How I Became a North Korean (2 page)

O
ne thing I know for sure: 2009 was the start of irreversible changes in my life. That Friday in early March, I opened my locker and discovered my very first love letter. I was sixteen, and church and the Boy Scouts had been the composite of my social life since my family had emigrated from the Autonomous Korean Prefecture in China when I was nine years old. Nothing like this had happened to me before. As I opened the envelope and skimmed the note doused in cologne, my heart went pitter-patter and my palms became slick with sweat. It was unsigned, but I knew the handwriting. It was from Adam Thomas, my physics lab partner. A guy with the long-limbed quickness of a deer and an unruly smile to match his wavy hair.

I'd never had my feelings reciprocated before; or rather, I'd never shared my feelings so that they could be reciprocated. It was a secret I could barely admit to myself. But I trusted that the note asking to meet me was sincere. I'd shot up six inches in the last year and I was confident of my worth, though only a few seemed
to recognize it—namely, my mom and dad. Adam and I had been partners the entire semester without once being separated, a pairing that in fact he'd insisted on. Maybe this is the most important thing about faith: I believed because I wanted to believe.

I was the kind of kid who usually spent weekends pestering my youth pastor with earnest questions, occasionally singing hymns in downtown Redlands with our youth group while brandishing a “God Is Salvation” placard, or reading fat tomes and pretending that school dances were beneath my intellectual interests. But that evening I tried to tame my curly hair that exploded like firecracker sparks from my head and camouflage myself in the ugly jeans and overpriced sweatshirt that my peers approved of.

I was so nervous I entertained not showing up that night, but I did finally drive to the hill where the lawyers' and doctors' kids lived. Streetlights and McMansions surrounded the park without a scrap of trash or a wink of graffiti in sight. It was as if the town's entire sanitation force was dedicated to these hills. Even their palm trees smelled like money. None of it made me bitter. I knew that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven.

I got out of the car and waited with my right profile—my best side—facing outward. My anxiety doubled as it became ten, fifteen minutes past eight, but I tried to be accommodating even if I wasn't exactly an easygoing person. I could learn. I was anxious and hopeful for the first time in months and feeling mostly luminous. I debated whether he might be amenable to attending church. I began wondering if it was just one more joke on me and I should go home.

They came quietly across the grass, and by the time I heard the crunch of gravel, it was too late. I tried to squeeze back into the car, but two guys all bluff and brawn twisted my hands behind me before I was halfway in. As they dragged me away into the dark, I saw that there were four of them in total. The ringleader was Adam.

When I reached out for him, he shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. “Thanks to you, I flunked the midterm. I'll owe my physics grade to you. It was a stupid move, turning me in.”

“I didn't turn you in!”

When I'd seen a note float between students during the midterm exam, I had merely behaved responsibly and informed our teacher Mr. Hood.

“It was
you
? I didn't know it was your note.”

One of his friends said, “What a fag!”

“You shouldn't be turning anyone in.” Adam flung an arm over my shoulders with the kind of confidence that comes from living on the hill all your life. With an ease that felt like a foreign country to me. “What have I ever done to you?”

“I'm sorry, really.” I shrank back. And I was sorry I seemed incapable of keeping a low profile like I needed to, sorry I had been dragged to America and away from my known world, sorry to have trusted a guy who didn't deserve my trust. “I'll find ways to repay you. I'm Christian—I keep my promises.”

“The whole shitty town knows you're a fanatic. Hard not to, when you stand on street corners screeching God's name.” He grabbed a hockey stick and with it poked me in the crack of my butt. “My dad expects Princeton, at worst. You have any idea what you've done?”

He pushed the stick upward, nearly lifting me off the ground. “Get the recorder running,” he said. “Insurance he'll keep quiet.”

They forced me to strip off all my clothes and hump the hockey stick, fondle myself in front of them, and worse, until they became bored and left for a party.

 • • • 

On Monday I got as far as ten yards from the school's chain-link fence. Those ten yards might as well have been the Pacific Ocean. A sea of students milled in front of me, all potential enemies and not a single ally in sight. I was sure that everyone knew what had happened to me. Gauzy-skirted Anna Hunter passed me, everyone's object of lust who didn't know I existed; then came cliques that treated the prom—a night on which girls across the nation wiped out their savings to resemble a cream puff—as if it were a national security issue. Somewhere, there was Adam. Harvard didn't matter anymore, my parents' hopes didn't matter, nor did a future banking job that would reward me with a handsome vacation home in Hawaii for preying on global markets. Confined in that small space of high school, no camouflage would ever be thick enough for me. I didn't belong there.

For nearly a month I left the house every day and made as if I were going to school. I told myself I was coming up with a plan B, some grand scheme concerning my life, but what I actually did was run away from myself. I skimmed through science journals and comic books in the local library and took long bus rides to the beach and stared out at the brutal ocean, falling back on familiar fantasies about the remarkable life I would have surely
led if I hadn't left China. That is, until the day the school contacted my dad.

My dad's complexion went from peach to pomegranate after we left the principal's office, but he didn't say anything in the car. He merely stroked the pocket watch in his palm, one he always kept with him as if it were a beloved aging pet. He was a clock-store manager and the ticktocking surrounding him seemed to satisfy his need for conversation. He took great pride in his job—he called it a “vocation”—and often told strangers that he had once repaired a 1902 Audemars Piguet.

There was no order or reason to the way he drove. We were up in the San Bernardino Mountains one moment, then bordering Fresno the next before backtracking. The gas tank dwindled. Waste was my dad's way of letting me know he was angry.

“You know what happens to people who let go of their routines?” he said, as if I weren't a believer of routines myself. “They end up sucked into the chaos around them. You and I, we're not so good at blending in. But an I.Q. of 150 is your way out. It's a gift from God, if you want to think of it that way.”

I managed to stay quiet for once. There wasn't an honest word I could share with him.

When he finally did look at me, he was angrier than I'd ever seen him. He was a good dad. He never hit me or raised his voice. He had also probably never broken a rule in his life. “What you did was wrong. Your only job is to go to school. We don't ask much of you.”

I felt, suddenly, very tired. “Abba,” I said. “You know sailors
used to study maps studded with dragons, mermaids, and sirens, and pray not to fall off the edge of the world. I think I understand how they felt. Did you ever consider there might be a reason I don't want to go to school?”

“Who wants to eat medicine or raise children? You do it because it's the right thing to do—it's good for you.” He pulled up in front of our house. “I'm sure you had your reasons, and they were probably very good reasons. But—”

“I know. There are two kinds of people in this world: people with excuses and people without,” I said. “You've been saying that since I was in the cradle.”

“We never had a cradle.”

“Not everything is literal.”

He said uncomfortably, “We can fix the problem together.”

But there was nothing I could tell him. I agreed to attend school on Monday if he insisted, which sent him into platitudes about the importance of education. The conversation went predictably downhill from there. I didn't know if it was us or our culture or both, but we were always speaking from two different shores, unable to hear each other.

 • • • 

My mom always insisted that my dad and I were exactly alike, but I didn't think we had much in common. One meeting point I was willing to concede was our fondness for habits. I relied on habits to rein me in. I prayed first thing in the morning, then studied five new English vocabulary words before getting out of bed. A breakfast of orange juice and some form of protein always followed. To structure the week, I did a sudoku puzzle daily and
read a book every three days. Once a week, I maintained my beloved collection of survival gadgets that my parents augmented each birthday.

The routine that gave my life its most definite shape was being a Christian. Thanks to my mom, I'd been baptized before I could call my parents Eomma and Abba. Compared with my immediate environment, the Bible felt like a known world.

My dad was visibly relieved when he shipped me off that Friday to Big Bear Lake for one of the many church retreats that dotted my yearly calendar. He hadn't known what to do with me since Mom took off for China a few months ago for her first-ever missionary effort, and my skipping school had only made it worse.

But camp was like a shirt buttoned wrong from the start. By the time I arrived I had developed a pimple the size of a wart on my nose. Then the counselors, some of whom I knew from other church retreats in other locations, served us dry pancakes for dinner due to a catering catastrophe. The downhill of my day escalated when I delivered a humiliating, full-throttle solo of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” after everyone else stopped singing following the first verse, and, despite the counselors' machinations, was picked second-to-last for Bible Jeopardy, a game everyone should have known I excelled at.

I'd never acquired the mysterious talent for making friends, but that weekend my usual thick skin felt flayed and raw, and without Tobias Lee, my Christian fellow-in-arms who usually kept me company on retreats, the cafeteria felt dreadfully vast. There, despite all our brother, brother, and sister, sister to one another a few hours before, the tired social order asserted itself. The usual
predictable groups sat at long tables, from kids with haloes hovering over their heads to kids wearing motorcycle jackets and hiding stashes of pot. Even one of the P.K.s (also known as pastors' kids) was a dealer. There were the cool Christians in preppy shirts and dresses at a table far from the others and a gaggle of colorless personalities crowded grumpily next to them, laughing each time the “cool” ones cracked a joke. It might as well have been a school lunchroom. Some of the nicer ones waved at me when they passed, but I knew I wasn't their first choice or their second or even their seventh. I slid onto a wood bench and sat alone.

I was relieved when Grace Lee came up to my table with a small group behind her. She had a sleek skein of hair and an expression as cheerful as a roll of Life Savers. I'd been in awe of her for all seven years of my life in America, and though she was perennially nice to everyone, including me, her sentences directed at me invariably began with “You're so funny” and was said in a way that suggested “You're so strange.”

I pulled together my splayed-out, gangly limbs and sat up straight, trying to appear as normal as I could.

She studied me. “That's the first Noah's ark T-shirt I've ever seen.”

“You can get them silk-screen-printed by mail order, if you sketch it first.” I spread the shirt out wide so she could see it better. “Isn't it great? It's got all my favorite animals on it.”

My elbow knocked into my tray, but a guy with lopsided biceps caught it before it fell.

“Hey, chill out there.” He gave me a friendly pat while frantically scanning the room.

What can only be called an awkward silence descended. I had a knack for creating them.

“Plenty of seats.” I patted the spot beside me.

“I promised Kate,” Grace said apologetically, and I saw her friend waving her over to the end table. “You want to join?”

I knew I wasn't wanted, but I picked up my tray and joined them. That was me, a nutty brown-skinned, elephant-eared guy with God and a collection of finger puppets as companions. A guy more at ease with objects than people. As the others swapped stories and strained to be likable to one another, I spooned up some of the rubbery lasagna. I reminded myself that God was with me and that I was never alone, but I felt like Robinson Crusoe on a deserted island surrounded by bright, chirping parrots.

 • • • 

There were certain myths that I lived by. One of them was that I was fearless. I believed I wasn't afraid of pain or being socially ostracized—that is, until we walked down to the lake the next day. To someone who can't swim, Big Bear Lake might as well have been the Pacific Ocean.

I didn't even like bathtubs, maybe because my father's idea of teaching me to swim was to toss me into the local pool when I was five years old and watch me promptly sink to the bottom. I excelled at all the other survival skills I'd picked up from years of Boy Scouts, but despite a whale's weight of effort I could only paddle for about two minutes before sputtering downward.

The ground on the way to the lake was as hard as an overbaked brownie and crackly with pine needles. I walked behind
everyone else, wishing I was heading in the opposite direction, deep into the mountains, past deer tracks and dried-up creek beds, to retreat like Moses and become renewed. I craved the courage to walk away from my life, from Monday, when I would have to face Adam and his friends and find a new map to live by. At the very least, I wanted to return to China, where my life had made more sense to me. As we approached the water, I listened for the omnipresence of God in the dim roar of the motorboats and the water lapping at the lake's shore. I almost heard it.