How I Became a North Korean

by Krys Lee

  “I haven’t thought that far,” I say. “You know I applied everywhere—law school, master’s in sociology, management. Whoever gives me money.”

  “You still don’t know what you want to do, do you?” Her fingers tighten around the wheel.

  I shrug. “I’m okay with not knowing. It’s not like you can perfectly navigate your way through life.”

  Everything is smaller at the border than I remembered it. The houses, the trees, the river itself. March isn’t as cold as the March in my memory. The Tumen River is narrower. More puddles of water in the dry season than a river. The long stretch of border looks mainly peaceful despite the new surveillance cameras, where there weren’t cameras before, and now much of the river is lined with barbed wire like cake icing and the new concrete holding centers that imprison North Koreans before they’re sent back home to certain danger. In any case, it’s hard to believe this river was the site of the claustrophobia, the fear, and the violence that the border has come to represent to me. We drive by the river-hugging small huts that my mom says are mainly owned by crooks trafficking North Korean women. The guard posts have now given way to camouflaged dugouts. The men still fish in the shallow water, a woman is doing laundry, and kids are skipping stones during what should be school hours.

  I was there. I was a witness.

  “But, Danny, you’re okay, aren’t you?”

  Smugglers trundle their goods to one another across the river, using a rope and pulley system. She knows almost nothing about what happened to me in China no matter how she tries to wrangle it out of me; all she knows of that time is that I lived in a cave dugout with North Koreans, who later, in groups of twos or threes, were met at locations assigned to them at the last minute by human smugglers, arrangements she had made with great difficulty, jeopardizing her evangelical work with the Han Chinese. She knows that I’d witnessed the violence done to Missionary Kwon but didn’t call for medical help until my friends were out of his reach.

  I keep my eyes on the divided country across the river. “Mom, do you think the North and the South will ever be unified?”

  “Your friends will meet their families again someday. If it’s God’s will.”

  “Was it God’s will that they lived in a cave? Even in March, it gave a new definition to the word cold.”

  She looks guilty, pained. “I’m sorry, Daehan, I’m so sorry for everything.”

  I want to tell her it isn’t her fault. To say that I’m now fairly confident that I’ll live a fairly happy life, whatever that means. That I finally understand the impossibility of orchestrating the future or who I am. That I sometimes dream of rivers of floating eyes. That all of those eyes are Missionary Kwon’s. Instead I massage her shoulder. “I’ve had a break,” I say. “I can take over the driving now.”

  We finally arrive. I had assumed that images would come rushing back to me as soon as I faced the building, like in a movie, but nothing of the sort happens. Shredded, weather-worn Bubble Wrap hangs from the windows, the building’s walls are streaked green with water stains, and the stairwell is rusted orange to the point of looking dangerous. In the building’s shadows, the ice is still hard and stubborn.

  My mom stays in the car as I walk toward the building. The yard’s the same tangle of knee-high weeds. I think about the little I learned about my friends through my mom’s contacts. Gwangsu out-Christianed the zealous South Korean church community, and after a couple of years in Daegu working odd jobs, he got a scholarship to seminary school. Namil was placed with adoptive parents through a Korean American church in Fairfax, Virginia. Bakjun ended up in Seoul, but after brawling in the kimchi factory he worked at whenever someone called him a spy or a dirty North Korean, he successfully applied a second time for refugee status in England, citing discrimination in the South, and settled in a New Malden boardinghouse. No one knows what happened to Cheolmin. Then there’s Yongju. And Jangmi. I haven’t heard from either of them since receiving a single phone call through the broker, letting me know they had reached safety. Halfway up the stairs, I stop. It’s better not to continue.

  As we drive back, my mom says, “Your friends, I hope they’re doing well, wherever they are.”

  My eyes fill with the brown, bare landscape. “They’re survivors,” I say. This far north, it’s as if winter never quite ended.

  20

  Yongju

  At first there was loneliness. Then there was loss. And then there was a greater loneliness, the loneliness of freedom. Freedom: Once I am truly safe, I see that there is too much of it. Freedom means you are free not to care about anyone or anything. Freedom shows me that all that matters to the free world is money.

  Before I understood what freedom meant, Jangmi and I blindly followed the broker through Chinese terrain ranging from bare plains to semitropical cities, then made that final jungle crossing from Laos into Thailand, where we sheltered each other for months in the crowded Bangkok detention center. The ground had shifted beneath me, becoming yet another new country, and the only stability was this primitive desire to live, and Jangmi. But in South Korea Jangmi and I were separated by a mosaic of men from their National Intelligence Service, who put me through weeks of lengthy security interrogations. Then I was finally admitted into the Hanawon resettlement center for the three months of required reeducation. I grieved, but I couldn’t hold on to anger; it moved through my hands like water. I didn’t feel trapped like the others, who were impatient to start a new life outside of the brick building’s lecture rooms and routines; I was looking for Jangmi.

  That first week I discovered her after a talk given by one of our people who had resettled in the South years ago.

  The man at the podium had a face shiny with moisturizer and wore his collar flipped up like Elvis. He said, “I was you once,” with the flat cadence of someone from Seoul, most of his Pyongan region accent rubbed out. He gave us warnings I didn’t understand yet as he relayed his experience of resettling, and proudly mentioned having a South Korean wife. His exertions were wasted. I was in the back, and in front of me rows of heads hung heavily like a field of sunflowers.

  I saw Jangmi in the corridor after I left the lecture room.

  Though we all wore the same orange jacket and black pants, I recognized her from her feline movements and the drag of one foot. Her arms were linked with the arms of two other women heavier-set than she was, and I sprinted forward until I got ahead of them and confirmed that it was her. The same harmonious proportion of eyes to nose to lips, tension alive in her every gesture. She was laughing, her smile as bright as the cheap rhinestone pin in her hair. My family’s background had slowed down my interrogation, and I later learned that she had been in Hanawon at least a month longer than me. It was as if she had moved so fast that the past couldn’t catch up with her. She was already blooming in this new country.

  “Jangmi!” I said.

  All the light in her disappeared and her arms dropped limply to her sides. We had hidden, pressing together in filthy train bathrooms and clawing our way through suffocating jungles, trusting whatever the broker told us to do. She was the only person in the country who knew me. Her eyes clouded over and she swerved away from me as if I were a distant, unpleasant memory, uncoupling herself from her friends.

  I grabbed her wrist. “Jangmi,” I said again.

  “You know I wouldn’t go by that name anymore,” she said. “It’s old-fashioned, anyway.”

  A bright smile overwhelmed her again as if she was determined to cover up the past. I wanted to reach her, but I didn’t know where to start, and the oppressive wall of her face seemed a kind of plea.

  I said, “I just arrived. They kept me longer than I’d imagined, cross-referencing and checking and double-looping my words back to me, until I couldn’t have lied even if I wanted to.” Except about Missionary Kwon. Always about Missionary Kwon.

  “I’m leaving here soon enough. I didn�
��t have your kind of family,” she said.

  “Have you seen the others?”

  “Why would I want to?” She cupped her hands together as if to share a secret and said, “You should keep your eyes and ears open here—there’s a lot you can learn outside the classroom, if you pay attention.”

  I took her chin in one hand and made her look directly at me. “I know you. You don’t have to pretend with me.”

  “You’re always living in the past. I belong to the future, I always have.” She stepped back. “It’s dangerous to live in the past.”

  She turned away from me, and I understood that the ghost of Missionary Kwon was standing between us.

  I knew how to wait. I knew how to be patient.

  • • •

  In South Korea, I meet a few of our people who have become brokers themselves and forge new routes out of China to bring our people to safety. I meet a South Korean Christian couple who sold their house and used that money to get people out. But I am no hero. I am one of the lucky ones. I studied for the college entrance exams and then matriculated into a famous university in Seoul. I work part-time for the South Korean government as a source of information on the North. I write for the university newspaper, hand out flyers about the human rights crisis in our country to impervious crowds, help release giant helium balloons with supplies and information north across the thirty-eighth parallel toward home. Home, a country that feels more like my country the longer I live in the South, which will never let us forget. I am a model North Korean refugee; I testify in front of churches, to the National Assembly, to anyone who will listen. I make endless inquiries into my family’s fate, striking back in my small way at the gated mansion that took my abeoji, at the man in the red leather jacket. I have returned to China several times on my South Korean passport that has my new name, following tendrils of rumors about my eomeoni, my dongsaeng.

  I haven’t found them yet, though I did meet one woman who described my dongsaeng perfectly; the woman had been married off to a farmer, then fled the village during a crackdown. I did not give up. I tried dating strangers who remained strangers. And I did find the public housing apartment unit assigned to Jangmi. Two years passed before I dared write to her the first letter, then the second. A third. When she doesn’t respond, I understand. Sometimes the memory is as much as you can bear.

  On Saturday I enter the empty church and slide onto a darkly stained pew as I often do, and force myself to return to the border that haunts my sleep. I return to Missionary Kwon, his image burning into my sight. To the Dear Leader, crossing borders in a green Soviet train with its curtains lowered so that no one can see in or out. To signboards of blood-red Chinese characters. To boys living in a cave, so gaunt that their cheekbones strain out of their skin. To the gun aimed at my abeoji’s heart. To the last sight of the women in my life. I carry my other countries inside me.

  As I wait for the bus back home to Kunsan, Seoul’s Saturday night crowd is awakening. Teenagers dressed like American rap singers pass, the girls with the same reproduced narrow, tilted-up nose, flaunting skirts that are more slips of fabric than clothes, flash the logos once coveted by my eomeoni’s peers. A middle-aged woman waits in a ruffled miniskirt, as if she couldn’t bear parting with an image of her twenty-year-old self. The café in front of the stop is lined with books, its ceiling as high as a church steeple. You could buy a kilo of rice back home for the price of an Americano. I am often bitter; I am always nostalgic.

  I find Jangmi’s letter in my neglected mailbox. The plain white envelope is the sort sold in twenty-four-hour convenience stores, and my address, a smudge of blue ink, as if she half-hoped that I would not receive it.

  In the apartment nearly as empty of possessions as the day I moved in, I wait as long as I can bear. I open the window and let in the early spring air, face its chilly fingers and try to stay calm. It might be a cursory note directing me to never write to her again. A colorful declaration of disgust at my epistolary rituals. She might mock my certainty that she is the only woman who can ever really know me, brand me as a man stuck reading the past. Which I am. My hands shake as I cajole the envelope open, careful not to rip it.

  21

  Jangmi

  The letter is sent, and it’s too late to take it back. I realize what this means as I sink into the largest tub in the bathhouse. I press against a shooting jet of water, its force compounding the pounding of my heart. The bubbling water swells up my nose. I proposed the meeting in a weak moment, but I don’t have to show up. I can leave Yongju alone waiting on the beach in front of the Paradise Hotel to watch the sunrise by himself.

  It won’t be a completely wasted trip to Pusan for him; there is the fish market, the beach boardwalk. The Pusan film festival exhibition hall to visit. I stay in the steaming water and watch the naked bodies of women surrounding me. They are dragged down by hanging breasts and wide thighs wrinkled like tissue paper. Weary bodies, my eomma’s body, the kind of body that will someday be mine. I decide I will arrange another phone call to her that week, no matter what it costs to pay the broker. For there is a broker for everything north and south of the thirty-eighth parallel. A thriving industry has grown up around us.

  I plunge into the cold pool then back to the hot, going from scalding to frozen, trying to distract myself. As I cross back to the cold pool, a halmeoni with thready gray hair and a bulbous stomach pinches my butt cheek as if my body is hers and says, “If you young ones had gone through the postwar years you wouldn’t be skimping! You’d know the value of food.”

  I have known all kinds of hunger, but I am tired of fighting. In my best standardized South Korean accent I just say, “Halmeoni, you must have had a hard life.”

  In the steaming room I listen patiently as she begins sharing the stories she must have needed to tell.

  • • •

  I once saw a person swept under the Tumen River’s summer currents. I got a single look at him before the square-jawed man sank into the swollen river. It happened years ago, but in Pusan his body returns to me in dreams. I see his hands reaching for anything to hold on to and his fingernails catching and tearing on an azalea bush. His brown face bobs up, down, and his wide-open mouth floods with water. His body floats downstream until his foot lodges between two rocks and his limbs fan out like kelp. Only then do I turn his body over and see Missionary Kwon.

  The day I’m to meet Yongju, I wake up early. The missionary’s sightless eye hovers outside the window where the moon should be. My breath draws sharply in. It’s just an image, I tell myself. An image that sometimes compels me to church. The past, my unborn infant, is always with me. I force myself to get up. The common room is weighed down with objects as if I have lived there for decades. Nothing useful escapes me: bundles of old cooking magazines, tossed-out construction gloves, abandoned bookshelves and chairs, orphaned buttons and safety pins, a straw basket choking with coupons. Between full-time work as a receptionist and night school, I rip through charity shops, looking for bargains that don’t look like bargains. My apartment empty of people, the way I wanted it.

  It is possible to live happily forever alone. That is what I told myself. Still, I take care before I leave the apartment early in the morning, applying makeup, curling my hair. I pass stores with their metal shutters pulled down and wait for the bus toward Haeundae Beach. I whirl around at footsteps behind me, but there is no one there.

  The only people out near Haeundae are drunk, sleeping men, couples, and a few hostess-room girls returning home in tight black dresses and fur coats. I blush just looking at them, but their smoky eye shadow makes me wonder if the blue I usually apply marks me as old-fashioned or worse, from the North, like my accent that reappears in traces and words from home that sometimes tumble from my lips. There is my bad leg that has never quite healed, which drags a beat behind the rest of me.

  The shore is as grainy as sandpaper on my bare feet, but it feels go
od to walk. Here I am, living in a port city, and six months have passed since I visited the beach. A wave hits the shore, then a larger one collides into it and swallows it up. I wade knee-deep in the freezing water, my bare feet clammy with salt and sand. My cardigan ripples around me; my hair tangles in the salty air. I feel lighter than I have in years. I wonder if I will reach another reality if I keep walking.

  Then I spot Yongju staring down at a crowd of hermit crabs scrambling near his feet. He hasn’t seen me yet, but it is as if he has touched me and awakened my sleepwalking body. He is wearing rumpled slacks, a white dress shirt, and a black wool coat as if for an interview, his silky hair blowing into his face. Though he has filled out from boy to man, a permanent storm of worry still creases his forehead. I see the gaps in him as plainly as missing front teeth. He has known and experienced too much, but still I want to walk, to run to him, toward my real life.

  I take a step back.

  “Nuna,” he says, looking up, the vowels in “Older Sister” made long and sinuous by his slow speech. “Jangmi.”

  I want to run away as fast as my bad leg will let me, preserve the peace I’ve worked so hard to build. Looking at him, my old fears flare up. My heart comes alive. Yongju is complication, a wound ripped open. He’s a student, a North Korean with little to offer. I know there are no happy endings. But I don’t run. This time I stay.

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to Kathryn Court, Lindsey Schwoeri, and everyone else at Viking Penguin for making this a better book, and to my agent, Susan Golomb, who has been my sound guide.

  Many friends read and commented on the novel at different stages: Rachel Howard, Kim Stoker, Joanna Hosaniak, Lillian Lee, and Anthony Adler. Jean Lee and others who prefer to remain anonymous gave valuable advice. Doosung Lee gave me a lovely place to write when I needed it most. My students Dongrim Song, Wontaek Lee, Sangyeop Lee, Seokjin Yun, Joon Oh, and Hani Lee helped me along the way.