all D’s, except for an A in world history (where the students barely did anything) and an F in math. I didn’t really care.

One evening, after a typically tense day at school, I found my foster mother had made chicken wings for dinner. I was famished and quickly ate my portion. I really wanted more, but there wasn’t enough for the other members of the family. So I left the last wing on the serving plate, and it was soon snapped up. I closed my eyes, thinking of another long night in my room, with the hunger—a mere shadow of what I’d felt in North Korea, but still hunger—aching in my belly.

I opened my eyes and looked down. There on my plate was a chicken wing. Someone had quietly left me the last one. I looked up. My foster father was looking at me, his eyes filled with . . . compassion, I suppose. I smiled at him. We said nothing, but inside I was moved. This man had shared his last piece of food with me.

That night, I lay on my bed and thought of one night in Hoeryong, in the Manyang house. My father and sister had gone to the mountains to look for firewood and I’d been left alone. I was eight or nine years old. I decided I would be a big boy and cook a meal for my family, so they would have something warm to eat when they came home from hours of foraging. I put some rice in the pot with water and lit the fire underneath. I stirred the pot, feeling the resistance of the rice against the spoon, sticky and wet.

The door opened and my father came in, his arms full of branches. Bong Sook followed behind. They were chatting as they entered. My father’s eyes fell to the pot and saw me stirring the rice. It was the first time I’d ever tried to cook for him, and his eyes lit up as if I’d surprised him with a wonderful and unexpected gift.

I spooned the rice into three bowls. My dad and sister dumped the wood in the corner and came to sit down. With my first bite, I realized I hadn’t let the pot simmer long enough. The rice tasted awful. But my father couldn’t stop smiling and he scooped it into his mouth with great pleasure.

I thought of that night now, in bed in my foster home. Since then, I’d become quite good at preparing rice and other dishes.
Father,
I thought,
I wish I could make you rice again. I am a much better cook now, and you would be so happy.
I began to cry into my pillow.

I was never a good son to you, Father. But from this day on, I will be different. I won’t lie
—something he always hated
—or fight with people. I will study and earn good grades and I will do something for our people. I will help them in your memory. This is how I will honor your sacrifice.

I have always been skeptical of moments that change people’s lives. Progress is painful and slow; in my experience, it doesn’t come in a flash from the sky. But from that moment forward I was a different person, in school at least. I began to study voraciously, and worked on my math and English especially.

I felt I had to move on from my foster parents, however. One morning I came down to the kitchen and saw a cold hamburger and some fries sitting on a plate. I began to eat. I realized the house was empty; everyone had left without telling me where they were headed. That was all I would have to eat until the family came back that evening. This only happened once, and I’m not sure what caused it. My foster mom, perhaps thinking my English wasn’t good enough, never tried to explain. But I somehow sensed it was time to leave.

All that night I worried about how I would tell Carolina. Finally, the next morning, I called her and told her what was happening. She started to cry. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “To come to America and be hungry!” Within a week she’d found a new foster family for me. I know my first foster dad and mom did their best, but food was such a powerful thing for me that I had to leave their home. They were sad when I left. I know this.

My new foster mom, Sharron, was a single parent and a loving person. That first day she embraced me, then led me into her kitchen. She opened the fridge and said, “Joseph, this is your home and you can eat whenever and how much you want.” Carolina had told her about my previous home.

That September, I went to a new school, the second best in the state, and made the dean’s list. For the next six semesters, I never dropped off the list. And I won the award for academic excellence three years running. My father would not have believed it.

Not everything was so sweet in my life. I still struggled to fit in at school. I went from being the “weird Asian kid” to the “crazy Asian kid.” I learned to swear, something that delighted my American classmates, and acted like a clown, especially around girls. I dyed my hair yellow at one point, wore it in bangs down to my chin, pierced my ears, and wore super-thin stovepipe pants and bright, outrageous shirts. Adrian nearly stopped speaking to me when the earrings appeared.

The worst time was lunch. I had no one to sit with for those eternal, agonizing forty-five minutes, so I would gobble up the school lunch alone at my table, then pick up my books as if I was late for an important meeting or a study session. There was no meeting or session, of course. I just made a circuit of the lunch hall and returned to my empty table, hoping no one had noticed. They had noticed.

There were some bright spots. I played pickup games of basketball and sometimes sank five jumpers in a row. I took up soccer, mastering a bicycle kick that had my schoolmates looking at me like I was some kung fu David Beckham. I made some friends, though I never told them I was North Korean. I feared that Kim Jong Il would send his agents to kidnap me, as he’d done to defectors in Japan.

All in all, I survived.

After high school I moved to New York, in July 2011. I shared a small apartment with a roommate and began working, going to college classes, and enjoying the city. My life was finally beginning to resemble the one I’d hoped for. But a few months after I arrived, I slid into a depression. It was my first time being on my own in America; I often found myself alone in my room, thinking about the past and my family. On weekdays, I was busy with a full load of classes and a part-time job, but on weekends the empty hours seemed endless. I would get a takeout meal from a Korean or Thai restaurant, lay the food out on my table, look at it, and say to myself: “How can you eat this when your mother may be starving? What kind of person enjoys his pad thai when he doesn’t even know if his own mom is alive or dead?”

The food turned bitter in my mouth, and I would open a bottle of whiskey. Often I finished it before the night was over. I lay in bed afterward, stupefied, my self-hatred at last subdued. But the next day it returned. I killed time by watching movies and grew ever more morose, until at times I felt anchored to the bed. I’d never learned how to express my deepest feelings. I was one of the lucky, I was far more blessed than my mother or father or sister. How could I possibly complain?

I suppose I was suffering from a form of survivor’s guilt, complicated by the role I’d played in my own escape. Questions kept running through my mind: What if I’d gone back to North Korea? What if I’d been able to help my mother after all? My guilt and depression got so bad that there were days I couldn’t leave my apartment.

Finally I started giving myself small chores, like taking the trash down to the street. Some days that was the only thing I accomplished. Then I assigned myself more ambitious tasks, like writing emails to five different people and taking long walks in the park. Eventually I worked up the nerve to travel to conferences on North Korea and related topics, where I was a featured speaker. At first it was simply the ego boost that lifted my spirits: “You are so brave,” people told me. “Your survival is nothing less than a miracle.” I enjoyed that. I liked being the center of attention, being recognized, after so many years as an invisible
Kkotjebi.

But I felt I was being selfish, and I berated myself.
You want to emulate Martin Luther King Jr.,
but you are just a showman, out for your own ends.
Part of that was true. But I felt I was also helping people, those thousands of homeless boys and girls who were vulnerable to the North Korean state and the Chinese authorities.
I am not Dr. King,
I said to myself after a while.
I’m not perfect, but I’m doing my best to tell the world these people exist, and are in pain.

Sometimes it’s difficult for me to tell my story in public. My suffering ended the day I came to the United States, but I know that there are millions of North Koreans living in pain at this very moment. There are boys just like me whose fathers are in the last stages of starvation, girls who are being sold off in China, and mothers on their way to prison camps they will never leave. The children among them are not castaways; they are deeply loved, as I was.

While I sleep on my comfortable bed, covered with a warm blanket, homeless boys and girls in North Korea are starving to death or sleeping under bridges in withering cold. They will spend tonight desperately hoping tomorrow will be better. But that can’t happen unless we all help make a place where these innocent people can live without terror or want.

I strongly believe that all North Koreans have the right to experience the life I have now. One day, I hope my countrymen will be able to taste freedom. This is what compels me to travel, to speak out and tell what I saw in places like Hoeryong. I can’t do this alone. Only together can we bring justice and freedom to North Koreans.

This is their right as human beings. And I hope to see the day when they enjoy the same justice and freedom that I do.

After giving a talk at the TED Global Conference in Scotland in June 2013, I traveled to London and Paris, capping off my first trip outside the United States. On my way home, I found myself in the Edinburgh airport. My flight to New York would leave the next morning, and instead of getting a hotel, I decided to sleep in the terminal. I’m not sure what compelled me to do this: a strange mood came over me after all that time talking about being homeless. A curious nostalgia, perhaps. I thought back to those nights I’d spent inside the big, warm steam engine abandoned next to the railroad tracks in Hoeryong. The Scottish terminal was far more luxurious—there was piped-in music and a food court—but there was something in those lonely nights I missed.

From the gray pleather seat I slept in, I could see the night sky through the enormous plate glass windows. The terminal began to empty out, and soon there was no one around except a team of cleaners and one or two travelers, stuck like me for the night. I felt a kind of pleasurable melancholy seep through my veins. My memories of North Korea were precious to me, and the stars and moon brought them closer than they’d been in many months.

I looked at the night sky and talked to Bong Sook. “I’ve just told our story to seven hundred people,” I said. “Everyone told me what a great speech I gave and what a hero I am. This isn’t true, of course. If anyone is the hero of this story, it’s you.”

I told Bong Sook about my plans to find her. I’d spoken with different people, and they’d told me there were Korean-Chinese brokers who specialized in locating North Koreans in the border provinces of China. We’d agreed this was the best way to approach the difficult mission of finding my sister.

Right now,
I thought,
we only share the stars. But I can look up at night and see that you are under the same sky. That will have to be enough until I find you.

I focused on one particular star.
Why don’t I know their names?
I must learn them.
“I wonder what you are doing tonight, Bong Sook,” I said softly. “Are you warm and safe like me? It’s been so long since I waited for your return, dreaming like a baby brother of the delicious food you would surely bring. But now I just want to thank you for being my sister, for loving me and remembering me always. I will not forget you, as you never forgot me.” I said a few more words, about my apartment in Brooklyn and my everyday life. Then I drifted off.

I slept peacefully that night. In the morning, I boarded the flight to JFK, and the plane ascended slowly into the sky as the muffled roar of the engines shook my seat. The stars were gone now, replaced by a pale blue sky and long ribbons of clouds.
Take everything from me,
I thought,
and I will still have those constellations. The hidden stars that draw me to those I love.

I
AM SO THANKFUL
for the opportunity to share my story. It’s a privilege but also a burden, because this isn’t just my story, but the story of millions of other people in North Korea today. Rudyard Kipling once said, “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” My hope in telling my story, our story, is that the lives of the North Korean people would not be forgotten. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to so many important people in my life who have helped me to make it this far and have been a part of shaping who I am today.

First and foremost, I would like to thank my mom and dad for bringing me into this world. Dad, you made so many sacrifices for our family, things I probably couldn’t have done. Mom, sometimes I felt so resentful. I wondered how differently things could have turned out if we had made different decisions. But I love you and am waiting to be together with you and Bong Sook again.

Adrian Hong, thank you for helping to bring me to the United States so that I could experience the true definition of freedom. You have remained a great mentor and friend through your continued support and care over the years. Angela Hong, thank you for always being so thoughtful. To the Hong family: Living in your house during the summer of 2008 was one of the happiest times in my life. I owe a very special thanks to my foster mom Sharron Rose: You are the epitome of kindness and generosity. To Carolina Velez: You were my lifeline when I first came to America, helping me through my resettlement as my case manager. Hannah
noona
(Hannah Song): Thank you so much for being my sister, for always believing in me more than I believe in myself, and for loving me the same way that I imagine Bong Sook would have if she was with me now.