Every Falling Star

by Sungju Lee

  In the spring of 2000, my brothers and I returned from a trip to Gyeong-seong to find Big Brother and his gang gone. Their few things, including metal chopsticks and clothes, were all missing, too. Chulho and I figured that they’d been caught by the police or the Shangmoo. Or that they had just picked up and left for a better market. Either way, we weren’t surprised. We assumed Big Brother was a target. The police don’t take kindly to military dodgers. If caught, Big Brother would have been beaten, maybe even killed. Every male in Joseon must serve ten years in the army; females, seven years. I also knew that with Big Brother’s disappearance, our safe house was no longer safe. The Shangmoo would come looking for us soon enough. We, too, had to leave.

  We talked as a group and decided to head to Eodaejin, the sea, and conquer the market that we had given up a year earlier, perhaps a little too quickly. This time, we would be ready.

  We came into Eodaejin Market from the west and on the offensive, tossing metal chopsticks at the knees and thighs of all the kotjebi we saw. They keeled over in pain and shock and then asked us who we were. I told them Chang, and that we’d come from Pohwang. That was enough. Most had heard rumors about us, either from other kotjebi or merchants traveling from market to market. We were known as the gang who had defeated the Rajin-Seonbong boys and who had spent a year training with a man-gang. It took only a few days for Eodaejin Market to echo with fictionalized stories of our triumphs, including training sessions that involved our slaying wild boar with our bare hands and hurling nunchaku with such precision we could skin the fur off a bear.

  I’d laugh when I’d hear these stories but then wonder after: Was this how Kim Il-sung’s childhood snowballed into such an epic? Myeongchul’s words came back to me: Folklore has a funny way of becoming truth.

  One thing was certain. My gang and I had become legend.

  ¤ ¤ ¤

  If Myeongchul was our voice, Chulho was our ears. He would spend hours drinking and smoking with the merchants and flirting with the women, all the while learning their problems and discovering information, including how Joseon rebounded from the great famine caused when the United States launched a nuclear weapon at our eastern shores. Depending on who was telling the story, either hundreds or tens of thousands of people were killed in that attack, and those left alive suffered from all sorts of diseases. The country was being invaded, but Joseon was winning because all our supplies were going to Pyongyang to help our army and navy.

  “Do you believe this?” I asked Chulho one evening at the train station, where we were sleeping.

  “I think it’s just Pyongyang’s way of taking all the country’s food and sool,” he replied slowly, as if admitting something to himself for the first time.

  “But for the merchants who give you an egg, a piece of tofu, for you to listen to them, you’ll believe anything, right?”

  “Yeah,” he replied. He then smiled. “Somewhere in the middle is the truth.”

  “Okay, but how do we know where the middle is?” Sangchul asked, joining us. He was nursing a wound on the palm of his hand. He had caught it on a metal fence while running away from a vendor.

  “I have no idea,” Chulho answered, “but maybe we can figure it out together.” He looked at each of us. “Listen to the merchants. Most people talk and talk and talk and never hear a thing anyone else is saying. But try to really listen. Like when we bring food back every night to share with one another, try to bring home one story each to divvy up between us.”

  “Oh, speaking of merchants,” Young-bum said, “they want us to work for them.”

  “Spit it out,” Chulho said, facing Young-bum and folding his arms across his chest.

  “Several of the fish vendors have asked if we could load and unload their crates and chase other kotjebi away,” Young-bum explained. “In return, they’ll give us food every day and some won if we don’t steal from them.”

  “Just what Myeongchul wanted … a legitimate job,” Unsik said in a hushed voice.

  We all fell silent at the mention of his name.

  “The merchants won’t turn us in to the Shangmoo or the police?” Mingook eventually asked.

  “No. They assured me they wouldn’t,” Young-bum said. “They said we could steal from other vendors … enough that maybe we can survive through an entire winter if we save.” He then turned and faced Sangchul directly. “They even asked me if any of us performed. I told them about you. If you want to sing for some extra won, sing. The merchants will let you stand on one of their boxes as a stage.”

  A quiet fell over us again. I don’t know what the others were thinking, but I sure wished Myeongchul were around to perform, too.

  My brothers and I lived by the sea in a fishing shed that one of the merchants lent us.

  During that summer of 2000, we spent our days in the market beating up other kotjebi and lugging fish, and our nights staring up at the sky and listening to the cackle of burning logs in Unsik’s fires. I fell asleep to lullabies I swear I could hear coming off the sea, and woke to twisted bread being warmed on the bonfire.

  I gained the confidence to speak to the vendors with whom I now worked, the way Chulho did. I would sit with these old sea-worn men on low stools around fires, waiting for customers, drinking sool, smoking their hand-rolled cigarettes, and listening, trying to really listen, to their stories.

  The merchants told me that Joseon’s prisons, particularly those near the border, were now bursting with women, many of whom were mothers, including pregnant women who were being forced to abort their fetuses.

  What could pregnant women do to the government? I thought. What secrets did our mothers know to sell to the South or to America? But putting in my own opinion on things, Chulho had taught me, was not listening.

  “Because the babies were conceived in China,” one merchant answered, as if reading my mind. “Maybe by Chinese husbands. Maybe by men from here but who have not lived in Joseon for a long time. Doesn’t matter. Either way, Joseon now wants these babies dead. They’re not pure North Koreans, you see.”

  “Children are supposed to be the kings and queens of Joseon,” I finally quipped. What I was really thinking, though, was that my mother could be one of these women.

  “It gets even worse,” the merchant continued. “If someone from Joseon manages to make it through China to the South—Namjoseon—the government there will give them money and food, even a house to live in. Namjoseon will ask for all sorts of secrets and then, when all is said that is needed to be said, Joseon people are killed.”

  Everyone really did hate us, just as our eternal leader had always said. Maybe all along, the government was trying to protect us. Listening to the merchants made me more confused than ever. I didn’t know whom to trust. Joseon really was an island on its own. And my parents? Where were they? I didn’t even want to think about it. My gut hurt so bad from all the worry, I started drinking water all day long mixed with syrup made from the opium plant. It was the only thing that helped me forget on some days. On other days, sool was enough. And still on others, I had to beat someone up to feel as though I wasn’t spiraling out of control.

  A merchant who sold old refurbished radios told me that opium and alcohol were the gods of the streets. I had actually approached him wanting to buy one of his radios. I’d heard that new radios captured signals from Chinese, sometimes even Southern, stations. That’s why, whenever my father was given a radio in Pyongyang, the government would put some device inside before he could bring it home, so the signals would be blocked, all signals except those from Joseon.

  I left radio-less, with two bottles of sool instead.

  “As a small child, I thought Kim Il-sung was a god,” I told Sangchul on a lazy day in late summer as we floated in the waves of the sea, sool moving through my veins and making me tired, as I had started drinking in the morning. For a moment I felt the water cradling me the way the night sky seemed to do the earth. For a moment I had this experience in which I felt I was a star and someo
ne far away was looking up at me. A calm moved through me, a peace I hadn’t felt in a long time.

  Sangchul wasn’t saying anything.

  “My father was kicked out of Pyongyang,” I finally said.

  “I know,” he replied. “Why?”

  “I have no idea. All he ever told me was that we were going on vacation. You know,” I continued after a long silence, “I think the worst thing anyone can do to another human being isn’t take away their home, their job, their parents. I think the worst thing anyone can do is make them stop believing in something higher, something good, something pure, a reason for everything—hope, maybe. God, maybe.”

  “Maybe hope and God are the same,” he said dreamily.

  “Maybe. And maybe the best oppressors know to take away our physical security, then our connection to loved ones, then hope, then dreams, and finally God dies along with everything else,” I whispered. “Then we’re dead until a savior comes along.”

  “Kim Il-sung was our savior,” Sangchul said in a low voice.

  “But who’s going to save us from Kim Il-sung?” Chulho, swimming out to join us, chirped in.

  “Maybe we can find ourselves a magic gourd to pull us all through?” I mumbled.

  Every time any of us got a shibwon, we squirrelled it away in a plastic bag, which we hid under a stone near a birch tree. We wanted to save enough so that we could buy our food for the entire winter and not have to fight other kotjebi for the right to a part of a market to steal for it.

  In the early fall of 2000, we finally dug out the bag and counted our money. We didn’t have nearly what we wanted—maybe only enough to go a month without stealing, and even that was a stretch.

  We needed more, so we started stealing from the government farms, stuffing corn, peppers, lettuce, cucumbers, potatoes, and even poppy seeds from the opium fields into our bags. We sold the produce to the merchants.

  We wore black long-sleeved shirts and pants that made us sweat. But the clothing helped keep us unseen, especially on the darkest nights. We’d crawl through the fields, sometimes lying flat on our stomachs, using our elbows to pull us along. We needed to remain hidden from Worker Peasant Red Guards that doubled up when the first crops started to be harvested.

  One time, when a full moon lit us up, I stifled a laugh looking around at all of us. We looked like a special ops unit. “My childhood dream was to lead a paramilitary group like us,” I reminded my brothers. “But instead of laying bombs, scoping out enemy territory, maybe even acting as snipers …”

  “We’re stealing carrots,” Young-bum finished the sentence for me.

  “I guess dreams do come true,” Chulho scoffed.

  It wasn’t that hard to rob the government farms, at least at first. The Worker Peasant Red Guards didn’t seem well organized. It was easy to sneak past them.

  As a result, I grew cocky, and perhaps that was my downfall.

  One night, some of the guards caught my brothers and me when I thought it would be safe to just walk onto a farm.

  They beat us with long sticks and locked all of us in an airless shed, which was so small and cramped we couldn’t really move much.

  I choked on the stench of manure, which, when the moon spilled in through the windows, I could see was piled from floor to ceiling in a corner of the shed in tin buckets stacked one on top of the other. In the morning, black and blue, we were told we had two choices: Spread the manure on the fields as fertilizer or go to the guhoso.

  I dry-heaved because I had no food or water in me to throw up, and not just from the foul stench. Some of the manure, the guards boasted, had been taken from the outhouses at the prisons. The manure was a mix of animal and human waste.

  While my brothers and I worked, the guards chewed gum, smoked our cigarettes, and followed us to make sure we didn’t run away.

  Chulho arrived back at the shed by the sea one evening in the fall of 2000, announcing in a singsong voice that he had heard that in the nearby town of Hwaseong was a farm called Ilho. A merchant had proposed a deal: If we stole its only product, pears, we could keep half the stock for ourselves to eat or sell at other markets. For the other half, the merchant would give us thirty won per kilogram—enough, Chulho beamed, that we could coast through the winter months.

  “We have to take this job,” Chulho said, dancing around Unsik’s fire. He was drunk. “We can find a safe, warm place to live and just, well, rest through the winter.”

  I know this farm, I thought to myself as Chulho chattered on about his plan to steal the pears. Each fall in Pyongyang, my father would come home with a box of pears that he said were from Hwaseong. The pears were large, honey-colored, and dripping in syrup that slipped down my chin and stained my shirts when I ate them.

  “These are pears for our general,” I interrupted Chulho. “They’re for Kim Jong-il and the Pyongyang elite.”

  Chulho swatted me across the forehead. “Can you listen?” he spat. “I’m talking.”

  “No,” I cut in. “Your plan is too risky. These are prized pears, the nectars of the gods. I have this sinking feeling. I don’t want to do this one.”

  Chulho slapped me across the head again. “Get a grip!” he yelled. “If we can get enough pears, we can go back to Gyeong-seong and Young-bum’s house. If the house has been sold, we can buy it back with the profits from the pears. We can wait for our parents there. Stealing these pears is our ticket to a new life.”

  I was outvoted. Everyone wanted to follow Chulho to Ilho. Of course, I would never allow my brothers to go anywhere without me. If anyone was going to die in battle, I had vowed it would be me, so I tagged along, too. With every step, though, I had this terrible feeling that we were walking into a trap.

  We had to wait several days in the station for a train headed to Hwaseong, and the night one came, the clouds sank on top of the mountains, covering their peaks. There was that stillness in the air, that omen of a storm.

  When we arrived in Ilho, the first thing my brothers and I did was find a safe place, an old wood log off the side of the road in the middle of a cluster of evergreens, where we would meet up if we got separated.

  We then slid up toward one of the pear farms and hid ourselves in some haystacks in a neighboring field. I peered out through a tiny hole I made in the straw, studying the guards as they marched back and forth. I was searching for a break in their routine—a window to steal our way into the pear trees.

  Nothing.

  These Worker Peasant Red Guards were well organized and well prepared for thieves.

  But the night guards, the two who came on shortly before midnight, were different. They were definitely locals, with hard accents and even harder, dirtier appearances. They were tired—I could tell by their sluggish gait—and stayed close to the outskirts of the farm, rather than weaving in and out of the trees the way the day guards did. One night guard carried a rifle, but I knew from my father that only the State Security Agency, the police of the federal government, ever had guns with real bullets. The State Security Agency wore a different uniform than these men, and it didn’t care about farming. The Shangmoo, the police, and the Worker Peasant Red Guards who did care were never given real ammunition.

  Under the battery-operated spotlight, which swooped into the pear trees and then out again, I could see that the other guard carried a wooden gun painted to look real, much like the weapon my father had made for me when I was a child.

  Every hour, right to the second, the two men took breaks behind a pillar to share a cigarette.

  The spotlight, I also observed, didn’t dig itself in deep enough to reach the center of the trees, which had been planted in neat rows, pruned to look like soldiers standing at attention.

  “Here’s the plan,” I whispered to the others. “When the guards are smoking, with their backs turned, and the spotlight has begun its circle to the west of the trees, run, and run fast and far. Count out two minutes, then lie flat on your stomachs with your hands and feet stretched out. Watch for t
he spotlight then. It should float over you, because it floats across the periphery of the trees every two minutes. Right when the spotlight has left you, run again for two minutes and then lie flat again. The third time you do this, the spotlight won’t reach you. Start picking the pears. You should be about in the center of the trees and able to pick as much as you want with no one noticing. When done, make your way back out the same way you went in, until you are close enough to see the guards again. When they go for a smoke, leave and head to the safe place.”

  The problem, though, was that we were all salivating at the thought of the taste of sweetness. I’d been hiding in the haystacks for hours, and my legs were cramped and hurt. My entire body tingled from a lack of circulation. Unsik told me later that he was imagining baking the pears on the bonfire with chocolate. Young-bum was planning to eat a pear right on the spot.

  We were overeager and took off running just as the one guard lit up the smoke but before the other had made it behind the pillar.

  Mingook, Chulho, and Young-bum were fast and hadn’t seen our error. I was behind them and saw it all. The guards caught Unsik and Sangchul before the boys even made it into the trees. I managed to sneak into the orchard and hide behind a tree trunk. I watched the guards wrestle Unsik and Sangchul to the ground, then tie rope around their wrists. The guards then dragged my brothers across the stone path to their shed.

  For a moment I felt paralyzed, not knowing what to do. Then I started to swear under my breath. We’d promised, we’d all made a vow that we would never leave anyone behind. Maybe everything had been taken from us, but we still had our word, and that meant something. I wouldn’t betray my brothers.

  Still swearing, I ran until I caught up to Chulho, Mingook, and Young-bum, who, being fast, were in the center of the farm with their bags already bursting with pears by the time I reached them.

  Breathless, I told them what had happened.

  Chulho shook his head, spat, and swore, too.

  “We made a pact,” Mingook said.

  “I know,” I whispered.