Stars Between the Sun and Moon (11 page)

“Yes,” said the fortune teller. “You always know where to find me.”

I knew I
was never going back to the fortune teller, even after Gilok gave birth to a son who lived. Two years passed, and I tried as best I could to hold on to my dreams of finding Sungmin. I spent much of my time foraging in the mountains for shrubs and herbs that my family could share. One day in a mountain village, I bumped into the woman who had sold Sungmin. I begged her for more information. She got angry with me and told me to never return. Her neighbour overheard the conversation and as I walked back to my family's house, she caught up with me.

“Don't be sad,” she whispered. “Your child is safe and doing well. He is very handsome.”

Stunned, I stared at the woman not sure what to say next. “How do you know?” I finally asked.

“Because that woman who sold your child is the adoptive mother's younger sister. Your son came to visit once.”

My knees felt like collapsing. My throat became dry. I wiped my perspiring brow.

“Will you come and get me next time they come back?” I finally managed to get out.

“I'll try,” she said, as I wrote, with shaking hands, directions to where I lived on a tattered piece of paper. “But they have only come once. Look at you, though,” she then said before I could ask any more questions about my son. “The people who are raising him are good, loyal, hard working and have food. He's better off where he is, if just for a little while.”

I looked down at my dirty, torn clothes. I stretched my hands, with their broken fingernails and calluses, out in front of me.

The fortune teller was right. I had to leave Sungmin where he was. I would confuse him now by telling him who he really was. He is better off in the home of people who cared for him, I thought, than in my frail arms. Filled with the deepest sorrow, I turned away.

Chapter Sixteen

From then on,
I endured my construction job without complaint, despite the calluses on my hands, the blisters on my feet, the clothes that stank of sweat, and the dried cement embedded in my matted hair. At least when I was busy, I could escape the pain that haunted my nights, spent longing for Sungmin. Even my physical hunger, growing worse with each day, was a reprieve from the hunger in my soul.

The construction team and I took our breaks at a small house down the road. The men talked and smoked as I sat hunched in the corner, listening to their conversations. Most of their talk revolved around the food they were lacking and the reasons why we were all suffering so much.

“People are quitting their jobs everywhere,” said a thin man whose knobby elbows poked through his coat.

“Why bother working?” exclaimed another. “There are no rations on the shelves and we have no energy for physical labour.”

“It's the Americans, the awful Americans. They're in cahoots with South Koreans to destroy us,” snapped a third comrade, a man with veins on his hands sticking out like rivers. “The Americans are starving us to death.”

One afternoon as I was taking a few sips of the cold water the homeowners had left in a bucket for us, I spied a bowl of white rice in an open cupboard. I had never thought of stealing from the people who lived here before, but my stomach ached from starvation and from the weeds we were now eating every day as our main source of food. After my co-workers had left the house, butting out their cigarettes in a metal can full of sand, I scooped a handful of the rice into the palm of my hand. In the outhouse, which had not been cleaned for a long time, I shoved the uncooked rice into my mouth and swallowed it without chewing.

Every week, my
co-workers and I attended a seminar at which the Party secretary of our company would inform us about the famine. “It is because of the Americans,” he would always explain, his voice harsh, his legs set stiffly side by side. The Party secretary's uniform was clean, unlike our work or home clothes, which were full of holes and dirty. Most people had only a few changes of shirts and pants now, having sold the rest for rice and vegetables. “You all need to exhibit heightened revolutionary awareness,” the secretary would belt out. “Do not heed false rumours. There are spies from the outside planting these.”

“What kind of rumours?” I whispered once to a colleague.

“Don't you know?” she replied with a snarl. “That there are no more food rations, that people in Pyongyang are being fed well while we in the countryside suffer.”

I looked at the Party secretary's round face and rosy cheeks. He was healthy. But when I scanned the workers, I could see that the skin on our faces caved into the crevices between our bones. We were covered in small rashes and wounds. A comrade on the construction site was having difficulty seeing out of one eye. None of us wanted him to lose his job, so we would guide him through his duties, pointing him to areas where he needed to smooth out the wet concrete.

“The United States is interfering with our trade activities,” the Party secretary intoned. “They are the ones to blame.”

I no longer had much idea what month, day or even year it was. It was easier to forget, because remembering meant thinking about how old Sungmin was now. He would be speaking in full sentences, starting school, lifting a pen and writing his name. “His name,” I thought so many times. “I wonder what it is now?”

For that reason, I was not sure exactly what month it was when our great leader Kim Il-sung died. The day before we learned of his death, my mother had travelled out to the farm area and bought a box of forty eggs with money she had earned from selling tofu. It was a windfall to find just one egg, let alone so many. She soaked the eggs in cold water overnight so that they would peel easily.

Early the next morning, I helped her boil the eggs. It was raining by the time we were done.

My mother, who walked with a limp by now, was not well enough to spend a day hawking eggs at the train station by herself. People were just not showing up to work, including me, so I could go with my mother and help. We tried to keep dry by wrapping plastic around ourselves, but the only plastic we had at home was full of holes. By the time we arrived at the train station, we could wring water from the hems of our shirts.

We planned to catch the workers on their way to the factories. But many people were at the train station for the same reason we were: to sell what food they had in exchange for food they were missing in their diets. When the rain stopped at noon, I sent my mother home, promising her I would sell the remaining eggs to the evening shift workers.

Once she had gone, I sat down for the first time that day and closed my eyes to take a nap. Soon I felt a sharp kick in the thigh. I opened my eyes to see a security guard pointing a stick at me. “You need to move,” he ordered.

“But I must sell my eggs,” I protested, showing him the bag they were in. “Would you like one?”

The guard hit me sharply on the back with his stick. “I will kill you if you remain,” he hissed. As I stood to go, he spun around and pushed me toward the exit.

Out on the street, there were uniformed men everywhere. Some were walking in military stride. Others patrolled the streets. Never before had I seen so many members of the Party out and about. “Maybe war has come,” I thought. “I must get home to my mother.” But then my thoughts turned to an even more pressing concern. I had not sold all the eggs, and my family was dependent on that. I had to find a way back into the station to sell the rest.

Then as I turned the corner, I heard the shocking announcement: the voice of a man, booming out from a radio, said that Kim Il-sung had died.

I crept toward the window of the home where the radio was playing, stood on a rock and peered inside. I nearly fell off the rock when I saw that it wasn't a radio at all, but a colour television. Some of my friends' families had black and white television sets. I'd even watched
Robinson Crusoe
once at Pumpkin's house. But I had never seen a set that gave off pictures in colour, though my father had told me about them. The families who owned them probably had relatives living in China before liberation, he had explained. The only other way a rural person could own such a thing was if their family had had gold from before the revolution. After liberation, my father explained, they would have been asked by the Party to exchange their gold for won and they could have used that to purchase a colour television from one of the markets.

I stepped down off the rock, my eyes filling with tears. I felt as if my own father had died. I passed others on the street who were crying like I was. By the time I made it to my family's home, all my eggs had been sold to passersby. But I was so weak with grief, I collapsed on the floor.

That next morning, filled with sadness, I donned my wedding outfit. My mother and I used our money from the eggs to buy chrysanthemums from a flower shop. The young woman who sold us the flowers was also dressed in a traditional skirt and top. My entire family and I then went together by train to my father's factory. Although all the carriages were full, not a single person spoke. The only sound was muffled crying.

The workers and their families gathered in the factory's auditorium. One by one, people moved toward the centre of the room, where a large photograph of Kim Il-sung had been hung, to lay their flowers. Many flung themselves to the ground and wailed so loudly my ears rang from the noise. When it was my family's turn, my own cries joined with the others. I cried for Kim Il-sung, I cried for the flower girl, I cried for our freedom, I cried for our hunger, I cried for Sungmin.

For the next ten days, no one was allowed to speak in a loud voice, even inside their homes. No one went to work. The Party informed us via radio and television that we were not allowed to congregate with more than one other person at a time, except in our homes, and even then it had to be family. “Our dear leader has given us great provisions,” my father said softly one night. “We owe much to him.”

Every morning, I bathed in cold water, then slipped into my wedding outfit and put white powder on my cheeks. Then my family and I would again go to my father's factory. Like everyone else there, we remained silent except when we cried in front of Kim Il-sung's portrait.

After ten days of mourning, we waited for Kim Jong-il, Kim Il-sung's son to instruct the nation what to do next.

We had always known Kim Jong-il would someday take over from his father. Most of our classes at school were conducted using the leather books containing the words and teachings of our dear leader. But some of the books had also been written by his son.

One of Kim Jong-il's teachings was a question posed in a song he had penned for his father. “Time stays the same for everyone,” he had written, “but the clock on my father's desk, why does it move so hurriedly?”

In class, I had flung my hand in the air to say I felt the meaning of the line was that our eternal father needed to slow down and rest. “He's working too hard to protect and serve us,” I said. “The song shows the son's great love for his father. He wants his father to look after his health.”

From the photographs hung in classrooms and factories, I knew that Kim Jong-il had the same square jaw, tiny eyes and wide forehead as his father. They wore the same kind of black-rimmed eyeglasses, and both of them had lots of fat on their bodies. Of course, they would always get food first. They had to look after us, and so needed the most energy of all. I could not imagine them doing their important work feeling the way I did every day, lugging my body out of bed, my head fuzzy from lack of food, my thoughts spiralling every which way, tears erupting from deep inside whenever I saw a boy the same age as Sungmin.

Family, neighbours and
colleagues: we all waited for Kim Jong-il to address us. But word from Pyongyang did not come. Months passed, but the newspapers were silent. People's hunger grew worse. Our monthly rations shrunk until they were enough to last only a week. There were days my family survived solely on water. And flooding from the rains brought disease. People broke out in rashes that became infested with maggots. Many had constant colds, flus and chronic coughs. People began to leave our neighbourhood, dragging their tired bodies out to the rural areas, hoping to find food there. Children struggled to keep up with their parents, their faces drawn, their skin blackened and flaking off. Everyone looked decades older than they actually were. We were dying. All of us.

My mother recounted a terrible story from the neighbourhood one night as we sat together in flickering candlelight. The electricity was long gone. A few blocks over, she said, a man had married a young woman who was fat and short. Her new mother-in-law felt the woman was eating too much, so she kicked her out of the house. My mother wiped tears from her eyes as she continued. “The young woman ate whatever she could find in the river: tadpoles, worms. She couldn't go home. I gave her some tofu, but I had only a little to spare. She became so bloated she lost all her strength and could only crawl. She found her way to an abandoned house, and her husband discovered her a few days later, after she had died. People say the young woman's body was rolled up in a sheet and taken to the mountain, where it was left to rot. But the mother-in-law prepared a table for her of whatever food the family could find, including some of my tofu. They didn't want to be cursed by her spirit.”

All around us, people's personalities had changed. Vendors on the street had their bread and eggs stolen. People sold their clothes and furniture in the rural areas in exchange for vegetables. With no more rations, everything had turned mad.

I quit my job, telling my supervisor that I was getting married and moving away. I needed to help my mother, to make sure people didn't rob her. I spent my days walking back and forth to the train station, ever watchful of limber young boys who would snatch our tofu and shove it in their mouths before I could even scold them.

Finally, in hushed conversations, people started to question whether our hunger really was caused by the Americans. People wanted to know why Kim Jong-il would not speak. Some defended the regime, saying Kim Jong-il was respecting the three-year mourning period,
sahm-nyun-sahng
.

And, indeed, he may have been. Three years after Kim Il-sung's death—three years of decay, in which even our summer sunlight did little to lighten the black and grey hues of life in Chosun—Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il issued a statement. He reminded us of the Arduous March, the slogan from our war of liberation with the Japanese. The slogan was coined after Kim Il-sung, leading his soldiers, marched through the Chinese border provinces near Chosun, fighting against ten thousand enemy soldiers for over one hundred days during a battle against the Japanese. All the while, his soldiers were dying from lack of food, the plague and low spirits. Kim Il-sung shared whatever food he had with his soldiers and encouraged everyone to press on. He said that victory was near, and it was.

In Kim Jong-il's first official instruction, communicated via the Party, he said that we, all of Chosun, were on an Arduous March much like his father and his soldiers had been. Because of the rains and the flooding, Chosun was in the midst of a nation-wide famine. We must fight through this, he commanded us. We must fight through this and win.