How I Became a North Korean (9 page)

“Eomeoneem.” I lowered myself to my knees, enraged and afraid. “Eomeoneem, I have nowhere to go. I'm so sorry. I had no choice.”

“Don't soil the word
eomeoni
on your lips. Get work in another city or something, anything.” She shivered. “How do you expect my son to look at you anymore?”

“If you want me gone so badly, you could send me to Nam—South Korea.” I said it quietly. “I hear they give you resettlement money and I will repay you, I promise. You will be doing a good thing, saving two lives.”

That was the wrong thing to say.

She tugged at the front of my shirt with her strong, veiny hands until my shirtsleeve ripped. A button popped off. Her bun came loose and her hair hovered like a thatched roof above her shoulders.

“That's what you always wanted, wasn't it? I won't see my son abused this way.”

My hands went to protect my stomach. My ears were ringing when I said, “No, he married me. I'm his wife. The past is the past—I can explain. I had to survive.”

“I don't want to hear it! You're not his wife. You're a North Korean, you're nothing.”

She pulled her purse open so quickly that she tore the zipper. As my baby moved inside me, I vowed to bear it all and wait until Seongsik returned. He would fix the situation. With time I could make him love me again. I told myself this before she withdrew a handful of yuan and threw it at me.

“Take it before I change my mind.”

I tried to follow her into the kitchen, but my legs wouldn't support me. She came back with a bag heavy with what she said was food.

“Take what's here. It's more than you deserve.”

“Please, you don't know what I've lost to get here! I'll be a better wife to him than you could ever hope for.”

I continued to beg. I considered beating her head in with a heavy pan.

Byeol was at her piano lesson. If she had been at home, maybe she would have pleaded for me, maybe the possibility of yet another new woman in her life would have finally driven her to me. But she wasn't there and I was as alone as ever.

“You forced us to this,” she said. “I want you gone before my son gets home. If you don't leave now, I'll call right now and report suspicious behavior in the apartment complex and have you sent back. They don't care, as long as vermin like you are gone. Is that what you want?”

“Think of my innocent baby.” I backed up against the bookcase. “And your son, your son will get in trouble.”

“I am thinking about my poor son.” She crossed her arms,
her legs spread out broadly beneath her long skirt. “There are ways. I promise you, there are ways.”

What choice did I have? I took what I could carry and left.

 • • • 

I stuck close to the side of the apartment complex, avoiding the eyes of suspicious strangers, passed the towering telephone poles plastered with advertisements. I was no longer anyone's wife, or a North Korean, or a Jangmi. That's what I believed. Only a stranger with a sack of food bulky under her coat.

I walked away from the building. Just then a patrol car pulled into the parking lot and I had a brief view of two men in dark green uniforms before I swiveled back around the side of the building, concealing myself. The cigarettes between their fingers, their relaxed demeanor, made them look so ordinary. That was the way it was with these men who casually destroyed lives after a cigarette.

The time it took to pass the apartment's security camera felt like a crawl. Slow, slow, I told myself. But once my feet were out of the camera's range and far from the officers, I dropped the heavy sack of food and broke into a run. I was terrified and couldn't stop. I slowed only as the fog rolled in. I had never been so unprepared. The fog erased the people, the buildings, erased everything, until I could have been anywhere and anyone. It was the perfect weather for thieves. And lovers.

Under the safety of darkness I found a street of my country's restaurants that Seongsik had pointed out on our first drive in. I saw a few bowls, plates, and chopsticks strewn across green
plastic tables in the window of one eatery. The floating islands of leftover noodles and rice they held, all that waste, still shocked me. There were two tin signs, one in Chinese and one in our language, and inside, laminated photos of food were taped to the wall. Its drabness had more in common with my hometown than with the dazzling Chinese cities I had seen on television.

There was also a woman alone. She stretched out her bare feet from under the table and wiggled her fingers in the air with an ease I envied. I pressed close enough that my reflection disappeared. Someday I would be like this woman in her own eatery, surrounded by all that couldn't be taken away. There would be my child beside me in a sunflower print dress, who would never know cold or hunger or suffering. There would be no denouncements, no fear, only my baby girl's feet tapping and the endless sun that would never set. I saw it through the window, the vision that sustained me: my future.

The woman rose and began counting her cash. Her heavier lower half billowed out in a flowery skirt and white pantaloons underneath, and her bucolic shuffle contrasted with the industry of her quick hands. She reminded me of my mother.

I entered into the amber light.

“Please.”

I gestured at the bowl of half-eaten noodles on one of the creaky plastic tables. I wanted to save Seongsik's mother's money, the little I had.

“I just want something—anything—to eat and then I'll go.”

The woman's eyes met mine and became unfriendly. “You're
from across the river?” she said. Whatever kindness in her was gone.

“What you have left over, anything.”

“You people,” the woman said, and again I was struck by the feeling that I was no longer a person, but one of many, to her. “After you beg for free food and clothes, you're always coming over and stealing eggs and rice from the same people who helped you. A whole cow disappeared in the next town. And now you want my noodles.”

I gazed beyond the woman's shoulder to the bowl. “But I'm not like that. The food will go to waste anyway, so I thought—”

“They say an old granny was killed by one of you. She was always helping your kind, then one of those she'd helped robbed her and took everything she had in the house, which wasn't much.”

I hadn't robbed or stolen from these people; I was sure I could never kill anyone. “Even the broth—that's all I need. That's all my baby needs.”

The woman picked up a bowl of leftovers from the table. My hands were outstretched and waiting when cold noodles hit my face.

“Not for your kind.” The woman wiped her hands on her apron. “I've had enough of you. Get out before I report you and they haul you back to where you came from.”

T
he border between the two countries was long, and on the winding road heading south for the random town I'd settled on, all I saw from the bus were the mountains veiny with snow. In fact, there was nothing left to distract me from my fear. I'd turned off my cell phone from the outset. The idea of my mom with another man made me shiver with shame, and I didn't know what to tell my dad. Returning home meant facing school and Adam, but going back to my mom's wasn't an option, either. I wondered why God was testing me.

I arrived at dusk, the Tumen River as thick as a blanket in front of me. The lights in the storefront windows of the town went out like dominoes in slow motion; the lights of cubicle-size residences lit up one by one. I stared up at those low-rise apartments, convinced that no one could possibly be as unhappy as I was. I wandered aimlessly with my backpack, the hallway lights tattooed across my mom's face in my mind.

By late evening I knew too well the dusty stores along the main
strip with dusty products and the ubiquitous red neon signs advertising everything from adult entertainment to car parts. I wore layers of new clothes I'd bought from a local store to disguise myself and kept a cap low over my face and ducked away anytime I saw someone who looked remotely like my mom. When a bundled homeless granddad rattled a can in my face, I told him, “No, I'm like you,” and the man shot me a venomous look as if he were deeply insulted. I tried to check into a run-down motel, but the manager insisted on taking down my identification card or passport number as was the law, which would help my mom track me down and lasso me in. I checked into a bathhouse instead. Only then I finally gathered the courage to call my dad.

I lay down across the common room's heated floor in the corner, flipped open my cell phone, and used my phone card to call home. On the second ring, my dad picked up.

“Daehan? Where are you? Your poor
eomma
is nearly dead from worry. Do you have any idea what you've done to her? I was about to fly out and look for you.”

“Dead from worry? She's perfectly fine. Believe me, she's more than fine.”

As I realized all that I could never tell him, I felt the distance between my dad and me growing into a big fat canyon.

“I'm fine, too. I'm just checking in so you won't worry about me.”

“Go back to your
eomma
now, wherever you are. We just want you home.”

“I'd rather stay where I am. I need time.”

“Time for what? Did something happen?”

“Dad, I need time on my own to figure things out.”

“None of this would have happened if your
eomma
hadn't suddenly changed phones without telling me. She never tells me anything. Don't do anything to yourself, please! Daehan, for us!”

“Dad, I promise I won't do anything stupid. Double promise, in front of God. I just need time.”

He didn't understand. “Don't do this to us. You're a good boy; there's nothing to figure out. You need to come home.”

I apologized and apologized, then hung up.

I wanted to be far away from my parents and from everything that had happened. To know that I was capable of surviving on the streets because I was one hundred percent masculine. That was probably mainly behind my move to the streets a few nights later, though I told myself it was to save my yuan for emergencies. It was as if I was onstage and Adam and his friends, the kids at Bible camp, were my audience.

After walking through the whole town I took up residence in a half-abandoned building made of cubicles of shops. I used my canteen to sprinkle water on the floor and wiped it down with toilet paper, stacked up my worldly goods, and pondered what God was trying to tell me.

 • • • 

I was shaken awake and blinded by a flashlight. I scrambled up, wishing I had my slingshot and marble in hand and ready to shoot, until I saw they were kids around my age. I became excited; I was lonely for people. But these guys had mean looks.

One with Chinese characters tattooed down his wrist spelling out “Of the Universe” said, “Don't you see the lines drawn showing what's ours and what's yours?”

“Lines, what lines?” I strained my eyes at the floor.

A stocky kid pushed me down to the slab of cement. “Still can't see it? The line I'm about to make on your face.” He told me to leave.

“There are so many other rooms,” I said. He didn't look convinced. “I'll just move to another room.”

“Every one of those rooms are ours.” He spat on my foot. “This is our territory.”

I was groggy, frightened, and my thoughts returned to my mom's apartment, a place I finally decided was worse than the cold and the grime. After much searching, I found an apartment building complex at the edge of town left in mid-construction, as if the developer realized that there would be no buyers around by the time it was finished. Rusted wires poking up as high as bamboo shoots from the cement floor and the concrete pillars made it a pretty bleak obstacle course. Lying down, I saw sleeping pigeons above me roosting on the skeletal roof.

I prayed daily and tried not to lose my way. I washed in the public bathroom and reminded myself, as I stepped around puddles of urine, that at least I wasn't in high school. I approached restaurants and collected the day's leftovers in exchange for running errands. Hurt and anger rattled in my head like loose marbles, so I disciplined myself with a regimen of push-ups. I willed the asphalt into packed dirt, the town into a state park, the food scavenging into foraging in the forest, reimagining this as a familiar Boy Scouts trip. I added details to my map of the town in my notebook. Maps help you find your way and guarantee that if you're careful you won't stray off course. I was sure that with a map I could avoid future suffering.

The next week I began collecting cardboard for a few coins from the recycling center, but during a bathroom break someone stole the entire day's stack from me, along with my precious parachute cord, the most durable of ropes. I reminded myself that though Job had been enslaved for seven years I'd had less than two weeks of setbacks. I found work in an eatery instead, where the severe thin-lipped lady complimented me on my system of washing and stacking. My diet improved dramatically. At night I set the alarm on my watch for an early wake-up, which reminded me to call my dad the next day. I tried not to think about my mom.

 • • • 

I was lonely. A few weeks passed with only the sour-faced owner of the eatery for company. She liked how I worked but more than once said, “You talk more in an hour than I do in a week.” I can't pretend I didn't think of home.

At night I reread the same two books:
Three Kingdoms
and a book on
baduk
-playing strategies. I became a fountain of speech for myself, a delirium of quotations and epiphanies. I talked to God. I began to hear God everywhere: in honking cars, the beating of pigeon wings, a water fountain's bubbling, the
whoosh!
of a school swing. He was north, south, east, and west for me. He was the boy peeing against a wall, the umbrella pines fanning mightily in a private conversation, and I was the sky and the earth and they were me, and the night wasn't so scary anymore once the roofless building filled with the Word, the Word being God. One night, in that deep peace I would never feel again, I heard footsteps.

I thought, finally, I was meeting God.

Before I saw the man, I saw his feet. His black shoes, laced so tightly they looked as if they were about to snap, stepped through the hole that was my door. Next his black suit that made him look like a typical gray-haired businessman, then his round face as serious as the Bible and so unlined that he must have never smiled or frowned. He walked steadily, even with the rusted wires shooting up from the floor, as if he was the kind of man for whom there were no obstacles, only a destination.

“Is anyone there?” he called out in Korean.

I recalled my mother's warnings about organ thieves thirsty for my juicy liver or kidneys and Chinese mafia that carved out a person's lungs for the fun of it. He might be a Joseon-
jok
like me, maybe one who sold boys into some seedy industry. I scrambled to get away, but my leg caught in my plastic wrap. His eyes focused on me as I heaved up again, praying for the superhuman strength of action-movie heroes, but I fell forward, more Marx Brothers than Superman. I probably would've broken my nose and more if the man hadn't caught me in his arms. He did so gingerly, as if he disliked intimacy.

I flung myself backward and in a flash I had my slingshot and polished stones ready.

“Don't be afraid,” he said. “I'm not a bad person.”

I kept quiet. He pulled away the rest of the plastic until it surrounded me like wilted flower petals, and I was inches away from his pencil-sharpened eyebrows. His hair, his pupils, and the shadow above his lips were the color of ash. His eyes flashed across me while I considered whether it was sinful to slam him
in the groin and run. He looked puzzled, and disappointed, and he repeated what he had just said in Chinese.

That I couldn't abide. I didn't appreciate being mistaken for one of the Han people, and told him as much in Korean.

“A Joseon-
jok.
” He said it in Korean this time. “What are you doing here, then? Where are your parents? I could've been someone you wouldn't want to see.”

“I don't know where my parents are.” I didn't see it as a lie, not exactly. Burdened with a distant father and a mother who had gutted the core of the seventh commandment, I viewed myself as a kind of Christian orphan.

His bland expression softened. “My own parents were killed by the Japanese in the war. I was young, too, but the church took care of me. You shouldn't be out alone like this. There are organizations for orphans and other kids like you.”

I was pretty sure that those organizations would lead me right back to the deacon and my mom.

“I don't like institutions.”

He sighed. “Many of you don't. You don't live here like this all the time, do you? You'll get pneumonia.”

I said nothing.

He assessed my clothes, my bag, the corner I had scouted for myself. He put his hands together as if in prayer.

“All Christians are friends,” he said.

I reached up for the cross that was now protruding over my shirt collar.

“Can I bring you food, a blanket? Help you in any way?”

“I have friends. They're coming for me.”

He had an impassive face, like a rocky cliff, and I could only guess at his intentions until he drew out a piece of paper and scrawled a basic map and the name of a restaurant on it.

“I often eat here,” he said. “She's a good woman. Whenever you need something—anything—ask for me. You can call me Kwon
ajeoshi
.”

 • • • 

That early spring evening as I was leaving work, two men pulled me into the shadows of an alley. I tried to break away, but they slammed me against the brick wall. It happened so quickly that the shock only hit me when an arm jabbed into my chest.

“Hand over your bag,” said the man with a bald spot exposed like a medieval tonsure. He was a Han Chinese and blew out cold puffs of air as he spoke.

“Here's my wallet and my watch.” I offered up my wrist. My passport, which I considered my life, was tucked into the bag's deepest compartment.

“I said your bag.” The man straightened, his voice louder. “You think I'm asking?”

I fumbled with the backpack, but I finally managed to get it open. “You'll see that most of what's in there is of no value to anyone but me.”

“You think I'm joking, kid?”

I shook my head.

That was when the tonsured man flipped open a jackknife and twirled it until it sliced through the air and rested against my Adam's apple. Within seconds, the two of them stripped me of my possessions, taking even my waterproof boots. The knife
stayed by my neck, and it sparked the same strong desire to live that I'd felt when I'd nearly drowned. I was fearful, my heart and head racing at the prick of the cold blade, when the sound of glass cracked behind me and someone shouted in warning. The criminals turned and ran deep into the alley.

Apparently I had been rescued. I slumped against the wall, weak and grateful and ashamed. Rescue reminded me of desperate maidens stuck in towers and sleeping beauties stretched out on beds of vermilion roses, waiting for their prince. Nothing made me more uncomfortable. I wanted to be the kind who did the rescuing.

I was also strangely at ease. The tall one with grave looks and a pensive droop to the corners of his eyes approached me under the streetlight, calming the breakneck speed of my heart. He shouldn't have; he was clenching the neck of a soda bottle, an image incongruous with his fair, Asian pear skin and out-of-focus features. I had never seen such a beautiful man. He set the bottle down before facing me.

“Are you all right?” he said with such concern that I pretended that I was better than I felt.

“They took my bag, they took everything.”

I had lost my passport, my identification cards, my tools, everything except the cash tucked into my underwear and the inner lining of my pants. Daniel Daehan Lee, a citizen of the People's Republic of China and a permanent resident of the United States of America, was now paperless, undocumented, as if I had never existed. I rubbed where the cold knife had pressed against my skin, feeling strangely free.

“Look,
hyeong,
they even took his shoes,” said the other, much smaller kid, sounding impressed. His cap was pulled down low over his face, and his voice crackled with the same awkward change I had suffered a few years ago.

The young man I'd call Yongju considered me, then told me to lift up my foot. I did as he said. He ripped his scarf in half with one great pelican motion of his long arms, then wrapped the two halves around my feet.