by Joseph Kim
So I hesitated. But what choice did I have, really? Hyo Sung was right. I was probably one or two sewer grates away from a firing squad.
“OK,” I said.
Hyo Sung nodded and we began walking toward town, talking all the way.
The three members took me back to the apartment where they stayed. I greeted Hyo Sung’s mother as I walked through the door. She was about four feet tall and talked a mile a minute, just as I remembered. I wasn’t too surprised that she had become a den mother to the Association. What else was she supposed to do?
When we’d settled down with some soup, Hyo Sung told me his story. His father, the giant man who’d been our family friend in July 8th, had died of starvation, just like mine. And there were more similarities between our lives. Amazingly, his sister had also gone to China under mysterious circumstances that I knew not to ask about. He hadn’t heard from her since. I told him about Bong Sook and his face took on a mournful expression.
Hyo Sung introduced the others to me. There was Moon Ho, who was maybe eighteen or nineteen years old, shorter than me, with big, widely spaced eyes. His shirt had more holes than it had material and his face was dirty. But I noticed something about Moon Ho immediately: he had presence. He looked capable; he had that calm that men who know what they’re doing in life have. I sensed that he was the brains of the Association. This man is cunning, I said to myself.
The other guy was named Dae Ho. He’d been abandoned at five years of age and nearly died of exposure while sleeping on the street his first spring as a Kkotjebi. He had curly hair and, like the others, an unwashed face, which usually wore a kind but dumb expression. He often served as the butt of our jokes and never interrupted when the rest of us were arguing about something.
I got along with Moon Ho quite well. I felt he had things to teach me. I could tell that he’d traveled around more than Hyo Sung. He told me he’d been left on his own at an early age—maybe ten or eleven—and I realized we had things in common. Hyo Sung always had his mother, and that made him a little softer than Moon Ho and me. If we didn’t make it on our own, no one was going to rescue us.
The next day, we went to the market, which I knew was controlled by a group of older homeless teens known as “the gangster brothers.” They ran the place. They decided when you could graduate from begging to pickpocketing. They decided who could steal where. Some orphans were restricted to the vegetable market. Others could work only in the household goods section. You might get away with wandering outside your assigned zone once or twice. You could always say, “I was following a guy and he walked from one area to another. What am I supposed to do, give him up because he wanted a bite to eat?” That might work a few times, but if you did it too often, the gangster brothers would hurt you in front of everyone.
In Hoeryong, to be a gangster brother meant you were at the top of the heap. They had each earned their spot: either they had beaten three guys at once in a fight or they had refused to give up while getting pummeled. The first result meant you were uncommonly strong, the second that you were stubborn. Both were very good qualities.
When we went to the market to buy things, the people there saw Moon Ho and nodded respectfully at him. I noticed the gangster brothers, who were always so aggressive, avoided any kind of confrontation with Moon Ho. I’d never seen that happen before.
“Why are they avoiding him?” I asked Hyo Sung.
“Have you seen Moon Ho fight?”
I shook my head.
“He’s really fast,” he said. “And really crazy.”
I had been around the market a lot but had never seen Moon Ho in action. Perhaps he never really fought at all. Perhaps it was how he looked that got him his reputation. This is the ultimate power, I thought: to earn respect just by the fierce expression on your face.
We began to go out at night, the four of us, stealing. We picked locks in apartments and stole the entire contents, cleaning out the places of pottery, food, and firewood. If we couldn’t pick the lock, we smashed it open. My first night out, we hopped a fence and plundered a field planted with ripe onions. Dae Ho kept a lookout for the owner while the rest of us ripped the onions out of the ground and stuffed them in a bag. In fifteen minutes, we filled our bags. I immediately saw the advantages of being with the Association. If the owner burst out of the house, we’d each have only a twenty-five percent chance of getting caught.
After we filled up our bags, we hopped the fence and headed back to the fifth-floor apartment where the Association members lived. Here I met the Association’s manager, a thin, elegant man in his thirties named Yoon Chul, who had been away the afternoon I arrived. The group handed over all of their takings to Yoon Chul, and in return he provided food, shelter, and alcohol.
Hyo Sung detailed my qualifications for Yoon Chul: I knew a lot of people in the market, I was big for my age, and I’d been on my own for many months. Also, I had gotten as far as sixth grade in school, further than most orphans. I was, all in all, an above-average recruit. My qualifications and Hyo Sung’s word were enough for Yoon Chul to accept me into the Association.
Every day we would lounge around the apartment, singing songs and drinking. We played round after round of cards, hooting and laughing. The loser would have to go out and buy North Korean moonshine, very bitter and strong. How terrible that stuff was! I’d never really been a drinker before, but it was like a rite of passage with the Association. When Yoon Chul handed you the glass, you had to gulp it down in one swallow. If you tried to sip it, he would fill the glass to the top again and hand it back with a smile. To be a thief was a man’s job.
We had to watch out for three groups: the owners of the homes we raided, the police, and soldiers. Thieves with a lot of money (unlike us) could buy off the police with a bribe, but the soldiers were different. Growing up, I had always wanted to be one, and I’d seriously considered joining the army before realizing that, with my family background—a sister missing in China, a mother known to be a smuggler—I would never be able to become an officer and make good money. My childhood dream of being a spy and fighting the Yankees had ended. I felt a trace of sadness over that.
But by this time, the reputation of North Korean troops, once so high, had begun to suffer. I knew soldiers assigned to poor rural areas who were malnourished and frail (while those in Pyongyang and along the border with China often lived very well). This was shocking to me, having grown up believing the slogan I saw on the cement billboards: “Soldiers first!” Now I heard stories of troops whose eyes bulged from their sunken faces; even though the government wasn’t feeding them, they were expected to march and burn calories as if they were still living in the glory days.
When soldiers came out of the army, they began robbing ordinary people. There was nothing anyone could do. You saw them in the mountains or on the roads that connected one small city to another. They set up roadblocks and shook down everyone who came by. If you didn’t have money, they beat you. We stopped going to the mountains after nightfall because you didn’t want to walk the roads by yourself.
Even real soldiers could turn dangerous. These young men were mostly eighteen or nineteen years old, and the collars of their uniforms hung loose on their scrawny necks. In normal life, they would have been pathetic—I could have beaten one to a pulp. But with soldiers, the fight is never the end. If you beat up a soldier, he would come back with his squad and attack your whole family. It was once a glorious thing to wear the olive-green uniform with the bright red collar. But during the famine, we had a name for those uniforms: “tiger skins.”
The soldiers were insatiable. We learned to avoid them. But staying free in North Korea was easier said than done.
Chapter
Thirty-Two
* * *
I WAS HAPPIER THAN at any time since I became homeless. Depending on how successful we’d been that day, I had food and drink. I had somewhere to sleep every night. I had my childhood friend Hyo Sung and the cunning Moon Ho to teach me how to
be a better thief, and I had Yoon Chul, who showed me something else: how to be an optimist. “If your mind is strong,” he told me, “you can survive anything.” I was luckier than ninety-five percent of the Kkotjebi. I didn’t aspire to anything higher, and never thought of leaving North Korea.
Being in the Association was like having a full-time job, with assigned hours. Our day would begin at about 8 p.m. We had to be in position by 8:45, at the house we’d scouted the night before. That was the hour when North Korean television broadcasts the dramas and homemade tearjerkers that the whole country watched. Movies and TV series had become even more important for those people still affected by the famine. When you spent all day hunting for food, bent over in the mountains or crouched in supplication in the market, this was the only time you could sit down and have a rest. Really, the entire nation shut down at 8:45 for at least an hour. If you ever wanted to invade North Korea, that would be the time to do it, because half the country would be at a neighbor’s house waiting for a show to begin.
The third night I went out stealing with the Association, we waited for the sound of a soap opera’s opening theme before breaking into someone’s accordion house. After a few hard smacks, the lock snapped open and we were inside. We found a bag of uncooked rice and a few small vegetables. There was also some cooked rice that had just been prepared. Perhaps it was for the next night’s dinner, but in any case we descended on it like wolves. I took a spoon and bent over my plate—we were so confident that the occupants wouldn’t be back, we decided to eat the rice right there in the house—but as soon as I dug into the food my hand began to shake. I relaxed my fingers, then gripped the spoon again. But it was no good. My hand was shaking so violently the rice wouldn’t stay on. I had to drop it back onto the pile.
The others were watching me and shook their heads. They must have wondered whether I had what it took to be a member of the Association.
Was it nerves? I suppose so. I had never been inside someone’s house before as a robber. It seemed so intimate to steal the rice still warm from their pot.
We returned to our base and turned everything over to Yoon Chul.
I was doubtful at first about his role in the Association. Here he was, sitting in his apartment while we were out stealing things and risking getting caught by the authorities. What risks did he take? But slowly I learned to respect him. His wife had left him when the famine struck, unable to deal with caring for their two children, a three-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl. This wasn’t shocking. It was actually more shocking that Yoon Chul had kept his kids rather than run away himself. So many Kkotjebi had living parents who had dumped them at the market one day, unable to feed them and unwilling to watch them starve. Yoon Chul’s attitude was different: “My children are going to make it, whatever I have to do.” I admired him for that.
Yoon Chul never told me what he did before becoming a manager of thieves. But he was very good at his new position. The four of us decided what to steal, because so much depended on opportunity on the particular night we were out working—who had left his bike with only a skimpy lock on it, whose field was coming ripe. But Yoon Chul was a wizard at getting a good price for our stolen goods. His connections were unbeatable.
We told ourselves we were the men who balanced out the world. If you had too much, we would come to your house and relieve you of the surplus. It might seem cynical, but we really believed this. If you had called us criminals, we would have fought you. But the reality of our work never matched our illusions, because the rich had taller fences and stronger locks to keep us out. We ended up stealing from ordinary people.
Once, when we stole a bicycle, I went to see my father’s friend who’d lent us money when my dad was dying. This man’s job was repairing bicycles, a very lucrative trade because transportation was so important and the roads were so bad. I found him in his shop, which smelled pleasantly of rubber and oil. “Some of my friends stole a bike,” I said, “and I’m getting a commission to sell it. Can you help me?” I didn’t want to admit I’d become a thief myself.
My father’s friend looked at me and saw the shame in my eyes. He shook his head. “Kwang Jin, in these times you may die of starvation, or a beating, or freezing. Death is everywhere, so you must be ready to do anything to survive. Why do you go out and steal too?”
I nodded. But deep down, I still didn’t feel right about what I was doing. It was hard to get rid of that emotion, planted in me by my father so many years ago.
My father’s friend didn’t end up buying the bike. Despite his concern for me, he offered me only half what it was really worth.
Chapter
Thirty-Three
* * *
IN MY FIRST few weeks as a member of the Association, Moon Ho and I became close. We were always talking, telling stories about how we survived in Hoeryong. And soon I realized that the Association wasn’t as tight as I thought. Moon Ho was scheming.
“Why should we give Yoon Chul a hundred percent of everything we get?” he said to Hyo Sung and me one day as we walked home from another night of thieving. “Shouldn’t we be able to keep ten percent for ourselves? Is that so wrong? I’d like to buy some snacks, maybe save up for a new pair of shoes. But Yoon Chul takes everything! Why should it be that way?”
The Association was divided. Moon Ho wanted a bigger cut. Hyo Sung wanted to be loyal; his mother, after all, was a manager. “We gave our word,” he said. “Yoon Chul takes care of us. We can’t go behind his back.”
I thought it best to stay neutral. I was new to the Association, and I valued Moon Ho’s friendship. I couldn’t afford to make enemies. The deciding vote fell to Dae Ho, and dreaming of those snacks he remembered from childhood—chips and homemade sour candy—he voted with Moon Ho.
Soon we were going to the street vendors once or twice a week, spending our ten percent on schoolboy things. Even as he stuffed his mouth, Hyo Sung would mutter, “This isn’t right.” We ignored him. I decided one day to plunk everything down for a piece of chocolate. I had never tasted chocolate in my life. It was a small piece, the size of my thumb, wrapped in an old piece of waxy paper. I paid the woman twenty won and popped the chocolate into my mouth.
“Oh, boy,” I mumbled as I chewed the delicious stuff. The chocolate seemed to pour through my veins, coating them in that sugary warmth. I wanted more.
Yoon Chul soon figured out something was wrong. I’m not sure if Hyo Sung had said something to his mother, but a few days later Yoon Chul tapped me on the shoulder.
“I have to go see a friend in Manyang. You know that area, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Come with me, then. It’ll be good to have someone to walk with.”
Manyang was about a forty-minute walk from the city center, but we weren’t on the road for more than five minutes before Yoon Chul asked me something odd.
“What do you think of Moon Ho?”
My chemical sensor buzzed a warning. This was not a normal question. Yoon Chul was the boss. Why should he care what two of his workers thought about each other? I was immediately on guard.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been watching him,” Yoon Chul said. “He’s very smart, you know? But also very sly. I think he wants to do things for himself.”
My nerves began to jangle. If I sided with Yoon Chul, the other boys would consider me a snitch. If I sided with Moon Ho, Yoon Chul might consider it a betrayal and throw me out of the Association. Or worse.
I didn’t want to sell out my friend, so I simply said, “I’m a new member, and I want us all to do well. Whatever he’s thinking, Moon Ho is still our friend. If we kick him out, who’s going to take his place? If he’s doing jobs behind your back, that can be fixed.”
This was what Yoon Chul had taught me. Be optimistic. Look for the positive way forward. I was admitting that, OK, we’ve been a little bad. All of us are taking a bit for ourselves. But it’s not the end of the world. We can work it out.
&n
bsp; Yoon Chul said nothing more, and we walked to his friend’s house in Manyang in silence. But I could see he was thinking about what I’d said. I believe he respected the fact that I hadn’t snitched on Moon Ho. I hadn’t told him what he wanted to hear.
He never brought up Moon Ho again. That was a lesson I learned that day. Even if life has made you a criminal, you can be true to yourself. In fact, you have to be true to yourself.
Joining the Association was the luckiest day of my life up until then. It gave me shelter and taught me many things. My one source of sorrow was the memories of my family. When we came back to the apartment after a long night of stealing, Hyo Sung’s mother would fuss over her son and they would talk and laugh. I saw the affection between them and missed my mother even more. Before bedtime, I would daydream of becoming a millionaire and buying my uncle’s house—the fanciest one I’d ever seen. I would send agents to find my mother and my sister and reunite my family in the grand house. We would eat whatever we wanted and watch movies from China all day long. Or my mother and Bong Sook would return to me and I would go to school, dressed in new clothes and carrying a fresh black book bag.
Every night, I fell asleep thinking of Bong Sook. We’ll all be together again, I told myself. Kwang Jin, you must find her.
Chapter
Thirty-Four
* * *
THERE WERE GOOD and bad days with the Association. Sometimes we came home with nothing to eat or sell and so went hungry until the next night. But still, I was eating more than I had in months. I put on a little weight, rising from ninety pounds to close to one hundred. My clothes fit snugly instead of hanging loosely off my bony shoulders. My face filled out and my ribs retreated back underneath my skin.