by Sungju Lee
“This world is not for the living anymore. Tread lightly, for all the dragons now fall,” she said in a steely voice, which made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end the way the yu-ryeong did.
“You’re a seer!” I exclaimed with a gasp.
The young woman turned to face me. Her complexion was smooth, and the whites in her eyes were bright. She wasn’t suffering from malnutrition, at least not yet. Her brown irises had yellow dots, like a spiral pathway lined in candles.
“I left my body a long time ago,” she continued in a soft, low voice. “Now I can only see the dead. And there is death around you.”
I swallowed hard. “Are you sure?” I then shook my head and admonished myself. I don’t believe in fortune-tellers, I scolded myself. They sell folk stories, not facts.
“I see you going to the South,” she continued, ignoring my question. “I see a hand taking yours.” She then smiled. “I see you becoming a teacher. But before this happens … you need to remember to tread lightly, for all the dragons now fall.”
“She’s crazy. Don’t listen to her,” an old woman said, coming up behind me and pushing me to get up. I dusted my pants off as the old woman sat down beside the girl.
“Go,” the old lady said in a creaky voice, like a rusted door hinge. “This girl has been hit in the head and knows nothing anymore.”
We finally took a train to Eorang, jumping from the car when the train was still in motion. I landed hard, sending a shock through me, and rolled until I came to a stop in some mud. That was definitely an omen of what was to come. The merchants at Eorang Market beat us with clubs and told us to go away. They refused to discuss any arrangements for us to watch their stalls in exchange for food. One man told us we were all wild and crazy and couldn’t be trusted. I wanted to tell the merchants about the gang in Rajin-Seonbong Market. Now, those boys were wild and crazy, high on the drug nicknamed ice that they got somewhere from someone who was importing it from China. This drug was made in laboratories and not grown in fields like our opium. But the merchants all plugged their ears, not wanting to talk to us at all.
The Eorang Market gangs were not strong, and we knew we could take them and take control of the merchants by fighting back. But we needed a few weeks of training, running the hills, lifting stones, mock fights with one another. We had become soft as kings in Gilju. We needed to become warriors again, the way Big Brother trained us, and refind that hunger that became fuel that we used to conquer foes. We decided that until we were ready, we would steal from the government farms instead of fight for territory in the market.
What I didn’t know then was that we had all become dragons, too sure of ourselves and too coddled. We weren’t as sharp as we had been. This was to prove to be our fatal flaw.
We headed out of the city on foot, the sun setting behind us, walking along the dirt roads, which eventually became mud paths weaving in and out of the hills of Orang County in North Hamgyeong Province. The air was fresh and filled with the scents of pine and cedar. No matter which direction we looked there were mountains.
“There is a rock somewhere near a river around here,” Chulho said, “that the locals say brings good fortune. Make a wish at the rock, and it comes true.”
“How does it do that?” Young-bum asked.
“Some spirit lives inside it.”
“Shan-shin-ryong-nim,” I whispered.
“You know it?” asked Young-bum.
“I’ve heard of the spirit,” I replied.
“Follow me,” Chulho said, walking out in front.
“Where?” I asked.
“Up there,” he said, pointing to a nearby mountain and rock face that stretched up for hundreds of meters, with slopes and slabs that made me think of the story of Kim Il-sung’s daring march, the Learning Journey of a Thousand Miles.
“That story was folklore, you know,” I said to Chulho, who had already started to climb.
“What story?” he called out.
“The one in which Kim Il-sung walked as a child from China to North Korea. It was made up to make us think he was a god. You know,” I continued, watching Chulho’s technique, “you’re as good a climber as any mountain goat. From now on, I nickname you ‘Ram’!”
It took us a couple of hours to clamber up the mountain, digging our hands into the huecos to pull ourselves up, thrusting our bare toes into the crevices to give us support. But it was worth it. When we finally reached the top, it was as if we were gods looking down. From this vantage point, Joseon looked like a painting worthy of the halls of Pyongyang’s finest buildings, a painting of swaying fields and tall evergreen forests framed by mountains. The sky was dyed pink and orange by the setting sun.
I could see for miles, including the government fields that lay low below us in the valley. Looking at the fields from up here was like looking at the stars from the sand: I felt everything was in order. Innocent. Pure. Peaceful.
The mountain had a flat top with two large polished patina boulders set side by side, touching each other.
I couldn’t help but think as I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face that this place had been built by a hand reaching down from the stars, putting things just so. Maybe that was how the lake in Baekdu Mountain had been formed.
We lived at the Orang train station part-time, and every few days we headed to the sea to bathe in the warm water.
We stole by night—potatoes, carrots, and cucumbers—which we sold at the market for food, sool, and cigarettes. The merchants soon began to trust us and left their goods out, knowing we were buying not stealing. And the other market gangs, fearing our reputation, left us alone.
At the end of the potato season that year, 2001, when I was confident we had this town, I had a dream that disturbed me to my core.
Young-bum’s grandmother was in it, wearing a long white dress. She was years younger than she was when she died. She was beautiful—breathtaking, even. She didn’t look at me, though. She was crossing a river, walking on water, carrying in her arms a boy dressed in black. I could not see the child’s face. She disappeared on the other side of the river in some bulrushes.
I awoke, panting, the words of the young seer I had met at the train station in Kimchaek playing over and over in my mind: This world is not for the living anymore. Tread lightly, for all the dragons now fall.
I was still thinking about the dream when we stole our way onto a government potato farm.
The guards had caught another kotjebi gang earlier in the evening and were beating them in the shed. We could hear the boys’ screams moving across the fields with us. Their capture allowed us to go unnoticed.
As I plucked potatoes and stuffed them into my bag, I heard a fist or a bat or something hit hard flesh and bone. For a moment I stopped what I was doing and looked around. Chulho, digging, hissed for me to get a move on.
Then I saw a light dance across the crops.
I stopped what I was doing and crouched down low.
It was Chulho, not Unsik, who gave three long whistles, meaning danger, time to leave and quick.
I whisked my bag onto my shoulder and ran at top speed, weaving in and out of the crops, hoping to lose anyone who might be on my trail. As I drew near our safe spot, though, something made me stop. I whistled for Chulho and Mingook, who were up ahead, to come back as Sangchul and Unsik pulled up alongside me.
“Where is Young-bum?” I said, breathing heavily, catching my breath.
“Maybe in there.” Mingook motioned to some nearby pine trees.
I looked up at the sky, which was cloudless. The stars seemed to shine brighter than I’d ever seen them before. The constellation Ursa Major was directly above me. I stared at the brightest star, Chilseong, and all her children that made up the Big Dipper.
Chulho tugged on my sleeve, trying to get me to run. But I brushed his hand away. “They have Young-bum. I know they do,” I said.
“We need to get out of here or else we’re all going back to the guhoso,” Mi
ngook said.
“Trust me. I heard … I heard … I heard …” I was stammering now, my thoughts moving quickly, the way Mingook ran.
“What did you hear?” Chulho demanded.
“The sound of a club on flesh,” I finally managed to get out. “The sound didn’t come from the shed where the guards were beating the other kotjebi. The sound came from outside.”
Once again, the seer’s words came to me: This world is not for the living anymore. Tread lightly, for all the dragons now fall.
“Something bad has happened,” I said in a hushed voice. “I know it. I need to go back.”
I walked toward the main building of the farm, crouching low in the crops in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, I was wrong and the guards didn’t have Young-bum. Then, if the guards didn’t see me, I could scamper away once I knew we were all safe.
The screams from the shed had stopped. As I drew near, all I heard coming from inside was the sound of muffled whimpering. I swallowed hard, knowing the guards had abandoned torturing the other gang to look for us.
Suddenly, a light shone in my face. I stood up tall on shaky legs and raised my hands into the air.
“Get out of here,” a gruff voice said to me.
The flashlight moved from me to a guard who was holding up Young-bum. Young-bum’s head hung down and loose, as if he were a puppet whose handler was waiting to go onstage.
“Take your friend with you,” the guard growled.
I moved cautiously toward Young-bum, half expecting to be walking into a trap. But neither guard moved to capture me as I lifted up Young-bum’s face and studied his wounds. Blood dripped from his mouth, eyes, and nose.
The guard carrying Young-bum pushed him into my arms, turned, and walked away.
I must have been a giant that night, for I lifted Young-bum onto my shoulders and walked with wide, strong steps across the potato field. I didn’t stop when I saw the others, who were waiting for me. I didn’t stop at the pine trees, bundled together as if a child had planted them. I marched until I reached the Orang River, where I laid the moaning Young-bum, seeping blood onto my clothes and mumbling sentences I could not make out, on the sand on the bank.
My brothers soon joined me, kneeling by Young-bum’s side the way they had when Myeongchul was hurt.
Unsik passed me a pinecone smeared with resin, which I lit with my trembling hands, not really wanting to see the full extent of Young-bum’s wounds. I bit my lip to stop myself from screaming out loud when I could see. The entire right side of Young-bum’s neck was bloodied and blue, soft like paper floating on the sea. I felt that if I touched it, it would break into a thousand bits and disintegrate.
Young-bum’s breathing was short and raspy, like his grandmother’s before she died.
I quickly tore off my shirt and had Unsik dip it into the water. I then patted down Young-bum’s burning face.
Unsik held one of Young-bum’s hands. I held the other, while Sangchul shone the pinecone up for all of us to see.
Young-bum opened his mouth, but his voice was too faint to hear. Wheezing with the effort, he twisted my hand around and pulled me down close to him.
“Go find your families,” he said in such a quiet voice that I had to repeat the sentence for the others to know what he had said.
“When you find my father, do not tell him I died. Just say I left the group.”
“You’re not going to die,” I started to protest, but he pinched my hand hard.
He seemed to smile, and for a moment his entire face looked sun-kissed, as it did when we lived on the beach in Eodaejin. His eyes looked like dew drops sitting on leaves in the morning. He didn’t look at me. Or anyone else, for that matter. He just stared out, into nothing, and stopped blinking.
Stopped breathing.
His hand in mine fell lifeless.
I started to cry, as if all those other times I wanted to weep, the pain had just collected on the other side of a big dam. This, however, was the final blow that broke it. All my grief exploded.
I gathered Young-bum into my arms and just held him, crying into him, not letting go.
“You’re my brother!” I screamed, my voice echoing against the large boulders near the river. “We’re a team. You can’t go!” But like that very first day when Young-bum had taken me to the market, he had already left before I could finish what I wanted to tell him.
The others crowded around Young-bum’s body and me. No one could sleep. No one said a word for the longest time.
At last I said, “My grandfather told me that love burns brighter than any star, so bright that love can be seen and felt from one end of the earth to the other. One day, when those children on other planets see our dead earth, it will be your light they see, not Kim Il-sung’s or Kim Jong-il’s. But the light of people like you.”
The owls called and the beetles and tiny insects pitter-pattered around me on their suction-cupped feet. At the darkest part of the night, I saw those lights again, blue and white, moving south with the wind. The shan-shin-ryong-nim.
I then heard my heartbeat, followed by distant bells.
Young-bum had arrived wherever it was he was supposed to go.
My brothers and I stayed with Young-bum’s body for two days, singing and talking to him, all of us, as if he were still there. I bathed his stiff body in the river, washing away all the blood. I combed his hair with a brush I made from sticks. I then placed him in my own T-shirt, so he would remember me.
Chulho found the rock that some peasants said was home to shan-shin-ryong-nim. On the third day, at the base of that rock, we dug with our hands a shallow grave for Young-bum and laid his body in it.
The boys and I roasted potatoes and found gamtae, a wild berry that Young-bum liked to eat, often fistfuls at a time. We set these on large ferns as plates for Young-bum to take to the afterworld.
Young-bum’s death was a turning point for me, and not a positive one.
I’d been on the streets for more than three years.
My kotjebi gang, Chang-pa, which had started out as seven, was now five.
Our voice, Myeongchul, went first, followed by our heart, Young-bum. I was angry, bitter, and full of so much sorrow that I found the only way to cope was to seal myself off from feeling. I consumed sool like water at the end of a dry day. Anytime a memory popped into my mind, I’d smoke a cigarette, take another sip of alcohol, or fight to get it to go away.
If a kotjebi in the Orang Market, where we lived for several months, brushed my arm, I turned on him with such rage, he didn’t know what hit him. He’d be down, kicked, and punched before he could even lift an arm to fight back. I became everything the merchants thought I was before I arrived, if not worse. I searched for ice, asking everyone coming from out of town if they knew where I could find some. I knew I’d take it until I reached heaven, if God would let me in.
Sure, I still had dreams of my parents, but I’d always tell myself sometime during the dream that I was just having a nightmare. My parents were gone, likely dead, and I was an abandoned street child.
Then one morning by the train station where I was sleeping, as some magpies woke me with their haughty chatter, I heard Young-bum whisper to me: “Go back to Gyeong-seong.” I awoke, startled, thinking for a moment that he was still alive and that the past few months had just been a dream.
I had this burning determination inside me to honor that promise to Young-bum to find his father and tell him that his son was brave and kind and the best friend I ever had. He was my brother. I needed to tell him that Young-bum had simply just left the group.
Chulho, Unsik, Mingook, and Sangchul felt it was time to go back to Gyeong-seong, too. We’d been gone now for more than a year and a half, enough time that surely some of our parents had returned.
So that’s how we ended up back there in the middle of the harvest season in 2001, at the Gyeong-seong train station, standing on the platform near the grassy knoll where Sangchul used to sing and Myeongchul would act, se
arching every face for our mothers and fathers.
Soon enough, though, we discovered that not only were our parents not there and hadn’t ever returned but also that the so-nyon-dan manager, the teacher, our neighbors … all had gone, too.
Even the merchants had changed.
It was as if our families had never existed.
It was as if I had never existed. My mind started to play tricks on me, especially when I was drunk, that maybe we’d returned to the wrong town. Maybe this wasn’t even Gyeong-seong. Maybe we were actually dead and this was the land in between.
One person was still there, though: the old woman who sold nightflowers. Long lost were my and my brothers’ morals around the selling of women. For every male customer we brought the old lady, we were given ten won, enough to buy two steamed buns or ten candies. Sometimes we collected as many as six men in a night and received sixty won. We partied on those nights with sool and opium.
My boys and I also found work guarding some of the merchants’ things. At night, we sold women to these same merchants.
Truth: I had no clue how old I was anymore. I felt like an old man, though. I had forgotten my real name because I hadn’t used it in so long. As back in Orang, I slipped into darkness. There was nothing left inside me but a big hole waiting for the yu-ryeong to fill, since, as in other markets, I couldn’t find ice.
With my brothers, we became men. “You are the man! You are the real man,” we would even tell one another. We did grow into men on those streets, and not very nice men.
Sometime that fall of 2001, we headed to the mountain to pick mushrooms. We met up with some peasants who lived in the caves.
They prayed, as my mother had, to the stones and the trees, believing in the power of shan-shin-ryong-nim to grant them their wishes, which were usually for more food, to get their houses back, to find their missing sons and daughters, and an end to their poverty. Most blamed the Americans, who were still trying to invade us. Chulho and I would shake our heads while listening to these folk stories. Some of the peasants talked as if Kim Il-sung were still alive and fighting the greatest battle of his life.