How I Became a North Korean (10 page)

I didn't know what to say. It was April and still chilly, and it was clear from their straggly hair and pants stiff with dried mud that they didn't have many choices, though maybe I didn't look so different from them by then. Yongju's slender neck was now exposed. And still he had given me his scarf, he had risked himself for a stranger.

“That'll do for now,” he said. “You'll have to find a pair—”

“Or steal one later,” said the smaller kid.

We mutually assessed the situation. The soft modulation of Yongju's voice and the draping of his hands made me long for those mysterious friendships that I'd watched from the sidelines back in America.

“You have anywhere to go?” Yongju finally asked.

“Not really.” I found myself whispering though the city had long shut down, and at its fringes, where we were, there was no one else in sight.

“You wouldn't like where we are.” He jerked his head toward the mountains. “It's primitive. And far.”

“You're a Joseon-
jok,
aren't you?” The smaller one I'd learn was Cheolmin lifted up his cap to have a closer look at me. I saw
that part of his forehead and cheeks had been burned, giving his skin an uneven, blistered texture. His inflamed gums showed when he smiled.

“My name's Daehan,” I offered. “Yeah, I'm a Joseon
-jok
.”

“The burn happened at a lumber mill in your country,” said Yongju. I'd been caught staring at Cheolmin's face.

Cheolmin said, “Maybe Joseon
-jok
. Or he could be a spy from down South.”

Yongju made a small noise, something between a quiet chuckle and a sigh. “Our country's in bad shape, but not that bad. You think anyone can be a spy?”

I said, “I know how to start fires from practically nothing, I can build huts and know the difference between good and bad mushrooms. And I'm practically a compass. And there're lots of other things I know how to do. I'm pretty useful.” I stopped, surprised by myself.

“
Meojori,
that's a big mouthful of bragging about yourself,” said Cheolmin, frowning.

I didn't know what
meojori
meant, but it didn't sound pleasant. The modus operandi in East Asian cultures was modesty, but I've never gotten the game of humility right, or its opposite, what I call the American swagger. I tried correcting myself. “I'm just trying to say . . . I wouldn't be an absolutely terrible burden to have around.”

Though our accents were more or less the same, by then it was clear to me that these two were not Joseon
-jok
. For one, there was their peculiar diction. And from the onset Yongju was too vigilant and tense, making broad sweeps of the scene with his eyes.
Cheolmin was no different, his neck jerking to look behind him like a tic, his hands flexing and bunching together with his breath.

“Come on, we have to keep moving,” Yongju said.

He retreated from the alley. Cheolmin followed, a sour smell trailing behind him. No one outside my family had ever put themselves on the line for me; I wasn't about to let them walk away. When we turned the corner I found my plastic cover that the crooks had tossed, ignorant of its usefulness even with a hole in it, and my books. No one ever seemed to want books. I dusted them off.

The two moved steadily toward the mountains. I continued following them.

Cheolmin lurched at me, his fist raised in the air. “There's no space for you!”

I halted midstep.

Yongju said, “There could be space. You heard what Namil said last night, it would help to have a Joseon-
jok
with us.” He turned to me. “You'd be a good scout?”

“How can we trust him?”

“My
eomma
was born across the river in Hamgyong-do, actually. We crossed back into China early.”

“Really? Your
eomma
was from our country?”

Cheolmin looked suspiciously at my clothes.

“That must've been really early. You've got Chinese papers, I.D. card, everything?”

“I did, but . . .” I waved my hand at the alley that was no longer behind us. I didn't mention my next crossing to America—
considering what America meant to their country, I assumed they wouldn't accept me if they knew.

Yongju said to Cheolmin, “You know a group's the only way you survive, Joseon-
jok
or not. His kind can help out—they can scout ahead and approach people without any danger. Let's take him with us.”

“It'll be crowded,
meojori
.” Cheolmin spat as he cursed but began walking anyway.

“Come on.”

Yongju rested a hand on my shoulder.

“Come with us.”

T
his was my China: a mountain dugout opening into a cave several meters deep. The drip of water during rain, the scratchy music of the trees outside. A bed of stones and paper to keep the cave dry. Blankets, clothes from the city dump, and donation bins we would break into, anything to create heat in the chilly underground. A small cry, a young, pebbly voice floating alone in the dark, then silence.

Each morning I woke up in the hollow full of orphans who had crossed out of hunger, to the music of misery in their arrhythmic breathing, the grinding of their rotten teeth. The morning cold burrowed into my bones and made its home there and my hands and knees became slippery on the cool earth, and my eyelashes thick with the loose soil that trickled down. It was so dark that the word
dark
was inadequate. So dark it was as if I was dead. The cave was full of haunted life and the stink of urine, and the only relief was to close my eyes and pretend that the darkness wasn't there.

When the truck drove away with our women, I had collapsed into the beveled tire tracks, stared down at my useless hands, and searched for words to comprehend how I felt. Grief. Wretchedness. Disbelief. But there were no perfect words. The men left behind began to talk. There was some heated discussion between us, a little pushing.

Someone said, “We're too close to the border. This place is crawling with surveillance.”

Another said, “We have to make our own way.”

One man gripped his chest as if to hold his heart in.

Soon they scattered under night's sheath. Some must have headed for the mountain ranges nearby; the bold or lazy ones followed the winding paved road or looked for a sympathetic farmer who might hire them and give them a corner to sleep in. Maybe a few had relatives, a phone number, a lead. It didn't matter to me then. All I could do was stare. Sound subsided. I sat crouched for so long that matter melted and my legs grew roots into the dry packed ground. I became the trunk of a tree. I no longer felt cold, heat, sadness, or fear.

Maybe I would have lapsed into sleep and frozen that night and died peacefully. But something moved in the periphery of my sight.

I ripped a branch off a rotting tree and clutched it between us. Splinters embedded in my palms, but I didn't feel them until later.

It was the boy from the hut. He said, “I'm on your side! It's me! Remember, the bun?”

I saw the outlines of his face in the dark, then the black gaps between his teeth.

He jumped up and down, warming himself up. “It's your first time crossing, isn't it?”

I nodded.

“You came alone? With parents?”

I shook my head. “I'm alone now.”

When he saw that I wasn't going to move, he said, “You can't stay here. You want to get as far away from the border as you can, and you better learn the Han people's language. Fast. The
ganna saekki
get everyone by the border, just wait. It's my third time crossing. The first time I got picked up the morning after I crossed. They'll send you back into the asshole of our country—you're older than me, and you don't want to know what they'll do to you.”

I didn't care. I sank my head into my hands and stayed huddled. But Namil waited for me.

The cave took us hours to reach. Namil said the group he'd stuck with when he crossed the last time had discovered it by following an older man. The man had left, vowing to walk all the way to a safe country if he had to.

 • • • 

At first I didn't leave the cave. But I quickly realized that I needed to do my share and help the others, who spent their time in a hopeless cycle of collecting wood or working at small farmsteads or at logging sites that dotted the mountains for food with no pay. I cleaned myself as best I could, hoping that my height differentiated me from the other four boys, who were stunted in growth by their lean years of living. I began venturing out to the nearest town in search of work, food. Information. I was afraid of every single person I met, knowing what it would mean to be
repatriated. Shadows scared me. A stranger's voice, footsteps, all of it sent me on dizzying detours. I had never been so afraid of people.

I forced myself to burrow through the nearest village dump to salvage what we could use. Sometimes I found canned goods. What people discarded in China amazed even me. I rinsed out a pigpen in exchange for eggs and potatoes, and back on the mountain I planted my first potato eyes. We rotated all-night guard duty in case our cave, which we had camouflaged with tin and brittle branches, was raided. I slept with my shoes on.

Once I was beaten by an old farmer for no reason, except that he could. I was no longer a privileged Pyongyang man but a North Korean that you could abuse without punishment, and the locals knew it. I learned that a North Korean man in China was less than a man, less than the dogs or cats that every Han Chinese person seemed to raise. You could be murdered for working too slowly. Entire villages of our women were said to be held captive, slaves in bed and in the field, which made me think of my
eomma
and
dongsaeng
. Some of our people who I briefly met had lived in hiding for years. I had never thought of myself as an angry person, but I was getting angrier. I lived inside the mouth of a giant beast, and that beast was China.

Hope was a distant island. The other boys only aspired to be like ghosts, invisible, and thought about how to get food and smoke and drink. They lived in the present tense, too afraid to desire more. But Daehan was different; he was educated and spoke in the future tense, and he gave me back a little hope.

“You want to see something?” Cheolmin said to Daehan.

He had ignored Daehan all week, like the others, but tonight Daehan had brought leftover meat from a town market over two hours' walk away and started a small fire the size of a pear blossom for grilling. He trudged into town and coaxed vegetables to grow in the stubborn mountain soil, laboring at any job he could. As a Joseon-
jok,
he was safe from everything, it seemed, but loneliness.

“Don't let him show you,” said Gwangsu, who was a mere baby when his
abeoji
was taken away, maybe to the camps or to jail, for stealing food. His
eomma
had been seized after they crossed into China.

“Keep your mouth shut,
saekki-ya,
” said Cheolmin.

With a ballerina's agility, Cheolmin leaned against a tree and pulled off a shoe a few sizes too large and two pairs of socks. He braced his foot up high so close to Daehan's face that even in the dark, he must have seen that it was blackened with frostbite.

Daehan studied the foot respectfully. “That's rough. How did it happen?”

Cheolmin told the same story he recounted each time he got drunk, but with every telling the number of guards at the river, the water's depth and temperature as his foot broke through the ice, changed. I had told them very little, holding that terrible night close to me, though the others already knew about me because of Namil.

I said, “We have to leave. And we will. Someday it will happen.”

Cheolmin, the angriest, most unpredictable of us, poked Bakjun in the side. “You know what our
dongmu
from the great city of Pyongyang keeps saying? He says he's going to find his
eomma
and
dongsaeng
. How're you going to do that in China? This country's as big as Mars!”

“You can't talk to him like that. He's older than you! Don't you have any respect for your
hyeong
?” said Daehan, when it was obvious that Cheolmin didn't. He added, “If he says he's going to find them, he's going to find them.”

 • • • 

The next day, in the stubborn, practical manner I would come to associate with Daehan, he thrust at me a written list of possible steps to take, some that I hadn't thought of and others that I wouldn't dare attempt. He trailed after me when I went twig hunting and silently watched me kick the face of a granite rock slope until I was too tired to go on. We said nothing to each other and in the easy silence walked back together.

A week later he said, “Why don't we walk to the nearest city? I know it's a long way, but there's supposed to be a church there.”

“A church?”

“That's where Christians gather.”

“Christians? Those South Koreans that the boys say are generous with handouts?”

“They're not always South Koreans, and they're far more than an easy handout.”

From his lengthy monologue, I gathered that these Christians could help our people reach a safe country. I hadn't known that churches were illegal in China and most Christians clustered underground in house churches; I hadn't known much. The Chinese border of the Joseon-speaking people was an exception. Contact with Christians could mean death if I was caught by the
police and repatriated, since my country feared Christianity, he said, so I could wait nearby while he met the pastor in charge.

The next day, as the night became a vein of light rimming the horizon, we washed at the nearest icy brook the best we could and made the four-hour walk into the city together. He rambled on, as was his habit, through the valleys of bare trees and narrow dirt roads while circumventing the villages of mud huts and small towns. I didn't mind. I was a quiet person and liked to listen.

“Did I tell you about,” he would begin, and I would learn many things, interesting things, about animals I'd never seen such as orcas and emperor penguins, and robots that defeated any man at
baduk
. He was an educated Joseon-
jok
with more of a future than us, but in his rare pauses his smile turned south, as if his bright energy were a vast production of effort made to convince himself.

As we passed in the distance a farmer working in a cornfield, Daehan said, “You have a
hyeong,
too?”

“No.” I swallowed. “Only the
dongsaeng
you already know about.”

I was grateful when he pressed no further.

The crisp air and sunlight flushed through us, then the city was upon us. We walked in silence as the huts turned into towering apartments and the yeasty smell of a beer factory. There were so many cars that I was afraid to cross the street, afraid of being recognized as North Korean. Numbness spread from my heart to my hands as the words
dongsaeng, eomeoni, abeoji
rang in my ears like restless bells. Maybe it was the same for Daehan, for he had become quiet.

When Daehan saw me hold back, he said briskly, “Follow me!”

He crossed the street at an even, steady pace with the cars.

“Look at the budding trees!”

He was himself again, pointing out the cloudless sky, the swinging pigtails of two girls in an apartment's playground, his words fleeing darker subjects. Brown hills rose from behind brown apartments, and magpies scattered as we passed.

“Straighten up and look like you belong here,” Daehan said.

I realized I was hunching, trying to make myself invisible.

“With your height it's not hard.”

I said, “You're different from the other Joseon-
jok
kids on the streets.”

He looked at me. “You must feel a whole world between you and the others—it's like putting a beluga whale in with a group of panthers.”

“Why do you stay? I can't help wondering. You're too educated and you have other options.”

He looked wounded. “You mean you don't want me here?” His hands mined down deep into his pockets.

It was as I had suspected. He needed people, and for reasons known only to him, he had no one.

 • • • 

The redbrick church looked like a giant eye, a tower of sight. As we stood looking at it from across the street, I waited for Daehan to lead us.

“Not to worry.” He patted my arm as if he were the older one. “I was practically raised in the church. You'll be safe here.”

“Let's go, then.” I was grateful for his confidence, his vocabulary of hope.

Daehan's overgrown hair curled up at his collar, his skin was brown and flaky, and his black clothes a shade of gray despite our morning wash, but he strode inside as if he were entering his own house.

I took one step forward, then another, and was blinded. Searchlights, spotlights, but it was only the sun beaming down through a skylight. The building was plain inside, and a painting of a bearded man hung on the wall.

Daehan pointed to it. “That's Jesus, God's son.”

What he said meant nothing to me. Still, the church was beautiful: Sunlight soared in through the high windows and cast its warm spell over the burnt-honey varnish of the long seats he called pews. I passed a large wooden cross hovering over the podium, seemingly midair.

Daehan skidded down the empty aisles and approached the doors at both sides of the central platform. I followed. I was suddenly terrified. There could be a security patrol lying in wait behind the doors, or even the Dear Leader himself, though that was absurd.

“Is anyone there?” He tried the door to the left.

I was ready to flee when the door opened, Daehan jumped back, and a stooped man with a thick rug of hair ambled out.

He looked us over. It didn't matter that I had tried to wash in the icy stream or clean my wool coat and trousers; my new life must have marked me like a prison uniform.

The man said, “What can I do for you?”

Daehan propelled himself forward.

“We're looking for the leadership of this church. The pastor, preferably.” He sounded polite and educated.

The man said he was the pastor and that we had caught him just in time; he was on his way out. His eyes were wide and frank, and I had no choice but to trust him.

Daehan spoke rapidly, braiding together words so foreign that at first I wondered if it was a Korean dialect. Only much later did I understand that he was trying to gain the pastor's trust with his Christian credentials.