Every Falling Star

by Sungju Lee

  “The afterlife,” she replied, “where there is no fear, no hunger, no sickness.”

  I was glad, as I bowed the customary three times, that Young-bum’s grandmother was going to that place.

  We returned to Young-bum’s house in Gyeong-seong, and just as all of us boys, who were now living there, were talking, Chulho showed up carrying a bouquet of wilting orange osmanthus, which he said he got from a smuggler crossing the Duman River. “For your grandmother’s grave,” he said, handing them to Young-bum. “I’m sorry they’re not white,” he said so politely I was startled for a moment. I had never heard Chulho be soft or kind before. “And these are also for you,” he continued, handing Young-bum a small white paper box.

  Perhaps surprised, too, at Chulho’s sudden gentleness, Young-bum opened the box slowly and with shaking hands, as if expecting something like a snake to pop out.

  When he peered in at the contents, his face opened into a wide grin. He squealed and jumped up and down.

  We huddled around him and looked, too. Inside were moon cakes.

  “Where did you get these?” I asked, stepping away.

  “In China, cakes like these are sold at bake shops,” he replied. “Can you believe it? The Chinese eat cake every day!”

  Young-bum passed around the box. We each picked out a moon cake to eat.

  “They have so much food in China they give rice with pork and chicken to their dogs to fatten them up to eat,” Chulho continued, sitting down and uncorking a bottle of sool that had been left over from Mi Shun’s house. He then started drinking it right from the bottle.

  “What are you going to do next?” Myeongchul asked, sitting down beside Chulho. Chulho passed him a cigarette, which Myeongchul lit and smoked.

  I looked on with disbelieving eyes. Boys don’t drink alcohol or smoke.

  Chulho shrugged. “I don’t know what I’ll do next,” he said, leaning back. “Mushroom season is over … What are you all going to do?”

  No one spoke.

  I sat down on the other side of Chulho. “Well … ,” I began slowly, my eyes circling the others. I wanted for one of them to jump in, but no one was volunteering. I took a deep breath. “Well, I guess, even though we don’t have any blood relationship, we’re brothers and family now …”

  Chulho tilted his head to the side to get a better look at me and then cocked an eyebrow. “Go on,” he said.

  “I guess … as brothers … we have to protect and trust one another and share everything, even a small piece of bread,” I continued, again looking into the eyes of the others to see if any of them, particularly Myeongchul, wanted to take over. “If one of us falls sick, we have to take care of him until he gets better,” I said. “If one of us is left alone somewhere, we have to find him. We will never fight against each other. These,” I finished, “are the rules.”

  “So you’re a gang?” Chulho said matter-of-factly.

  The others all nodded. I breathed a sigh of relief, for I had made up the rules on the spot, hoping everyone would agree.

  “Then I’m in,” Chulho said, thrusting his fist in front of him and into the middle of the circle we had formed. We all did the same until our knuckles were flush up against one another’s. “You need someone like me,” Chulho added. “Every gang has to have the wild card. The guy who doesn’t care whether he lives or dies.”

  “As the old Korean proverb says: We all scratch where one itches,” Myeongchul said.

  We laughed.

  Chulho passed the sool to Myeongchul, who took a long swig and then passed the bottle to Sangchul. When it got to me, I picked up the bottle and held it to my mouth.

  “Drink, drink,” Young-bum and Chulho chanted.

  I gingerly took a sip. The liquid burned my throat as it went down and made my head feel as if it were on fire. I felt for a moment like I was going to vomit.

  Chulho grinned. “The first time is always hard,” he said.

  “Like watching the first execution,” Young-bum had to remind me.

  “It gets easier,” Chulho said, taking the bottle back.

  As the bottle, and then another, made itself around the room that night, that hole inside of me seemed to fill up with something. I began to laugh, feeling carefree, like a butterfly flitting from one flower to another. For a bit, I didn’t feel so alone.

  My brothers and I drained the last two bottles of sool from Young-bum’s grandmother’s funeral. We saw the sun come up on the tail end of our day. I was staggering, slurring my words, and hugging my new brothers, not wanting to let them go or to surrender to sleep and find that the night had become day again, a gray day in which I burned inside not from sool but from knowing that my parents were gone and I was a kotjebi, a street boy with no home.

  We divided ourselves into two teams. Young-bum, Chulho, Mingook, and Unsik would cover the market, meaning they would steal food for us to eat or sell and also steal won. Sangchul, Myeongchul, and I would perform at the train station. Chulho actually volunteered for his group, announcing with a wicked smile that he had no moral issues about thievery and wasn’t particularly fond of the arts. “I prefer the art of perfecting me,” he said, puffing up his chest.

  I walked right up close and stared him down. “There are two rules: We don’t steal from children, and we don’t steal from old people. Got it?”

  Chulho opened his mouth to protest and then caught Young-bum’s cold, icy stare. I guess Young-bum wasn’t quite as hardened as I had thought.

  “Okay, okay,” Chulho said, putting his hands up in the air. “You win.”

  Our plan was to meet back at Young-bum’s house, making it our base of operation. I wanted to make sure we lived in the house as much as possible so brokers didn’t get it. The others were happy to not have to sleep outside anymore. The other part of our deal was that we shared everything. We pooled our goods and won together at the end of each day.

  Life unfolded. Or, rather, we existed for all of the fall and part of the winter. I guess we drifted like the snowbanks. We’d arrive back at the house at different times of the day and empty our bags and pockets into a yellow plastic washing bowl that Chulho had stolen from a woman with a baby. He shrugged when I started to lay into him about how we weren’t going to steal from children or old people. “She wasn’t old,” he said. Chulho liked to push boundaries—I had to give him that much.

  At first, when we needed to cook, we took turns. After about a week, Unsik took over. He had a knack for adding a pinch of salt in the right place, or a dried green radish somewhere else, to spruce up any dish, including corn rice. As he cooked, he hummed the revolutionary song “Red Flag.”

  There are a few things about boys being left on their own that I came to discover during those months. One: With no adult around to lecture us, we could pretty much get away with anything. Chulho and, well, all of us, started to chain-smoke. Chulho also got us talking about things we’d like to do with older women. I’d never heard such talk before, so I blushed in the beginning and turned away. But as the alcohol Chulho said we had to have every day to make it through the winter made its way through my veins, I loosened up and listened.

  Sool was hard to steal because the merchants hid it in boxes, so we used either the won we earned performing or the won that Young-bum and the market crew stole to buy alcohol. We stole most of our food, from twisted bread sticks to dububab to candy. These foods became pretty much our steady diet during the coldest months so that Unsik didn’t have to lug water from the river every night to cook.

  Chulho was always the last to fall asleep and the hardest to wake in the mornings. We’d be ready to go, and he’d still be snoring, drooling on his mat, and mumbling women’s names.

  Young-bum, however, had nightmares, screaming into the night, often calling out for his grandmother. One time, he even thought she was standing in the room, watching over us, holding a white magnolia, welcoming him to the spirit world. “I’m going to die! I’m going to die!” he woke up yelling.

&n
bsp; I settled him down, eventually convincing him that what he’d had was a fear dream. You know, the kind you have in which your worst fears seem like omens of what’s to come. But these were just his mind playing tricks on him, I told him. “I have fear dreams several times a day in which I am sure my parents are dead, their executions watched over by some school class in another city. Then I wake up from my daydream or night dream and tell myself: fear dream. You had a night fear dream … but same thing. Not real. These are in your mind. Now, dreams that are premonitions of things to come, these are from somewhere else … not your mind … like a voice in your head telling you not to go down a certain alleyway.”

  I think Young-bum got it. But he still had nightmares.

  When Myeongchul got drunk, he became even chattier, quoting Korean proverbs and acting out different characters, keeping us all in stiches.

  Mingook, who was a quiet guy to begin with, became even more so. Occasionally, though, he’d recite sayings from Kim Il-sung. One night, I hit him on the back of the head with the palm of my hand to get him to stop. “I’m just not sure it’s relevant now to keep saying stuff like ‘I vow to adopt the communist look, revolutionary work methods, and people-oriented work style.’”

  I think he got what I was saying, because he stopped.

  Sangchul played games, like the food-fantasy game my father had taught me, even with just himself. “I am thinking of candy, sugar-melting-in-my-mouth candy, shaped like flowers … from a wedding … ,” he would say. I told him that I did that, too, and that my favorite was a yellow tulip candy.

  Unsik became like our housemother. Young-bum called him a jultagi, a street boy who stole clothes, mostly from people’s clotheslines. He made sure we were always dressed warmly. He also swept and kept things as clean as he could. Before the deep-freeze days of winter came, he’d awake early in the morning and trudge his way through the snowbanks to the river, where he collected water in that plastic yellow laundry bowl he’d use to wash whatever dishes needed cleaning.

  But no matter how well Unsik looked after the place, one thing about boys living together in a confined space with no adults hollering at them to bathe is that they also stink. And stinky boys don’t smell it on themselves or on one another.

  Mi Shun came to tell us she was leaving Shang-gi-ryeong in search of a distant relative in another town who she hoped had food. She stepped into the house, plugged her nose, and then immediately left. Shivering outside, she told Young-bum that we didn’t need to worry about brokers stealing her mother’s place. It reeked of onions, cigarette smoke, stale alcohol, and our foul body odor. She said she’d never visit again unless we found a way to wash our bodies and the house. But even Chulho, who one night when drunk admitted he had a crush on Young-bum’s aunt, wasn’t that inspired to change. For one, there was no hot water. We’d have to buy extra wood to heat enough water for all of us to have a bath. Chulho would rather stay dirty than spend his extra cash on wood instead of sool.

  ¤ ¤ ¤

  Although we never said so formally, it was understood that we were no longer celebrating holidays, like the Day of the Sun or our birthdays. I thought it was just plain economical to forget, not having to buy any eggs or pork or to skip a day making money to party. But the truth was that I wanted to forget what my life had been like before I’d become a kotjebi.

  So it was just a few weeks after the winter solstice, when those short days were dark to begin with, when Young-bum and I figured we actually were bringing home less than was usual, even taking into consideration that most of the merchants who lived outside Gyeong-seong, like the fish sellers, were no longer coming to the market and there was little produce left to sell.

  “We should still have more,” I said.

  “I think someone is stealing,” Young-bum said out loud what I was thinking. “I think it’s Chulho,” he added. “He disappears every day without telling me where he’s going.”

  I said nothing. But I was playing Chulho’s own words over and over again in my head: Every gang needs a wild card. My gut said it was him, too.

  “Why don’t you skip performing for a few days and spy on him?” Young-bum suggested.

  I nodded. I had to catch a thief.

  When I awoke at dawn, I didn’t get up. I moaned and pulled my dirty wool blanket over my face. When I heard the footsteps and the voices of the others fade down the road, I slipped out from underneath my covers and ran through the fields until I reached the market.

  As soon as I entered, I grabbed a wide-rimmed hat off an old beggar man, promising to give it back. I then trailed Chulho, biting my lip to stop myself from laughing as I watched him flirt with the female vendors. What the women couldn’t see, but I could, was a hungover Chulho, standing on wobbly legs, sneaking a hand onto a table and grabbing whatever items were on display that he could hold. As the women batted their eyelashes and stuck their hips out toward Chulho, giggling and blushing from his attention, he’d stuff the items into his bag.

  Nothing so far seemed out of sorts.

  Until midday.

  With that Chulho swagger of his, he grabbed some fried tofu off a tray a woman was carrying and sauntered right out of the market. I followed at a distance, ducking in behind the corners of buildings whenever he looked back. He walked clear through town until he stopped in front of a house with boarded-up windows. He knocked three times and waited. The door swung open and he stepped inside.

  I had to see for myself what was going on, so I sneaked up to the building and found a small hole between the boards on one of the windows.

  At first, the lighting inside was so dim I saw nothing but the shadows of moving people. Then, as my eyes adjusted, I saw tiny candles set in jars on the floor. A woman sashayed in front of me and I leaped back in shock. But she didn’t notice me. I looked in the window again. The woman was about my mother’s age, wearing dark gray slacks and an oversize black wool sweater that had a big tear in the back. Her arms and hands moved like birds’ wings. She flitted around like a swallow. She eventually sat down in front of another woman, who began to pick lice out of her hair.

  Then I heard Chulho talking to another woman, who had an older, crinkly voice, like leaves being rubbed together. I couldn’t see him, and I strained to hear the conversation as if it were taking place in another room.

  A woman stepped toward the front door to leave. I ducked down behind a garbage bin so she couldn’t see me. As she opened the door, a gust of wind scented with some heavy perfume, a body oil maybe, moved out and hit me.

  All I could think as I watched her move down the street was how different a house full of girls was from our house full of boys.

  I skulked back to the train station, my insides feeling like sour milk with a lemon squirted over the top. I was angry. I was hurt. Most of all, I was confused. Someone was stealing from us. Chulho was up to something. A knot in my stomach curled its way up, strangling my throat.

  But it was not Chulho who was stealing. That night and the nights that followed, everything I watched him steal he plopped down in that plastic yellow laundry basket. In fact, he was stealing more food for us than anyone else.

  Finally, after following Chulho several times to the women’s house, I told Young-bum, “He’s not stealing, but he’s doing something … Something’s not right, I can feel it,” I said.

  “Whatever it is, he’ll come clean about it one of these days. You know him,” Young-bum said with a sigh. “Chulho’s always talking to someone, digging up some piece of information.”

  Young-bum was right. I had to give it to Chulho; we knew more about what was going on in Joseon through him than through anyone else.

  “We still have a thief among us,” Young-bum continued.

  So I ditched following Chulho and started trailing Unsik. And sure enough, he was the one. He pilfered some fresh buns from the lady who on my first day in the market had told me I was kotjebi. Unsik never turned them in.

  After a few days of watching him steal st
uff he never brought home, I decided to confront him.

  I followed him as he sidled out of the market with a handful of twisted bread, not stopping until he reached a low bridge on the far side of the train station. As some barefooted children looked on with hungry eyes, Unsik ate bread stick after bread stick. I stepped out from the shadows as he was licking his fingers clean.

  “I’m sorry,” he said in a quivering voice as I gripped him tight around the throat. Urine started seeping through his pants. “I just … I was so hungry,” he choked out.

  “We have a pact!” I yelled. I punched him hard in the face. He fell to the ground, spitting up blood. He then stared up at me with desperate, frightened eyes.

  I heard a familiar voice call my name and then the sound of feet running up behind me. “Stop,” Chulho said.

  I didn’t care. All I saw in front of me was a thief.

  I was on fire. A fury burned inside me, making me perspire despite the cold weather. I ripped off my shirt to cool down, and then I lunged toward Unsik to kick him.

  Hands grabbed my arms and pulled me back before I could. “If we fight against each other, we weaken our link,” Chulho hissed right into my ear.

  I quickly spun around, raised my fist to punch Chulho, ready to kill him if I had to because he, too, was doing something wrong, and then stopped.

  It wasn’t Chulho at all, but Young-bum. He looked tired and worn, like the tattered bike tire some of the children now held. They were staring wide-eyed at me. One little girl in a dirty dress with sunflowers on it had a slim, open wound on her cheek, as if a knife had been swiped at her face.