Every Falling Star

by Sungju Lee

  My entire body trembled. “We made a pact,” Young-bum continued. “We would never fight against each other, no matter what.”

  Young-bum let go of me and helped Unsik up.

  “I know what I did was wrong,” Unsik said, stepping in close, tears streaming down his face. “I won’t do it ever again. Can we start over?”

  I said nothing.

  “Being on our own makes me think strange things sometimes … not be myself,” Young-bum said in a quiet voice. “Did you know I even wondered … when we had nothing to eat for several days in a row … I wondered what it would be like to eat a dead person?”

  Young-bum started to cry now, too.

  I just stared out into nothing.

  What I didn’t tell him was that I had actually wondered this as well.

  On his way back to the house, Chulho had bought two bottles of sool with won that Sangchul had earned singing. When Chulho walked in through the front door, he raised the bottles high over his head and announced we needed a pick-me-up.

  As we drank, we were eerily silent, as if the thick cloud that hung over us had swallowed our voices. At one point, Chulho came clean. He told us that he was having meetings with an old woman who wanted us to sell nightflowers for her. “You know—women, to men, for sex,” he said to me. Finally, I got my definition of nightflower: a prostitute. “It’s illegal to sell and buy sex, and, well, I’m not sure how I feel about it. That’s why I didn’t tell you. The old woman wants us to go to the train station and find men for the women and bring them back,” Chulho explained. “But the more I talked to her, the more I came to understand that the women she was selling were just poor, hungry mothers trying to feed their kids.

  “So I get it now,” he continued, looking at me. “These women could be our own mothers somewhere.”

  “Even you have a moral compass?” Young-bum said with a grin, punching him playfully on the shoulder.

  Any other night I would have laughed, thinking that Chulho actually had a human side. But not this evening.

  We all fell silent again. I was angry at Unsik, at Chulho for taking so long to tell us about these meetings, and also at myself for reacting the way I did. I could have killed Unsik, that much I knew for a fact. Wind trickled in through the gaps between the window and the wall. I felt it calling me, so I decided to sleep outside.

  I made my way with my blankets to a clearing near the river. I wanted to be alone. But as I sat down on a large, dry rock and wrapped the blankets around me, I heard the sound of approaching feet. I turned to see that the others had all followed me.

  “Can we join you?” Young-bum asked in a timid voice.

  “Why not?” I snapped. “As long as you’re quiet. I want to sleep.”

  I lay down on my back, my hands behind my head. I strained to find the biggest and brightest star, which was low in the winter sky. When some clouds finally moved and Ursa Major came into view, my mind drifted back to Pyongyang. My anger lifted a bit, and in its place was a burning sadness.

  “When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a general in the army,” I said out loud. “That dream seems now like it belonged to a different life, one that I never really lived.”

  After a long silence, Young-bum said, “I wanted to be a truck driver, so I could visit all the cities and get rich.”

  “I wanted to be a singer for our great leader, Kim Il-sung,” Sangchul said.

  “I wanted to be a professional marathon runner and advertise my country to the world,” Mingook said next.

  “You may not believe this,” Chulho began, “but I wanted to be a party leader. A big party leader. Head of the party for Gyeong-seong.”

  I stifled a laugh. Oddly enough, I could see Chulho as a party leader.

  “My dream was to become an actor, in case you didn’t know,” Myeongchul said. We all jumped on him. Of course we knew. “Stop,” he eventually called out. “I’m serious. I wanted to be the next Gil-nam Lee, the action hero in the movie Order 027. The next big Joseon action hero. I still do and will be,” he said. “Failure is the mother of success, after all.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Stick to radio, since you’re not that handsome,” Unsik chimed in. “Even I’m a better-looking guy, and that’s not saying much.”

  The latter was kind of true. Unsik had a big nose and a round face. Myeongchul had a nose that was flat. His face was long, like a green pepper, and his eyes were small, staring out into the world like the black buttons on my father’s winter coat.

  “What did you want to be?” I asked Unsik.

  “I don’t know,” he said wistfully after a long pause, his voice suddenly sad. “I liked math, I guess. But I … you know … I knew I’d finish high school, join the army, serve my mandatory time there, then go and work where the government sent me. I didn’t really have any dreams. Just things like math and doing experiments in the science lab.”

  “I liked math, too,” I said in a quiet voice. “Maybe we have more in common than we think.”

  “I miss my parents,” he then said.

  The cloud swallowed us again.

  I kept staring at the brightest star, viewing it not so much on this night as a beacon, something I wanted to believe would lead me out of this dark tunnel, but instead as a place I’d rather be. As my teeth started to chatter and my body shook from the cold, I decided to go back into the house. “Anywhere but here,” I whispered as I got up to leave. “I wish we had been born anywhere but here.”

  That night I dreamed of Pyongyang.

  I entered the front gates of Mangyeongdae Yuheejang. I reached out to the sides as if I were a star and grabbed my parents’ hands: eomeoni’s to the right, abeoji’s to the left. “High,” I shouted. “Swing me high.” And they did.

  I heard the laughter of children on the roller coaster as it swooped down and around me.

  Abeoji, with a wide smile, handed me a small paper bag of stale bread. I called out to the swans on the Daedong River. A black swan with bloodred eyes skirted closer than the white swans I wanted to feed and ate the bread, catching the pieces in the air before they even landed in the water.

  Then I wasn’t at the amusement park anymore. It was winter. I was panting from sledding. My cheeks were red and chapped from the biting wind; my hands and feet numb from the cold. Eomeoni tore off my mittens and wrapped my frozen fingers in hers.

  “I made rice cookies,” she whispered.

  In my dream, I was back in my apartment in Pyongyang, which was filled with the aroma of sesame.

  “We need to move,” Young-bum said. It was midwinter 1999, nearly a year after my father had left for China. I thought we needed to leave Gyeong-seong, too, but had not brought it up with Young-bum or any of the others. If we left, Young-bum would lose his house. Brokers would take it—that was almost a certainty. I wanted the decision to leave to come from Young-bum and from him alone.

  But the truth was, we were struggling.

  Kotjebi from all over the country had flocked to Gyeong-seong, like migrating geese. But unlike migrating birds that traveled to warmer climates in the winter, including as far away as New Zealand, the kotjebi’s internal radar was slightly off. These hungry boys thought Gyeong-seong was the answer, not realizing we likely had even less than they had where they came from. Now we were all competing for very limited resources, and the newer the kotjebi, the better they seemed to do. Mostly it was because the merchants knew who we were, all of us. When they saw any of us come into the market, they would hide their goods. It was getting harder and harder for us to steal, so we had to rely more and more on the money we made performing.

  The problem with this was that Myeongchul was running out of ideas for plays he could put on. Sure, there was no shortage of stories to choose from: Kim Il-sung’s childhood tests showcasing his physical and emotional strength; his love and devotion to his mother, Kang Ban-sok; and his overthrow of the Japanese colonialists. Myeongchul, however, had been at the train station for more than a ye
ar now. He had to repeat skits, and his audiences were getting bored, drifting over to watch the new kotjebi.

  Trying to keep the spectators’ interests alive, Unsik, Sangchul, and I wrote some original material. In one skit, Myeongchul plays the hero who saves the audience from villains, which were played by Unsik and me. Myeongchul was like Boy General, swooping in on his horse, a long stick, flailing his sword, also a long stick. The play started when Unsik whistled, because he could whistle louder than any train to get people’s attention. And we had that. For about a week. Then the audience moved downstream to watch the newer talent.

  The kotjebi gangs streaming into the market, some coming from as far away as Hamhung, were so desperate for food that they would fight anyone for it. Young-bum was strong. He could look after himself when he faced foes. And Unsik and Mingook were fast. They could escape easy enough when another kotjebi pulled out a chain or a broken bottle. But Chulho had a lot of puffed-up bravado inside him. He instigated a lot of fights, and he was always nursing a sliced-open side or a knife wound on his hand as a result.

  “If we don’t move, Chulho’s going to get killed,” said Young-bum, as if telling me something I didn’t know. “Let’s head north, spend a few weeks in a town or city before moving on to another,” he suggested.

  I nodded. The others agreed, too.

  We’d start in Cheongjin, the provincial capital of Hamgyeongbukdo, the third-biggest city in Joseon. Our plan was to stow away on one of the coal trains just as it was leaving the Shang-gi-ryeong station.

  We all helped Young-bum nail planks of wood across the doors and windows of his house, in the hopes that if we made the place look as if it were falling down, it might keep the brokers away while we were gone. I wasn’t optimistic it would work, but it was worth a try.

  When night fell, we ate dububab. Young-bum was quiet as he chugged a bottle of sool on his own and looked around his house for the last time.

  “We’ll be back,” I tried to reassure him.

  As I said this, I made a vow to myself that when we returned to Gyeong-seong, I would reclaim not only Young-bum’s house but also my own house and then clean it for my mother.

  Boarding the coal train was not as hard as I’d expected. It was a new moon, for one, and a cloudy night. So it was dark, almost pitch-black. There was also no wind and, well, little noise other than my racing heartbeat and the sound of us boys breathing. For some reason, that kind of scared me, that and there being so few people milling about, including kotjebi. It was a night like the one when I arrived in Shang-gi-ryeong. If I hadn’t been with my brothers, I might have been a bit scared of yu-ryeong.

  We climbed up the ladder and then hid under the coal.

  I only looked up when I felt the train reach its full speed. Then I sat up, spread my arms out to the side as if I were a bird, and exhaled. We were moving through the mountains, north, where the air was even fresher than in Gyeong-seong.

  We arrived in Ranam station on the outskirts of Cheongjin looking as black as the night, our skin, hair, and clothes covered in coal dust. Our hair was so matted with the stuff that Unsik suggested we steal a pair of scissors, cut off all our hair, and then use Young-bum’s razor to shave the rest. We, indeed, looked as if we’d just been dug out of graves, but I thought of the people I’d seen at the train stations on my way to Gyeong-seong from Pyongyang: the old people and children with frizzy hair and bald patches. I told Unsik I’d rather walk around looking like death itself than cut my hair. “I’m still alive and healthy,” I told him. “So until I get sick and lose my hair without the use of any scissors, I’d like to keep what I have.” I vowed then and there that if I ever got the opportunity to live in a house again where there was a bath, I would never be dirty again.

  The Ranam train station was full of men, some unloading the train, others milling about drinking sool. I guessed that the latter were too out of it to really notice us. Or maybe they’d seen kids like us before and didn’t care anymore. Either way, no one seemed to notice when we climbed down off the coal train and slunk through the station, looking for the exit.

  We headed into town and in the direction, I hoped, of the coast, where, despite the cold weather, if we reached the water, I was going for a swim.

  We walked and walked, meeting no one until shortly after dawn, when we came upon two old women pushing a cart of dried mackerel. Cheongjin, the women with sea-wrinkled faces told Chulho, had four open-air markets: Ranam, Pohwang, Sunam, and Songpyeong. “Ranam Market is just around the corner,” one of the women said, grabbing my arm and pulling me down the street, leaving the boys and the other woman to push the cart. When we turned the corner, my breath was knocked out of me. The market stretched out before me for as far as I could see. There were so many people, even at this early hour, it could have been Parade Day in Pyongyang.

  “Let’s explore,” Chulho said, catching up to me and then taking off.

  I waded into the market behind him, trying not to get distracted by the colors and smells, studying which vendors sold what foods and, more important, locating the kotjebi gangs that my brothers and I needed to avoid.

  For more than eight hours I meandered through the market, stealing candies and twisted bread. Chulho and Young-bum, using the double-razor-brick trick, got a few purses, too.

  As the sun finally began to set, streaking the sky in pale pink ribbons, the boys and I met up again where we first entered the market. We needed to find somewhere to sleep that was warm. We were heading down the road, back in the direction of the train station, when we ran right into another kotjebi gang: boys older than us, dirtier, more confident and more sure-footed. I could tell that just by the way they stood facing us.

  “Who are you?” the tallest of the boys asked, stepping toward us.

  My brothers and I looked at one another and shrugged. None of us knew who should speak.

  “Where are you from?” the boy demanded, clenching his fists, preparing for a fight. Some of his crew grasped wooden poles in their hands. The sight of these made me shiver.

  “Gyeong-seong,” I finally replied nervously, my eyes darting from one boy to the other. If we had to fight them, we had one thing going for us: There were six of them and seven of us.

  The boy spat, his saliva landing on my shoe. “Leave,” he said with a snarl. “There is no room for you here.”

  I shook my head slowly. “We can’t leave,” I said.

  “You have two choices: Leave or fight,” the boy said, walking toward me. He stopped so close I could feel his breath, hot and sticky, on my cheek.

  “Fight,” I said nervously. I wished Chulho had taken over talking or that Myeongchul had come up with some Korean saying that would make us all laugh and we’d become friends.

  The boy scowled. “Are you sure you want to fight?” he asked. “Have you ever done this before?”

  “Of course,” I said. What was there to know? His gang would fight my gang.

  “Well, then, you know that in street fighting, the leaders of the groups usually fight against each other. It’s kind of the rule of the kotjebi. If we all fought and we all got injured, then, well, no one would be left. So we fight one-on-one.”

  I grunted, “Uh-huh,” as if I already knew this. But I didn’t. Back in Gyeong-seong, kotjebi gangs fought each other informally. These Ranam boys, though, had rules for kotjebi fighting that I had no clue about. My mind churned with who was going to be our leader. We had never discussed this. And while I was confident of our fighting as a group, one-on-one was different. Individually, none of us was strong enough.

  I felt as though I was going to vomit and pass out, not certain which would come first.

  “So, who is your leader?” the boy asked. He had a slim mustache and narrow, beady eyes. An old scar cut his chin in half. He must have been sixteen or seventeen, I figured.

  “Who is your leader?” he repeated in a raised voice. I opened my mouth to say Chulho when I heard the sound of feet shuffling behind me. I turned. My b
rothers had all taken a step back, leaving me to face the boy.

  My mouth was dry all of a sudden.

  “So you’re the leader!” The boy smirked. He started pounding his fist into the palm of his hand. “Glad that’s finally settled.”

  As I took a deep breath to calm my nerves, the boy pounced, knocking me to the ground and the wind out of me. The entire weight of his body fell hard on top of me, pinning me. Instead of getting off then, as in tae kwon do, he clung hard, so close and tight I couldn’t use any of my tae kwon do skills to fight back. I couldn’t even push him away to get out from under him to punch and kick. It was as if I were inside the jaws of a big whale, and he was clamping down hard, choking me around the neck with one hand and punching my face with the other.

  This boy wasn’t made of blood and bones but the wind of fury. This boy could kill me unless I surrendered.

  Finally, the boy pulled himself off me. I rolled over onto my stomach, gasping for air, my lip swelling, my entire body bruised and bloodied and tingling from the trauma.

  “You have two choices,” he said, kicking me hard in the ribs one more time. “Leave, or join us and work under us.”

  My brothers and I trudged our way back to the train station, like mourners, carrying the embarrassment of having been defeated in battle and being forced to leave the market. None of us had any intention of remaining and working under another gang.

  In a corner of the waiting room, my brothers had me lie down. Unsik got some clean water from a woman selling tofu soup. Chulho tore off the bottom of his shirt, which Young-bum ripped into several strips to use as bandages. As they looked after me, I drifted in and out of sleep. When I was awake, I’d see my brothers’ eyes peering down at me, big, black, and glossy, the way fish looked when laid out on trays at the market.

  Young-bum had me sit up at one point and fed me some bread. He also gave me an egg. As he did, I felt a tightening in my chest, for I remembered my mother then. When I was four, I had fallen off the slide at the day-care center. “Adeul,” she had said, handing me an egg. “Roll this over your sore arm, back and forth, like I use a rolling pin in the kitchen. The egg will take the swelling down.”