by Joseph Kim
I hung around the market that day from dawn until dusk, unable to speak. Other homeless children came and stood beside me. It was a hot day. We smelled like rotten fruit.
Some of the homeless kids cried out to the customers, “Can I have the last of your soup?” In North Korea, you didn’t beg for a full meal. You asked for the leavings of a bowl of soup, one swallow of cloudy water at the bottom of the wooden cup. A few of the Kkotjebi found people willing to give them the dregs from their bowls. Not much, only a few calories to last an hour or two. The rest of us watched them drink, our Adam’s apples bobbing as they swallowed, as if we were eating too. But I said nothing, rooted to the ground in a peculiar fear, feeling my hunger pangs grow sharper.
If I asked for soup, I thought, my condition would somehow become permanent. I feared the words would act as a spell, turning me from a normal boy into a Kkotjebi. Unlike some of the other children here, who’d been abandoned when they were four or five, I had been cherished by my parents until I was a teenager. I had plenty of happy memories, and this gave me hope.
But it also made it harder to believe I was truly homeless. And so I was silent. If you keep this up, I told myself, you surely will starve.
That evening, when the sellers had all gone, I went to a friend’s house. He let me sleep there for one night. I didn’t even ask about staying longer—more than that, I knew, and you became a burden. Before the famine, if you arrived at a friend’s place at lunchtime, your hosts always invited you to eat. But now it was considered rude to show up unannounced. You were asking to be fed. That you could not do.
The second day, I was back at the market, but still unable to force any words past my lips.
I slept in the cornfield and returned to the market on the third day, telling myself, Say something. Ask for the soup and maybe you’ll eat. But still my mouth stayed shut. I felt embarrassed by what I’d become. Layers of dirt and coal soot coated my face, giving it a shiny patina that made me look like a scary doll. My filthy toes, crusted with mud from the road, stuck out through the holes in my shoes, which had begun to decompose in the rain and slop. My eyes appeared bigger because hunger had stretched the skin around them, and lice had made a home in my ragged, foul-smelling clothes.
I hadn’t bathed in a week or two. My last bite of food had been three days before. Yet I still thought like a teenager from a fairly well-off home who went to school and had crushes on girls. Like a boy who had a father to protect him and a sister who gave him her rice and claimed to be full. But I wasn’t that boy any longer. I had to accept it.
As the afternoon of the third day wore on and the customers began to grow scarce, the hunger pains were like knives scraping down my rib cage from top to bottom. I walked to the far end of the market, away from the path that my classmates would take home from our school. I feared seeing someone I knew. That first look of recognition when they spotted me among the Kkotjebi. The beautiful Hyang Mi staring at me with a look that said, You are not human anymore, and I am sorry for you.
Around me, the other Kkotjebi called out, “Can I have the last of your soup?”
The merchants who were selling soup and corn noodles and rice looked at me angrily as I stood, swaying slightly, at the side of the road, trying not to pitch forward into the mud. They knew that just the sight of me, let alone the smell, robbed their potential customers of their appetite. They used the same bowl for all their customers, and if one of them saw it being touched by a Kkotjebi, they might turn away and go to the next vendor.
Was it just our uncleanness or that they feared our condition would rub off on them? I didn’t know. I didn’t have room in my brain for such questions.
We were called Kkotjebi, “wandering sparrows,” because of the way we would bend over and look for grains of rice or kernels of corn on the ground. And we did look like birds, I suppose, but not sparrows. More like crows or ragged vultures, descending on our next victim, crying out the same thing.
“Can I— Can I— Can I—”
I didn’t feel human anymore. A human being has many thoughts running through his mind, many emotions, some happy, some sad. The wandering sparrow has only one thought—food—and one emotion, which can be summed up as I don’t want to die. This causes you to lose any gracefulness you once had. Hunger makes your voice sound odd. Your eyes become glassy and depthless. Your arms snap out at customers in the market, frightening them. You can’t help yourself.
Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. If I didn’t get something to eat, I thought I might not make it back to the market the next day. I scanned the crowd for someone who might have a bit of kindness left in him after the long years of famine. I spotted a man who looked like a traveler. He was older than my parents, clearly from the country, not rich, with something sympathetic about his face. This man knows what it is to struggle, I thought. He’s the one. I rushed over to him and called out, “Can I have the last . . . ,” my voice high and nervous. But he looked at me with a bored expression and passed me by.
After you’ve done it once, it gets easier. I got two swallows of soup that day. I could feel the lukewarm liquid whip into my bloodstream, like a power surge that brightens the lights in a house before fading.
Even when they handed you their bowls, most people would snap, “Take it and get away.” They would shove the bowl at you so hard that some of the soup would slop over the edge and fall to the ground, which defeated the purpose. When the buyers had gone home, I went to the Hoeryong train station and slept on one of the long wooden benches, my belly nearly empty. Later, I would move to an abandoned steam-engine train, rusting on a sidetrack. Its heavy iron absorbed the heat of the sun all day and kept me warm at night.
I was grateful for the food. I felt I had won a victory. But I knew two sips of soup a day wasn’t going to keep me alive for very long. I needed to become smarter if I hoped to survive.
Chapter
Twenty-Eight
* * *
I WENT TO THE market faithfully every day, arriving just after dawn. I was usually one of the first Kkotjebi there, but soon others would swarm the lane. When I wasn’t crying out to customers, I studied the most successful beggars, the ones whose eyes were clearest and who had the most energy. I saw that they always targeted certain types of people. They had a strategy.
Soldiers were the best. The ones who came to the market were mostly officers, and some of them made extra money from bribes paid by those crossing into China. They were young, still idealistic, still proud of North Korea, like my father. Only about half the soldiers offered me a bit of food, but this was far more than I got from the average citizen. A young officer would give me the last swallow of his soup and say, “You poor boy, take it.” If I saw a soldier walking along the lane, I made sure to be the first to run up to him.
Next best were the grandmothers. They usually came to the market to shop for their families during the late morning. They would look on as you noisily slurped down the last mouthful of soup, and even if they didn’t say anything, their eyes were soft and filled with sympathy. Maybe they had grandchildren like me. Sometimes I wondered if they gave me the soup they needed for themselves.
But I never refused it. That was unthinkable.
After a few weeks in the market, I could tell you who the most likely givers were. People from the countryside were better than city people. Women were better than men (except for soldiers). The rich were useless. By carefully choosing my targets, I increased my daily intake to four sips of soup.
But I still wasn’t getting enough nutrition. And there were times I couldn’t persuade a single person to give me the dregs of their meal. Those days I felt panic rising in me. This isn’t working. I’m not going to make it.
Sometimes I would watch new Kkotjebi come to the market and stand just like I did at first, afraid to speak, afraid to cross over into the unknown. Or perhaps they imagined that all they had to do was sit by the side of the road with a miserable look on their face and some passerby wo
uld take pity and offer them something to eat. They didn’t know that this never happened, not once. You had to ask or you would die.
By the second week, the smart beginners would steal something from a cart. By the third or fourth week, they would form alliances with other Kkotjebi and become part of a small gang. (Being homeless at the market was like being at school: in your first few days there, you bonded with the other new Kkotjebi who’d showed up at the same time. These “classmates” often stayed together for years.) One orphan would distract the seller or cause a ruckus while the others plundered his cart. Knowledge was exchanged, techniques were honed.
How quickly we all changed! I was astonished by this. We readily took the step from innocent children to tough boys who plotted to deceive good people. And the ones who didn’t change simply disappeared. These were the boys and girls whose bodies you would smell in the tall grass as night fell and you went looking for a place to sleep.
There are only two things you really need as a homeless person: food and heat. Heat keeps you alive at night, when the temperature falls below freezing. On those nights you have to be inside or you will die. Occasionally, Kkotjebi found electrical transformers on the street and huddled against them for warmth, but these units were badly serviced and their wires frayed over time. Some orphans were electrocuted on cold nights.
I never did this, but I was always on the lookout for ashes. Housewives would throw out the coals that heated the floors of most North Korean homes onto a pile in the back of their houses. Sometimes the ashes were still warm. If I saw a pile of fresh coal ash, I would lie on top of it and press my cheek against the surface, absorbing the heat. It was soothing and smelled like my old house in the July 8th neighborhood. I slept and dreamt of a time when I had a roof above my head and people who loved me. The only downside was that the coal ash would stick to you. That’s how many of the Kkotjebi acquired their black faces.
Heat you needed for only a few hours a night. If you got desperate, you could gather some of the increasingly hard-to-find tree branches and start a fire. But food you thought about constantly. How to get it, how much there will be, what it will taste like when you do get it.
I became a different person when I became homeless. For one thing, I was shocked to learn that I was a better thief than I was a beggar.
It happened very naturally. It was almost as if my body knew what to do when the hunger reached a certain point. I don’t remember any moral debate about whether stealing was wrong.
The sellers who lined the road approaching the Hoeryong city market were my first victims, but they were crafty, thanks to many other Kkotjebi who had tried to steal their goods. To prevent people like me from sneaking up behind them and swiping their cakes, the merchants would sit close to the cinderblock wall that lined the market street and place their baskets in front of them. I could approach these sellers only from the front, and when I did so, their faces would turn ugly and they would scream at me to go away. They had families to support, I suppose. But I didn’t think about that. I just saw the cakes and buns in their baskets and heard the hateful way they yelled at me. I didn’t let their snarls scare me away.
I observed these sellers for a long time. I noticed that first thing in the morning, many of them stood hypervigilant over their baskets, their eyes darting at the approach of anyone who looked suspect. (I looked very suspect.) But few customers had enough money to buy a bun, so the merchants would end up staring at their baskets for long periods without a break. This became boring after a while. As I watched the sellers’ eyes hour after hour, I realized they’d turned dreamy. To test their reaction, I would walk in front of their baskets to see if they noticed me. Sometimes they didn’t. The sellers had hypnotized themselves. They were thinking about their children or remembering a movie they’d seen. This meant I could sneak up next to one of them, reach down, slip a bun from his basket without his noticing, and walk away as if nothing had happened. The first time I did it, my heart pounded in triumph. I sauntered down the lane, munching on the bun like I was a rich boy.
Stolen buns taste sweeter than bought ones. This is something else I learned.
My trick worked only occasionally, however; most of the time the sellers were alert. So I developed a new technique. Some sellers would sit on the raised bank of the Hoeryong River where pedestrians passed on their way to the city center. The river was six feet below, bordered by concrete walls built to contain high waters during flooding. I would walk to another part of the river, jump into the shallow water, then double back along the water’s edge until I came to the sellers, whose backs were turned toward me, just above the top of the wall. I grasped the edge of the concrete and pulled myself up until I could see the merchants’ baskets a foot or two away. Then I quickly reached my hand out and grabbed a biscuit or bun. Focused on the people walking by, the sellers had no idea I was there.
I felt rather proud of my cleverness. But pedestrians, startled to see a boy’s hand appear out of nowhere, eventually alerted the sellers that something was going on. That brought an end to my bun snatching.
My new profession was exciting. For the first time, I saw hope—not for a life as I’d once imagined, but for survival.
My testing, as it turned out, had only begun.
Chapter
Twenty-Nine
* * *
AFTER A FEW months of being on my own, I was growing weaker. The more experienced merchants had learned my tricks, and there were few new ones showing up with food to sell. The number of Kkotjebi grew day by day. Everyone was eating less. Often I went to bed in the old, broken-down train at the railroad station and was unable to sleep because of hunger. Sometimes I would go for one or two days without a single bite of anything.
I decided to devote myself to thievery.
There were three places where thieves operated in North Korea. One was at railway stations. In the early 2000s, the government was importing basic supplies from China. Corn and fertilizer were transported on long trains of closed cars that were closely watched by guards. Major railway stations in North Korea tended to be far apart, so when a train pulled into one of them, the crew often needed to take a break. A few of them wandered off to use the bathroom or buy a meal from a roadside stand outside the station. That’s when the thieves struck. They ran to the tracks and stooped underneath the railcars in search of something to steal, and later to sell.
All kinds of people did this: grandmothers, fathers, pregnant women, old men, and orphaned kids. They would swarm beneath the platforms and scour the ground between the rails and just to the side for corn that had fallen through the cracks of the cars. The train would be there for an hour or two, and in that time you might gather half a handful of yellow corn, mixed in with the cinders and dirt. I joined the station people once or twice. I can still remember the surge in my bloodstream when I saw the kernels spread across the shadows. It was like a spray of gold nuggets. You had to move fast, because the corn would be gone in seconds, and it might be days before another train came through.
The fertilizer trains were tougher to steal from. Chemical fertilizer in North Korea is very sought after and expensive, so if you can get hold of a cupful you can make enough for two good meals. A full bag of the stuff is a jackpot, but you have to take your life in your hands to get it. If the guards catch you, they’ll crack your head open with their truncheons and leave you on the tracks to be squashed by the next train. I saw people clamber up to the tops of fertilizer cars and try to break open the locks, only to be batted down by security men. The thieves fell to the tracks with a heavy thud.
The second good place to steal is at the market and the lanes leading up to it. Here pickpockets and snatch-thieves thrive. The market is dominated by the Kkotjebi. It’s like a syndicate. You have to ask for the permission of the group that controls the market if you want to graduate from, say, ordinary thief to pickpocket. If you just show up one day and snatch a few won from a peasant’s pocket, the other Kkotjebi will shout an
d warn your intended target, who will likely give you a beating. If your intended victim doesn’t attack you, the Kkotjebi will box your ears and run you off. The market was the only place in North Korea that belonged to the homeless, and they guarded it jealously. You began by stealing a head of garlic or a single pepper from a vegetable merchant and trading that for a bit of noodles in the food court. (This worked at least for a while, because the merchants never expected us to steal raw vegetables, and the food sellers always needed fresh ingredients for their dishes.) Then you slowly worked your way up.
The third place to steal is from people’s homes. A stack of firewood on an apartment balcony. A row of green onions at midnight. A bicycle. This is what I took up after leaving the market. I began with sewer grates.
I was so hungry that I needed to steal something readily available, so I could fill my belly immediately. I recalled that once I had seen lots of scrap iron near the train station, so I walked there, but by then, of course, it had disappeared, scavenged by other hungry people and sold off. My thoughts turned to the sewer covers that dot the roads of Hoeryong. I knew that iron dealers were always eager to have scrap, which they would sell to Chinese foundries. Why not the heavy sewer grates? Here was metal just lying, literally, in the street. I decided to wait up one night and see if I could steal one.
There are two kinds of manhole covers in North Korea: one weighs about fifty pounds; the other, massive ones the size of a large bicycle wheel, a hundred pounds. I probably weighed about ninety pounds at the time, so my only chance was to steal the smaller size. One night, I waited along a main road until it was clear in both directions, then ran into the street and pounced. By pulling at the small gaps in the cover, I got it out of its hole and rolled it to the bushes at the side of the road.