by Sungju Lee
I chased after the man, but as I turned a corner, I ran right into a lady pushing a baby in a pram. I landed on the hard concrete with a thud. I lay on the ground wailing, as my mother had wanted me to do when Kim Il-sung died, blood from my wounds reddening the snow underneath me, people and more snow collecting around me.
A week later we headed to the train station for our so-called northern holiday. My father and I plopped our bags down on the platform, as well as the oak wedding chest that had been made especially for my mother to take new linens, fine china, and silverware from her parents’ house to abeoji’s when they married. My mother gripped my hand hard, and we stood off to the side as we watched my father hand a policeman our papers giving us permission to travel. The papers said that we were going to a city called Gyeong-seong and that, while on vacation, my parents would serve the country by working as laborers.
The police officer ran his eyes up and down my father and then turned and did the same to my mother and me. Eomeoni blushed and looked down. I stood up straight, as if I were about to salute the man. The policeman huffed some words to my father, passed the papers back, and then stomped off.
As my father and I heaved the chest toward the edge of the platform to wait for the train, my eyes landed on the policeman, who had stopped to talk to some colleagues. They were all looking at my father, with expressions on their faces that sent a shiver through me. I’d seen that look before, on my classmates’ faces when we talked about the Japanese colonialists and the evil Americans. It was that look that said “We’re better than you.”
On the train, my father leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. I sensed he wanted to escape as much as I did. I opened my sketchbook and, with the one pencil that my mother had said I could take with me, drew a BTR-40, also known as a Bronetransporter tank, which the Soviet Union built and our armies used in the 1950s to try to free the South from American control.
After a while, the constant sway of the train made me dizzy, so I closed my eyes like abeoji. The clickety-clack sound of the train lulled me into a fitful sleep in which I felt my muscles twitch. I dreamed I was at Mangyeongdae Yuheejang. I saw myself on the Ferris wheel, looking down at the purple and white lilac blossoms and at abeoji and eomeoni smiling and waving. I heard music from the nearby merry-go-round. I felt light and carefree, knowing that when I got off my ride, I would be enjoying a drink of sweet water.
I woke up with a jolt, perspiring and breathing heavily. I looked over at abeoji and eomeoni, who were both asleep. I caught my breath and then brushed my messy hair using some spit and the palms of my hands. I closed my sketchbook, tucked the pencil into my shirt pocket, and looked out the window.
I wished I hadn’t.
The train was starting to slow, its brakes screeching us to a halt. Our carriage eventually stopped with the window facing the end of the platform. I leaned my face up to the window, so close my breath caused it to steam. I wiped the window clean and then looked out. Lines of people stretched out before me, but people unlike any I’d seen in Pyongyang. Their skin sagged, their eyes were sinking into their faces, and their complexions were bluish, almost gray, like the clouds that rolled off the East Sea in February. The men didn’t wear Mao jackets but dirty dark gray or blue pants and matching tops. The women weren’t in skirts, nor did they wear their hair neat on top of their heads in buns. They also wore pants and jackets, and their hair was messy. Some of the children wore shoes with big holes in them through which I could see their toes. These children’s faces were covered in scabs and a white coating, like patches of snow on the grasses of the parks in early spring.
Like the barricades that kept spectators off the roads on parade days, policemen blocked the steps up to the train. Some people were slipping won, North Korean currency, to the policemen along with their papers that looked, at a distance, like ours. The policemen wouldn’t take the documents, though. They shook their heads, their facial expressions cold, their gaze looking out beyond the train station, over to some sloping mountains.
People fell to their knees, wailing … wailing, as if our eternal leader had passed away a second time. I could make out some of the words they shouted to the policemen: “Please, I need to see a dying relative! … Please, my children are starving and waiting for me! … Please let me on the train!”
Tears flowed down the wrinkled cheeks of an old woman who had managed to push her way to the front using her pointy elbows. Some of her gray hair was missing, exposing red-chaffed skin on her scalp. The policeman in front of our carriage, a stiff young man, tossed the papers she tried to give him into the air like confetti. The old woman crumpled to the platform as if she were lying down for a nap. The crowd moved in on top of her.
The day that started off sunny and winter-crisp turned cloudy. As we moved north, sleet slapped at the windowpanes.
I was glad for that, for I couldn’t see out the window anymore.
Inside the Gyeong-seong train station, I became very aware of my clean clothes and clean body amid all the dirty faces and the dirty floor and walls, which I took to have once been white but were now covered with a dull yellow film. I shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot under the gaze of the people, who must have noticed, too. I stood out, I thought, like eomeoni’s gold wedding band on a black piece of fabric.
I shifted my eyes to my father as he approached a young man, about the same age as me, standing in the center of the room. The boy was singing the “Spring of Hometown.” His shrill voice moved around the room like a warm summer wind and made me smile for the first time that day.
Still singing, the boy turned his head to listen to something my father asked him. He pointed to another boy standing nearby. This boy was small, with red eyes that circled the room, like the singer’s voice. He was bone-thin, like a newly planted cherry tree, and his hair was bushy, wild, and dull-looking, not short and shiny like the hair of the boys in Pyongyang. My father spoke to him and then waved for eomeoni and me to come.
Once outside, the boy grabbed hold of my mother’s wedding chest and, despite his frail appearance, hoisted it without any help onto the back of a pull-cart. My father handed him our papers and some won, and we followed on foot as he wheeled the cart away from the station and through the town. The only light was from tiny lamps set in the windowsills of the houses, which were wooden and small. There were no apartment buildings. But there was a mural in the middle of town with a saying from Kim Il-sung underneath it. In the dim light, I couldn’t read it, though.
I listened to the soles of my mother’s loafers crunch the snow. I lowered my head and watched my feet as snowflakes drifted down around me like cherry blossoms falling in Pyongyang’s Daedong River. Tonight I didn’t want to try to catch them in my mouth. Tonight the snowflakes reminded me of large pieces of dust that collect in the corners of rooms and underneath furniture.
The pull-cart driver took us to the party official who was responsible for overseeing Gyeong-seong. This man was thin, too, like the boy, with stubble on his face and slits for eyes. He had my mother and me sit in an outer room beside a wood-burning heater while he and my father talked behind a closed door. When my father emerged, his face was red, and he looked weary, as if he were losing a military battle but wasn’t quite ready to surrender. Eomeoni went to him and touched his shoulder. Over the years, he and my mother had become like one, moving as if a symphony played between them. I had, at times, studied their unspoken language, and I knew my mother was now asking if everything was fine. Abeoji, stone-faced, waved her away.
No, I thought, nothing is fine.
We headed back into the cold, eomeoni and me following the cart while abeoji walked in front, beside the boy. We finally stopped by a dark gray house with a door painted royal blue. I dropped the bags I was carrying and ran, pushing open the door, which wasn’t locked. I flipped on the light switch. It didn’t work. Eomeoni rushed past me and with some matches she carried in her purse lit one of two kerosene lamps placed in the middle of the floor
. I looked around. Paint was peeling from the walls, and in some places the walls weren’t even painted—just bare concrete. The front room was a kitchen, with three black iron pots sitting on the woodstove. There was a sink, with tubes coming from it and leading to the outside. “Our vacation home!” abeoji said, faking a smile. He then patted me on the back. “A little smaller than our apartment in Pyongyang, but it’s only for a short while.”
“I was hoping this was my new dog’s home,” I said, sighing.
“Adeul,” my father began. “I’m sorry. You’ll get used to the small size. I know it.”
I inspected the room off the kitchen. The lamps that my mother lit, while dim, still revealed all the house’s dirt, and its yellow walls—like the train station and the oil—and the foot stains on the paper flooring. It felt like an old home, a dying home.
I turned and asked my father, “Why did we really leave Pyongyang?”
My father and I sat cross-legged on the ground, watching eomeoni put wood in the stove and boil water that she had pumped in through those long tubes that led, she explained, to an outside well. In Pyongyang, we had faucets and pipes that were connected to the city’s water and sewage system. “Here we have an outhouse for a toilet,” she explained. “When you have to go, I’ll show you where.”
My father cleared his throat. “I want to answer your question about why we left Pyongyang as best I can,” he said. “What you’re learning in school isn’t everything there is to know about Joseon,” he continued slowly, as if thinking hard about every word. “There are problems … The country is facing problems. Here in the countryside”—he waved his hand around the room as if all of it represented rural Joseon—“life is different. I mean, Pyongyang’s great monuments, museums, hotels, and theaters were all built in the 1960s and 1970s—everything is new and efficient. Here … well, here all the buildings owned by the Japanese were destroyed, but those built in their place are not as state-of-the-art as in Pyongyang. It will be a hard vacation, but one designed to test your strength and open your eyes to how the rest of the country lives.”
I didn’t say anything, but with every word my father spoke, my shoulders slumped a little more. “Abeoji, are we really on vacation?” I eventually asked, looking deep into my father’s eyes. But then, as I studied his eyes, which were the color of varnished oak, I felt guilty. A good son trusts his parents, I lectured myself. My shoulders slackened again, and my head drooped. I had betrayed my father and my role as his son by even hinting that I didn’t believe him.
“We’re on holiday,” he repeated, tilting my head up with his hand and forcing me to look at him.
Eomeoni sat down with a sigh. “Look, adeul,” she started, “Joseon is facing some problems.”
Okay. I had heard that. “What kind of problems?” I asked.
“I can’t fully say, but it’s all due to the evil Americans,” she said.
I bowed to show I agreed. But I didn’t understand. I wasn’t getting enough information to understand. At least in school when the teacher says the Japanese did terrible things, the teacher also lists everything the Japanese did when they occupied our land.
“Look at this holiday as a test, a test of your courage,” abeoji repeated.
“And strength to lead an army one day,” eomeoni added.
I looked at her with surprise. It was the first time she had ever acknowledged my future dreams to be a military leader.
“Like when our eternal leader set off on foot from Manchuria to Mangyeongdae?” I whispered to her. “The Learning Journey of a Thousand Miles?”
She nodded. “Yes, adeul. Like that time.”
I awoke early the next day. I sat up quickly and looked over to the window. Dirt filtered the sunlight that was trying to stretch itself into the one room where we now all slept side by side on the floor.
Still in that fog between wake and sleep, I crept out from underneath my covers and crossed the icy-cold floor. Our vacation house had no central heating, unlike our apartment in Pyongyang. Now only the stove in the main room warmed us. Like the sun, the stove’s warmth also struggled to spread itself into the house. I could see my breath steaming up the air.
The lower part of the inside of the window was covered in a thin layer of ice. Using a fingernail, I chipped at it, creating a small pile of snow powder on the floor and a clear patch of window, which I could peer through. Snow—all I could see was white snow that sparkled like jewels in the sunlight.
My father and I ate a bowl of noodles and broth in silence, partly because I was still ashamed of myself for questioning him the day before. Also, I was freezing. My teeth chattered and my fingers shook when I lifted my bowl to my lips.
“I have a trick for you,” my father finally said.
I smiled. I liked tricks.
“In the army, when men are sent out for long marches and it’s cold like this and they’re hungry, we get them to play a game in which they think about their favorite foods and eating these foods in the warmest places they know. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” I said, closing my eyes. My mind drifted to my birthday: tender pork in a special sauce that eomeoni alone in this world knew how to make, hard-boiled eggs, and steamed bread with red bean paste. “Nampo’s wedding!” I then shouted. “Remember, abeoji? Aunt Nampo’s wedding?”
I heard him say, “Uh-huh.”
“Sugar candies shaped like flowers,” I continued. “I ate a yellow tulip and a peach rose. It was summer, and we wore short-sleeved shirts. I was warm …”
I then thought of a long, hot bath.
It worked.
My father was right.
When I opened my eyes, I felt full and warm. I pulled myself up and changed into a pair of slacks, with tights underneath to keep the chill out. I then headed with my father to my new school.
¤ ¤ ¤
My father sat in a stiff folding wooden chair facing the principal’s long wooden desk. The principal appeared small sitting behind a mound of Kim Il-sung books and swimming in an oversize thick woolen coat, which I wondered why he wore, given his tininess. He looked at us through lost gray eyes, the color of which matched his salt-and-pepper hair. He didn’t wear a Mao suit, like the principal at my school in Pyongyang, and he spoke with an accent that I found hard to understand at first. It was rough, like the barking of a large dog.
The so-nyon-dan manager came in and introduced himself. He explained to my father that, like the so-nyon-dan manager in Pyongyang, he taught the anti-imperialist courses and oversaw biweekly revealing sessions, in which the class lists the things they had not done right. Back in Pyongyang, my answer was almost always that I had skipped studying to watch Boy General. In these sessions, we also had to condemn our peers for what they did wrong. The goal was to help us become good citizens, of course, and follow the rules of the country, the so-nyon-dan manager explained to my father, as if we didn’t know this already. “If we reveal our problems and point out to others where they need to improve, we won’t repeat the wrongs in the future,” he said. I could tell he was trying to impress my father. At least he wasn’t acting like the policemen at the Pyongyang train station.
Then the so-nyon-dan manager told me to follow him to my new classroom. “We will be having an election to decide the student council president soon,” he said as we trudged back through the snow, past some low buildings that he waved a hand toward and said were other classrooms. “I’m sure you know from your schooling in Pyongyang that part of our education is to learn to agree with the decisions made by those in authority. We’ve discussed it and decided that, because you are from Pyongyang and attended such a distinguished school before coming here, we would like you to be the student council president.”
I bowed to show that I agreed. I knew that my elite upbringing destined me to be a leader. Part of my education was to accept my responsibility.
He led me onto a cobblestone path that had recently been shoveled. We followed it as it wove around several more low wooden
buildings, which I figured were outhouses. Finally, the so-nyon-dan manager stopped in front of a building that he said was my new classroom. He led me inside. With me standing nervously behind him, he introduced me to the students.
The room had no electricity, but there was a long window that let in lots of light. The room was heated, I could see, by a small wood-burning stove in the corner. I shivered, and not just from the cold. All the students were staring at me with shocked expressions.
In Pyongyang, my classmates had always been the same since I was seven. No one ever left, until, well, me, and no new students ever came. I guessed it must be the same up here. My face suddenly felt flushed, and I wrung my hands together.
The teacher, who asked me to call him seon-saeng-nim, or simply “teacher,” moved a student from the front of the class to the back. “You’re from Pyongyang,” he said to me. I was getting that this fact alone granted me privileges the others didn’t have, including sitting close to him. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to, though. His body odor filled the room, and he spoke in a harsh, gruff voice that, when he recited Kim Il-sung sayings, pounded at my ears like a buk. This man, too, swam in his suits. I looked down and saw that his shoes were large, like flippers a military diver wears. I shrugged. Maybe men in the countryside just like wearing clothes that are too big for them.
I was quicker than any of my classmates in solving geometry questions, so I made a mental note at afternoon break to ask my father if I could move to a higher class.
As I reached under my desk to pull out the container of noodles my mother had given me for a snack, a strong hand grabbed my elbow. I looked up quickly into the round black eyes of another boy. “I’m Young-bum,” he chirped like a bird. His hair was short and choppy, as if he had cut it himself with dull scissors and without a mirror.
I nodded back. Like his eyes, Young-bum had a round, glowing face. He also had high cheekbones. He was tall—that much I could see, as his legs spread out underneath his desk like tree roots. He had long fingers, and when he caught me looking at them, he informed me with a big grin that he played the accordion. “I’m also the best fighter in the school,” he boasted. “So what’s it like in Pyongyang? Have you been to Mangyeongdae Yuheejang?” He ran his tongue over the name of the amusement park as if he were hungry. “Did you ride the Ferris wheel?”