How I Became a North Korean (19 page)

T
he letter is sent, and it's too late to take it back. I realize what this means as I sink into the largest tub in the bathhouse. I press against a shooting jet of water, its force compounding the pounding of my heart. The bubbling water swells up my nose. I proposed the meeting in a weak moment, but I don't have to show up. I can leave Yongju alone waiting on the beach in front of the Paradise Hotel to watch the sunrise by himself.

It won't be a completely wasted trip to Pusan for him; there is the fish market, the beach boardwalk. The Pusan film festival exhibition hall to visit. I stay in the steaming water and watch the naked bodies of women surrounding me. They are dragged down by hanging breasts and wide thighs wrinkled like tissue paper. Weary bodies, my
eomma
's body, the kind of body that will someday be mine. I decide I will arrange another phone call to her that week, no matter what it costs to pay the broker. For there is a broker for everything north and south of the thirty-eighth parallel. A thriving industry has grown up around us.

I plunge into the cold pool then back to the hot, going from scalding to frozen, trying to distract myself. As I cross back to the cold pool, a
halmeoni
with thready gray hair and a bulbous stomach pinches my butt cheek as if my body is hers and says, “If you young ones had gone through the postwar years you wouldn't be skimping! You'd know the value of food.”

I have known all kinds of hunger, but I am tired of fighting. In my best standardized South Korean accent I just say, “Halmeoni, you must have had a hard life.”

In the steaming room I listen patiently as she begins sharing the stories she must have needed to tell.

 • • • 

I once saw a person swept under the Tumen River's summer currents. I got a single look at him before the square-jawed man sank into the swollen river. It happened years ago, but in Pusan his body returns to me in dreams. I see his hands reaching for anything to hold on to and his fingernails catching and tearing on an azalea bush. His brown face bobs up, down, and his wide-open mouth floods with water. His body floats downstream until his foot lodges between two rocks and his limbs fan out like kelp. Only then do I turn his body over and see Missionary Kwon.

The day I'm to meet Yongju, I wake up early. The missionary's sightless eye hovers outside the window where the moon should be. My breath draws sharply in. It's just an image, I tell myself. An image that sometimes compels me to church. The past, my unborn infant, is always with me. I force myself to get up. The common room is weighed down with objects as if I have
lived there for decades. Nothing useful escapes me: bundles of old cooking magazines, tossed-out construction gloves, abandoned bookshelves and chairs, orphaned buttons and safety pins, a straw basket choking with coupons. Between full-time work as a receptionist and night school, I rip through charity shops, looking for bargains that don't look like bargains. My apartment empty of people, the way I wanted it.

It is possible to live happily forever alone. That is what I told myself. Still, I take care before I leave the apartment early in the morning, applying makeup, curling my hair. I pass stores with their metal shutters pulled down and wait for the bus toward Haeundae Beach. I whirl around at footsteps behind me, but there is no one there.

The only people out near Haeundae are drunk, sleeping men, couples, and a few hostess-room girls returning home in tight black dresses and fur coats. I blush just looking at them, but their smoky eye shadow makes me wonder if the blue I usually apply marks me as old-fashioned or worse, from the North, like my accent that reappears in traces and words from home that sometimes tumble from my lips. There is my bad leg that has never quite healed, which drags a beat behind the rest of me.

The shore is as grainy as sandpaper on my bare feet, but it feels good to walk. Here I am, living in a port city, and six months have passed since I visited the beach. A wave hits the shore, then a larger one collides into it and swallows it up. I wade knee-deep in the freezing water, my bare feet clammy with salt
and sand. My cardigan ripples around me; my hair tangles in the salty air. I feel lighter than I have in years. I wonder if I will reach another reality if I keep walking.

Then I spot Yongju staring down at a crowd of hermit crabs scrambling near his feet. He hasn't seen me yet, but it is as if he has touched me and awakened my sleepwalking body. He is wearing rumpled slacks, a white dress shirt, and a black wool coat as if for an interview, his silky hair blowing into his face. Though he has filled out from boy to man, a permanent storm of worry still creases his forehead. I see the gaps in him as plainly as missing front teeth. He has known and experienced too much, but still I want to walk, to run to him, toward my real life.

I take a step back.

“Nuna,” he says, looking up, the vowels in “Older Sister” made long and sinuous by his slow speech. “Jangmi.”

I want to run away as fast as my bad leg will let me, preserve the peace I've worked so hard to build. Looking at him, my old fears flare up. My heart comes alive. Yongju is complication, a wound ripped open. He's a student, a North Korean with little to offer. I know there are no happy endings. But I don't run. This time I stay.

I am grateful to Kathryn Court, Lindsey Schwoeri, and everyone else at Viking Penguin for making this a better book, and to my agen
t, Susan Golomb, who has been my sound guide.

Many friends read and commented on the novel at different stages: Rachel Howard, Kim Stoker, Joanna Hosaniak, Lillian Lee, and Anthony Adler. Jean Lee and others who prefer to remain anonymous gave valuable advice. Doosung Lee gave me a lovely place to write when I needed it most. My students Dongrim Song, Wontaek Lee, Sangyeop Lee, Seokjin Yun, Joon Oh, and Hani Lee helped me along the way.

To Dong-hyuk Shin, survivor and brave friend. I owe Amy Lee and Kye Myeong Lee all my gratitude and love. To all the great, brave women in my life—I wouldn't have made it all the way here without you.

The nonprofit organizations Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights and Justice for North Korea do inspiring work devoted to the safety and resettlement of North Koreans
fleeing their country, and also created international awareness about the human rights crisis at a time when few knew or cared.

For their generous support, I am indebted to the Toji Cultural Center, the American Academy in Rome, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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