Chapter 8
“They [My biological parents] were my sperm and egg bank. That’s not harsh, it’s just the way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more.”
–Steve Jobs
No one came for me the next day, but that wasn’t unexpected as the Gang was returning to Pyongyang and Honey had mentioned she wouldn’t be seeing me for a few days because of “prior appointments.” Apparently when I was out of Honey’s sight, I was out of her mind, left in my room to endure the tortuously slow progress of the day, with no books, no TV, not even a pair of knitting needles, just the constant churning of my mind, knotting tighter and tighter around Wendell’s offer to help me. In a crowd of sniveling toadies, he was the one whose belly slunk the lowest, and I strongly suspected that whatever he proposed would be more to his advantage than to mine. But if he approached me again, what choice did I have but to take the bait? No one else was clamoring to help me, and it was clear that I could not escape on my own. I couldn’t make it out of my room, much less find my way through the labyrinth of corridors to an exit, much less flee North Korea—a country about which I knew next to nothing, except that its leader was often a punch line to morbid jokes.
One day turned into two and then into three.
The only person to visit my room was Ting, whose response to my incessant chatter was an occasional blank stare. Once I tried to slip out the door with her, and she shoved me back with surprising ferocity, pausing to make sure I wasn’t hurt before slamming the door shut.
On the fourth day, Ting brought me a simple cotton frock and ballerina flats. Elated at the prospect of release, I encircled her tightly in my arms, causing her to briefly flutter against me in panic, before relaxing and enduring my hug, even flashing me a shy smile that revealed ivoried corn-niblet teeth.
After another confusing odyssey through the serpentine corridor, Wendell’s advice to learn my way around ringing in my ears like a cruel joke, Ting delivered me to a door that required not only an eye scan but also a numeric code to open. Entering through a dark vestibule, I walked toward the light into a vast kitchen, where I was greeted with a deep bow by a stocky man in a white chef’s uniform, shoulder-length hair slicked back into a ponytail, face composed solemnly into cascading pleats of skin. “Welcome, Lisa.”
“Hello, Cookie.” I bowed back. “It is nice to finally be formally introduced to you.”
“Yes,” he intoned, bowing to my bow. “But no. My name is Miura Masaaki.”
“Miura-san.” Crooking forward at the waist, I quavered, “Hajimemashite. Lisa Pearl desu. Yoroshiku onegaishimasu.”
“Waa! Nihongo wo dekimasu ka?” he yelped in surprise.
“Sukoshi dake,” I admitted. “Your English is much better than my Japanese.”
“Nihongo ga jouzu desu ne?” he marveled, politely giving me much more credit than I deserved, as was the Japanese way. Showing me a stack of books—The Joy of Cooking, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and The James Beard Cookbook—still in their cellophane wrapping, he said, “Madam asks you show me new dishes for cooking.”
“She thinks I can teach you?” I laughed. “That’s absurd. You’re an excellent cook.”
“Maybe not teach,” he said. “Maybe advise. Lisa knows the foods Madam was eating in America. Together we choose new foods for Miura-san to cook.”
“Will Madam be joining us today?” I flicked at an enormous copper-bottomed pot that dangled from a ceiling hook, the reverberation shimmering in the air.
Pulling back his ponytail, he smoothed the tight cap of his hair, blazed down the middle by a streak of white. “No, Madam rests after surgery.”
“Surgery? What for?”
He must have thought my voice conveyed alarm rather than surprise. “Nothing serious,” he assured me with a crazed giggle. “To take fat away from tummy.” He darted a finger at his own paunch and made little sucking sounds.
“Liposuction?!” I gasped.
With a wicked smile, he flashed a finger to his lips and gave a nervous shrug, signaling that we should change the subject.
Light and airy, the kitchen sparkled with stainless steel and copper: counters, sinks, an industrial-sized fridge, an eight-burner gas stove, exhaust hoods, a double-tiered oven, and racks of shining pots, pans, and utensils. But I had eyes for only one thing, a large window through which real light poured. Here, finally, was the outdoors! Peering out, I saw that it wasn’t really the outdoors but a neatly furrowed greenhouse teeming with edible plants in various stages of growth, the glass ceiling revealing the blue, blue sky, blotted by a few unraveling cotton-ball clouds. “Can we go out there?”
“Sou.” He scurried over to a door tucked behind wire shelves stocked with jars of dried beans and sacks of grains. “Come, come,” he urged me, pawing at the air with an underhanded motion.
It was like stepping from a flat drawing into 3-D, the air hot and moist against my skin, eyes squinting shut against the painful glare of the sun, nose twitching in olfactory overdrive, picking up the umami bass notes of damp soil, the muscular scent of onions, the sweet trill of sun-warmed glucose. An overhead fretwork of pipes and wires cast a delicate gridded shadow over the straight green furrows and raised vegetable beds. Parting a curtain of oregano trailing from a hanging pot, I peered through the glass at a tidy swath of lawn bordered by an outcropping of mossy rock that blocked any further view. “Can we go outside?”
“No,” he replied mournfully. “Only Madam can take you outside.” Tapping me on the arm, he extended his upturned palm to me, a cherry tomato cupped inside. It dissolved like sugar on my tongue.
Seeing him now in full sunlight, I couldn’t tell if he was a young-looking old man or an old-looking young man. A silver stripe slashed through his thick midnight-black hair. His skin was smooth and uncreased, but his face was heavy with folds of flesh, nose emerging in a long, clean curve like a hawk’s beak.
Brushing at a gnat that was hovering in front of my face, I asked, “How long have you been here, Miura-san?”
He stilled, lidding his eyes in contemplation. “Eight, nine years.”
“Were you kidnapped as well?”
“Kidnapped?” he wondered, probing a finger into the soil of a raised bed of tender seedlings, emerald leaves just beginning to unfurl, then wiping the dirt off on his pants. “I don’t think so. I worked in Thailand, in very luxury resort in Phi Phi Islands. I was number one sushi chef, one hundred pounds of fish a day. One day a young man ask me to work for him for a lot of money. I say no. But he comes back again next year, with same question. Many things happen in a year, and so I say yes. And”—he spread his arms wide, knocking into a hanging basket of thyme—“here I am.”
“You’re a sushi chef?” I asked, following him to a thick pipe studded with a series of taps, each one a different color. “Why haven’t you served any sushi since I’ve been here?”
His thick, square-tipped fingers unscrewed a yellow tap, and a gentle mist hissed from the overhead pipes. “Madam is tired of sushi. She wants only Western foods.”
“Why does Madam have a sushi chef if she only likes Western food?”
“You know they are like that, those guys. They like things the same.”
“What do you mean?” I turned my face up to be tickled by the settling droplets of water vapor.
“The father had sushi chef, so the son gets sushi chef, to show respect for the father.”
“What father? What son? What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you know?” he demanded, the thin aperture of his eyes dilating in surprise.
“I assure you, Miura-san, I know nothing.”
Tiny beads of water turned his black hair gray. “The father is the Dear Leader.”
“Kim Jong Il?” I whispered.
“Dear Leader,” he said, nodding and picking a few dead leaves off a stalk drooping with slender scimitars of purple-skinned eggplants.
“Is he your boss?” I asked.
“No, the son is.”
/> I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I don’t know who his son is.”
Slowly turning the tap closed, Miura-san said, “Kim Jong Un.”
I put out a hand to catch the last few microdrops of water; they sparkled like diamond chips on my skin. “What does Honey have to do with Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un?”
Kneeling by a row of verdant feathery stalks bowing in the sun, he said, “These are carrots,” his fingers caressing the lacy crowns. “Pick up one.” As I hesitated, he insisted, “We want to show we are talking to each other about the foods.”
“Why, are they watching us?” I turned to look over my shoulder.
“Lisa-san,” he said solemnly, “the cameras are always watching. Do not forget. Cameras are everywhere. Pick up a carrot.”
Gingerly, I grabbed a lacy clump and started to pull, thinking a lot more about the cameras than the carrots. “Dame, dame,” he scolded me. “Down at the bottom, you pull from there. You have two, three carrots you pick up now. Don’t be lazy. Find before you pull.”
I did as he directed. As the vegetable was torn from its cradle of dirt, he said, “She is his mother.”
Clots of dirt pinged against the stiff white front of his chef’s jacket. “What? Honey is what?” I began to snicker. “Stop it. You’re freaking me out!”
The ridges of his face settled into the armor plating of a rhinoceros. “I am not saying a joke.”
“So,” I said, my brain slowly processing what Miura-san was telling me, “Honey is the mother of Kim Jong Un, and Kim Jong Il is his father?”
Still clutching the carrot, I wobbled away from him, fleeing past frilly heads of lettuce, effulgent stalks of broccoli, sinewy vines heavy with pregnant pea pods, until I arrived at the far end of the greenhouse. Beyond the glass was a narrow strip of jumbled boulders bordered by a dense grove of bamboo. I leaned my forehead against the glass, expecting it to be cool upon my suddenly flushed brow, and was surprised that it was as warm as a human cheek. Miura-san followed me, busying himself with a coil of hose that snaked at my feet.
“Remember, they are always watching. No one is your friend. Not even I am.”
When I returned to my room that afternoon, I found a paperback propped against my pillow, the title emblazoned in red: Guiding Light: General Kim Jong Il. It felt like a reward, for what I wasn’t sure, and I was grateful for it and then alarmed at my gratitude, at how quickly I was adjusting to my new circumstances, how soon the unacceptable was becoming the normal. Nevertheless, when I wasn’t working in the kitchen with Cookie, I hungrily devoured the adulatory text, savoring each hyperbolic word, treasuring each outlandish assertion, and marveling over each overwrought exclamation point. The Jong Il in the book was a selfless, benevolent humanitarian of superhuman proportions who bore little resemblance to the stunted, cold-blooded asshole that the rest of the world knew him to be.
Two weeks after I arrived in Boston to attend college, airplanes hurtled from the sky like thunderbolts, and I watched the endless replay of the Twin Towers collapsing, the Pentagon burning, and people running for their lives from a smothering cloud of rubble that pursued them with nightmarish intent on my crappy portable TV, sitting on my narrow bed in a cinder-block-walled dorm room with a boy named Nigel, whom I had met my very first night at a dorm mixer. Never before had a boy pursued me with such ardor. Without a trace of self-consciousness or hesitation, he offered himself up to me, hanging on to my every word, staring at me with eyes that fairly smoldered with adoration. He was smart, frighteningly so, wielding his wit like a leather whip. He was also beautiful in a delicate-boned, long-haired kind of way.
About a week later, we were sitting on his bed, listening to the Replacements and talking about Heart of Darkness, when he blurted out, “Can I kiss you?” We leaned toward each other, and his lips were warm and pliant, his tongue gently insistent. When we finally broke away, I murmured, “I’m sorry about my nose,” because it had knocked into his several times, requiring some neck-cricking maneuvers.
Gently cradling my face in his hands, he brushed his lips over the bridge of my nose, slid his silken tongue down the ridge, and sucked softly on the tip. “I’ve been wanting to do that ever since I met you, Lisa Pearl,” he said breathlessly. I was in love.
There was only one point of incompatibility: Nigel did not drink. He’d do the occasional bong hit, and one wintry day we took some mushrooms and went to the Boston Aquarium, but he said he didn’t like how out of control he got when he drank. So, at first, I stayed sober for him, not because he asked me to, but because I feared he wouldn’t like the drunk me very much. But as time went on, I began to cheat, not with booze, because he’d be sure to smell it on my breath, but with pills, usually a Percocet or Vicodin, something to give me a nice, discreet buzz.
One night I took two OxyContins and blabbed to him about the famous adopted people list, which I had never told anyone else about, feeling it was a sacred secret just between Mindy and me. He gave me another name to add: Steve Jobs. Nigel was an Apple acolyte, but in a doubting Thomas sort of way, believing Jobs to be a genius, a revolutionary, and an asshole, and it became a favorite debate of ours whether being an asshole was a prerequisite to being a genius. Nigel wanted to be a writer too, and most of his favorite authors—Ernest Hemingway, William S. Burroughs, Patricia Highsmith—we decided were assholes; mine, an ever-evolving list of mostly female authors that he called the “clit club,” which at that moment included Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and Ursula Le Guin, were not, or if they were, we hadn’t heard about it. I also told him about the pact between Mindy and me to become famous and that wrenching moment of betrayal when she put aside her dream to become an actor in order to please her mother, leaving it to me to become the famous one. He teased me that I needed to be more of an asshole to become famous. Little did he know.
Mindy was just across town, at Harvard, but whenever either one of them suggested that they meet the other, I put them off, afraid that the two people I liked the most in this world would like each other more than they liked me when they finally met. Just the fact that they wanted to meet each other raised my suspicions. Jealousy wasn’t a new emotion for me—according to Mrs. Frank it was common in adoptees—but it had never so completely possessed me the way it did when I was with Nigel. A joke shared with another girl, an admiring comment, and it would come for me out of a perfectly blue sky: a seething black cloud like the one that roared down the streets around the World Trade Center on that calamitous September day, and instead of running, I let it come, and I let it envelop me in hot, smothering ash.
Having recovered from liposuction, Honey summoned me for a hike in the woods, providing me with a tracksuit that matched hers, only mine was jade green to her hot pink, and telling Yolanda to do our hair in sporty-looking pigtails. Tremulously, I stepped from the gloomy portal of the compound out into the naked sunlight, savoring the delicious stroke of the gentle breeze on my skin, the satisfying crunch of dirt beneath my feet, the ambient noise of insects and birds and stirring leaves. Drawing pure, unadulterated fresh air deeply into my lungs, I welcomed the chilliness of the spring day after being cosseted for so long in a temperature controlled to a Goldilocks perfection, the air so sere it crackled. Honey started off at a brisk pace, arms working like pistons, stabbing her walking stick into the ground with each step, and we headed into the bamboo, where the air glowed green and shed husks and leaves rustled beneath our feet, a bodyguard following closely on our heels. When we emerged from the grove, Honey paused in the full sunlight, eyes closed as she soaked up the sun.
I spoiled her moment of tranquility by asking, “Can you tell me a little about my father?”
She sighed and resumed walking, leading us into the woods, sunlight splotching through tall pines in scrappy patches, needles crackling underneath our feet, the air sticky with the aromatic pungency of pine resin. “I’ve already told you that I’m not exactly sure who your father is, probably one of the earnest young university students who visite
d Honey Do, talking revolution as an aphrodisiac. I really can’t remember a thing about any of those men who came before Jon.”
“Does Jon know I’m here?”
“Not exactly.” She bent to pick a creamy white flower, tucking it behind her ear. “It leaves you vulnerable, but you are fortunate to have the protection of the second most powerful man in this country, my son, Jonny.” The flower fell out, but she didn’t notice.
“Are you talking about Kim Jong Un?”
Her face softened, the varnished mask dropping away, briefly exposing a tremulous vulnerability that I had not glimpsed before. “Yes. My boy. Your half brother. After many years of indecision, Jon has finally named my child his successor. He would have done it sooner, only there were certain risks, for even though our son looks fully Korean and was raised by Jon’s wife, the secret of his true heritage had to be fully erased.”
“You didn’t raise your own son?” I asked.
Our climb suddenly turned steeper, and her words rode in on galloping puffs of air. “It is not uncommon in Asia, taking a baby away from his mother to be raised by the father’s wife, in his house and under his watchful eye. When my son turned thirteen, Jon allowed me an occasional visit with him. Korean children have a very special bond with their mothers, and little Jonny was no different. He loved me with a fierceness that was almost frightening and hated the woman whom he had to call ‘Mother.’ I suppose she was not very nice to him, as he was a rival to her own children. And she had a lot to worry about.” A small, bloodless smile split her chin like a paper cut. “Her oldest son is a sissy, and the other one a big fat slob. The only one of her children with any gumption is the girl, and in this society there’s no way that she will come out on top. When it became evident that the wife’s sons were just as stupid as she was, his father began to take more interest in my boy. He liked the way he rode a horse, the way he managed his friends, the way he didn’t back down for anyone. He liked the dimple in his chin, which was just like his own.” She dreamily placed a finger at the tip of her own pointed and dimpleless chin.
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