Every Falling Star

by Sungju Lee

  “He’s a god,” said a grandmother living in a mud hut she said she had made herself. “His very spirit is guiding my son, who’s in the military, to kick the Americans back once and for all.”

  “When was the last time you heard from your son?” I asked.

  “Two years ago,” she said with sparkles in her eyes. “He’s doing great work, my son, my adeul.”

  I started laughing so hard I fell to my knees and rolled around on the ground holding my aching stomach. I knew this woman’s son was dead, either from fighting or from famine. But she still clung to the legend of Kim Il-sung.

  A just death, I thought.

  I laughed so hard the woman started to cry, thinking I was some possessed spirit. As Sangchul and Unsik dragged me away, Chulho kicked me hard in the groin. “You’re really scaring me,” he said. “You’ve become like a demon.”

  “Like that guy in Rajin-Seonbong,” Unsik added. “You will kill, Chang. Very soon, I know you will.”

  “Whatever,” I said, shaking them loose. “I am what I am!”

  “And what is that?” Mingook asked, stepping toward me. It was the first time in all our years on the street that he got in my face. His arms were crossed, and he was staring me down. I stepped toward him, pounding my fist into the palm of my hand.

  “Wanna fight … Wanna make it your death?” I snapped back at him.

  He shook his head and spat.

  “You’ve become a ghost, Chang,” Chulho chortled. “Go cool off in the river. Don’t come back until you’re part of this group again.”

  Needless to say, I did cool off, or warm up. I needed my brothers, and they needed me, too.

  In February 2002 we made up our minds to leave Gyeong-seong again at the start of planting season. Back to the coast, maybe—mackerel, dreams of being a shipmate, I didn’t care. Anywhere but Gyeong-seong. All I knew for certain was that there was nothing left for us in this dead town.

  I was in the train station near the end of February, having just stolen some twisted bread sticks from the market, when an old man with bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows looked right at me and pointed.

  “Come here, boy,” he said in a strong, gruff voice.

  I sized him up and down before moving toward him. He wore pressed pants the color of the sea on a winter’s day and a matching cotton shirt and cap. I hadn’t seen clean clothes on anyone since we left Pyongyang. His cheeks were not sunken and hallow, either. He was full and glowing from the winter wind. There was something about him I recognized. Something about him felt familiar. Yet I couldn’t quite make out what.

  I pushed the feeling away. This is a rich man, I thought, instead, slinking up beside him. I held my hands up, cupped together in front of me, and tilted my head, hoping to look innocent and desperate.

  He shook his head. “I don’t want to give you handouts,” he said. “What is your name?”

  I was startled. His accent was from Pyongyang.

  I glanced at the poster beside him. On it, in the neat handwriting of an educated man, he had listed the Chinese medicines he was selling: elm tree powder for stomachache, woo-wong for the liver, and dried omija for bronchial problems. The poster also said the man could make medicines upon order to cure headaches and menstrual cramps.

  “You a doctor?” I asked, letting my hands fall to my sides.

  “I am,” the man replied. “But I asked you a question. What is your name?”

  “Chang,” I said, puffing out my chest and holding my head high. “I’m very fast and accurate at throwing metal chopsticks.” I wanted this old man to be scared of me like everyone else. “Want me to work for you, guard your things?”

  “What is your real name?” he said, seemingly unimpressed with my attempted bravado or my invitation to work for him.

  I shook my head and turned away from him. I refused to answer. If he wasn’t going to give me food, won, or a job, he was useless.

  “Is your mother Jeongwha?” he asked. “Is your father Seong-il?”

  I turned back around and stared at him. His brown, almost amber, pupils drew me toward him. He reminded me of something … an animal perhaps. Yes, he had the eyes of a brown bear. No … the eyes of a person, someone I knew.

  “What?” I finally said. My arms began to tingle, and my face became flushed. “You’re a fortune-teller,” I spat. “The last seer I met told me death was around me, and it was. My best friend in the entire world, my brother, died.”

  “What is your real name?” he continued, ignoring me. “Is it Sungju?”

  I stared at him for a long time. “Only people who see the dead would know these names,” I finally said.

  “You’re Sungju from Pyongyang, and your mother is Jeongwha. Your father is Seong-il.”

  “Only those who speak with the dead know these names,” I repeated.

  “I’m your grandfather,” he then said, taking a step toward me.

  “No!” I said, stepping back from him.

  “Come with me to my home,” he continued, folding up his poster and placing some glass jars into a large backpack.

  “You’re a sorcerer—I can’t trust you,” I said, flicking my fingers in my nervousness. I wanted to hit this man, to beat him up, to tell him to go away. How dare he say those names to me.

  He stopped what he was doing and stared at me, his face soft.

  Unsik, Sangchul, Mingook, and Chulho sauntered over, having taken my flicking fingers as a sign that we were about to engage in battle.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” I told the old man as I pulled my brothers into a huddle.

  “Let’s go with him,” Unsik said after I explained what was going on. “Steal his things. He’s wealthy! Look at his clothes.”

  “Yes,” I said, rubbing my hands together. My initial fear had turned to greed. This man was using me for something. Instead, I would use him.

  The light on the front of the old man’s bike danced across the snow as we made our way from the train station, through the main town square, and past the monument in honor of Kim Il-sung, with red lettering that said the great leader is with us forever. While there was a nearly full moon hanging low in the sky, clouds kept drifting over it like waves in the sea.

  I listened to my shoes crushing the ice, the howl of a dog, and the hum of the motor that generated the old man’s light.

  “What are your friends’ names?” he asked me.

  “None of your business,” I snapped.

  “That’s a funny name,” he replied.

  “How much longer?” I asked after we had walked for what seemed like a few hours, the snow-covered fields replaced by the sloping hills and forests of the countryside. The few wooden houses we passed were in complete darkness.

  “About another hour,” he replied. “It’s quicker on the bike. But I can’t take you all. Do you—”

  I grunted to cut him off. “Don’t ask me any more questions,” I hissed.

  We finally turned into a driveway that led to a house at the foot of a tall mountain. Kerosene lamps had been placed in the windowsills, casting light out into the courtyard.

  I followed the old man as he moved toward the house as my brothers tailed behind me. All the while, I surveyed the scene. There was a shed that clearly housed goats. I snapped my fingers on my right hand three times, indicating to my brothers to steal the goats. Then I spied the chicken coop. I snapped my fingers again to indicate that the chickens had to be taken, too. Then I saw the rabbit cages. We would be feasting for months! I thought.

  Just as the old man reached up to turn the doorknob, the door opened. A woman stepped outside. She squinted as her eyes got used to the dim light, and I watched as her expression moved from joy to shock when her eyes landed on me. Wearing only socks, she stepped into the snow and headed straight for me.

  “Yaeya, we’ve finally found you! You’re alive,” she said, reaching me and embracing me in her warm arms. My heart started to race.

  “No, I am not your grandson,” I replied thr
ough clenched teeth. This woman was crazy, just like the girl who told me dragons would fall.

  “What kind of game are you two playing?” I demanded, pushing the old woman away.

  “Come inside,” the old woman said in a kind voice. “We’ll talk there.” She wore her gray hair in a tight bun and a rabbit fur collar over her sweater. She took my hand and pulled me into the house, which smelled of burning cedar.

  “I’ll get you and your friends some hot water and honey,” she said, leaving me standing in the doorway. I looked around at the bookshelves as the old man pushed his way past me. There was one full of Chinese medicines in glass jars and another with leather-bound books. My gaze moved to the kitchen, the open shelves of which were well stocked with rice, noodles, chopsticks, dishes, and spoons. I saw a few chests in the corner of the main room. So much to steal, I thought.

  Then my eyes landed on a portrait hanging on the opposite wall.

  I stopped breathing.

  Without taking off my shoes, I inched my way into the center of the room, as if learning to walk.

  As I neared the picture, my legs shook, and I tried to breathe, but I couldn’t. My chest had become tight, as if a fist had just hit me hard. I felt dizzy and had to reach out to steady myself against the wall. “Am I dreaming?” I asked out loud. No one answered, but I could feel the old man move right in behind me.

  I pinched my legs. “Am I awake? Am I dead now? Is this what happens on the other side?”

  “You are awake,” he whispered. “You’re not dead.”

  I stared at the portrait, first into the eyes of my mother, and then at my father. The black-and-white photograph had been taken on their wedding day. It was a copy of the photograph I had wanted from my mother’s wedding chest.

  I managed to whistle to let my brothers know to abort our plans. Unsik came rushing in the front door wanting to know what was going on. I whistled again, and he ran outside to get the others.

  I then turned on legs that felt like rubber and faced the old man, the old woman, and soon my brothers, all staring at me wide-eyed with mouths agape.

  I opened my own mouth to speak. But before any words came, my knees gave out, and I collapsed to the floor.

  “What is it?” Mingook asked, coming to my side.

  “This man is my grandfather,” I said, my voice faint and weak. “And this woman … is my grandmother.”

  She had fallen to the floor, too, and was sobbing. And my grandfather—the man who had told me that before every storm is a calm, who lay with me in Bo-Cho’s house and told me the story of Heungbu wa Nolbu—smiled.

  “You may have grown since I last saw you. You are not a little boy anymore. You’re sixteen. I would never forget your face. Every Sunday, I went looking for you,” he said as he slid down beside me on the floor. “With every falling star I saw, I knew I was getting closer.”

  My brothers and I took off our shoes and sat in a circle around my grandfather as my grandmother finished making us hot water with honey.

  “I wrote your mother every week in Pyongyang,” he began to explain. “I got worried when she stopped replying. And so I came to look for you. You weren’t there. Another family with a little girl about your age lived in your apartment. I asked the block party head where you had all gone. I had to bribe him, but he eventually told me you had moved to Gyeong-seong. I paid him a lot of money for the address, and for nearly a year he refused to give it to me. Finally, he did. But when we got here, it was too late. The people who had taken over your house said your father had disappeared, that your mother had gone to look for food and she had never come back. The man who owned the house said you were a kotjebi at the train station and had never come back.”

  “But I did go back to the house,” I exclaimed. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “If the man who had taken over our house had just said, had just told me, that my grandfather—someone—was looking for me, the past four and a half years wouldn’t have happened.”

  “I never gave up hope I would find you,” my grandfather said.

  “Hope,” I whispered. Something I had lost.

  “Is this your gang?” my grandmother asked as she shuffled into the room, carrying a clay pot of steaming water.

  I nodded.

  My grandfather rolled a cigarette while my grandmother poured each of us a cup of hot water and then spooned in honey.

  “I have honeybees now,” my grandfather said as I took a sip of the drink. Then he quickly asked, “Where is your mother?”

  I could tell by his creaky voice that he wanted to know, and yet, at the same time, he was not ready for the answer.

  I shook my head slowly. “She went to Wonsan to get food from Aunt Nampo,” I said after a long pause. “She never came back. I don’t know where she is.”

  My grandmother spilled part of her drink on her sweater.

  “Aunt never mentioned that your mother was ever expected there,” my grandfather said, his voice full of tears.

  It came to me then what was so familiar about my grandfather’s eyes. They drooped in the corners the same way my mother’s did.

  My grandfather slaughtered his best goat to celebrate my being found. “You need to know that even before the famine, killing a goat was done only on special occasions and showed the highest respect for those it was being cooked for and served to.”

  With the famine, of course, few people had livestock anymore. I had heard stories over the years at the markets of the military killing entire families just to take their pigs and sheep. The military was hungry, too, you know. That my grandfather slaughtered a goat for my brothers and me … that gesture alone made me at least feel human again.

  We were no longer wild animals who stole, who found customers for nightflowers, who fought, who had become so hardened we forgot our real names. Needless to say, I wondered how my grandfather had so much livestock up here, in the hills, deep in the countryside, miles away from any other home. It was as if his home was that lake in Baekdu Mountain: placed there from heaven.

  My brothers and I spent much of the second day vomiting because we were not used to eating so much meat. Our diets had been mostly breads and rice, after all, and lots of insects and bugs and worms that came attached to the food. But being sick didn’t stop us. Since we didn’t want to appear disrespectful to my grandfather by not eating, we’d throw up and then eat another dish. Vomit again, then eat some more, feasting on the tender goat that was roasted on an outdoor spit and served in bowls with baked radish and potatoes. We boys grew lazy, smoking cigarettes with my grandfather, drinking sool, sleeping, and eating. As we relaxed, we recounted many of our journeys, including the gangs we defeated and the brothers we lost.

  “Myeongchul was the best actor in Joseon,” Chulho told my grandfather.

  “And Young-bum was the most loyal of any brothers,” I whispered. “He saved me after abeoji and eomeoni left.”

  My grandmother stopped listening early on. “I hate hearing how you suffered,” she told me as she busied herself in the kitchen, cutting more vegetables. She wanted to give us an endless stream of food for all the meals we’d missed over the years. A tear dripped down my cheek then. She really did love me. Someone, somewhere, was listening to my prayers. Someone, somewhere, still had hope when all of mine had gone.

  ¤ ¤ ¤

  My brothers told me they were leaving on the morning of the sixth day. They first said it was because they didn’t want to see my grandparents with no food. All of us had managed to finish off the goat, and my grandfather was about to kill two chickens and a rabbit for us. But I didn’t believe this was the reason.

  “We want to live in the train station,” Chulho said, pulling me outside so my grandparents couldn’t hear. “The merchants in Gyeong-seong are paying us to protect their goods. We have nothing to do here, and soon everyone will go hungry if we keep eating the way we are. In Gyeong-seong, we have work and food.”

  “My grandfather has lots of food,” I said.

&n
bsp; “We want to go,” Sangchul cut in.

  “Maybe you can come back and forth?” I asked, my voice sounding desperate. I didn’t want to lose them, but I also knew I wasn’t going back to street life, either.

  Sangchul placed a warm hand on my shoulder. “We’ll miss you, too—so much you don’t even know,” he said. “But it’s two hours each way from here to Gyeong-seong. We’ll die of exhaustion if we try that every day. We need to live in the train station.”

  “It’s all we know,” Mingook added. “We want to see if our families might come looking for us, too. We’ve only ever kept moving and looked for them. What if, like with you, we all keep missing each other?”

  “We had a rocky start,” Unsik said, stepping toward me. “But …”

  “But you’ll always be my brother,” I said, finishing his sentence.

  “The best brother I could have,” he said with a smile.

  “Can you make us a promise?” Chulho said, moving in close.

  “Of course, anything,” I replied, wiping my eyes.

  “Can you come to the train station every Sunday to see us, as your grandfather did looking for you?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  I then watched my four brothers walk side by side down the road, wearing clothes that my grandmother had washed and sewn. I choked back my tears and swallowed the hurt and sadness swelling inside me. Even before they disappeared from my view, I missed them. I felt hollow all over again, like when my parents left.

  For the last months of winter I helped my grandfather make his medicines, grinding herbs into fine powders with a wooden pestle-and-mortar hand grinder he had made himself. He taught me the exact amounts of powder to mix with honey or sticky rice powder. I also boiled his syringes and cleaned his glass jars.

  A few times every day, someone would pop in: an aging grandmother, a sick child. In one of the many sheds, which he had built himself, he would see the patient, never turning anyone away, even if they couldn’t pay. He’d administer whatever medicines were needed, and I’d help him bandage wounds and set broken bones. His patients often gave him food—an animal or vegetables. The men would come by on another day and fix a fence or replace a beam in the chicken coop. Unlike the doctors I’d heard about in Gyeong-seong, my grandfather always gave his medicines to the people along with treatment.