by Joseph Kim
Bong Sook was gone. That was all there was to say.
My mother decided to take me to her younger sister’s house in Undok—the same “small aunt” who had gone to the humiliating birthday party with us years before. We got a ride in a truck, and two and a half hours later we found the house. I knocked on my aunt’s door around dusk. She answered and said my name with concern. Then she saw my mother and invited us in.
At first my aunt was sympathetic. She found old sleeping mats we could use and fed us her simple dishes. We were safe for the time being.
As the days progressed, the relationship between my aunt and me became kind of like that of high school sweethearts: one day we’d be super-close, gossiping and laughing, and the next she’d be angry with me, for what reason I didn’t know. She would shoot me angry glances and refuse to speak to me. Food was at the bottom of this, of course. The family was rich now, by North Korean standards. My uncle had gotten a visa to visit relatives in China, and he’d come back with televisions, clothing, and other consumer goods and sold them at a great profit. I could see that my aunt wanted to take care of my mother and me, but as a survivor of famine, the fear of hunger never left her. Often she compromised by splitting the available food, which just meant that none of us got enough. My stomach bloated with malnutrition, and the overstretched, shiny skin became painful to the touch.
I, too, was facing a dilemma: Should I steal some of my aunt’s white rice and risk her wrath? Or should I accept what I was given and hope it got me through? I had no real loyalty to my cousins; they were merely competitors for food. That’s how I felt. The same heartlessness that my relatives had shown to me I now felt for them.
Eventually the urge to eat became too much. One day while my aunt was away gathering firewood, I stole an uncooked turnip from the bag where she kept her vegetables. I estimated that I had a good hour to eat the whole thing. I bit into it hungrily, ignoring the bits of dirt clinging to the skin.
But five minutes after I took that first bitter bite, my aunt suddenly pushed in the door. I quickly hid the turnip behind my back. We stared at each other.
My aunt’s eyes filled with tears. “Kwang Jin!” she cried out. “You’re my nephew! You should have just asked me.”
I handed the turnip to her, my eyes cast down. I felt shame, and anger at my shame. At least Auntie still had a human side. As for me, I was like a starving rat; my hunger controlled me. I felt brutal and nasty.
I didn’t have the advantage of long experience with people in normal times. The idea that most people are good if you give them enough to eat and a warm place to sleep was foreign to me. I had mostly seen people’s evil, jealous sides. I tried to tell myself: It’s just the famine talking. She really is a good person. But I’m not sure I believed it.
I hated it when people were selfish. When I was selfish it was even worse, but it’s hard to act like a human being when no one you see is doing the same. You feel like a dupe. Your good heart will take your life.
I didn’t want to die. I was determined not to. I really was different from my father, who had been too honorable to steal.
Chapter
Twenty-Six
* * *
MY AUNT’S HUSBAND was a miner. For years he had held down a job in a state-run company until the economy collapsed. The electricity at his work site had stopped one day, and the workers were forced to go all over the countryside and dig random holes in the ground, straight down, which only a North Korean would call a mine. They used equipment they’d scavenged from their old jobs. Despite the money he’d earned trading Chinese goods, he still worked at the mines to support his family.
After a few weeks, my aunt suggested I go along and work in the coal shafts, to pay for my keep. “At least do something,” she said. I agreed immediately. I’d never had a real job, and the thought of having money for snacks and other things was exciting.
The job of a miner is the lowest in North Korea. Even Kkotjebi who are in the last stages of starvation will refuse to go down into the tunnels. “I’ll wait just one more day,” they’ll say, “maybe I’ll get lucky begging at the market,” when they hadn’t found a thing to eat there in a week. There was something final about the mines. Dying there is ugly. Many men are caught by cave-ins in the tunnels, where few beams hold up the ceilings. When their bodies are pulled up, their mouths are so tightly packed with dirt it seems like some underground monster did it out of malice. The mines are the last stop before the graveyard.
We walked two hours to the head of the tunnel, where about a dozen men were gathered around, preparing to go down. My uncle and I approached the miners and he told them I wanted to work with them. The men studied me carefully. I remember those looks very well: horror, but a kind of wonder, too. “This child,” one miner said, turning to the others, “has come to us?” The black-faced men said I’d made a mistake. They told my uncle to take me away. When I stood my ground, they tried chasing me off, but I always returned. My uncle didn’t intervene: if I wasn’t tough enough to get into the mine, I wasn’t tough enough to do the work.
When the miners realized I wouldn’t give up, they waved their hands at me in exasperation. If you want to kill yourself, their expressions said, be our guest.
I climbed into a large metal bucket and a man at a hand-operated winch began lowering us into the earth. I was very afraid the first time I went down. The shaft was so narrow, I could reach out and touch the soil as I was lowered, and the air around me turned black and ferociously hot even before I reached the bottom. Once the bucket knocked against solid earth, about one hundred yards down, I got out with my tool, a heavy iron crowbar. I stooped down, following the other miners into a horizontal passageway cut into the earth. When the man in front of me stopped, I heard the ringing of iron against the walls. I turned and began to slam my crowbar into the coal seam.
There were no lights in the mine, only the small lamps attached to our plastic hard hats, the kind with a strap that went under your chin. There were no beams or supports along the passageway that I could see. I didn’t want to think of what would happen if the earth gave way and came down around my ears.
I pounded at the coal flashing in the little beam of my light, and I didn’t stop for twelve hours, except for a short lunch break, noodles and a small cornmeal cake. The good thing about risking your neck in the mines was that the work was so hard they were forced to give you a decent helping of food.
By the end of the day, I couldn’t feel my arms or upper body. When the man next to me tapped me on the shoulder, I bent down and gathered up the coal I’d chipped away, put it into a large bucket, and carried it to the light that shone down from above. It felt like my spirit was walking alongside my body, so complete was my exhaustion. When I got to the surface, I saw that my pile of coal was tiny compared to those of the men around me. My wage was the lunch I had eaten, plus a small share of the coal in my bucket. I took my portion back to my aunt’s house and saved it. Every day I added another bucket to the pile, dreaming of the morning I would go to the market, sell the coal, and buy an armful of food for my mother, along with several delicious snacks for myself. I lingered over those fantasies for hours at a time, especially while sweating and laboring deep in the mine pit. I felt I was working toward a little bit of happiness.
But it wasn’t to be. After a few months, my aunt came to me and asked if I could contribute the coal to the family’s budget. My dream was crushed. The money she would make would be insignificant, yet she wanted it anyway. I had to press the bitterness down into my heart and say nothing, but for days I was upset and close to tears.
The miners, most of them, were kind to me. They knew there was nowhere beneath this place, nowhere else to fall to. After a few weeks of my pitiful hauls, they found me an easier job. I was shown how to work the oxygen pump, which was a converted bicycle wheel attached to a pipe that carried air down to the men in the tunnels. I spun and spun the wheel for hours, until I could no longer feel my right arm. All se
nsation ended at the shoulder. At around two o’clock on my first day at the wheel, I unconsciously slowed the spinning. It felt like I was on the edge of blacking out.
Suddenly the metal pipe attached to the contraption began to chatter. The miners down in the shaft were shaking it to let me know that I wasn’t pumping enough air. If I didn’t wake up and spin the wheel faster, they would die. I fought off the blackness in my mind and picked up my pace. As the sun began to sink in the west, the bucket rose from the shaft and the miners gathered around. I could see they were angry, but when they saw me—God knows what I looked like by the end of the day—their eyes softened. “Try to pump a little harder tomorrow,” my uncle said. I nodded yes.
What I remember most about those days were the candles. Every morning, we would light one and drip some wax onto the bottom of an iron bucket and set the candle there, so it wouldn’t tip over. Then the miners tied the bucket handle to an old rope and lowered the bucket into the mine. Bit by bit the flame grew smaller in the blackness. If there was no oxygen, then there was no work. If there was no work, the miners’ families would go hungry. Many of the men had children at home who were so malnourished that a few days without food would kill them.
When the candle remained lit, the miners would gather their tools and descend. Other times, though, the flame would flicker and disappear, and we knew that no one could survive down there, even with me pumping what little oxygen I could through the pipe. A feeling of desolation would go through us, and we’d pull the bucket up in silence. No one spoke. Being a young boy, I was fascinated to discover that fire needed oxygen to burn, but the others were thinking only of their loved ones.
That image comes back to me when I try to explain my homeland to people who’ve never been there. The basic ingredients of life had disappeared. My schoolmates, my beloved television, my house and family, all had vanished like the candle flame, swallowed up by darkness. If we’d been capable of it, the miners and I would have laughed at the thought that even the oxygen had disappeared from North Korea. What was next, water? Sunshine?
I’d witnessed this kind of thing once before, on the train to my uncle’s town with my father and Bong Sook at the start of the famine. One morning on that endless journey, I was half awake and daydreaming when I saw a North Korean soldier stirring from sleep. He cried out. During the night, someone had stolen his jacket. A few of us passengers watched him closely as he looked around wildly for the missing uniform. But it was gone.
In normal times, stealing a soldier’s jacket would have been not only illegal but unthinkable. Your brain wouldn’t even form the thought, Boy, that army jacket looks good. What if I . . . As we watched the soldier, we worried about what he might do—perhaps he’d call the police and accuse us of stealing. Perhaps he’d beat us and leave us by the tracks to become food for wild dogs. Passengers began to edge away from the man.
But instead of anger, a look of what I can only describe as hilarity appeared on the soldier’s young face. He began to laugh, a total-body laugh. More people woke up and stared at him. We didn’t know what to make of his reaction, and the strangeness of it has stayed with me over the years.
It was only when I was working in the mines that I realized what the soldier was feeling at that moment. The reality he’d known since he was a baby had disappeared. Food was gone. Authority, too. Many hundreds of people were piled onto a train to nowhere. And people were stealing the uniforms off the backs of the Korean People’s Army. His laughter seemed to say: No, this can’t be real. I refuse to believe it! What mad world is this I’ve found myself in?
This is what people don’t understand about North Korea in those days. We didn’t “give up” hope or “lose” it. We grasped it tightly with every bit of strength we had. What was missing were the few molecules of air that hope nourished itself on. Those were sucked away by the strange place we happened to inhabit, by the unseen powers we never met or spoke to. The candle went out and blackness flooded in.
Under those conditions, hope was a superhuman effort. I began to have more sympathy for my father, who had been broken by this country. I know now I was too hard on him. How can you be expected to breathe when there’s no air?
After my mother and I had lived with my aunt for some months, she asked us to leave her house. So another connection to our family was cut. As we gathered our things, my mother again talked about going to China to make money.
I could see that I was soon to be alone.
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
* * *
BY THE SPRING of 2003, we were back in Hoeryong. My mother went to stay with a friend as she prepared for another trip to China. It was best we separated. She couldn’t care for me, so she told me to find my way to Small Grandfather’s house.
I still couldn’t comprehend that Bong Sook was gone and that her fate was so dark. I clung to the hope that she was married to a kind person who was treating her well. Many nights, I’d have imaginary conversations with this Chinese man. Please take care of Bong Sook. She deserves so much better than what she got in life. The old people in Manyang were right: Bong Sook wasn’t an ordinary sister. I realized that only when I had lost her.
As I wandered Hoeryong those first few hours after we returned, what I thought about the most was the last time I saw my sister, that lackluster “Bye” that I gave Bong Sook when she must have known the truth. Why didn’t she rush to me and give me a hug? Why didn’t I embrace her?
I had no idea our goodbye was for the last time. It’s haunted me ever since.
Someday, Bong Sook, I said to myself, I will find you.
I wasn’t prepared for life on the street. We had arrived in Hoeryong without extra clothing or money. I was dressed in the black coat I’d asked my mother for the year before, the one inspired by my crush on Hyang Mi.
I no longer had the figurine Hyang Mi had given me. I no longer had anything from that life. All I’d managed to save was the coat, and it was so torn and stained it was hardly fashionable anymore. But I was thirteen and there was something exciting about being on my own. I was free for the first time in my life.
I walked three or four miles in and around Hoeryong looking for something to eat, but found nothing. I had no idea where to look for food or how to go about asking for it.
That night I walked toward Small Grandfather’s house. Just beyond its walls was a cornfield where I’d often listened to the stalks waving in the wind, making that dry rustling sound that corn makes. I had the strangest feeling passing by the path that led to the front door of his house. My mind made a right turn at the gate and walked up the path as I had done so many times before, even as my body walked on toward the rows of green corn. My mind slipped through the front door and made its way to the right where my room was. It drank in the warmth of the room wafting up from the floorboards. It prepared for sleep.
But I didn’t knock on Small Grandfather’s door—I was afraid to. Soon I was in the field next to his house, hidden deep in the cornrows, looking for a place to bed down for the night.
The stars were out by the time I found the right spot. It was in one of the furrows of dry dirt that were angled up on each side, leaving a narrow valley in the middle, perfectly sized for my thin shoulders. I lay down and looked up at the sky through the husks just beginning to sprout the light brown tassels that show the corn is getting ripe. The plants moved above me as gusts of warm wind came sweeping down the rows. I was snug against the warm earth.
Small Grandfather’s house was five hundred feet away. I imagined him and his wife settling down for the night, talking in low voices. Were they wondering where I was? Did they know I was back in the city? Did they worry I’d had nothing to eat that night, or had thoughts of me passed from their minds months ago? Small Grandfather had probably erased me from his memory the moment I’d left his home. He wasn’t one for remorse.
But I wasn’t unhappy. I thought, This is better than my old sleeping mat! I could see the beautiful stars, th
e universal consolation for North Koreans who had no roof over their heads. I was pleasantly tired and soon fell asleep, my furrow of earth holding me in its snug embrace.
The first enemy of someone sleeping rough comes at about one in the morning. You feel a chill. You’re aware in your dreams that something is stealing over you. Your skin becomes aware, even if your mind is still asleep. Then the cold dew wakes you up. From being warm and dry, you’re now miserable. I opened my eyes at about two. The rows of corn were black now, with just the fringes edged with moonlight. My good mood had disappeared. This was my first true moment of being homeless.
I tossed and turned, trying to fall back to sleep, but the dew had mixed with the dirt and turned its topmost layer muddy, and my clothes were getting dirty and matted. Eventually I stood up, my sleep over for the night. My skin was covered with a thin film of soil. I was famished. At three or four in the morning, I started walking to the Hoeryong city market.
When I got there half an hour later, the lane where the sellers stood in their little stalls was deserted. A sense of loneliness came over me. It felt as if I was the only one awake in Hoeryong and no one knew or cared that I was hungry.
When the sun rose over the hills people began to stream in, sellers who set up their humble stands or stood by the side of the road holding their products: combs, sunglasses, clocks, onions, cucumbers, cornmeal. The soup makers came with their pots filled near to the brim and placed them carefully on the ground. Kkotjebi arrived, tiny black-faced figures in oily, ragged clothing, begging for a bit of food or watching for their moment to steal. Nobody gave me so much as a second glance.