How I Became a North Korean (6 page)

“I guess it comes off?” I said jauntily. I approached and sat at the bed's edge.

He gave me a smile like dried seeds. I patted his knee. Its strange, hollow sound made me jump.

He nodded. “You can rely on me,” he said, and made a sound between a gasp and a sob. “Everyone likes me. I may not be much to look at, but they know I'm a good man. It takes time, but maybe you'll like me, too. And I'm very clean and I'm a good cook.” Despite myself, I felt sorry for him.

“Well, then. You don't always go to bed with it on, do you?”

“All right, then,” he said. “All right.”

He took it off. He held the fake leg in the air and asked me to set it beside the bed. The leg made a dull thud.

“You walk on it all day and the pain goes all the way up.” He spoke slowly now. “You're not afraid?”

“I'm not scared. I don't scare easily. It was only startling.”

“I'm damaged goods, I know,” he said. It embarrassed me to hear my thoughts echoed. He stroked the remains of his right leg. “I'm sorry.”

“You had an accident.”

“I wasn't always not there!” He stroked the end of his thigh. “I lost it in a factory. In South Korea. I went there to make money—all the healthy Joseon-
jok
in China leave to make money if they can—but I came back with debts and one leg.

“South Korea, it's war there. A bad, bad country.” He frowned as if the country of wealth and opportunity had deliberately deprived him of his leg.

“Come closer,” he said, though I couldn't get much closer.

His gaze slid away from me as if he required permission to look, so I unzipped my dress and unclasped my bra and revealed myself under the hard fluorescent light. He couldn't stop looking now. I needed his looking. For him to become the father to my baby. I took his hand and planted it on the curve of my breast. It was dangerous not to encourage him. He stared downward; I kept my eyes fixed ahead and waited.

T
he morning after I'd nearly drowned, I woke up to my nose filled with the familiar smells of frogs and lizards preserved in formaldehyde. My own bedroom. My eyes still closed, I tried to block out other thoughts by reciting the order of my books lining my three shelves—one-third Mandarin, one-third Korean, one-third English—then the names of the beloved finger puppets I'd made myself, until the alarm clock rang and I hit it before the cuckoo bird said “cuckoo.”

It was no good. It was still Sunday, I'd still been rescued lying facedown in the water the day before with only my mind sinking to an imaginary bottom. I'd turned myself into a public fool. Tomorrow was still Monday, which meant school. I got up and knocked down my academic awards from the walls, pulled my clothes lined up from light to dark from their hangers, then collapsed onto the bed. The mess didn't change anything. I was still me.

The dark living room I marched through was part of a
double-car garage converted into what was probably the smallest house in Loma Linda. Since my mom left on the church mission, he'd swept all her potpourri, porcelain figurines, and other pretty collections into Costco boxes, which he'd stacked in the closet, leaving our house as bare as a box, the way he liked it. The coffee-stained carpet and the dorm-room disrepair left by the families before us looked even sadder than before, a place any sane person would want to leave.

I was startled and sorry when I saw my dad in the kitchen. He had a five o'clock shadow and was wearing the same plaid shirt and pants he'd had on the day before. This was the man who rarely let me hug him because of the potential exchange of germs. I had done this to him.

I said, “Morning, Dad.”

His eyes stayed fixed on the sizzling tofu in the pan as he muttered to himself, “Time made man and man made God to help him understand time.”

He set down orange juice in front of me and a plate of tofu with scallions and garlic, stir-fried in his special sauce.

“Look, I have a plan,” he said.

“Thanks, Dad.” I immediately began eating, my mind solely on the prospect of school. On Monday. The day before, when I'd made a one-man show of myself to all of Bible camp, seemed a mere preview of what awaited me.

I kept my mouth full of food, my head low to the plate. I waited for him to ask me about the day before, dreaded it, in fact, and it seemed he was waiting for me to explain. The soft wedges of tofu caught in my throat. How could I tell my dad
that he had an idiot of a son who'd nearly drowned with his life vest on? How did you explain that?

When I finally did look up, he was gazing at the flat California sunshine coming in through the window, poking between his teeth with a green plastic toothpick. He sawed it back and forth, then cleared his throat. His eyebrows knitted together and he turned his milky brown eyes on me.

“Maybe it's because we never gave you brothers or sisters,” he said. “I'm very aware that I've failed you as your
abba
in some way or other, and I'm not confident that I have the skills to make the necessary amends.”

I was so surprised that I didn't know how to respond, and I always had a response.

“Frankly, your mother was an accident in my life, having a child was an accident. I suspect Mother Nature meant for me to be a bachelor. I'm not good at this.”

I knew that any topic that diverged from fact made him more uncomfortable and awkward than he already was, but something still collapsed inside me. “So you regret having me.”

“Don't be immature, Daehan,” he said sharply. “I want you to be safe. But you clearly aren't well here. There's no reason you should feel well here, with me.”

His facial expression didn't change once.

“Well, you're getting your wish. You're going to China for a few weeks. It'll be good for you. I thought about it for a long time last night and purchased an airline ticket online for you, Beijing onward to Yanji. I'll call your
eomma
once she's back from her work trip. You'll be better off with her.”

It was a trip I'd fantasized about for years; I also felt rejected. What was worse, we weren't the kind of family who could afford last-minute airline tickets. I wondered what meager savings account he'd broken into.

“So you're going to send me away. Get rid of the problem.”

“But you wanted to go!” He scrubbed at his face with his knuckles. “It'll be good for you, time to rest and recover. Help us, help your parents. Why can't you be a good, normal kid?” he said sadly, as if normal wasn't what I keenly wanted to be.

He began clearing the table, then turned back with a plate balanced in each hand. “I want to know one thing. Did you think about us at all when you jumped? One thought about your parents, what it would do to us?”

“Dad, it was an accident. I wasn't trying to do what you think! It wasn't like that, I promise!”

 • • • 

As I tapped my glass with the fork, the stubborn rhythm of his voice thinned out for me.
Ping! Ping!
The bright notes lifted my spirits, lifted me out of the kitchen, to elsewhere. After all, elsewhere had to be better than here.

Over the next few days, I made meticulous preparations. I packed my Chinese passport; I raided my beloved survival kit and withdrew my Leatherman Squirt PS4, not much bigger than a toothpick; a Bic pen sawed in half to save weight and a notebook the size of my palm; a multi-use plastic bag that served as a tent, SOS signal marker, and hydro bag; a military meal kit; a parachute cord, the sturdiest of ropes; vitamins and a sleeping aid; two changes of clothes. On my person, I would keep a money wallet
stitched into my underwear, zip-up military Gore-Tex combat shoes and all-terrain tiger-striped military pants—the basic pattern American soldiers donned during Vietnam. Once packed and prepared, I felt more secure. A few days later, armed with my supplies snugly fit into a backpack and a suitcase of goodies for my mom, we left the house at sunrise.

The streetlights flickered on and off as our car curved away from Loma Linda. Good-bye to the neighborhood's manicured lawns, the thick blanket of smog, to my teachers' and school counselors' expectations, to the habit of excelling. I couldn't even remember why I had wanted to go to Harvard. I felt buoyant as we drove past a grove of corporate-owned orange trees that seemed to stand between me and a new life. China. The word rolled off my tongue. My backpack bounced on my back. It was happening, it was real. I was crossing borders for the second time in my life. I believed I was prepared.

I often think about borders. It's hard not to. There were the Guatemalans and Mexicans I read about in the paper who died of dehydration while trying to cross into America. Or later, the Syrians fleeing war and flooding into Turkey. Arizona had the nerve to ban books by Latino writers when only a few hundred years ago Arizona was actually Mexico. Or the sheer existence of passports, twentieth-century creations that decide who gets to stay and leave.

Borders aren't a random obsession of mine—unlike my affection for the double helix or Burmese temples—since they'd already changed my life. My family was Joseon-
jok,
ethnic
Koreans who'd lived alongside the Han Chinese in northeastern China. That is, except during the madness of China's Cultural Revolution when my grandfather crossed into North Korea, where my mom was born. If my mom and her family hadn't recrossed while they still could, I might have been born in North Korea. As it was, I still had relatives on both sides of the river, and having grown up in northeastern China until I was nine, I could pass for a North Korean from the Hamgyong region when I spoke Korean, like many in the Chinese border towns.

Still, when the plane landed in Yanji and I didn't see my mom anywhere, I felt disoriented. The airport's fluorescent yellow and blue plastic chairs, the glass-walled facade, the tidal wave of concrete wasn't the China of my memory. I felt, suddenly, American, though my only passport was Chinese.

The ground tipped as I scanned the pointillist painting of black-haired heads before me. I blamed jet lag for the vertigo of crossing, for that shift when language jostled out of place, and my mind sought to reverse the order of words in my head and became part of another geography again. Thankfully, I remembered that I was supposed to call my parents with my phone card once I landed. Plans, another anchor.

My mom didn't pick up the phone, but my dad answered in one ring. He said, “You haven't met Ku
ajeoshi
yet?”

“Ku
ajeoshi
?”

“Eomma must have lost her cell phone on her last work trip, but I'd already bought the plane ticket.” He took a deep breath. “I didn't want to worry you.”

He told me that this Mr. Ku, his old school friend, was holding a sign with my name on it. He would drive me all the way to my mom's town. I felt dismayed. There was little worse than hours of interrogation by a stranger who acted like he knew you, so I insisted on being dropped off at the bus station. It was my hometown, too, and a small one at that. My dad objected.

“Half the people in town know us,” I said. “I'll be fine.”

“You're not going unescorted for a minute, after what you did.”

“Dad, I've taken survival tests and camped across half the Sierra Nevada practically alone. And I'm of legal age to drive a car, pilot a glider, even get married. I'll be more than fine.”

When a dot of a man across the hall waved at me and started walking my way, I pretended to give in but began drafting plans. After years of surviving American public schools, I was pretty fearless.

“Daehan!” The man, whose upper torso reminded me of an Asian Santa Claus, and the lower, a sparerib, thumped me on my back as if he was my friend. “I haven't seen you since you used to spit on your favorite foods, so no one else could have any of it. I'll never forget how you sucked your toes, too.”

“All babies do that.”

He laughed. “You were six. Not exactly a baby.”

It didn't get any better in the eatery we settled into. Mr. Ku was even more heavy-handed with the memories than I'd expected. Halfway through breakfast, I said I needed the bathroom, which was located conveniently on the building's second floor, and gave him the slip. I tucked a note of apology under the car's window wipers before jumping on the first local bus
heading out of town that passed me, avoiding the central bus station. Wherever I ended up, I trusted I could eventually transfer to the one I needed since buses were a way of life in China.

I transferred onto a second bus, then later a third. I kept my feet a safe distance from my seat partner's chicken, which was squashed into a cage. “I'm going home,” I whispered. “I'm finally going home.”

 • • • 

My hometown wedged in a forgotten corner of China felt like it belonged to another self. After six years away, its buildings seemed to me as plain as the people, worn out like saggy granny panties. On the main strip there were song rooms, bars, and clubs with Korean signs in neon displayed above the scarlet-red Chinese characters. It was hard to imagine my bow-and-arrow-gripping ancestors roaming these stark mountains and plains, a fact that China tried hard to ignore so that it could claim the land had always been theirs. Or to imagine North Korea's so-called Great Leader journeying through the land with his bandit group of rebels and first wife in tow, on his way to Russia. Those times must have required desperate courage.

I hitched up my belt, heavy with emergency rations of dried tofu and nuts, bought a chunk of fresh tofu from a vendor, and bargained with a cyclo driver. When he tried to rip me off, I began walking toward my mom's apartment through the landscape of comforting faces that looked so similar to mine.

I headed down a ventricle of paved streets in the town—there were more than I'd expected—and mapped a grid of old apartments in my head as I walked. I passed snack stalls, corners
where kids might target the ones in uniforms from better schools and, just maybe, target me. I sampled dumplings, spun sugar, and grilled chicken on a stick until my mouth flooded with the tastes of my childhood. The crowd thickened and thinned around me like oil. I passed twelve people treading by slowly, nine trotting onward rapidly, approximately one out of five of them wearing lace-up shoes. I dodged a car that rumbled onto the sidewalk and had to dart into an outdoor market when I saw the owner of a Han Chinese restaurant that my family knew. Inside, I observed a moment of silence for seven slaughtered carcasses of pigs. Finally, I felt it: the thrill of being out of my time line, in China, a body returning to the past to escape the past.

After asking for directions from a few people, sometimes in Mandarin and sometimes in Korean, I arrived exhausted at my mother's building.

The low-rise apartment building was covered in dirty yellow tiles and laid out in a Soviet-style grid. I walked past men playing mahjong in the lobby, their syllables like music to me, up to the fourth floor until I was standing at her door that was covered with bright scarlet and gold ads. All my rehearsed speeches morphed into uncertainty. Chances were high that my mom wouldn't be happy with me. After all, I was half the reason they'd left for America in the first place. I pressed the buzzer and waited. I was desperate for simple solutions. My mom, keeper of the family flame, our rainmaker and solution seeker, chair of all committees, would diagnose what was wrong with me.

She called out from the apartment, “Who is it?”

I called back, “A hundred-and-fifty-pound surprise in his favorite military fatigues!”

Feet battered the floor behind the front door, other doors opened and slammed, as if a dozen people were moving under my mom's orders. When the door finally opened and I presented myself to her like a birthday present, my mom squinted through the gap in the door as if trying to decide who I was.