Under the Same Sky

by Joseph Kim

  I didn’t even know the name of Bong Sook’s favorite book. She had very few to choose from; most of the titles in our house were about the North Korean Communist Party. Like every family we knew, we had a copy of Kim Il Sung’s memoirs. They came in an eight-volume set, and Bong Sook liked the one in which the Great Leader described fighting the Japanese in Manchuria. There were many action scenes and battles, and illustrations of Kim Il Sung and his brethren bayonetting the enemy. It’s a very good book. Whether it’s true or not is another story.

  Bong Sook would read to me from one of the volumes. I spent many nights curled up in her lap on the heated floor of our house, listening to her soft voice. Kim Il Sung’s story was full of dramatic and vivid scenes, and I asked her to read our favorite chapters over and over again. At one point, as the Japanese crackdown on Korean rebels intensifies, Kim Il Sung is forced to flee into China:

  Avoiding the watchful eyes of police, I walked away from the ferry pier to Jul-mok. The river Yalu was frozen there and I would be able to walk across. The Yalu was less than ten feet wide at that point . . . My feet refused to get on the ice because I might not feel the soil of Korea again. I turned around and picked up a small pebble and held it tightly in my hand. I wanted to take a piece of Korea with me . . . That moment at the Yalu bank was one of the most heart-wrenching of my life.

  I was thrilled by scenes such as these. But now I ask myself: Were these really Bong Sook’s favorite chapters too? Or did she read these passages just because I liked them?

  I don’t know where my sister’s love for me ended and the real Bong Sook began. I depended on her as grass depends on the sun.

  I wish I hadn’t been so selfish with Bong Sook. It never occurred to me to ask myself, “Does she really want to wash my socks today?” or “Why is Bong Sook giving me her food?” I was the boy. It was simply her role to serve me, or so I thought.

  Our only entertainment on these long nights was my father’s stories. He was a wonderful storyteller. He would begin his tales when the lights flickered and went out at night and there was nothing to do but lie on our mats and stare at the painted white ceiling above us. My father had a light baritone voice, and for an hour it would take us away from our worries, bring us to places far from Manyang.

  One of my favorite stories was about Kim Il Sung’s return from a visit to Moscow. It was the Great Leader’s habit to circle an airport three times before landing, to make sure everything was OK with the approach. When he flew back to Pyongyang one afternoon, assassins had planned to shoot down his plane with some kind of missile. As he neared the city, Kim Il Sung, sitting in the back of the plane, ordered the pilot to circle only twice. The assassins, waiting for his third loop, missed their chance, and the Great Leader landed safely.

  “How did he know?” I asked my father. He just smiled at me and raised his eyebrows. The Great Leader was an extraordinary person who’d saved North Korea from slavery; tricking some assassins was all in a day’s work for him. But he was gone now, I reminded myself. Such miracles were in the past.

  My favorite stories of all were about my dad’s time in the Special Forces of North Korea. He told us how, as an eighteen-year-old, he and his fellow soldiers were ordered to cut a hole in the ice of a frozen river. They then stripped off their uniforms, dived into the numbing water, and swam a certain distance before breaking another hole in the ice with their rifles—this time from underneath! Another time, during parachute training, his instructors told him that if his parachute got tangled with another recruit’s, one of the two should cut his own lines and fall to his death to save his comrade. “The things we had to do were very hard,” my dad said. “During our training, one piece of candy had to sustain me on a twenty-five-mile march!” A few years into his ten-year service, he lost his hearing in one ear during an ocean dive and had to leave the army.

  My father signed a paper when he left the military, promising he would never use the skills he’d learned there in civilian life. He took that oath so seriously that he would never teach me how to fight. His only piece of advice in this area was “Never close your eyes,” because that shows you’re scared and also hampers the accuracy of your punches. I always remembered that.

  When my dad told his tales, we were transported aloft to a North Korean air force plane, or we joined a mountain march where men stumbled through the darkness, nearly asleep on their feet. His stories gave us courage; we were no longer sick and hungry creatures, but comrades of these dashing men. When I heard my father’s voice in our dark house, it would feel as if his arms were around me again and all was right with my country.

  I would soon come to miss those nights very much.

  Chapter

  Seventeen

  * * *

  IN THE FALL of 2000, our “good year”—really, it was just six months—came to a sudden end. Inflation shot up again, and a kilogram of rice that had once cost forty or fifty won now cost two hundred. The rest of the country was recovering, but my father had become sick. Hunger had taken a hard toll on his health, and he had contracted cirrhosis of the liver (though he’d never been much of a drinker).

  We went back to our “farm” in the country, two and a half hours away on foot. By then, we’d realized why the government had given the land away—it was at the base of a mountain where the trees had been cleared by burning, and the soil wasn’t very good. Year after year, our plot yielded fewer and fewer vegetables. We ate string beans and the first corn, which came in around August 15, Korean Independence Day. But soon we were back in Manyang, starving and worried. The famine returned to our home, and it was like an animal that had grown up and gotten stronger. It began to devour us.

  Home was bleaker than ever. My mom took out loans and was unable to pay them back. There was no more rice or grain. We subsisted on weeds and wild grasses, scavenged from the fields that bordered the mountains. My father warned us about mushrooms. He was worried we would be so hungry that we’d be unable to wait to bring the mushrooms home for him to identify and mistakenly eat a poisonous one. We’d heard whispers that entire families had been found sprawled around their dinner pots, where the bad mushrooms still sat in lukewarm water.

  Hunger sucked away our energy. We entered a kind of brownout, a time of slow starvation. Your mind is partially numbed but your stomach is racked with pain, and each day is lived on the wire between the two: when it glows hot, the scraping in your stomach is almost unbearable and you want to scream. Your mind turns against you, flashing images of lavish meals in front of your eyes. When the connection grows dim, you slip into a half slumber. You feel irritable. Your heartbeat is shallow and fast.

  As the weeks went by, Bong Sook looked weaker and weaker. She would sit unsteadily on her sleeping mat, as if she was going to topple over. One day, my mother asked Bong Sook to pass a plate of cabbage leaves so that she could dump them in the cooking pot and boil them. The leaves sat on a table five feet from Bong Sook. She turned to get up, but her limbs wouldn’t support her and she collapsed back on the mat after rising only an inch or two. Then she attempted to crawl, but again her body betrayed her: the left arm buckled and she sank down on the mat like a building that had partially imploded. Once Bong Sook was tilted over, she didn’t have the strength to straighten up, so she stayed there, slumped at a steep angle.

  It was the first time I ever saw terror in my sister’s eyes. Bong Sook looked at me, then at my mother and father. Her eyes were loud with fear. What’s happening? they cried. Why is my body doing these strange things? What does it mean?

  My parents struggled to their feet and pulled her up straight. I couldn’t move. It felt like I was watching through the kind of haze a fire throws off. This is how it happens, I thought. How families are found dead. If my parents didn’t have that last reserve of strength, we would have watched each other topple into unconsciousness, barely realizing it was real and not a dream. We were close to the precipice.

  My mother’s pellagra returned in full force, and my
father grew more ill as the weeks went by. Hunger caused his stomach to swell, and the cirrhosis darkened his skin and caused intense, jabbing pain. The skin above the liver became hot and painful as the organ swelled and scarred. We had no money for a doctor, so beyond the initial diagnosis, my father was never really treated, and we never found out what caused the disease. But the fact that both my parents were weakened by their illnesses worried them terribly. They dreaded Bong Sook and I becoming Kkotjebi.

  One day my father came home from work looking excited. “We should go to the river,” he said. “My colleague told me there are small snails there that you can boil and eat. The river is full of them!”

  We’d never considered snails as food before. But the thought of having meat, which we hadn’t seen in months, was too tempting to resist. We all began dreaming of this exotic new food, how it might taste—like miniature shrimp, firm-fleshed and delicious, or like ocean fish, briny and bracing?

  That weekend, my father and I walked to the river carrying empty buckets. I hadn’t thought of what he meant when he said “the river.” It was the same place my friends and I went swimming. It was summertime, and they were sure to be at our favorite spot. I hoped they wouldn’t see me. That would be embarrassing.

  I needn’t have worried. My father led me to another section of the river that was shallower than our swimming hole. And we found that his colleague had been speaking the truth. There were snails everywhere, clinging to the rocks and small boulders that lined the bottom of the river. We began to gather them. I felt along the mossy rocks until I found a shell under my fingertip. I plucked it off and tossed it in the bucket. Soon the dark gray things were making that rich clicking sound of shell on shell. I thought of the feast that awaited us.

  At about four o’clock, we headed home with our haul. My mother met us at the door and took the bucket. While my father and I washed up, she rinsed off the snails and poured them into a pot of water already near boiling on the fire. She stoked the flames underneath, and soon the snails appeared at the little cave of their shells, trying to escape the heat. I looked at my father. He nodded, so I picked up a shell. It was so small. Holding it between my index finger and thumb, I sucked the snail out of its home.

  “Father!” I cried. “It tastes awful!” And it did—slimy and eel-like.

  My father looked at me sternly.

  “Eat it anyway.”

  I closed my eyes and swallowed miserably. “Do we have salt at least?”

  My mother shook her head. Salt was a luxury far above our station. The disappointment of the snails soon gave way to simple ravenousness and we ate the meat. I thought, No wonder my father’s friend told us about these things. They’re disgusting. But I ate them until I thought I would throw up.

  Dogs began to disappear from the streets. Before the famine, you would see them on leashes outside the homes in Hoeryong, with their own tiny houses by the front door. They ate scraps and guarded the property. Really, their lives were pretty bad. But when the famine came, you never saw dogs walking the streets anymore.

  Rats were next. Before we got hungry, perhaps one in a hundred families had ever tasted rat. I remember one girl, Oon Hwa, whose father used to trap rats in the market and take them home for dinner. We would laugh at her, saying, “Her father eats rats! She probably does too!” But now the rodents became sought after, though my friends never admitted they’d tasted rat meat.

  By the spring of 2001, it seemed that even the lowliest sources of food were drying up, leaving nothing remaining. My father left his job, which meant we had no more government farm to supply our food. My parents argued often now, and my father would sometimes kick my mom out of the house, usually after she admitted she’d lost the latest loan he’d arranged for her. One day, after I hadn’t seen her for a week, I was walking to school when I saw my mother by the side of the road. She motioned me over, her face strained and her eyes filled with sadness. “Kwang Jin,” she said, “take these.” She had somehow found enough money for a new pair of shoes, which she stuffed in my school bag, and ten candies. I gobbled up two of them and put the rest in my pocket. My mother embraced me and I walked away, leaving her crying by the roadside.

  My heart was torn with childish grief in those days. I didn’t understand why my mother couldn’t live with us.

  Mothers and sons have a powerful bond in Korean culture. My father used to tell me this fable: In famine times hundreds of years ago, there was a son who could no longer afford to feed his mother, so he put her on his back and made his way to a mountain, where he planned to abandon her to die. She knew what he was doing but said nothing until they got close to the mountain, when she finally spoke: “Son,” she said calmly, “I have been snapping branches from the trees and dropping them behind us. After you leave me, follow them home and you won’t get lost.”

  Finally, that spring, my mother left Hoeryong for the house of one of her friends in the north. I think she was glad to get away from my father and the constant tension.

  I wonder now what my parents’ marriage would have been like without the famine, without the stress of having nothing to feed their children. Would they have made it? Would they have been happy? Were the cracks that split them apart geographical ones—the result of living in North Korea? Or were they fault lines that lay deep inside their love affair all along?

  When summer came, the three of us remaining in Manyang hoped that the harvests would bring us relief. But instead the famine grew more intense. With no job, my father had no money to buy food. His concern deepened. Would we survive until the fall harvest from our little farm? Alone, without my mother, the responsibility for saving us weighed on him even more.

  Bong Sook and I spent our days in the mountains, leaving home in the predawn darkness. Alongside us on the road, barely seen, were other figures with bags hanging from their hands. They were villagers headed to the same hills, hoping to forage their evening meal. To make the journey easier, Bong Sook would tell me stories or we’d talk about the good days when we could buy snacks anytime we felt like it, about the Sundays when the TV channel started broadcasting at 9 a.m. and we’d stay home all day eating corn cakes and watching movies. It made us feel happier for a moment or two.

  We worked all morning, then took a break around noon and munched on anything we brought with us—root vegetables or leftovers from the night before, if there were any. Any edible weeds we found we put in a plastic bag. We usually managed to fill the bag after a ten-hour day. It would be near midnight before we headed home to collapse on our sleeping mats.

  One day, as we were walking to the mountains just after dawn, we saw a peasant woman walking ahead of us, an infant tied to her back. (This way, the woman would be able to pick weeds without putting the child down on the ground.) I noticed something in the toddler’s hands: corn chips. Where on earth did she get them? I wondered. Instantly I felt a wild desire to steal the treats out of the baby’s hands and devour them.

  Hunger is humiliation. But hunger is also evil.

  Finally, after a few months, the mountains had nothing left to give. When we told my father, he nodded slowly. He looked like he was aging: his face was lined, his back no longer as straight as it had once been. His skin was yellow from the cirrhosis and his belly had swollen like a pregnant woman’s.

  There was nothing left to do, nothing left to sell. The heat pressed through the ceiling and there seemed to be no oxygen in the house.

  I spent the days in and out of a delirium I didn’t want to wake from. The weaker we grew, the less terrifying death seemed.

  Chapter

  Eighteen

  * * *

  AS OUR FAMILY sank further and further, old people from the neighborhood stopped me on the street and told me: “You have a wonderful sister. You should be thankful for her!” I must have toughened up by this point, because I remember the old people waiting for me to heartily agree, but I just stared at them, a frown slashed across my face. Why don’t they mind their own busi
ness? What concern is it of theirs if my sister is good or not? Aren’t we almost starving, Bong Sook or no Bong Sook? Perhaps I was feeling a bit guilty about all she was doing for us, and about my tiny contribution to the household.

  I couldn’t trap animals. I was useless at business. My brain produced no ideas for new sources of food. It was mostly dormant, shuttered for lack of nutrients. I was just a stomach.

  The reason the old people were so impressed with Bong Sook was that she had come up with a way to save us. She took up where my mother left off, buying and selling noodles to help us survive. And at least in the beginning, she proved a much better businesswoman than my mom. The old people were always running into her on the streets as she bicycled this way and that in pursuit of food to feed our family.

  Every night, Bong Sook would take my father’s old bicycle and head off to the local market to get corn. She bought twenty pounds and took it to a nearby factory, where she laboriously ground the kernels into flour to make noodles. Part of that process involved adding water, so her twenty pounds of corn resulted in twenty-five pounds of noodles, which she stuffed into plastic bags to keep them moist. The next morning, she got up, dressed, washed her face, and loaded the noodles onto the rickety black bike parked outside. She pedaled for about two hours, until she was in the farthest depths of rural North Korea. Then she would knock on farmhouse doors, asking, “Any corn noodles for you today?”