Under the Same Sky

by Joseph Kim

  Mother was telling Grandma about the journey: the packed cars, the slow train, the local that didn’t run anymore, the restaurant food that gave us the strength to walk.

  Grandma’s face froze. “Which restaurant did you stop at?” she asked.

  “The second one from the station,” my mother said. “Why?”

  Grandmother’s expression was one of fear and disgust. Bong Sook and I looked at each other. Was it wrong for us to have eaten something?

  My mother and grandma disappeared into the other room, where I could hear them murmuring.

  “Bong Sook, what’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Go play with your cousins.”

  I was happy to, but Grandma’s reaction still bothered me. I ran off to find my cousins.

  It was a couple of days before one of them spilled the beans.

  There had been rumors going around for months about a restaurant by the railroad station. They said that the owners of the place had been kidnapping homeless people and travelers and killing them. They would then chop them up, strip the meat from their bones, and add it to their soup.

  “Which restaurant?” I asked quickly.

  “Some say the fourth from the corner,” my cousin said, watching my reaction closely. “Some say . . . the second.”

  I felt my stomach do a flip.

  “Cousin,” she said, “what shape were the fat bubbles?”

  My tongue felt covered in greasy fur. Had I eaten a human being? If I did, I was now a cannibal. And what was worse, the soup, I remembered, had been delicious.

  “What shape?” she repeated.

  “Why does it matter?”

  She looked at me hopelessly.

  “When you boil meat, the fat rises to the surface.”

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “I know that.”

  “OK,” my cousin said. “But were they circles or triangles?”

  “What kind of a question is that?”

  She frowned impatiently. “Fat from pork, beef, or chicken forms a circle,” she said, as if she was repeating some famous science equation, like the law of gravity. “Fat from a human . . .”

  “Triangles?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Triangles.”

  I racked my brain to remember what the fat blobs looked like. I could see the heavy wooden bowl and the few corn noodles floating half submerged in the cloudy soup. I could see small chunks of vegetables and the tiny bits of yellowish fat on the surface. But no matter how hard I closed my eyes, I couldn’t for the life of me remember the shape.

  When I saw Bong Sook, we talked softly about the soup that day.

  “Are you sure there were no triangles?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “There weren’t.”

  But the truth is, we couldn’t remember. Some days, I would say to myself, Who knows if the circles and triangles are even true? But folk stories, rumors, and superstition were all North Koreans had. There was no authority to consult to see if you’d consumed a human being or not.

  Chapter

  Eleven

  * * *

  I SPENT MANY SAD hours with my grandmother. Like my father, she liked to tell stories, but her tales were very different from my dad’s, which were heartwarming and always triumphant. Grandma’s stories were filled with melancholy. Most of them centered on how, during Japan’s occupation of our country in the early twentieth century, her father had sold her off to a rich family when she was only thirteen.

  It turned out that my great-grandfather was an alcoholic who sold his own children to buy bottles of corn moonshine. Grandma went off as a maid to the big house, but the family there worked her hard while feeding her only small meals twice a day, barely enough to live on. When they sent her to the river with a basket of dirty clothes perched atop her head, she would run to the foothills of the nearby mountains and desperately search for blackberries to eat. When she found enough to stop the dizziness that always afflicted her, she would go back to the house, saving the small portion of rice the rich people gave her. And what did she do with this rice? She gave it to her father.

  I always wondered why Grandma did this. Was it out of love or fear? Did her father force her to give up her small pittance of rice? I’d like to believe she did it out of a noble character, saving the man who had sold her like chattel. Ironically, she would tell me these stories over meals of rice and soup, her long face creased with wrinkles. The meals were so small she would have only three bites of food before it was gone.

  Though she had so little, barely enough to survive, Grandma always fed me a spoon of rice or two sips of her soup while telling me her stories. As I swallowed the soup, I thought about Grandma’s life, so full of bitterness and scarcity. She’d been hungry her whole time on earth, and she was hungry now. “Kwang Jin,” she said, “even though the Japanese occupation was horrible, we had more to eat then than we do now. How can this be?”

  We heard more and more stories of orphans being stolen and eaten by ravenous people in the countryside. The orphan children called Kkotjebi (“wandering swallows”), figures dressed in dark rags who haunted the roadside markets, a consequence of the famine, were told not to sleep in the open, lest they be kidnapped and consumed. Townsfolk warned us about buying meat (as if we could afford meat!) if we didn’t know where it had come from. There were cases of people eating their own newborn infants. A kind of mass insanity spread from town to town.

  Soon after we arrived at Grandma’s, the news came that authorities had arrested the owners of one of the restaurants near the train station for serving human meat. But there were no newspapers or official bulletins, so we didn’t know which house it was. Some people said it was the first house, others said the fifth, still others the second.

  It was an inauspicious omen for our stay with Grandma.

  The first week or so, we ate well: cornmeal, rice, and soup, along with side dishes like radish kimchi. I would wait all day for the main meal. One day my uncle came home from work and saw me lying on the floor. “Instead of sitting around,” he said, “why don’t you clean up the house or chop wood for the fire? If you do this, you’ll become more likable, and this will help you survive.” His tone was warm and kind; he was trying to help me. That day I chopped a load of firewood, which my aunt thanked me for, smiling broadly. Everything was going well.

  But as the second week began, my mood sensor felt the welcome leave the air like a fading scent. By then, we were having soup at almost every meal; the rice had disappeared. My aunt worked on a farm and my uncle worked for a coal company, and they received food as their wages, but the government didn’t increase your portion because you had three relatives staying with you.

  It always began at the dinner table. My aunt would snap at her older daughter, “Why are you eating so much?” Bong Sook and I bowed our heads when she said this. We knew she was really talking to us: Why are you here? Can’t you see I can barely feed my own children? It was hard to get the food down after hearing those words.

  My mom grew more tense with every passing day. So much was piled on her shoulders. Why were we here? Why couldn’t she provide for her own children? Her face grew strained and pale. It seemed that my old mother—the one I knew before she went to Kang Suh—had returned.

  I was getting hungrier. The pain scraped the lining of my stomach. It felt like there was no fat left for my body to consume, and the hunger was attacking muscle, which made the pain worse.

  One morning, when my aunt and uncle went to work and my cousins were at school, I was alone in the big house with Bong Sook. After an hour, I couldn’t take it anymore.

  I looked at the clay pot that held the soup we would have for dinner with the family.

  “I’m just going to have a few spoonfuls,” I said to Bong Sook.

  “No, Kwang Jin. You know you can’t do that.”

  “One, then. Only one.”

  Bong Sook shook her head sadly at me. “You can’t. Auntie will find out.”


  “But Bong Sook!” I whined. She was adamant. So I waited for her to close her eyes—we drifted in and out of sleep like old people—and then went to the kitchen. There was a plate over the soup pot. I lifted it and dipped the ladle in and quickly sucked in a spoonful of soup. Then two more.

  My body seemed to bloom. A feeling of contentment, of sweetness in my bones, came over me. I wanted desperately to keep eating, but I knew that would court disaster. I put the ladle down and replaced the top plate.

  At lunchtime, my aunt came home from work and went straight to the kitchen to begin preparing dinner. A few seconds later, I saw her standing in the doorway to the main room, staring at me. Her face was flushed, her eyes big and wet. She shot me a poisonous look, a look that said, “No better than a thief!” I dropped my eyes. And yet I was still hungry.

  My aunt couldn’t say anything. It was as if we were all choking on these unsaid words. The next day, my uncle came to me and said, “What is your mother’s plan?”

  “Uncle, I don’t know.”

  “What is she going to do? Is your father getting money together while you’re away? Kwang Jin, what is their plan?”

  Why was he speaking to me? My parents had barely told me we were getting on the train to Grandmother’s the day before we left! Did he think we were all in cahoots?

  “I really don’t understand,” he said, his eyes bulging. “I feel I am suffocating.”

  Finally Mother couldn’t take it anymore. She went out and found a job. It wasn’t a real job; it was another of her crazy schemes to feed us. She would go out and buy corn powder at the factory and then sell it on the street—not even making it into noodles—hoping to make one won for every sale. When she’d made enough money, she would buy corn noodles and bring them home to us.

  But there were very few people in the market who could afford corn powder, and many days she would come home with nothing. When this happened, her face was like a clay mask, frozen in the expression of a hopeful person. She was trying hard to convey confidence in our future. But she needn’t have bothered; I felt the strain growing within her. She talked to Bong Sook about her troubles, and then both of them would wear the clay face. I felt sad that they couldn’t tell me what was happening, but part of me didn’t want to know.

  There was one day when we felt the sting of our poverty especially deeply. My mom had four sisters and three brothers. Her second-oldest sister, whom we called Great-Aunt, was doing well even in the famine. Her son had joined the police department, and the police always found a way to survive—either through bribery or corruption. One day my mom and my small aunt (my mother’s younger sister) were invited to a birthday party for Great-Aunt’s son, the policeman. They were excited to go; they hadn’t seen my great-aunt in many months, and it would be a day they didn’t need to worry about feeding their children. The party givers would provide plenty of food.

  When you go to someone’s house, even a relative’s, you can’t go with empty hands. So my mom worked hard to make my favorite meal: a single corn pancake. She went to the market with her last few won and bargained until she got the most corn powder for the money, then brought it home and pounded it into a pancake shape and steamed it. A single pancake was all she could afford. She wrapped it up in waxy paper and we headed to the birthday party, an hour away.

  When we got there, I was dazzled by the large crowd. So many people, so nicely dressed! Police officials wore suits of rich wool with sharp creases down the legs. The wives of government managers wore lipstick and beautiful light clothing. We walked into the house, me in my stained white shirt and dark pants, and my mother and Small Aunt in their scuffed shoes and country clothes.

  When my mother handed the corn cake to my great-aunt, our hostess wouldn’t so much as look at it. Usually the host smiles and thanks you for whatever you bring, but Great-Aunt didn’t even open the waxy paper to see what we’d brought. Her face never changed—she gave us a look of frozen indifference—as she handed the pancake to one of her children. I saw in her face that she was embarrassed by us, embarrassed to have such poorly dressed relatives in their drab work clothes among this glittering array of local government officials. We watched as they put our pancake in the kitchen, apart from the other gifts and dishes brought by the other guests. I saw the back of my mother’s neck flush red. She turned quickly away, her eyes on the floor.

  One part of the party lived up to expectations: there was plenty to eat. We found a corner of the room to sit in and tried not to make a spectacle of ourselves as we tasted things we hadn’t eaten in months, if not years. Tasty, well-marinated kimchi with spices and fish! Fried pork! Beef ribs! We cleaned our plates and waited for a few minutes before going back for more, so as to look like we were perfectly capable of stopping at any time.

  My small aunt sat with us, watching the guests. She was on the verge of tears. “How could you treat us like this?” she whispered, addressing her older sister across the room, more in sorrow than in anger. No one came to our corner to ask us how we were and if we were enjoying the food. Great-Aunt and her family carefully avoided us, though we saw them circulating and chatting with the more glamorous people. I was mostly unfazed—the food and its enticing aromas had given me a jolt of happiness, and I didn’t care what people thought of us—but my mother and my small aunt were inconsolable. Awkwardly, I chewed on spare-rib bones and waited for the next dish to be served. To make my mother’s misery complete, as we left the party, Great-Aunt handed us back the single corn pancake we’d brought, along with some leftovers.

  My mother accepted it, bowed, and turned wordlessly toward the door. On the way home, Small Aunt’s sorrow had turned to rage. “How dare they!” she cried. By now, Bong Sook and I were embarrassed, too.

  The night was cold and I didn’t have a warm enough jacket. My mother put me on her back and Bong Sook walked beside us. I could feel my mother crying, her throat working to stifle the sobs, my head resting on the back of her neck.

  Years later, Small Aunt’s family grew quite rich. Her husband had relatives in China, and after many attempts, he got a visa to see them. This allowed him to bring back Chinese goods, which he sold at a large markup. Their income shot up. Soon Great-Aunt went to their house looking for handouts, saying nothing of the time she’d humiliated us.

  Great-Aunt was a shameless person. She wouldn’t be the last one I’d meet.

  Chapter

  Twelve

  * * *

  AS MY SEVENTH birthday approached, I saw my mother grow more depressed. I was still a boy and hoped for nice things on my special day: a small gift, perhaps, or something good to eat. I dreamed of boiled eggs, fluffy rice, sizzling pork dishes. Surely my mother would find something.

  But when the day came, it was just like any other. There was the usual watery gruel for breakfast and no hint that something better was on the way. My mother didn’t cry out “Save some room!” Nothing to let me know a treat had been stashed away for me. I tried to hide it, but I was disappointed that there wasn’t the tiniest gift to celebrate my day. I laid my head on the sleeping mat and tried to sink into sleep.

  Bong Sook was upset, I could see; her face was troubled and she spent long periods staring at the tile floor. Finally, without saying a word, she got up and ran out the door. I thought she’d gone for a walk, though there wasn’t much to see around Grandma’s, just fields echoing with the sound of peasants chopping wood. But an hour and a half later, the door opened and Bong Sook rushed in, holding something behind her back.

  I sat up cross-legged on my sleeping mat as she approached, bringing her hands forward. In each hand Bong Sook had a rice cake. My mouth began to water.

  Bong Sook thrust the cakes into my hand. “Happy birthday, Kwang Jin!”

  I delayed devouring the cakes long enough to ask her one question.

  “But how?”

  Bong Sook shook her head happily, her black hair swinging. “Don’t worry about that.”

  Did I offer Bong Sook a bite of th
e cakes? I’m not sure; my memory is filled only with the joyful, drug-like recall of the sweetened rice hitting my taste buds. I was so happy. The taste, for me, literally equaled love. It meant that my birthday was still special to someone besides me. I gobbled up those cakes and pressed my fingers on the crumbs that had fallen into my lap and ate them too.

  I had two or three moments of happiness before the storm broke over Bong Sook’s head. When you produce unexpected food during a famine, everyone immediately becomes suspicious. Where have you been hiding it? Or what did you sell to get it, when we have nothing?

  Bong Sook, it turned out, had done something rash. She’d run out to the yard and dug up some of Grandma’s potatoes, the ones that were to sustain the family through the winter. Then she marched off to the market, exchanged the potatoes for some saccharin, and with part of the saccharin bought the two rice cakes.

  In other words, my gift had been stolen. Worse still, my birthday would cost us precious calories in the future.

  Grandma berated Bong Sook. It was the first time I’d ever seen my sister disobey her elders. But she was unrepentant. As Grandma yelled at her, and my mother watched with a wretched expression on her face, my sister stared at me. Her eyes said, I’m happy I did it. I am.

  My mother, already depressed, had grown paranoid about the possibility of someone kidnapping Bong Sook and me. The cannibal story had burrowed itself deep in her brain. “Kwang Jin, if someone offers you candy, don’t go with them. Hear me? People will offer you food if you go with them to their houses, but I forbid you!” She repeated this every couple of days, and she wouldn’t allow us to go into town alone.