by Alana Terry
I figure that’s what happened with Uncle, and it just goes to show that he didn’t never consider me family no matter how much Granny loved me. If we really had been family, he woulda run after me and wailed on me for getting him angry, and he woulda dragged me home, and then everything would go pretty much back to normal, ’least as normal as it could be living with a man who’d maybe murdered his own mama by dropping a table on her. But I wasn’t even worth Uncle’s time to run after, and I know that’s the Pyongyang-perfect truth, ’cause I looked back once and couldn’t see him at all.
I got to walking and ended up somewhere near the school on account of that being one of the only places I knowed how to get to. And you know who I seen there? It was Ji-Hoon with his ugly cross eyes, and he was sitting in the dirt sorta poking at things with a rock, and I went up to him and said, “You hunting for bugs?”
And he looked up at me, and once you live through famine you learn to see how bad off someone is by how deep their eyes go down into their skulls. I seen all ranges, from someone who looks as normal as you but maybe a little tired all the way down to someone whose eyes are so sunk in they look like a skeleton that someone forgot to peel the skin off of. And Ji-Hoon, his eyes were more like a skeleton’s, and so I knowed he was pretty bad. The second clue was that he didn’t try to run me off or even yell something mean on account of my ripped ear or me not knowing how to read when he first met me. He just said, “Yeah, you can look too if you want.” And that gets me thinking, Teacher, you know how I said famine makes you turn bad even if you’re actually good? Well, I wonder if the backwards is true too, like if you start off as a mean person who doesn’t care if everyone around you’s got a bellyache, but once you realize yourself how bad a bellyache feels, maybe you stop being so mean anymore.
So me and Ji-Hoon, we dug around for bugs a little bit, and he said, “Don’t your granny want you home?” ’cause of course he hadn’t seen the way that table crashed down on her and made her crumple to the ground like a big bag of rice that splits open if you drop it too hard. And as soon as he said granny, I knowed I was gonna start crying, and I didn’t want him to see that, so I run off a little, but he run after me shouting, “Hey, I found a grasshopper. Wanna split it?” And I remember his eyes looking already like a skeleton and knowing he was at least three or four steps higher than me on the starving scale, so I said, “Nah, Granny made soup tonight,” which really wasn’t a lie if you think about it in a certain way.
If you’d met me that night, Teacher, and asked me why I ran away and then asked me what I figured I’d do, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you nothing. See, I hadn’t really planned to run away, I had planned to run from Uncle, and I figured he’d drag me back home to whip me good like I already told you. And I was so scared on account of Granny being stuck under that table and me not even knowing if she was still alive, and I was a little confused by Ji-Hoon looking so skinny and still offering to split his bug with me, and it was already mostly dark, so I sat behind the school and cried for a while, and sometimes a tear or two came, and sometimes I just made the sounds.
Anyway, I think that maybe I dozed off ’cause when I went looking for Ji-Hoon later, he weren’t there no more, which made me feel even lonesomer, and I couldn’t figure if it’d be best to go back to Granny’s in the dark and risk Uncle thrashing me or if I should stay put and be early to school the next day. School wasn’t anything like it’d been at first on account of the famine. ’Least half the kids had stopped coming, and I don’t want to hurt your feelings by saying so, but famine don’t care if you’re a teacher or not, so the lady we had was pretty high on the starving scale herself and didn’t do much teaching. But I didn’t know what else to do, so I sat for a while figuring I’d be the first in my class to school in the morning and wondering when I’d eat and trying to remember if I’d ate a breakfast that day or not. It wasn’t terribly uncommon back then for me to just get one meal a day, but I still hadn’t gotten used to going all day with nothing at all.
And that’s kinda how famine’s like sadness, Teacher, ’cause maybe when you’re no bigger than a toddler you lose one of the eyes off your ragdoll, and you think that’s the saddest you’re ever gonna be until your sister tells you she hates you and wishes you weren’t never born, which ’course is a whole lot worse. Only then your grandmother dies, and so you learn ragdoll-sadness and even sister-sadness don’t really count as sadness at all, and you think you’ll never feel worst than that no matter what happens. But then your parents lose you in a flood, which might be tolerable except for the old lady who loves you like a grandson running out of food and then getting maybe murdered by her son who hates you. And then you realize it’s possible that you’re just gonna keep on getting sadder and sadder, which is scary to think about ’cause there’s no way to tell or even guess how it’s gonna end.
It’s the same thing with hunger. Back in the old days, when there weren’t more than plain fish, I thought I was starving when we stopped getting no more rice or noodles. But when I got to Chongjin and Granny run out of food, I woulda been happy to go back to plain old fish every day ’cause at least it’s proper food, you know? And even that night when I sat behind the schoolhouse, I was feeling sad for myself on account of it being maybe twelve hours since I last had something to eat, and I thought that was the most hungry a growing boy could ever get, except it ain’t. That’s why Miss Sandy’s real careful when she’s babysitting her grandson, so whenever Tyson whines that he’s starving, she makes him say it again in a different way on account of him never having learnt what starving actually means.
Well, I dozed a little more and then the cold waked me up, and the schoolyard was full of shadows ’cause the moon was out. And even to this day I think shadows are some of the lonesomest things, only when I told that to Pastor he said I was wrong and a life without Jesus was the most lonesome thing and then after that a life without family. Well, I didn’t know about Jesus back then on account of there being no pastors or churches back home, and I certainly didn’t have any family, not even a fake one no more. So that on top of the shadows made it one of the lonesomest nights I can remember, and have you noticed them lonesome feelings always attack hardest once the sun sets?
Pastor said it’s the most natural thing in the world to be scared of the dark, and Miss Sandy says even a lot of adults are, and she talks to everybody, so I figure she knows what she’s saying. I know I was sure scared that night, even with the moon being out. And when you’re lonesome and hungry and then afraid on top of that, it’s one of the worst combinations you hafta face all at once, and you sometimes wonder if your heart’s even big enough to hold all them bad feelings without getting stretched so far, like a piece of candy that you pull too much before it’s all the way cool, only then you can’t never get it back to looking just the way it should.
Have you ever been in one of those cases where you’re too scared to do anything, but you’re also too scared to do nothing? That was me that night behind the school. I wanted to go home — back to Granny’s I mean — and with the moon out I figured I could find my way all right. But then I was so scared of Uncle still being mad, or even worst Granny being killed, that I couldn’t make up my mind what to do on account of both choices sounding so awful. And I remember wishing Ji-Hoon was there with me for the company, ’cause I woulda rather had someone saying nasty things to me all night long until I cried than sit there listening to silence and not knowing if Granny was dead or maybe even still trapped under that table wondering why her Chong-Su didn’t come help her.
So I finally found that spot inside me where some of the last bit of courage was hid, and I used to it to get up and start on my way home. And the closer I went, the louder my heart got in my ears on account of me being afraid I’d find Granny killed, and I made myself a promise that I’d go to the house and just listen, only I wouldn’t go in unless I knowed for sure she weren’t dead, ’cause I didn’t want that picture in my brain right next to the pictu
re I already had of Mama scrubbing down Grandmother’s body after she turned cold.
So I got to the house, only I remember it taking a lot longer to get there than normal, probably on account of the shadows or me being scared for Granny or maybe both. So when I got there, I went under the window to have a listen, and I was only hoping to hear Granny’s night noises on top of Uncle’s snoring.
Except Uncle wasn’t asleep. He was having a meeting. I couldn’t tell exactly how many others were in there with him ’cause I didn’t want to look in the window and get spied, but I figure there musta been at least three or maybe four other voices in there with him, and those were only the ones I heard. There mighta been more just listening and not saying anything, kinda like when we have a discussion in social studies and you tell Miss Sandy I do a great job being a listener but you know I’ll do even better once I start becoming a talker, too.
Anyway, their meeting went something like this:
Uncle: They can’t expect us to just lie around.
Hard Voice (I call it that on account of it reminding me of a rock that’s all jagged-like and would cut you if you tripped over it): Why would they care? It’s the babies and the elders who will suffer most.
Soft Voice (this one was nicer sounding and not quite so angry as the others): They already are.
Low Voice: Did you hear? They buried the schoolmaster’s father-in-law yesterday.
Soft Voice (This part kinda made me shudder): It’s only the beginning.
Uncle: Meanwhile, the bad guys in Pyongyang get fat on the food aid that’s meant for us. (And ’course, Teacher, he used worser words than bad guys, but I know enough not to write them out where you could see.)
Hard Voice: We gotta act now while we still have our strength, before all the able-bodied men cross the border and ...
Low Voice: You keep talking like that and we’ll all end up in the gulag.
Hard Voice: We do nothing and half of us’ll starve before summer.
Uncle: What do you say we do, Comrade?
And then they talked about some silo for storing the grain and how many men they’d need to overrun it and whether they could get their hands on enough weapons to make it work out, and I strained my ears to listen for Granny ’cause if she was there I’d know I had a home again, but if she wasn’t I’d hafta decide where I’d sleep.
Well, sometimes with hunger, Teacher — the famine-hunger, I mean, not the regular kind — you don’t always have control over all your muscles like you would if you’d been eating proper-like. And I was crouching there trying to hear if Granny was sleeping in her bed or maybe crying for help under that table, and I lost my balance. I didn’t mean to. It just sorta happened, and I reached behind me to catch myself from falling, but I knocked against a branch and set some leaves rustling.
“What was that?” someone asked, and someone else said, “I knew we shouldn’t meet here twice in a row,” and Uncle said, “I’ll go check.” And I could hear his big, heavy feet thudding toward the door, only I was sorta froze with fear and couldn’t move, so there I was still when he come out. And he roared in my ear and slapped me around hollering so loud two of the other men come out, and I got pretty worried it would be like when Ji-Hoon beat me up and then his friends decided it looked fun and took their turns at it, too, except that’s not what they did. They didn’t stop Uncle neither, though, just let him get all that anger out until before I know it, the prettiest sound come from the house and it said, “That you, Chong-Su?”
And that’s when my heart did a flip in my chest. It’s happened a few times since, especially if Becky Linklater says something nice to me at recess, but that was the first time it happened to me, ’least so far as I remember. And I was so happy to know Granny was alive and well enough to worry about me that I was gonna run right into the house and forget about my soreness from Uncle, except that’s not what happened.
Uncle grabbed me before I could get past, and if I’d thunk the mudang pinched my arm back in the old days, it really was more like a hug compared to what Uncle did. He grabbed me so hard I got tears in the corners of my eyes, even though I’d figured those woulda been all dried up already. And he brought his face real low to my ear (the busted one) until the scruffy part scratched my cheek, and that’s why I’m so glad Pastor shaves every day or ’least close to it. Uncle wanted to know what I’d heard, but I made out I just got there and hadn’t heard nothing, and Uncle was dumb enough to believe me, or maybe he didn’t want his friends to get mad at him on account of him having a beggar boy outside his house who could tattle to the police about their meeting.
“Chong-Su?” Granny said again, and for the first time, I got this horrible feeling I wasn’t gonna be seeing her after all. And that’s exactly what happened ’cause Uncle kept his fingernails digging all the way near to my bone and hissed, “If I see you again, I’m gonna kill you.” Then he called to Granny, “It’s nothing, just a little beggar girl,” and Granny said, “Ask her if she’s seen Chong-Su,” and Uncle called back, “I already did. She said he went back to look for his mama in China.”
Like I already said, I figured my body was all out of tears by then, except it weren’t, ’cause I can still feel the way they slid down my cheeks when I shuffled off from Uncle’s house. The only little bit of happiness I’d found was knowing Granny weren’t murdered like I feared, only that was hardly good news on account of me never being able to see her again.
CHAPTER 9
After I got myself throwed out of Uncle’s house for good, I went back to the schoolhouse on account of not knowing anything else to do, and I made myself a little bed of leaves ’cause the snow hadn’t fallen yet, but it was coming real close on account of the trees having lost near everything on their branches. And you’d think I woulda been miserable on account of the cold or on account of the hunger-weakness at the very least, but I don’t remember thinking about that stuff and nonsense. You know what I was thinking? I was thinking that maybe this was what it was like to be a real orphan ’cause I’d already come to figure if Mama or Papa were still alive after that flood they woulda found me by now, even if Chongjin was a big city with lots of folks going every which way.
And then I thought about Granny and the angel who she said brung me to her porch after the flood and how maybe it really had been an angel, only if it was then why weren’t it looking out for me now? And that got me kinda sad on account of me never knowing much about angels back then, so I didn’t know they couldn’t never die, and I got to worrying that maybe the angel who was supposed to take care of me had gotten so hungry it went over to China looking for food, or even worst maybe it starved to death. Sometimes I still wonder if something like that coulda happened, and I wanna ask Pastor, only it makes me pretty sad to talk about, and I’m trying to do a good job of not thinking on things that get me crying on account of it being two and a half weeks since the last time.
And one of the things that got me feeling even more lonesome on top of that was realizing how I started the day out as Chong-Su who had a granny who loved him and cooked for him when she could, but by nighttime I’d become a flower swallow. And flower swallow can be so confusing of a phrase that me and Miss Sandy took a whole afternoon once to figure it out once. When I first come to Medford, it was pretty hard on account of me not knowing English, only Miss Sandy was real patient and sat down with me little bits each day until I started to figure things out. Well, even now there are still some parts that don’t make sense to me, or even more often there’s something I hafta tell her only I don’t know which words I’m supposed to use. And when that happens, she calls this friend of hers, Kennedy, who grew up in China but knows Korean on account of her parents hiding North Korean runaways in their house.
So one time, we had to call on Kennedy ’cause Miss Sandy had taken me clothes shopping in Boston, and I was asking her about the homeless people there and wondering where all the homeless kids were. Miss Sandy said in America they have nice families who take in thos
e kind of children. She said that’s what happens to kids who don’t have no families, and the ones who have families but they’re too poor to live in a house usually find something called a shelter where someone lets the kids and parents live there free, which I think is awful nice of them, don’t you?
Well, I was trying to tell Miss Sandy about the kids back home who didn’t have no place to go, except I only knew the Korean word for it, and so I didn’t know how to explain it proper-like. So Miss Sandy called Kennedy, and I got to ask her my question on the phone, and she told me the way to say it in English would be flower swallow, and then Miss Sandy had to explain to me that a swallow was a kind of bird. So then we had to call Kennedy back ’cause neither of us could understand why a homeless kid would have that sorta name. Closest guess I could figure was those of us on the streets knew what kind of flowers was best to eat, like I already told you, but that still didn’t explain the swallow part.
So Kennedy explained it to me in Korean and then I put Miss Sandy on the phone so she could tell it to her in English, and what Kennedy said was we’re called flower swallows ’cause we’re always looking for food and never staying long in one place (like a bird). And that part’s not too bad when you think about it, but it don’t explain the flower part. That piece is sadder on account of it referring to the way we just kinda sprung up out of the dirt like a flower, but too much rain or someone running by who wasn’t careful where they was stepping and we’d be nothing more than a few pieces of torn leaves and maybe a petal or two.
And Miss Sandy thought it was a beautiful name on account of it being so poetic. She said it was tragic-like but still so much more dignified than any word she could think of. And then I asked her what a flower swallow would be called in English if there weren’t them nice families who let the kids live with them, and she said they’d call them street children or street urchins. And then she explained to me how an urchin is a kind of spikey ball that lives in the sea, only I didn’t know what she meant ’til I saw some at the aquarium, and neither of us could figure out what that had to do with being homeless. But I prefer the name street children on account of it still reminding folks we’re human and not some other sort of animal, even if urchins are so colorful and a swallow does chirp awful pretty-like.