Every Falling Star

by Sungju Lee

  I bit my lip to stop myself from crying. I really hated it when these memories hit me like this. I felt pulled under by a huge ocean wave.

  I hurt all over.

  I missed eomeoni.

  As the pale light of morning streamed through the station windows, I finally fully emerged from my dream state. Young-bum, who was lying beside me, was just opening his eyes, too.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” he said, propping himself up by the elbow.

  “What?” I said, turning my face away from him, in part because he stank, with his morning breath and bad body odor, and also I felt sick again. I didn’t want to vomit on him.

  “You’re going to tell the others that you’re stepping down as our leader. But don’t,” he said, turning my head so I had to look at and smell him. “From this day on, you are our leader, our daejang.”

  “But I lost the fight,” I said, moaning from both the shooting pain that ricocheted through my body and the pain of my bruised ego.

  “Yes, but you led our student council. You are brave and smart and courageous. We trust you.”

  I looked at my brothers, who were now all awake, some rubbing their eyes filled with gunk. “I’m not your leader,” I whispered to them. “I’m not strong enough.”

  “We trust you,” Sangchul and Unsik said at the same time.

  “I may act brave, but I would have run away,” Chulho added, lighting up a cigarette.

  I scrunched up my face as he did so. “You’re not even up yet and you’re smoking!” I exclaimed.

  He rolled his eyes.

  “You brought us all together,” Myeongchul continued. “You always scratch where it itches.”

  I wanted to make a joke about Myeongchul’s proverb, but it hurt too much to laugh.

  “We would all be dead right now if it wasn’t for you,” Mingook said instead.

  I wasn’t sure that was true, but I agreed to act as their leader, at least for a little while.

  I stood up to stretch my legs, which also hurt. I looked around for my running shoes, a black pair I had brought with me from Pyongyang. But they were nowhere. On the floor beside me, where I thought I had placed my shoes the night before, was a pair of thin sneakers with the soles falling apart. I scratched my head and scanned the train station. My eyes landed on a young kotjebi near one of the exits who was staring at me. When I caught his eye, he bowed to say thank you.

  “Did you steal my shoes?” I called out, my voice echoing against the concrete walls. “Did you take mine and replace them with these?” I held up the tattered sneakers for him to see.

  “In future, you should tie your shoes around your neck when you sleep!” he yelled back. He then left quickly, too quickly for my brothers and me to chase him down.

  Angry, I threw one of the sneakers across the train station floor.

  I was still filthy from traveling in the coal train. I was dirty from the fight the day before. My skin was covered in dried blood, bruises, and mud, and was scratched from the tiny stones on the ground on which I had been pinned. My head itched, likely from lice. And now all that I had to wear on my feet were old, broken sneakers.

  Chulho and Young-bum each grabbed one of my arms and spun me around as Mingook slipped his shoes onto my feet. “I’ll go barefoot,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to run a marathon barefoot,” he added as I opened my mouth to protest taking his shoes.

  “This is what I want you to do,” Chulho explained as he came in close to me. “I’m going to leap into an open cargo hold as the train is starting to leave the station. I’ll get in first to help you up, but you follow me and do the same.”

  Before I could ask any questions, Chulho took off, with all of us trailing him, me at the very back.

  I huffed and snorted like a wounded wild boar.

  My ribs hurt, and breathing was difficult. When Chulho rounded the caboose, I lost track of him for a moment. Then he came into view again. He was racing, running even faster than Mingook, down the tracks on which a train was slowly moving out. Then suddenly he was flying through the air, leaping like a mountain tiger. He disappeared into the cargo hold.

  Chulho reemerged to help Young-bum up next. Mingook flew in, much like Chulho and without needing assistance. Myeongchul raced along the side, his hand outstretched waiting for someone to catch it. Finally, Chulho, with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, pulled him in. Sangchul and Unsik were each pulled up by Young-bum.

  Soon it was just me left. I pushed my legs to move faster as the train started to speed up.

  When I neared the open door, I lifted my arms into the air the way I did as a child when I wanted my mother and father to swing me high at the amusement park.

  I don’t know who grabbed my hand, but whoever it was, he was perspiring. I thought I was going to slip out from his grasp and fall under the moving train.

  I felt myself being lifted and my legs leaving the ground.

  I screamed as I felt the grip loosen.

  But then I saw Young-bum. He held on tight to my lower arm and yanked me into the open cargo hold.

  I fell clear across to the other side and landed against the metal wall with a thud.

  We got off almost at the center of the city at Songpyeong train station.

  We had barely set foot inside Songpyeong Market when we found ourselves cornered by another kotjebi gang. I was angry mostly because we hadn’t even had time to get food, sool, or a pack of cigarettes. Chulho had smoked the last one on the train.

  This time, I didn’t even try to remain standing when their leader hurled his entire weight down on top of me. As his fists pounded my face, somehow I managed to indicate to him that he had won. As he got off me, he spat in my face and said: “Work under us or leave.”

  “We’ll leave,” I said as Young-bum pulled me up.

  We hopped another train and got off at Sunam Market. I lost there, too, this time to a boy about half my size. Well, not really. It just seemed that way because he was short, not much taller than Myeongchul. But this guy had a surefire trick: He got me in a hold like a sumo wrestler, with one arm around my leg, the other around my shoulders, and he kicked so hard at my chest with his sharp, pointy knees that I nearly vomited. He also liked to bite. Besides bruises all over my body and too-many-to-count head wounds, I had this scrawny guy’s teeth marks on my arms and legs.

  We arrived at Pohwang Market starved and all of us wigging out for cigarettes and alcohol. We waded into the sea of merchants, determined to steal food and buy some sool before meeting up with a kotjebi gang and my getting the senses knocked out of me.

  But, man, what was it with Pohwang? It was as if the kotjebi could smell new blood.

  As I reached for a twisted bread, the leader of the gang that ruled that section of the market, a tall wiry guy with a long neck, tapped me on the shoulder and flicked his head, indicating “Let’s go.” I groaned, grabbed the bread stick anyway, and tossed it to Young-bum. Someone should at least eat. I then motioned for the rest of my gang to follow.

  The guy led me to an open field that was covered in broken glass. His crew soon formed around him. He stepped toward me and, speaking with a lisp, said: “The loser will leave.”

  As if I didn’t know the rules already.

  From my other fights, if you could call them that, I had learned a few things. First off, go in first and fast, grab hold of your opponent, and don’t let go. Wrestle him to the ground. Now, since my training was tae kwon do, I had to be able to step back far enough to inflict my kicks and punches. My strategy, if I ever could implement it, was that when my opponent was on his knees or swerving, unlike the others, who just kept hanging on to me, I would let go, move back, and do my tae kwon do patterns.

  “Go,” one of his sidekicks said.

  The tall skinny guy with the lisp lunged toward me fast. But this time it was as if I were watching in slow motion. As he moved, I shot my right leg up and out, my foot landing hard on his groin, forcing him to stumble
backward, squealing in pain. I sprang toward him, kicking him hard in the stomach. He fell down on his knees, gasping for air. As I raised my fist to strike his back and face, he lifted a shaky right hand and called out for me to stop.

  “You win,” he said, wincing.

  I stepped toward the boy and offered him my hand. “Leave or come under us,” I said.

  “We cannot leave here,” he said, in between catching his breath. “We will stay and work for you.”

  The boy’s name was Hyekchul, and he and his gang were familiar with Pohwang Market, as they’d grown up nearby. He and his gang were a lot like us, with parents who had either died or left to find food and never came back. They were pajang-jebi, Hyekchul explained, whose modus operandi was to knock over a vendor’s stand and then steal the items as the merchant scrambled to pick things up.

  Hyekchul said that in his first fight with an opposing gang, his upper lip had been cut with a knife so badly that he no longer could speak properly. “The other kotjebi make fun of us,” he said, “because pajang-jebi is considered one of the lowest forms of stealing. Begging is worse,” he explained. “But we come right after that.”

  “The other gangs say we’re like ants on their sticky buns,” one of Hyekchul’s underlings joined in. “They call us weak. They say we shame them. But the truth is, none of us wants to fight. We’re just kids wanting to eat—mostly wanting our parents to come home.”

  I got that, I told him. We were all pretty average kids, too, some of us with big dreams at one time. To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether we still had them. Some unspoken rules about street living include never speaking about family or our hopes.

  We stayed at Pohwang Market for several weeks, sleeping in an old warehouse alongside Hyekchul and his gang. It was dangerous in Pohwang, with the Shangmoo and police always looking for boys. Because of this, we took shifts, two of us awake at all times, acting as watchmen.

  On the outskirts of the city, I found us all a second home, an old farm shed. It was cold in the shed. For when it was just too risky to sleep in the warehouse and we found ourselves in the shed on blistery winter nights, Chulho and Unsik came up with the idea of making pants and sweaters out of vinyl sheeting that we’d wear like shells, to keep in our body warmth.

  Death was all around us. We’d enter the market in the mornings to find women wailing and rocking in their arms children who had died during the night. As we plunged deep into the merchants’ stalls, we found the corpses of old men and women, mouths still agape as if, in their final moments, they wanted to say something, their eyes staring out, pleading with us to hear them. I always thought the place after death was peaceful. It was how my eomeoni had described it. But what I saw on the faces of the dead was anything but. It was as if they had got stuck looking at and feeling all their grief and pain.

  I started to smoke heavily in Pohwang, so much so that I’d awake with a wet cough and my chest feeling tight and on fire.

  I bought raw opium from a merchant Chulho got to know. Back at our home base, my gang and I heated the latex from the opium pod on a spoon, mixed the syrup in water, and drank it. The concoction would settle my stomach when I ate a bug or rotten food—at least, that was my excuse. On those days when I did opium, I’d float through the markets, drifting in unknown places in my mind, many of which I can’t recall now, but they sure felt like they were nice.

  Chulho told me that there was another drug, called ice or ping-du, that he’d heard some kotjebi gangs used that took them to heaven. This drug, he boasted, helped them forget their hunger. Ice made them confident and gave them more energy to steal and fight.

  Chulho looked for it for us, but he couldn’t find it.

  I eventually chalked the mystery ice drug up to folklore, which Myeongchul explained was make-believe stories that helped people cope with difficult lives. “It’s like if we believe the drug exists, then we’ll keep going until we find it. In moments of despair, we’ll pick ourselves up because we want to find this thing that people say takes us to heaven,” he said one night right around my thirteenth birthday, a birthday I wanted to forget. I hadn’t told the others, but that day I had sipped my opium drink from noon until nightfall. It was my way of celebrating, I guess.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, thinking instead of the Learning Journey of a Thousand Miles. “It’s kind of a folk story, too?” I asked Myeongchul, who nodded. I was so high that, for a brief moment, I felt as if I were Kim Il-sung stuck up in those mountains.

  “It’s a folk story, a good one,” he replied matter-of-factly. “Folklore has a funny way of becoming truth. If we didn’t have folk stories, we might start to question our lives, our governments, our world … We might start … thinking for ourselves.”

  “Ah,” I said, floating on the ship of opium. I don’t think he noticed.

  “Right now,” he leaned in close and whispered conspiratorially, “we’re in the middle of a river, with one bank being our old lives filled with those folk stories that helped control us and which made us feel safe. The other bank, the one we are trying to swim toward, is the unknown.”

  “Ah,” I said again, thinking to myself that I didn’t mind the middle part of this journey so much as long as I had opium to calm the waters.

  Unsik, with his distinctive whistle, climbed a tall post in the market and perched himself at the top. His job was to whistle—“one long”—to let us know if the Shangmoo had caught our scent. Two short whistles meant the police were following us.

  One day, as the azaleas were just starting to bloom, the Shangmoo not only hunted Mingook and me down as we meandered through the stalls, two policemen joined in as well, forcing us to split up. We started heading toward the abandoned farm shed, but instead we ducked behind a building and let them pass. The Shangmoo and the police went right to our safe house. I stole through the back alleys to a large boulder about a block from the safe house, which we had all agreed would be our marker. I took three pebbles, just as my father had taught me when we played toy soldier in Pyongyang, and laid them at the foot of the boulder to tell my brothers and Hyekchul’s band not to go to the shed. What was once a game had now become real. I had taught the others how to use small stones to communicate with one another. What I was saying on this day was that we’d been busted.

  That night, Hyekchul’s gang and mine split up. We let his gang take the shed.

  My brothers and I headed to the forest.

  It was a noisy night and raw, the cold getting right inside our bones so much that even the vinyl sheeting couldn’t keep the chill at bay. We all stayed awake, shivering, huddled together, waiting for morning and the chance to slip back into the train station to get warm. We were all quiet, including, uncharacteristically, Myeongchul. We listened to the wind and the night noises.

  “I think we should stop calling each other by our real names,” Mingook eventually said at dawn.

  None of us had slept.

  “If we have fake names and we’re caught, the party can’t track down our family members and hurt them,” Myeongchul added.

  “What should I be called?” I asked, thinking Boy General would be most fitting.

  I could hear my brothers scratching their chins. Chulho and Unsik were starting to show man-stubble.

  “Chang,” Chulho eventually called out. Chang means “spear” in Korean.

  “Why?” I exclaimed. “After all, you’re more like a Chang. When I first met you, I thought you were the one who was piercing and sharp.”

  “It’s only my mouth that stings,” Chulho replied with a sinister laugh. “Inside, I am more like soft tofu.”

  We all chuckled at that.

  “I think ‘Chang’ is a good name for you,” Young-bum said. “You’re quieter, for sure, than Chulho and Myeongchul, but when you speak, we trust your words because we know you’ve thought things through. I know you would die for me. You are direct and sharp like a spear.”

  “When you fought Hyekchul, you were focused, just like a spear whizzing
through the air toward its target,” Unsik added. “I saw that same look when you performed your tae kwon do patterns for the first time at the market. It’s like something takes over.”

  “I wish something would take over for me in every fight,” I muttered.

  I ran the word Chang over my tongue. I liked it. “From this day on,” I finally announced, “I shall be known as Chang.”

  The morning that I came to be called Chang, my gang and I discussed moving on because the Shangmoo had discovered our hideaway. While we didn’t say it to ourselves or to one another, I think we all secretly wished that we’d go back to Gyeong-seong and find our parents home.

  “A plan is a plan, and we vowed that we would head north and work our way back to Gyeong-seong,” Myeongchul said, waving his fingers in the air as if he were drawing a map. “We’re here,” he said, pointing. “Let’s start making our way back to there.”

  Hyekchul and his gang weren’t ready to leave the area where most of them grew up. Some fortune-tellers had told them tales that the famine had ended. Hyekchul and his posse had paid them a small fortune of their hard-stolen won to do spells to bring their families back together. Hyekchul and his boys still had hope, lots of it, that soon they’d see their mothers and fathers. The fortune-tellers promised them. I was now a full-blown skeptic. But I didn’t want to take their hope away from them by making them move with us, so I released their gang.

  “You’re free to go,” I said on the rainy day when we said goodbye. As I spoke, lightning flashed over the southern hills. “I hope we’ve taught you well so the next gang you meet you’ll beat and they’ll fight under you, not you under them.”

  Hyekchul nodded and gave me a long hug, showing affection I wasn’t used to from a friend. When he finally pulled away, his eyes were bursting with water like the spring rivers. “I’m scared being without you,” he said.

  I rubbed his back and told him that it would be okay, that he and his group had skills now and would make it to the other side of the riverbank, the unknown side, where his family was waiting for him. He thought that I was speaking about the Duman River and that his parents were on the other side, in China.