by Sungju Lee
The woman who had given me the bun and told me I was kotjebi was at the same spot.
I started to move toward her, hoping now that my swelling had gone down a bit, she wouldn’t recognize me. As my luck would have it, just as I reached her table, another woman approached her to buy some eggs. I snuck around the back as the two women argued over the price. I lifted the netting with the flies gripping the top, grabbed three buns, and stuffed them into the fold of my shirt.
I was nearly back to the cardboard box on the ground when I felt a heavy hand come down on my back, nearly knocking the wind out of me. The hand spun me around quickly, making me feel dizzy. I looked up and into the cold stare of a middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair. He wrapped his long crooked fingers around my throat. “Put them back,” he said, sticking his foul-smelling mouth up close to my face.
I shook my head no.
His fingers dug hard into my flesh, and I felt my feet lifting off the ground. I saw stars and moving lights, and I began to gag. I heard the sound of running feet and then saw the female vendor’s face and her wild, bloodshot eyes. She slapped at me with her calloused hands, ripping into my bare skin. I knew I was about to black out from lack of air when all of a sudden a force grew up from inside me. I saw myself not in the market but facing my tae kwon do master.
I kicked the man in his groin and then butted his head hard against mine. He tumbled backward, letting go of me as he fell to the ground. I started to trip, too, but I quickly found my footing, jumped up, and kicked the woman in the stomach. She fell backward and to the ground, too.
I then walked out of the market toward Ha-myeon Bridge, looking back as I did to make sure I wasn’t being followed.
While I held a damp cloth, which I had dipped in the river, on the swollen nose I got from head-butting the man, Young-bum discussed strategies for my stealing the next time around. The first rule was to never return to the same safe spot, which I had done when I went back to the cardboard box. He criticized me. “Merchants know where you’re headed when you do that. Go toward the train station. After you steal, walk normally, as if you haven’t done anything wrong, and surround yourself with lots of people.”
As we talked, another idea came to me, which I told Young-bum after he finished laying into me about my mistakes.
The next day, when we headed to the market, we decided to try it to see if it would work.
At midmorning, when the market was at its busiest, Young-bum and I sauntered up close behind a woman who had a bag slung over her shoulder. Young-bum cut a hole in the bottom of her sack—not on the side, as he had been doing. The contents of the woman’s bag fell into his own, contents that included not just her wallet or small purse but also small packages of food. I then slipped a brick into the woman’s bag and fastened the fabric back together with safety pins ever so carefully so she wouldn’t feel any pressure and catch me in the act. The victim, who was talking to a vendor, didn’t even catch on that she’d been robbed.
“It works,” I whispered as we crossed Ha-myeon Bridge. I felt both pride as well as sadness at our success, for I was now a thief, having stolen not just a piece of bread but won.
Young-bum glowed like the sun. “It really does! Now I can take twice as much, if not three or four times more than I ever could before. We’ll be rich!” he said, jumping up and down as I had done at my birthday parties in Pyongyang when eomeoni served cake. “We can eat the food and sell what we don’t need. You’re brilliant!”
“So … we’re a team, then?” I asked, holding my hand out for him to shake.
“We’re a team,” he said, taking it.
Every evening for the next few months, after Young-bum and I had finished at the market, he returned to his home to feed his grandmother. I went to my own house to check in, hoping—no, daydreaming—that when I opened the door, eomeoni would be there, praying over her bowl of fresh well water. Every day, though, I’d find the house empty, growing lonelier, like an abandoned amusement park, hollow and haunted like some of the people I’d see in the market. The house was collecting dust, cobwebs, a family of field mice, and lots of cockroaches.
Every day, Young-bum and I stole twisted bread sticks, candies, dububab, and won. With the won, we bought his grandmother’s medicine and then white rice and soybean paste, which he would cook into meals for his grandmother. With all the food she was now eating and the proper doses of medicine she was getting, her health slowly improved. By the start of harvest season, she started spending her days sitting up, and soon she was standing. By the middle of the fall, she’d even awake before Young-bum and me and prepare us a meal of corn rice and vegetable porridge. As we’d eat, she’d tell us stories about what Joseon was like before Kim Il-sung. “It was a terrible time when the Japanese made slaves of us all. If you think now is tough … ,” she would always say, ending her sentence by clicking her tongue: “Tsk, tsk.” While she didn’t come right out and say it, Young-bum and I both knew she was saying we should bear our hardships the way our eternal leader had borne his. Hunker down like Kim Il-sung did in the Learning Journey of a Thousand Miles.
Young-bum and I pretended to listen, but we’d heard enough of these stories in school. “The past doesn’t feed us,” Young-bum would say as we’d walk the road to the market.
I realized after spending nearly all my time with Young-bum that when he had chanted for the prisoners to be executed, he wasn’t doing so because he believed they should be killed. He was putting on a show so the principal and the so-nyon-dan manager wouldn’t think he was a criminal, too. Truth: I don’t think Young-bum believed in anything anymore, least of all in Joseon. He believed in survival, plain and simple. His grandmother’s and his own.
I was in the middle somewhere between them, trying to find my way out of a murky bog, no longer believing in a lot that our eternal leader, his son, or our country had ever told me, but also not wanting to believe yet that life was the survival of the strongest street boy. I wanted to believe in my mother’s prayer bowl, in Chilseong, shan-shin-ryong-nim … that something higher and good was also at play.
The harvest moon came and went. As the cooler weather moved around us, Young-bum and I began to worry about the winter. We both felt we should try to steal more money and more vegetables to store in his grandmother’s underground cooler, as well as blankets and firewood. Young-bum suggested we pick the pockets of passengers at the train station, from the few people who still had jobs and earned won. “The people working will certainly have more won than those poor women at the market,” he said. “We should try.”
At first, I resisted the idea, fearful of running into a kotjebi gang, like the one I’d watched on my very first day in the market. I didn’t want to get beat up as Young-bum had.
“I’m afraid, too,” Young-bum replied when I voiced my concern. “My old gang, the Jjacdari-pa, worked out of the train station, and yeah, if they saw me there stealing, they’d try to kill me. They’ve moved on to another city, though—at least, the last I heard. I think we’re safe. I promise if I see any of my former gang members …”
I had stopped listening. Something was playing over and over again in my mind. “Young-bum,” I finally interrupted him, “what do you think about you and me joining a gang? I mean, if we formed our own gang, found some other kotjebi, and made our own rules, then we’d be in control.”
Young-bum looked at me as if it were Kim Il-sung’s birthday and pork was being rationed out to everyone. He patted me on the back. “Great idea. I may even know the guys who can do this with us,” he said with a grin.
We headed straight to the train station’s waiting room. There were about two hundred people, true enough, but most of them were degeori, merchants who sold their goods from town to town, and other kotjebi. The merchants were just as poor as we were, and we kotjebi gave each other the evil eye, hoping to intimidate one another. A few of the harder, bigger kotjebi belted their fists into the palms of their hands, indicating they wanted to fight Young-
bum and me. They’d make a move as if they were about to pounce on us, but then the police would arrive to check the room. The policemen’s ice-cold eyes would linger on each kotjebi. While no words were exchanged, I knew what the police were thinking: Try anything, steal, fight … and off to the guhoso you will go.
As morning slipped its way into the afternoon, Young-bum’s patience began to wear. He started to pace back and forth and sigh. Finally, he took a deep breath and bravely approached one of the police officers, asking when the train was due in. The officer looked away, wanting nothing to do with him, which was better than his wanting to arrest Young-bum.
Young-bum pressed on, however, explaining that he was waiting for his grandmother, who was coming in on the next train. “I’m not like these other boys,” Young-bum said to the man, his eyes moving around the room. “I think they’re kotjebi,” he whispered, and then scrunched up his face, as if he had just eaten something sour. “I just want to see my grandmother and take her to my mother, who is sick.”
“You’ll have a long wait,” the officer snapped, and then stormed off without giving an explanation.
We were still waiting when the room grew darker and the cream marble floor became streaked in long shadows. Twilight had begun to wrap itself around us.
I was frustrated now, too, with no food or money to show for our day.
Just as I was about to drag Young-bum out of there and to the market to at least find some bread sticks for dinner, the policeman with whom Young-bum had spoken moved to the center of the room. He cupped his hands together to act as a bullhorn and announced that the train wasn’t coming today. “There’s no electricity,” he said. “The train is stuck somewhere between Kimchaek and Gilju.”
I kicked Young-bum hard in the shin. “This was such a bad idea,” I said with a scowl, watching as the crowd of kotjebi began to disperse. If we didn’t hurry, they’d get to the market before us and steal whatever was still out, leaving us and Young-bum’s grandmother hungry.
We took a shortcut, heading along the platform to try to get to the market before the other kotjebi. As we neared the end, I heard “The sound of thunder at Jong-Il peak” lines from the Boy General song, sung by that voice with the cascading falsetto that I knew belonged to Sangchul.
Young-bum and I pushed our way through the crowd that had gathered around Sangchul on the grassy knoll at the end of the platform, a crowd full of odors of unclean clothes, hair, and bodies. When we reached the front, we could see Sangchul standing in the middle of this circle of people. Mingook and two boys I recognized from our class but whose names I didn’t know were collecting won and food from the audience.
“That’s Myeongchul and Unsik,” Young-bum whispered to me. “Sangchul and Myeongchul are street performers. They put on plays and sing songs. Myeongchul is the actor. He won competitions in theater.”
“Did you know they were here?”
“I thought they might be here,” he hummed. He then turned, started tapping his foot, and looked at me with wide eyes.
“Are we thinking the same thing?” I asked.
“I hope so,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.
“Here’s our gang!”
The six of us sat on the ground with our backs against the chipped stone wall, facing the empty platform. We had just gone to the market with the money they’d earned performing and bought a dinner of noodles made from corn as well as some food for Young-bum’s grandmother.
Night had now fallen, and all around us were drunken men and a few women. The men would shout at one another, slurring their words. The women skulked around and asked in hushed voices: “Anyone want a nightflower? A nightflower?”
I made a mental note to ask Young-bum what nightflower meant, as this was the second time I’d heard the word.
Sangchul and the others didn’t seem to care about the chaos around them. We began to talk about our parents. Those who hadn’t died were missing, having gone in search of food like my mother and father. The boys had found a way to earn enough money to buy food by performing on the street. Myeongchul, who took over the talking from Sangchul, explained that he put on skits based on Kim Il-sung’s books. After Myeongchul performed, Sangchul would sing, usually partisan songs such as “We Are Kid Scouts.”
“We are brave because we’re kid scouts.
Even though there are storms out there blocking us, we are brave.
We pay back our enemies, a thousand times …”
We all sang together.
Mingook and Unsik were the heavies, as Myeongchul described them, collecting money from the spectators. The boys all slept at the train station in the waiting room when it was really cold or outside when it was warmer.
“Chulho thinks our fathers are stuck in China,” Myeongchul said.
“Chulho thinks they’ll come back in the winter,” Sangchul jumped in, “when the river turns to ice and it’s too cold for the guards to be out for long and our parents can run across the river, rather than swim.”
Chulho, Chulho, Chulho. He might not have been there in person, but he sure didn’t feel that far away, either. “Where is the infamous Chulho?” I finally cut in.
“Ah, he’s mushroom hunting,” Myeongchul said with a laugh. “He’s somewhere in the hills, picking the government’s prized mushrooms and selling them to smugglers who take them into China to sell. Chulho has seen and done it all.”
“Chulho told us that most adults now need permits to take trains, even for single stops, and the government isn’t giving out many anymore,” Sangchul added. “Kids, of course, have to be with their parents and have their birth certificates on them all the time to prove that their parents really are their parents. So I figure my parents are stuck right where they are, waiting for permits.”
“Yeah,” I said wistfully, looking off into the flames of a fire that some men were tending near the grassy knoll where Sangchul sang earlier in the day. “I bet my mom is waiting for a permit.” I could see her now in my mind’s eye, stuck in Wonsan with Aunt Nampo, waiting to return to me. Instead of focusing on my own suffering, I realized for the first time that eomeoni must be worried sick about me.
I left Young-bum and the others as they arranged to meet again the next day and ran at full speed back to my house, making a list as I went of all the chores I wanted to do, including sweeping the cobwebs away and scrubbing the dust that had caked the floor. I’d spend the night, and in the morning I would wash the few remaining blankets and sheets. When eomeoni returned, the house would sparkle. I wanted her to be proud of me.
¤ ¤ ¤
When I turned the corner and my house came into view, I stopped. There was a light streaming out from the front window. My hands started to shake, and my heart pounded. “Eomeoni and abeoji are home!” I exclaimed out loud.
I crept toward the door, staring at the light, afraid that if I looked away, I’d discover it to be just a dream.
As I stepped into the house, a gust of warm air from the cooking fire rolled over me. “Eomeoni?” I called out.
Silence.
I looked around the room, at blankets I didn’t recognize piled in one corner, tin bowls we didn’t have scattered on top of a new table and shoes lined up on the mat, including several pairs of men’s sneakers and two pairs of women’s slippers. I blinked and felt so happy inside. “My parents are home, and they’ve come with lots of new things.”
When I opened my eyes, though, instead of seeing eomeoni and abeoji, I was staring at the bewildered faces of two men, one my father’s age, the other my grandfather’s age. A middle-aged woman emerged from the back room, gripping hard the hands of two small children, a girl and a boy. In their free hands, each child was holding a children’s story written by Kim Il-sung.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
“Who are you?” the older man with graying hair said, taking a giant step toward me. His tone of voice was forceful but not unkind.
“I—I—I live here,” I stammered.
&nbs
p; The man replied, “Son, this house is ours. We bought it.”
I clenched my fists and bit my lip to stop myself from crying. “This is my house,” I said. “I …” I stopped suddenly. There was no more echo. The house now had things—but not my family’s things. “Where are my family’s belongings?” I asked.
“There wasn’t much,” the woman said in a sympathetic voice.
“But where are those few things?” I demanded.
“They’ve been sold,” the older man said.
“You sold my things!” I exclaimed. My mind ran over all the items that were special, that I wanted, including my mother’s wedding chest and her photographs.
“Where?” I said, my voice now hoarse. “Where were they sold?” Eomeoni’s prayer bowl. I wanted that, too. And her bedding. It might still smell like her. Thoughts crashed into my mind like metal shovels hitting concrete.
“We don’t know,” the older man continued. “The binjibpali took it all away.”
“Binjibpali?” I asked, puzzled. I’d never heard that word before, like kotjebi and nightflower.
“The broker said that it was his house and that the items belonged to him. Binjibpali is a person who finds empty houses like this and then sells them,” the woman explained. “But in this case, the man said this was his house.”
I looked down. I hadn’t done a good job at holding back my tears. They now stained my shirt, Young-bum’s white button-down shirt that once had been his school uniform. “You have to get out,” I said under my breath. “My parents are coming home soon. I want to clean for them.”
The younger man now moved toward me. “No,” he said sternly. His speech was spitting, like Chulho’s. I stepped back from the force.
“We’re not leaving.” He faced me squarely, clenching his fists. “This is not your house, not anymore. We bought it from the owners. Now get out. And pretend you never even came here.”
“I can’t do that,” I said, looking pleadingly into his eyes, hoping that I could get through to this man that this was my house.