How I Became a North Korean (4 page)

“Choral music. Bach,” I repeated, trying to learn the new world as quickly as I could. One of my hands curved around my unborn baby who would never meet her real
abeoji,
an official, a married man who wouldn't have let her live if he had known about her. I thought about my
eomma
and sank to the couch as far from Seongsik as I could manage. He was as nervous as I was and gripped his teacup as if it were a crowbar.

He gulped down the tea. “Everything in here's quality. I only want the best.”

Looking at the man whose square teeth protruded over his lip as he smiled, I wanted desperately to reverse time. To be reborn into a
ganbu
's family and go to special private schools. Eat red meat every week and enter the University of Pyongyang and never have to think about crossing into China. But my family's lowly
seongbun
—my
abeoji
a coal miner and South Korean relatives staining my
eomma
's side—meant I was barred from all opportunity. I knew this much: I would be sent to jail or, worse, the camps in the far north if I was caught. The authorities would assume my baby was of impure Chinese blood and murder her.

I moved closer to Seongsik.

He showed off the solid oak furniture and the kitchen counter he claimed competed with the most elite homes in Pyongyang, as if he had personally visited them. The indoor flushing toilet did thrill me, but it was the framed picture of Jesus Christ that I remember most vividly. Why was a white man hanging like a
powerful politician in his house? I wondered. I was also intrigued, for this man with a tangled brown beard looked homeless, nothing like the dashing men in the smuggled VCD of
An Officer and a Gentleman,
or the cruel American soldiers in posters stabbing children with bayonets. Not powerful and kind, like the portraits of the Great Leader and the Dear Leader that hung in every house across the river, though even then I thought that a sack of rice was more useful than their portraits. This white man looked weak; he looked so ordinary. So this was the real American!

Seongsik took in all his belongings, including me, and rubbed his stomach as if he were full. “And this is our drinking water,” he said in front of a plastic tank standing on four legs.

“What else would you do than drink it—bathe in it?” I said, as if such a machine didn't surprise me.

But when he pressed the blue knob at the top, saying, “Red's for hot, be careful,” I wasn't prepared for the water shooting out in a remarkable, reliable stream. It was the promise of better things. My future would begin with this owlish man abandoned by his Chinese wife. My baby would start her life here, and more.

“Your very first electronic piano.” Seongsik tapped at the plastic keys.

“Electronic piano,” I repeated seriously as if it were new to me, though bands in our country had played the instrument for decades.

“Credit card, sleeping bag, DVD player,” I repeated, naming the world that he said was now also mine.

“Look at this, listen to this,” he said, and slipped a round disc into yet another machine. I was shocked that everything inside
the apartment seemed to require electricity, and even more shocked that electricity continued to surge reliably, the machines buzzing without pause. I was used to black nights, trains idling for days. I began to exclaim when the music silenced me.

The sound reminded me of autumn leaves, drifting currents. Nights while returning home with my goods, afraid of every man I met. There was no fear in that music. Just sadness, and beauty.

“Chopin, one of his nocturnes. Not a scary note in it,” Seongsik said. “But you're crying. Oh, why are you crying? I must have hurt you badly!”

“No, it's not that,” I said. “I've traveled so far to hear this music.”

Another kind of conversation might have happened between us then. For weren't there those cracks in time when life suddenly reversed itself and surprised, and anything became possible? Maybe even a temporary, but real, affection between two strangers who needed each other, for now? But the bedroom door flew open and a young girl emerged from the room, her pink flesh overflowing from the armbands of her nightgown rumpled with sleep.

This girl, who shared Seongsik's squat nose and his anxious, chewed-up lower lip, looked hungrily at him, and he scooped her up in his arms and held her high in the air.

He glowed into her pinched, radish-shaped face. “Is my favorite lady still angry at her
abba
?”

That was when my baby made a whisper of a kick, my stomach flipped, and the overfed girl gave me a murderous look, then wailed, “Abba, you promised!”

T
he morning of the last day of my
abeoji
's life, even the streetlights in our neighborhood were blacked out. After dodging my
abeoji
and in this way proudly refusing the car and driver he made available to me, I walked to the tram in the dark, stopping to write a line of poetry as it came to me. I noticed things that I assumed he wouldn't notice: the smell of burning coal and the grit of soot on my face, how some people wore the bleak dawn like a coat. How in the glass window of the trolley I looked as solemn and awkward as a contrabass, standing a head taller than everyone around me. I listened for the clang of the red and white trolley, watched the traffic girl with her blue and gold cap guide the thin weave of cars, the crumbling plaster of huts tightly packed together that hid behind a front line of apartment buildings. I heard the story of a city being constructed around me, them, all of us, making everyone a part of its story.

I walked with my eyes drawn toward the stray weed, the cigarettes a vendor sold in single units, the older woman lingering
alone alongside a bare, cracked wall. Crowds of people talking reminded me of a gaggle of geese honking at one another. I've always been a well-disguised solitary, preferring books to people and music to socializing and playing sports. I didn't see myself as part of any group though I was part of the many that organized our lives, shuttled from place to place in packs, as we all were.

That was how I began the last day of my
abeoji
's life: dodging encounters with the people closest to me. I arrived at the university and retreated to the back of the class, where I was forgotten, the way I wanted to be. The temperature outside was higher than in the sunless classroom, and all of us were swaddled in winter coats, warming our fingers swollen blue with cold and breathing in the air that caught like glass in our throats.

That evening I returned home from a parade drill, exhausted. For some it was a beautiful spectacle, a point of civic pride, but for me it was only another garish gathering I was forced to participate in. As I took off my shoes, I heard the traditional folk song “Arirang” playing, the kind of music that my modern parents would never listen to in private.

At first I didn't believe what I saw. A stranger was burning photos and documents in our kitchen, standing over a flame that made his cheeks glow yellow and red. “Arirang” continued to undulate through the room. The image enchanted me and from the door I watched the material curl in the wastebasket, until my father's and mother's glossy faces turned to ash and I began to understand. My stomach seized up. The stranger was erasing us.

He looked so ordinary in his black wool coat and suit. He had the tidy haircut I expected for a man of his age, and his diffident
air reminded me of someone in a cold office who typed up dull reports all day. I assumed he was half-alive, half-conscious in his environment, as I was, sleepwalking through the orders that had brought him into our house. He looked perplexed as he stared at the fire curling and rising, then looked up at me and pointed at the walls around us. The walls are listening, he meant. I understood immediately.

He said, “You must be back from classes,” sounding official and uninterested, unlike his eyes. He made a bowl with his hands, then pointed at the fire. “Where are your parents?”

I said, “I don't know. Working?” I felt strangely calm, as if I were talking about another person in someone else's house.

I trusted that if you did what you were told, you would be left alone, so I went quickly, quietly, to the cabinet and withdrew a large steel bowl, then held the bowl to the faucet and turned the water on at low force so there was no noise. I brought some cornstarch as well. He smothered the fire in the cornstarch and only then drizzled what was left with water. As we watched, a cloud of smoke rose from the charred remains.

“My parents—they . . . they're coming back, yes?” I said. Had they been taken away? My head filled with thoughts and images that I hadn't known were there: the camps farther north of us. The world suddenly much bigger, and lonelier, than I had imagined it.

“Look, you should have a seat.” The man's voice was calm, but his hands trembled. “I'm doing a routine inspection,” he explained as his eyes danced across the room, landing everywhere but on me. We were not the kind of family used to such inspections.

I waited to discover who the man was and if he had discovered all the usual illegal possessions: shelves of Western VCDs and music, foreign novels and poetry books that were available to select students, questionable gifts that foreign diplomat friends had given my
abeoji
on their trips to the West, and most of all the stacks of foreign currency hidden throughout the house that I had found by accident. When I discovered the false wall built into the closet a few months ago, my mind had begun to spin, uncertain of what else I didn't know.

“My
abeoji
is a loyal, powerful member of the party. There must be some mistake.” I picked my words carefully, imagining someone far away listening in. It seemed impossible that a few hours ago I had felt so safe.

“Look at this,” I said, and I led him to a letter signed by the Great General. “This is addressed to my
abeoji.
And you know who my
eomeoni
is.” Everyone knew who she was.

I anxiously showed him my
abeoji
's honors and official party photos, a party publication spread out so the Great General's photo was uncreased and turned faceup, and the Great Leader's and the Great General's gleaming portraits prominently placed and dusted daily with a padded stick. All the necessary evidence of a loyal life.

He smiled at me, a thin, sympathetic smile, and I saw that he was afraid for me.

“We have great love and respect for the Great General,” I said. “Our entire family does.”

I began mourning what I sensed would be the end. Already
the house no longer felt like ours. When our lives were dismantled and taken apart, I wondered who would take my
abeoji
's grand piano. Or my
eomeoni
's movie projector. Which anonymous bureaucrat was eyeing which appliance? What else had the stranger burned? I had so many questions that would never be answered. I could only trust him; I had no choice but to trust.

“Of course, of course,” the man said. “I know all about your family.”

I didn't like that. A blanket of silence fell over us. I looked outside at the street, still icy where our building's shadow fell, and wished my parents were home.

“Look, I have a few questions for you. Again, no one's in trouble. When is your sister coming back?”

Had he read in a file that I had a sister, or was that something he had already known?

He continued. “I'm sure you have studying to do. My son is a good student, he has a head for numbers. You?”

I nodded, and some words fell out of my mouth as terror spread like alcohol through my body. All the abstractions I had seen as someone else's life became real to me.

He cracked the window open, letting the smoke and bitter embers and the scent of burned paper out. A trickle of cold crisp air entered, a girl's thin high call.

He asked me rote questions about my
eomeoni
and
abeoji
as if he was reading from a script. Then he wrote on a notepad and held it up. I'm here to help you, it read. Before I could be
sure that I had seen it correctly, he rested the note in the still-smoldering ashes and it shrank and disappeared.

 • • • 

I ran past all that I knew and all that I would forget, past the security guard who suddenly seemed there to keep us in more than to keep others out. I ran, coatless, my fingers icy without gloves, fleeing the image of the man who had left before me. I ran from my brightly lit neighborhood and into the darkness of tram stops and building-size portraits of the smiling Great Leader, past the city's statues and hotel towers, stopping only for a random checkpoint. Ran, feeling a giant beast bearing down on me, though when I turned back there was nothing there. I was afraid of staying in Pyongyang, afraid of leaving. I wished for a power outage to pitch the city into a great unfurling darkness. This was my home, the center of my world, and I couldn't imagine myself banished from it.

Dusk became evening, the time my girl and I had planned to meet at the Pothong River.

I waited for Myeonghui. The wind chilled my sweaty skin as I watched the few out by the riverbank striding back and forth for exercise. This daily life was something that might no longer be mine. My hands knotted tightly together. I was impatient to see Myeonghui. I thought I loved her.

I waited by our designated weeping willow and hummed a few bars of “Whistle,” the entire time listening for her. I heard her before I saw her, the way her school uniform made a fine woolen rustle, and her bob swished as she laughed a mild, honest laugh,
and shook her head my way as if to say, Not tonight. Though tonight might be all I had left with Myeonghui, whose family had left Japan years ago to return to our homeland. I pulled her closer to my side before the moon could peek out from the clouds and illuminate us to the others.

She swiftly put an arm's width of space between us with her habitual modesty. “You're usually so reasonable,
dongmu
.”

I was as intimate with Myeonghui as I had ever been in the time we knew each other. Along the winding river path, I breached the distance between us to brush her wrist, as if touching her would help me recover the order that she was for me. Everything about her was what my family wasn't: relentlessly formal, a clarity to her quietness that helped me hear her heavy skirt sway like a bell. I wonder what she meant to me, if she had mattered to me only because I knew her family's ties to Japan would have enraged my
abeoji,
whose own
abeoji
had been murdered by Japanese colonialists. Anyone with Japanese associations was considered unsafe, suspicious.

Again, she moved out of my reach. Only she was betrayed by her eager left foot skipping ahead of her eager right, her breath catching in a rhythm common to those who had come from Japan, the trace of the past echoing on her tongue.

That night there was no family, no committee duties, no small group studies, and few words spoken between us, which meant fewer lies to protect each other and our families. There was only the time given us. We avoided the occasional passing bike, a drunk man stumbling home. The distant conversations of other strollers
murmured around us like restless ocean waves, overlapped and blurred into each other, until for a moment I heard only our small voices ballooning in the emptiness.

“You're so lovely,” I said. It was true, though in the dark she was a faint outline, an occasional flash of skin so bone white her arms gleamed. You didn't have to see beauty to know it was there.

She said, “You're so quiet tonight . . . so strange . . .”

I turned toward her voice. She sensed the fine difference between my normal quiet and brooding, and knew me without knowing anything about me.

“We've known each other so long now, and it seems wrong that we know so little about each other. You feel so unreal in the dark, as if you were never there.”

“No, no,
ireobseubnida
.” She laughed, her hair flying in the air as she shook her head. “We have time.”

She swung her slender arms from side to side, her faith in the future intact. Again that pause, and in it began the kinds of silent conversations that none of us dared to have with each other. In those imagined conversations, she told me what it meant to have Japanese soil in her. I confessed what I feared might be happening to my family.

I watched her whirl and embrace the moon's silhouette, and for the first time I thought she must carry with her an unlived life and the sadness of her family.

I asked, “How did it feel on . . . on the last day of your life?”

“
Dongmu!
You're so morbid, thinking about death already.”

“I don't mean dying—not exactly. But when your family . . . left. Being dead, but not dead. Only . . . gone.”

Her hands dropped and her voice took on a clipped formality. “I don't understand you today.”

I thought about all the things that could go wrong when you tried to cross into China.

I said, “Too much of us can't be measured. When Abeoji plays the piano, each time he plays, the phrasing is more or less the same. Recognizable, is what I mean. You can listen to one recording and compare it to another, but it's the same composition. It's not like people—we're so different from moment to moment that we wouldn't be recognizable if we didn't have this body and voice, these enormous fingerprints.”

I kept speaking nonsense, anything to defend myself from my thoughts. Were traitors actually traitors, or were they wronged, betrayed, or just unlucky? My laugh grew into painful, unstrung sounds.

Myeonghui pulled away. “Someone might hear,” she said with the same pleasant, even tone.

Without warning, she added, “
Dongmu,
don't do anything you can't reverse. It's best you not say anything more.”

I weighed whether to return home or run away, though how and to where was beyond my ken. I thought of my
dongsaeng,
only thirteen, at home alone and waiting until I returned to have dinner. I was afraid. For the first time, I pulled Myeonghui close to me with my arm around her waist the way Jack had done to Rose on the sinking
Titanic.
Like a girl raised properly, she resisted this first embrace, then gradually gave in. Of course this must be love, I thought, giving my nostalgia and fear and longing for all I was about to lose a name.

Much later I heard the stories of others: older women who recalled the seven years they dated their husbands before permitting a peck on the cheek; a receptionist at the Koryo Hotel who relived the illegal kiss she shared with an English teacher from Canada, who had, before he left forever, bequeathed her his final, stingy gift of loneliness. But that night there was only the way I cleaved to Myeonghui.