How I Became a North Korean

by Krys Lee

  He said, “Thanks to Cheolmin, we’ll fast and pray for a few days and begin our relationship with God over again in the right state of mind. For ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

  He instructed me to take the storeroom’s boxes of canned goods to the front door, then began emptying out the kitchen drawers: dumplings freshly rolled for the night’s dinner, a tub of kimchi we had seasoned together, a shelf of vegetables and another of fruit, all the cartons of banchan, packages of dry noodles. All of it was deposited into large plastic bags that he ordered Daehan to help carry to the car. He said, “There are others who will appreciate this.”

  “You mean we won’t be eating at all, when there’s food?” Bakjun’s knuckles scrubbed at his face as if to erase himself. He looked confused and hostile and sorry all at once. “All of us, for days?”

  Daehan’s hand only passed over his face like a fan, and he lugged the heavy sack out, his feet as heavy as flagstones. I didn’t move.

  When Missionary Kwon had his nose in one of the drawers, Cheolmin spat on the floor and in one swift movement rammed him with his head, pushing Missionary Kwon into the wall. It was as if my wishing had made it happen. Bakjun took the cue and grabbed the missionary by the shirt with two fists. “You liar!”

  Cheolmin said, “Come on! We’ll get goryangju with his money.”

  Namil and Gwangsu followed as they clamped themselves on the missionary’s legs. I could have stopped them, but instead I let them sabotage months of patience. When Jangmi limped in the missionary’s direction, I blocked her behind me. I said, “He deserves worse.”

  “How dare you raise your hand to me? To God’s representative?” Missionary Kwon ripped Bakjun’s hands away from his shirt and pulled him up, dangling him in the air. “We’re giving you an opportunity! And you can’t stay still for five minutes to draw strength from his words when there’s hundreds of thousands of your people who live on garbage every day!”

  Cheolmin bit the missionary’s hand and forced him to release Bakjun. Cheolmin said, “One! Two! Three!” and they tipped the missionary over as if he were a pine tree.

  The missionary shouted, threatened. “Yongju! Yongju!” he pleaded. I didn’t let anyone help him. Sweat rimmed his lips and the bridge of his nose, soaked his collar. His limbs jolted like an epileptic’s. The boys were as excited as a pack of dogs, and their movements shook the lantern on the saang. Their hands had finally found an object for their anger and they kicked and punched and tore, communicated in a language they understood.

  Their hands were my hands. Because I now knew hands blistered and feet cracked white by the weather. How to sleep with rats the size of rabbits, how to endure the slow crawl of lice. How drinking helped you live with unlivable fear. How you could wake up with frozen icicles in your hair, not knowing if one of the boys would be frozen dead, forever fourteen. How being locked in was a kind of daily death. I understood what it meant to be a North Korean in China. Because I was one of them.

  Jangmi flew out from behind me and pried Bakjun’s hands from the missionary’s chest, but Cheolmin pushed her away and she fell. She limped in a fretful semicircle around them like a stray cat. She clutched her stomach, her phantom child.

  I felt helpless. There was nothing I could do for her or for any of the people I had lost. When I closed my eyes, I saw Missionary Kwon’s dirty hands on her body. The cycle was as clear to me as a simple sentence; I wanted to break it.

  “Is this your plan? Simply to hurt him and release your anger, then wait for your punishment? Tie him up,” I said. “Make him call a broker and get us out of this country. One of us can stay and watch him while the others leave—maybe Daehan?

  “Or I’ll stay.” My thoughts spun beyond me.

  I came back from the kitchen with the laundry cord and the kitchen scissors, and instructed the others to hold down his arms and legs. I sawed the rope into two with the scissors and used half to strap his arms so tightly back that the white shirt buttons strained against the convex curve of the missionary’s stomach.

  By the time Daehan returned, my work was done. When he saw us, his hands rammed into his crinkly hair and raised it into a bush. “Oh no, no!” he said. “You’ve got to stop!”

  I didn’t want it to stop.

  “How dare you? Boys, calm down! Let’s discuss this!” our overthrown ruler said. His muddled roil of thoughts were more a trail of panic than sentences. He pleaded, threatened. “Lord, why have you forsaken me?”

  “Do something!” Daehan screamed at me, assuming it was the work of the others. He hurled himself at my back; I shook him off.

  He said, “You’re sabotaging yourself! I’m getting you help, I promise!” It sounded like another futile Christian promise.

  “Watch this.” Namil checked to see if we were watching, then grabbed the scissors from me and slashed the window’s covering, which was sticky with the cicadas, and wrapped it around Missionary Kwon’s head.

  The missionary shook his head wildly, trying to shake off the plastic. “It doesn’t get better—your lives will feel like a dream and no one will ever understand you again once you cross. But I understand. God understands. You North Koreans are always so ungrateful.”

  The legs of his chair lifted and thudded against the floor as he struggled. The boys looked at one another for what to do next.

  I withdrew one of the cell phones from Missionary Kwon’s jacket pocket and scrolled through the list of names. “Which one leads us to a broker?”

  The missionary sat up straight in the chair and his arms went limp in their binding. He took a deep breath, and panic and anger eased from his face until his glacial gaze went right through me.

  “You think I care about this body, this mere shell?” he said. “You think that God is so weak, for you to threaten me?”

  “All you have to do is get us out of here. You drove us to this.”

  “I saved you, all of you. Without me, you’re nothing. Less than vermin.”

  Cheolmin spat on the floor near the missionary’s feet. “What did you say?”

  The missionary didn’t stop there. He compared us to germs and parasites. Black spots danced in front of my eyes.

  “If I made a phone call tomorrow, you’d disappear. Another call, you cross the Thailand border. I’m the one who decides. Don’t you see?” His mouth twisted upward into a mournful smile. “Who’s going to know about you if I’m gone? Or care?”

  My hands reached for the hard knob of his throat. The escaping air whistled from his pressurized pipe. No one, finally, was there for me. It wasn’t Missionary Kwon facing me anymore but the darkness pursuing us. People crowded my eyes, voices knocked against one another. I was pushed back, backward, across the river. They were back, it was back.

  I was surrounded by men, by hunting dogs. The ice gleamed silver moonlight as we crossed. The riverbed cut into my feet, and the mantraps lining the river opened and closed their mouths. There were traps everywhere, and mouths, and eyes. The eyes and mouths moved across us. I was there, we were there. I struck out at the Dear Leader, the red leather jacket, at the hands that pulled me down. Water surrounded us. We were drowning together.

  Then I was dragged back from drowning. I gagged. The kitchen scissors were in Jangmi’s hands and my hands were around hers. Our hands were dark and wet and smelled of fresh liver. Voices erupted. The missionary was on the floor and the boys were kicking him. The blood trickling from the missionary’s eye glowed in the lantern’s light. His gurgled screams filled the air; his shirt was a river of blood. That severed voice, those tattered ribbons of sound, were the only sounds he managed. As if his tongue was mourning his eye. I stared at his bruised arms and chest, his punctured eye socket. At my hands. They had held but not stopped Jangmi.

  Daehan walked backward, leaving pale red tracks on the cement floor. He held his st
omach. “I want to go home,” he whispered.

  “Meojori!” Cheolmin looked impressed. “A woman did that?”

  “Let him bleed to death.” Bakjun’s voice was small and unconvinced.

  Namil gnawed at his fingernail, staring down at the missionary.

  Gwangsu began to pray.

  “Did I do that?” Jangmi’s pupils were dilated.

  From somewhere distant I heard Daehan say, “He needs help. He has a son.” He wiped the blood from Missionary Kwon’s face with the edge of his shirt. “Where’s his phone? I’ll call that doctor.”

  “You’ll get us sent back!” Cheolmin punched Daehan in the stomach. “You’re not calling anyone.”

  Jangmi clutched the bloody kitchen scissors to her shirt, shivering. Her hand ripped at her hair as if she were trying to wake herself up with pain.

  Now we would never leave, I thought. “We need to call someone, anyone. We need to get out.”

  “Help is coming.” Daehan made a sound between a sniffle and a moan. “Help was already coming. Give me the phone.”

  • • •

  For forty-eight hours we waited in the thick of the missionary’s mortified flesh that only Daehan approached and fed, as flies buzzed and laid their eggs in the submarine heat. We simmered in our fear until at the designated time we crossed the small stone bridge that led to a muddy country road, took several turns as instructed, and eventually, behind an abandoned village school, we met the brokers that Daehan’s eomeoni had hired. I didn’t know who Daehan was. It didn’t matter anymore.

  This is how it happened. We fled in the brokers’ footsteps. We scattered into small dark spaces in the backs of buildings, trains, and buses, through the great mouth of China. Our feet made fresh tracks as we weaved through mountains and made unreliable allies of the moon and the night and the stars. Every shadow a soldier, a border guard, an opportunist. Each body of water reminded us of the first river, the river of dreams and death, where we saw the faces of people we knew and would never know frozen beneath it. The children who had run and been caught and sent back. The pregnant women repatriated to our country and thrown in jail, forced to run a hundred laps until they aborted. The women who gave birth in the same jail and saw soldiers bash their new infants against a wall to save bullets. The countless others whose peaceful lives ended when an enemy informed on them—ours was one small story in all the other stories. We stumbled across the jungles and deserts of Southeast Asia, seeking safety and freedom. We would look and look. A few of us would find it.

  Part IV

  Freedom

  19

  Danny

  Maps are borders that keep people in and others out. My brand-new U.S. passport, which the immigration officer stamps for me at the Yanji airport, a modern surveillance tool. I made it past twenty and am several inches taller than my parents now; I’m half a semester away from a degree in sociology at Harvard, and only occasionally lapse back into supersonic leaps of speech. There are other changes, too. For example, it only takes me a few minutes in China to discover that my Chinese isn’t what it used to be. In any case, after my digital fingerprints and photograph are taken for the first time, I step through the arrivals gate and into an old map, the topography of my past.

  I look for my mom in the crowd of anxious faces. The airport echoes with the singsong seesaw of our Joseon language, which is so different from the rat-tat-tat of American English. I’m tired out from the flight, and the fluorescent blue chairs seem to beckon. The deacon spots me before I can dodge him and migrates through the curtain of noisy reunions, then stretches his hand my way as if we are in America. Next thing I know, he’ll try to act like a father to me.

  “You’re all grown up, Daehan.” He seems determined not to acknowledge our most recent encounter, when I found him six years ago curled up boomerang-style in my mom’s wardrobe. “We’re so glad you finally came.”

  I stay civil but I don’t smile. That would feel like a betrayal of my dad, though from the way my old man reacted to the divorce, you would think that nothing has changed. He’s still devoted to his timepieces, still plays baduk weekly with the same two friends. Worst of all, he still lives alone, with only me to call him once a week to make sure he isn’t surviving solely on microwave meals. The only times I know he is affected are when by necessity my mom’s name comes up on my visits home and his eyes mist over as he polishes his spectacles.

  “Call me shameless.”

  I hide my irritation even though my mom has broken promise number one: to leave the deacon at home. I’ve gotten better at forgiving.

  “I’ll go anywhere if someone else is paying for the plane ticket.”

  She comes up behind him in a hunter-green down coat and coordinating red scarf. A veritable Christmas tree, though my boyfriend would say that I don’t fare much better in the fashion department.

  “My Dumbo!” She looks elated and cautious all at once.

  “Mom!”

  We suffocate each other with hugs as if she hadn’t just visited me in Boston four months ago, and in her arms I immediately feel more at home. She squeezes my cheeks with both hands. “I’m so, so happy you’re here.”

  “Mom! I’m a little too old for public demonstrations.”

  “You’re my saekki.” Her smile is framed by crevices that seem to deepen by the month. “You’re never too old.”

  She aims up to kiss me, but I dodge it by stretching to my fullest height.

  “How was the flight?”

  “The way it always is. Uncomfortable.”

  She tugs at my ear. “Did you read many books?”

  I take her hands in mine and feel how dry and flaky they’ve become after the long Chinese winter. “I thought you were coming alone,” I say, my voice lowered.

  She pulls away. “I—I need the bathroom before we go.” She dashes off, leaving me alone with the deacon.

  I scoot my suitcase out of the way of passing travelers and plant myself on one of the plastic chairs. All of the airport’s surfaces are coated in early spring’s film of yellow dust. The deacon trails after me.

  When he leans down to make eye contact, I fiddle with my luggage tags.

  “You’re not going to avoid me forever, are you? I’m part of your family now.”

  “I already have a family.”

  “Don’t blame your eomma. She wanted me to stay at home.”

  Home.

  “I imagine you don’t want to see me.”

  I finally look up. “You are responsible for my parents’ divorce.”

  “I had to come out since you refused to see me. I wanted to . . . apologize.”

  I clap for him. “And now you’ve apologized.”

  “I’m a hypocrite, Daehan. I’m a sinner. We all are.”

  “I’ve figured out that much myself by now.”

  “This isn’t easy for an adult to do—apologizing.”

  “What’s your apology going to do—repair my parents’ marriage? It doesn’t change anything—it only makes you feel better.”

  He draws back as if I’d punched him. “Your eomma tells me you stopped going to church. It’s my duty—my responsibility—to say this one thing: Don’t rebel against your faith because you’ve lost faith in other people. I’m asking you, for the sake of your soul, don’t confuse God with man.”

  Waves of fatigue wash over me. I think he’s wrong about rebellion. Every day I mourn the loss of God, which also equaled the loss of my childhood. My faith was the greatest, most reassuring map of my life. But my doubts certainly aren’t his business, so I say, not entirely untruthfully, “I’ve been on two flights for a total of over sixteen hours. I’m trying my very best to be civil.”

  I watch the rusty wheels of suitcases scrape past us and, in the silence, wait.

  • • •

  After saying our good-byes to the deacon,
my mom and I drive through the smog and traffic that personify the new China, then along the border. She switches on an air freshener that smells of dried apples, and when she pulls off her sun hat before we leave the motel where we spent the night, the new sprays of gray hair shine in the sun. She notices me looking and says she’ll dye it as soon as I leave for the States. Even her last name has changed.

  As she drives now, she puckers her lips, soundlessly forming words and sentences the way she does when she’s trying to find the right words. Finally she says, “I know you really wanted to go back to that house, but returning there doesn’t seem such a good idea. Why not just visit the mountains and my hometown?”

  “I need to face it.”

  Six years have passed, but in some ways time has stayed still for me. I know where I have to go.

  “You’re certain about this.”

  I nod, afraid my voice will crack if I say anything.

  “A lot has changed, hasn’t it?” She charges ahead. “There’s a surplus of missionaries here now looking for Han people to convert. I’ve decided to return to California once the year’s out, since I’m no longer needed here.”

  “With that man.”

  “Dumbo, he’s my husband.”

  I tell her to veer right out of the city on the next road, which she does.

  She says, “You’re still not going to church.”

  “No, Mom.”

  “And you won’t reconsider.”

  I give myself a moment to think. “It would be dishonest.”

  “So . . . when do I get to meet this girlfriend of yours? Maybe the next time I’m in America?”

  “We’ve dated for less than two months. It’s very present tense—it’s not like we’re getting married.”

  “Will you at least be on the same coast after you graduate? She sounds so nice . . .”

  Meaning, she sounds like good wife material. I refrain from telling my mom that my girlfriend isn’t exactly a girl. Or telling her that I don’t know where I’ll end up or what I want to become, or whether I’m made for a traditional wife-and-two-kids kind of life or something radically different. Leaving the church was bad enough and I don’t have the courage yet.