by Joseph Kim
It felt like the air had left my lungs and nothing replaced it. I hung my head. Again I didn’t get to say goodbye to someone I loved. Someone who’d risked her life for me.
“I saw her,” Danny told me.
I stared at him. “You did?”
“Yes. She was very sad she didn’t get to say goodbye.”
I felt daggers in my heart.
I sat down and wrote Grandma a poem that was inspired by a movie I’d loved as a kid, about the occupation of Korea. In the movie, some Koreans go to work for the occupiers and become more Japanese than the Japanese. But others sacrifice their lives fighting for independence. The poem said that even when you burn bamboo, the ashes line up in a straight line. That is, the bamboo retains its shape even when it has vanished into smoke. The same for white rice: you can smash it into a paste, but it is always white.
It was a poem about righteousness, about keeping your values no matter what. I believed Grandma had done that. She’d sacrificed so much for me. I wanted her to know that I would always remember that. I gave the poem and a letter I dashed off to one of Adrian’s associates and asked her to send it to the shelter.
Adrian left the hotel to make a phone call, and I was alone with Danny and John. Our anxiety began to spike, like frightened puppies left in a box. We wanted to make sure we could get out of the room in case we had to escape. As we fiddled with the doorknob, one of us inadvertently locked it. We couldn’t get it open again. The three of us kept getting more and more nervous, whispering, “Why won’t it open?”
“What do we do?” Danny said.
Was the lock controlled from the front desk? Was someone on his or her way up to arrest us? At that point, I would have believed anything. Our thoughts ran away with us. Finally we got the lock to work, and two minutes later Adrian walked in, his face tight. He’d brought us cookies and chocolate pies, but we were so wound up that we couldn’t eat them.
“It’s time to go.”
We gathered our things. We’re getting on the plane, I thought, and the food on board will be delicious. We were all so excited that we left the snacks on the table.
We got into taxis. I thought we were headed to the airport and that I was moments away from being free. China was connected to North Korea, but America was an ocean away. It was possible to start over there. I wanted to. I’d left so much behind.
We didn’t go to the airport, of course. Instead, after fifteen minutes, we pulled up in front of a building with a black fence around it and Chinese policemen guarding the entrance. Adrian hustled us out of the cab. We stood on the sidewalk, staring at the passersby. Where was the plane? What were we doing here?
Adrian made a call. Soon a young Asian woman in a smart suit emerged. She nodded to Adrian, and he motioned for us all to follow her. John and Danny and I fell into line and we walked through the gate.
It was the U.S. consulate. We walked quickly toward a door and inside. Adrian was separated from us. Men with black wands—I had no idea what metal detectors were—approached us and began waving them over our bodies. Adrian’s hands were in the air as men swarmed over him. Are we being arrested? My heart was beating like a rabbit’s and our faces were sheened with sweat.
I thought of running. I turned to look at the door and the gate beyond. If I could get there, I could find the train station. I could get back to Grandma.
I was ready to bolt. Adrian saw the look of terror on my face. His hands were still up in the air. He began vigorously shaking his head back and forth.
“You’re safe!” he cried out in Korean. “You’re safe!”
Epilogue
I LIVE ON A quiet street in Brooklyn now, in a two-story wood-frame house with yellow aluminum siding, where I rent a one-bedroom apartment. When I leave for work in the morning, I turn left and walk to the subway station, about fifteen minutes away. I pass Indian restaurants, bagel shops, a Tibetan crafts store. I slip by people of all colors, walking the streets in the slanting light of early summer, most of them young and busy-seeming, on their way to work or school or something more mysterious. Some of these people, I’m sure, are newcomers like me.
I’m twenty-four years old and work for a private education company, helping to develop their curriculum. I attend Borough of Manhattan Community College, where I’m in my second year of studying international business. In the spring I will apply to my dream colleges as a transfer student: Yale (where Adrian founded LiNK), Princeton and Amherst, plus a few other schools. I finally got my phone—an older-model iPhone, not the Nokia I lusted after back in China—and its contact list is surprisingly full of people who care about me and whom I care about.
I have friends and colleagues I go to dinner with. I take vacations and worry about my bills. I’ve been to Europe. In other words, I am a fairly typical American.
There are still things, nine years after leaving North Korea, that I find strange about America. Sometimes I miss the simplicity of my life there. In North Korea, if you have food and a place to sleep, you are beating the odds; you can feel satisfied with your life. In America, there are so many shades of gray between the black and white that is a North Korean life. To pass a homeless person on the street or to turn down an invitation to an event involves a moral calculus that, though most Americans might barely register it, is still palpable to me. Whose feelings will you hurt, what amount of selfishness is permissible in life? These are things I never thought of while I was in the Hoeryong city market.
I am a much happier person than I was when I first came to this country. But my journey to the West and my journey within the West was far stranger than I could have imagined.
I spent four months in the embassy in Shenyang. It was a difficult time. Danny, John, and I were put in a room with two North Korean couples who had also escaped. None of us understood the defection process, and we were all impatient to be in America. As in my first days in China, I couldn’t walk outside and remained a kind of prisoner.
I spent a lot of my time wondering about Adrian and the others who had helped me. Why would they do such a thing, take such risks for people they’d never met? It seemed important to me to figure this out, a clue to the world I was going to. I decided that Adrian must be the richest man in America; surely he lived in the tallest skyscraper in New York. He must have lots of extra money and time, and so he liked to travel the world doing nice things for people, to amuse himself or whatever. I looked forward to seeing his house. I wondered if I would look out the windows and see clouds slipping by at eye level.
I also spent some of my spare time ogling the American ambassador’s car, a new black Ford. I thought all cars in America would be this sleek and powerful and black, and that I would own one someday. And I thought about Bong Sook.
After four months, we were given new white dress shirts, black pants, black shoes, and new sunglasses. We flew to Tokyo—where Danny and I had an unsettling encounter with a bathroom hand-dryer that startled us with its roar—and then boarded a plane for Los Angeles. I was so excited I could barely contain myself.
After a long flight of sixteen hours, we came down through the clouds and I began to see houses and cars below. When we got near the airport, I spotted a line of cars, not black like the ones I’d fantasized about, but yellow. (They were taxis, of course.) My dream car is not so common in America, I thought sadly. I still wanted one.
At LAX we were in for a shock. We were to be separated right then and there. Danny was going to Salt Lake City, John to Seattle, and the two North Korean couples—whom we’d grown close to in the consulate—to Kentucky. I was frightened. I spoke maybe four words of English and was headed to a place called Richmond, Virginia, alone. One of our guides put a sign on me that said Minor, and after many tears, I got on another plane.
When I landed, Carolina Velez, my social worker, was waiting for me. She was Colombian, quite emotional, and very compassionate—we remain friends to this day, which doesn’t always happen with caseworkers. She reached out to hug me and I s
tepped back in terror. I’d never really been hugged before—there is no culture of embracing in North Korea—and I didn’t know what she wanted. We drove to my foster home, which was in a rural area surrounded by woods where deer occasionally flashed through the underbrush.
This was not the America I’d imagined from the movies. I wondered if I’d done something wrong to be sent here, but was too afraid to ask. My foster parents were an African-American couple who had two American children they were caring for as well. I got my own bedroom, and I stayed in it that night, looking out at squirrels scampering across the lawn. I couldn’t communicate with my new parents. I felt scared and lonely and lost.
My foster father was kind (and so tall I had to crane my neck to look up at him). My foster mom, who ran the household, had to be strategic with her budget. She was very strict about food, for one thing. There was nothing in the fridge or freezer, and her foster children were forbidden to eat outside of regular mealtimes. The food was locked away except for some condiments. I found this odd, but I was too timid to ask for more. Later, I realized she had to feed a few hungry teenagers, so it was necessary to be careful with the groceries.
Three days after my arrival, Carolina told me I had to go to high school.
“But I never finished middle school!” I said through the translator. “Besides, I don’t speak English.” And I never studied in North Korea, I added silently. Why would I begin now?
The rules said I had to go, however, and my foster parents took me to a department store to buy school clothes. Nothing in the men’s section fit me, so we went to the children’s racks and they chose a few button-down shirts and khakis. The clothes were uncool, but I didn’t complain.
School was a nightmare. It was a tough place. It was also ninety percent African American, which made me stick out even more. Some of the boys in gym class tried to get me to say swear words, while others pointed at me and laughed. One boy tried to teach me how to play basketball, but when it came time for the game, I just grabbed the ball and ran, infuriating everyone on the court.
I was desperate to fit in. Adrian came to visit me, but was allotted only ten minutes—perhaps out of an excess of caution—by Catholic Charities, which ran the foster program. Adrian bought me a package of Reese’s Pieces, which were precious to me because they were a gift from him and because I wasn’t getting enough to eat. I didn’t devour them on the spot, however. Instead, I brought the candy to school. In the hallway that morning I went up to two or three kids, complete strangers, and handed them the chocolate treats. “You want be friends?” I said in my broken English. The kids freaked out.
I made one friend, a boy named Chen, who was from China. Chen was kind and less clueless than me, and he soon became my anchor, just the latest in a long line of people who’d shown up to help me when I most needed it. But I had no idea how to socialize with real Americans.
At home, I felt like an alien. My English was still spotty. But what confused me most was that I was hungry all the time. Maybe my foster parents thought I was getting enough food, since I never complained. But I couldn’t understand why I’d traveled from China, where Grandma stuffed me full of exotic foods, only to end up starving in America. I began volunteering to wash the dishes every night, so that when everyone left the kitchen, I could sneak the ketchup bottle out of the cupboard and suck from its spout.
After a month in Richmond, Adrian called, concerned that he hadn’t heard from me. I told him that I didn’t know how to use the phone and was afraid to make my foster parents angry by experimenting with it. On his second visit, he and Hannah Song, a LiNK colleague, picked me up and brought me to their offices in D.C. I thought, Now, finally, I am going to see how the richest man in America lives! We arrived at a modest two-story house, filled with twenty-somethings sitting on couches and the kitchen table, tapping away at laptops. I thought this must be the home of one of his friends, but it turned out to be the LiNK office. I learned that some of the workers here held part-time jobs to support their work with North Korean refugees, even though they’d graduated from places like Yale and other top schools. They were struggling to make ends meet.
I was astonished. These people were sacrificing the American dream to help people like me. That moved me tremendously.
During the trip, I met Hannah’s boyfriend, John, and together we went to a mall to buy me some clothes. Once there, we couldn’t find any shorts with a twenty-seven-inch waist, which saddened John. He took out $100 from his wallet and handed it to me. “The next time I see you,” he said, “I want you to have a thirty-two-inch waist.” That was the most money I’d ever held in my hand. I was so grateful. That $100 would buy many slices of pizza in the school cafeteria. Even now, I’m a couple of inches away from meeting John’s target, and every time he sees me, John buys me steaks to get me closer to that thirty-two-inch waist. Though he’s very successful, John is always humble, and he has become like an older brother to me, one whose generosity and kindness I hope to emulate one day.
I returned to Virginia inspired by their example, but I was still flailing in most parts of my life. My report card came that May: all D’s, except for an A in world history (where the students barely did anything) and an F in math. I didn’t really care.
One evening, after a typically tense day at school, I found my foster mother had made chicken wings for dinner. I was famished and quickly ate my portion. I really wanted more, but there wasn’t enough for the other members of the family. So I left the last wing on the serving plate, and it was soon snapped up. I closed my eyes, thinking of another long night in my room, with the hunger—a mere shadow of what I’d felt in North Korea, but still hunger—aching in my belly.
I opened my eyes and looked down. There on my plate was a chicken wing. Someone had quietly left me the last one. I looked up. My foster father was looking at me, his eyes filled with . . . compassion, I suppose. I smiled at him. We said nothing, but inside I was moved. This man had shared his last piece of food with me.
That night, I lay on my bed and thought of one night in Hoeryong, in the Manyang house. My father and sister had gone to the mountains to look for firewood and I’d been left alone. I was eight or nine years old. I decided I would be a big boy and cook a meal for my family, so they would have something warm to eat when they came home from hours of foraging. I put some rice in the pot with water and lit the fire underneath. I stirred the pot, feeling the resistance of the rice against the spoon, sticky and wet.
The door opened and my father came in, his arms full of branches. Bong Sook followed behind. They were chatting as they entered. My father’s eyes fell to the pot and saw me stirring the rice. It was the first time I’d ever tried to cook for him, and his eyes lit up as if I’d surprised him with a wonderful and unexpected gift.
I spooned the rice into three bowls. My dad and sister dumped the wood in the corner and came to sit down. With my first bite, I realized I hadn’t let the pot simmer long enough. The rice tasted awful. But my father couldn’t stop smiling and he scooped it into his mouth with great pleasure.
I thought of that night now, in bed in my foster home. Since then, I’d become quite good at preparing rice and other dishes. Father, I thought, I wish I could make you rice again. I am a much better cook now, and you would be so happy. I began to cry into my pillow.
I was never a good son to you, Father. But from this day on, I will be different. I won’t lie—something he always hated—or fight with people. I will study and earn good grades and I will do something for our people. I will help them in your memory. This is how I will honor your sacrifice.
I have always been skeptical of moments that change people’s lives. Progress is painful and slow; in my experience, it doesn’t come in a flash from the sky. But from that moment forward I was a different person, in school at least. I began to study voraciously, and worked on my math and English especially.
I felt I had to move on from my foster parents, however. One morning I came down to the kitch
en and saw a cold hamburger and some fries sitting on a plate. I began to eat. I realized the house was empty; everyone had left without telling me where they were headed. That was all I would have to eat until the family came back that evening. This only happened once, and I’m not sure what caused it. My foster mom, perhaps thinking my English wasn’t good enough, never tried to explain. But I somehow sensed it was time to leave.
All that night I worried about how I would tell Carolina. Finally, the next morning, I called her and told her what was happening. She started to cry. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “To come to America and be hungry!” Within a week she’d found a new foster family for me. I know my first foster dad and mom did their best, but food was such a powerful thing for me that I had to leave their home. They were sad when I left. I know this.
My new foster mom, Sharron, was a single parent and a loving person. That first day she embraced me, then led me into her kitchen. She opened the fridge and said, “Joseph, this is your home and you can eat whenever and how much you want.” Carolina had told her about my previous home.
That September, I went to a new school, the second best in the state, and made the dean’s list. For the next six semesters, I never dropped off the list. And I won the award for academic excellence three years running. My father would not have believed it.
Not everything was so sweet in my life. I still struggled to fit in at school. I went from being the “weird Asian kid” to the “crazy Asian kid.” I learned to swear, something that delighted my American classmates, and acted like a clown, especially around girls. I dyed my hair yellow at one point, wore it in bangs down to my chin, pierced my ears, and wore super-thin stovepipe pants and bright, outrageous shirts. Adrian nearly stopped speaking to me when the earrings appeared.
The worst time was lunch. I had no one to sit with for those eternal, agonizing forty-five minutes, so I would gobble up the school lunch alone at my table, then pick up my books as if I was late for an important meeting or a study session. There was no meeting or session, of course. I just made a circuit of the lunch hall and returned to my empty table, hoping no one had noticed. They had noticed.