The Boy Who Escaped Paradise

by J. M. Lee

  He shook his head and flapped his wings.

  “You went exactly how you wanted to, just like Chow Yun-fat in his movies.” He had known how he wanted to die, though he hadn’t figured out how he wanted to live.

  “I did. I aimed at the bad guys and got shot. Just like Chow Yun-fat.” Dash flew up higher and higher. My plane began drifting down toward Earth. I looked down at the roofs of Seoul. I was here now. Somewhere, Yong-ae was here, too.

  “That’s a lovely dream. Your friend was with you even then,” Angela says.

  “That wasn’t a dream,” I correct her. “Dash was flying next to the plane. We talked.”

  “A person can’t fly,” Angela says.

  “Are you saying I’m lying?”

  “Or maybe you hallucinated.”

  “He flew next to me. He talked to me, then he flew up higher.”

  Angela just stares at me.

  I know there is magic in the world. People only believe in things they can see, but invisible things exist, too. Numbers tell you everything you need to know about physics, music, even poetry and philosophy. “I’ll prove to you that magic and miracles exist,” I say hotly.

  She shakes her head gently. “Please stop. I can’t help you if you’re like this.” She’s still suspicious of me. I can’t say that I blame her.

  Interpol Red Notice: Ahn Gil-mo

  Wanted by the judicial authorities of Korea,

  Republic of, for prosecution / To serve a sentence

  Charges: Fraud

  In 2002, Ahn Gil-mo defected from North Korea and passed through Yanji, Shanghai, and Macau before entering South Korea in 2006. He subsequently received Korean citizenship and support from the South Korean government. Authorities discovered that he was a person of interest implicated in hundreds of incidents of fraud, along with two accomplices, also defectors, one of whom was imprisoned for spying. Ahn was suspected of cyber dealing, manipulating stocks, and disturbing the financial markets. After pocketing a large profit, he came under notice of the stock crime unit and was investigated; he also committed additional major crimes and fled overseas. In November 2007, he was placed on the Red Notice.

  Another official document from Interpol confirms yet another crime. Banks lobs questions at me, but I remain silent. He asks his question, notes my silence, and moves onto the next. “Did you cross illegally into the United States?”

  I don’t answer.

  “This is ridiculous!” he snaps. “Even a Red Notice criminal can refuse to answer any questions.”

  Angela comes in, holding a thermometer and a chart. Banks sighs and leaves the room. Angela takes my temperature and draws blood. I scribble a poem of my own making.

  I wish I could calculate my mystical dream.

  3.14159265

  She puts the chart down and writes:

  The shiny daylight reflects unknown yearnings.

  358979

  We take turns writing down the value of pi.

  “What did he ask you?” Angela asks casually.

  I don’t answer.

  “Why don’t we focus on the fraud you committed in Seoul? And the manipulation of stock prices?”

  “I didn’t manipulate stocks. I just bought suitable stocks at the right time and sold them at the right time.”

  “Tell me what happened,” Angela suggests.

  I go back to the day I arrived in Seoul.

  SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION

  I left Incheon International Airport and made my way to Seoul Station. Years ago, I had read an article to Kunlun about the homeless people congregating there. I figured that was the perfect place for me, since I also didn’t have a home. I placed my knapsack in a coin locker and ate free meals given out by volunteers. About a week in, a volunteer asked me where I was from and where my family was. I told her that I was from Pyongyang, that I arrived via Shanghai and Macau, and that my parents were dead. Her eyebrows shot up in surprise. She ladled extra soup for me that day. But before I could finish my lunch, police surrounded me and put me in a squad car. They photographed me and asked endless questions. Finally, they figured out that I wasn’t Chinese, Macanese, or Japanese, but North Korean. I was handed over to investigators specializing in defectors. They peppered me with questions. Where did I live in Pyongyang? Where were my parents? How did I get to China? What did I do in Macau? I told them about my life in Pyongyang, the prison camp, Yanji, Shanghai, and Macau. They seemed to suspect that I was an ethnic Korean with Chinese citizenship from Yanji, trying to enter South Korea as a defector, aiming for a citizen’s ID and resettlement funds provided to North Koreans. They were professionals at ferreting out fake defectors. With ten thousand defectors living in South Korea, one out of every two thousand North Koreans, a defector would know at least one or two people from back home.

  A few days later, the investigator closed his file. “We found someone who knows you. Once we can verify your identity, you will become a South Korean citizen.”

  Later, I was told that this person had arrived. I combed my hair carefully and went to the visiting area, which contained three tables with two chairs on each side. The door opened, and I looked up eagerly, expecting to see Yong-ae.

  “Gil-mo!” he called, striding over to give me a tight embrace. He patted me jovially on the back.

  I extricated myself and stared at him, at his asymmetrical face, his drooping, shiny skin, his gold-rimmed glasses, his comb-over. His fleshiness and glasses obstructed the face I had known, but it came to me: Yun Yong-dae, the warden at Muryong prison camp.

  “So do you know this young man?” asked the investigator.

  “Yes, yes! This is Ahn Gil-mo. He was at my camp for two years.” He smiled warmly. “Welcome to Seoul, Gil-mo! Don’t worry about anything. I’ll look after you. I know that’s what your poor father would have wanted.”

  But I was supposed to look after Yong-ae. “Do you know where Yong-ae is?” I asked.

  “That’s right, you left the camp because of her,” exclaimed the warden. “I’ll help you find her. You’ll have a good life here, Gil-mo. I’ll help you. You’ll make money, find Yong-ae, and live a nice life.”

  After the warden left, the investigator marveled at my luck. “Mr. Yun is a model case,” he said. “If all defectors were like him we’d be out of a job. He’s adapted to Korean society very well. He’s quite comfortable, and he’s become a Christian, you know.”

  He had become a Christian? But my father was put in the prison camp for a single Bible. He perished there, and I didn’t know where my mother had gone. Christianity had made me an orphan.

  The investigator blathered on, not noticing my shock. “Mr. Yun began taking care of other defectors. He founded an organization called Defector Friendship Collective. He gives talks about how horrible life is under communism. He became well known in the community, and government agencies work with him closely now. It’s an amazing story, really, considering that he crossed the border without anything on him. You’re in good hands. He’ll give you all the tools you need to be a contributing citizen, just like him.”

  I sat still, stunned. I didn’t understand why a loyal official of the republic left. And how did a warden of a prison camp come to sponsor defectors, the likes of whom he used to treat like animals? Could he have become a better man?

  I was sent to Hanawon, a resettlement center for defectors. My room had a small desk, a fan, and a drying rack for laundry. The warden bustled around, making sure the boiler was working and I had hot water. He promised he’d be back soon. From my window, I watched his black car drive out of the parking lot. He was so kind now. The Heavenly Father had to be a good person if he was able to change the warden into such a nice man.

  The resettlement education curriculum was 420 hours over twelve weeks. It taught us about cultural differences between the two Koreas, sought to develop democratic civic consciousness and cultivate societal and economic independence, instructed us with basic job skills, provided psychological support, and made s
ure we were adjusting. Every week, the warden visited me with an armload of books. Perhaps this was his way of compensating for all the horrible things he had done to me in the camp. I didn’t want his silent apologies, but I eagerly awaited the books. Through them, I understood more about Seoul, South Korea, democracy, and capitalism.

  Three months later, I left Hanawon. It was summer. I walked out of the facility with a new bag filled with all my new books. The flowerbeds along the sidewalks were a riot of color. Hot air was thick around me.

  A car honked behind me. I turned around. A tinted window slid down. “Congratulations!” called the warden. “You’re a South Korean now.” He opened a can of Coke and handed it to me as he helped me into his car.

  I asked him to take me to Seoul Station. My knapsack in the coin locker had been collected because it had been in there for too long. My head buzzed; the ground shifted. Inside were Knight Miecher’s notebook, my calculator, compass, triangles, ruler, tape measure, buttons of different colors, and fake passports. The warden reached through the fog of my panic and dragged me to the long-term lost-and-found counter. The employee told me I was lucky; my knapsack would have been thrown out if I had come any later. The warden paid the associated fees for me, and I was able to leave with my knapsack.

  We stopped at the entrance to a dark, dank alley, dotted with potholes and sour-smelling puddles. Red neon signs in Chinese and Arabic blinked over stores. I followed the warden up a long slope. One hundred and twenty-eight steps later, we had climbed up thirty-eight steep stone steps.

  “People here like tall buildings,” the warden said, panting. He pushed open a blue galvanized steel gate, revealing a shabby two-story house with many doors. In one corner of the yard was a faucet and a dented basin.

  Two men were perched on the small veranda playing go. They didn’t bother looking up. The warden climbed up a creaky steel staircase on the side of the house and went up to the roof, where a single room was on top. He opened the door. “Here we are,” he announced. “You like it?”

  My new home was twenty-four square meters, composed of sixteen square meters of living space and eight square meters for the kitchen and bathroom. People from all over the world lived here. On the first floor was a young Pakistani couple—Ali worked as an assistant night guard at a construction site and Shareen worked at a restaurant with her pregnancy under wraps. Shareen went to work when Ali came home, and when she came home, Ali had already left for his job. Next door to them was Purba, a Nepalese laborer, who pretended to be fine at work but moaned all night from various aches and pains. Three Korean girls lived in a single room together; Ji-na, Se-ran, and Su-min, who went to the salon around three in the afternoon for their hair and makeup and returned home at dawn. Su-min told me that if I came to visit her at work with my resettlement funds, she’d show me a good time. On the second floor were Hyon-su and Jong-hye, from Yanjin, who lived next to Mr. Jang and Mr. Cho, laborers in their fifties, the go players, and a middle-aged woman who worked as a cashier in a big box store thirty minutes away.

  I settled into life in my small room on the leaky green roof in that noisy, stinky alley. Hyon-su and Jong-hye fought loudly; Su-min yelled, “Keep it down, don’t you two ever sleep?”; and Ali and Shareen listened to ABBA. Purba hummed Nepalese tunes, and the cashier lady clanged the dishes together as she washed them. Pigeons cooed around the faucet in the yard. Ali and Shareen’s room smelled like bread, while Purba’s smelled like instant ramen. Mr. Cho and Mr. Jang argued and bickered. The yard smelled pungent, of kimchi and spicy curry. Perched on top of everything, I looked down at the streets of Seoul spread out below my rusted staircase, the steep hill, and the thirty-eight stone steps.

  The warden told me that he placed my resettlement funds in a five-year fixed deposit account with 5.6 percent interest. In five years, I would have just over 30 million won.

  Seoul was enormous and plentiful. The asphalt on the streets sparkled in the sun, and even the floors in public restrooms shined. But you could find poverty and discrimination if you looked closely beyond the glitter. According to the warden, South Korea was ten times more complicated than the republic. I should be careful, as someone would take advantage of me if I didn’t pay attention. He handed me a pamphlet. “The government is helping defectors settle in by offering classes. There are computer classes or cooking classes or a number of other kinds. Why don’t you take some classes?”

  “Can I go to cooking school and learn how to make sushi?”

  “Sushi? What for?”

  “I like rice.”

  “You can take whatever class you want,” the warden said. “You’ll get 116,000 won each month for transportation and food while you’re enrolled. If you complete more than 500 hours, you get an additional 1.2 million won as an incentive. And if you go on to get a national technical qualification certificate, you get 2 million won. That means you can get up to 3.78 million in addition to your resettlement funds. I’ll put any extra funds you get from the government in your savings account so you can make more money.”

  “I don’t want to be rich.”

  “Here, you do. You work hard, use your head, and make money. You have to be smart, Gil-mo.”

  I signed up for Japanese cookery. I didn’t take classes to become rich; I knew I would meet more defectors, and that I might bump into someone who knew where Yong-ae was. I believed in numbers and in six degrees of separation. Someone had to have seen Yong-ae after she got here. I showed Yong-ae’s picture to an older defector named Min-su, who had worked in the Hamhung mines and sneaked across the river. “How are you going to find someone in this huge city with only a single picture?” he asked.

  I explained to him the theory of six degrees of separation.

  He laughed, revealing missing teeth. “I wouldn’t worry about that, kid.”

  “What should I worry about?”

  “About how to survive! You risked your life to land here. Don’t you want to prove to everyone that you can thrive?”

  That night, the warden stopped by with a gift—a new computer.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I can look up academic papers from the School of Mathematics at the Institute of Advanced Study.”

  “Oh, don’t bother with that nonsense,” the warden said. “Do something more productive with your time.” He typed something into the browser window and hit Enter. Thousands of numbers, graphs, and red and blue arrows climbed and dipped, creating hyperbolas of gains and losses. “This is a stock investment site,” he explained. “This is the best place to play with numbers. Mark my words, this is going to be your favorite site.”

  I peered closer at the screen. A world composed of numbers moved according to invisible but precise rules, driving capitalism on. In my small, shabby rooftop room, I began playing with capitalism’s huge engine.

  STORIES SURVIVE AFTER PEOPLE DIE

  It was still morning, but my rooftop room was sweltering under the heat of the sun. The warden climbed the stairs and rested for a moment outside my open door, wiping his sweaty forehead with a handkerchief. He took out a bundle of documents from his briefcase. “Good news, Gil-mo! Your paternal grandfather is alive here in Seoul!”

  I shook my head. “My grandfather died in Haeju on April 28, 1976. April 28 is the one hundred and eighteenth day on the Gregorian calendar. On that date in history, Charles de Gaulle stepped down; General Yi Sun-sin, Saddam Hussein, and Kurt Gödel were born; and iTunes began service.”

  The warden was staring at me. He must not know who Kurt Gödel was. “Gödel announced what he called the incompleteness theorem in 1931. It suggests that mathematics can’t prove its own incompleteness—”

  “Never mind that,” the warden interrupted. “The date isn’t important.”

  “Father prayed each year on April 28,” I prattled on. “So that was clearly the day my grandfather—”

  The warden cut me off, exasperated. “That’s why I said your grandfather was alive. The man who died in Haeju wasn’t your grandfat
her.”

  I stared at him.

  “I did some research. Your grandfather left your pregnant grandmother in 1950, during the war, and defected to the South alone. He told her he would be back soon, but with the demilitarized zone established, they were forever torn apart.”

  “That’s not what Father told me. He never told me that my grandfather defected.”

  The warden tutted. “Of course he didn’t. Why would he want to reveal that his mother remarried? Or maybe he didn’t know the truth himself.” He plucked out a few photographs from the bundles of paper. “This is your grandfather. You won’t believe how much work it was to get these photos of him.”

  I stared at the picture of the old man. His face contained the golden ratio in the width of his forehead, the distance between his eyes and nose, the length of his lips, the space between his brows, the length and width of his eyes. He had white hair, wrinkles revealing life’s turns, and a faint smile. Father died before he was able to grow this old. If he lived that long, would he have had this old man’s face?

  “Aren’t the similarities uncanny?” continued the warden. “You both have slightly wavy hair, and the tips of your noses droop a bit.”

  I could see some similarities, but that didn’t mean he was my grandfather. I didn’t know what to think. After all, I’d never had one. “Does it matter that this is my grandfather?”

  “Yes, of course. It’s very important. Because now, you’re very, very rich.”

  None of this meant anything to me.

  “Listen carefully, Gil-mo,” the warden said seriously. “Your grandfather earned quite a lot of money in the last fifty years. He remarried and had two daughters and a son, but he never forgot his first wife and son up north. Every time the government organized a family reunion, he applied. He never got picked, though. When he heard that I helped defectors get news of their families back home, he contacted me. He asked me to find his first wife. I unfortunately had to bring him the sad news that she remarried and died a long time ago. So he asked about his son. Your father is unfortunately already dead, but I was at least able to find his grandson!”