In the Shadow of the Sun

by Anne Sibley O'Brien

  The bus turned to cross a bridge over the river toward a small island, nearly filled with the inner-tube shape of an enormous stadium. Mia pointed. “Is that where we’re going?”

  Daniel nodded. The bus slowed as it pulled into a giant parking lot. In front, Mr. Kim, Mr. Lee, and Miss Cho stood up.

  Daniel gestured toward the guides. “I feel such a pull when I’m here. There’s the sense that everyone’s Korean, these are my people.” He placed his hand on his chest, near his heart. Then he dropped his voice. “But then there’s the complete disconnect when it comes to the political and social realities. Like what we’re seeing tonight.”

  The guides herded them off the bus, through huge doors, and toward bleachers overlooking an enormous indoor field. Filing into their row, Mia stuck close to Daniel, ending up between him and Dad with Simon on the other side.

  “How’s this for blending in?” Daniel gestured to the crowd of spectators. As far as Mia could see in any direction, the bleachers were filled with Koreans. Except for a few tiny clumps of foreigners, it was an unbroken plain of black hair.

  Still, in this crowd of tens of thousands of people, Mia and Daniel were special. Different from the other Americans because they were Korean. Different from the other Koreans because they were American. But until Daniel had pointed it out, she hadn’t noticed that space existed.

  She scanned the crowd, trying out Daniel’s phrase — my people — to see how it felt. Then she had a strange thought: It could literally be true. Somewhere in this huge crowd there could actually be someone who was genetically related to her. Of course her birth parents were from South — not North — Korea. But long before her parents were born, families had been split up when the peninsula was divided in the Korean War. There was actually a possibility that some relative of her birth mother or father could be here, somewhere in this crowd.

  She noticed movement on the other side of the stadium. A solid wall of schoolchildren — twenty thousand of them, the program said — had started warming up. Each child held up a large book of colored cards. Like mosaic squares, the cards merged to create an enormous picture of the North Korean flag, running the entire length of the stadium. Conductors made signals, the kids flipped their cards, and the image changed, sometimes snapping, sometimes rippling. Twenty thousand kids’ voices shouted slogans as they flipped the cards in perfect unison.

  Martial music swelled from loudspeakers, spotlights flooded the stadium, and the show began. The pictures shifted — flowers, a mountain scene, a sunrise — all in brilliant color. There was an enormous portrait of a smiling Kim Il-sung, then a group of workers holding up tools. Sometimes the cards formed words in the han-gul alphabet against a colored background, even a few that she could read — Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un. Man-sei. Ju-che.

  “The kids rehearse at school, every day, for months.” Daniel spoke in low tones. “According to defectors, it’s actually pretty grim: They’re forced to practice for hours and hours on almost no food, with no bathroom breaks. If a student performs poorly, the entire family gets punished. A strange form of child labor, all for the glory of the nation.”

  Mia couldn’t take her eyes off the spectacle before her. But now she worried about the kids being hungry, needing to use the bathroom. What would happen if one of them made a mistake?

  She tipped her head toward Daniel, keeping her eyes on the performance. The music was loud; there was no way the guides could overhear. “Do the kids really want to do this? Or do they have to?”

  “Well, it’s complicated. It’s supposed to be a great honor to get chosen. But the children of the elite here in Pyongyang don’t have to participate.”

  “So an ordinary person couldn’t refuse to be in it? If they didn’t want to?”

  “Not without consequences.”

  Mia could only imagine what those consequences would be. It felt dangerous and exciting to be saying these things, surrounded by North Koreans, right in the middle of the Mass Games.

  “How they get away with it,” Daniel went on, “is convincing people that the greatest thing you can do is sacrifice yourself in service to the Great Leader. That’s what this whole display is about.”

  Mia had to admit that the performance was completely amazing. On the green floor of the stadium, eighty thousand dancers, gymnasts, and acrobats moved together in waves, in ribbons, like flowing water or the wind through trees. There were thousands of women dancers in identical turquoise tops and billowing white skirts, then thousands in pink, thousands in yellow. After them came soldiers in olive-and-tan camouflage uniforms, brandishing guns and executing tae kwon do moves, shouting out fierce songs.

  Daniel leaned over to her again. “The games also shore up the power of the state and its leaders. Watching something like this, the message is clear: ‘Don’t mess with us. We can get a hundred thousand people to do whatever we tell them to do.’ People might take a lot of pride in the display, but in a way it feels like it’s also a warning.”

  Mia tried to resist getting swept away by the show. She wanted to stay in the conversation with Daniel, watching the performance but at the same time telling the truth about it. Usually, it was following instructions that made her feel safe. But breaking the rules here, talking about things that the North Korean government didn’t want them to talk about, felt better than safe. It felt right.

  “Can I ask you something?” Mia whispered during a lull in the loud music. Daniel nodded, leaning closer to hear. “About that meeting this afternoon, the ministry guys coming to see Dad? Who were they?”

  “Well, that’s funny. They introduced themselves as being from the Ministry of Agriculture. But I think that was a cover; based on how they were dressed and how they carried themselves, I’m guessing that they were actually from the Ministry of People’s Security. That’s basically the police here — regular police, not the secret police. They like to keep a low profile because they run some of the labor camps, the ones for people accused of crimes like theft and smuggling. People get nervous when they show up. But they’re also in charge of the state food distribution system, so that’s why they’d be aware of your dad’s work.”

  Mia frowned, trying to puzzle it out. “But why would they thank Dad publicly for his work when he’s providing aid from other countries? Isn’t the whole ju-che idea that the North Koreans are doing everything all by themselves — growing all their own food, taking care of themselves? Wouldn’t they want to kind of cover up the thing about people starving?”

  “It might look like it from the outside, but the North Korean government is not all one, monolithic entity.” Daniel was speaking directly into her ear. “There are actually quite a few competing factions within the government. Power struggles are going on all the time. This leader or ministry is in favor, this one’s out. For instance, it seems as if the Ministry of People’s Security, MPS” — he gestured with his left hand — “is almost always in conflict with the State Security Department, the secret police.” He gestured with his right hand. “The SSD runs the worst camps, the ones for political prisoners that no one escapes from. They tend to be a lot more paranoid, always looking for threats to the state.

  “But back to your question. No one wants to admit it, but everyone recognizes that the food distribution system doesn’t work anymore. They know it only feeds a tiny percentage of the country. So foreign aid and the independent markets are the alternatives to another mass famine. In our experience, MPS people tend to be more pragmatic. They’re willing to see what’s actually helping — food aid from other countries. But they can’t be up front about supporting it, or they risk displeasing other parts of the government. That could be another reason why they pretended to be from the Ministry of Agriculture. Maybe it’s another form of ju-che: doing whatever it takes to survive.”

  Thousands of children were on the floor now, dressed in bright pastel gymnastic suits, their legs bare, prancing and somersaulting and doing back bends, the movements creating colorful des
igns against the green ground. Behind the children, the constantly moving backdrop of the card pictures, in perfect time with the blaring music and commentary, told the story of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in ten glorious scenes. At the completion of each section, the mass of performers on the floor all jumped up and down, making brilliantly colored patterns undulating across the stadium. There was so much going on that Mia didn’t know what to watch; no matter where she looked, she missed something. The entire thing was the most astonishing display she had ever seen.

  She sat back and closed her eyes, her mind overwhelmed by a barrage of conflicting thoughts and impressions. The sense of connection with Daniel, sharing things that mattered. The mention of people in prison camps and people starving. The eye-popping spectacle of the performance. The idea that something awful might happen to one of these children if they missed a beat.

  Everything seemed, impossibly all at once, so beautiful and so terrible.

  Kyung-ae would not, could not, make a mistake. She fixed her eyes on the conductor, afraid to blink lest she miss his flag signal and fail to flip the card at the exact right second.

  This was the moment for which they had trained the whole year long, standing on the bare athletic field in the chill damp of autumn, the frigid cold of all but the worst days of winter, the icy rain of early spring, the hot summer sun. During daily gymnastics classes, and on the weekends. Hour after hour after hour. Drilling, until the flick of her wrist and the snap of the card into place was an involuntary response. She and all her schoolmates became one machine, at the command of the conductor, in perfect service to the Grand Marshall.

  Now they were here in the stadium, in actual performance, standing in rows from the floor to the top of the bleachers, watched by tens of thousands of people. The Grand Marshall himself might come to one of these performances! Her terror at making a slip had mushroomed beyond anything she’d felt in rehearsal. A mistake here, now, in front of the crowds and the Party officials, could be catastrophic. She had hardly slept the night before, worrying about it. She’d heard rumors of one boy who had dropped his card book during a performance, creating a hole in the image of the Great Leader’s smiling face. His entire family had been interrogated and had to attend weeks of self-criticism sessions.

  The thought made her flinch, hands trembling as she held the cards. Steady. She inhaled fiercely through her nostrils, reestablishing her stance and aligning the edges of her book with those of the student on either side of her. Flip. Flip. Flip.

  As she’d eaten breakfast at dawn that morning, her mother had watched, face drawn, the expression habitual since the day her father had come home early from work to report that the factory was closing. Her mother was the one who went to work now, selling noodles from a street stall from early morning until after dark.

  “Remember not to drink too much,” her mother had said, reaching out to straighten the red scarf around her daughter’s neck. “And eat all your dinner so you have energy to perform well.” Deep lines were carved across her forehead and on either side of her down-turned mouth.

  But the final rehearsal had gone on so long that their break before the performance was cut short. There’d only been time to swallow a few bites of her dinner.

  Flip. Flip. Flip. The music surrounded them, lights flashed and poured like liquid color, and the announcer’s voice boomed across the stadium. She could sense the movement of thousands of dancers and acrobats on the floor below the bleachers, but she knew not to let her eyes be pulled by the spectacle. Focus on the conductor’s flags. Flip. Flip. Flip.

  She grew more and more tired but forced herself to concentrate, to think only of the conductor and the cards. She listened to the story the announcer told, the birth of the Great Leader, like the rising sun; his military prowess, winning battles against all odds to drive the foreign invaders from the homeland; and how he founded the greatest, most blessed country on earth. Flip. Flip. Flip.

  Then her favorite part, the magical birth of the Dear Leader, in a cabin at the foot of Mount Paektu. The birds singing the glorious news, the double rainbow sparkling in the sky above, and at night, the brand-new star in the heavens. The music swelled to a crescendo.

  “Mansei! Mansei!” The crowd roared their devotion.

  The finale began. Fireworks exploded overhead. Acrobats flew through the air high above the stadium, then plummeted toward the ground to land in nets. On the floor, hundreds of performers formed the shape of the Korean peninsula, symbolizing the reunion between North and South. Eighty thousand more performers surrounded them. An enormous globe, like a giant turquoise beach ball, rose over the sea of people. The stadium erupted in thunderous applause. Adrenaline rushed through her body like electricity, connecting her to everyone in the stadium, one drop in a great tide of sound and light and movement. She thought her heart might burst with the majesty of it all.

  As the lights came up, signaling the end of the performance, the students stood as a group, ready to file line by line out of the bleachers. It all crashed over her then, the tension of her empty belly and shallow breath, her exhaustion and terror and exhilaration. She slumped back onto the bench, then collapsed in a faint. Her card book slipped from her hands to the floor.

  OCTOBER 2

  Mia woke early. 5:24 a.m. At least she’d made it till actual morning and Dad hadn’t woken her with more spy games.

  Only four more days left in North Korea. She could get through this.

  After showering, she pulled on black jeans and a clean long-sleeved T-shirt and dried her hair. She tugged on the chain around her neck to make sure her locket was in place. Still not even 6:00. Breakfast wasn’t until 7:00.

  She pulled her daypack onto the bed, unzipped it, and surveyed the items: Water bottle. Guidebook. Korean-English/English-Korean dictionary. She probed deeper in the pack, unzipped a couple of pockets. Her useless phone. Her journal and colored pens. Her wallet. Snacks and two packs of gum she’d bought in Beijing.

  The process reminded her of her favorite book from when she was two or three. It had brightly colored cloth pages, each with something to manipulate: buttons, zippers, Velcro tabs, buckles, pockets. According to Mom, Mia had made the book her bedtime ritual for most of a year, paging through it to unfasten and refasten every single thing until it was in order, where it belonged. She got that same sense of security from checking the contents of her backpack. Whatever happened, she’d have what she needed. She grabbed her blue nylon jacket from the chair and folded it on top.

  Ready to go, and still a big chunk of time to kill. She’d read the guidebook cover-to-cover, and anyway, North Korea was the last thing she wanted to focus on right now. She’d foolishly read all six of the books she’d brought with her in Beijing while Dad and Simon were sleeping off jet lag. She didn’t have a North Korean SIM card, so her phone didn’t work here. She had her pens and journal, but she was all caught up in her account of the trip so far, and it was too early for her brain to want to do any more writing or even doodling.

  Most of all, she wished she were back in her own room, on her laptop, immersed in her favorite video game, Quest. She always played the Scout, moving through the virtual deep, dark woods. Gathering food and tools and treasures. Discovering dangers to avoid. Finding the way for her team. Every time she shut the game down and reentered “reality,” she felt as if she was coming back from another world, a very real one, and one that she often preferred to her actual life. If only she could play it now for an hour or two.

  The gift box from the ministry sat on the bedside table. Mr. Lee had told her to wait and open it when she got back to the States, because of customs or something. Everything in North Korea seemed to be mysterious or forbidden. Or both.

  She couldn’t see any harm in taking off the wrapping paper. Dad hadn’t gotten into trouble for sneaking out of the hotel in the night — at least not yet — so she was pretty sure there weren’t any video cameras in the rooms. Even if someone was watching, it couldn’t
be that big a deal to unwrap a package.

  Mia reached for the box, scooted back onto her pillow, crossed her legs, and placed it in front of her on the bed. She carefully peeled off the strips of tape without tearing the paper. She realized she was holding her breath, like a spy in a TV show stealing secrets or defusing a bomb.

  The paper parted to reveal a cardboard box. Mia lifted the lid. Inside was another box, this one made of wood. She slipped it out with two hands, set it down on the bedspread, and studied it. The box was carved to look like a traditional Korean farmhouse, set on a thick platform about eight or ten inches square. The heavy tile roof was decorated with leaves and spherical fruit, some kind of pumpkin or gourd. She’d seen houses with vines of squash growing on roofs like that, in the ink paintings of the printed calendars Mom brought home from the Korean grocery store in Stamford. In fact, the whole box looked like one of those scenes, with an old farmer and his wife seated on the veranda. She smiled, charmed.

  She lifted the roof lid, expecting it to be empty. But inside was a third box. This gift was like a set of nesting dolls, one thing after another to discover. The box had a picture of a phone. A North Korean cell phone? Cool! She knew she couldn’t use it here; the tour guides in Beijing had explained that North Korean phones were only for citizens. But as much as she loved the wooden box, a phone would be a much more awesome souvenir to show her friends.

  She lifted it out. One of the box tabs wasn’t glued down all the way, which seemed like an invitation to open it. If she was careful, she could close it to look exactly as it had when it was given to her.