by Joseph Kim
I took the new jeans down from the top of the clothes pile, put on a fresh white shirt and my red jacket. Sneakers, too, tied perfectly with the loops of equal size. Grandma told me we were going to the grocery.
I’d observed that North Korean refugees who’d been in China a while looked different. Their faces are different. Smoother. Lotioned. North Koreans tend to hunch their shoulders and walk stiffly, but after a month or so in China they walked faster while appearing more relaxed. Their shoulders unclenched; their posture improved. Their clothes, of course, looked smart and modern.
I was terrified that despite my red coat and the Nikes, my face and my body were going to give me away. I didn’t have any lotion, but I put on some of Mr. Lee’s gel to give my hair a nice sheen, hoping that would help me blend in. Still, I was almost shaking with nerves.
The police can come for me anywhere, I thought. This wall I sleep next to is no protection against them. I might as well go outside and be a person.
We walked out of the apartment, down the stairs, and out into the street. It was spring and there were crowds everywhere. The noise, after being cooped up in my room for so long, was like the blast of a ship’s horn. I held Grandma’s arm like I was guiding this old woman around, but that was only for show. Really, I was clinging to her.
We made it to the bus stop and joined the line of people there. Suddenly a woman turned to me and stared. I froze. My pulse went slam-slam-slam in my ears. Grandma turned to look at the woman, and the stranger spoke to her, keeping her eyes on me.
Grandma said a few words, then turned to me.
“She says my grandson is very pretty.”
I was offended. “Pretty?” But I smiled at the woman. Grandma nodded and gave me a look. She was quite proud of me.
Next to the woman was an attractive girl about my age. The woman whispered to her.
Oh, God, please don’t let her play matchmaker, I thought.
We got on the bus. Grandma paid the fare and she found us seats. When an elderly man got on, short and stooped, I stood up and gave him my seat and he thanked me profusely. By now Grandma was beaming.
The grocery market was another wonder. We walked the aisles and I stopped to touch some of the goods. The broccoli fascinated me. Soft miniature trees. White broccoli cost more than green. Why? Grandma didn’t know.
“What do you want to eat?” she asked. But it was too overwhelming. I pointed to some things—tomatoes, shrimp—and she gathered them up, along with the items on her list. How did she know which products to choose from the thousands stacked on the shelves? Had she memorized where they were placed in the never-ending aisles? I thought I would never master the market.
We went home on the bus, and when the apartment door closed behind us, I felt relieved. But I knew I’d be venturing out again soon.
I ate constantly. When I finished breakfast, twenty minutes later I would be nibbling on a banana or popping a few grapes in my mouth. I wanted to know the food was still there, always available. It’s like a brother you left in the park one day and almost lost forever. You keep going to his room to check on him.
Two days later, I asked, “When are we going out again?”
She took me to her church. It was an underground church, meaning it had no official certificate allowing it to operate, unlike the ones that paid bribes to government bureaucrats. There were only thirty congregants. The pastor was from South Korea, and he introduced me to his three daughters. They were each blindingly pretty. I, on the other hand, was as talkative as a rock.
“Say hi.” Grandma nudged me.
I couldn’t even make eye contact. I’d never been exposed to the Western way of flirting. I had no idea what they wanted from me and was sure that if I said anything, it would be the worst possible thing I could have done. So I stayed quiet.
The next week, we went to a super-church, the biggest one in the province. There were at least a thousand people jammed into a huge building. It was the evening service, and a youth chorus sang hymns from the stage.
I spotted a young man walking up the aisle wearing a bright white suit with white shoes. I’d never seen anyone dressed all in white before. The thought of doing that in North Korea—you would be covered in mud in half an hour. His skin looked so fresh and smooth against the white. I was mesmerized.
“You like his suit?” Grandma whispered to me.
I nodded.
“One day I’ll get you one just like it,” she said. “And one day you’ll come here and talk to anyone you like.”
That day will never come, I thought. To be like this young man? Impossible.
As time went by, Grandma grew more confident that I wouldn’t be spotted on the street and taken back to North Korea. She began letting me go out alone, handing me two yuan to take the bus. Sometimes I saved the money to spend on cigarettes and walked wherever I was going. When I took the bus, I sat in the back and spoke to no one, but the feeling of being out on my own was precious to me. At first I didn’t know how to tell the driver I wanted to get off. I went to the bus depot and waited for the bus to turn around, watching the other passengers. Finally I caught what they were saying: Xiàchē, which meant “I want to get off.”
Each of these little discoveries was rewarding for me. You don’t recover your humanity all at once. It’s like climbing out of a deep pit, one shaky handhold at a time.
Chapter
Fifty-Three
* * *
EVERY NIGHT GRANDMA and I read from a well-used Korean Bible with a scratched and worn black leather cover. We sat together in the living room, which had tall windows looking out over a busy street. We sang hymns together and talked about the meaning of proverbs. I was still lost. To begin with, the concept of B.C. and A.D. was alien and confusing. I didn’t yet know Jesus’ story, so I couldn’t figure out what those terms meant. I felt my head spinning.
Grandma arranged for a young man from the church to come read the Bible with me. We went over many passages and I puzzled out what they meant. All these strange names: Joshua, Moses, Noah. To me, they were like characters in a foreign mythology. Just penetrating to what they were actually doing in the stories required a great deal of effort. What it all meant was beyond me.
But the young man told me something I never forgot. “If you pray to God for something selfish,” he said, “he won’t hear you. If you ask him for a Mercedes-Benz to drive fast and catch girls, it will never arrive. But if you want the car to drive old people to the doctor, if you want to do good, he will hear that prayer.”
Everything about Christianity was backward. What I’d learned in life was that if you didn’t constantly put yourself first, you would die.
I had food and shelter now, but as the days went by, I grew more and more depressed. I felt lonely and so filled with fear that I thought of sneaking back into North Korea again, though it meant risking starvation. I decided I would start collecting as much money as I could for the trip back. You can even yearn for a prison, so long as it contains the people and places you love.
One night, Grandma turned to the back of her Bible and picked out a hymn. We began to sing it together, her voice frail and reedy, mine faltering over the words. The hymn was “Father, I Stretch My Hands to Thee.”
Father, I stretch my hands to Thee,
No other help I know;
If Thou withdraw Thyself from me,
Ah! whither shall I go?
I felt something pierce my heart. This I understood; this was my life. The thing that had been haunting me, the feeling that I was a hunted animal whose luck was running out, came over me again. That night, alone in my room, I began to cry. I closed my eyes tightly and attempted to talk to God for the first time. “I don’t know who you are,” I said. “I don’t understand the Scripture. But I’m surrendering myself to you. If you fail me, I have nothing left to fall back on. Please help me. Please show me the way.”
Was that a prayer? I didn’t know. Exhausted, I curled up in the wool blanket that
was my mattress and quickly fell asleep.
Over the next few weeks, I read more and more of the Bible, and the strangest thing happened. My worries, my alienation, began to melt away. I felt refreshed in my soul. What’s happening to me? I wondered. I found it hard to believe that the Bible stories I’d been hearing in the churches I’d visited were real.
The world was changing for me. The sun that shone through the glass was the same sun. The trees outside my window were the same trees, the food was the same I’d been eating for weeks. But I had new eyes to see all of these things. The world had lost its terrors; I felt like a child who’d come home after a long, painful journey.
I was in no less danger of being caught and taken to a labor camp. But I felt God walked beside me now. His love covered me like a thick, warm cloak. I knew He would never forsake me.
I didn’t understand the Bible intellectually at that point. (I would struggle with concepts like the Trinity for months.) But in my soul, I was no longer a fugitive. God had shown me that He was everywhere in the world, and that He cherished me beyond reason.
My first experience of Him was one of a deep and transforming love.
Chapter
Fifty-Four
* * *
ALL OF GRANDMA’S dumplings and rice and beef with orange had an effect: I was getting chubby. Uncle took me to a Korean-style sauna one afternoon and noticed a thin roll of fat around my belly. I hopped on the scale. Four pounds heavier than the week before.
I began skipping rope in my room at four in the morning. Downstairs was a store, so they didn’t care. I tied a clothesline from my doorknob to my dresser and jumped back and forth over it. I ran on the street—two, five, ten miles. I would jump over trash cans, and people actually stopped and stared at me in surprise. I was getting stronger.
One of the places I ran to was the Yanbian University of Science and Technology. It lay behind a stout black steel fence. The first time I went, I looked through the railing at the gleaming green grass with all these young students playing and studying and chatting on it. It was too perfect; it looked fake. I couldn’t believe anyone could live this way, studying and flirting in this beautiful world. I started ending my daily runs at the fence, and for five or ten minutes I would stare at the students. Why were their lives and mine so different? Did they always have to be that way? I was afraid to speak to the students, afraid I would discover something in them that told me: This is why you are kept outside.
Then I would run home.
It’s strange, but I measured progress in material things: a new shirt, sunglasses, cigarettes of my own. My great desire was a cell phone. To be without one in China was to be a nobody. I even knew which model I wanted, a Nokia with a sliding cover. I would see someone pull one out and think, When I have a phone like that, I will be happy. It wasn’t so much the physical object that entranced me as it was the idea that I could reach anyone I wanted, anytime I pleased. It didn’t occur to me then that I had, in fact, no one to call.
I still felt closed off. I didn’t know how much I’d been affected by my time in North Korea, but I was far from the swaggering boy I’d been in the markets.
Eventually I got to know one of the ministers at a church, and one night he put his arm around me and said, “Joseph, do you know how amazing it is that you survived? You must pray to God and thank Him and ask Him what He has planned for you after such a miracle.”
I did wonder about that, and I asked God, “Why me?” No answer came, but I felt compelled to make the most of my new life.
My pastor told me about a missionary who was going to visit me at Grandma’s. She wanted to give me some encouragement and an allowance as a refugee. When she arrived, I was startled by her appearance. The woman was of average height and very overweight. Her clothes and eyeglasses weren’t fashionable; even after only a few weeks in China, I knew what was stylish and what wasn’t. I thought, Why are you dressed like this?
We sat in the living room and she asked me, “What do you want?”
I’d never thought of that before. I had new shoes and a jacket. All my needs were taken care of, except for a cell phone. And that was too much to ask for.
The silence went on and on. Three minutes later, she said, “Joseph?”
It was summertime. I looked up. “A soccer ball?” I said.
The woman laughed out loud, then her eyes filled with tears. I didn’t understand. I thought I’d offended her. She nodded and left shortly afterward.
Two weeks later, she picked me up in her van. We were going to the mall to buy me a soccer ball, along with some clothes. I was so excited that someone had taken me zooming along the highway on a glorious sunny day. It made me feel special. After we’d picked up the items at the mall, we headed back home. On the way, the missionary told me why she’d cried the last time she saw me. She said that whenever she visited North Korean refugees, they immediately asked her for one thing: money. Unlike me, these refugees often had no sponsors, and were living hand-to-mouth in the mountains. They asked for cash to help them survive, and not just a little cash either.
So when I asked the missionary for a soccer ball, she had been moved. It might also have been the fact that South Korean teenagers my own age were taking exams and preparing for college and good careers, while my only thought was for a simple toy. In fact, I never thought to ask for money or anything extravagant; it would have been rude and, honestly, I didn’t need any at the moment. All my needs were being met.
Then the missionary turned to me and asked if I wanted to go to America. My response was automatic. I said no.
She was shocked and a little angry.
“Do you know that this is a one-in-a-thousand chance? I have many refugees who would die to go to America. Why do you say no?”
America was big and strange and far away to me. It was thousands of miles from my mother and sister. And I’d always been taught that it was the enemy, full of big-nosed, big-eyed, vicious people who’d killed my countrymen. I guess I was still brainwashed from all those years ago.
“I have a special feeling for you, Joseph. You’re not like the other boys. Please consider this.”
She told me she’d be back in a week for my decision.
Chapter
Fifty-Five
* * *
WHEN I GOT home to Grandma’s, I showed her my new sneakers and the soccer ball. I didn’t talk about going to America. It was such a new and unexpected idea, like defecting to the enemy, that I wouldn’t have known what to say. And I was afraid of hurting her by announcing that I might leave China.
That night, confused and unhappy, I opened my Bible. I began reading in Matthew, one of my favorite gospels, and soon came to chapter 26, verse 39, which describes Jesus at Gethsemane. “Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed . . . ‘Yet not as I will, but as you will.’” I closed my eyes. I knew exactly what was in Jesus’ heart at that moment. He’s physically spent, hopeless, filled with black despair. His body fails him; he can’t take another step. And so he delivers himself into his father’s hands.
In my own small way, I needed to do the same thing. “God,” I whispered, “I don’t know what to do. Do I stay with Grandma or go to America? I feel powerless to decide. I leave it in your hands.”
No voice or vision came to me as I lay on my bed that night. But my confusion melted away, and I found in its place a conviction that my way in life was through America. It was clear in my heart that I had to go. I felt relief and joy wash through me. I put the Bible down on the desk next to my mattress and finally fell asleep.
I knew nothing about America except that it was full of people with large eyes who hated North Koreans. I tried to picture a typical American city, but I couldn’t do it. All I could do was multiply what was outside my window: shopping malls many times bigger, streets many times busier. (Even then I somehow knew that America was big.) I decided to research the United States by watching a lot of movies. Grandma’s TV had about
two dozen channels, and I would flick through them for hours on end, looking for movies with white people in them.
Uncle found me watching a movie one day.
“What are you doing?” he said as he sat next to me on the couch.
“Learning about America,” I said. I could talk to him in ways that I couldn’t to Grandma, who feared I would leave her.
He looked at the screen in confusion. “America?” he said. “This movie is German!”
“But it has white people!” I protested. It was some kind of action film, and I’d been staring at the houses in it with fascination. I couldn’t believe the places these people lived.
He laughed. “Lots of places have white people,” he said. “Don’t you know this?”
I shook my head. Uncle took the remote and searched for American films. The first one he came across starred Sylvester Stallone. An early scene in the movie really impressed me. Nothing much happened in it. Stallone wakes up one morning, takes a shower, dresses in a black leather coat and black leather gloves. He opens the refrigerator and takes out bread and a bottle of wine. He eats the bread and drinks some wine and gets up and leaves.
This was astonishing. America was so advanced, he didn’t even have to wash his own dishes. I washed the dishes three times a day at Grandma’s. Three times a day, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, there were several main dishes, side dishes, soup bowls, glasses—I was at the sink for hours. If I went to America, I was sure I wouldn’t have to wash another glass.
North Korea had trained me to think of concrete things. The obvious dishwashing gap between American and Chinese life impressed me to no end.