by Joseph Kim
“They threw them overboard! And although these men had been on an island for years, do you know they hadn’t even learned to swim? So they drowned.”
I looked at Small Grandfather, but he just kept walking along, his eyes facing straight ahead. This, apparently, was the end of the story.
For years, I dismissed his little tale. It was a simple one of wrongdoing and punishment, and my small grandfather was a great fan of people getting what they deserved. (How much mercy had he shown my mother? Or me, for that matter?) But I think I did him a disservice. He wasn’t so clear-cut a character, in retrospect, and his mind was deep if not particularly kind. When I think of the story now, I believe he was telling me that my predicament, living as a shabbily dressed teenager with nowhere to call home, was not my fault. The government hadn’t educated the three thieves, or given them a trade, but instead pitched them back into the world with only one option: to steal. In my most charitable interpretation of the story and his reasons for telling it to me, my small grandfather was saying: Don’t blame yourself. Your torn clothing and your matted hair are not who you are. Take heart.
It was a very unusual thing for him to say. He’d been a supporter of the government, but he was telling me subversive stories about how officials didn’t take care of their people. It made me think of Small Grandfather as a sad person. Perhaps he didn’t feel right about what he’d done to my mother and me.
Maybe I misunderstood this old man. I sometimes believe that, deep inside, he felt remorse. Maybe.
Chapter
Forty-Three
* * *
IN 2004 I turned fourteen, and when the harvest came in we stored away the crop for the new year. It’s traditional in North Korea at this time, September 12 to be exact, to go to the cemetery and pour alcohol on the graves of your ancestors, thanking them for the good harvest. Then you take a portion of the new corn and make a meal.
It’s like Thanksgiving in America in many ways. A celebration. The whole family gathers from all parts of North Korea; the roads are clogged with people on their way to join their kin. Only the rich go by motorcycle; everyone else forms parallel lines on each side of the roads, heading to their home place on foot. Once they get there, kids escape from their parents and play with their cousins for hours at a time. Everyone eats well. It was always one of my favorite holidays.
But this year, September 12 only served as a reminder that my family had been thrown to the winds. I went to my father’s grave alone with a small bottle of homemade liquor that Small Grandfather gave me. It’s traditional to say some words over the grave, such as “Father, I’m here. Thank you for your sacrifice over the years.” But those words were merely ritual. I couldn’t think of anything from my own life to say. Despite Small Grandfather’s story, I was embarrassed by what had become of me, and felt there was nothing to be thankful for. I couldn’t say what I felt inside: “I’m tired and I don’t know what to do.” That wouldn’t have been right. So I just stood there quietly, my mind drifting through memories of my family, the sad times and the happy times.
The fall hadn’t brought a bounty. All I had was what I’d managed to steal from Small Grandfather. My mother was living with another man, my sister was in China and in unknown circumstances. When you are alone on Thanksgiving, far from the ones you love, with nowhere to call home, the holiday is empty and painful.
When my work for Small Grandfather was done, I went to Sung Min’s apartment. He was working as a security guard at a hospital, not making much money. He would steal a box of nails or some lumber from his job, and my mother would go and sell it in the market. But they were losing weight; their skin hung on their bones in dry, loose ridges.
I stole at night and slept during the day. One morning I returned to the apartment and found my mother gone. “She’s been arrested again,” Sung Min told me mournfully. She’d gone to see a broker about smuggling her into China, and he had informed on her. My mother was sitting in a jail in Manyang, on suspicion of plotting to escape North Korea.
My heart dropped. This was the third time my mother had been arrested. The authorities were sure to give her a long sentence.
I knew Manyang, of course. I went to see my mother, bringing some cornmeal powder and two aspirin that I’d bought. The guards wouldn’t let me see her, so I left my little gifts and asked them to pass them to her. I left with a heavy heart.
Later, my mother wrote Sung Min that she had cried when shed’d been given the aspirin and told I’d brought it. She was seriously ill at the time, and the medicine helped her recover. When I heard that, I wished I’d spent all my money and bought her a dozen. But perhaps it wasn’t just the aspirin that gave her strength; it was knowing that I was thinking of her.
Time went by. I lived on the street. That year was the same thing repeated day after day, with no weekends or holidays. Get up at noon. Wait for dark. Steal. Eat. Sleep. There are entire months that are blank to me.
The summer of 2005 came and Small Grandfather hired me again to watch his corn. After we had harvested the last of the shucked ears, gathered wood for the coming winter, broken down the camp, and organized everything for next year’s planting, my small grandfather surprised me. “Do you want to go to school?” he asked.
“Yes, of course,” I said.
“Then you will come live with me.”
That was all. Suddenly I was readmitted to the house I’d been exiled from three years before. Perhaps this was the lesson Small Grandfather had been teaching me: you’re not a thief at heart, you’re a schoolboy who’s had bad luck.
I was so excited to be a student again, a high school junior. I was fifteen now, and this was my chance to return to a beloved place that had become a vague memory to me.
Chapter
Forty-Four
* * *
MY FIRST DAY at school, I showed up bright and early. It was the same place where I’d been a student when I was ten, a one-story building of painted white brick. The classrooms had big windows with small square panes, dark green desks with yellow chairs, the paint fading after years of use. I felt as if I’d walked back into a world that had gone on seamlessly without me. Here were the same kids I’d known back in fourth and fifth grade, the same boys I’d wrestled and had adventures with years before, the same girls I’d played with (though Hyang Mi, my boyhood crush, was going to a different school). Everything was the same, as if I’d walked out the school doors only a few weeks before. But of course this was an illusion. Things inside all of us had changed.
I was wearing a new uniform, dark blue trousers with a five-button jacket. I was carrying a fresh new notebook in my bag. And I quickly found a few of my old friends: Ahn Jin Hyuk, Kim Goom Hyuk, and Kim Myung Il.
I had known the three in elementary school, and they were now in the cool group. The girls I’d known as awkward, lumpy-faced eleven-year-olds had blossomed into poised and beautiful creatures. I was shocked. Some mysterious change had occurred inside them. Their hair was combed. Their figures were full. I had been away for three years, so it appeared this had happened overnight.
School was strange to me. Myung Il, who’d been a bit of a clown in elementary school, was now known as Ax, because he was supposedly a scary guy. I said, “But it’s Myung Il. He’s not scary at all!” Ahn also surprised me: he challenged me to an arm wrestle one day and I scoffed at him. “Are you kidding me? I’ve been working on farms and fighting on the streets.” But finally I agreed, and I couldn’t believe it when he won. I realized he’d been eating well for four years, while I’d been subsisting on one or two meals a day. It was shocking that this boy was stronger than me.
The first class I walked into was English, and I immediately sensed trouble. I could speak at that time perhaps three or four words: “Hi,” “OK,” “no,” and maybe one other. My brain was frozen in place as a twelve-year-old. Of course all the other students had been attending school regularly, and as soon as I walked in I heard this odd buzzing, the clipped sounds of Engl
ish in Korean mouths. My classmates were so far ahead of me. I stared at my old friends and realized that the world had passed me by.
The teacher spoke indecipherable words. My friends, a little bored, began to write things down in their notebooks. I just stared at mine, an expanse of white that would never be filled up. Academically, I was doomed the first day I came back. There was no way I would ever catch up; North Korean schools don’t have any remedial classes. If you’ve dropped behind, you’re lost.
But socially I was in heaven. All the things my friends and I had dreamed of doing when we were twelve years old we could do now. When I walked out to the schoolyard after classes, my friends turned to me, cigarettes in their hands. I started smoking, which in North Korea is a symbol of adulthood. Then we flirted with the girls.
I had a bit of a mystique now. All the other Kkotjebi my classmates knew were dead or under the control of the Saro-cheong, which made me seem like I was special. They never faulted me for becoming homeless; they were more mature now and realized it wasn’t my choice.
Not everyone was so understanding, however. The head of my school’s Saro-cheong division was one of my teachers, an aggressive guy who kept tabs on the students’ lives. He was an intimidating person who relished the power he had over us. On my fourth day in school, he saw me and walked over.
“So, you left the market?” he said with a smile.
I was a bit shocked. He was reminding me that I’d been a homeless castoff for three years.
I didn’t know what to say. I nodded.
I could see that some of the students—I noticed two pretty girls in particular—were watching us.
“Are you going to continue coming to school this time?” he demanded in a loud voice.
“Yes.” I grimaced.
“Good. Make sure you do.”
I felt my blood boil.
I continued my lackluster ways in school, but now I had the very good excuse that I was way behind. During the school day, I would hang out near the hearth, located in a back room behind the main classroom. Here a fire was kept going all day to heat the building (there was no boiler or central heating system). My pals shared their cigarettes and gossiped, not bothering to do their work, because in North Korea good grades without family connections meant nothing. The fireplace was hooked up to a chimney, and if we spotted any teacher walking past the door, we’d blow the smoke from our mouths into the fire. We had loose cigarettes that we passed around one at a time. But it was a cool thing, an adult thing to do, and we were addicted.
One day a teacher passed by the back room and the boy who’d just taken a drag stared at him in horror. He managed to flick the cigarette into the fire without the teacher seeing, but there was still the problem of the smoke in his lungs. The teacher walked in and studied him.
“Breathe it out,” he said calmly. Our friend only stared, his face growing redder and redder. “Breathe it . . .” With an explosive pah! the smoke came belching out of his mouth, right in the teacher’s face.
The teacher grabbed my friend by the neck and hauled him away. The rest of us just laughed. But the others would go back to class and earn A’s and B’s, while I was sure my report card would be a list of miserable C’s and D’s.
Did I think of my father and his love of learning? I did, but I pushed those thoughts away. This is asking too much. I’m not superhuman, I told myself. Let me enjoy my little taste of life while I have it. It’s bound to be brief, like most of life’s pleasures.
I was right about that.
Chapter
Forty-Five
* * *
AFTER SCHOOL, I would stay out with my friends, smoking in the streets or hanging out at one of their houses. I wouldn’t arrive back at my small grandfather’s until midnight. He’d be waiting for me, suspicion written all over his face.
“Where have you been?”
“There were extra classes,” I said. “I had to stay afterward to catch up.”
The first time I lied, he looked at me dubiously, but didn’t challenge me. But after I kept showing up at midnight reeking of cigarette smoke, he looked at me in a new way. Any trace of pity or sympathy, which had been hard to detect in the first place, was gone. Clearly I was a bad investment, a thing whose economic function had vanished.
“I have no hope for you,” he told me one night. “Tomorrow you must leave my house.”
The little idyll had lasted only a few weeks. Strange, it looms large in my memory now; I remember more details about that short time than I do about entire other years of my life. I was happy again. I’d been reunited with my old friends. I’d failed in Small Grandfather’s eyes, yes, but when you find happiness after so many years of misery, you want to savor every second. And I had.
Some days, I wonder what would have happened if I’d taken school seriously. I could have studied hard, made Small Grandfather happy, and he would have let me stay with him indefinitely.
As it happened, however, I was out on the streets the next day.
I returned to Sung Min’s house. Sung Min was kind enough to let me stay without asking anything in return. Since my mother’s so-called marriage was enough for me to call this house home, I waited there to hear news of her sentence, whether she would be sent to a labor camp.
I still had money from stealing part of Small Grandfather’s corn crop, and I spent it on food for Sung Min. We stayed in the attic, which was our secret place, and played a card game—famous in North Korea—called 44A. The game requires a great deal of strategy, and you can lose yourself in different theories of how to play it. We became obsessed, dealing cards for hours and inviting neighbors over to gamble with us. There was a guy next door, Chul Nahm, who’d been to China many times and made piles of cash, which, like most people who came into money, he had spent immediately. He was a funny guy, a talker who could meet a girl and five minutes later she would be his girlfriend. “Kwang Jin, money is like a drug,” he would tell me. “Once you have it, you can’t go back to a normal life.” But he was half starving now, just like the rest of us, eating maybe one meal a day.
Chul Nahm was planning another trip to China, where his mother lived. He described to me the meals she would make, including a beef stew, simmering in an enormous pot that she would stir continuously. As he described it, the meat gave off so much fat that the pot didn’t send up any steam. I thought about that a lot: a pot of meat as large as I was. I’d never seen such a thing. I told Chul Nahm that I would go with him to China. That was the first time I ever really considered leaving North Korea.
I was living day to day, with no conception of my future. When we ran out of money, I went to the liquor store and pawned my leather jacket, the one I’d stolen from a boy at the detention center, and bought three bottles of moonshine and some tofu. If I could eat and laugh a little with Chul Nahm, it soothed my mind and kept bad thoughts about Bong Sook away. The thought of escaping to China wavered like a mirage.
Then Chul Nahm disappeared. One day, I went to his house and he was gone. Perhaps he’d seen a chance and made a dash for the border. No one knew.
By early February 2006, I was out of money and Sung Min was broke too. I had to leave or I would become a burden to him. I had nothing to pack, not even a toothbrush. I started walking to a small town a couple of hours away, where a distant relative of mine lived. I called her Byeck Sung Aunt (Byeck Sung was the place where she lived), though she was really a fourth cousin. I had met her only once or twice before, but by now I had exhausted all my family options in Hoeryong City.
It was a raw spring day, with blustery sheets of rain sweeping along the road. I was miserable. As I walked, I saw kids and their parents holding their special Kim Jong Il birthday packages. Every year during his birthday week, all children below the age of ten receive gift packages to celebrate; each one has cookies, candy, and popcorn. The kids who had already gotten theirs carried them with great pride and anticipation of eating the boiled sweets. The holiday was two days away.
The next morning, I woke up and found her waiting for me. I had a shaky feeling in my stomach; I knew what was coming.
“Kwang Jin.”
“Yes?”
“You can’t stay here.”
I dropped my head. It had been only one night.
I gathered my things and walked out with the family. Her husband had left to go somewhere—perhaps to work, I don’t remember. At a crossroads, Byeck Sung Aunt and her children said goodbye. I waved to them and began walking back to Hoeryong. It was cold and gray outside, the light filtered through heavy, rain-bearing clouds.
After five minutes, I realized I’d left my gloves behind. I turned around, hurried back to the house, and pushed the door open without knocking. I saw Byeck Sung Aunt’s mother-in-law reaching up to the shelf where the children’s holiday packages were. I could see she was trying to get to the candy and popcorn. She turned with a stricken look on her face.