Every Falling Star

by Sungju Lee

  My gang and I hopped the freight train to Rajin-Seonbong, which was an economic zone, Chulho explained, in which Chinese, Russian, and Joseon merchants all sold goods. “We can get things in Rajin-Seonbong that we can’t get anywhere else, like fur hats, chocolate made with milk and mint, and this alcohol called vodka that goes down your throat smooth like cream.”

  Not like sool, which always, no matter how much I drank, burned its way through me.

  “Maybe in Rajin-Seonbong we can get jobs on a ship,” Myeongchul said, his voice wistful and dreamy. “Maybe we can put our lives as kotjebi behind us.”

  I let my mind wander to thoughts of a life sailing the seas.

  “I’ll wake to the sound of gulls,” Myeongchul continued, as if describing my daydream, “and I’ll eat mackerel for breakfast and lunch.”

  The way Myeongchul talked, I could see us all there on some big fishing ship, our faces sun-kissed and our hands calloused from pulling up the fishing nets and separating the crabs from the fish.

  “Stop,” I eventually said, more to myself than to him. “I don’t want to think of such things. Even if we landed jobs, we’d still be kotjebi, because in Joseon no one is allowed to work until they’re eighteen. We’d be slave laborers. The captain could pay us nothing and starve us to death.”

  Myeongchul looked at Chulho, who shook his head and pursed his lips before saying, “Sometimes it’s nice to daydream. You really can be sour sometimes.”

  “Really?” I said, glaring at him. “I’d say your nickname is ‘Dream Wrecker,’ because since I first arrived in Gyeong-seong, that’s all you’ve ever done—get me to look at the facts rather than believe in something better.”

  Myeongchul sighed. “I don’t want to fight. Not now. At least it was a nice dream,” he whispered, blushing and lowering his head.

  “Dreams are beautiful,” I said to him in a soft voice, trying to be more upbeat. “Keep it, because you never know.”

  “Dreams are one thing the government can’t take from us,” he replied, looking up.

  “Yeah, but they sure try,” Chulho complained.

  I rolled my eyes at him and pounded my fist into the palm of my hand, indicating “Enough.”

  My brothers and I decided on the train to Rajin-Seonbong that we would not wait to be cornered by any kotjebi gang. We would search them out and jump them first.

  Rajin-Seonbong Market was beside the harbor. A large freight ship, with crates piled high with what Chulho said were English markings, was moored there. I stopped to stare, for the ship was heavily guarded by military. Workers were moving the crates off on trolleys and loading them into a large and heavily guarded truck.

  “I bet that’s all going to Pyongyang,” Young-bum said in a hushed voice, coming up behind me.

  A shiver ran through me because I knew he was right.

  I led my gang into the market, which was much like all the others: stalls upon stalls, manned mostly by disheveled men, who I suspected had had big government jobs until all went to rot up here, and a few of their wives; people hawking wilting produce, likely taken out of underground freezers where it had been stored since harvest season; and a few professional vendors, who were better dressed and more filled out. What was different was that there were cars driven by Russian and Chinese businessmen, large cars that would push themselves through the crowds of people. None of my brothers except Chulho had ever seen a white person before, so we stopped to stare at the Russian drivers. Both the drivers’ and my brothers’ expressions were a mix of awe and fear. I slapped Unsik and Young-bum on the back to get them out of their daydream and told them we had business, too, or else we’d starve. “Let’s go and get breakfast.”

  In Rajin-Seonbong Market there was white rice, tofu, seaweed, and fresh fish, some of which was dried and hanging off clothes-pegs on lines stretched behind the vendors. I was looking at these fish, some skinned pink, others fully whole and blue, when suddenly something made me look up. I stopped dead in my tracks.

  I snapped my fingers twice, indicating to my gang, who were behind me, to do the same.

  I then pointed at this jumpy kid wearing gray slacks with holes in them and a dirty gray jacket. He was skittish as he looked around, not yet noticing me, reminding me of a field weasel. He sniffed the market, looking for something. But what caught my attention was the way the merchants looked at him: as if they were afraid. It could have been my imagination, but I felt the merchants were backing away to give him space to steal whatever he liked.

  “I’m sure this boy is part of the gang ruling the market,” I whispered to Unsik, who was now standing beside me.

  “Or its leader,” he shot back. “I don’t like the look of him. Shifty. Ruthless, like he’d pull a chain or, worse, a knife.”

  Easy fight, I thought. “He’s thin,” I replied. “He’s on some drug and lost in some mist of whatever it is that’s making his skin yellow and his nerves twitch like sardines frying in soybean oil. Look more closely.

  “Hey, you,” I called out to the guy in a confident, strong voice. I wanted him to get the message right at the get-go that my gang and I had arrived and were taking over. “Where’s your leader?” I shouted, taking a few steps toward him.

  He stopped, turned to look at me, squinted his eyes, and puckered up his lips. “Who are you?” he asked in a voice that made me take a step back. It was like a gale, like the voice of the man who had taken over my house back in Gyeong-seong and eventually threw me out the front door.

  “This guy has no fear,” I whispered out loud. “Chang,” I replied. “I lead this gang. Who’s the leader in charge of the gang who rules this market?”

  “We don’t have leaders here,” said the boy, who I guessed was about sixteen. His voice was cold and empty, like a week-old corpse. “The alley, in one hour. Be there,” he continued, pointing to some buildings on the far side of the market. He took a few steps toward me, then stopped. He was close enough now that I could see his face. He had a crooked mouth and wide, high cheekbones, pockmarked from some skin disease. He opened his mouth and grinned. His gums were black, and his teeth were yellow, like his skin. The whites of his eyes were yellow, too, and his enlarged pupils moved over us like spotlights, back and forth. Whatever he was on was not opium. Whatever this guy was on made him smell sweet and brought him back to life. I shuddered, thinking that the drug that takes a person to heaven might actually exist after all. And if it did, this boy was on it.

  “We call over there the ‘cemetery,’” he continued. “Today it will be your funeral.”

  I wanted to know who “we” were, but before I could get the question out, the boy had spun around and swiped some electronic wire from the merchant who had been standing around listening to us talk.

  The merchant didn’t even flinch. It was as if he were used to it. It was as if he knew it was better to let this guy take what he wanted than stand up to him.

  As we made our way through the market toward the alley, I bent down and grabbed handfuls of stones from the ground, which I then wrapped inside T-shirts I swiped off tables and tied as bags to be used as weapons. Chulho picked up a wrench. Young-bum and Unsik knicked wooden poles. It was like we knew this fight would be different.

  The alley was cloaked in the shadow of the abandoned buildings that stood on both sides of it. And the way the alley was positioned between these buildings, I could no longer hear the sounds of the market. Instead, there was a wind, as if we were in some kind of tunnel—a wind that seemed to swallow us up. I felt like I was inside a coffin.

  I heard a scratching sound and jumped. My heart raced. “It’s just rats,” Chulho said, putting a warm hand on my shoulder.

  Then there was the flapping of wings. I jumped again.

  A raven was taking off, with a long piece of raw flesh dangling from its talons.

  We turned a corner, and there they were, six of them, all of them like the boy from the market: wild-eyed and jittery, but not like Young-bum at school. These boys were
like the alley, like Joseon … hollow and haunted. The holes inside them had grown so big that only cobwebs, shards of glass, and yu-ryeong roamed around within. These boys may have once had families, had dreams, felt love, had hope, but now the bricks and mortar that held them together were whatever drug they were on. That much I could read off them.

  “Who is your leader?” I called out, mustering up the strongest, most authoritative voice I could find. It was hard. Every muscle in my body was twitching to turn around and run away.

  “What?” several boys said at once, looking at one another and then at us.

  “I told you, we don’t have leaders,” the boy I had met at the market spat out.

  “We fight together,” another said.

  My hands grew clammy and my heart started to race. I didn’t know what to do or say. I was the only one of my brothers prepared physically and emotionally to fight. My brothers were soft, especially facing a gang with no fear.

  I opened my mouth, wanting to make a deal with them to let me fight their strongest and in return we would leave Rajin-Seonbong. But I didn’t have the chance. They came at us, waving metal pipes and broken bottles.

  Everything became a blur as arms flailed toward and around me. My mind couldn’t keep up with my body, so I just stopped thinking and, as my tae kwon do master had taught me, let technique take over. I watched myself, as if seated in an audience high above, dodge weapons being thrust at various parts of my body. I heard that thump of a fist pounding on flesh, and I started kicking anything in front of me with a ferociousness I didn’t even know was inside me.

  Then I saw blood … blood pouring from my brothers’ faces and onto their shirts, so I attacked even harder anyone who was in front of me, in front of my brothers. I started swinging my T-shirts of stones, hearing them crunch against bone. Much later, my brothers would tell me I was like a superhuman, a real-life Boy General. “You could have conquered Japan on your own,” Chulho would say one day with a laugh.

  But that conversation would take place much later.

  Slowly, one opposing gang member after another retreated until, finally, I was staring into the wild yellow eyes of the boy I had met at the market. He put up his hand to indicate I had won. But I wasn’t about to give him any concessions. I went at him, kicking him in the stomach, then the groin, and finally the head, until he stumbled backward, hit his head hard against a concrete wall, and slumped to the ground. I then spat in his face.

  “Don’t ever come back here,” I said as he moaned and fell unconscious. I didn’t kill him, that much I knew. But I wanted to.

  I bent over, hands on my knees, to catch my breath. All the while, my eyes were closed and my mind was thanking whatever force had allowed us to beat this group of seriously nasty boys. Then something startled me, and I looked up.

  It wasn’t a noise. It was silence, like the wind being sucked back up, as if I were standing in the eye of a hurricane, as if I were inside that coffin again.

  Hair stood up on the back of my neck as if the yu-ryeong had found me this time. I turned around.

  Chulho, Sangchul, Mingook, Young-bum, and Unsik were huddled around Myeongchul, who was lying on the ground.

  We already know the things that will happen to us in life. We spend our days just waiting for them to be revealed. I heard my grandfather’s words as I walked toward them.

  Myeongchul had a huge gash on the side of his head. His entire face was plastered in blood.

  “He’s d-d-dead?” I sputtered as I collapsed onto my knees.

  My brothers and I found long planks of wood that we tied together with strips of our clothes to make a stretcher. We then lifted the moaning Myeongchul onto it and carried him along the dirt road toward the countryside.

  On the outskirts of the city, beside a field overgrown with weeds, Chulho spied a farmer’s shed that, from a distance, looked abandoned.

  Inside, we covered Myeongchul’s trembling body with the clothes we were wearing.

  “I’m cold and hungry,” he managed to choke out. I had to put my ear up close to his mouth to hear him. I felt his forehead. He was clammy and cool. Unsik lit the pine tree stick dipped in resin that he carried with him in a plastic bag around his neck. Once the shed was lit, I could see that Myeongchul was pale, nearly white, like the underbelly of a swan.

  Young-bum pulled from his bag a stale twisted bread stick, which he started to break into pieces for Myeongchul to suck on.

  Myeongchul, however, reached up and waved for Young-bum to stop.

  “Don’t forget our first rule. We have to share,” he whispered into my ear. He then smiled, his teeth white against lips that were turning blue. With shaky hands, he broke the bread stick into seven pieces.

  Myeongchul drank some water that Chulho had collected from a nearby stream and then told a few proverbs, his voice becoming stronger as the night wore on, which made me relax a bit, thinking he would be all right once he ate and rested.

  I cleaned his wounds, the way my brothers had cleaned mine after I had lost my fights. Then, as Myeongchul’s eyes fluttered back and forth into sleep, Sangchul sang the lullaby my mother sang to me as a child.

  “Hushabye, hushabye baby

  sleep well

  go to a country of dream

  my lovely baby

  go to a country of dream

  my lovely baby.”

  We eventually left Myeongchul alone to sleep while we stood outside and smoked.

  As we took long drags on our cigarettes, we talked in hushed voices about how we had won a battle against probably the worst foes we would ever face. Chulho agreed that this gang was likely on the drug that took people to heaven. “Ping-du,” he told us. “See, that drug is not a folk story!”

  “We should stay in Rajin-Seonbong for a while,” I said, changing the subject. “I got a feeling those merchants wanted those boys out of there. They might be nice to us.”

  “Maybe Myeongchul is right, and we might even find real work on the ships here,” said Mingook.

  Chulho laughed. “There is no work for kids,” he said. “Such is the life of us kings of the nation.”

  Since chatterbox Myeongchul wasn’t there to say anything, we soon fell silent. After we finished two packs of cigarettes among us, we crept back into the shed and fell asleep on some hay.

  I dreamed again of Pyongyang that night and of Mangyeongdae Yuheejang, of abeoji and eomeoni swinging me high into the air. I saw the hill near the Daedong River where I went tobogganing in the winter.

  In my dream, though, I started to cry, for in the middle of it, I knew … I knew … I was dreaming. “I’m a street boy,” I told myself. Then I heard Myeongchul’s voice digging its way toward me.

  “A nobody, a lost boy, a dead boy,” he said, his voice faint, as if he were very far away.

  I saw myself back in Gyeong-seong Market, late at night, the men drunk, taking swipes at me with their rusty chains, their stench hitting me long before they ever could. Then I saw, in my dream, a dead old man left to rot in the snow, holding his hat in one hand, a small toy soldier in the other.

  I heard Myeongchul again. “If you keep your mind, you will survive in a tiger’s den,” he said.

  I went somewhere dark after that, where my dreams and Myeongchul’s voice no longer reached.

  In the morning, all of us awoke more or less at the same time, chilled and soaked in dew, for someone had left the door open. We patted ourselves dry with Chulho’s extra shirt as we hopped from one foot to the other to warm up. Then we looked out the front door at our surroundings of barren fields. In the distance was a low mountain. We weren’t far from Baekdu Mountain, Young-bum said, where Kim Jong-il was born. “My father told me once that there is a lake in Baekdu Mountain made from when a meteor hit the earth. A crater that had fallen from the stars, as if to say Joseon was the chosen place.”

  I wanted to share with Young-bum my mother’s Myth of Dangun, but I remembered Myeongchul and wanted to wake him first.

&n
bsp; I shook him gently. “Wake up, Myeongchul.”

  I then shook him harder.

  He was stiff and cold like the ground outside.

  He had died sometime in the night.

  For the longest time my brothers and I huddled around Myeongchul’s body.

  Myeongchul, I thought to myself, was our voice. I felt, looking at his corpse, that my throat had been torn from me.

  We were all so far away in our own thoughts that we jumped when the door to the shed flew open and a tall figure blocked the light.

  “What are you doing here?” a deep, commanding voice demanded. Police. Shangmoo. I leaped to my feet and held my hands up over my head.

  “I s-s-surrender,” I said, my voice trembling. “I mean you no harm, but …” My throat hurt too much to talk because, while I couldn’t cry, I sure wanted to. I pointed to Myeongchul.

  The man stepped into the shed to get a better look. As he did so, I could see him clearly. He wasn’t wearing a navy-blue police uniform. I didn’t smell that smell—you know, police.

  Instead, he was wearing the outfit of the Worker Peasant Red Guards, a dirty and tattered khaki Mao-collared jacket and matching pants. He smelled of earth and dew. He worked the farms.

  At first, his face was taut. I sensed he was more afraid of us than we of him. But as he bent over Myeongchul, his face softened.

  “Where are you from?” he asked no one in particular.

  “Gyeong-seong,” Sangchul whispered, tears dripping down his cheeks. He wiped them away with the back of his hand, smearing dirt across his face.

  The man reached over and shut Myeongchul’s open eyelids. He then cleared his throat. “At the mountain,” he said, pointing across the field. “I will show you where. You can have a funeral.”

  The man allowed us to use his pull-cart to wheel Myeongchul’s body. We walked for about an hour, following the man through the muddy fields, until we reached the foot of the mountain. Then my brothers and I hoisted Myeongchul onto our shoulders and carried him up. We wanted to bury him high so that his grave wouldn’t be disturbed by dogs sniffing around for some flesh and bones to eat or by other people looking for a spot to bury their loved ones.