Every Falling Star

by Sungju Lee

  “No. I’m not,” I said in a low voice.

  “Every day we’re burying kids at the foot of the mountain,” Chulho said. “Soon there won’t be any space left in the ground. My brother was just one ceremony of about forty you’ve missed.”

  That evening, after I sold my textbooks, abeoji and I made backpacks by sewing together old pairs of pants.

  On the days abeoji didn’t go into work, we’d head out at dawn, with the mist still covering the fields, and collect arrowroot, dandelions, and pine and elm tree bark, which my mother would make into broth for our soup or sell at the market. My father and I cut down small trees for firewood that we piled inside the house, because a neighbor had warned abeoji that thieves were taking anything that was left outside at night. Soon there was so much wood in the house there was little room for us to walk around.

  In the forests, abeoji and I caught chipmunks by pouring water from the river into their holes. The little creatures would scamper out to avoid being drowned. As they did, we would strike their heads and torsos with our knives. When they were dead, we’d skin them, cut off the meat, skewer some of the flesh onto sticks, and roast it over the fire. My mother would smoke the rest and then store the meat in an underground cupboard my father and I dug.

  The first time I saw a snake, I jumped into some ferns, screaming so loudly I scared a couple of magpies, which squawked at me before flying away. My father was stone-faced and shaking his head, waving for me to come back. He pointed at the brown snake that had tiny yellow and green flecks, then to a rock about the size of my head. He motioned for me to throw it.

  I held the rock up high over my head, the way Young-bum and I had been lifting weights. I then crept up behind the snake, which was nearing a decaying log that was covered in moss and armies of ants. If the snake got inside the log, I would never be able to catch it. I closed my eyes and threw the rock as hard as I could.

  Thump.

  My father had to pry open my eyelids to make me look. The rock had nearly split the snake in two. I had killed it.

  My father and I decided to stay in the forest for the night so that we could get a jump start in the morning collecting wild vegetables and deodeok root. For our bed, we laid a sheet of plastic on top of some dead leaves in a clearing. For dinner, we roasted the snake meat on skewers over the fire. Afterward, we both tried to sleep but couldn’t. My father moved in close beside me and wrapped his arms around me. I rolled onto my back, and the two of us looked up at the stars. “On an island called Jeju, people feared snakes,” he started to tell me. “They would never kill them, for they are seen as symbols of wealth.”

  “Abeoji, don’t tell me that now, when all the snake has been eaten,” I scolded. I already felt bad enough for having killed it. I didn’t want to see its death as a sign that I’d be poor for the rest of my life.

  “There is more,” he continued. “It’s believed that if you cut off the tail of a snake that’s still alive, it will come to kill you at night when you’re sleeping, seeking revenge.”

  I shivered. “I don’t like these stories, abeoji. Tell me a happy story.”

  “Okay, how is this, then? In Jeju, they believe in a goddess named Chilseong, who by some accounts had seven daughters. Others say she had seven sons. Some believe Chilseong came from China, cast ashore in a metal box. Others say she was a star who wanted to experience being human, so she and her children, also stars, were born as snakes. One thing both sides believe is that when their human lives came to an end, Chilseong and her children returned to the sky. They’re the seven stars of the Ursa Major, or the Big Dipper. Chilseong is considered the brightest star in the constellation. Look,” he said, pointing. “Chilseong and her children shine the brightest of all the stars and are thought to protect the Korean people from misfortune and pain. Chilseong, being a mother, watches over children. Whenever you feel lost or in pain, adeul, find Chilseong and call out for her help.”

  “Abeoji,” I said after a while. “What do people believe in Joseon?”

  “Well,” he started slowly, “I’ve heard that some people, especially in the villages, believe in spirits, the shan-shin-ryong-nim, which live in caves. These are good spirits, not spirits of unhappy people looking to hurt the living.”

  “Like the yu-ryeong,” I cut in.

  “Yeah, like the yu-ryeong—ghosts who are cursed. People take clear water in big jugs and food and lay it before these caves where they believe the shan-shin-ryong-nim live. It’s an offering, to ask the shan-shin-ryong-nim for things such as food and maybe better jobs, a good marriage for their son or daughter or good school results for their smaller children.”

  I thought hard about abejoi’s words. It struck me as odd that starving people would offer up food to the shan-shin-ryong-nim. “Abeoji, what do people believe in Pyongyang?”

  “In Kim Il-sung and now the general, Kim Jong-il,” he replied a little too stiffly, as though he were annoyed.

  “That’s all?” I continued.

  “Pretty much,” he said.

  I wanted to touch his face then, have him look at me, and tell me what he did that forced us to leave Pyongyang. I wanted to know what he believed in. But I heard him sigh. I could tell he felt defeated now, and I decided against the idea. Instead, I slipped my left hand into his and laid my head on his shoulder.

  The winter of 1998 was hard. My mother stored dried vegetables as well as radishes and potatoes in our underground cupboard in the backyard. On top of that, I had used evergreen boughs to hide the location of the freezer from thieves. But while no thieves found our stash, our stored food had to be rationed nonetheless.

  I was hungry every day.

  I was also bored.

  When the animals hibernated and the ground was frozen, I’d wake before my mother and father, shimmy to the window, and peer out at the snow. I’d long since sold my sketchbook at the market. Now my only canvas was the thin layer of ice on the inside of the windowpane. Using a fingernail, I’d sketch pictures of the 105 army tank and combat airplanes. I’d do this for a while and then slump back down onto my mat, light-headed, with my feet and hands pricked by pins and needles. Eomeoni said these were symptoms of malnutrition.

  By the end of January our supply of squirrel, chipmunk, rabbit, and snake had all gone. We had one meal a day of corn rice and some cabbage or pickled radish.

  I wasn’t the only one suffering from hunger. The neighbor men would visit our home sometimes with bottles of alcohol, sool, that they would drink with my father. It took only a glass for the men to begin slurring their words. “Drunk” was the word eomeoni used to describe them as she shooed me into the other room away from them. But I would press my ear up to the wall and listen to them. As the men got drunk, they would hound my father for information from Pyongyang, including what General Kim Jong-il was going to do next about this thing called a famine.

  My father would answer their questions as if he were one of the government representatives who delivered information to us on Joseon’s Central TV station back in Pyongyang: formal and evasive. He always skirted around the men’s questions and toed the party line, which in the case of this famine thing was that Joseon’s enemies were responsible and that all of us had to be strong and consider what we were going through as an Arduous Walk, like what Kim Il-sung did when he ousted the Japanese.

  Over time, the neighbor men shrunk before my eyes until two of them were no bigger than their own sons, who were just a little older than me. The skin on the men’s faces sagged, making them appear years older than I knew they actually were. As they withered away, their eyes remained the same size and began to stick out like saucers. Looking at them made me think of the yu-ryeong—legless, floating ghosts that people left on earth after they died because they hadn’t completed some mission, like protecting a family member or seeking revenge on someone else.

  At least now I knew why the principal and teacher swam in their suits. Now I, too, had to use a rope to tie my pants around my waist to k
eep them from falling down. So did Young-bum. The few times we got together, he and I would look out my window at the smaller children, many now bowlegged like frogs. We called out to them: “Gae-gu-ri.”

  Eomeoni would slap us across the back of the heads and tell us not to be so rude.

  “They’re sick,” she’d admonish. “They’re suffering from rickets. They need the oil from pollack fish to help them get better.” Her own hair was dry and splitting, her fingernails cracking. Before my eyes, she was wasting away, too. But then she’d sing in a soft voice “Dondolari” or “Shagwa-poongnyon,” a bumper year of apples, and I’d be reminded all over again of the time I saw her do the fan dance.

  In March 1998, a week before my eleventh birthday, at night as we kept warm by the wood fire before bedtime, my father announced that he was going to China.

  As he spoke, images flashed across my mind of executed prisoners wilting on the posts after having been shot nine times. Images of the blood, of their frantic eyes … “No!” I finally screamed, cutting him off midsentence as he explained how he was getting in and out of China. “You can’t go. You’ll be killed.”

  Both eomeoni and abeoji crawled up beside me. They stroked my back and told me everything would be all right. “Lots of people are going to China,” eomeoni explained. “The border guards can be bribed.”

  “The neighbors and I have a plan,” abeoji cut in.

  I pulled myself into a tight ball and covered my ears with my hands. I started to rock back and forth on my haunches, humming to myself. I didn’t want to hear. But I did.

  “The neighbors and I are going to pay the guards to let us cross over the river at the lowest point, where it’s still frozen. One of the neighbors has done it before. We’re going to pay the same guards to let us come back a week later, just before spring thaw. It’s safe.”

  I rolled onto my back and looked up at him. “What are you going to do in China? Steal? Work for a Korean on his farm as a slave?”

  “No,” he said with a laugh.

  “I have my medals,” he went on, his voice lower. “While I don’t want to sell them, they’re made of precious metals. They should fetch enough won for me to start a business buying white rice, sugar, and oil, which I’ll bring back with me and sell here. I’m going to start trading goods back and forth.”

  “You agree to this?” I asked, looking to eomeoni.

  She nodded.

  “But it’s illegal!”

  “I also want to get you something special for your birthday … a cake … a candy … ,” he said, ignoring my statement. “No—a rice cake?”

  “We’ll get through this,” my mother added, leaning over and kissing my cheek. “Abeoji will be back in one week, promise.”

  “One week!” my father said. “Just one week.”

  When abeoji walked through the door, a wave of fresh, pine-scented air came, too, swirling around the room the way Sangchul’s voice did at the train station. His face was rosy, wind-touched, and his eyes sparkled as if he were a young man again.

  He lugged a large blue duffel bag. Like a child unwrapping a birthday present, eomeoni began pulling items out of the bag: white rice, a block of tofu, some dried fish, cabbage, peppers, sugar, oils … While she did this, abeoji reached under his coat and handed me a paper bag. “Happy birthday,” he whispered, ruffling my hair.

  He didn’t need to tell me what was in the bag. I knew. Rice cakes, sweetened and with sesame sprinkles, and a serving of mashed red beans.

  As I ate, my eyes moved up and down abeoji. He wore a new pair of black wool pants and a warm gray sweater underneath a new navy-blue wool coat with big gold buttons. Eomeoni held up a dress in soft yellow, like the color of a canary; it was a dress she would have worn to the military parade on the Day of the Sun.

  I woke then and patted down my bedding, hoping that it wasn’t a dream and that abeoji was lying beside me. Then I saw it, the ice inside the windowpane, the dull walls, and my mother’s bedding, blankets of which were scattered across the floor. Abeoji was not home.

  I crept out of bed and crawled to the wall where I had tacked a piece of paper. On the paper I had drawn squares, each of which represented a day of the week. I took my pencil, now a stub, and put an X through Monday. This was the fourth day abeoji was gone. He had left on Friday.

  I turned around, my stomach aching for food, and saw my mother sitting on her knees in the other room, her back facing me. She was mumbling words I couldn’t quite make out. I felt, despite her nearness, that she was very far away.

  “Eomeoni,” I said softly, trying to get her attention.

  I moved toward her on tiptoe until I was standing at her side. Her eyes were closed. Her features seemed softer, and her eyelashes glistened in the sun shining through the window. She looked as if she had been kissed by a cloud.

  A weak smile crossed her face.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, sitting down beside her.

  “I’m praying,” she said with her eyes still closed. “But shush.” She put her finger to her lips. “You can’t tell anyone.”

  “What does praying mean?”

  Eomeoni took my hands into hers. For the first time since we left Pyongyang, she felt warm. “Some people talk to a higher power, a universal power, an energy, where our ancestors go to live after they die,” she said. “That higher power listens and answers what we ask of it. We speak to that power in the form of prayers.”

  “Like asking Chilseong or shan-shin-ryong-nim to watch over us?”

  “How do you know about these things?” she said, opening one eye and looking at me.

  “Abeoji,” I answered. “What do you pray for?” Whatever this prayer thing was, it made her look as she did when we lived in Pyongyang: like a butterfly.

  “I pray for abeoji to be safe and to come home quickly,” she said, closing her eyes again.

  “I dreamed he came home,” I whispered, “with rice cakes and nice clothes and …” My voice trailed off. A knot had formed in my throat. I didn’t want to share my hopes and dreams, even with my mother. It seemed to me that as soon as I told anyone what I wanted, it was taken from me.

  “What is that?” I asked her, pointing to a bowl by the wall in which she had placed fresh water.

  My mother opened both her eyes this time. “Water is pure, and in offering it up to the power, we are showing it that we give to it, surrender, our most pure souls. The water represents us.”

  “Oh,” I exclaimed, dipping a finger into the water. “If we’re so clean, though, how come we get so dirty?”

  My mother started to giggle then, the first time she’d laughed in months.

  My mother and I did not speak of what could have happened to abeoji. We sat in silence at night, alone while together, listening to each other’s breathing. Abeoji’s absence lay like a heavy wool blanket between us that neither of us could lift. I looked to eomeoni’s hope as a light leading me down a dark tunnel.

  “Trust” was all she would whisper, as if in our silence I was speaking my worries to her. “Trust” was her answer, always, but I wasn’t quite sure whom I was supposed to trust.

  One morning after I awoke screaming from a nightmare in which I saw a strange white creature, half man, half monster, with fire for wings, I asked my mother to teach me how to pray.

  She placed my hands together and raised them until they were the level of my chest. “Close your eyes and then talk in your head to that universal power. Tell it your fears and ask for guidance.

  Chilseong and shan-shin-ryong-nim … , I began. Abeoji is lost. Can you bring him home? Eomeoni and I need him. I miss him. I …

  I stopped on the word I wanted to say next. It just hurt too much to think it. But somehow my mother knew and finished the sentence for me. “I love him, too.”

  As the days wore on, I repeated my prayer to Chilseong and shan-shin-ryong-nim over and over again, slowly and then more quickly, silently, methodically, much as I once did in school with the sayings of ou
r eternal leader, Kim Il-sung.

  On the longest day of the year, as mosquitoes and blackflies attacked me while I picked berries near the Gyeong-seong River with eomeoni, she said that she was going to visit her sister, Nampo, in Wonsan. “There is nothing left to sell,” she said in a low voice, sitting down on a large flat rock and dipping her toe into the water. I sat on the rock beside her. The frogs croaked around us.

  “For how long?” I asked as a woodpecker knocked at a nearby tree.

  “A week. Nampo’s husband is in the navy. She will have food.”

  “When do we leave?”

  “I want you to stay here,” she said after a long pause. Her voice was drawn and tired.

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. “You’re not leaving me.”

  “I’ll be gone only a few days.” She was fighting back tears. I could tell.

  “What are you not saying to me?” I demanded so harshly I regretted asking the question as soon as I spoke it.

  Eomeoni began to shake. I reached out and pulled her into my arms.

  “Nothing,” she said as I rocked her back and forth. “I’m keeping nothing from you. We need food, and Aunt will have it. I will be gone just a couple of days.”

  “Like abeoji,” I spat out. I was hot and angry again. I wanted to punch something, anything I could find, except eomeoni. I couldn’t let her leave me. I gripped the bottom of her shirt. “I’m coming with you no matter what,” I cried out as tears started to fall.

  It took a while to convince her I had to go with her. She kept shaking her head and saying, “No. It’s too dangerous to come with me.” But she wouldn’t tell me what those dangers were, so I pressed and pressed on, determined not to be left alone.

  Finally, she nodded and whispered yes.

  I stayed awake well into the night, listening to the crickets strumming their lullabies and the occasional hooting of an owl. I refused to close my eyes. Even when my mother went to the outhouse, I followed. I wanted to make sure she didn’t leave without me.

  I felt guilty. I was a bad son. But the truth was, I didn’t trust her.