by Adam Johnson
“I heard you playing the other day, in Anguk Station,” he said when he caught up.
She gave him a look that was either suspicious or curious.
“You’re very talented,” he told her.
She didn’t respond.
“Did you go to Mangyongdae or the conservatory?”
“I taught children propaganda songs all day,” she said. “You need to know accordion to do that.”
A squadron of obsolete fighter jets guarded the park entrance. They were mounted on grand pedestals, their nose cones pointing north. Mina turned in to the park and walked along a snow-flurried trail. “Your teachers didn’t play the accordion?” she asked.
DJ shook his head.
“Where are you from?”
“Pyongyang.”
“I thought I heard your accent,” she said. “Maybe kids actually learned in Pyongyang. Where I’m from, it worked differently. Men came into my high school. They divided the girls into beautiful and not so beautiful. The beautiful girls were sent away. We got accordions. And that was that. How much you hated the accordion didn’t matter at all.”
DJ wanted to tell her he thought she was very beautiful, but he kept quiet. He wanted to ask her why she risked her life to defect with an instrument she hated, but he didn’t.
They came to a group of women, bundled against the cold, doing some kind of slow-motion dance. They moved in unison, a hand taking forever to pass before the eyes, a foot lifting, seeming never to be set down. DJ and Mina exchanged a look. Then they walked on, to keep from laughing.
After a while, Mina said, “At Hanawon, you were with an older man. Was he your father?”
DJ hadn’t seen his parents since he’d received his engineering degree. They were like the memory of a photograph to him, an image stared at so long that, before it was lost, it had begun to replace the real thing.
“That was Sun-ho,” he said. “We worked together, generating foreign currency.”
The look Mina gave him was clearly suspicious.
“It was nothing dangerous,” DJ said. “Cars were stolen in Japan, shipped to Vladivostok, doctored in Chongjin, then hauled north by train, where the Chinese forged new documents. Other people got rich. We got to eat.”
They started moving toward an outdoor ice rink. Groups of teens and couples skated counter-clockwise, some dancing to a kind of music DJ hadn’t heard before.
DJ asked, “Does no one recognize the songs you play?”
“Only North Koreans,” Mina said.
“You ever run across people you knew in the North?”
“A few.”
“But not the one you’re looking for.”
She shook her head.
Soon they were leaning against the dasher boards, watching the skaters carve the ice. The music was loud, so you couldn’t hear the best part—the blades scissoring the curves. The guy who was making the music wore headphones and fingerless gloves so that he could work a panel of knobs and turn records by hand.
“I’d like to hear you play sometime.”
Mina looked toward the families skating ahead. “You can if you want,” she said. “But you should know that when I play, I play for my husband.”
DJ offered his best attempt at a smile.
A teen beside them was moving to the beat.
“What’s the name of this music?” DJ asked him.
The teen stopped swaying when he heard DJ’s accent. “You’d have to ask the DJ,” he said.
DJ didn’t understand.
“You’re from the North, right?” the teen asked.
DJ nodded.
“Do you have DJs there? Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“DJs?”
“How to explain a DJ?” the teen asked himself. “The DJ, he’s a kind of artist. He takes different kinds of music, you know, funky and strange and old-fashioned, even bad music, music you wouldn’t normally like. Then he mixes it all together. That mix, that’s the DJ’s brand, that’s who he is.”
—
On Friday, DJ went to meet Sun-ho at an American chain called Burger King. As he opened the door, however, Sun-ho came walking out with three Whopper meals in takeaway bags.
“Who’s the other meal for?” DJ asked.
“Come,” Sun-ho said. “I need to show you something.”
With his lurching step and slow foot drag, he led the way.
Two blocks later, they were standing before a 2002 Corolla.
DJ knew his Toyotas. “The LE sedan,” he said. “With the upgrade.”
“Go ahead,” Sun-ho said. “Check it.”
DJ bent low and inspected the tailpipe—sure enough, it was notched. They did this to keep track of which cars they’d modified. When he rose, he was smiling.
“I was walking down the street, and there it was,” Sun-ho said. “Imagine its journey—Niigata to Vladivostok to Chongjin to Shenyang to Seoul to us.”
He used a master key to open the driver’s door, and the two stepped inside.
Before closing the passenger door, DJ scraped a pile of textbooks onto the curb. Out of habit, he flipped down the visor, lifted the floor mat, opened the glove box. Their greatest source of wonder was the things you might find in a Japanese car—aside from food and money, they’d once found a bullhorn, an inflatable woman, a cooler containing a single eyeball. They’d even found a kitten once, living in the trunk off old apples.
The three meals sat between them. DJ looked from the extra bag to Sun-ho.
“I’ll tell you who the extra burger’s for,” Sun-ho said. “First we need to make a stop.”
They drove toward the university hospital in Sinchon-dong. Crossing Olympic, DJ realized that by taking the subway everywhere, he had never really seen the city. From the elevated causeway, here were Yeouido, the National Assembly buildings and the tourist boats lining the Hangang. Climbing the Seogang Bridge, he saw for the first time the Bamseom Islets, with great flocks of mallards and mandarins basking in the midday light.
At the hospital, Sun-ho parked across the entrance to the emergency room, blocking the ambulance ramp. “I’ll be back soon enough,” he said, slowly limping toward the ER doors.
DJ leaned to inspect the odometer, which registered a mere twenty-seven thousand kilometers. Then he rapped his knuckles where the passenger-side airbag should have been: hollow.
Soon enough, he saw two security guards escorting a man from the hospital who gripped several dozen balloons. The guards tried to wrest the balloon strings from the man’s hands, and when they couldn’t, they pushed him to the ground.
By the time Sun-ho had made it back to the car, he was livid, barking insults toward the maternity ward as he set about stuffing It’s A Boy! balloons into the backseat. “I would have given them their stupid money!” Sun-ho shouted. “Do they think fifty baby boys will be born in a single night? No, it’s impossible, so why does the gift shop need all these balloons?”
DJ had no idea what Sun-ho was talking about, but he now knew whom the extra meal was for. “The burger will never get to her,” DJ said. “You understand that, right?”
Sun-ho turned his anger toward DJ. “It doesn’t matter if Willow gets the burger,” he said. “What matters is that we sent it.”
They headed north on Highway 1, toward the DMZ, with Sun-ho at the wheel. He drove like he was in North Korea, racing down empty roads a hundred meters wide with a free pass from the dictator himself.
“Yesu-Nim!” DJ shouted as the car floated across lanes of thick traffic.
He turned to see if they’d caused an accident, but there was only a wall of balloons.
When he turned back, Sun-ho was glaring at him.
“Yesu-Nim?” he asked, shaking his head.
“You have to be careful,” DJ said. “This is the one car in South Korea that has no airbags.”
They crossed the Imjingang and parked with a hundred tour buses at Dorasan Station. The air smelled of diesel and carnival food. They made their wa
y through masses of tourists toward the observatory, where they approached a bank of binoculars. Together they beheld North Korea: Mount Songaksan, the Gaeseong Valley and the collective farms at Geumamgol, where several oxen were pulling something unseen through tall brown grass.
“Look at those peaceful meadows,” Sun-ho said, dialing in the focus. “Doesn’t it look like you could just walk home?”
DJ turned from the view to his friend. “Yeah,” he said. “Except for the seven million land mines, you could take a nice stroll.”
A group of high school boys approached and leaned their backs against the parapet. They were young and handsome and maybe were making fun of Sun-ho’s balloons. In general, they seemed more interested in eating fried sweet-potato balls than gazing upon the North.
Sun-ho bristled at their arrival. He’d taken offense at teens in uniforms, and he seemed to take even more at students without them. He peered into his binoculars. “Imagine how stupid we must look to our countrymen,” Sun-ho said. “Imagine what real Koreans think of our sequined ball caps and manga shirts and K-pop footwear.”
When DJ panned the countryside, he saw only peasants in wintertime, laboring in heavy canvas coats. He saw packed-clay roads and corrugated metal roofs. No cars were visible, let alone freeways or hospitals or people contemplating South Korea.
“No launchings,” they heard someone shout. “No launchings.”
They turned to see the black-and-white helmets of border guards moving through the crowd. Working quickly, Sun-ho stuffed Willow’s burger in a plastic shopping bag, hitched the handles together and secured a knot.
“No launchings,” a soldier shouted.
Then Sun-ho let go. The balloons raced at great speed across the windswept fields. After clearing a stand of trees, the cargo rose high into North Korean air.
The soldiers arrived, barking. “Who launched that contraband?” they demanded.
DJ and Sun-ho were silent. The teens beside them were silent.
The soldiers stared at each face before moving down the observation line to question others. When they were gone, Sun-ho approached the boys. He spoke to the tallest one, who must have played basketball. “You’re loyal,” Sun-ho said. “I like that. You weren’t afraid of those South Korean soldiers. Yes, your mind is strong. But you must tell me, I must know—why do you dress yourself like that?”
The young man offered a bemused smile.
“Look at your friend,” Sun-ho said, pointing at another young man. “He’s dressed like a pop singer. And the other one is wearing eyeliner. Do you know what makeup is for? Makeup is for foreign girls who are kidnapped to Pyongyang to be whored out to Party officials.”
The young man’s smile went away.
“You are Korean,” Sun-ho said with disdain. “Koreans defeated the Jurchens. Koreans fought off the Manchu. We repelled the Mongol invasions. Six times the Mongols tried to conquer us, and six times we prevailed.”
“Enough,” DJ said. “These are just kids.”
For Sun-ho, it wasn’t enough. “We beat the Japanese,” he said. “We took them at the Siege of Jinju, at the Battle of Okpo, and we swept them from the forests of Taebaek in ’45. We even whipped the Americans!”
“The Americans?” The young man laughed. “You crazy ajeossi. We never fought the Americans.”
That was when Sun-ho took a swing upward, toward the young man’s throat.
DJ jumped between them, but someone grabbed his back and rode him to the ground. He felt an elbow around his throat and smelled the junk-food breath of the boy who choked him out. When he came to, he was on his hands and knees, Sun-ho patting him on the back. The boys were nowhere to be seen.
“There you go, you’re back,” Sun-ho said. “You were only gone a few minutes.”
Saliva ran from DJ’s mouth. He could feel grit pressed into his cheeks, and both eyes were trying to stream clear.
Sun-ho said, “It feels good to fight, doesn’t it?”
DJ tried to say no, but a kind of retching sound came instead. He blinked and looked down at the pavement, dark with spit.
“What happened to our country?” Sun-ho asked. His voice sounded philosophical and faraway. “How did this happen to us?”
“You don’t belong here,” DJ said. “I get that. But there’s no way to take you back. You have to start adjusting, you have to accept that things are different here.”
“I’ll tell you where we belong, Dongjoo,” Sun-ho said. “We were made for another time, one before all this, when a man had a wife, some kids, and lived out his days in the village of his birth. In the summers, a man’s family would feast on what his war pony could carry home. In winter, they’d huddle to keep warm.”
Sun-ho helped DJ to his feet, steadied him.
“You can’t just attack people,” DJ said. “Life is different here.”
Sun-ho ignored this. “What does a man need?” he mused as he brushed the dirt from DJ’s clothes. “Some heat under his floor, a woman he comes to love, the ram’s-horn bow he inherits from his father? We should have been born before this mess, Dongjoo. What I wouldn’t give to live a thousand years ago. I’d serve a Goryeo king. I’d live a life of honor. If your growth was stunted back then, it was due to crop failure, not a dictator who steals your food. If your hip got broken, it was the work of an ornery ox, not the fucking secret police.”
DJ said, “I would take you back if I could.”
Sun-ho took a last glance northward.
“Nonsense,” he said, and clapped DJ once more on the back.
—
Mina let DJ hear her play. They worked their way along the Daehwa-bound Orange line, playing accordion in the Apgujeong, Oksu and Geumho stations. Mina tended to close her eyes when she played, allowing DJ to watch how she leaned back to fill the bellows, the way her right hand was light on the piano keys and her left punched through the registers. The tunes were less patriotic today. When she played “Hwiparam” in Yaksu Station, an unseen man whistled along from deep within the tunnel. “Rainbow Bridge” brought forth a woman who’d defected from Hamhung and now had a stall in the market selling Northern-style tofu. Following “Bangeap Sumnida,” a fellow from Nampo approached. He sold icy bowls of naengmyeon from a little cart. “You two are new, I can tell,” he said, and tossed some won in the accordion case. “Be patient. It takes a while, but Seoul will offer you her teat.”
When he was gone, they had a laugh about that.
The Dongguk station, it turned out, was beneath a soaring church clad in blue glass. Here, Mina sang the words to “Waiting for Him” as after-sermon parishioners made their way down to the trains. They formed a large circle as she sang, unaware perhaps that the “Him” in question wasn’t their beloved Yesu-Nim. When Mina thanked them and they heard her accent, money poured into her case.
When the crowd cleared, Mina took the instrument idly through its scales.
“The people at my meetings want me to give up the accordion,” she said.
DJ sat on the cool marble floor. He was still in the thrall of the song.
“Are you serious?” he asked.
“They say I’ll never accept the South while my music pays tribute to the North.”
“But what about your husband?” he asked. “Aren’t you on a mission?”
“They say if my husband were here, his name would have been recorded at Hanawon.”
Mina stopped squeezing the bellows, so the notes she fingered became only the soft clacking of buttons.
DJ said, “Even if he’s not to be found, it matters that you looked, right?”
Mina seemed uncertain. “I suppose.”
“You can’t stop playing your accordion,” he said. “That’s one thing I’m sure about. That’s who you are. Why not just learn new songs? Or better yet, write your own.”
Mina laughed at this. “And what do you think I should sing about?”
“How about a woman searching for her husband? She never gives up. In fact, she plays her acco
rdion at every subway stop in Seoul.”
“You think that would make a good song?”
“Are you kidding?” DJ asked. “It would get you on one of those contest shows. A beautiful woman makes a daring escape and then scours a new country, playing North Korean tunes in search of the man she loves. There wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house.”
Mina started playing again. “I only said I had to find my husband,” she said. “I never claimed to love him.”
—
I never claimed to love him. DJ heard those words through an entire dishwashing shift. The water was scalding hot. It penetrated his hands, gave him focus. And the racks of dishes never ended. DJ didn’t have to think about them—the dirty plates came, clouds of steam rose, and there were Mina’s words. The other guys in the back of the restaurant swapped stories all night, tales about chasing virgins, Gangnam District dancers and episodes of slapstick in the jimjilbang. DJ enjoyed the stories, though he never joined in. What would he have to contribute about nightclubs, steam rooms or even the topic of women? Plus, he’d never told a story in his life, at least not about himself.
In his bunk that night, DJ lay studying the South Korean lottery tickets Sun-ho had given them. Back when he and Sun-ho counterfeited Chinese tickets, they’d run off thousands, then deal them to peddlers across the border. Their press wasn’t very sophisticated, so on one print run, all the tickets would be winners. On the next, everyone was destined to lose.
DJ noticed the guy in the next bunk staring at him. He was one of the young veterans. “So, you’re from the North?” the veteran asked.
“That’s right,” DJ said.
“That’s fucked up,” the veteran said. “I guess you’ve seen it all. The famine and the mind control and the Dear Leader—all that shit’s for real, huh?”
“Yeah, I suppose it is,” DJ said.
The veteran nodded. He was quiet a moment. “So you’re into the lottery?”
“I take an interest,” DJ said. He offered the veteran a ticket. “Try your hand?”
“No, thanks,” the veteran told him. “You only get so much luck in life.”
DJ nodded. It was getting late. Around them were the sounds of men clicking off lamps and closing metal lockers. When he reached to turn off his light, the veteran spoke.