by Joseph Kim
Most nights, I headed to the mini-mart that was owned by Kim Il’s grandmother. In order to feed her family, she had opened a store inside her home. You could go up to the small glass window in the front of the house and look inside. The entire contents of the store—tubes of toothpaste, a few handfuls of corn, some candies—were visible in that little square, lit by a single bulb. If you didn’t see what you needed, you moved on. If you didn’t see it, Kim Il’s grandmother didn’t have it.
When I knocked, I could hear someone stirring. As the famine had worsened, honest people had turned to stealing, as I had in the fields. If you didn’t keep constant watch over your goods, these people, driven mad with hunger, would smash the window of your shop, scoop up a handful of corn, and stuff it in their mouths. So Kim Il’s grandmother slept on the floor of the store on a thin mat. Soon the door latch clicked and the door opened.
The grandmother smiled at me. She knew what I wanted. She could hear my father’s screaming, a little softer now but never losing its hoarse, animal-like bellow. She knew that a bit of food or a sedative, injected by Bong Sook, would soothe him for an hour or two, until the pain woke him again. I gave her what little money we had left—provided by an old friend of my father’s—and took the vial of sedative. My pace was faster now as I thought of the peace the medicine would bring and of my bed on the warm floor.
I would hand Bong Sook the vial and she would take out the needle. In a few minutes, we’d be able to sleep until the first cry of the next day woke us again.
The two and a half months it took my father to slowly pass away were the strangest of my life. A friend of my father’s was giving us small amounts of money from time to time, but my poor sister still had to work herself to the bone: going to the factory to buy noodles, bicycling to the rural districts, then coming home to care for my father, washing my socks, barely sleeping four or five hours. I didn’t work and I’d stopped going to school, so I was with my father constantly, often staring at him as he lay in a coma, unable to speak. I was paralyzed by a shapeless feeling that often turned into childish rage or apathy. I couldn’t tell my father how much I missed him.
My sister and I were the only ones caring for him during this time. As for relatives, there were no phones to call them, and besides, we’d already tasted the bitterness of their charity.
One of my father’s relations did visit once or twice. He was my father’s uncle, but we always called him Small Grandfather. He would bring kimchi or a few side dishes from his place, twenty minutes from my house. He would sit next to my father and say, “How could you do this to me? How can you leave now?” In our culture, it’s considered almost rude for a son to die before his father, or a nephew before his uncle. Small Grandfather didn’t mean to chastise my father; this was his way of expressing sorrow.
A nurse who lived thirty minutes away came for a few weeks, but when she saw our situation, she ended up crying more than my sister. In North Korea, you must give nurses or doctors a meal when they treat your loved one, and we had nothing to spare, so eventually she stopped knocking on our door. Before she left for the last time, she showed my sister the proper way to give the sedative injections. She saw me watching her, and she came up to me and put her hands on my shoulders. “I know this is hard,” she told me, “but you have to grow up and be a man.”
I did neither. If I grew up, it would mean my father was gone. I wanted him to wake up and be my dad again, and for my family to magically knit itself back together into what we’d been during the good year of 2000.
Instead, as I sat in our house, my mind wandered to the past. Sometimes I thought of silly things, like imagining what was happening on a North Korean TV series we used to watch. Or I pretended to be a secret agent. In my mind, I was battling enemy aggressors, America and Japan, capturing their agents and plugging them—pow!—with my gleaming black pistol. I had played that game many times as a child in the hills behind our house in July 8th.
But other times I would try to untangle the mystery of why my father and I had drifted apart. What had caused me to hate him at times, and for him to disown me. Most of all, I asked my father to come back to me.
One bright, warm day a few weeks after the nurse had visited for the last time, I was sitting in our room watching the sunlight play in the dust motes that rose from the floor, daydreaming as usual. I’d had nothing for breakfast, and Bong Sook was off on the bicycle in the countryside, trying to make enough money for dinner. If she didn’t come home with something, the hunger pangs in my belly would spread to my bones. Hunger informs you that your skeleton really is hollow.
Suddenly I heard my father’s voice, for the first time in many weeks. “I’d like a cigarette,” he said calmly. I sat up straight. It was as if a ghost had spoken. I looked over and saw his figure sitting up, too, a light smile on his face, his eyes clear and unworried.
I was speechless. What was going on? I felt like my mind was playing me for a fool, that my desire to see my father as he’d once been was so strong that I’d willed this mirage into being. He hadn’t been coherent in over two months, and now he was sitting up and talking to me as if nothing had happened.
My father met my stare, his brown eyes confident and serene. Hope flared inside me. He was real. Magically restored! So many possibilities arose in my mind. The things we would do together now.
But first, the cigarette. I ran out into the street. If I had scraped together all the money we had, I could have gotten him a real, factory-made cigarette. We had enough money for that, just barely. But my brain rattled along in the ruts of old instincts—survive, survive, only survive—and so I walked through the streets of the town, studying the gutters and the fringe of grass near the road, looking for discarded cigarette butts. When I had four or five, I raced home and watched as my father, weak as he was, gently tore the papers open and shook out the tobacco until he had enough for a smoke. He wrapped the tobacco in the least torn of the papers and lit up. He smiled at me, though I knew that this patched-together thing must have tasted awful.
If I had known what was to come, I would have bought him a quality cigarette. This torments me to this day, every time I pass a store with Marlboros and Camels and Lucky Strikes. Why didn’t I take our little bit of money and get him a fresh, Chinese-made product? He would have enjoyed it. He might even have sensed that I had watched over him all those weeks, praying for his recovery, that night after night I had run to get him medicine and racked my brain for a solution to his mystery illness.
My father said, “Son, come help me outside.”
I helped him to the door and we pushed it open. It was clear, the sky blue and cloudless. A fine spring day. We stood in the doorway, my body pressed against the warmth of his. I thought, He’s going to be fine. All that worrying for nothing. Stupid boy. I felt as light as a leaf carried along by the breeze.
He didn’t scream that afternoon. Or that night.
The next day, my father made a gurgling sound and dark liquid came rushing out of his nose and mouth. I was terrified. He was staring up at the ceiling, his eyes bulging.
“What should we do?” I cried to Bong Sook.
“Run to Small Grandfather’s house,” Bong Sook said. “Hurry!”
I took off out the door as Bong Sook knelt by Father’s head, cradling it in her lap. As I ran, my mind repeated the words Not yet, not yet, not yet. When I reached Small Grandfather’s, my uncle, the soldier, had just arrived. I blurted out that something was happening to my father. They looked at me with stricken faces and we hurried back to our house.
When I opened the door, I could sense that my father was dead. His face was clean; there was nothing coming out of his nose or mouth. But his skin had already collapsed a bit on the bones, as if something had departed.
Bong Sook was staring at the floor. “He stopped breathing five minutes ago,” she said quietly.
I had never seen my uncle cry. He was always a calm and sweet-natured man. But now he began to weep. “Brother, w
hy couldn’t you wait five minutes more,” he wailed. “I just arrived and now you’re gone!” Then he apologized to my father for being so late. Small Grandfather nodded but said nothing.
My sister and I performed the test our father had told us about: we tried to slide a hand under the small of his back. But there was no room.
I didn’t know what to do or how to feel. So much pain was over for my father, but now I had to live without him.
Chapter
Twenty-One
* * *
I KNOW WITH ONE hundred percent certainty that my father was an excellent sangju in his time. I can see him, his back ramrod-straight, holding the picture of his father without letting it shake so much as a millimeter. He would have been exacting and knowledgeable in every detail, and the black-clad women would have spoken about him in admiring whispers. He would have honestly felt the guilt that the ritual was supposed to absolve. Believe me, if you wanted an eldest son to send you on your way, you could hardly do better than my father. Perhaps he even wore a hemp coat.
I, on the other hand, was a second-rate, famine sangju. There was no ceremony for my father, no first or second day. Many people did come, perhaps a hundred. My mother returned the day after my father died. She’d been arrested in China, but since it was her first offense, she was released from jail and allowed to join the mourning party.
I did my best as eldest son, but I couldn’t scrounge up a black outfit and instead wore my school uniform, which hung loosely on my emaciated body. I brushed it and made it as presentable as I could.
I held my father’s picture and bowed to the people as they entered our house. They didn’t stay long, just dipped their head toward the body, then stood against the wall for a while before making their escape. To go to the funeral of a man who starved to death and expect to be fed is its own contradiction.
A sangju isn’t supposed to cry, but there was one moment when I couldn’t control myself any longer. It was when two officials from the local Communist Party arrived to confiscate my father’s documents. For my entire childhood, the papers had sat underneath the portrait of Kim Il Sung, our little North Korean shrine. They were kept in a thin booklet, stamped with the Party’s seal. That magic number—a Party member at only twenty-four!—was confirmed in black typewritten letters. My father had treasured those documents.
The officials entered our house, and the more senior one took the booklet down and read aloud what was typed there. The crowd listened, hushed, eyes cast down at the floor. When the official finished reading, he nodded and tucked the booklet into his chest pocket. It was then I let out a yelping sob. Tears streamed from my eyes. It was only at that moment that my father really ceased to be alive for me. Why had I not believed my eyes when I looked at his corpse? Maybe I believed in the state more than I thought I did. Nature was variable; it changed its mind all the time. But the Party? Never. I knew then my father was not coming back.
My sister and I couldn’t afford to transport the body to the graveyard. Luckily, the bosses at one of the companies my father had worked for years earlier sent a car. My military uncle was good enough to pay for the coffin.
On the way to the casket factory, my uncle looked down at me. His eyes were unreadable, but there were multiple sorrows in them, I felt, instead of just the one sorrow inside me. “Poor Kwang Jin,” he said. “You shouldn’t have left your father’s side, today of all days.” He said this with what we call hansoom—a deep, troubled sigh. “Poverty makes you mature,” he said in his next breath. It was a North Korean saying: even as life hurts you, it prepares you to accept the next bit of pain. You’re growing up too fast, he meant to say. You should just be a boy, but life isn’t letting you.
I thought of my father’s lessons on North Korean funerals. He must have known we wouldn’t be able to honor him in those ways, which were from another time. He was thinking of his father’s and his grandfather’s funerals and not his own. Was he sad that he wouldn’t have the same rituals? My father never complained about his fate, but I think he would have liked those last things to have been done, to have a dignified farewell.
Instead, it was all I could do to find a piece of wood at the casket factory to mark his grave. We couldn’t afford stone. We carved his name on the plank and shoved it deep into the dirt on the side of the mound.
My period of mourning lasted only a day or two. Then I had to go back to surviving.
Chapter
Twenty-Two
* * *
SMALL GRANDFATHER—my father’s uncle—had been a big man in North Korea. An economist, he’d been higly placed in an important ministry in Pyongyang. But he’d lost that job for mysterious reasons, and soon went to work at a government agency with much less prestige. Despite his demotion, Small Grandfather was what I suppose you could call a government loyalist. He was tall, with swept-back gray hair and penetrating eyes, eyes that told you he expected to be obeyed. He had a diplomat’s charm and could talk most people into anything. He once told me that when he visited the Soviet Union as a government representative, he got the Russians to raise their glasses and cheer for Kim Il Sung—the first time that had ever happened at an official dinner.
I had seen Small Grandfather often as a boy. We would go to his house for holidays and his birthday, and I would sing out my little good wishes before running off to watch his TV. (It was the first set in our family.) The reason my father moved from Undok to our pigeon coop apartment in Hoeryong was to be near Small Grandfather and, he hoped, share in his success. Small Grandfather was super-smart. He had graduated from eighth grade but couldn’t afford high school. Instead, he’d waited until he was eighteen, then joined the army and fought in the Korean War. He was so smart that, when the war ended, he skipped high school and went straight to college. I never heard of another person doing that.
As a boy, I loved Small Grandfather. Or at least I think I did. He was part of a childhood that I remembered fondly, before the famine came, and so he was surrounded by the warm feelings I had for that time. But I always found his deep voice to be scary. I would jump a little whenever I heard it.
Smart and coldhearted—that describes my small grandfather. And proud of his frosty reserve. He once told me, “In normal life, you can be a romantic. But in economics, you must keep a cold heart.” He liked the saying so much, he sometimes forgot the “economics” part and applied the lesson to all of life.
After my father’s funeral, my mother, Bong Sook, and I had to move out of our house. My father’s friend, who had given us small amounts of money when my father could no longer work, informed us he was taking the space as reimbursement. Mother and Bong Sook thought this was cruel, but I didn’t blame the man. He’d spent cash on us, and now he was getting it back. I was thankful that he had lent us the money, so we could afford aspirin and a little food to make my father’s final days comfortable.
We spent our last few days in the house trying to think where we could go. It was during this time that Small Grandfather came to see us.
“You can live with me,” he told my mother. We were surprised and a little mystified by the offer, but very grateful. We took our belongings—they fit in a small bag—and followed him to his big house in Hoeryong, in a nice part of town with widely spaced unattached houses. We had gotten lucky, we thought; a place like this in a time of hardship. It was the best house we had ever lived in.
The memory of my father lingered. I would be playing in the front yard of Small Grandfather’s house and for a moment I’d forget that he was dead, and then some memory of him would prick my heart, and I would remember, Oh, yes, he’s gone, and want to cry again.
Small Grandfather and his wife had adult children, so none of them lived in the big house. He’d retired almost a decade before, and had put away enough money to survive ten years. Or so he thought. Now the rampant inflation that had doomed so many families was eating into his savings. Still, we had food, and so we began to relax. Small Grandfather was nice to me; he even let me
ride his bicycle, which was a big deal in those days. We had long ago sold our family one.
But after we’d been living with Small Grandfather only a few days, he grew concerned about his shrinking savings.
“What are you going to do now?” he asked my mother one morning. “Do you have a plan to support yourself?”
My mother was taken aback. What could she do? There were no jobs, and no one had money. People were abandoning their children because they couldn’t feed them.
“I don’t know, Small Grandfather.”
His brow furrowed. “Listen, I have an idea,” he said, not unkindly. “You should take Bong Sook to China and live there.”
Though my mother had her own mind and opinions, we were living in Small Grandfather’s house. I’m sure she thought that she couldn’t defy him. She stood there, her head bowed, and nodded slightly.
“You must be thinking about Kwang Jin,” Small Grandfather said, seeing her hesitation. “Don’t worry about that. I will take care of him. Just make sure to send us money every month—once you get settled, of course. Money is easy to make in China.”
I didn’t know it, but this was the moment that determined the rest of my life. This, far more than my father’s death. My father wasn’t able to protect us; the famine had taken him as it had thousands and thousands of others. And his brothers and sisters could offer us no protection. An epidemic had killed his siblings when he was just a boy, which meant that there were no paternal relatives nearby to save us now. Small Grandfather and my uncle were the only ones. It’s strange to think that your fate was written before you were born, in a tiny virus that swept through a village where your father had lived as a child.