Under the Same Sky

by Joseph Kim

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  BY THE EARLY spring of 1994, when I was almost four years old, my parents wanted to leave the pigeon coop. We didn’t pay rent; we knew an old woman who had an extra room she let us stay in. But my parents felt threatened by the woman, who was always knocking on our door and asking my mother pointed questions. Mother wasn’t used to being harassed, and this upset her terribly. The old woman—she wanted, I think, to show my family who was boss—would even ask my father to bring her wood and coal and to do odd jobs around the house, hinting that if he didn’t obey her, there would be consequences. My parents began to think about leaving. They wanted to go someplace where we could afford our own home.

  I didn’t want to go. I loved the little building where we lived. Every morning, I would tear off and go running around the apartment complex with the few friends I had, making all the noise we wanted to. We were left to our own devices for most of the day and would explore the nearby streets for hours on end. Three blocks felt like a dozen miles to us, with each more distant street full of mystery and danger and exotic smells. We would meet in the stairwell and play rock-paper-scissors, or run outside and find a tree and play hide and seek. Each tiny corner of the building’s stairwell held memories embedded in the dirty, chipped cement. Here was the stair where I sprained my ankle and couldn’t play for three weeks; there was the step where I ate pillow bread, a North Korean specialty, and ice cream that Bong Sook had brought me, a rare double snack. It was the only world I knew.

  There were shops along my street, everything you could want: a barber, a grocery, an ice cream parlor. There were no rich people in our neighborhood to support fancy stores and no poor people to pity. At 5 p.m., when the day’s TV programming began with news and cartoons, we’d all rush over to the apartment of the one friend whose parents had managed to buy a set. There we’d sit in a row and eat homemade popcorn and candy. The residents of the apartment building were very close. All the kids would play together and anyone who had extra food would gladly share it with their neighbors.

  We were all alike, one big North Korean family, or so it seemed to me. I wanted to stay.

  One cold afternoon that fall, my father came home from work on his bicycle, pedaling fast. We didn’t own a car—hardly anyone in North Korea could afford one—so my father’s bicycle was a treasured possession. I spotted him a block away on our cluttered street, leaning over the handlebars, his lean and handsome face—so different from my round one—shining with sweat. Right away, my mood sensor understood something: my father was very excited.

  “Come, Kwang Jin,” he called to me from half a block away. “We’re going to see the new house.” He lifted me and set me down behind him on the bicycle seat. Off we flew through the loud and congested streets, headed toward the country.

  My father was determined to leave the inner city. He had a good job and a spotless reputation. As far as we knew, North Korea was doing well economically, through its citizens’ hard work and the generous help of food and fuel subsidies from Russia. My father was thirty-seven years old, smart, incorruptible, and loyal to the regime. He’d joined the Workers’ Party of Korea at the young age of twenty-four, a major accomplishment. Everyone wanted to join, but few were accepted, and my father had no family connections to help him.

  All in all, it was high time to build a house.

  Now my father powered steadily through the traffic, his strong back flexing with each pump of the pedals. A couple of blocks away was a broad highway, lined by branching elms, yellow flowers, and the tall concrete statues the government put up with slogans carved into them. I knew these slogans well: CHUN LEE MAH flashed by as we sped onward. It meant, “We must work a thousand times harder than other countries!” It was one of Kim Il Sung’s favorite sayings.

  I held on to my father’s shirt so as not to fall off. I watched the trees and buildings flow by. The small apartment buildings fell away and cars became harder to find, replaced by peasants with carts and oxen. I had never been so far away from home except for our trips to see Grandma and Grandpa for New Year’s.

  Our destination was an hour away: the July 8th neighborhood, named after the date Kim Il Sung came to visit. This is how many places in North Korea are named: by some event far in the past related to the Great Leader and his ministers. The farther we went, the quieter the roads became. The homes I saw now were rough-looking farmhouses with mud splashed on the walls. My father tirelessly pumped the pedals of the old black bike.

  By the time we pulled up to our new plot of land, he was sweating beneath the thin material of his shirt. He turned and plucked me off the seat and set me down. Happiness and anticipation were written all over my father’s face. How much this house meant to him! We walked over and inspected the site.

  It wasn’t much to look at, really. The foundation had been dug deep in order to keep jars of kimchi cool in the winter—in North Korea, even the houses are designed around that most sacred of foods. The walls were slowly going up. It was a two-room building with a basement. No bathroom. We would use an outhouse for that, as do most North Koreans.

  There were three or four workers mixing cement to bind the cinderblocks together. And this is what my father delighted in most: the walls were surrounded by nothing but air. We were going to escape the apartment building and live in something modern and new. My father’s house stood on its own, touching nothing, touched by nothing.

  Father began walking the dimensions of the small plot, squatting down and pointing at something in the foundation, shouting questions at the workers. I fooled around with some loose bricks and placed one on top of two others. Then something caught my eye. Behind the rising walls of the house, I saw a hill. And on the hill were little mounds, like gophers or beavers might build, only bigger. I stared at the mounds, my nerves tingling and then suddenly still.

  I knew what those shapes were. Graves.

  In North Korea, a grave is just a small, round mound of earth with a stone or wooden tablet stuck into the dirt saying who is buried there. As I looked out beyond the house, I saw the rising foothills of a mountain range that reached perhaps 2,500 feet in the air, with veins of snow snaking down toward the valley. At the foot of the mountains was a huge cemetery. And next to the cemetery was our future home.

  Father has decided to build a place near a cemetery, I said to myself. Why would he do that? Does he even know about the graves? I was afraid of the dark, and often felt panic on my nighttime trips to the outhouse. How much worse will it be to face these graves on the way to pee every night?

  Much worse, I thought.

  But I said nothing. My father was my hero; I wanted him to be happy. For him, I would live with the dead.

  While my father inspected the property, I played with broken bricks and watched the men slap cement onto the walls with trowels. There was space for a big yard and garden, but all I could think of was the boys in the apartment building I was going to leave. Them and the cemetery. My father issued a few orders and then we turned around and pedaled home.

  My father had many reasons for wanting the house. Somewhere in his mind, having grown up in a poor backwater like Undok, he equated unattached houses with the rich and the well-connected. Now, after becoming a rising star in our little community, he had a chance to build such a house. He was like ambitious men everywhere: he wanted his success to be visible.

  But the house was also for my mother.

  Years later, I visited my maternal grandparents. Several aunts and uncles were there, gathered around, talking about my mother when she was young, and how she pursued my father to the point of recklessness during the time they both worked for the same farming organization. “How you used to chase him around that office!” her brother cried out at one point, trying to coax a smile from her. What had happened to that headstrong girl, they were saying, what became of that mad love? I glanced at her face; she looked down, her lips tight. I turned to my father. His eyes were downcast too; he looked pained, uncomfortable. He didn’t wa
nt to be reminded of how things had turned out. My mother didn’t chase him around anymore. That feeling had died before I was born.

  My father thought the reason my mom was often ill and depressed was that she had no home of her own. Or rather, he must have hoped the solution was so simple. In any case, with the great risk of building a house, he was taking care of her. The new place wasn’t only a statement of how far he had risen from his humble beginnings. It was also, I’m sure, a message of silent concern. Of love.

  Yet the July 8th house would witness great suffering soon enough.

  Chapter

  Three

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  WHEN WE MOVED the following spring, the house wasn’t fully finished. There were more than a few things that needed fixing: pieces of flooring missing, a window with a missing pane. My father would come home in the evenings and work on the house, singing sentimental North Korean songs. When he was done, he moved on to making furniture: beautiful cabinets went up, and fine dressers made of Korean pine for our clothes. When I went to my neighbors’ houses I realized that the furniture they’d bought from the store wasn’t nearly as nice-looking or strong as what my father had made with a few simple tools.

  Everything went well in the beginning. Bong Sook was as kind and quiet as ever. My mother’s illness seemed to lift, and my father was as delighted with his new house as if it was a second son. I managed to come to terms with the people in the graveyard. When the wind from the mountain blew toward our house, I could hear the sounds of mourners. Sometimes I heard three crisp gunshots above the houses, the sign that a soldier was being buried. Instead of being horrified, I would think, Someone actually got to fire a gun! I was becoming obsessed with firearms and the military around that time. Three shots, I thought. Lucky guy.

  All in all, when it came to the cemetery I surprised myself. Instead of always asking my father to hold my hand and take me to the outhouse, I would run there alone just before bed. When the moon was out, you could see the sloping face of the mountain and the small bumps of graves. North Koreans are very superstitious: they believe in haunted places and ghosts and omens. I wasn’t afraid of the dead people beneath the mounds, but sometimes on those short walks, when the moonlight lay on the graves in a certain way, my mind would stumble across the thought, What if you were no longer in the world, Kwang Jin? What if you stopped being? Then I would get scared. If it got to be too much, I would call my father and he would take my hand and lead me back. He never refused.

  I made friends. My best pal in July 8th was named Bae Hyo Sung. He lived a few doors down from me and we played every day. Our main game was called Ddakji chigi, where you compete to own beautiful strips of paper that look like origami. We were completely mad for this game. Later, many of us would rip up our school notebooks—even our textbooks—to get paper to make the intricately folded squares that we would then try to flip over with a hard slam. Kids put tiny bits of steel in the pieces of paper to make them harder to flip. I even tore up my father’s copy of Kim Il Sung’s memoir, which not only infuriated him but was also a crime against the state.

  Hyo Sung and I were about the same height, but he was more confident than I could dream of being. Some of this probably came from his father, a city official, who was a giant: six feet at least, which made him taller than almost anyone I knew. His mom, who was kind and chatty, looked like a dwarf next to her husband.

  My friend’s cocksure talk electrified me. I was beginning to change from the obedient boy my mother bragged about to her friends in the street.

  I started kindergarten that year and met my first school friends—and my first mean kids, too. In North Korea, when you go to school, you aren’t ranked academically, but by your ability to fight. Literally. I can tell you who was the number-one boy in my first-grade class, and the number seven—and the numbers refer to only one thing: how good a battler you are, as judged by your classmates. The schools encouraged this kind of thinking: for example, when a child fails to show up for class, the teacher doesn’t call the parents and ask about the absence (to begin with, there are no phones). Instead, she sends a group of the toughest students to yell at the kid. Sometimes they even beat the boy until he agrees to come back. I don’t know where this mania for toughness comes from. Perhaps it’s my country’s history, which is full of pain and oppression.

  In kindergarten no violence was allowed, but I knew that in one year the bigger kids would be sizing me up. It was in kindergarten that I acquired my first nickname outside the house: Gang Duk Gee, the name of a character in the espionage movies we all watched. Gang Duk Gee was a South Korean spy, which made it a horrible thing to call someone. Later, in grade school, I got a second nickname that was only slightly better: Yeok Do San, which referred to a big-boned Korean-Japanese wrestling champion and meant “fatty.” But I wasn’t fat. It was my round face, like my mother’s, that earned me that name.

  In any case, I knew I’d have to fight people because of my nicknames. It was inevitable.

  When I went to kindergarten, I learned more about Kim Il Sung. I knew a lot about the Great Leader before I ever went to school, of course. He was our grandfather; he had magical powers; he was the smartest man in the world; and he often flew around the countryside keeping watch on all his children. Like all North Korean families, mine kept a shrine on our wall to the Great Leader and his wife. The first thing my father did in the morning, even before he washed up or ate his breakfast, was to take a cloth and carefully dust both of their portraits. Kim Il Sung looked very handsome, his face glowing with a dazzling and benevolent light, his eyes kind but also determined.

  You could be sent to a prison camp for allowing dirt to gather on Kim Il Sung’s portrait, or for putting it behind cracked glass. But my father cleaned the pictures out of reverence, not fear.

  Kindergarten changed my view of the Great Leader. In the first few days of class, our teachers, their faces solemn and still, brought out a set of drawings and showed them to us. We crowded around to see: a group of American soldiers with big eyes, even bigger noses, and flashing white teeth were stabbing Koreans with razor-sharp bayonets. The picture was so terrifying I thought I would faint. But I already fancied myself a soldier and would not turn away. I held my breath as the teacher explained that Americans had come to our country to massacre Koreans for no other reason than they liked to. The Americans enjoyed killing Korean people.

  I felt a thrill of dread travel the length of my body. It came as a physical shock that there were such people in the world. We’d known that the Americans were bad. In the spy movies, it was always them or the Japanese who were trying to steal North Korea’s secrets, but here was evidence of just how awful they truly were. My teacher showed us a new picture from the back of the pile. I blinked in disbelief. American soldiers were shoving pregnant Korean women into a room filled with fire. I stared at the drawing as my teacher explained that the Americans loved to roast Koreans alive or put them into gas chambers. The gaschambers killed them faster.

  Tears welled up in my eyes.

  The only people who stopped the Americans from coming to my country, our teacher said, were Kim Il Sung and the soldiers of North Korea. I nodded. The Great Leader was so much more than I had ever known.

  That summer, Hyo Sung and I became secret agents. We tossed our bows and arrows onto the trash pile and begged our fathers for guns. My dad had always bought me toys when I asked, but now he looked at me strangely. “Things in the market cost more these days,” he said quietly. “But I’ll carve you some guns out of scrap wood. How would that be?”

  I felt my skin flush with annoyance. Why couldn’t my father earn more money to buy me toy pistols? I began to complain, but one look at my father stopped me. I detected a sadness in him that was new. He’s worried about something, I thought. I wonder what.

  My father was as good as his word. He supplied me with an unending number of hand-carved pistols, revolvers, and rifles. My popularity soared. When my father carved me a gun that sh
ot small pebbles with an elastic band, my new friends nearly died of envy.

  I was a clumsy boy, always tripping and falling over exposed roots or little holes in the ground. Or I would stuff a gun in my pocket like a bandit and jam it against a doorframe when running into my room, smashing my toy to pieces. It gave me a mournful feeling to lose a gun.

  When this happened, I would run to my father and say, “Could you . . . ?” The first few times, he only laughed and began fashioning a new one. But eventually he got mad at my astonishing ability to break everything in sight, and handed me a toy with no details on it, just a wood block carved into the shape of a gun. I looked at it. This was my punishment for being such a thoughtless boy. I brooded for a while, but even my father’s worst pistol was better than what my friends had.

  I loved those guns so much. I slept with them, and when I woke up in the morning, the first thing I would do was feel around my bed for my latest sidearm. When I touched the smooth wood, a feeling of peace would come over me. When I grew up, I was sure I would become a spy or soldier who saved his homeland from the big-nosed people.

  I was very patriotic. I believed Kim Il Sung would take care of my family and me. Everyone believed this. Which is what made what was to come so hard for us to accept.

  Chapter

  Four

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  HYO SUNG AND I spent our free time chasing dragonflies. As a transplanted city boy, I became obsessed with the sight of their dark glinting wings. We hunted them day after day. The bugs’ favorite place to land was on the green corn stalks in the fields next to our houses. They liked the top parts of the stalks; they sat there buzzing in the heat. We snuck up behind them and clapped them in our hand-prisons. We even created our own equipment, a sort of tennis racket made out of corn stalks with spider webs draped across the middle. If you swung this in the buzzing air, the dragonfly would get caught and become your prisoner.