How I Became a North Korean (8 page)

“You're from the south. Pyongyang? You've got the accent, the attitude. Young man, you better learn this quickly: You're in China; now you're nobody.”

The man directed the women to take turns climbing through
the break in the wall where they would change into local clothing. We were sent in only after the women reemerged in their new garments. Inside, I tasted dandelions and dried fish and urine in the air. As motes of dust misted down from the roof, I gagged at rats with tails as long as rice stalks rattling in the dark corners.

“Others were here before us,” someone said.

In the light shooting through a crack in the roof, I saw plastic bags and empty bottles and flattened squares of straw and tarp for bedding. The hut, filled and emptied many times with the fleeing and the hiding, held the story of our people in its smells. But I didn't think of myself as one of them yet.

I dressed slowly until one by one they left and I was alone again.

“Your first time crossing?” A boy's voice, whistling through a gap between his front teeth, carried in the dark. “You'd do good to stick with me. I know my way around.”

The boy I would later call Namil hiccuped and came closer so that I smelled the alcohol on him. I saw his slight silhouette and his smile, so wide it was as if both sides were being pulled apart by strings. He pulled out a bun from his jacket pocket and tore it in half. “Here, you can have some.”

“Where did you get this?”

“The trash is high quality here, not like back home. You get fat off what they throw away, really! You'll find out. And the Christians—the good ones—they'll practically give you their house if you look young and sad and tell them you're an orphan.”

But I wasn't an orphan. I still had Eomeoni and my
dongsaeng,
one more long journey awaiting us from China to the safety of another country. The boy tucked the piece of bun in my hand
though I wasn't going to reduce myself to feeding off garbage. The rats stilled and became attentive. I stared at the stale bread, repulsed, but was touched by his kindness and pretended to take a bite of it.

At a rattling sound outside, the boy instantly turned wary. When a voice spiked in through the crack, he sank behind a couch with filling springing out of its seats. His speed, his animal intuition, made me feel soft, my brain padded by dull fatty layers that didn't know how to read any of the signs around me.

Outside, I saw that Eomeoni had chosen only white clothes, the traditional color of mourning. Her knuckle was locked in her mouth, and I wondered if she was thinking about Abeoji. Or was she crying for our home, our lost lives? Only then I noticed, in the way that time became slow for me, that some men as large as sedans were now positioned behind Red Leather Jacket.

It was as if one of my mother's film reels played in slow motion, the way our men lined up in front of the women. The way some of us were already turned sideways even while standing in front of our women, prepared to run. I stayed behind in the back with my
eomeoni
and my
dongsaeng,
and my hands found theirs without my knowing. A man was shouting, his face inches away from Red Leather Jacket's droopy left eye.

“What are you doing with the baby?” he said.

One of the men trained a gun on him. He stepped back.

They had wrenched the baby from the
eomma,
and the
eomma
had collapsed at Red Leather Jacket's feet, her hands curled around the tops of his shoes. A cry gurgled out of her as he kicked her away from him—I will never forget that sound.

One of the large men turned to Red Leather Jacket. He
pointed at a girl with heavy bangs, at the woman collapsed on the dirt, then at my
eomeoni
and my
dongsaeng
. His associates broke easily through my grip, through the barricade of our men's bodies. Some of us protested as the women were herded to one side, but more quietly now, their minds on the gun.

Nothing was as real as the gun the short squat man pointed at us. Nothing I did could make a difference, but to do nothing was to admit that nothing could be done, and to be alone in the world was to be less than nothing.

All I needed was the gun.

I rushed ahead until my hand brushed against the dull steel. A shoe bore into my spine. Though there was always fighting at school, I had managed to stay beneath the attention of violence, but this time I forced myself up. We struggled, arms confused and tangled with each other. The leaden gun gleamed each time the moon struck it; the man's finger stayed locked into the barrel. How much power was in that hand. It was so close, it was almost mine. But there were too many of them.

Eomeoni screamed as they pinned my arms behind me. The red leather sleeve arced slowly, then it was over. The black butt crunched down on my nose and the burning spread across my face. Coppery blood perfumed the air; I tasted it on my tongue. It will swell, I thought, it will be hard for me to sleep without rolling over, though none of this mattered anymore. Laughter seeped from me at the absurdity and the horror, and I wondered who I would have to become to survive this, until the gun struck down on my nose again.

“You Joseon people,” Red Leather Jacket said. “You're too emotional.”

The sobbing women were herded past us to a van.

So this was the enemy. The finger curled around the trigger. And this was the enemy: the clouds breaking up, the moon above looming too brightly and exposing us. The blank face of China that made us the hunted. I gazed at the men who were destroying our lives; they looked the same. A swift blur of red leather passed me.

The man opened the back door to the van and invited the women to step up. He looked tired but satisfied that his day was nearly over. Abeoji, Eomeoni, and my
dongsaeng
 . . . my mind went silent, into a cool, dark place.

“The women will be taken care of,” the man continued. “You do what you're told, then it's not so bad. Some women even like it.”

“May I . . . please say good-bye to my son?” Eomeoni spoke quietly, as if not to startle anyone.

“I'm a reasonable person,” Red Leather Jacket said, “and you ask like a reasonable woman. Keep it short.”

She released my sister's hand. Her loose white pant legs swished as she approached me. I tried to reassure her and tell her, I'll find you, I promise, if it takes my entire life, but my lips wouldn't move. When she took my clammy hands into hers, tears dimmed my sight, turning her features so vague and delicate that I feared I would forget what she looked like.

But I remember so much: her dancer's body leaning into me and her smell of wet pine needles and the promise of spring weather, her gaze that lingered on my face, memorizing. Her bright, fearful eyes as she squeezed my hands and said, “My love, you must be brave.”

I
n new clothes with a new man and a new name, I thought I could finally leave my country behind and become someone else. I made Seongsik happy. I worked hard to make him happy; I was determined to maintain my devotion until my baby was old enough for us to leave safely. Or maybe we would stay forever with this man, but there was the constant danger of being discovered, and my baby would live as a shadow child who couldn't be registered and officially exist. All through our second week together I made sure that when Seongsik woke up, my soap-scented face was pressed close to his. He craned up to touch me, seeking the son he must have wanted. He would have a baby soon enough. I waited for a safe number of days to pass until I could make my announcement.

Meanwhile, Seongsik followed me to the common room, which was always a remarkable late-spring temperature due to the heated floors, then to the bathroom. When I reemerged, he was waiting by the door to follow me to the kitchen, his
movements shy but eager as he walked at my heels. I tried new hairstyles to charm him, laughed helplessly to make him feel more capable. I strived to be a beloved, pleasing wife.

It could have worked. I knew that many women had crossed and married Joseon men for relative safety and given birth to children, and some of them must have escaped capture. Worked, in the only ways that a refugee's life could work. Like those women before me, I was becoming familiar with many things. The camouflage Seongsik's presence gave me in the nearby city's shopping mall, as if I were unafraid of each person who passed us, the smell of pork and beef seeping from everyone's skin. The towers of glistening pastries and watermelons bigger than babies, the soaring plates of food that people in restaurants left half-eaten. Kitchen gadgets that squeezed, ground, separated. So many bewildering freedoms, if you had the money for them.

Memories came back to me, images of my
abba
feeding me what he could find while he starved, my
eomma
's freckled arms rising up to the sun while she hung the laundry. These thoughts weakened my knees and once forced me to sink to the tile floor, fruit knife still in my hand. My body ached with phantom pain. This, I thought, is what it must be like to lose an arm or a leg.

Still, I felt the eyes on me everywhere. The women on the stairwell when I went to throw out the trash. The building security guard who did nothing but sleep and keep watch, not so different from the guards posted across the river who monitored our villages. In the car on the way to church, Seongsik said, “Stop checking in the mirror. There's no one back there.”

But of course there was the security camera at the building's
front entrance watching me, a stranger's casual glance. Then there was his daughter.

In those first few weeks in China, Byeol and I had learned that I couldn't eat fish. Or bean sprouts. Or spicy fried tofu. So she demanded that I make these for her every day and made me ache with tension. In front of Seongsik, I feigned having a delicate stomach and counted the days until it was safe to let him know that he had become an
abba.
Would I say it was a premature birth? I decided to worry about that later. The days went by slowly, and as he was often not there, I was left with Byeol and her relentless questions.

“Why can't you eat fish?” or “Why can't you eat bean sprouts?”

“I told you, my stomach is sensitive.”

“What is ‘sensitive'?” “Why do you like my
abba
?” “Why don't you know how to draw?” “Why can't you speak Chinese?” Then she would look suspiciously at me. One wrong word from a child could get me sent back.

She brightened up each time the doorbell made a rusty ring, which made me freeze, until she remembered that since my arrival she was no longer allowed to answer the door. If her
abba
wasn't home, she would flop in front of the television and prop her chin on her fists and watch cartoons for hours, smiling again.

“Why does the moon change color?” she asked me. “Why do the planets look still when they're supposed to be moving? Why do we have last names? Where is my
eomma
? When is she coming back? Why do boys look so different from girls? Why can't I see God?” Why, why, why? And on and on.

I admired and feared her questions. I wondered if all children were like this.

I patiently answered what I could. But on the evenings when her
abba
was home, she only turned to me and said, “I wasn't asking you. I was asking Abba.”

I almost told him in time. I was starting to show despite my mother's genes, but he assumed it was because I often ate three bowls of rice, though I knew that there was always more, and because of my unbearable cravings for the fruit and sweets that were everywhere around me. I ate, then felt overwhelmed by the desire to sleep all day.

“Believe me, there's always more in this country,” he would say, laughing, and even I wasn't sure whether it was my greed or my growing baby that drove this hunger.

It happened after he came back from a three-day tour, at dinnertime. I had planned to tell him that night. When my body refused the stew I made with the dried pollack he had brought home, Byeol pointed at me with her spoon and with her mouth full of the
bukeo
stew said, “She doesn't eat fish. It makes her run to the bathroom and throw up.”

My throat tightened; he bit into a fresh green pepper dipped in spicy
gochujang,
looking concerned. “Are you sick? When did this happen?”

“From the day after you brought her home.” Byeol frowned. “And she doesn't eat bean sprouts or spicy tofu or pickled lotus, either. All of them make her run to the bathroom and throw up. If you have to marry, why don't you marry someone healthy? She's sick all the time!”

She made her best exasperated expression. Seongsik forgot to
close his mouth and
gochujang
trickled out and stained his chin a dark red.

I said quickly, “I've never liked fish.”

I rested my hand on the bridge of his clenched knuckles and made my first silent prayer: Please let this man weaken at my touch.

 • • • 

He didn't weaken. Instead he stopped speaking to me for the rest of the evening and didn't come to bed. I couldn't sleep. The bed might as well have been made of stone.

Outside, Seongsik and Byeol moved around like red-eyed rats. When I shifted from right to left, the electric blanket beneath me crackled and the blanket above chafed against my skin like pumice. I curled up with dry heaves, but nothing came up, not even my fear. How could I be afraid when I had always taken care of myself with so little help? But I found myself jumping at a branch tapping against the windowpane.

After what felt like hours, Seongsik switched on the light. I shrank from the walls covered with pictures of Byeol, his spiteful face, all of it bathed in an antiseptic yellow.

“You know how much yuan I've spent on you?” He limped to the foot of the bed, his fists positioned on his hips. “Whose baby is it?”

I tried to get up, but he pushed me down by my shoulders. That was what I had become: a woman prostrate before a man. There was no love in his look, no credit earned in the weeks we had spent together. I was owned, and my owner was distraught and capable of punishment.

“I trusted you,” he said. I begged him to calm down, but he threw aside the blanket, exposing me.

“It's the past—it has nothing to do with us.” I clutched the edge of his trousers. “Please, I'm completely yours.”

“You're using me,” he said as if he hadn't heard me. He bit down on his knuckles, leaving teeth marks. “All that money and time, and you're going to leave me.”

“I won't. You must believe me.” I slapped at my forehead. “Where would I go?”

“You're such an actress—you're evil, another Jezebel! A Salome come to see my head on a silver platter!” He shouted insult after insult.

“And what about your past and everything you hid from me?” I felt reckless, myself again, able to finally say something true. “I've been a good woman for you. I've been a good
eomma
to Byeol.”

He banged his head against the wall twice, three times, making an angry red dent on his forehead.

“We were supposed to be happy,” he said.

How easily the idea of happiness, the possibility of it, slipped from his lips.

“You cost me a lot of money. I had plans for us.” His agitated fingers spun through his hair. “You don't deserve to be saved.”

“You think you can save me, don't you? You think you're some kind of savior?”

“You're talking back to me? A North Korean woman?”

He punched the heaped-up bedspread with his fists.

“You're going to leave me anyway, so why don't you leave now and wait for the police to do their sweeps? Everyone knows
where you people hide—they feel sorry for you, until they don't. Let the police take you to the detention center and send you right back so your government can do what they want to with you, and you know best what they do to an unmarried woman with child. Then you'll wish you had been nicer to me.”

I covered my eyes. “Please, just stop.”

I was unable to breathe.

He turned to leave. His retreating back, his thin, tuber neck. This man was all I had.

I closed my eyes as one person, opened them as another. Somewhere inside me there was another self hidden from sight. She was watching this other woman pull him to her, gather his chapped brown hands together, and take his index finger between her lips.

“Don't leave me,” that other woman said. A thin trail of saliva still connected her lips to him. “Don't leave your wife.”

 • • • 

A person can get used to almost anything to survive. That was what China taught me. But I never got used to the fear. The next morning Seongsik claimed that he forgave me and that nothing had changed for us, but that wasn't true. He didn't turn mean, not exactly, but distant, as if I had failed some unspoken test and was no longer worthy of his attention. That day he didn't once step on my heels like a clumsy mutt, and he left the room each time he made a phone call, speaking in a low whisper. At night, he left a wide gap between us on the bed, and forbade me to come any closer. His cold gestures alarmed me, and I began to wake up late at night clawing at the air, trying to escape the truck repatriating
me. I was desperate for him to enforce his rights, make my body laundry scrubbed against a wooden board. I was ready to sacrifice my body to keep my baby safe. My baby.

I was sitting on the floor one morning, a textbook on the Han language spread open on my lap, when Seongsik came in and covered the pages with his hands.

“You're learning Chinese to leave me. You were never planning to stay,” he said as if he had just realized this. “That's all you've ever wanted, to get to South Korea.”

“No, never. Why would I want something so dangerous?” I tucked my trembling hands between the pages of the book. It was the first time he looked at me directly since he had found out.

“Everyone warned me about trusting a woman from your country. I'm such a
babo
! I never listen.”

His words churned deep in my lower stomach and sickness overwhelmed me. The world tipped from one side to another, then righted itself again. I needed Seongsik. But how to convince him that he needed me?

We withered.

“You aren't eating,” Seongsik said at breakfast the next day after Byeol had been packed off to school.

I tried to meet his eyes across the bottles of soy and oyster sauce that he had moved into the center of the table.

“Why aren't you eating? It's perfectly good food!” He was so agitated that his words ran into each other.

“I don't feel very hungry.” Overwhelmed by the fishy, beany smell, I had pushed the pungent
dwenjang
stew far from me.

I rested my hand on his thigh. He pushed it off and went to the common room.

“You think I'm stupid, don't you?” He pressed his face against the window. “Some kind of bank account to use up?”

I didn't know what a bank account was yet. The loneliness of the new geography, and language, my new body that demanded sleep day and night, overwhelmed me. I began to cry. It wasn't hard to cry as I thought of my baby and how much we needed Seongsik. Need. I wanted to be free from it. The body that demanded food and shelter, that traded safety for sex, how pregnancy weakened it, all of this disgusted me. To be free of your body's needs, I thought, that is true freedom.

He covered his ears with his hands. “Don't cry,” he said. “You don't deserve to cry!”

As if someone had pressed a button, my tears stopped. I pressed a cool glass of water across my cheek. “Who's crying?”

He tallied up all my betrayals and pounded his palm with a balled-up fist. When I tried to hold him from behind by the waist and calm him, he threatened to report me to a North Korean official that he said he was secretly friends with. Then he cried and said, “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”

I was relieved when he left the next morning to guide some Christian tourists. But as the tension stitched into my body began to ease, around noon the doorknob turned and someone called out shrilly, “You! You North Korean girl!”

The voice pricked me. It was his
eomeoni,
who had let herself into the apartment with a spare key. As soon as I greeted her, the doughy-faced woman grabbed me by the hair and yanked me
toward the door. The burning went tingling down to my knees, and I just managed to stay on my feet.

“You witch! How dare you stay here!” She let go of my hair. “You don't deserve my son. I'm tempted to call security and ship you straight to a repatriation center.”

Terror quickened my heart and a flash of guilt was swallowed up by more terror. How could a woman with child survive alone in this country?