How I Became a North Korean (3 page)

A blond kayaking instructor straight out of a Scandinavian magazine dumped a set of life jackets near my feet, as if he somehow knew that I needed one the most. The others, who had stepped straight out of a J.Crew catalog in their polo shirts and shorts, talked nonstop to one another without receiving strange looks or offending anyone. These people born with a social finesse I lacked started partnering up, grabbing paddles, and helping each other with their life jackets.

“Okay, kids!” said one of the older youth leaders with a tug to his ginger-colored mustache. He extended his large hands out to each side like race car flags. “Don't be stupid out there—God's always watching.”

There were already people rowing out into the lake's endless silver gray, bobbing up and down with each slap of water, no bigger than twigs. The kids ahead of me waded in and pushed off in double kayaks until it was my turn. My hands felt as thick as winter gloves. Finally my single kayak's plastic belly scraped against the sandy bottom and I floated away from the shore.

The other kayaks paddled ahead. I watched a blue heron dip low, thrust its needlepoint beak into the green water, and burst back up with a tiny fish. My fear magnified everything on the lake. A bird's shadow was the size of a baseball field, the murmuring water around me resembled the voices of people. Entire civilizations seemed to be speaking, but not to me. There was a disturbed motion from deep down in the water, and I thought of the Loch Ness monster, of Grendel's lair. I felt a desperate hope that the bright cerulean sky would split apart like a badly stitched bedspread as the Lord and his procession of trumpeting angels marched through, with Michael the archangel in the lead, making his stunning entry. They would clarify my life.

I was leaning over when a motorboat zipped by, the kayak's bow jumped, and I was pitched out. Water plunged up my nose and into my mouth and lungs. I flapped my arms and clung to the straps of the life vest.

“Isn't that Danny?” said some faraway voice. “What's he doing this time?”

Air bubbles rose in front of my stinging eyes. The sun became a distant spot. My arms flailed for the paddle, but it was already floating away. I descended into the dark. All sound was sucked down deep into the lake, and I was seized with the certainty that someone was waiting for me. It became silent.

Only then I blinked, astonished to find myself conscious again. Fish were investigating my dream legs, my dream body that had landed in their watery garden. I bounced in slow motion across a bedrock littered with broken glass and cigarette butts. I vaulted across a path—if a moving mass of dead and
living matter can be called a path. I wondered if this was the path to heaven, and I leaped buoyantly from a bed of waterweed that was kissing the bottoms of my feet.

My delusions grew. The algae gave way to a podium and a man behind it barely visible in the murkiness. Someone was waiting. The plants hushed, the fish arced away. The shadow closed in on me. Tiny pieces of coral scraped against the soles of my feet. I was fearful, ecstatic, and reached for the hand of salvation, but suddenly there was no shadow, no water, no peace. Only rough human hands came pumping down on my chest and a mouth over my mouth, in a long, unwelcome kiss.

I
n late February or early March, I walked across the frozen Tumen River toward a man from China, ready to give my unborn child a different life. Of course my crossing had actually started much earlier, maybe with the Great Hunger or even before I was born. The China beyond the river that day was as dried up and brown as my country. I walked with the eyes of men and women following me from both sides of the shore. I remember being hopeful though the riverbanks were still hoary with the remaining snow.

A border patrol who the man from China had bribed followed me across. There were broad, dark patches where the ice looked as thin as glass, but I was from a border town. I had smuggled goods in and out since I was fourteen and knew how to read the river. I looped around where the ice became dangerously clear until I was standing in the center of the frozen river and facing the man from China: a Joseon-
jok,
so he spoke our language. He had an eager smile and a small head—he was small everywhere,
it seemed—and he limped slowly forward as if needing my permission to come closer. With every step his left leg swung out rigidly in a semicircle until we faced each other. He was nervous; his right foot kept making circles on the ice behind him like a ballerina.

This man named Seongsik said, “You really do believe me now, don't you? I'm a person who can make these kinds of meetings happen. I know everyone, and everyone knows me. Money? Who needs money? You need connections.”

He tore skin from his lower lip with his teeth. He wanted my approval, the way he repeated himself made that clear. But we didn't have much time so I interrupted him.

“I learn fast,” I said. “I'll learn anything you want.” I shut my eyes tight so I wouldn't have to look at him.

When I opened them, he was still shyly taking me in. The shy ones were the worst, hard to read.

“Why do you want to leave?” he asked, as if half my country, the country of his ancestors, didn't dream of living differently.

I was so nervous that my fingers dug arcs into my palms. “There are no good men in my country.”

He brightened as I'd intended. “I'm a good man, I promise.”

While the border guard smoked an imported cigarette from the many cases I'd given him to keep him happy, the Joseon man and I hurried through the ten minutes of time we had to talk—the courting time that he had bought for us.

Money was a symbol, a disease that infected our country. It was all the money I had earned after quitting school during the Great Hunger, my life savings you could call it. I was eight when
the famine changed everything. After the government rations stopped and the crops were flooded and destroyed year after year, my
eomma
made several trips into China's border towns to find work and food to feed us. Our government had disappeared and everyone who had followed the rules, including my
abba,
died. I didn't follow rules; I stole and bartered and learned quickly, and I survived. But when the government devalued our money and made our savings worthless, all my work became nothing at all. There was no present, and the future looked even worse. Then my monthly bleeding stopped, and I realized I was pregnant.

 • • • 

After that brief meeting, I continued talking with the Joseon stranger on a Chinese Telecom–wired cellular phone that I used to smuggle goods between the two countries. I delayed making decisions while I continued to work and earn yuan. Foreign currency was the only kind I trusted anymore. The same dust clouds blew behind me as I walked to the Chinese border. It opened its large mouth to receive and release dried fish, iron ore, pine mushrooms, and other goods that we floated over in plastic sacks to our Chinese partners across the Tumen River after paying our bribe. Unless we were pretty and poor—then we could pay with our bodies. I stared across the narrow bend of river at the cars and the blue- and red-tiled roofs bright in the sun and imagined who, on the other side, I might become.

There was no dream possible on our side of the river, and a child with only a mother would be a second-class citizen. But I didn't rush and made contact with a broker trolling our border towns for prospective brides to marry unwed Chinese men. This
woman with leathery hands approached me at the market, then quickly pulled me away so that we could talk in private and out of danger. She made me offers: “This man they say has one of those wobbly, not so strong hearts, but he's a meek one—so you can do what you want!” “That one's a farmer living in the countryside and owns a lot of livestock.” “A landowner—you know what a landowner is, right?” “And this one, this one's a businessman.”

“What business?” I asked.

“Business, business,” the marriage broker replied, and looked offended.

I thought of telling her about the baby I was carrying, how the man was a powerful local
ganbu
who had protected my growing smuggling business, and laughed out loud.

The businessman could have strange sexual desires or be violent, the farmer could be as old as my grandfather. Rumors traveled through the markets, and I had heard of such marriages. But the harmless-looking man who had arranged our brief meeting a week ago on the frozen river, this sometimes tour guide with his seesaw limp and sun-beaten face, he was real. Even though my
eomma
was famous for not showing until her fifth month, I was afraid my body would start to betray me; leaving wasn't a choice anymore. It was Eomma or my baby.

After the broker that the Joseon man had hired bribed a chain of local officials, after I bribed still others to register me dead of tuberculosis to protect my
eomma
,
I left while she was sleeping; it was safer for her not to know much. I packed the essentials, nothing personal, and passed the village walls without looking back. I believed I was good at not looking back.

 • • • 

Maybe it was two or four in the morning when I finally crossed, but all the hours feel the same when you're terrified and ready to end your life if caught. Against the mountain peaks rising like dull knives, the moon stalked our half-naked group wading across the shallow river. The moonlight made us as translucent as ghosts; it was as if we were shedding our very selves to become someone else.

“It'll hurt,” the broker leading us out had warned.
Hurt
wasn't the right word for crossing in early spring. Pain needled up my legs. I blew out white clouds too thick, too visible; I tried to stop breathing. Halfway across, I heard what sounded like a gun. We dropped deep into the water, and my hands rose up to beat away a bullet that never came.

Like the thousands before me since the famine, I shadowed the broker's exact watery steps to avoid the mantraps along the shore and the gaze of China's cameras. I could only ask myself: Why didn't I cross before the river's sudden thaw? Finally, shivering, colder than I have ever been, I dragged myself up the muddy bank and kneaded my numb fingers and toes. When I found them still there, I felt light, almost happy. I looked for the man who would be my husband, for now. His thin arms, his chestnut-brown face, anything to reduce the scale of that country suddenly too large for me.

 • • • 

That was how it happened for me, the impossible dream of crossing.

But the Dear Leader's arm had vast reach, and even as I
crossed the river and disappeared to marry the Joseon-
jok
man, we weren't exactly married. We who entered China, and all the children created from these marriages, didn't officially exist.

The broker had received the extra cash that he demanded, and the Joseon man named Seongsik left me overnight at his friend's house. “Only until our wedding,” Seongsik said, and blushed.

I was too scared to sleep and too exhausted not to, and my throat was so tight that I couldn't keep my food down. The next day, he returned to gaze at my pale face as if marveling that I was his.

“We're starting out on fertile land, for luck,” Seongsik said. I followed him out of the house, fearful that I looked like someone from across the river despite my new clothes. He was referring to the field set up for our wedding ceremony, but when we got there, it looked like nothing could ever grow out of it.

“It's farmed by my church deacon,” he said.

The shoes he had me wear, more slender towers than shoes, threatened to send me tumbling into the mud.

“Church?” I didn't know what a church was yet.

He caught me as I wobbled. “Don't worry. Just do what I tell you to.” He held me tightly by the arm and pulled me along as if he were leading a cow.

I didn't like being told what to do, but he had paid too large a sum for me. Already twice that morning he worried out loud about the broker's sudden last demands. And I was grateful. How could I not be? Seongsik was as slight as the orphans who snatched corn doughnuts from the hands of customers back home and ate as they were beaten—but he had saved my unborn baby.

I've lived an unusual young life, some would say an
extraordinarily difficult life, but I was a typical mother. I had all kinds of dreams for my baby. I had a name picked out if she was a girl and another name picked out if he was a boy, though I was sure she would be a girl. I worried about how her head would emerge from my small body unhurt, how to bathe such a fragile creature. It was the most important thing that had ever happened to me, my living, beating secret that I could share with no one. My baby, only a faint murmur in my belly, but already I felt less lonely.

So I wasn't as frightened as I should have been when the gathering clouds settled over us and Seongsik's people pretended not to stare while they stared at me. Only a man the others called deacon greeted me warmly, clasping his hands around mine.

“You've traveled a long way,” he said, though it was only across the river. “You must be tired.” Tears crowded my eyes at his hands, their warmth.

A gray-haired matron who smelled of dried mushrooms clutched her purse to her chest as she walked my way, as if I might steal from her.

She said, “It's that awful one-child policy,” in informal Korean, as if I were a child she was speaking to or a work hand she had hired. “Perfectly good men like my son have no choice but to marry women like you.”

“And what exactly is wrong with someone like me?” I smiled sweetly. The old rag of a woman wouldn't have survived five minutes of my former life.

“Eomeoneem, you promised,” Seongsik whined to his
eomma,
suddenly sounding like a ten-year-old. “She's what I want, my Jangmi.”

Like that, I was given my new name: Jangmi. Rose, a lovely, thorny name that suited me. So easily, one life ended and another began.

He stroked his
eomma
's hand, which was rough from farm-work, more in the way of a lover than a son. I didn't like seeing that. No woman wanted her man beholden to his
eomma,
even if she did live far away. He said, “Anyway, she's beautiful like I said, isn't she? I know how to pick them.”

“She's too pretty.” Her lips pressed together. “Good-looking girls are too demanding.”

When you have nothing, you grow up taking. You steal and cheat if you have to. What I knew was that you never got what you wanted if you didn't take it, so I took the first thing I saw: I plucked the pink carnation from my mother-in-law's buttonhole and held it to my nose.

 • • • 

That was the way I was. Not soft, though I looked like I would be soft. I was all gristle and bone and rage. All muscle and metal. I believed I had experienced everything, though I had never been in love.

Numb to pain and fear was how I wanted to be as we drove afterward in a boxy red car to Seongsik's apartment, passing concrete buildings that I couldn't tell apart from one another. The skyline blinded me with its glowing signs—neon, he called it. But it was the hundreds of motorcycles flying past that I couldn't stop staring at. I promised myself that I would become like one of those women who looked so fearless, so free, riding alone on the enormous steel machines.

“Here we are!” Seongsik rushed to open the car door for me.

Dusk reflected off his apartment building and made the windows opaque. This is where you belong, the building's yellow facade seemed to say to me. This is all you're worth, the puddle of urine we passed on the stairwell reminded me. We followed the smoke stains that wound straight up four flights of stairs. All at once the great, terrible China seemed to declare, I'm a building you're unable to leave, and you, you belong to me. I pushed those voices away; I reminded myself that the grim walls only obscured the somewhere beyond. Beyond. It was another name for hope.

I didn't know how to read this world yet. So when Seongsik, still a rabbit-faced stranger to me, opened the front door and the dark hall flooded with chanting, deep and otherworldly, I didn't understand that this was choral music. In the swell of sound that ballooned out of the apartment, I heard the sadness of my
eomma,
my
abeoji.
The people and the past I had abandoned. I fled for the stairs we had just climbed up.

“Where are you going?” He seized me by my hair.

I ripped away from him, my scalp burning. A long coil lay limp in his fist. He forced me to the floor by the shoulders, straddled and pinned me to the cement.

“Where do you think you're going?” he said again.

I pleaded into his face that was tight with disappointment. I choked out, “Don't you hear them? The voices of ghosts?”

For a man like him, the sight of my retreating back must have been the history of all departing women. Only when I kept explaining did he understand that I was running, but not from him.

“I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.” He let me go.

Inside the apartment, after he turned the music off and brewed a pot of jasmine tea, he broke the silence. “It's Bach, choral music. I had it set on repeat, for your arrival. Don't be scared.”