Every Falling Star

by Sungju Lee

  We dropped our bags and walked with our heads lowered, shuffling our feet, back toward the guards, our hands in the air to indicate our surrender. There was no point in trying to fight the guards to get our friends back. They were powerful men to begin with, but even if we overpowered them, the police and the Shangmoo would hunt us down until they found us. We had only one choice: Turn ourselves in.

  The guards didn’t beat us. They locked us for the night in the shed, which luckily didn’t have any manure in it.

  In the morning, they walked us to the guhoso.

  When we entered the main gate, we saw some kotjebi sweeping and others chopping wood with axes, all of them watched over by guards. There were two long buildings for the kotjebi: one for males, the other for females. When I walked, or rather, when the guards pushed me, into the building for us boys, I immediately saw the torn gray wool blankets piled in the corner, which moved with lice and other bugs. Four boys lay on the ground wrapped in some of these blankets, lifeless, like Young-bum’s grandmother when I first met her. It was raining, and as I moved into the room, droplets of water dripped on me from the holes in the roof.

  The kids in the guhoso ranged in age from ten to eighteen, which made me wonder where the little ones went. But I didn’t have time to answer that question. My brothers and I tried to get out, of course, on our very first night there. But we discovered that the planks of wood nailed over the windows had been nailed so tight we’d need a tool to jimmy them open. We were trying to pick the lock in the only door with a piece of metal Chulho had smuggled into the prison in his mouth when the manager and some guards unlocked it for us. As punishment for trying to escape, the guhoso manager tied Unsik to a pole, the way the police tied prisoners waiting for execution, in the center of the guhoso yard. For that night and the following day, Unsik wasn’t allowed to eat, drink, or use the toilet. By the time he was let loose, he reeked of his own excrement.

  After that … well, we never got much sleep, any of us. For one, there was no room to lie down, so we slept sitting up, cross-legged, leaning against one another. The older kotjebi made the youngest boys sleep near the drafty door and windows. The younger ones had coughs, moaned and cried, and urinated on us all night long. In the day, I could see that the little ones were so malnourished that their skin hung from their bodies like oversize T-shirts, but their stomachs shot out in front of them like they were pregnant women. I soon discovered why. When our meals came—twice a day—the older boys took all the food, which was pretty much always rotten potatoes, moldy and soft and covered in flies. The little ones were given the leftovers, which weren’t much. Simply put, the older boys in the guhoso, many of whom were part of gangs, were killing the younger ones.

  I was also kept awake by the girls in the other building moaning and groaning. Even though we were separated, I still knew what was going on. Sex, lots of it. I may have left Pyongyang an innocent boy, believing that holding a girl’s hand meant marriage and then babies. But I knew now that sex trailed poverty like alcohol. And girls—well, they had it bad if they were good-looking. That’s why during the day many of the girls hid in the back of the jail, cutting their lips with sharp sticks and pulling out their hair. They wanted to be ugly, so the guards wouldn’t choose them.

  A few mornings each week, I’d awake to stare into the open eyes of a child, usually the youngest, who had died in the night. I kid you not, but sometimes in that place just before awakening, I’d see that dead boy walking among us, no longer sickly but alive and sparkling like the sun on the crest of a wave. He would see me, wave, as if waiting for me to say goodbye, and then leave … up, like a balloon full of helium on Parade Day.

  “We’ve become murderers,” I whispered to Chulho one night. “The state is clever. We’ll kill each other before ever defying them.”

  Every morning, we stood outside in single-file lines, like we had done at school, while the guhoso manager did work selections. He sent some kids to clean the toilets, others to the mountains to find kindling and firewood. A few were sent to help cook in the kitchen, which basically meant skinning the potatoes, boiling them, and when not doing that, cutting wood. Some boys were also sent out to pick up kotjebi who had died in the market and bury them in the hills. I’d seen them do this from the other side, the freedom side. Not realizing at the time that these were guhoso boys, I’d see these kids, watched over by guards, lug the stiff bodies from the market in old rickety wooden wheelbarrows.

  What I picked up pretty quickly was that the guhoso manager had a racket going on. He sent the strongest kotjebi gang to Hwaseong Market to steal cigarettes and money for him and the other guards. At first, my brothers and I all slunk to the very back and scrunched our shoulders down to avoid being picked. None of us wanted to work for these guhoso skinny pigs, who would drink the alcohol that had been stolen for them at night, chain-smoke, and play card games like sasakki. These guards, when really drunk, would stagger and fall over us, looking for and calling out the names of the pretty girls. They were lost in their stupor and had come to the boys’ building instead.

  I hated the smell of them. All of them.

  One day, however, the manager with a wide, pockmarked face chose Young-bum to go to the market. I guess something about the gang the manager had been using had ticked him off, because when he stood at the front, his eyes floated over his usual boys and went straight to Young-bum.

  I had to be quick on my feet, because I didn’t want Young-bum to refuse and be hung out on the pole, because that’s what the guards did with any kid who said no to their work duty. I also didn’t want Young-bum to go alone to the market or, worse, with the other gang, who surely, when the guards weren’t looking, would beat him up for interfering with their work.

  I flung my hand high in the air and waved it at the manager. A guard dragged me out of the line and up to the front. When we stood face-to-face, the manager spat saliva onto my cheek. “What do you want, street boy?” he croaked.

  Wiping my face with my sleeve, I told him about our gang, how we were one of the best. “We’re fast on our feet,” I boasted. I then told the manager that if he didn’t believe me, to ask the merchants, because everyone in markets far and wide had heard of me and my gang.

  The man looked at me with his beady eyes, which gave me the shivers. I saw nothing human inside him. “I know who you are,” he finally said. “Everyone does. Chang-pa, the most feared gang in the province. I was testing you when I picked your street brother. I’ve been waiting for your gang to volunteer. My old boys have become weak. The merchants now hide their things from them. I want new blood … yours.”

  I inhaled deeply, thinking here was our chance to escape. We could overtake the guards at the market.

  “Except you, him, and him,” the guhoso manager said, pointing to me, Unsik, and Sangchul. “You three remain behind as collateral to make sure your gang will come back. I know”—he leaned over, his breath smelling of fish paste and day-old alcohol—“I know how you operate. You’ll never leave anyone behind.”

  Before Young-bum left for the market, I pulled him aside. “You need to bring as much stuff as you can—including won, alcohol, desserts … whatever you can steal—back to this bastard, because my plan is to gain his trust. I want us, and us alone, to steal for him from now on. We will become invaluable to him so that he gives us extra food, and then somehow, when he is not looking, we’ll run away.”

  My brothers returned at the end of the day with bags full of cigarettes and alcohol, including the pricey and hard-to-find takjoo, North Korean rice wine.

  The manager stuffed a twisted bread stick into his mouth and, spitting crumbs everywhere, announced in front of all the boys that he had made the lineup again, that from that day on, my boys, and my boys alone, would go to the market.

  Being the guhoso manager’s favorite didn’t mean life was good for us, though. Sure, he didn’t make me, Unsik, and Sangchul do chores. I no longer got toilet duty, which meant loading our feces into buck
ets and carrying them to the oxcart for other boys to take to the farms to be spread as fertilizer by yet other boys captured while trying to raid the farms. I also didn’t have to scrub the buckets afterward with pebbles in the cold river.

  But we didn’t get any extra food. And the other kotjebi gangs in the guhoso didn’t like that we were all of a sudden the it boys. Four guys jumped me when I was alone one afternoon circling the guhoso grounds, getting exercise. The skin over my rib cage was bruised blue from being kicked so much and so hard in the same spot, and it hurt to breathe. At night, the other kotjebi gangs knew to stay away because my gang was all there to protect me, but by day, Unsik, Sangchul, and I were free game. And as the leader of the gang, I was the main target. Whenever the other boys had a chance, they would kick me in the groin or back, punch me in the stomach, and poke me in the eyes.

  Sangchul, Unsik, and I started volunteering to do chores again, begging to collect wood on the mountain. Because we had to spread out, the manager always assigned extra guards for this duty. Every night, Young-bum would sneak me a pack of cigarettes and some bread, which I’d slip the next day to a guard to let Unsik, Sangchul, and me stay close to him to act as our heavy, to keep the other gang members away.

  One day, about a month after we arrived, the manager called Young-bum and me into his office. “I’m going to send you and your guys to the special forces unit. You can become military. You are the bravest boys I’ve ever met,” he told us.

  “When?” Young-bum asked, wide-eyed and eager. We both had discussed that it was just a matter of time before the merchants got to know who we were and started hiding their goods when my boys walked into the market. Then the guhoso manager would move on to a new gang and we’d miss the opportunity, whatever it was, to escape.

  “Next week,” the manager said, beaming. I didn’t believe him, though. For one, I knew as the son of a father in the military that the military only allows kids starting at the age of eighteen to begin their mandatory service. No child can start younger than that. I was fourteen. Chulho, our eldest, was fifteen.

  So, of course, that next week turned into next month. Young-bum and the market crew were getting exhausted stealing as much as they were to make the guards happy.

  My gang and I were more trapped than ever.

  Maybe because of the darker days that came as we approached the winter solstice, the night guards began to drink more and more. When they did, they became brutal, coming in and beating us kids for no reason and taking more of the girls. The girls, when I saw them the next day … Well, let’s just say something about them had left. They looked out with eyes that seemed to be coated in frost, blinking slowly, as if they were living in a place where time moved backward. They wouldn’t tell anyone where they’d been. But I knew. Street girls became yu-ryeong. Street boys became dragons breathing fire until they got themselves killed.

  One morning I found a guard passed out on the ground outside our door, his face stuck to a thin layer of frost. It dawned on me as I watched him drooling and grumbling in his drunken sleep state that there was a way we could escape.

  I flicked my fingers at Young-bum, indicating I wanted to have a meeting. He trailed behind me as I walked around the circumference of the building, as if getting some exercise. Around the back and away from the guards, I whispered my idea to him.

  That night, when the guards locked us in our building, my boys and I started phase one of my plan. Earlier in the day, Sangchul had scoffed a long, slim piece of metal from the garbage. Chulho and I used it to pull out the nails across the window, but it was hard. The nails were in tight. It took us several hours, in fact. Light was just starting to stream in through the window when all the nails were loosened.

  That day, my brothers stole more alcohol from the Hwaseong Market than they ever had. They also stole food, including dried fish and clams.

  When the manager saw it all, his greed came well before his responsibilities, just as I had hoped. He jumped up and down and clapped, his jowls flapping like flags. He shouted: “Tomorrow is a day off for the kotjebi. Tonight, we will have a festival.”

  The manager let my gang and me stay out past the usual time to pass the food and alcohol around. By midnight, the guards and manager were rip-roaring drunk, singing revolutionary songs at the top of their lungs.

  The guards eventually passed out one by one, in such synchronicity it was like watching the close of a performance at the Mass Games in the Rungrado Stadium in Pyongyang. That’s when the guhoso manager locked us boys in our building for the night. But my gang and I stayed awake and listened to the manager stumbling around, trying to wake the other guards to get them to drink with him.

  “‘The roll of thunder at Kim Jong-il’s peak,’” he sang in a booming baritone voice.

  “How many kotjebi does it take to change a lightbulb?” he then called out.

  “Four,” he replied, since all the guards were asleep. “Because you’re all so stupid!” He then threw rocks against the outside wall of our building.

  Finally, I heard his body fall to the ground with a thud.

  Then I heard his snoring, which was almost as loud as his singing.

  My boys and I pulled the plank away from the window. We then pushed open the glass and jumped out.

  We climbed over the wooden fence and ran at full speed, side by side, down the dirt road, not stopping until we reached the train station.

  We got off at Gilju, where we decided we were all too weak after our stay in the guhoso to fight against other kotjebi. The best way to survive the winter would be to surrender to the first gang we faced. We would work for them.

  The gang we met was called Kim-pa, and it had strong fighters; some even knew tae kwon do. They’d been homeless for a long time, but they hadn’t developed any real strategies to steal. My gang taught them our techniques, including how to whistle and use sign language in the market to communicate orders to one another. I also taught them the importance of having two homes and how to communicate by laying a certain number of stones. “If, for example, there are three pebbles placed in a spot you all agree on—and it must be a spot hidden away, so the police and other gangs can’t mess with it—it means that one of your brothers has come back and found it too dangerous to stay. Maybe the police or the Shangmoo are sniffing around, or another gang has taken over the place. Three pebbles means to go to the other safe place,” I explained to their leader, Kim.

  “Where did you learn all this?” he asked.

  “When I was a child, I played army with my father and sometimes my mother. We would reenact many of Kim Il-sung’s great battles against the Japanese, especially the one near Bocheonbo Mountain.”

  The Kim-pa had been in Gilju for a year and worked for many of the merchants. Because we were part of Kim-pa, these vendors shielded us when the police or the Shangmoo came. Some of the merchants even said we were their very own kids and not kotjebi. The vendors let Sangchul sing on New Year’s and on Kim Jong-il’s birthday on February 16.

  I need to say that, despite all of our hard living—cigarettes; alcohol; bad, rotten food; opium—Sangchul’s voice was still magnificent. His falsetto was a cascading waterfall that softened even the most hardened hearts. “In the valley where there are no tigers, the fox is king,” I imagined Myeongchul would have said after this winter.

  Indeed, in Gilju, we had no predators.

  Our first mistake was moving on.

  In the spring of 2001, we left Gilju, landing in Kimchaek, mostly by accident because we had hopped the first train headed out of the station, not realizing it was going south when we wanted to go north. While Kimchaek was on the coast, which I liked, we didn’t stay long. There was little food, for one. Kimchaek was the closest sea city to Pyongyang that we’d visited, and I think most of its food, particularly fish, was going to the capital. We stuck around the train station waiting to go somewhere else. One kotjebi told us the tracks were being repaired. Another said there was no electricity. Whatever the rea
son, there were just no trains running anywhere.

  Our nights were spent in total darkness. None of the people living in the train station dared light a candle, a pinecone dipped in resin, or a kerosene lamp, fearing the police would see and raid the place. So my brothers and I found ourselves huddling close together, dodging bats and drunken men falling on top of us. The room stank of waste, for no one dared leave in the night to go outside and use a toilet. There were some women who sashayed around the station whispering, “Do you want a nightflower?”

  I certainly knew now what was going on.

  “I died a long time ago,” a woman, who I was pretty sure was one of the nightflowers, told Chulho on our third day. I glanced quickly at her and then away, not wanting to embarrass her. I got enough of a look to know she’d been pretty once, with full lips and round eyes. Her hair was frizzy, but she looked clean. “I was sent to Rodong-dal-ryondae,” she said, her voice faltering at the mention of Joseon’s main prison, where few ever left alive, or so I had been told.

  I came to realize then that everyone had a story. Everyone was affected by the famine—everyone outside Pyongyang, that is. I sometimes felt, listening to people tell their stories to Chulho, that there was a competition to see whose story was worst.

  I got up, not wanting to hear this woman’s sad tale, and walked to the other side of the station, where a young street girl, maybe my age, fifteen now, was rubbing a tin cup with a dirty rag. I’d been watching her since we arrived. She made me think of the orchid Kimilsungia, bred special for our eternal leader, with her watery black eyes set in the center of her bright, oval-shaped face. Something stirred inside me. Something fresh and light when I thought of her.

  “Can I sit beside you?” I asked, lighting up a cigarette. By now, I was chain-smoking so much that my fingertips had turned yellow.

  “Yes,” she said in a voice that chilled me like the winter wind, for she had the accent of Pyongyang.

  “Are you from the capital?” I asked as I knelt down beside her. She really didn’t need to answer. I knew. What I really wanted to know was, had she been forced to leave, too? I had believed for so long that my family was the only one. So far, I’d never met another kotjebi from Pyongyang.