Under the Same Sky (4 page)

When I walked into my house, I found my mother sobbing, her hands clasped over her mouth. This wasn’t that big a deal, actually. My mother cried at the TV all the time. She would hardly wait for the opening titles to roll on the screen before letting her tears stream down.

It was embarrassing to look at her. I used to watch my mother out of the corner of my eye and think,
Please don’t cry tonight.
Why couldn’t she wait until the sad scenes started, when at least one or two other people would cry, covering up her strangeness? It never occurred to me that she was sad or depressed to begin with, and that the movies simply triggered emotions she felt deep inside.

But now her eyes were red and her hands were shaking. And then I saw Bong Sook—the eternally cheerful Bong Sook—and knew something had gone terribly wrong. My sister’s face was crumpled and from her lips came a wail.

It was July 8, 1994. Kim Il Sung had died.

I turned to the TV and watched soldiers marching and mobs of people in Pyongyang sobbing. I had never seen people cry so hard, shaking and beating their chests with their hands. I was afraid.

That night, the sky seemed darker than usual. Clouds covered the moon and the foothills disappeared into blackness. It began to rain, a hard, pounding rain that turned the streets into mud pools. Everywhere were the sounds of crying people, crying on the TV and crying in my own house, and outside there was the slap of rain. We believed that the earth was in mourning for our Great Leader.

Life stopped. I couldn’t meet my friends for dragonfly hunting or even venture outdoors. Our only trip outside was the next day, when we went to a statue of Kim Il Sung’s first wife, Kim Jong-suk, which stood in a beautiful plaza in the middle of Hoeryong. So many people thronged around the statue, scores of them in traditional Korean clothing, that you couldn’t get within fifty feet of it. People laid flowers at her feet and sobbed some more. A feeling of death seemed to snake through the crowd, transmitted from person to person. My mood sensor was overwhelmed. I burst into tears, clutching my mother’s hand.

Maybe some of the people in the crowd were faking, but a child doesn’t realize this. I didn’t even know why I was crying, really; the sorrow of the crowd was so strong, it pushed its way into my heart. We inched our way closer and I kneeled on the steps below the statue with my mom and sister, tears streaming down my face. The statue now stood in a field of flowers, seemingly floating on their bright petals.

With the Great Leader gone, the world was a scarier place. I felt his absence the way a navigator would miss a guiding star. Who would watch over us now?

Chapter

T
HE FAMINE ARRIVED
. It wasn’t like we opened the rice pot one day and there was nothing in it. Instead, everything disappeared slowly, as if by evaporation. There wasn’t any Internet or television news or ringing telephones to warn that bad things were headed our way. Later, some people would call the famine
Gonan-eui haenggun
(the March of Suffering), which was a government slogan meant to convey that life was difficult now, but better times were coming. The government also wanted us to believe that the crops had disappeared through no fault of the state, and that everyone was suffering equally. This, I later learned, was a lie.

North Koreans never called the famine the March of Suffering. We never gave it a name. It was like a heavy, poisonous fog that enters your mouth before you can shout a warning.

What we didn’t know then was that Russia had stopped sending North Korea food and fertilizer, the tons of it that had helped sustain the country for many years. The Soviet Union had collapsed in 1991. The Russia that emerged in its wake was cash poor and no longer inclined to prop up the few remaining Communist regimes, such as Cuba and North Korea. Despite the government’s propaganda that emphasized a policy of
juche,
or self-sufficiency, the nation had relied on that food to survive.

To make matters worse, monsoon-like rains struck North Korea in 1995, washing away topsoil and destroying many thousands of acres of crops. The disastrous policies of the government, which had introduced farming on only a small portion of the country’s arable land, caused great suffering. The government, now led by Kim Jong Il, responded with a series of patriotic campaigns. City dwellers were forced into the countryside to toil in the fields from before dawn until nightfall. The “Let’s Eat Two Meals a Day” drive commenced. But corruption and a broken economic system doomed all their efforts. There were no private markets where one could buy rice and tofu; the government was the only source of food. And each month it distributed less and less.

My father, as it turned out, had chosen a terrible time to build his dream house. North Korea’s economy was rapidly falling apart.

The first sign of disaster I witnessed came in late 1995, not with crop failure or anything so obvious, but with a cartoon show. It was called
Boy General,
and it was set in 50
B.C.
In it, an ordinary boy wakes up one day to find he’s been turned into a superhero. He flies through the air, shoots a bow and arrow, and rides a horse like he was born to it. My friends and I were obsessed with the cartoon. We would climb on fences made of plank wood that separated our yards and jump from the tops, yelling that we were the Boy General, and jump—
aiiiyyeeeeee!
The hills resounded with our blood-curdling yells.

It goes without saying that I never missed my favorite show. Then one ordinary Wednesday, when I sat down in front of our TV, nearly levitating with excitement, to watch the latest episode, the picture was wavy and there was no sound. I couldn’t even hear the theme song.

Somewhere in the countryside, a TV relay station wasn’t getting enough power. I was shocked. I began to make up the dialogue of the cartoon in my head, watching the characters’ lips move and imagining what he or she was talking about. It was terrible. My dialogue made no sense! I grew so frustrated that I wanted to smash the set to the ground.

“Papa,” I cried, “what’s wrong with the TV?” My father came and adjusted the rabbit ears, but nothing happened. He stood silently for a moment, then sighed. My mood sensor picked up something unfamiliar in his expression, but I ignored that. A whole episode of
Boy General
was slipping away! I stared at the screen in mute horror. I was so annoyed. How could the adults let this happen to our national hero?

I began to notice other things. The electrical outages we had always suffered grew worse. The lights in our little part of July 8th would snap out and all you could see were things lit up by moonlight: the rooflines of houses, the hummocks of the graves on the mountainside.

Next, my mother’s corn pancakes disappeared. She made them for the last time one evening and they never graced our table again. My mother said nothing. I didn’t ask her when we were going to have them again. Something inside of me sensed it was not a good time to explore the subject.

Even humble corn noodles—the basis of our diet—grew scarce. Bong Sook would always “get full” first and shovel some of her noodles over to my plate, noodles I ate hungrily, but no one was getting enough. The homemade bread my mother loved to make no longer sent out its wonderful yeasty smell. White rice departed that autumn. Any kind of meat was soon a distant memory, and the entire concept of a snack, something you ate just because you liked it, became a sad joke.

With the shortage of vegetables and the stress of not being able to feed her children, my mom’s illness returned. I’d find her lying on the floor when I came back from school, her eyes slits of black. The lack of food began to affect her brain. She kept telling my father she heard things moving in the walls.

My father shrugged off her fears. But my mother insisted that when I was out playing and Bong Sook was still at school, the noises would start—scrapings, rustlings, mysterious squeaks. Was it mice? Or was the new house settling?

Finally, when the noises didn’t stop, my father told her a secret he had been keeping. During construction of the house, he and the workers had found something under the foundation that didn’t belong there. Bones, in fact.

While my father and the laborers were digging the basement for the kimchi, they’d uncovered pieces of human skeletons at a depth of five feet. Perhaps the government had reclaimed the land from the cemetery and never bothered to remove the graves. Perhaps the bones had been washed down from the mountains many years before and covered in layers of dirt. But my father, afraid to lose his dream house, had said nothing.

This revelation affected my mother deeply. “It’s because of the bones that I’m sick!” she cried to my father. “The dead have no rest. They want to find their home.”

My parents were completely lost. First a famine, and now ghosts in the house. Both of these things were beyond their slight experience of the world. The government wouldn’t help; the neighbors could do nothing. So my parents went to a
Mishin.

A
Mishin
is a shaman, a figure that has been part of Korean culture for thousands of years. Despite the government’s crackdown on all forms of spiritual belief, every decent-sized village still had one person, usually a woman, who was ready to intercede in the spirit world on your behalf, for a small fee. So my parents went off one evening to meet the spirit worker. They must have asked her to perform a
bhang toh,
the guiding away of a disturbed ghost.

When my mother and father got back home that night, their mood had changed. They were cheerful. As soon as they walked through the door, they got to work making a delicious meal: white rice and eggs and fried pork, and plenty of it, too. We were already suffering from hunger pangs, a scraping misery that tears at the pit of your stomach and nestles like a malevolent thing in the twists of your intestines. So I was overjoyed when I saw them cooking the food. White rice! Succulent meat! Where had they gotten it? The aroma of the pork was like a powerful potion, and I drank it in happily. But as midnight approached, my parents scooped up the delicacies and slid them into a ceramic jar, which they covered with my mother’s best scarf and set in a corner of the house.

After a moment of stunned silence, I commenced wailing. Loudly. I wanted to eat the eggs and the white rice. My parents hushed me and explained that the food was prepared so the ghost in our walls would leave. I thought that was ridiculous. It was a long while before I fell asleep.

My parents followed the same ritual three times over several months, following the
Mishin
’s instructions to the letter. The second and third times, they also placed paper money with the warm food inside the jar. I thought this ghost must be very important for them to be feeding him
and
giving him cash. After we placed the jar in the corner, we would all go to sleep.

The next morning, the jar was gone, every time. My parents were highly satisfied. You could even say the ritual worked. After the third jar disappeared, my mother stopped hearing noises in the house. My parents believed that the ghost had come out of the walls and taken the food, and the
Mishin
had guided the poor spirit back to the land of the dead. We were now poorer, but no longer haunted.

What happened, really? Perhaps it was a neighbor who wanted rice or money for free. Perhaps the shaman herself came in the middle of the night to take the jar, so as to keep her customers happy and to enjoy a rare good meal.

I’ve always wondered about the bones and the
Mishin.
Did my mother really hear noises in the walls of our house? Or was her mind warning her about something else? Sometimes I think she saw the great hunger coming, and the voices she heard were her own mind telling her that disaster was on the way.

The ghost was gone, but the
Mishin
could do nothing about the famine, which was with us always, making us irritable and sleepy. I wanted to ask my parents what was going on—
why has all the food disappeared?
—but the dread in their eyes made me silent.

We added more and more water to our grain soup. When the grain was gone, we stirred in dandelions and green weeds to give the soup some flavor and bulk. Then one day spiky things appeared in our bowls. At first I didn’t understand what they were, but after studying their shape, I realized they were soybean plants. Not
soybeans,
which tasted nice, something like peanuts, but the stalks of the plant itself. My mother had gone into the nearby hills and come back with these dry things, boiled them in water, and served them to us. My brain, as hunger-crazed as it was, said,
This is completely disgusting.

I picked up a stalk and put it in my mouth. It dripped with water, and just by looking at it I knew it was going to taste bad. I nibbled on the end. “It’s terrible!”

“Eat it,” my father said quietly. He didn’t look at me. He was a much more subdued person nowadays. The palpable confidence of just a year ago was gone.

I didn’t want to eat it. The plant had tiny spikes along the side and it tasted like what I imagined cement would taste like. I felt the stalk crawling down my throat, the spikes jabbing the soft flesh there. I thought I would throw up, but finally managed to get a single stalk down.

Your body knows when it is eating something that’s not food. It’s as if some alien thing has entered your stomach. Your belly is temporarily full, but you can tell that no nutrients are flowing to your limbs, that there’s no fat to make your taste buds happy. There is only a sodden arrow made of lead sitting in your belly.

This is worse than starving,
I thought. But I was wrong, of course.

Chapter

W
E WEREN’T THE
only ones suffering. One night I overheard my parents talking. (Our house was too small to keep secrets.) Our next-door neighbor’s grandfather had died of hunger the day before.

I didn’t know this grandfather; his name brought no face to my mind. But the news frightened me. I didn’t know that you could run out of food and actually die. This new fact, that hunger’s path led to death, was shocking to me.