by Joseph Kim
“Brother, come in,” he said.
We ate like kings that night. Seafood, noodles, white rice. We stuffed our bellies and laughed. It was heaven. Before going to sleep, I fervently wished that we would never leave this place.
I was reunited with my two cousins. I explored their neighborhood hand in hand with them. I ate my first blackberry. My older cousin—he was the prince of our family, smart and handsome and destined for the army—took me on a tour of their house and, in the kitchen, proudly showed me an enormous metal box called a refrigerator. I had never seen one before. Truly, my uncle was blessed.
I saw the ocean for the first time. Everything in the south seemed bigger, richer, and happier.
After spending one week at my paternal uncle’s, we went to Kang Suh, where my father dropped us off with my mother’s relatives before he headed home to Hoeryong. In Kang Suh, a surprise awaited us.
We hadn’t seen my mother for several months, and something had happened to her during that period. I’ve puzzled over this many times in the intervening years: What things did my aunts and uncles say to my mom that would end up causing such pain and disruption in our lives? Did they tell her she wasn’t like her old self? Did they encourage her to stand up to my father? Did they disparage him for not taking care of his family?
Whatever it was that caused the change, my mother was a different person. She had put on a few pounds and dressed better than before. She wore shoes with heels now, and stylish, well-fitting pants, and brightly colored blouses that looked like they were from China. Obviously her family had treated her well. But it was her personality that had undergone the most startling transformation.
Somehow, my sickly mother had been replaced with a dynamo. She talked more in those first few weeks than she had in years. My mom had always been smart—she read constantly, mostly books about health and nutrition and philosophy—but now she offered us bits of wisdom she’d been storing inside all those years. “Stop eating when you feel like you want to have one more spoon of rice,” my mom told me once, which I later interpreted to mean, If you fall in love with power, you’ll never be satisfied and ruin your life. It’s funny that I remember that particular saying above all others. She herself would soon ignore it, with dreadful consequences.
My mother had always left most of the big family decisions to my father, as was traditional in North Korea. But now she was outspoken, ambitious, fired up with the possibilities of life. I was so happy to see my mother was happier and more at peace with herself.
When my mother had arrived at my uncle’s doorstep, she was a thin, depressed thirty-nine-year-old woman who was fleeing starvation and an unhappy marriage. To give her something to do, my uncle, who owned a factory that made household goods, bestowed on her his excess inventory. There were pencils, as I recall, and sunglasses and other small consumer items. In the bad economy, the stuff was just collecting dust in a building nearby.
My mother didn’t see the pencils and sunglasses as throwaways. She saw them as her salvation. The famine, and the almost complete governmental breakdown that accompanied it, had given my mom the big chance she’d been waiting for all her life. Before the disaster, it was illegal to start a small business. But as the country threatened to come apart, Kim Jong Il and his ministers decided to allow a little private enterprise, so as to save at least some of its citizens. My mother leapt into the breach.
I wonder if she ever saw the irony in this: that the disaster that threatened to wipe out everyone she loved also freed her. I don’t think so. There was no room for such thoughts in my mother’s whirring brain. She was fighting to save us.
My mom took the items from the Kang Suh warehouse and went to rural districts where people didn’t have the chance to buy such things. She sold them door to door or at small markets, making a decent profit. She was traveling, meeting new people, reinventing herself as an entrepreneur. She was as independent as she’d ever been in her whole life. From what I found out later, I’m sure my mom dreamed of becoming fabulously rich, of parlaying her meager profits from the sunglasses and pencils into larger and larger hauls.
My mother was a dreamer. She was also, it turned out, a terrible businesswoman.
After another trip to the countryside, where my mom had managed to sell my uncle’s dusty old inventory, she thought, Why should I leave this place with empty hands when I can go back to Kang Suh with unique products from the country? I’ll sell them in the city and double my profits. My mother spent the won she’d earned on local handicrafts and brought them back to Kang Suh.
This is where her plan backfired. The goods didn’t sell. My mom had to go back to my uncle and ask for more inventory to start over again. This caused friction: my uncle wanted to know where the profits went from the first batch of goods. She defended her scheme to double down. My uncle, in so many words, told her she was acting like an idiot. The sophisticated people of Kang Suh didn’t want the crude homemade things she’d brought back. But my mother had seen her fortune, and she wouldn’t give up.
“She always wanted more!” my uncle cried to us.
We shuttled between Mother’s relatives and my paternal uncle’s house, so as not to overburden either family. On one of these trips, while we sat in the grass next to the railroad station in Kang Suh, waiting for the next train, my mother pulled out three cucumbers she’d purchased and passed one each to Bong Sook and me. We munched on the thick green vegetable, savoring the juice that flowed down our throats. That cool, tart liquid was so refreshing. We ate the cucumbers down to the bitter ends, which were inedible, and looked for somewhere to throw them.
Amid the throng of other travelers I noticed a plain young woman in her early thirties watching us. She had a baby strung to her chest, maybe one year old, very small, making no noise. The woman turned to my mother and asked for the cucumber ends.
“These?” my mother said. “But they aren’t good to eat.”
“They’re for my father,” the woman said. “We’ll take anything.” My mom nodded and we gathered up the six nibs. The woman bowed slightly as I tilted them into her cupped hands. I watched as she walked several yards to where someone was lying in the grass. I followed her.
After taking a few steps I saw an old man, wearing a red ribbon with thin gray stripes and a medal hanging off it, a five-pointed star in light gold on a pale blue background, surrounded by a circle and then gold bars that suggested intense beams of light. I knew this medal from the countless war movies I’d watched: it was called the Hero of the Republic, and for many years it was the highest award a North Korean could earn. Only those who’d performed some extraordinarily heroic action in the Korean War had received it.
I stared at the medal in awe. I’d never seen one in real life. Then I looked at the old man as his daughter tilted his head up and tried to feed him the bitter nibs. He spat the cucumber back up. Perhaps there was something wrong with his digestion. Or perhaps he was tired of the long journey.
The Hero of the Republic medal usually ensured respect and a comfortable life. Even at five years old I knew that. The old man and I stared at each other. He was breathing so shallowly, like a fish that has mistakenly jumped onto the shore. If a Hero of the Republic can die, I thought, what chance is there for Bong Sook and Mommy and me?
Chapter
Nine
* * *
THE ATMOSPHERE AT my paternal uncle’s had changed since I’d first visited with my father. At dinner our first night back, after our father had dropped us off and headed back home, my chemical sensor went off. I began to pick up a feeling of unease in my uncle’s family.
I didn’t have the words to express what I was feeling, but suddenly I knew. Auntie wants us to leave.
The next day, my uncle found us playing in the yard and asked if we wanted to go blueberry picking.
“Yes!” I cried. I hadn’t had blueberries since I’d last been here. He smiled and went to the kitchen. “Wife, do you have cups for us to go looking for blueberries?�
�� She whipped around.
“Why do they need blueberries? Are you going to pick everything and leave nothing for us?”
I was the baby boy, I had always been cherished, my needs seen to first. Now I felt the sting of being unwanted. Hated, even.
I didn’t understand it. I wanted to leave, but to leave was to starve. We stayed there for a month or so before moving on.
I knew then the panic that I’d seen on the train had spread everywhere in North Korea. Not only had the state abdicated its role in our lives. So had family. Blood meant little or nothing. There was no force on earth that could stop the famine.
I felt older than I was. The chaos around me was so strong that its waves seemed to overwhelm my mood sensor. You couldn’t help but feel them.
In August, we returned home to Hoeryong. My father greeted us at the railway station. His face lit up with joy, and he embraced us. He’d never been away from his children before, and his voice was filled with happiness as he spoke our names.
The mood in our little detached house lifted despite the gnawing hunger in our bellies. My mother now had a thousand and one schemes to save us from the famine. She would buy candy from the market and sell it in the rural villages. She would purchase corn, turn it into noodles, and make a killing in the city market. Sometimes the plans were so complex I couldn’t follow them.
My mom began to go on trips to the north of the country to make her deals. She was gone for weeks at a time. Sometimes she’d say she would be back on the sixteenth of the month and not return until the twenty-eighth. At first, my father welcomed her newfound vitality, but soon I could feel the tension rise. No words were spoken, at least ones that Bong Sook and I could hear, but it was like climbing higher and higher in an airplane. The pressure in your ears begins to grow. My mood sensor was on high alert.
By the fall of 1996, my parents’ dreams were collapsing, and they took their anger out on each other. My father had borrowed money for my mother’s schemes, sacrificing his ideals, and she’d betrayed him. Her new name in the house became “thief.” She fought back, asking why my father couldn’t feed us. Her depression returned.
Their fights sometimes went on all night. It made it hard to play or to read books with Bong Sook. My sister and I were always on edge, expecting another blowup.
One night, my father lost his mind completely and began beating my mom during an argument over money. He slapped her with a thunderous crack across the nose and she collapsed to the floor. He began clubbing her with a closed fist, grunting, no longer speaking human words.
My sister and I watched, holding each other. We cried out for my father to stop, but his handsome face was like stone, dark stone.
Chapter
Ten
* * *
WE WERE HUNGRY all the time now. Our soup, with a few bits of grain or corn in it, kept us alive, but we were desperate for something more substantial. We tried eating wild plants and raspberry leaves, which were incredibly bitter and which you had to force down your throat with water. My father, whose wages had remained constant, couldn’t buy anything in the market because inflation had pushed prices beyond working people’s means. We were beginning to waste away, and the dull knife of starvation probed at our guts.
One night I heard my parents whispering on the other side of the main room. I could hear the desperation in their voices, and I realized they were discussing selling the house and moving into the abandoned office where my father once worked. The company could no longer afford to pay him or any of his fellow employees, so people were taking what they could: stealing equipment or inventory to sell at a pittance.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The detached house was the great joy of my father’s life. He’d taken such pride in crafting every piece of furniture inside, every lintel and every cabinet. I could feel his sadness in my chest.
My parents began to spread the word that they would consider offers for the house. There were no real estate brokers in North Korea, no For Sale sections in the newspaper. You had to spread the news by word of mouth. So my parents told their friends and neighbors, and my father his former colleagues, that they were selling. I don’t think they put a price on the house; it was assumed they would take almost any offer.
The idea of making money from the sale of our home gave my parents hope. Unfortunately, everyone else had the same idea. People were willing, even eager, to become homeless if it meant surviving for another month. They were hawking their places for whatever they could get and moving into shuttered offices or factories or just camping out in fields. There was suddenly a glut of houses on the market.
Nobody could afford to buy our whole house, even for the price of a sack of cornmeal. After only ten days, my father divided the house in two and sold half to a young couple. The house had two rooms, and now it had two one-room apartments. The new couple were under thirty and just beginning their lives together. The price they paid was enough to buy us cornmeal for seven or eight days. Though it must have been devastating for my father, he never showed any bitterness toward the couple. In fact, they became good friends of ours. We visited them in their half of the house and shared meals with them. It felt weird, but with families camping in the wild grass, weird was better than the alternative.
Still, the famine pursued us. There were days when all we had to eat was a handful of wild mushrooms in water. So we decided to travel to my maternal grandmother’s, where we hoped to find food.
Usually, my mother would have planned a trip like that for months, since it took all that time to notify the person you were going to see of your arrival, to get train tickets, and to tell the school your kids wouldn’t be attending. But we didn’t have normal lives anymore; your schedule was decided by what you needed to do to get food that day. It was frightening how these major decisions were made the night before, in a moment of panic.
My father told us he would be staying behind. My parents made it seem as though he had to work, but I knew they were separating again. Another mouth to feed wouldn’t be welcome at my grandmother’s, and my father’s pride would be hurt by showing up at his mother-in-law’s house, destitute.
The morning of our departure, my mother gathered our bags by the front door, one big one for each of us. My father watched us, his hands behind his back, his face lined with sadness. I’d been calm until the last moment, but as we said our goodbyes, I felt a wave of fear wash through me. “But . . . but what if we never come back here?” I said to my mother. “What if we die on the way there?” I don’t know what made me say such an awful thing; perhaps it was the tofu or boiled egg that every family is supposed to eat before leaving on a journey. (Eggs roll fast, which means the trip will go quickly, and tofu is perfectly square, which means everything will go according to plan.) Since we didn’t have any tofu or eggs to eat, I got nervous and blurted out the words about dying.
My mom erupted. “Are you crazy? Why would you say such things?” I looked at her, stunned by the vehemence in her voice. But nothing about the journey was right. Usually you wear your best clothes and set off with a warm meal in your belly. We were doing none of that. We’d sold our good clothes and were wearing the only outfits we had left; I was dressed in a dark coat, dark slacks, and a soiled, much-washed white shirt. Honestly, we looked like vagrants.
At the railroad station, huge crowds were waiting for the next train. My mother managed to get us on the second one that came through—when she wanted to be, she could be fierce. There was nowhere to sit down, so we stood pressed up against the people we’d boarded with.
The dumb thing I’d said at home immediately cursed the journey. As the train got under way, moving down the track at a snail’s pace, the car swayed and someone dropped a huge suitcase on my foot.
“Yow!” I cried. It felt as if the bones had been smashed. My mother scolded the man with the bag, but she could barely reach me through the bodies stacked inside the car. I couldn’t even reach down to massage my foot, but howled and wept
as the other passengers looked at me with blank faces.
The trip should have taken an hour or two at the most. We arrived six hours later, pulling ourselves through the mass of bodies at the Hokseung station.
The wind swept across the train platform and instantly I was cold. On past visits, we would wait for the local train that branched off and took us very close to Grandmother’s house. But we saw no one waiting on that platform. “That train doesn’t run anymore,” an old man told us.
My mother looked at him anxiously. “What? But we have to get to Undok.”
“Then you better start walking.”
Our grandmother’s house was a couple of hours away on foot. My mother’s face grew grim and she picked up our suitcases and marched out of the station. Bong Sook and I followed, me limping on my smashed foot.
“Mother, I’m hungry,” I said. Outside the station there was a street with private houses that doubled as restaurants. One house would sell soup and radish kimchi, the next corn and bread. We stopped at one and bought a bowl of soup with some kimchi, along with a couple of potato side dishes. We stood there on the road and dug in: the food was delicious, little globs of fat floating on the soup’s surface.
In two minutes, the food was gone. We felt refreshed and began the long walk. We arrived at our grandmother’s house around midnight and could hear the TV as we walked up the path. There were two houses in my grandmother’s compound: a big one where my aunt and uncle lived, and a second, much smaller house for Grandmother. We hoped they had enough to feed us.
We knocked on the door of the big house and my aunt and uncle let us in. Exhausted, we dropped onto our sleeping mats. The next morning, Grandmother greeted us, her expression a mix of love and worry. She was in her early eighties, tiny, stooped, and skinnier than I remembered.