by Joseph Kim
Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
The Guard
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
Fifty-Three
Fifty-Four
Fifty-Five
Fifty-Six
Fifty-Seven
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Copyright © 2015 by Joseph Kim
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhco.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Kim, Joseph, date.
Under the same sky : from starvation in North Korea to salvation in America / Joseph Kim ; contributions by Stephan Talty.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-544-37317-4 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-544-37318-1 (ebook)
1. Refugees—Korea (North)—Biography. 2. Immigrants—United States—Biography. 3. Victims of famine—Korea (North) 4. Human rights—Korea (North) 5. Rescue work—China. 6. Christian ethics—China. I. Title.
HV640.5.K67K567 2015
362.87092—dc23
[B]
2014039686
v1.0515
Jacket design by Mark R. Robinson
Cover photograph (bowl) © Tongro/Getty
Cover photograph (rice) © Scott Phillips/Corbis
Author’s note: Some of the individuals I knew in China and North Korea are still at risk today. Their names have been changed.
To my sister, Bong Sook,
and to my brothers and sisters in North Korea
May you never lose your hope,
for it is what makes us live
Prologue:
The Guard
MY SECOND DAY at the Saro-cheong Detention Center, I was sent to work weeding the rice fields. The task was exhausting, slogging for hours through the flooded rows of dirt, pulling at the weeds and digging down with my fingers for the grub-white roots, but at least it got my fellow inmates and me away from the prison. Even though I’d been homeless for more than two years by then, and had dealt with gangsters and starvation, the place terrified me. The day before, I’d seen a teenager beaten so severely I was sure he was brain-damaged, and darkness had brought the shrieks of girls being raped in the next room. The detention center had once been a school, in fact the best art school in Hoeryong, but now, like many things in the city, it was broken and wild, a place of seething chaos.
Around noon, we marched under a hot sun back to the detention center for lunch. Not knowing the routine, I simply followed everyone else, trying not to stick out. After we ate our meager portions of corn noodle soup, the guard, a lean teenager with an angry face, yelled to us: “It is your break time.” I watched as the other boys lay down and fell asleep, all in a matter of twenty seconds. I could tell how precious this time was by how fast they dropped to the floor. I, too, was exhausted and found a spot to lay my head.
I fell asleep soon after and dozed among the others. After I don’t know how many minutes, I heard a voice calling in my dreams: “Up, up.” I opened my eyes. The guard was screaming at us, kicking the sleeping boys, threatening the slow ones with the long stick—actually the handle of a garden hoe—he held menacingly in his right hand. Everyone began scrambling to find his shoes that sat in a pile at the center of the room. My hands shook. I found one shoe but not the other. I was stooped over, hunting among the remaining pairs, when something struck me between the shoulder blades with great force.
“Bastard! Why are you so slow?”
I turned, crouched in pain. It was the night guard. He’d struck me on the spine with the long stick. It hurt terribly, but I managed not to fall over. I knew that showing weakness here could mean death. I bowed to the guard, his face twisted in a bright grin, as the flesh above my spine throbbed.
“Please, sir,” I said, “I’m looking for my shoes.”
He raised the stick again and screamed “Bastard!” He slammed it down on my left shoulder, trying to break the collarbone. I wanted to kill him, but I thought he must have allies among the other guards and they would come for me when the sky grew dark.
From this day on, the guard chose me as his number-one victim. I learned later that his parents were middle class and could have afforded to get him out of the prison, but chose not to. The guard had been abandoned and then sent to detention, where he got a job watching over the other inmates. To show his dominance, he attacked people for no reason at all. And he made a special case out of me.
I learned to put my shoes in a place where I could find them, but the guard didn’t care. Bastard was my name, and beatings were my regular fate. Sometimes he hit me with the big stick; other times he slapped my face with his open hand. I only bowed in response. But rage was building up inside me. I could feel the blood pump hot to my face when he slapped it.
Out on the streets, I was considered a good fighter for my age. I was even feared by some. But people were treated like animals at the detention center, often brutally beaten by a dozen men at a time. No one could stand up to that.
One day, after weeks of this treatment, I heard the guard approach me from behind.
“Hey, bastard,” he said, almost jovially. I could feel the eagerness in his voice, the anticipation of a good slap, a release of his hatred and frustration from his skin into mine. It was almost like he craved the letting go of the dark electricity that had built up in him all morning. I could feel how he savored these moments. I had always been sensitive to others’ emotions, even my enemies’.
But today, I couldn’t take the thought of him touching me. I spun around.
“Why are you always picking on me?” I cried, my voice breaking. “Leave me alone, please. Leave me alone or else!” Even as I said it, I knew that I’d opened myself up to danger. But it was too late to take the words back.
The guard’s face went still with surprise. Then it blushed dark and his eyes slitted.
“How dare you talk back to me!” he said in a low voice.
We began shouting at each other, the other boys gathering, wide-eyed, to watch. The team leader heard what was going on and came running over.
“What’s happening?” he said, pushing boys aside. “What are you two yelling about?”
Before the
guard could open his mouth, I quickly spoke up. I described what had been happening under the team leader’s nose. He listened and nodded, gesturing for the furious guard to be silent. When I finished, the team leader nodded.
“I don’t need to hear any more. I will do what’s fair! And that means only one thing: you two will fight it out!”
The team leader looked very pleased with himself. He was clearly bored with his daily routine, and here was an opportunity for a little excitement.
I knew that losing the fight would be dangerous. The guard would have total control over me, and because I had humiliated him by defying him in public, he would show no mercy. I decided I would do whatever it took to win.
The team leader gathered all the boys together in the center of our room. I studied my opponent. He was bigger and heavier, but I knew he’d led a more privileged life while I’d been on the street. You are mentally stronger, I said to myself. Whatever you do, don’t give up.
“OK, begin!”
The guard and I grabbed each other by the shoulders and arms and pushed back and forth, grunting with the effort. He quickly slipped his hand away and landed a punch on my jaw, mashing the flesh against my teeth. I tasted blood and this frightened me. I shoved him back, trying to topple him over. But he was stronger than I thought. After a few minutes of furious wrestling, my left knee gave way and I rolled to the ground. The guard’s hands went to my throat as he fell on me. We rolled back and forth, punching each other and snorting for air. The minutes stretched on and on. I saw in my peripheral vision that the other team leaders had joined us. I could hear bottles of moonshine clink as they were set down on the concrete.
After twenty minutes of wrestling and blows, my arms were slick with sweat. I was exhausted. It felt as if my arms were hanging from their sockets by thin strings. But I had more to lose, and I’d always been a stubborn fighter. I threw the guard to the ground and climbed on top of him, sitting on his heaving chest. I pinned both his hands with my left hand and started punching him in the face as he turned it this way and that, trying to evade my blows. I felt no rage anymore, no emotion at all. I was like a miner gouging out a seam of coal. There was no hatred left in me, only determination.
Bang, I gashed his lower lip on his teeth. Again. I took a deep breath, leaned forward, and gritted my teeth. Bang. Harder. Bang. A spurt of blood drifted up, then fell to his cheek.
“I give up!” he shouted finally. A cheer went up from some of the spectators while others blew out their breath in disgust.
I rolled off the guard and lay on the floor, gasping.
I’d survived yet again.
I’d only wanted to serve my time as quietly as possible, but by winning I’d brought myself to the attention of “the gangster brothers.” That afternoon, I learned my reward. I was named the new guard. This meant more and better food and freedom not to work all day in the intense heat.
The guard I’d beaten became a regular inmate, and would go out to the fields to weed. The stick was handed to me, with the understanding that I would use it indiscriminately, and with great harshness.
I didn’t want the long stick, I didn’t want to be a guard, but I had no choice. I vowed to be a better person than the teenager who victimized me. I hoped I wouldn’t become a brutal creature, like the gangster brothers who ran the detention center. I wanted to keep a part of the old me alive. But within weeks, there were boys in that place who would probably have killed me with pleasure. Months after I left the center, I was still being chased on the streets of Hoeryong by the same boys, with the same rage in their eyes that I’d felt when the stick rapped me on the spine. We were angry, I think, because of what had happened to us, but also because of what we’d become.
The famine in North Korea killed hundreds of thousands of people. Some of their graves are still visible on the low hills outside Hoeryong. But the famine also did secret things. It dissolved families as if they’d been dipped in acid (mine, unfortunately, was a good example); it broke up deep, committed friendships over something as small as a cornmeal cake. Even if your body survived, you would find someday that your soul had been marked in ways you couldn’t know until much later.
This was true of many people I met in those times. And it was true of me.
Chapter
One
* * *
AS A VERY young boy, I was quiet and introverted. It was hard for me to talk easily with people, and this made it difficult to make friends. But I found that I’d been given something that went some way toward balancing out my shyness: an ability to gauge other people’s emotions without the use of words. I think of this gift as a kind of chemical mood sensor inside me. It was as if people’s feelings left their bodies as invisible particles and sailed through the air between us, passing through the pores of my skin before being absorbed into the mood sensor, which identified them for me.
At that time, my family—my handsome, confident father, my sickly mother, my beloved older sister, Bong Sook, and I—were living in a small “pigeon coop” apartment in Hoeryong, a city known for its white apricots, its beautiful women, and for having the best pottery clay in North Korea. I still remember the emotions that flowed into me then from my parents and sister. Few words we spoke come back to me now, only shades of light and blackness, sadness and joy.
My mother emitted dark energy. In the middle of the day, I would find her motionless on her sleeping mat. She would stay there for hours, completely still. Why she was like this when my friends’ mothers were always bustling around, making tofu and sweet snacks, gossiping loudly in the stairwells or shooing us away from their doors, I didn’t know. She did tell me once that she’d come down with pellagra—a disease caused by a lack of vitamin B3—while pregnant with me. She’d also eaten a fish the week before my birth and gotten really ill. “The neighbors didn’t think I was going to live,” my mother said. I couldn’t understand what the pellagra or the fish had to do with her lying on the floor all these years later.
I absorbed her sadness into myself. When she was like this, I felt listless too. I would often lie down beside her and sink into a miserable slumber. In those rare moments when she laughed, I wanted to laugh with her.
The truth was, my mother was depressed about her life and her marriage, and this resulted in a sad and spiritless woman whose moods permeated our tiny pigeon coop. Her sickness, or her distress about her own life, also caused her to become a clean freak. “Kwang Jin,” she would call to me as soon as I walked in the apartment. (My name, Kwang Jin, means “moving forward with brightness.”) “Hurry up and wash your hands!”
Bong Sook, on the other hand, had the complete opposite effect on me. Seven years older than me, sweet and uncomplaining, she never failed to light up my mood sensor like sunshine. In those years, before I fell out of favor with my father, I was the prince of the family. The nice things Bong Sook did for me (and what didn’t she do for me?) I came to expect. Whenever I was hungry for more rice, she would take some of hers and put it on my plate, saying, “Look, Daddy, you gave me too much.” When she came home from school, she would be sure to bring me a little snack, ice cream or candy, from a shop along the road. When my socks needed washing, she would wash them. When I was bored, she’d sit me down and read from one of her textbooks.
Bong Sook didn’t get the same love I did as the baby boy. When my father swept through the house and picked one of us up to swing around and around, it was always me. When he chose one of us to drape across his feet while he lay on his back, allowing us to feel like we were flying, I was always the one. When the family bought a new bike, it was handed to me.
But Bong Sook never got jealous or spiteful. When my father went out of town on business, he would always return with gifts (a toy gun for me, a doll for my sister) and North Korean candy—boiled sucker balls, white with light brown stripes, sticky and delicious. If he pulled ten pieces out of his pocket, I would get five and Bong Sook the same. But she wouldn’t eat them. She would take one hersel
f and hand me three, which I would gobble up in no time. The last piece she would hide away for a day when I was feeling sad. Then she would dangle it in front of my eyes and laugh before letting me tear off the wrapper and pop it in my mouth.
Bong Sook did this without the slightest resentment—or so I have long believed. But did she? Or did her heart flutter with secret jealousies? Did she long for my father to pick her up just once and swing her around the apartment, chortling with glee? I wish I could ask her now.
One of my first memories is of my sister’s school uniform: a white blouse, a scarlet-red scarf tied around her neck, and a royal-blue skirt. I was out playing with my friends near the stairs of the apartment building, and I recall the whirl of activity: cars passing and honking, pedestrians pushing along the sidewalk, my friends laughing and dodging among the people. And then, through this tan-gray blur, something, just an outline of a body, appeared at a distance. Somehow I knew it was my sister. I must have been three or four years old. Out of all the cold and unfamiliar things in the world that weren’t Bong Sook, Bong Sook had magically appeared. This filled me with happiness.
And my father? He provided light, kilowatts of pure energy. My father had risen far from his poor peasant boyhood, having been named the second-highest official in a district in Undok before becoming a successful accountant for a military school in Hoeryong. This had given him a shining confidence in all of life’s possibilities. At least for the first few years of my boyhood, he could send a surge of hope through me just by walking in the door.
Men like my father were, I think, especially vulnerable to the storms that awaited us. It’s impossible to confirm that such men died at higher rates than cynical or skeptical types—where in North Korea would one find such statistics?—but I believe they shared a dark fate. Their simple belief in life must have cost them dearly.
Chapter
Two