Under the Same Sky

by Joseph Kim

  * * *

  THE DAYS BEGAN at 5:30 a.m. with the guards shouting at us to get up. We would go out into the field in front of the building and sing for fifteen minutes. Since the gangster brothers ran everything, you could forget about political tunes. Instead, we sang old songs that the kids had been taught in high school. Having been a Kkotjebi in the market and having spent my time drinking with the Association, I’d never really learned the songs, so I moved my lips silently while trying to pick up the lyrics. I was afraid if I messed up, I’d be beaten. But honestly, the gangsters didn’t need that excuse.

  After the singing, we’d walk to the nearby river and wash our faces and hands. Arriving back at the center around 6:30, we’d eat a meal of corn mush and soup, which consisted mostly of water and salt. At 7:00 we’d go out to work and not come back until well after dark—around 9:30 p.m. We’d eat our dinner and gather in the girls’ room for a round of orak heh, or musical performances. We sat in a big circle, and one boy or girl would get up and sing while a few others would shuffle around in a dance. Like everyone else, the performers were so exhausted they could barely stand, and they had to catch themselves from collapsing on the floor. Anyone who stopped the orak heh was set upon by the gangster brothers and thrashed.

  The first night, I desperately wanted to sleep. Blackness kept stealing over my brain. If I slept, though, I was afraid I wouldn’t wake up. We had to keep singing for the team leaders, who wanted to show that their members had spirit. But most of all, the older inmates wanted to demonstrate that they owned us. So they had us perform these ridiculous songs.

  I was shy and apprehensive. I willed the brothers not to pick me to perform. Of course, I was the first one chosen that day. I stood up, my hands shaking, my throat hot and dry. I didn’t know any cheerful songs and instead began croaking out the first thing that came into my head, a mournful dirge about a son and his dying mother. I’m not a very good singer, and I watched the faces of the gangster brothers as I forced out the words. They looked confused at first, their mouths hanging open, but this confusion quickly turned to anger.

  “What the hell is that?” one of them yelled. “We don’t sing songs like that here. Sit down!”

  I sat down, my skin burning with embarrassment. It turned out that sad songs were forbidden at the detention center because they “disturbed the good atmosphere.” That is, they made everyone depressed.

  I was never chosen to perform at orak heh again, which was fine with me.

  Things got worse. The next day, the guard with the hoe handle, the boy who’d fallen so far in the world, attacked me when I couldn’t find my shoe. After that, whenever he saw me, he’d give me a hard slap or a blow with his stick. There was no rhyme or reason to the violence. It was sudden and completely irrational.

  That night, as I lay on the floor, afraid to sleep, I heard a commotion. It was the gangsters again. This time they were walking through the crowd. A cold fear gripped my insides as I realized they were grabbing people like me—new arrivals.

  I heard the gangsters yelling: “Where is your money? Don’t show me your pockets—where’ve you hidden your cash?” They demanded cash from each new inmate. We had come in off the streets, so we should have something on us, a few won at the very least. If you didn’t have money, you were knocked down and kicked in the face. When they came to me, I could see their teeth and eyes in the darkness. Their breath smelled of alcohol. Where are they getting liquor in here? I wondered.

  “Give us your money,” one of the men said, sounding bored.

  I reached into my pocket. I had a few won I was going to spend on snacks. A hand snatched the money out of my palm.

  “Is this all?”

  “Yes, everything.”

  I sensed their massed shapes in front of me. I feared a hand or a brick might smash me out of the darkness. I bowed my head, thinking, Pass me by. Pass me by.

  I felt the men move on.

  Nothing made sense. Another night early in my stay, I woke up at around two or three in the morning. I got up off my mat and saw the night guard watching the sleeping prisoners.

  I stepped over several boys and made my way to him. I bowed.

  “May I use the bathroom, please?”

  He turned to look at me. “No,” he said calmly.

  I was stunned by this answer. My bladder was painfully swollen. What objection could he have to letting an inmate relieve himself? But I couldn’t risk asking why. I lay back down and stayed awake until morning, the pressure in my bladder growing until I was sure it would explode like an infected appendix.

  If I am ever a guard, I thought, I will let every boy pee when he needs to.

  I had no peace at the center. Even when I was out of sight, I worried that the guard with the stick was sneaking up on me, ready for another round of humiliation. I seethed with a violent hatred, but what could I do?

  I was trapped, like the other inmates.

  Chapter

  Thirty-Eight

  * * *

  THREE WEEKS INTO my sentence, I fought the hated guard and won. Now it was my job to interview all the new arrivals. “What’s your name?” I would ask them. “Where are you from? What’s your crime?” I tried not to be too intimidating. If it was their first time in detention, many boys shook with fear. I wrote all the details down in a book. The team leaders read it through and estimated how much they could extract from the newbies. It was their price for survival.

  My other duty, of course, was to watch the prisoners at night, keep order, and make sure no one escaped. I had to stay awake most of the day, snatching twenty minutes of sleep when I could, then remain vigilant through the dark hours. The leaders didn’t want this job—they were too eager to sleep. But I was grateful for it. Even though I barely closed my eyes, it often kept me from getting beaten up. I wasn’t a leader, but I was an employee. My status had risen.

  I won’t lie: it felt good to have power. I had boys older than me approach where I stood and bow deeply. “How did you sleep, hyung?” they’d ask (hyung means “older brother”). Most of the time I wouldn’t answer them; it didn’t pay for me to become too friendly with the inmates. They would ask permission to use the bathroom and I usually said yes—I was still traumatized by the memory of my own experience—but I couldn’t be seen as a pushover. Every so often I would bark, “No! Lie down!” and the inmate would walk away, crestfallen. If I were seen as soft, the gang members would start victimizing me. I had to make an example of some boys.

  The leaders abused me despite my new position. Often at night around eleven, they would send me to the local store to get snacks or drinks for them. When I returned, they would look at me as if they’d never seen me before and begin slapping my face. There was one brother in particular, Small Pig was his nickname, who liked to attack me. He had a round face and very short hair. His face was such a perfect circle it was mesmerizing. Whenever he saw me, he would smile and come toward me. I would bow, but as soon as I rose to full height, he would shout, “Your back is not straight!” and slap me hard across the face.

  When the mood in the detention center was dark, more people joined in the beatings, until one time four or five people tried to kick my head in. The trick was to fall to the floor and protect your skull. When several people were attacking you, there wasn’t much room, and they eventually got tired of wrestling with one another to land a good shot. You can’t ask why you’re being beaten, because then you’d suffer more. The rest of the night, my torso and shoulders throbbed and my cuts festered, oozing blood.

  I stood guard until dawn, staring at the moonlight as it came through the holes in the roof or cast its glow on the yard outside, which appeared lunar and peaceful. My eyelids would begin to droop, and it seemed someone was singing in my ear: Sleep, sleep. But if the leaders found me napping, or if one of the boys escaped, I would get a severe beating meant to maim me. I might also lose my position and be forced to work in the fields again. Two or three o’clock in the morning was the wor
st time. There was no coffee to help you stay awake. I was barely able to stand up.

  Often on those nights I heard screams, terrible high-pitched screams. It could only mean one thing: an inmate was being raped in one of the other rooms, forced to be the sex toy of this or that older man. (The victims were always girls; I never heard of a boy being sexually abused at the detention center.) I wanted to stop my ears, but I knew the sound would still penetrate. I closed my eyes and dreamt of escaping.

  The only time I could be alone was while bathing in the nearby river. It was just a creek, really, maybe ten or twelve feet across. On a hot day the water was clean and fresh on our faces. There was no soap or shampoo, but when I felt the first shock of coolness, I had a sudden urge to live longer. Nothing else gave me that feeling. Even food. If I had enough of food, I would eat uncontrollably and it would hurt my shrunken stomach. But river water was like the promise of another kind of life.

  One day, a young boy, ten or eleven years old, was brought to the detention center. I heard he was from Undok, where my mother was born, and this gave me a feeling of kinship. I saw how frail the boy was, his ribs visible through a torn green shirt. I didn’t think he would survive very long. It seemed that he couldn’t stand up to even the most casual beating.

  I took him aside and questioned him gently. His parents had abandoned him when he was six or seven, and he’d been floating around ever since. Every day he’d get on the train in Undok, beg for food, and hop off. But one time the train left the station before he could get off. He had to stay on until Hoeryong, and he was arrested there.

  I kind of adopted the boy. I made sure that he had a good sleeping spot near me and enough to eat. The center’s cook, a twenty-three-year-old woman who was an employee, not an inmate, had taken a liking to me. She was very pretty; I and the other night guard, Kook Cheol, would often watch her and marvel at her beauty. Kook Cheol was nineteen, a former leader of the beggars in the marketplace and a typical Kkotjebi: energetic, smart, and very bitter toward life. When he was eleven, his mother had taken him to the market and asked him to wait while she went to the food court to get his favorite snack. He stayed there for hours, but she never returned. Eventually he became a beggar and a pickpocket. His hatred of his mother was something to see. “That bitch is probably in China living the good life with some man,” he’d tell me. Like many orphans who’d been abandoned, he had a recurring fantasy: he’d become rich and buy a mansion in Hoeryong and one day his mother would come begging at his door. “And I will take a heaping bowl of white rice and eat it, all of it, six inches from her face, as she watches.” I had the same fantasy, not about my mother but about Small Grandfather.

  (Ironically, Kook Cheol’s mother showed up one day, months later. But instead of tormenting her or turning her away, Kook Cheol took her in and supported her by pickpocketing for many months afterward. His fantasies, like many of the Kkotjebi’s, were really a masked appeal for love.)

  Whenever the beautiful cook smiled at me, Kook Cheol would glare angrily and I would laugh. But I wasn’t looking for romance; what I wanted was food. So I asked the cook, with all the charm I could muster, for extra rations. She smiled slyly, and at the next meal there was a heaping portion of corn mush on my plate. I shared it with the boy. I started giving him snacks in the evening and allowed him to use the latrine whenever he wanted.

  One night, one of the team leaders ordered me to take some wood and coal to his parents’ house. It was about three in the morning when I left with a wooden cart; the little boy and two other inmates came with me. On the way, we got so tired we had to stop. I told the others we’d rest for half an hour, and we lay down in the middle of a municipal garden and fell asleep. The grass felt so good underneath my head. For me, the garden was like a five-star hotel.

  When I woke, the sun was up. It was at least six in the morning. The little boy was awake, happily watching the early-morning pedestrians walk by.

  I looked around. One inmate was still asleep, curled up on the grass.

  “Where’s the other one?” I asked the little boy, sitting up quickly.

  “He ran away.”

  The ingrate, I thought. I’ll suffer for that.

  I looked at the boy. He was regarding me calmly. “Why didn’t you run, too?” I asked.

  The boy’s eyes registered shock. “But that would mean you’d be in trouble! How could I?”

  I laughed. We got up, roused the other boy, and resumed pulling the cart to our destination. It was hard work, but I felt glad that, out of all this horror, I’d found friendship with at least one other human being.

  It was the first time I’d ever taken care of someone else. I protected the little boy because, if I didn’t, I felt I would drown in wickedness.

  I will not become one of them, I told myself, any more than necessary. I didn’t know I would have to sink much lower before my chance at redemption appeared.

  Chapter

  Thirty-Nine

  * * *

  THE BOY ESCAPED a few weeks later. One day, he ran away from his work group and I never saw him again. I felt sad that I didn’t get to say goodbye, but at least he was free.

  But I sank further into cruelty. Being the night guard was harder than I thought it would be. If someone disobeyed and I didn’t punish him, I would be beaten and replaced—the team leaders made this clear. So I beat those who refused my orders; I beat them with my fists as they looked at me with hatred. Once I took a leather jacket off the back of a new boy and kept it as my own. I took it because I wanted it; that’s what the streets of Hoeryong had taught me.

  The leaders had another scheme for making money, one that I shared in. The children who had no survival skills were sent to farms or construction sites to work, but those like me were employed in our old jobs, as thieves. Instead of staying at the detention center during the day, Kook Cheol and I were sent to the market to steal. The gangster brothers gave us a quota we had to meet each day—say, five hundred won—which we turned over to them when we returned. The rest we kept for ourselves.

  I now became a pickpocket. Kook Cheol and his Kkotjebi friends were my teachers.

  At first I served as a spotter. When we went to the market in the afternoon, I began to look for anyone who appeared out of place. Farmers were easy to pick out: they wore heavy, ankle-high work boots. Meanwhile, the teenagers from the country would dress up like they were going to a party, which market day was for them. They tended to look around slowly, as if there was a video camera in their head recording everything for the folks back home, and they studied even the small buildings with real interest.

  Once I found a mark, I would watch him. What is he interested in? Is he shopping for a new cooking pot, a television, a radio? If he wants a radio, is he looking at the more expensive models (good news) or the cheapest ones (bad)? You have to know what your target is interested in, because you have to anticipate where he’s going to be in two or three minutes, so you can position your friends to rob him. Is he going to talk to that seller who’s got a set of bowls in his hands? Is he just browsing? A bumpkin who is negotiating a price is a distracted bumpkin, and that was good for us pickpockets.

  Most important, I had to figure out where the mark kept his money. When I knew where the cash was, I would tap that place on my body so the pickpockets had the right spot. Some people stashed their money in their back pocket, but they were a rarity; even someone from July 8th knew that was the pickpocket’s favorite location. Others had a bag they stuffed their won into. After a few hours at the market, I learned that about eighty percent of North Koreans put their cash in their front pants pocket.

  After spotting for a few days, I began to pick pockets myself. I brushed up against a mark and slipped my hand into his pocket. This way he had two distractions: the seller he was bargaining with and this rude young man who had bumped into him. I would grab whatever I found—sunglasses, a key ring—and saunter on.

  Kook Cheol and the others were razor men. They car
ried the thin sharp blades between their index and middle fingers as they strolled through the market pretending to be looking for a bargain. When they saw a woman carrying a canvas bag or purse, they would sidle up to her and, while leaning over to look at a seller’s wares, slice open the bottom of her bag. In their hand would go, and out it would come with a little cash or merchandise. Some guys even used long tweezers to reach into people’s pockets without them feeling anything and extract their money. In many cases, your hand is too thick—the mark will feel it fumbling around in his pocket. So the thief stands to the side and just behind the victim and slips these long-nosed extractors (used in North Korea by dentists) into the bag.

  In the market, we had not only the police on our side, but the sellers too. That’s because if a trader shouted at a victim that he was being pickpocketed, his business suffered. The other Kkotjebi would single him out for rough treatment. Out of nowhere, he might find a shower of stones raining down on him. Or he would become the target of all the thieves in the market, who were punishing him for betraying one of their own. We felt that stealing was all we had, our only way to survive, and if the traders were going to take it away, we would fight back. But unconsciously, we made moral decisions. We avoided stealing from pregnant women, for instance, or young mothers with toddlers. It was just understood.

  Kook Cheol and I would watch out for each other. I would take his guard hours when he wanted to go pickpocketing in the market; he thanked me by bringing me snacks when he sneaked back into the detention center. One day, I asked him to return the favor by taking my shift so I could go check on my mom. He agreed.

  After two months in the center, I went out in search of my mother.