by Adam Johnson
“You’ve been going to too many meetings.”
“Far too many meetings,” Sun-ho said, and took a bite.
When they first arrived at Incheon airport and surrendered to authorities, they didn’t go free, as they’d expected. Instead, they spent eight weeks in Hanawon, where they were debriefed, interviewed, fingerprinted and subjected to a battery of physical and mental exams. All defectors ended up there. They took group classes about adjusting to life in South Korea—handling money, hygiene, being pleasant, avoiding crime. DJ and Sun-ho had lived pretty good lives in the North, so they weren’t as stunned as other defectors. Still, one thing they learned in Hanawon surprised them: in the South, Dongjoo and Sun-ho weren’t the most popular names for boys. Old-fashioned names might hinder their assimilation, they were told. The officials suggested Dongjoo adopt a hip nickname like DJ. Sun-ho left the room.
Even when they got out of Hanawon, they weren’t free. Too many defectors had become alcoholic, homeless, suicidal or, worse, had redefected. So there were meetings—case officer meetings, support group meetings, Christian outreach meetings, weekly “Talk Out” sessions. On Saturday mornings, middle school children gave them English lessons. They were given bank accounts, housing allowances and a stack of food vouchers that no decent restaurant would accept. Luckily, this was the food they loved the most. So much flavor, so hot, and like magic, it appeared whenever you wanted it.
Together, they nodded in pleasure, savoring every bite.
“What do you think?” Sun-ho asked. “Would Willow have liked this burger?”
DJ was silent.
Sun-ho answered his own question. “Yes, I think she would have enjoyed this burger very much.” With a french fry, he scraped Shanghai sauce drippings off the paper wrapper. “These fries, though,” he continued, “they’re too greasy for her. You remember Willow’s skin, how perfect it was. So yes to the burger, but because of her complexion, she would avoid the fries.”
Rumor had it that Sun-ho had slept with every widow in Chongjin. Yet all he talked about was Willow, how he’d nearly attained Willow, that with a little more time, Willow would have become his. And since their escape, Willow had somehow risen to the level of angel, as pure and inaccessible as Yesu-Nim Himself.
DJ knew better than to get Sun-ho going on Willow, but he couldn’t help it. He asked, “What would Willow think of all the Namhan women you’re sleeping with?”
“Preparing to sleep with,” Sun-ho corrected. “You don’t just jump on a Southern woman, my friend. You cultivate her. You must attend many meetings. And for the record, what I do with other women has no impact on Willow’s purity.”
DJ asked, “Are you telling these Southern women the juicy stories they crave?”
“The point of the meetings is to process your experience,” Sun-ho said. “These women are volunteers; they care about our plight. The whole reason they’re there is to listen.”
“Ah, a celebrity defector in the making,” DJ said.
They’d seen such defectors on ROK TV. Usually, they were beautiful young women who wept as they told the most harrowing stories—of starvation, separation, suffering and torture. Always a baby died. Always there was the moment when the dark shadow of rape fell across the story, and the interviewer let the silence linger before shifting to the desperate escape. All the average defectors, they weren’t news. And never on TV was there a story of a man who escaped North Korea in a black Mercedes sedan with a driver who must sit on a briefcase filled with counterfeit lottery tickets in order to see over the wheel.
DJ asked, “Do these ladies drink white wine while you tell them about freezing winters and endless peril?”
“The winters were freezing.”
“We had a propane heater.”
“There was peril. People were shot. People disappeared.”
“We paid protection money,” DJ said. “You haven’t told those ladies about the things we did in Chongjin, have you?”
“Of course not,” Sun-ho said.
He licked the last streaks of sauce from his fingers and wadded up the wrapper.
“The famine was real.”
DJ nodded. “The famine was real.”
Sun-ho smiled. “Look,” he said, “you’re only going to meet hobos and crazies going to meetings in Gwanak. Come to Gangnam—all the ladies there are genuine do-gooders. They have absent husbands. Their kids have shipped off to Stanford. These are ladies with time on their hands, and trust me, they take care of themselves.”
Sun-ho caught the teens in school uniform sneaking wary glances their way.
“What?” he called to their booth. “What the fuck are you looking at?”
The students feigned interest in their fries.
Sun-ho turned back to DJ. “When I was their age, I didn’t sit around giving people stupid looks. When I was sixteen, life was hammer and sickle.”
It was true. While DJ’s path had been smoothly laid out for him, Sun-ho’s had been one long scramble. DJ looked at the kids. Growing up in Pyongyang, he’d worn a school uniform, too, complete with a red scarf. Images of kids in uniform were everywhere recently. A ferry filled with such students had sunk, and DJ was newly aware of these uniformed kids drifting down the streets, huddling in the subway cars, killing time in fast-food booths. There was something ghostlike about them, the boys in their green-and-white ties, the girls with their slate-white scarves, their blazers the color of the cold, cold ocean. As the ferry slowly sank, the students were told to wait in their cabins, and there they passed the time until the ferry rolled under the waves.
“I almost forgot,” Sun-ho said. “I brought gifts of good fortune.”
He produced a handful of lottery tickets.
DJ took one. It was an instant ticket named Triple Jewel.
“What’re you doing with these?” he asked.
Sun-ho shrugged. “I cash my government checks at a liquor store. On a whim, I bought some. I thought, why not try our luck with the Korean lottery?”
DJ held the card to the light. This was no cheap Chinese scratch-off. This was no forged Pai Gow Poker card that you printed off ten thousand at a run. This wasn’t even Fortune Smiles, which was the finest lottery ticket they’d ever counterfeited.
“Look at this one,” Sun-ho said. “This ticket’s called 520. You win a pension from the Korean government. It pays out five million won a year for twenty years.”
DJ retrieved his reading glasses, which the ophthalmologist at Hanawon had given him. He examined the 520 card. It was multi-layer, with dual win zones, holographic foil, confusion patterns and self-voiding strips. Looking closer, he saw micro-printing and perforation work. This was made on a very sophisticated machine, probably a series of machines, not the old Japanese press they’d managed to modify and keep running.
“Don’t look so serious,” Sun-ho said. “Scratch a few.”
DJ watched Sun-ho use a car key to play a card, vigorously scraping away the grey vinyl topcoating. DJ recognized the mad energy in Sun-ho’s eyes. In North Korea, crime was state-sanctioned; crime was an absolute necessity. If you dined at all, you dined on illegality. Here in Seoul, crime was a much different matter.
“Wait a minute,” DJ said. “What are you doing with a car key?”
Sun-ho handed it over. It was a Toyota dealer’s key, stamped for the year 2000. It would open and start any Toyota from that year.
“Where’d you get this?” DJ asked.
“I brought it with me,” Sun-ho said. “I brought all our keys.”
How, in the sudden mad scramble of their escape, had Sun-ho thought to bring the master keys? DJ handed it back. “Get rid of it,” he said. “We don’t have hard currency quotas to meet anymore. Those days are gone. And you don’t need a 520 pension. We get deposits from the government now.”
Sun-ho came around to the other side of the booth so the two men were shoulder to shoulder. Here he turned his wide, bulging eyes to DJ. The doctors at Hanawon said Sun-ho’s eyes were
the sign of a condition, a condition that had a name, but Sun-ho didn’t want to know it. Most people were frightened of these eyes, but as DJ looked into them, he thought only that they were vulnerable and revealing.
“So I play the lottery,” Sun-ho said. “So I’m friendly with a few Gangnam moms. So I borrow cars.”
“You’re borrowing cars?”
Sun-ho ignored this. “I’m trying to make the best of the situation we’re in,” he said. “I didn’t choose to defect, if you’ll remember.”
DJ cast his eyes down. “I don’t forget,” he said.
“Good,” Sun-ho said, and clapped DJ once on the back.
There was no word in the South for their relationship. Sun-ho was perhaps fifteen years older than DJ, yet he was more than an uncle. The term comrades no longer applied, though it never really captured the way they had each sacrificed to keep the other going. Even though Sun-ho called him sajang and, jokingly, big boseu, DJ had never acted like a boss. And there had never been an employee as cunning and steely-eyed as Sun-ho. Sun-ho was an assistant, a driver, a partner, an enforcer, a friend. Maybe there wasn’t a name for their relationship in the North, either, but there they didn’t need one.
“Besides, I’m not the one you should be worried about,” Sun-ho said. “I only lost a country. But you, you’re losing more than that. I guess you’re worried you’ll never fit in here. If you ask me, DJ, you’re starting to fit in too well.”
How to explain to Sun-ho that living in Seoul was bringing into focus not the South but the life he’d lived in the North? Where was the lottery ticket whose prize took the blood from your hands?
They heard a noise. It was the electronic-shutter sound of a cell phone taking a picture. They turned to look at the teens, who sat innocently, sipping their sodas.
Sun-ho rose and limped toward their booth.
“Let’s just get out of here,” DJ called after him.
“You want a picture of a North Korean?” Sun-ho asked them.
None looked up, though one girl let a nervous laugh escape.
“Here I am,” he said. “Go ahead and take it. Take a Chosunin photo for your Internet pages.”
“Come on,” DJ said. “Let it go.”
Sun-ho didn’t let it go. He leaned in close and produced a maniacal, exaggerated smile. “I’m ready for my photograph,” he said. “I’m smiling, I’m saying kimchi.”
The students sat frozen.
“That’s what I thought,” Sun-ho said. “You are all passengers. And this whole fucked-up country is the ferry. You call us robots. You call us order-taking zombies. But we know what adversity is. We know what it is to survive, and I can tell you—not a single one of us would have drowned on that boat.”
—
Maybe blood was too strong a word. Yes, DJ had lived a certain kind of life in North Korea. Perhaps there had been some privileges, but were his hands bloody? He’d never felt great about selling false hope, fake medicine and unsafe cars. And yes, the regime used the money he raised for sinister means. But it was only in the South that he’d started thinking about blood. It was only here that he heard others speak, something impossible in the North. In Hanawon, defectors told stories of eternal hunger, endless labor, random reprisals and punishments of the sort not seen since the Mongol invasions. There were tales of slavery and disappearances and prisons that sucked up entire families. There’d always been rumors, but here, DJ could gaze upon people from remote poverty-stricken provinces, places no one was allowed to visit. Here were their bodies, ropy and blackened. Here were their cored teeth, here was skin scaled from pellagra.
And then there was Google Maps. He’d become addicted to satellite photos of Pyongyang—the Mansudae Art Studio where his mother had been a painter and the Golden Lane bowling alley, where, in the shadow of the Juche Tower, he had been a teen champion. He gazed at the university where he’d taken courses in engineering, nostalgic for the way one bulb stayed lit after Pyongyang went black. This light cast its glow on the university’s statue of Kim Il-sung. When he was a college student, DJ believed the formulas they memorized would one day be used to make their country great. They all did. So when the lights went out, the students drifted down from their darkened dorm floors to sit together at the feet of the Great Leader, reading and studying by his eternal light.
Of course, a different fate awaited. Upon graduation, the bottom half of DJ’s class was given engineering positions. They actually got to design things. The top half, DJ’s half, was recruited into foreign currency–generating units. One division manufactured counterfeit pharmaceuticals. Another ran a Pacific Rim insurance scheme. Others operated drug labs or repackaged cigarettes or distributed shark fins. DJ was sent to Chongjin to oversee a press that printed fake lottery tickets. Because of its success, he was also given command of a pan-Asian used-car operation. They imported eight hundred vehicles a month from Japan, removed their catalytic converters, stripped the airbags, rolled back the odometers and dumped them dirt-cheap in China.
It was hard to look at images of Chongjin. Even from space, you could see the toxic-waste dumps, the rusting steelyards, the foothills riddled with an infinity of famine graves. The black specks dotting the main square were beggar kids, sleeping in the open. The tent city near the shipyards housed teams of guards shifting on and off prison vessels. And along the tracks west of town were the boxcars, packed with families, awaiting departure for the penal mines of Mantapsan and the Hwasong concentration camp.
It was Sun-ho who had protected him from all of this. From the moment DJ stepped off the train in Chongjin and was assaulted by kotjebi kids begging for food, Sun-ho was there to shoo them away. Sun-ho handled the drifters who swarmed their black sedan. Sun-ho kept the dockworkers in line and stood up to the ferry crews from Niigata. He faced down the Chinese lottery ticket peddlers in Yanbian and bribed the Bowibu. Even in the darkest days of ’97, when humans were eating the paste off propaganda signs, Sun-ho arrived each morning with fish and rice, and DJ didn’t have to ask where the food came from.
But what good was rethinking all this when North Korea was a place he’d never see again? It was Seoul he had to wrap his head around. And the longer they were here, the more it seemed their roles were reversing. It was Sun-ho who needed a guardian now.
—
DJ took Sun-ho’s advice and went to a different meeting, but instead of heading for the glitz of Gangnam, he found a different meeting in Gwanak, one not far from a south-bank bus terminal. The new meeting was in a gritty urban church whose cross was fashioned from neon. When he approached, an alcohol-support group was on break. All the alcoholics were out front smoking and trading their jumpy energy. As the defectors filed past, DJ could read their minds: My life may be a wreck, but at least I wasn’t born in the North.
Metal chairs ringed the basement. Above was a portrait of Yesu-Nim wearing a crown of thorns. When the meeting began, great tribute was paid to Him. Like everyone else, DJ bowed. There were no hot Gangnam moms running things—only Christian ajummas, serious in their demeanor.
The defectors went around the room introducing themselves, mentioning things like age, province of birth, date of defection. Then you had to say three things that were great about life in the South. People listed the usual things: freedom, opportunity, the Internet and so on.
There was a young woman, quite poised, with the beauty of some celebrity defectors, except she guarded her eyes. Without her accordion, DJ almost didn’t recognize her.
“I’m Mina,” she said. “From North Hamgyong Province. I was a schoolteacher until my troubles came.” Perhaps because she was distracted or wasn’t listening, she listed three things that were great about life in the North. “I miss going to karaoke and the hot springs with my friends. I miss my students most of all.” She paused, then added, “This time of year, the weather makes me think of deer. Before the famine, my father raised them for their antlers. I loved their little horns—how they felt like moss and smelled of cold str
eam water.”
The North was a land of thuggery, corruption, brutality and murder. But Mina was right. There was beauty to be found in Chongjin. Under the tufted rime of winter, even the husks of old Soviet factories could be beautiful—gantry cranes frozen under fat white clouds; abandoned zinc carts crenellated with frost; rusted conveyor belts standing sentinel over garbage-glinting icebergs drifting south from Vladivostok.
DJ studied Mina’s bobbed hair, her elusive eyes. The only place for karaoke in Chongjin was the Seamen’s Club, a late-night hangout for big shots and Party officials. And you had to know people in the military to gain access to the Onpho hot springs. He wondered if her husband had held rank in the navy. There were only so many commissions, and that alone was a pretty good way to find yourself among the missing.
When it was his turn to speak, he didn’t want to admit he was from Pyongyang.
“I defected from North Hamgyong Province” was all he said.
And what positive things could he list about life in the South, that he appreciated only burgers, Google Earth and the reading glasses they’d given him? He didn’t want to fall into reverie about the North. He did miss Chongjin, the salty smell of fishing nets hung to dry, the jade-green waves of the East Sea. He missed traffic girls, pastel housing blocks and roaming calisthenics squads at dawn, none of which he’d ever see again. He missed women in rabbit-fur coats. He missed winter radishes, pulled cold from the dirt and wiped clean in the snow. He missed the power going out each evening, how a nightly blanket would be thrown over you and the person you were with, how the intimate conversations you’d held back all day would suddenly begin.
Mina’s eyes found him. He realized everyone was looking at him.
“I appreciate democracy, freedom and the variety of television programming,” he said, then added, “But I do miss how dark it used to get.”
He received a few disappointed looks for this counterproductive commentary. At the end of the meeting, when Yesu-Nim was again worshipped, Mina slipped out, and DJ followed her. She walked down Bongcheon-ro, toward Boramae Park.