Under the Same Sky (13 page)

“This is the first day,” my father said. I listened, finding nothing strange in his telling me these things. The transition from the escapades of North Korean soldiers to the arrangement of incense sticks was seamless. There was no need to worry: it was just another plain subject that my father would turn into something wonderful.

“The second day, the body is cleaned and dressed and put into a coffin.” (He went on to describe the intricate procedure. I forget some of the instructions he gave me; they did go on forever.) The
sangju
must supervise every detail of this process, of course. Then he drapes a black ribbon across the photograph of the dead person and sits next to the coffin on a mat made of coarse material. The roughness of the mat he sits on—this I remember—is part of his penance.

Now the visitors come. They bow to the photo, then bow to the
sangju,
who bows back. In the old tradition, the
sangju
would say nothing throughout the entire second day—he has sinned, the body in the casket is evidence of his sin, and he must atone for it—but in modern times he is allowed to thank the visitors for paying their respects. In earlier years, the mourners would leave an envelope filled with cash. But nowadays few people had money to spare even for the living.

On the third day, the casket is carried to the burial ground, led by the
sangju,
still holding the picture of the deceased. At the gravesite, the
sangju
recites the life story of his mother or father, and mourners, if they wish, can offer memories of the person’s integrity or goodness of heart. When the casket is being lowered into the ground, the
sangju
throws three handfuls of dirt on top of it. The grave is filled in and a low mound of earth left atop it, with a small stone on it telling everyone who is buried there.

It used to be that for three years after his loved one’s death the
sangju
had to withdraw from normal life, not get married or have sex, to atone for his horrible error in allowing his loved one to die. Now, after only a few days, he may rejoin the world.

It’s obvious to me now that my father was preparing me for his own death, charging me with the knowledge of what I must do afterward. I admit I didn’t realize it then, however. As I said, my dad could make anything sound magical: his voice drew you in. But I was a poor student, missing the essential lesson as always. It was one reason I had disappointed him so consistently.

My father also told me how to tell if a person was really dead. When a living person lies on the floor, he said, if you put your hand under the small of his back, there is space there—you can slip your open hand in, palm down. But if a person is dead, there is no space to fit your hand. It was an odd fact, but my father was always passing on bits of strange information to me.

I wonder now if he found comfort in envisioning his death in painstaking detail. Perhaps it was like attending his own funeral, which must have had its appeal—to know that even in a time of famine, when so much of what he treasured had disappeared, the old ways would survive. I suspect he was being so precise because I was not the most focused child. Deep down, he was telling me: Son, forget your usual wild nature and do me this last service. Observe the rituals that my grandfather taught my father and that my father taught me. Kwang Jin, don’t let me down.

My mother returned to the house with the money she’d accumulated from her business ventures. She’d made some friends in Sambong, a city north of Hoeryong, and was doing business there, but her profits fluctuated widely. She wasn’t making enough to feed her family consistently.

By the fall of 2001, we’d exhausted all our options for staying alive. We’d collected wood in the mountains above our house and taken it to the market, but fewer and fewer people had money to buy it. We had no harvest from the farm. We’d bartered away almost everything we owned. To have to sell your household belongings is a terrible loss of face for a North Korean man, an admission that you can’t support your family, and it took a lot of courage for my father to walk out the door carrying the cooking pots. But he did it, and returned with enough noodles to last a day or two.

The beloved black-and-white television that had made me a prince of the neighborhood went next. My father told Bong Sook and me, who were distraught over losing it, that he was selling the TV only to buy a bigger one. The bigger one, of course, never appeared. Most of the clothes followed, then our clay bowls and our furniture. Then the clock on the wall, which my father took down one day and sold to a merchant in the Hoeryong city market. Finally there was nothing left.

Around this time, we learned that my maternal grandmother had died of starvation. A friend who’d journeyed from my grandmother’s village came to our house and told us the news.

I was devastated when I heard this. Grandmother’s life had been painful. When I thought of her, the cold expression on her face came back to me, the expression of a woman who expects nothing good in life. I tried to remember her smiling, but couldn’t. Still, I recalled those spoonfuls of rice she gave me while she told her stories.
She loved you, Kwang Jin,
I told myself. There is no greater sign of love than a spoonful of rice.

My mother was shocked by the news. Her dark energy filled the house, but this time we contributed to it, our thoughts of Grandma starving, with us unable to help. Soon Mother told us she would be leaving again—not for a relative’s house (who would have taken her in?), but for China.

Escaping to China was dangerous. If you were caught on either side of the Tumen River, which lay a few miles away and bordered China, you’d be imprisoned. (Though people in Hoeryong, many of whom had relatives across the border, sometimes got reprieves if they stayed in nearby Chinese towns and didn’t proceed to the interior.) But we’d all heard stories of North Koreans going to China and getting fabulously rich, returning with enough money to buy a new house and living off their earnings for years. This had an obvious appeal for my mother. She would go across the border and work or trade—the details were murky—then return to us flush with cash.

When my mom left, I didn’t cry. I had no idea she was going to China; I thought it was just another trip to her relatives in the south, which she’d taken many times before. I didn’t even hug her, just whispered, “Goodbye.”

Weeks after she left, there was no food in the house and no prospect of getting any. It was time for last measures.

My father had a distant relative, a second or third cousin, who lived three hours away by foot. She was an ordinary farmer, far below my father in social rank. We’d heard that she’d had a big harvest that season, producing more than enough to feed her family. If my father waited any longer to seek her help, he might be too weak to ask. My father feared going to see his cousin and dying on the way, alone by the roadside, leaving us to starve without ever knowing his fate.

If he was going to go, he had to do it now. After much deliberation, we decided that forty pounds of cornmeal was the least we could ask for and still be able to survive the coming winter. In the spring of 2002, my father would pay her back. How, he didn’t know. But his reputation preceded him. My father was a small legend, a man who’d succeeded young and risen far above his station. Of course he would pay his cousin back.

I remember him leaving the house. He was hopeful. His back was straight and he had that air of strength and purpose I always associated with him. He simply said goodbye and was off at eight o’clock in the morning. Bong Sook and I lazed around that day, barely moving, with that luxuriant feeling of waiting for a meal so full and bountiful that it will stretch your stomach to its limit and send you off into a snoring, happy sleep. We were sure of his success.

That evening, we heard footsteps coming up the path to our house. I sat up, hoping I’d see my father push the door open with his feet, a heavy bag of corn clutched in each of his hands, a big smile on his face. But he slipped in quietly. He couldn’t bear to tell us what his relative had said to him. (Bong Sook and I would spend hours theorizing about the precise form our cousin’s cruelty took. “Are you out of your mind?” is what I imagined her shouting at my father, standing forlorn in her doorway. “What kind of world do you think you live in?” was Bong Sook’s guess. That, or “Go home, you idiot!”) My father staggered into the house, the right side of his face rigid and the right eye staring blindly, as if he’d suffered a stroke.

“Father, what’s wrong?” my sister cried out. He collapsed into her arms and I rushed over. Together we lowered him to the mat.

My father seemed to be undergoing some kind of rapid aging process. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t move his hands, which he held out in front of him as if they’d been scalded. His condition seemed to worsen in the few seconds since he’d come through the door. The symptoms stabilized that night, but he was practically catatonic by the next day. And three days later, the screaming began.

Bong Sook and I didn’t know what was wrong with our father. We could recognize the signs of starvation, but then there was his yellowed skin and the terrible pain—not the usual symptoms of hunger. To us, something had entered his body and was slowly eating him from the inside, hollowing out his belly. Something far worse than disease.

A loss of dignity. Hot shame.

I imagine my father’s state of mind that night as he approached our house empty-handed, humiliated by his own flesh and blood. He believed he was going to watch Bong Sook and me die in front of him. This is his deepest fear; it has been with him for many years, and now, as soon as he opens the door, the process will unfold in scenes that cannot be altered or stopped or slowed even for a moment. This is what he is seeing in his mind: flashes of the near future, starving bodies, dead brown eyes. I believe it was fear, as much as anything else, that paralyzed my father’s body. As he takes hold of the doorknob (perhaps it happened earlier, on the road into town, or as he passed the accordion houses to our left), he sees that his children will not survive.

Can one will oneself to fall into a coma, to unsee what is before one’s eyes? I don’t know. I think my father’s heart was in turmoil, and he was overcome by a kind of prescient horror. Whether he willed himself to die or his body and mind simply gave way, it’s hard to say. To me, they are almost the same thing.

That night, my father began to disappear.

Chapter

T
HE SHAME OF
my father’s long walk to seek the help of his distant cousin seemed to release all the toxins in his body to a free-for-all in his poor belly. He suffered agonizing stomach pains. He screamed continuously. His belly swelled further, its surface horribly distended and shiny, like smooth scar tissue. We didn’t know what was killing him. The lack of food over the years had weakened him so much that it seemed there was a race to see what would finish him off, starvation or cirrhosis.

In a way, it didn’t matter, because there was no medicine for either of his conditions. If you took your loved one to the hospital, the doctors would tell you, We have no medicine, take him home, let him die in a place he knows. The doctors had sold the government-provided medicines to profiteers in the market. They did this to survive. So when you went to the hospital, they would say, Go to the market and talk to this seller or that one. They knew exactly whom they’d sold the medicine to. But when you went to the market, the drugs would cost a fortune.

The father I’d known was gone. Only a body remained, a wretched, writhing, foul-smelling body so bone-thin it pained me to touch him. My father would often scream through the night, then lapse into unconsciousness, terribly still. But even when he was awake, he was no longer the stern but secretly loving man I’d always known. He was a raving thing that pain twisted and turned at all hours. Sometimes I worried the strain would snap his back.

On those nights when I could no longer take my father’s yelling, I would go outside and walk, just to hear the crickets and the sigh of the grass by the roadside. The night sky was my only consolation in those days, the stars so beautiful and clear that it felt as if I could reach my hand up and scorch my fingertips on the light.

I wandered by the accordion houses that lined the streets. If the moon was out, I would look up at it as I made my way along the road. Behind the dark windows of the nearby houses, I sensed my neighbors were awake. Surely no one could sleep through my father’s howls.

Sometimes I walked so far that it seemed physically impossible for me to hear the screams. Two hundred yards. Three. But they were always there, coming over the rooftops of orange Chinese tile. Perhaps the sound had become inaudible after only a few blocks and what I was hearing was something that began in my own mind. An echo of my father’s suffering. The voice of guilt mixed with sadness and the desire, deep down, for it to be over, one way or the other.

I loved my father deeply despite our fights, but sometimes I wished he would suffer in silence, like others were doing. I knew that all across North Korea there were people who were as close to death as my father. And there were others who wouldn’t even live through the night. Those families would bring their loved ones’ bodies out in the morning, and young boys—sad-faced and bewildered
sangju
s
—
would stay with them while the others went to the casket factory. It’s strange to say that I envied those boys their corpses, but in a way I did. Their anguish was private, dignified. Ours had entangled the whole neighborhood in its course, like some too-loud soap opera that began every night around ten o’clock. They could tell the nights when my father slept and those when the pain turned unbearable. And when, exhausted, he at last sank into unconsciousness, they could take to their beds and get a good night’s rest.

Most nights, I headed to the mini-mart that was owned by Kim Il’s grandmother. In order to feed her family, she had opened a store inside her home. You could go up to the small glass window in the front of the house and look inside. The entire contents of the store—tubes of toothpaste, a few handfuls of corn, some candies—were visible in that little square, lit by a single bulb. If you didn’t see what you needed, you moved on. If you didn’t see it, Kim Il’s grandmother didn’t have it.