Stars Between the Sun and Moon (4 page)

“Come here, child,” she called out. “And bring your sister too.”

I had never been inside anyone else's home, except that of a relative.

“Come with me,” the woman repeated. But this time her tone was kind, and her two children had appeared and they were smiling. Sunyoung ran to them and was inside the house before I could decide what to do. I had to follow. I couldn't leave my little sister alone.

After the woman had taken off her jacket and helped her children out of their shoes, which I noticed were shiny and new, with not a single hole in the soles, she invited Sunyoung and me to sit. We crossed our legs and huddled together, enjoying the warmth from the
ondol
floor, the traditional heated floor with slabs of stone underneath warmed with hot air from the kitchen fireplace. As one of the boys unfolded the legs of a small wooden table, the other brought us steaming bowls of corn rice, followed by some noodles.

The two boys made shadow puppets with their hands on the wall. When she was done eating, Sunyoung joined them.

“Why are you not in school?” the woman asked me, sitting down and slipping on a pair of round spectacles.

“My umma said I was to start in the ninth month,” I replied timidly.

She opened the large, red, leather-bound book she was holding. “It's by our eternal leader,” she said, catching me looking at the cover. “It's about his life as a child. You must have a copy at your house,” she continued as I nodded. “Would you like me to read you a story?”

I shook my head. I'd never had a conversation with anyone other than family members. I didn't know what to say or do.

When the light inside grew dim, and our neighbour's overhead light came on, I knew Sunyoung and I needed to head home. As soon as we were back in our yard, we each felt a hand swoop down and grab our coats. My grandmother hauled us inside the house.

“Where have you been?” she shouted. She didn't wait for a response. Instead, she grabbed me by the ear and dragged me into the second room, where she snatched a ruler. She hit me across the back of the legs so hard and so many times that I screamed out in terror.

I begged her to stop, but she aimed the ruler at my hands next. Soon my palms were covered in bloody scratches. Sunyoung sat in the corner of the room, her eyes tightly closed, rocking her body back and forth. She had covered her ears to block out the sound of my cries.

“I never wanted you here,” my grandmother yelled, her spittle landing in my hair. “You bring me shame by stealing my food. You and that mother of yours, your sister and you, you all bring me shame.”

My halmuni stopped suddenly. I turned my head to see what she was staring at. My mother stood in the doorway, her face white, her body shaking like the ruler my halmuni held in the air.

Chapter Four

Things changed after
that incident. One cloudy afternoon, my grandmother told my sister and me to put on our sweaters. Heook's energy was slowly improving, and apparently she had asked grandmother if I could come and play tag with her in the backyard. The air was crisp, filled with the scent of fresh rain and damp leaves unearthed by the melting snow.

My grandmother still ordered me to do chores. But she didn't leave us alone or lock us up anymore. She gave my sister and me a little extra corn rice or kimchi during mealtimes. In the afternoons, while she read, we were allowed to lie on our duvets and play hand-shadow puppet games. When spring fully emerged, we even went outside and made mud pies.

After work one night, my father announced that he had requested a new house, a home just for us. My grandparents, sitting off to the side, lowered their heads as we packed up our duvets and pots and pans and moved yet again.

Our new house was not far from my grandmother's place. Sunyoung and I would still spend our days alone, my mother informed us. I would be in charge of looking after my sister and making our meals. In the mornings, before she set off with Hyungchul, Umma would put the rice and some water on the stove for me to cook. She then locked us inside when she left.

Sunyoung and I spent our days making music with the pots and pans, dancing and singing at the top of our lungs. One afternoon, I dug a long piece of cloth from my mother's chest. I tied one end to the door handle of my father's drawing room and the other end to the pantry door. When we shut one door, the other would pop open.
Open, close, open, close
 . . . we did this for hours.

By the end of the third week, though, these activities had lost their initial attraction. My sister would lie on a cotton mat and stare at the ceiling, while I looked out the window at the shed where my father kept our wood.

When my parents were at home, I was allowed to play in the shed. Through the holes in the wall, I would spy on the other neighbourhood children running around in their yards. I learned their games, including one where they tried to outsmart each other by shaping their hands like rocks, paper or scissors. I taught these games to Sunyoung, and we sometimes played them during our days locked indoors. But the fun lasted only a little while, and then we would fall idle again.

Sometimes my sister and I would amuse ourselves by playing ration shop. Sunyoung play-acted a mother, holding a blanket in her arms as if it were a real baby. I played the ration officer who checked the ration card and made sure that the correct amounts of food were handed out.

“I came to get the rations,” Sunyoung would say.

“Here comes the rice—also pick up the potatoes,” I said.

“Your family of five gets four kilograms of rice for a fortnight,” I replied stiffly, just like I imagined the real ration officer would do. “But because you are a new mother and are breast-feeding, you can also get two kilograms of grain powder as well.”

I also liked to look through my father's drawings, which were strewn across his desk or rolled into cylinders that stood upright in the corner of the room. In the shed were also various machine parts. I asked my mother what they were. She said Abuji was good at building machines. Indeed, in the evenings and on the holidays he would spend hours in the shed making things like a rice harvesting machine and a corn popper. Ships were his favourite subject to draw. I had never seen a ship in real life. My mother had explained that to the east was an ocean with water so deep that if I fell into it, I would never be seen again.

“How did you
and Abuji meet?” I asked Umma on one of her days off from teaching.

“A friend of mine had a husband who was a cousin of your father's. I was teaching school by then. Our friends introduced us.”

One afternoon in
my father's room, I picked up his fountain pen, grabbed a piece of scrap paper from the garbage and began drawing. The ink flowed from the pen tip onto the paper, reminding me of swallows' wings touching the sky. I drew a picture of my little sister, then did some of the alphabet letters my mother said I would be learning in school. Soon after, though, the pen broke.

I was so engrossed in what I was doing that I did not hear my father's footsteps as he came home from work early, suffering from a flu that made him feverish. I was trying to fix the pen but it was no use. I stopped only when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

My father stood, red-faced and still in the grey uniform he'd worn ever since I could remember. I didn't even wait for his words. I stood up on wobbly legs and turned around.

“Roll up your pants,” he ordered.

With trembling hands, I rolled them up.

My father took the broomstick handle and smacked the backs of my legs three times hard.

A few days later, my mother announced that she'd now be taking Sunyoung to the daycare at her school. I was to spend my days now with my father, at his work. I'd be there until I started school in the ninth month.

And so I
adopted a new daily routine. I would wake and dress immediately, eat a bowl of corn rice, and then hurry with my father to the train station. We travelled three stops to get to his factory, which was located on the outskirts of the city. The factory building was a simple white building with a dark metal roof. The workers were stiff looking, their eyes piercing forward, their shoulders proud, all wearing the same uniform as my father.

Abuji led me inside the building and through to the main area. He pointed at the high voltage warning signs next to the electric wires inside. A person who worked at the factory had gotten too close to those wires and been injured here, he warned me. “You need to listen, Sunhwa. You must never come into the factory floor on your own.”

My father left me sitting in his supervisor's office. I had to wait there until break-time, he said, when he could join me. I sat down on the floor in the corner, pulled my legs tight against my chest and slowly scanned the barren room. It was large, with a furnace in the middle and a photo on the wall of our great father and eternal president, Kim Il-sung, wearing a black suit. We had the same photograph at home.

In my head, I told myself stories. After what seemed like a whole day, but was really just a few hours, my father returned.

“Come sit beside me,” he said, patting a chipped wooden bench that at one point had been painted the Party's favourite colour, sky blue.

I crouched beside him as some Party members joined us. I felt shy. I had never been alone with a group of men.

My father, whom I had only seen smoking in our shed, took a package out of the breast pocket of his grey work shirt. I watched as he scraped pieces of tobacco into a piece of paper and then wrapped it into a small cylinder.

My father remained silent as the other men talked about the Party and the government. I chewed on some chives I had picked at a farm my father and I passed on the way to the train station. “Kim Il-sung is like the eternal flame of our stove fires,” one man said. “A fire that never goes out and remains strong, despite the weather.”

“Thank you, General,” another man added, turning to the portrait of our leader on the wall. “Thanks to you we have such a good life.”

I spent weekdays for the next few months in my father's supervisor's office, playing games in my mind. I often pretended to be the little girl in Umma's story, calling up to the sky for a rope so she could escape the tiger. “If I am meant to be anywhere but here,” I chanted silently, “send me a good rope that I can climb.”

I longed to be with the children I saw through the dusty window, chasing each other with their coats undone, their cheeks flushed, their faces bright with laughter. They attended the factory's kindergarten class. “Oh, sky,” I thought to myself. “I won't ask so much as to become the sun or the moon, just one of the stars in between, if you send me a rope to help me escape this room.”

Chapter Five

Food was scarcer
than ever for my family. My grandfather, my father told me, had retired from his position as a biology teacher, and my grandmother had stopped working as a music teacher when her own children were young. Their sons and sons-in-law supported them now.

One balmy summer day, my mother and I sat together on the ground while my father and sister tended the small patch of ground we had tilled, stretching from behind our house to a nearby river. My parents had planted potato and cabbage seeds soon after we moved in. That afternoon, Hyungchul toddled after the goat and the sheep my grandfather had lent us. My grandfather had raised the animals in his yard, but there was little grass left there for them to eat. They were both females and we would be allowed to keep their offspring.

“The Party gives extra rations to people like you and Abuji, who toil long and hard for our great father and eternal president,” I said to my mother, who was picking burrs out of a sweater.

She nodded, not looking up from what she was doing.

“But Halabuji and Halmuni have so much more than we do because their sons also give them food.”

“We share our food with them sometimes, but not always,” my mother said matter-of-factly. “When your grandfather is in good health, he has work watching the melon fields. He gets extra food from the farms when he does this. It's our duty to help look after them when they are weak.”

“But then we go hungry ourselves!” I blurted.

My mother spoke sharply. “Don't be disrespectful!” She stood up wiping earth from her navy-blue skirt.

“Wait,” I said, tugging on the back of her tights. I was determined that day, whatever the cost, to get some answers. “Why is Halmuni so mean to us? Please tell me!”

My mother looked out over the field for a moment. I glanced at my shoes, covered in mud, and was ashamed of my boldness. But she surprised me by sitting back down.

“Your father has never told me much about his life,” she began. “But he did confide that his umma was very spoiled. Your grandfather did everything for her, even sharpening her teaching pencils at night. Your grandfather did the housework, too, with the help of your father and his brothers and sisters. Your grandmother was the daughter of a corner-store owner. Your grandfather's father was a farmer, so when your grandparents wed, it was considered a good marriage for him. Back then, before our eternal father was in charge, farmers were not respected as they are today. Back then, capitalists were respected instead. Today, your grandmother's family would be seen as capitalists who take advantage of others. Your grandfather's family would be the virtuous ones for serving the Party.”

I kept my head lowered as I pressed on. “But Halmuni is not mean to Heeok. She gives her candy and makes her fish oil. Why does she not like me?”

“Because you were my firstborn child and you weren't a son. Heeok has an older brother,” my mother replied, after a long pause. “During Chosun's war with the puppet army of the Americans and their allies, your father's father was a member of the Labour Party, which later became the North Korean Workers Party. But there was a rumour on the street that members of the Party were going to be killed by security forces backed by the Americans. Your grandfather buried his membership card rather than wearing it around his neck. He didn't want to be identified. When the puppet army made it to Yuseon, where they lived, your grandmother fled with your father and his five siblings to another city, where they stayed in the home of a Party supporter. After the war ended, the family returned to Yuseon.”

“I've seen the photos of Halabuji posing in his uniform,” I said excitedly.

“Your grandfather went to find his card,” my mother continued, “but he couldn't remember where he had buried it. Because of that, your father and your aunts and uncles all had trouble when they tried to register for membership in the Party. Your father received his Party membership card only when we moved to Suhdoosoo.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed in shock. I had always assumed my father and his siblings were Party members.

“So that is why Abuji married me. Both our families had problems with the Party,” she concluded. “Your father and I met only twice before we wed and your grandmother never liked me. She has always felt your father should have married better. Then, when you were born a girl, and not a treasured firstborn son, she cut off completely any feeling she might have had for you or me.” My mother got to her feet, signalling the end of our conversation.

Every Saturday morning,
my parents, like all workers, took part in
saenghwalchonghwa
, or total life retrospective. Each person present had to face their peers and document all the things they felt they had done wrong that week. My mother would confess that she had not pressed her skirts or shirts as well as she could have or shown enough respect to our great father and eternal leader. My father might admit to taking an extra-long cigarette break, as he sometimes liked to do. For their transgressions, my mother explained to me, people were forced to stand at the front of the main meeting room, head lowered, hands by their side, backs flush against the wall, while their colleagues stared at them.

My mother was always quiet and withdrawn when she returned. She would spend the rest of the afternoon by herself, reading one of the serials from the newspaper or mending the holes in our clothes.

Two Saturdays before school was due to start, however, my mother returned from saenghwalchonghwa in an upbeat mood. She got my brother ready and told Sunyoung and me that we were all going for a walk. She hummed a song as my sister and I skipped along beside her, something I had not heard her do since Sunyoung was a baby.

Our destination turned out to be someone's house. Inside, the walls of one room were lined with shelves piled with boxes of food, including biscuits and candies. Clotheslines dripped with shirts, dresses, pants and skirts. In another room, bookshelves and racks bulged with stationery items, cleaning supplies and make-up.

Umma asked the storekeeper, an older woman with a crooked smile, to bring out some skirts and tops she thought would fit me. My mother held them up to my body to gauge the size. She picked out a green plaid wool skirt, a white blouse, a solid green vest and a matching blazer. “For school,” she said, as she handed the lady some won she had tucked in her pocket.

By the time we left the shop, I also had two new pairs of underwear, a pair of thick green socks, a handful of pencils and a red backpack, something my mother said all the children carried. I had never had so many things that were just mine before, and when we got home, I tore a piece of paper from the pad my mother had bought for herself and practiced my letters with one of my new pencils. That night, I slept holding the letters in my hand.

In the last
few weeks before school started, the train to my father's factory seemed more crowded than ever. Every family, including ours, was receiving smaller food rations as we waited for the government to stock the shelves with vegetables from the autumn harvest. I didn't have to worry about teetering backwards and forwards with the motion of the locomotive since there were adults packed in all around me, holding me rigid like one bean sprout in the midst of many.

I was so hungry by the third day of accompanying my father to his work that my head felt light. The air was stuffy inside the train, and I had to lock my knees to stop myself from collapsing. If I fell, I knew I might be trampled. The next day, I picked two handfuls of chives at the farm we passed on our way to the train station, hoping the extra handful would give me extra energy.

But once I was on the train, the combined odours of perspiration, stale cigarette smoke and foul breath overcame me. I began to choke, gasping for fresh air. I put the chives to my nose, hoping the sweet smell would revive me, but my body began to shake. I sank to my knees, and everything around me started spinning. All I saw as I collapsed was the red lipstick a woman beside me was wearing. It was the same colour as Youngrahn's.

I woke at
home to the sounds of the well handle creaking up and down. I lifted my aching head to see Sunyoung lying near my feet, playing with a black sock she had placed on her hand like a puppet. She was talking softly, pretending to be a goat. “Bleet, bleet,” she giggled. She took another sock, this one white, and slipped it over her other hand. “Baa, baaa,” she said.

“You wake, big sister!” she squealed, when she saw my eyes were open. “Come play! Come play, big sister!”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. My body was chilled, despite the warm day and the heavy duvet covering me.

My mother felt my forehead and then put another blanket over top of me. “You fainted,” she explained. “I had to leave work. This is not good. You need to look after yourself better.”

“Yes, Umma,” I said, looking down at the duvet instead of into her eyes. “I promise.”

“I'm going out,” my mother said, tucking the duvet around my neck. “I'll get you some aspirin to help bring the fever down. Sunyoung will stay with you.”

I awoke a few hours later, my head pounding, my legs and back aching. I was covered in sweat, and the inside of my mouth was pasty. I was so hungry that my stomach hurt. I ate the chives I still had in my pocket, but that made no difference.

I looked around the room. The walls of our home were off-white. There was a hole in the ceiling where the light fixture should have been. We were the first family to live in this house, and it had never been finished. We didn't even have a front door. My father had nailed a piece of canvas to the doorframe to keep the animals out. Abuji said the government would give us a real door before winter.

I closed my eyes and remembered a riddle my mother had once told me while we were planting.

“What stands in the middle of the farm with a baby on its back?” she had asked.

“The farmer's wife,” I replied, thinking myself clever.

“No,” she said mischievously.

“Maybe the farmer's mother?”

“No.”

“I don't know,” I finally shrugged.

“It's corn,” she said, with one of her rare smiles. “Corn, standing tall in its tusk.”

The next time
I woke, I tried to pull myself up in bed, but I was too weak to do so. I rested my head back on the pillow. A shiver ran through me.

“Sunyoung,” I called softly. “Sunyoung?”

A shadow crossed the window, making me jump. Then came the sounds of many footsteps. People were running into the backyard.

“Sunyoung,” I heard someone else call.

More footsteps.

“Sunyoung, where are you?” I heard my mother call in a desperate voice that frightened me. “Sunyoung!”

I forced myself out of bed and ran outside in my bare feet. I was greeted by a parade of people, some heading into the forest as they called out Sunyoung's name, others running toward the river. Despite my fatigue, I found the strength to run with them.

In the stillness of the mornings in our house, when I woke before the others, I often heard the rapids of the river moving over the rocks. I would snuggle underneath the blankets, thinking of the fog that wrapped itself around the river's banks. I was glad to be at home and not near the water. Water scared me. I sometimes imagined myself sinking.

That day, as I hurried to the water with the others, I saw Sunyoung in my mind's eye, struggling against the force of the waves.

Just as I reached the riverbank, I tripped over a rock. As I stumbled forward, a strong arm swept me up.

“I don't want to lose two daughters in one day,” Abuji scolded, setting my feet firmly on the ground. “Go back to the house. You're sick.”

I looked around frantically. Men I recognized from the neighbourhood had climbed into the river and were plunging their arms beneath the surface. My heart beat so strongly in my chest that I thought I would faint again. I turned in one direction, then the other, not knowing what to do. All around me, people called out, “Sunyoung! Sunyoung!”

Suddenly my father was beside me once more. “Go back to the house,” he ordered. “Go back to the house and let us look.”

When I got back to our house, I sat down on a stone outside and cried, my head in my hands. I was supposed to watch Sunyoung. That was my job as a big sister. With my eyes still closed, I started punching myself in the head. “Bad, bad, bad! Bad big sister! Bad big sister!”

I felt a pat on my shoulder, but I could not pry my hands away from my eyes. I was too ashamed to face anyone.

“Big sister sleeping?” I heard a small voice ask.

I slowly opened my fingers and looked into Sunyoung's tear-stained face.

She was still wearing the sock puppets, and the white one was now muddy. “I wanted to play. You were sleeping, so I walked far, far, far looking for a friend,” she explained, pointing to the mountains behind our house. “I got lost.”

I screamed to let the searchers know that Sunyoung was home. When my mother neared, she started lecturing my sister for running away. “I told you to stay close to the house,” she scolded. But she couldn't maintain her anger for long. She whisked my sister into her arms and began to cry with relief.

Even when my father said later that night that it was not my fault, I blamed myself for not watching Sunyoung. No matter what, I was her big sister. I was supposed to look out for her and protect her.