by Joseph Kim
In the first months of the famine, people began to panic. They didn’t know what to do. It was as if they were children who’d woken up one morning to find their parents had vanished with all the rice, leaving no message behind. People in Hoeryong were bewildered, but they still feared their leaders. To cry out that your father or brother had died of hunger in a totalitarian state was to accuse the government of a serious crime: Why did you allow this to happen? The Inminban, the local committee of women who reported troublemakers to the government, kept watch over all of us. If one of these women heard you complain about the lack of food, you could get into serious trouble. So people remained silent.
Nor did we have the comfort of blaming God, as there was no God in North Korea. We had to swallow our fear and go on. The hopelessness I had once seen in my mother’s face affected all of us now. It seeped into our home like a heavy gas. Our faces grew pinched and dumb.
I would catch my parents looking at Bong Sook and me with terror in their eyes. At first I thought it was strange, but gradually I realized they were observing us for signs of starvation. The thought that they might die wasn’t what worried them. Their greatest fear was to not be able to feed us.
As the famine swept through Hoeryong, my parents bickered more and more. They had never been very loving toward each other. It’s not the North Korean way to hug your spouse or your children and say “I love you.” The marriage that was fragile to begin with grew brittle when this disaster, which would test the strongest marriage to its limit, blew down on them. Their love shivered beneath it.
My parents argued about food. It was hard to hide their worry and fear in a two-room house. “But we don’t have anything left!” I would hear my mother shout at my father. “Why don’t you take money from your company like other fathers?” One of the things that had made my mother fall in love with my father was his idealism. My father was the straightest of straight arrows. He refused to take bribes or steal food or use his company’s money, as other families did. During that time, North Korea was a place where corruption was so common it wasn’t even called corruption, it was just life. But my father wanted to walk with a straight back.
In that small house, when my father returned home from work, exhausted and gray-faced, my mom would be furious. She was the one who was forced to hear us whimper from hunger. She had to go into the hills and rip disgusting weeds out of the ground and pretend they were good for her family. So when my father walked in the door empty-handed, my mother screamed at him. “You’re sacrificing your own children!”
My mood sensor absorbed my mother’s resentment. Why didn’t my father bring sacks of rice home? He was an important person. I couldn’t yet see that my dad was a misfit in the feral world of North Korea, that his faith in the leaders in Pyongyang was a horrible curse for him. In his mind, North Korea had given him a chance to succeed, and he couldn’t steal so much as a single coin from its coffers.
My mother and I didn’t care about that. (Bong Sook never expressed anger at my father.) Rage built up inside us. We were dying.
The day after each fight, something else would disappear from the house. Clothes went first. My mother even sold the dress she was married in; my father’s wedding suit was also sacrificed. I knew she was selling these things in the market to sustain us.
We grew thinner. Our eyeballs pushed from their sockets, or so it seemed. Really, our faces were just growing leaner. We had little energy for playing or reading books or anything else.
Bong Sook didn’t need to come looking for me now at dinnertime. An hour or two before my mother would put the old battered pots over the flame, I hunched by the cold hearth waiting for food. I would sway lethargically, watching her prepare a meal out of whatever plants she could find.
One evening, my parents came back from a walk into town looking excited. “Children! Next month it’s going to be better,” they said. “We’re going to make a lot of money!”
Bong Sook clapped her hands. “How wonderful!”
“How do you know this?” I said, ever the skeptic.
“The Mishin told us!” my father responded.
My parents could barely contain their excitement. They devoted the whole night to talking about what they were going to buy when the cash started pouring in. It was as if the money had already been made. The hard part would be figuring out how to spend it.
When things got worse economically, my parents sought out the shaman. Inevitably, they received good news: “In two months, the best days of your life will arrive!” “In three months, you will never worry about money again!” This optimism led my father to make bad decisions. Usually so level-headed, he got swept up in my mother’s dreams. He was desperate to provide for us; he succumbed to false hope. When my mother asked him to borrow money from his company to fund a business scheme, he didn’t yell at her. He got the money. Wasn’t this the business opportunity the shaman had predicted?
Two months later, my father asked my mother for the loan back. My mother didn’t have the money. Something had gone wrong with whichever business she was running at that time. This caused my father to fly into a rage.
This happened whenever things got desperate in my home. There would be a new scheme, a visit to the Mishin, ecstasy, two months of waiting, public humiliation, then horrible screaming fights. Each time, my father’s debts grew and his marriage to my mother suffered another blow. We had less money to buy food, and our ribs nudged farther out from our shrunken skin.
When the confrontation came, it was made worse by the feeling my parents had of being made fools of. How could they fall for the same nonsense again? And yet there was nowhere else for them to turn. The next month, my mother would go to a new Mishin, and my father, unwilling at first to listen to her promises of riches, would tag along. Then came the shouts of “Where is the money?” echoing through our house.
Really, they were like lost children.
Even at that age, I knew I was different from my parents. They believed in things. My father believed in the value of hard work and the North Korean government. My mother believed in business. Both of them were crazy about “luck.” If North Korea had casinos, my parents would have been their best customers.
But me? I didn’t believe in luck, or miracles. My parents cured me of that. I always felt that if you wanted something, you were going to have to go out and get it yourself.
Dinner now consisted of a bite or two of corn, some watery dandelion soup, or once or twice those spiky soybean leaves that scratched my throat as I forced them down. I cried in frustration, wondering what was happening in the world to make us suffer like this.
To keep my spirits up, I would replay in my mind favorite meals from the past, the moment my lips had last touched a slice of kko Jang Dduck. I replayed every creamy bite in exquisite slow motion.
Those days will come again, I thought. And for the very fortunate, they did. But my family was never lucky in these things.
Chapter
Seven
* * *
IN THE SPRING of 1996, we clung to the edge of life. The famine had thinned out the village, as many of our friends lost grandmothers, aunts, sons, and cousins. The graves climbed up the mountainside as if it were infected with a virus. I went to my second year of kindergarten (in North Korea, kindergarten lasts two years), but learned little. I had no energy to concentrate. It seemed that most of our strength was devoted to fighting hunger.
We ate two meals a day, then one—mostly weeds that we choked down. Finally my parents admitted that we weren’t gathering enough to feed ourselves. My mother decided to visit her family in Kang Suh, a city more than five hundred miles away, to look for help. Better for my father to have three mouths to feed, she told us, instead of four. She left without ceremony and walked to the train. I missed her terribly.
Despite having just three mouths to feed, my family grew weaker. Some days we consumed nothing but a few sips of water before passing into a fitful sleep. My father began worrying
that we would succumb to starvation in the house without anyone knowing. “We’re going to my brother’s house,” he said to Bong Sook and me one day. How hard a decision that must have been for him! Only now can I appreciate it. To go begging for food from his relatives meant that he’d failed to save his own family.
Still, I was excited. A train trip! My love of travel and rail stations and the broad-backed electric trains overpowered any thought of the hunger that gnawed at me constantly. Bong Sook and I rolled up our clothes in the nylon bags we’d take on the journey, and my father bought tickets for one of the trains that were transporting whole provinces south in search of food.
We were heading for a city near Pyongyang, where my paternal uncle, a major in the Korean People’s Army, lived in a big house. My uncle was a legendary figure in our family; he’d prospered in his career through the power of his winning personality. When he was a platoon leader, years before, he’d so impressed his young soldiers—most of them members of the elite—that they’d taken care of him when they rose through the ranks. Now he was living the good life.
There was no way to warn my uncle that we were coming. We had to depend on his wholesome and sweet nature. Surely such a good man would never turn us away. If he did refuse us, Kang Suh—where my mother was staying with her relatives—was close by.
In the south, I believed, lay our salvation. I began to incorporate Haeju and my uncle’s great house into my daydreams. There would be food there. Mountains of food.
On the day of departure, we walked to the station in the stifling heat. There were no more scheduled departure times; with the power outages, trains simply appeared. Hundreds of people were waiting at the station, lying on the grass or sitting on benches, fanning themselves, silent and wary. I barely noticed; I couldn’t wait to leave. We expected to be away by nightfall.
We sat on the concrete platform guarding our few bags. After a couple of hours, the crowd stirred. A train appeared around the bend of the southbound track. But there was something odd about it. The train itself looked misshapen—instead of the sleek tubular carriages I was used to, a thick, swollen thing chugged toward us. I realized that the swelling was actually bodies crouched on the train cars’ roofs and people hanging from the cars’ broken windows. I felt my stomach lurch. Something about the train looked scary, chaotic-looking. Why were those people allowed to hang all over the locomotive? Where were the ticket takers and the conductor?
Everyone in the West talks about the oppressive, invasive government of North Korea, but what I experienced then was more frightening to a child: a complete absence of authority of any kind. A child wants someone to be in charge of the world. But it was clear from the train that the people in charge had abandoned it to the masses. No one was enforcing the rules any longer.
The locomotive heaved to a stop and the people around me surged forward, letting out a collective shriek. The sight of the only way out of the famine lands triggered a kind of hysteria in the people. “I’ve been waiting for days!” a woman next to me screamed, and people began to shove around me and to smack each other with their fists. My body was caught up in the swell. I was lifted toward the train, wriggling helplessly. I screamed to my father, but he was fighting his way toward the door. I struggled to keep hold of Bong Sook’s hand. The people were clawing at each other from behind now, swearing and red-faced. My father fought, too, but with two children, he was overpowered by soldiers and single men. Eventually the train pulled out of the station without us, and a keening wail went up from the women left behind. I saw a look of despair cross my father’s face. Perhaps we’d waited too long after all.
More trains came, one or two a day, sometimes only an hour or two apart, but it was always the same story. It seemed as if the entire north of the country was fleeing at once. We slept near the train station, foraging along the tracks for things to eat. On the second day, my father sold his favorite pen for a piece of cornbread. Vicious hair-pulling fights broke out over pots of stewed weeds.
One day, I saw a man carrying a corpse on his back, a corpse that had apparently come off a passing train. It wasn’t like the other bodies I’d seen before. The top half, including the head, was burned to a blackened crisp. It looked like it was wearing some kind of costume, with the completely normal legs dressed in tan slacks and scuffed black shoes, and then the black char of the upper body that cut a line right where his belt should have been.
“Father, what happened?” I asked, my stomach growing queasy.
My father glanced at the body.
“He must have been riding on top because of the crowding. He touched the live wire.”
I stared until the man with the body disappeared into the parting crowd.
On day three, when we saw a train approach around the bend, my father, knowing that to be left behind was to die, battled his way toward the closest open door, pulling my sister and me along with him. It felt as if my arm would be jerked out of its socket, but somehow I managed to keep my hand clasped in Bong Sook’s as she tugged me through the crowd at waist height.
We grappled our way to the door, elbows flying and people grunting to our left and right. My father grabbed the metal handhold attached to the outside of the train and pulled us on board. We’d made it.
The train moved off, the cry of anguish from those left behind fading as the sound of steel on rails swelled in our ears.
Aboard, there was no relief from the crowds. We pushed our way toward the seats, but of course they had long been filled, so we stood or crouched, supported by the bodies of the other passengers. If you could put your feet down on the ground without stepping on someone lying there, sick or passed out, you were lucky. Those who had been squeezed out of the carriages climbed to the roofs, near the overhead cables that powered the train.
The journey to my uncle’s town usually took three days. But now the train seemed to wander aimlessly across the countryside like a heat-dazed snake. The electricity went out frequently and the train would make a sad, droning noise as its systems died. Eventually it slid to a stop on the tracks. We often waited for a day or longer for the power to come back up.
There was no room for Bong Sook or me to play, and we had no books with us to help pass the time. It felt claustrophobic being stuffed into the car with so many other unwashed bodies. “The train is so slow,” my father said, shaking his head. “I hope we have enough food to last.”
The passengers were people like us, neither rich nor dirt poor, fleeing their homes on a rumor or a hope. “There is food in the south,” one woman told us. “My cousin will welcome us.” But she had no way of knowing this, not really. She was in the same situation we were: down to our last chance.
Instead of reading or playing, I watched the other passengers. They were my movies, and I studied them for hours. The first thing I realized was that the famine had produced many, many thieves. I saw people who probably had never stolen a thing before take food from the pockets of fellow passengers. Children waited for old men to fall asleep and then rifled through their pockets. People pushed their way down the aisle, noses bleeding, their faces raked with cuts, the losers in some battle over food scraps.
The mood of the crowd was sullen. It wasn’t like the carefree trips I remembered. Travel, to me, had always been fun: there were cousins and aunts and presents and food waiting for us on the other end. But now we were going to my uncle’s to beg. Everything was so different. People would go to sleep leaning on someone’s shoulder and wake up in the morning to find that that person had died during the night and had to be pulled out of the clench of bodies. It was what I would imagine traveling during the American Depression was like. Even though Bong Sook and I were still kids, we could see the darkness in people’s faces.
As the train swung southward through half-abandoned villages, we swayed along with it, staring mutely out the windows. There was very little to say. People lay in the aisles of the cars, too weak to lift their heads for morsels of food; others were taken out to t
he fields on either side of the railbed and left to die. As we passed stations, I saw corpses piled up outside them, people who’d been waiting and had expired in the heat. When the train passed those stations, you could smell the bodies, a stench of putrefying flesh that had one virtue: it cured your hunger pangs for as long as you breathed it in.
And yet the train pressed on. Three days, four, one week. It felt as if the city had disappeared, or the engineer could no longer find it.
After ten days we still hadn’t arrived. The crush inside the train got dangerous. At every stop, more and more people clambered on to escape the stricken countryside.
Chapter
Eight
* * *
THE TRAIN CHUGGED forward, on the last leg of the journey. We went through the rice and corn farms of the south, the faces of the locals registering shock at the malnourished faces in the broken windows. After three weeks, my father recognized the outskirts of my uncle’s city—there were no announcements anymore—and with a feeling of exhaustion and joy, we pushed our way off at the station.
It was just after midnight, and pouring rain. We still had five miles to go, and there was no other way to get there other than walking. That five-mile walk, dazed with heat and pain . . . it was as if it would never end. It must have been worse for my father, because it never occurred to me that we might be turned away when we reached my uncle’s house. But he knew that food was scarce everywhere and that our welcome wasn’t guaranteed.
When we found the house, we rushed up to the door and knocked. It felt like I would collapse unless the door opened that very instant. Finally, when it did, my uncle stood in the doorway, staring at us in shock and surprise. He was dressed in sporty clothes that looked foreign and new. His expression changed to one of happiness and he swung the door wide.