by Alana Terry
CHAPTER 11
So that’s how I become a flower swallow, and it’d be nice to say it got easier after that first day going house to house, except that’s not what happened. Winter was coming fast, and everyone was scared on account of how poor the harvest had been. ’Course the Dear Leader and his men were supposed to send food to us folks up north, except they didn’t, and so everything was kinda crazy, like it was on that day when you was sick and we had a substitute teacher and Chuckie Mansfield ... Well, I’m guessing the fill-in teacher told you all about that, and if he didn’t, I don’t wanna be the one to tattle, so never mind. All I’m meaning to say is people were acting even more anxious than normal on account of the snow coming soon and there being no food to last until spring and even the firewood getting scarce.
It was hard being a flower swallow, but some things did get easier. I eventually learnt which houses were most likely to share. If there was kid laundry hanging outside, I didn’t bother, unless it was baby clothes and nothing else. What I found was brand-new mamas would feel sorry for me on account of them worrying their babies might grow up to be flower swallows, and wouldn’t they want someone to do a kindness for them? But the mamas with bigger kids were worried enough about their own families starving — and when I say starving, I don’t mean being hungry so often you stop growing, I’m talking about the kind that gets you to fall asleep and then kills you while you’re dreaming — and so those mamas wouldn’t share nothing. Men typically weren’t that generous neither, so sometimes if a man opened the door, I didn’t even bother and just asked him if he seen my lost toy or stuff and nonsense like that.
The most helpful houses, aside from the ones I already told you with the new babies, were ones with ladies who weren’t so young they had children to worry over and weren’t so old they were too weak to cook or go out picking. I got most of my food from them kind, except I made another beginner’s mistake right off by going back to one of the houses that’d been particularly nice. That’s when I learnt it’s all right to ask for something once, but you shouldn’t go back unless it’s been two or three months or maybe even longer on account of them recognizing you and then getting mad. The best thing to do is pretend you don’t even know the area, ’cause if they think you’re a traveler they don’t always mind giving you a little something to carry you on your way. I made up this whole story about going to find my mama and papa in another town, and I used a name of a village I’d heard them mention at school before, and once I learnt that line I probably doubled my meal size. ’Course if you’re doing that, you hafta be even more careful not to go to the same house twice or you’ll get in even bigger trouble than if you’d just skipped a meal or two in the first place. And when I say meal, I’m not really talking about how you do it in America where you eat in the morning and again at noon and once more at dinner and then you likely have a snack after school on top of that. As soon as I became a flower swallow, a good day was if I ate once, and I even learnt there was a best time to eat. To make your meal last proper-like, you have to eat it in that middle space between afternoon and evening. If you gobble it all up too early in the day, you may as well not have eaten at all, but if you wait too long, that makes you get colder at night. I couldn’t tell you why, and I even looked it up in the science book except it never told neither.
Of all the people I met in my door-to-door days, most were mean and a few were nice, but only one was an actual angel. ’Course I don’t have proof, ’cause I don’t even know how you’d go about proofing something like that if you wanted to, but like Pastor says, some things you just gotta take by faith.
This angel I met, she looked mostly like a normal lady except for her being blind, and I’m not sure if I were an angel I woulda chosen that kind of body, but maybe there was a particular reason for it that only she knowed but kept a secret. Anyway, I figured she was blind on account of her touching my face and never really looking at me proper-like, and you might think that was strange, except it weren’t.
What happened was first I knocked on her door, and she opened it and stared over the top of my head like she was expecting someone a foot and a half taller than me. But when I asked for some food, she musta heard where my voice was coming from ’cause then she looked down. And there she was touching my face, and before I become a flower swallow it mighta felt weird, but now it didn’t. Miss Sandy told me once about this orphanage in a place called Romania and how them little babies there never get picked up or touched hardly at all, so sometimes visitors come and do nothing but hold the babies all day, and I guess them babies are smarter than I ever woulda expected on account of them doing things like grabbing onto the helpers’ shirts so it was harder to put them down. And maybe someone like Chuckie Mansfield would laugh at that, but not me ’cause I know what it’s like to go a month all at once between people touching you. And then when they do touch you, it’s only to pull your hair or shake you by the shoulders, so if a blind lady wants to feel your face all up and down, you don’t try to stop her even if her fingers are coarse as bark.
And I don’t know if this ever happens to you, Teacher, but can you ever just tell someone’s good after a word or two or maybe after they spend a few seconds touching your face or whatnot? ’Cause that’s what happened to me, and I knowed she was good. Not even nice, although I’m sure she was that too, but Pyongyang-perfect good, deep down in her soul. And that was my first clue she was an angel, only I hadn’t figured that part out yet. She said to me, “I don’t have any food, little nephew,” which was a polite way for a person to call somebody young like me, only most folks didn’t bother those days on account of me being nothing more than a flower swallow. Then she went on to say, “But I do have a present for you.” And she stopped touching my face all up and down and put her hand flat against my forehead and started to talk in a way that you woulda thunk she was praying except she was still talking to me. “You are a blessed child, with a blessed sign on your forehead, and sealed with the promise of providence.” Well, even when I write it out, them words don’t make no sense to me now, and back then they especially didn’t. Only that didn’t seem to matter ’cause where her hand was on my forehead, it got hot all of a sudden and almost tingly, like she had tiny electric bugs living in her skin that were giving me little zaps, except they didn’t hurt none.
And then she said, “You’ve been living as a stranger,” which I take to mean she knowed all about me not really being Chong-Su like Granny woulda liked, and she said, “You will find your healer on the coldest day of the year,” which ’course is mostly nonsense until you find out what happened later on.
I told Pastor about it once on account of him being able to take confusing things out of the Bible and setting them down so they make sense, but he said that blind lady coulda been sent from God to speak to me a blessing, or she just as easily mighta been friends with the devil and that’s how come she talked so strange and was right about the living as a stranger part and the part about me meeting a healer (which happens later, but you’ll hafta wait for me to get to that part). But if that’s the case and a person can tell the future with God’s help just as easy as the devil’s, then how can we ever know whether anybody’s good or bad really? And when I pressed Pastor about that, he said the way you know if someone’s from God is if they make good fruit, which isn’t meaning apples and strawberries or whatnot like you might think, but it’s like doing good things. And that blind lady, she couldn’t do nothing for my body like give it food to eat, but I know she done something good for my soul ’cause later when it got so cold you didn’t have to worry only about dying of hunger but freezing to death on top of that, I’d think about what she said, and I could almost feel the warm spot on my forehead again, and that’s my next clue as to her being an angel.
Another clue happened a few weeks later when the snow started to come and I had an even harder time as a flower swallow. First off, North Korea’s not like Medford where you go to the store when you run out of groceries.
If you haven’t growed it or picked it or hunted it, then you can’t eat it. Well, in the winter, there’s hardly nothing to pick on account of everything being either covered with snow or died off from the cold. And even bark was scarce ’cause people was cutting down trees for their fires. The college lady Kennedy, she starting reading me a story once about that boy Tom Sawyer who run away from his papa, only Tom already knowed how to build a fire, and that coulda made my life a lot easier, except I’d never learnt to build one proper-like, and even if I had, most of the trees were gone like I already told you.
So anyway, there I was with no fire and the wind howling and stinging my skin, and I remembered the blind lady. I hadn’t figured it out yet about her being an angel, but I thought about what she said about me finding a healer on the coldest day of the year, and this was the coldest I’d been yet. So I got to hoping her promise would come true right then, except that’s not what happened. And I didn’t even know what she meant by a healer would come neither, but ’course later it all came together and made sense. Anyway, I was so cold and hadn’t eaten in over a day by that point, which you might think you couldn’t ever get used to except you can (at least sorta), and I was so scared of freezing in my sleep like the other flower swallows that happened to. So I tried to remember where I first met the blind lady, and I walked up one street and down another wishing my brain would work better, except it couldn’t on account of the hunger-weakness and the cold. Well, finally I seen the house, so I went up to it, and even today I don’t know what I was planning to do. Maybe I’d ask her where I could meet this healer, or maybe I just wanted her to put her hand on me again and warm me up with some more powerful words like them ones she gave the first time. Anyway, I knocked on the door, and I didn’t even think to worry about her not being there, except that’s exactly what happened. It was a frowning man, and I already told you I didn’t ever have no luck with those in my flower swallow days. But I asked where she was, and he said he didn’t know what I was talking about. I tried to explain she’d said something to me I wanted to ask her about, but he said there weren’t nobody living there but him, and he didn’t have extra food neither, and he slammed the door shut.
So I walked around, puzzling on it and trying to figure out how she could be there at that house one day and tell me such good things and then be gone a little while later and there being a man there who’d never heard of her. And that’s when I figured the truth about her being a swear-on-the-Dear-Leader genuine angel. Maybe she was even the one who took me out of that flood and led me to Granny’s. That still don’t explain how come I couldn’t have stayed with Granny, but then again, maybe famines are hard on angels, too. And learning the truth about who she really was didn’t help me none right then on account of me still being so cold and hungry. But every once in a while I’d wake up from my sleep and feel sorta warmer than I’d been when I went to bed, and I’d wonder if maybe that angel was spreading an invisible blanket over me to let me know she was still around.
Oh, and that’s the other proof I forgot to mention about her being an angel. It came right after I met her and she gave me that blessing. Well, it wasn’t right after, but it came the very next day, right when I waked up. I was sleeping later and later now on account of the sun not wanting to rise too early, and I tried to stay pretty much asleep until it was at its highest point, which if you’ve noticed isn’t ever as high in the winter as it is in the summer. I looked into the science book on it once so I could figure out why that was, except I couldn’t. I think it’s one of them things you’d hafta teach me yourself ’cause you’re good at putting confusing points into words a kid can understand, sorta like Pastor can take something like Jesus being the Son of God but still getting himself born as a baby and put it into one of those Christmas devotions we’ve been doing before school and having it mostly make sense. You’re good at letting me ask questions too, and so is Pastor, except sometimes I’ll come up with too many at once, like did Jesus poop when he was a baby? And then Pastor just tells me to listen quietly and eat my breakfast. But if you’d growed up with teachers who told you the President never used the bathroom none for example, then you’d be wondering the same thing about the Son of God, don’t you think?
Anyway, I woke up sometime around noon the next day, and it always took me another hour or so to unfreeze my bones, which were always getting the coldest. After that I’d hafta go look for food ’cause sometimes I only got half an hour before falling so tired I’d hafta take a nap. If you take too long at that, the sun goes down while you’re not looking, and then you won’t eat nothing that whole day. And I tried to think on it once ’cause I wanted to know what was the longest I went without a single bite, and you’d think I’d remember except I don’t on account of those naps messing up my schedule. ’Cause sometimes you wake up in the afternoon, and you try hard to figure if you’d just been napping or if you’d slept until the next day, and you couldn’t really tell, and that’s what sometimes happened to me. It’s a confusing feeling, you know, but you get used to it sorta.
So the day after that angel blessed me, I’d only been awake for five or maybe ten minutes before a rat crawled by. And you might think a rat would be most likely to scurry by, except it didn’t, it only crawled. It was fatter than any rat I’d seen before, and I didn’t even hafta chase it. It let me pick it right up. So that’s when I knowed the blind lady’s blessing worked.
You know how we just had Thanksgiving, Teacher, and all of us went to our homes and had huge dinners with turkey and gravy and potatoes and pie and whatnot? And before we went on break from school we made that little cloud-looking thing on the board to describe all the food we was gonna have, and people got so excited on account of all the yummy things? Think about how happy we was then, and then imagine how much gladder you’d be if you hadn’t eaten more than a bite of leftovers every couple of days, and that’s how I felt about that rat. Miss Sandy tells me that when she and Pastor lived in New York City, there was rats the size of tiny dogs living down with those trains they got going underground, and the first thing I got to thinking was how many flower swallows them rats would feed if folks ever found a way to ship them over to Chongjin.
And that’s the other way that rat was kinda like Thanksgiving, except I just thunk of it right now. You know how sometimes nice people like Pastor and Miss Sandy go to places to feed hungry people on Thanksgiving Day, like maybe they’ll wake up real early and get a whole bunch of cooking done then go someplace in Boston and do the same thing again only it’s all for other people who don’t have much, and then they come home and finish their own cooking and then have dinner with their families? Miss Sandy says part of why she does that is ’cause Jesus tells us to, but another part is on account of how sad it is for people to be alone on a day like Thanksgiving. So if you think of that time I got my rat being like Thanksgiving, you’d sorta understand why I felt lonesome-like, and part of me wanted to stop by Granny’s and maybe have a bite with her, except I couldn’t never stop thinking about Uncle killing me if I ever went back. Plus I knowed it was the old folks dying first from the famine, even more than the flower swallows like me, so that’s the other reason I was too scared to try that ’cause I didn’t want to learn something that bad ever happened to Granny.
And so do you know what I did, Teacher? I went over to the school. There weren’t hardly no more kids left there like I said ’cause lots of them were flower swallows like me, and you might make the same mistake Miss Sandy used to and think all flower swallows were kids who lost their parents in floods or stuff and nonsense like that, except that’s not the way it worked. Most nearly all the flower swallows I got to talking to were shooed out of their homes like me, only it wasn’t fake uncles kicking them out but mamas and papas and real flesh-and-blood family. And it probably sounds mean to you if you’ve never lived in a famine, but I never thunk of it that way back then on account of it being so normal.
Anyway, a few kids went to school just to get out of the
cold for a few hours. Sometimes the teacher showed up, and sometimes she didn’t. I took my naps there by the Dear Leader, only I didn’t go into the building no more on account of how nasty those two big boys had been to me the night I became a flower swallow. But I had a guess about something, and it turns out I was right ’cause once I got by the school, it only took me a few minutes to find Ji-Hoon, and he was taking a nap outside, so I waked him up and shared some of my rat with him.
After that, when I got lonesomer than normal, I’d take a visit to Ji-Hoon, cross eyes and all, and sometimes I’d find him by the school, and sometimes I’d find him at his house. That’s the other mistake you might make about flower swallows, thinking none of us had homes at all, except that’s not how it was, ’least not for everyone. Ji-Hoon was a flower swallow, only he had a home and a family, and I figure that’s another reason it’s hard explaining the word in English since you couldn’t use something familiar like orphan or homeless, ’least not if you wanted to be real exact. And sometimes that sets me to wondering what really does make someone a flower swallow, and if we go back to what Kennedy said about it being someone who goes from place to place looking for food, then I start to wonder if maybe all of us were flower swallows in one way or another, ’least all of us young ones. Except that’s not quite right, neither, on account of some kids not being flower swallows at all, and I could tell pretty easy which was which, except it’s one of those things I couldn’t explain how I figured it, sorta like them math problems you make me redo if I can’t proof my work.