by Sungju Lee
When spring came, I helped my grandfather till the land of the small farm he ran. My hands became calloused from the friction of heaving the shovel up and down. But the land was fertile, and soon I saw the stalks of corn and the soybeans and potatoes pop forth from the ground.
After that, I became a shepherd. Several days a week, I’d take my grandfather’s goats to the hills. I’d sing, “‘The roll of thunder of Jong-Il peak,’” trying as hard as I could to sound like Sangchul when he performed in the train station. When I was bored of singing, I’d recite myths, including the one of Heungbu wa Nolbu.
Being a shepherd meant having a lot of time to myself; so when my voice grew hoarse from singing and I’d recited the few myths I knew, I’d point my long staff at one of those little creatures in my charge and name it. “You are so much like Mingook,” I said to the beefiest buck. “And you, lean and mean billy, you are Chulho.” Half laughing, half crying, I’d then recount to these animals stories of my brothers and what we did together, leaving in the parts I’d left out for my grandfather, including my using opium, kicking other boys when they had already surrendered, and finding men to have sex with the nightflowers.
Since the area where my grandparents lived was deep in the countryside, I could see more stars than I ever had anywhere else. When spring finally moved over to let summer in, I’d lie on the flat roof of one of my grandfather’s sheds and stare up at the sky.
One night, my grandfather asked if he could join me. We lay side by side, our hands behind our heads, and stared at Ursa Major. I wanted to tell him the story of Chilseong and her goddess children, but as before when I thought I wanted to share something, I couldn’t. The last time I had been this close to a grown man was when my father told me about Chilseong. That time felt so very far away now. It’s funny how, after a time, not just a person’s scent but also his or her face leaves our memories. All I had left was his story of Chilseong, and I think I didn’t want to give that away, not yet.
“Do you remember when you were little, my telling you that if you make a wish on a falling star, the wish will come true?” my grandfather said, and just in the nick of time. I was about to cry thinking of my father.
“Uh-huh,” I replied.
“Make a wish now,” he said, pointing to the northern horizon as a star blazed across the sky, fast and faint, like the final fizzle of a firecracker on Parade Day. If I didn’t hurry, I’d miss it.
I pinched my eyes shut. “You brought me my grandparents,” I said aloud to Chilseong and shan-shin-ryong-nim. “Now I want to find my parents. Please lead them to me.”
My grandmother had been a high school math teacher when she married my grandfather. She stopped working in her midforties and ran an after-school program for elite math students—that is, until she and my grandfather left Pyongyang to come looking for my family and me.
One rainy afternoon, I found my grandfather in one of his sheds, nailing planks of wood together, and then those planks onto a flat piece of plywood, creating a box. Then he poured sand into it. “We have no notebooks,” he explained as he waved his hands over the contraption. “This,” he said with a wide smile, “will be how you study at the house of your grandmother.”
After I did household chores or in the evenings on those days I had to shepherd, my grandmother would take me to that shed. For hours, she had me doing math equations and writing paragraphs in the sand.
I soon slipped back into study mode, replacing my need for cigarettes and sool with words and algebra. In the hills, while tending the goats, I’d use my walking stick and continue my studies on my own in the dusty earth.
At night I’d fall asleep in down bedding and wake up to my grandfather’s snores filling the house and my grandmother’s porridge cooking over slow heat on the stove. I could exhale and relax and sleep so deeply I wondered if I had slept at all in the past four years. On some days that hole inside me was filled, and time didn’t seem to move.
On other days, though, I’d wake to the sound of a magpie cawing or the call of the rooster, panting, not quite sure where I was, patting the bedding down and calling for my mother. My grandfather would calm me by stroking my back and then giving me hot water with honey. As he rocked me in his arms, he sang:
“Hushabye, hushabye baby
sleep well
go to a country of dream
my lovely baby
go to a country of dream
my lovely baby.”
Every Sunday, the moment the rooster announced dawn, I’d jump into my pants and sweater and head out the front door with the big gray canvas bag full of food my grandmother packed the night before. I’d race, more times than not running the entire way to Gyeong-seong, to the train station to see my brothers. By the time I got there, I’d be perspiring, and my feet would be blistered. But I ignored my discomfort. I had discovered I had two homes, you see, two places that drew me to them, as metal does a magnet. My grandparents and my brothers.
On hot, humid days when the cicadas hummed and the crickets sang, my brothers and I went to Gyeong-seong River to swim. We’d swing on an old tire tied to a tree on a fraying rope and leap off into the stream. We’d play tag, too, during which we would chase one another, splashing and singing at the top of our lungs.
We’d end our days by my buying them twisted bread sticks in the market using won my grandfather gave me from selling his medicines. We’d sit on the broken stone steps leading up to the train station and stare at the sunset. One time, I thought about Pyongyang and wondered why I was ever in such awe of our capital city, why everyone held it in such great esteem. I came to realize then and there that gilded castles in the sky aren’t ever buildings. They’re people. My gilded castle was here, all along, with my friends, my brothers, Chulho, Mingook, Sangchul, Unsik, Myeongchul, and Young-bum.
Inside, we already know the things that will happen to us in life. We spend our days just waiting for them to be revealed … I remembered my grandfather’s words then. I guess as a child, when I played with my toy soldiers under the baby grand piano and wished for a sibling, I had known I had some, somewhere out there. I was just waiting for time to reveal them to me.
I guess, also, I always knew that I’d have to leave my brothers for good … at least in body.
In spirit, my brothers and I would always be one.
On a late fall day, when the air outside was crisp and smelled of my grandmother’s cooking fires and damp leaves and the wind bit into my cheeks as I walked with the goats, I arrived home in the evening to find my grandfather pacing the driveway.
When he saw me, he motioned for me to leave the goats and follow him. His face was drawn. I could tell, even in the dim light, that he was tense.
In his examination room, which smelled of disinfectant, a man was seated in the old wooden chair where my grandfather usually sat. The man seemed nervous as he folded his gray cotton cap into his hands and stood up. “You must be Sungju!”
I stared into his black eyes and nodded slowly.
“He says he knows your father,” my hal-abeoji said, gesturing for me to sit on the patient’s cot.
I turned to my grandfather and tilted my head, unsure I had heard correctly.
“He says he has been sent by your father, who is living in China,” my grandfather continued. “The man wants to give you something.”
My hands trembled as I carefully opened the letter the man passed to me.
Dear darling son,
I’m living in China very safely. Please come to China to see me. This man will take you. I have looked a long time for you.
My love,
Father
My eyes filled with tears, from relief that my father had found me but also from anger.
My mother was missing.
I had spent four years stealing, begging, and living on the streets. And he’d been in China the entire time? He finally sent me a letter addressed “Dear darling son,” as if the years had not grown like a sea separating us?
I wanted to scream. I fought the impulse to tear up the letter. Who cares where he is? I wanted to lash out.
Instead, I started to pass the letter back to the man, my hands shaking more than ever, when I saw that my father had written more on the back.
In case you do not believe this letter is from me … When you were little, we used to picnic on the banks of the Daedong River. Afterward, we played war games. I taught you military tactics, remember? One of those tactics was to have a secret code. If we ever got separated in battle, we would use that code to identify each other. One of us would have to start the code, the other had to answer it. I will start: the Korean consonant N.
The tears came crashing down my cheeks. It was the start of the code, what my father was supposed to say or write, to identify himself. I leaned over, unable to breathe. For a moment I couldn’t see, blinded by my crying. I knew this was my father. In our secret code game, father would give me a random consonant, and I had to answer with a word that began with that consonant.
The man finally spoke. “I’m a friend of your father’s.” I didn’t look up, and I started to shake. “I will take you to him,” he continued. I wished I hadn’t heard that. I didn’t want to.
Fury, love, hurt, and guilt had all rolled themselves into one tight ball that got stuck in my stomach and threatened to choke me.
“Give the boy time to think,” my grandfather said, I guess sensing something wasn’t right with me. “Come back in two days’ time. We’ll have a decision by then.”
All that night, I tossed and turned, trying to sleep but waking at the faintest of sounds, including a twig falling on the roof, the rustling of leaves from the wind. Tomorrow I will tend the goats. Tomorrow will be a normal day, like any other, I’d tell myself. Tomorrow I will forget completely about this strange man’s visit.
But then my mind would drift to that letter. I’m living in China very safely. Please come to China to see me. This man will take you. I have looked a long time for you. My love, Father.
I wanted to see my father—that much I came to realize. But not to run into his arms and hug him. Instead, to ask him why he left and never came home. “Why, why didn’t you honor your promise and return in a week? Eomeoni once told me that you could brave anything except the thought of my thinking of you as a failure, too.”
“I will go with the man,” I told my grandparents the next morning as we sipped hot water with honey and I ran a spoon through a bowl of porridge.
“What if it’s a trap?” my grandmother whispered. “What if this man doesn’t know your father and wants to hurt you?”
I explained to her that in the letter something was written that no one else in the world but my father would ever know. “At least the letter is real. It’s my father’s handwriting. He used our secret code.”
My grandfather cleared his throat. “I, too, am worried about you going to China. I don’t trust this man. For four years we have not heard a thing from either your mother or father, and now—”
“I’m coming back,” I said, cutting him off, reaching over and taking first my grandmother’s and then my grandfather’s hands in my own. “I want to live here and grow old with you.”
My grandmother gasped, and my grandfather sighed and lowered his head. “We want that, too, but …”
“But what? I thought this is what you wanted. I thought this was the reason you came looking for me.”
“There is no hope for Joseon,” my grandfather said, looking up, his eyes a pool of tears. “If you can get out—I mean, out of Joseon—you should go. I just … I just … I just want to make sure this is the right way with this stranger.”
Now I was really confused. The Chinese hunt us down like rats, wanting to exterminate us, and the South gets information from us, then kills us. “Where is there to go?” I finally said.
My grandfather shrugged.
I pressed on, trying to be as reassuring as I possibly could be. “Look, this isn’t a trap. This man has a letter from my father. That much I know for certain. I survived four years in train stations and back alleys. I can survive this.”
¤ ¤ ¤
My grandmother slipped a bag with rice balls and honey over my shoulder. My grandfather, whom I knew well by now, chain-smoked when he was nervous, and he lit up one after another of his hand-rolled cigarettes as we waited for the stranger to return to take me to China.
When the man, who looked as though he was in his early thirties and who reminded me of Chulho, arrived, he reassured my grandparents that we could trust him.
I didn’t cry as we walked down the road or look back after I had bowed to my grandparents, even though I could hear my grandmother sobbing at the doorway. I had to fight every nerve in my body that wanted me to turn around and run back into her arms.
And then they were gone. All I could hear was my feet crunching the snow underneath me.
“Why didn’t my father come sooner?” I asked the man.
“He tried. He sent people to look for you and your mother.” His speech was curt. I got the sense he really didn’t want to talk.
“Why didn’t he come back?” I pressed on.
“We’re all in hard times, even those in China,” the man began. He was thin, but I could tell by his strong gait that he was fit. I was breathing heavily to keep up. This man has walked many mountains, I thought. He’s well trained.
“What does that mean?” I asked. “My father couldn’t come home? He got stuck in China for four years?”
The man stopped and spun me around so I had to look at him.
“The less you know, the better,” he said sternly. “Just trust this: Every arrangement possible has been made to ensure your security. Your father has done a lot to find you and bring you to him and avoid being caught.”
“By the border guards?” I asked. The man was walking again and grunted. I reached out to him and held his elbow, getting him to stop again.
“Can I at least say goodbye to my brothers in Gyeong-seong before we leave?” I asked him. We studied each other’s faces. I was looking particularly into his eyes to see signs of deceit. There were none. He was a hard man, for sure, but I felt he could be trusted.
“Yes, you can see your brothers,” he finally whispered, shifting from one shoulder to the other the bag of food my grandmother had given him, saying it was for the boys. “But you need to listen to me at all times. If I say jump, you ask how high. This is one of the most dangerous journeys in the world you are about to take. You’re a street boy, so you know people, whom to trust and whom not to trust. You know danger. You also know how to act calm in the face of danger. That’s why I know we’ll be okay. But stop asking questions. That’s your first order.”
“What’s your name?” I asked as he huffed off.
“None of your business,” he called over his shoulder.
I smiled then.
He reminded me of … well, me.
My brothers weren’t anywhere at the Gyeong-seong train station. The man started to get impatient as I searched for them, snapping at me at one point that I couldn’t waste any more time. We had to go.
“You seem to know what it’s like as a street boy,” I said. He glared at me, but I didn’t care. “Everyone in these boys’ lives has let them down. Everyone. And you know that. So I’m not leaving until I find them. You can leave if you want, but I’m staying.”
The man sighed, stepped back, and said he’d wait for me by the willow tree by Ha-myeon Bridge. It was the same tree where Chulho and Mingook sat that late-summer day in 1997 when I sold my textbooks.
I finally found my brothers in the market. I waved them over and gave them my grandmother’s food.
“But it’s not Sunday,” Chulho said, tilting his head and eyeing me up and down. “Something up? Everything okay with the grandfolks?”
“Yeah,” I replied slowly. “I have to go to Hweryeong. My mother’s sister, Nampo, now lives there. She’s ill.” I felt sick inside from the first and what would be
come the last lie I ever told them. I wanted to take it back, swallow it, and start all over. Tell them the truth.
Then I reminded myself that what I was about to do with this strange man was illegal and considered treason by the government.
“We’ll come with you,” said Sangchul, tossing his bag over his shoulder.
The others nodded.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I have to go on my own. But I will try to be back, if not this Sunday, the Sunday after. Soon … very soon.”
“Okay … ,” said Chulho.
I could tell by the way he looked at me that he knew I was lying. But then his eyes moved to a woman carrying a basket of boiled eggs a little too loosely in front of her, as though she was new to selling and unprepared to face kotjebi.
Mingook, Sangchul, Unsik, and Chulho all grunted goodbye to me and were then gone in a flash, following the woman.
“If not this Sunday, then the one after I will come and see you,” I whispered as they disappeared into the crowd. “A promise is a promise. And I mean that. Whatever I face in China, whatever man my father has become, I will be back here in a week to see you and live with my grandparents again.”
The strange man paid an old truck driver, who looked as beat-up as his vehicle, to let us hitch a ride in the back.
We got off the truck around midnight in Hweryeong. “We’ll stay here at a friend’s house,” the man said. And I mean that’s all he said. This stranger had gone mute on me.
I spent the rest of that night and all of the next day inside this so-called friend’s house. I was unable to eat my grandmother’s rice balls, unable to sleep, unable to do much but stare out at nothing and think about all the things I wanted to tell my father, every detail of my life over the past four years that he was responsible for. At least my anger toward my father, I thought at one point, made me not think about what I was about to do: Smuggle myself into China. I should have been way more worried about that than I actually was.