Krys Lee - How I Became a North Korean

I said, “I’ve eaten meat more than a few times, and always had money to buy cold buckwheat noodles at the market.”

I took delicate bites on purpose, my mouth hardly moving, while his rotated from side to side like an ox’s. Maybe I hadn’t had much schooling, I added, but I knew my letters and had owned a cellular phone and a stiff silk hanbok. A friend had once given me a gold watch as a gift.

“Gold? Real gold?” He spat out a mouthful of rice onto the table. “Your friend’s a man.”

The girl screamed, “A man?” as if her father was exempt from this category.

“If he treated you so great, why didn’t you marry him?”

I wondered if his jealousy could be useful to me.

“It was my uncle,” I said at last.

He leaned in closer. “You can tell me anything.” He was testing me. I had been tested before. “You don’t have to hide from me.”

I didn’t forget to compensate him with a kiss.

His daughter and I shared the bedroom after her abba was called by “one of his associates” to guide a Christian group touring through the Yanbian province and had to leave for a few days. Anything that delayed my first night alone with him was good news.

“I’m entrusting Byeol to you,” he said. “She never recovered after her eomma left.”

His guide work had forced him to travel around the region, leaving Byeol at the mercy of his local Christian friends. But now he had me. Our marriage was also practical.

I linked my arm in his. “You can trust me, I took care of my abba until the very end. I know how to take care of people.”

He crouched over the black and white tiles of the kitchen, digging up a book of recipes. “You know, I try to get the tourists to help your people at their hideouts. Some live for years in underground caves like moles.” There was sympathy in his voice but also a vein of satisfaction in telling me this.

• • •

My name is Jangmi now, I reminded myself the next morning as I made his prescribed breakfast for Byeol. But one bite of the salted mackerel that I had been craving sent me gagging to the bathroom. The girl noticed, how could she not? She watched everything I did. I told her I had a chronically weak stomach. That morning, I learned that unlike my eomma, I wasn’t immune to morning sickness.

When the girl left for school, I tried to better understand the man I had married and went through his belongings — as his wife, I considered this fair — and saw the care that Seongsik had taken. He had set up a new life for me in the common room: a stack of Chinese language books and CDs with a note to me taped to the top cover, even a glass ball that rained snow on a couple when you shook it. I had never seen an object so beautiful. I flipped through his shelf and, for a few hours, skimmed the books and magazines in our language — a language that was the same but different somehow, pages with words I had never seen and alien expressions. I looked up the many words I didn’t know as I read, and was stunned at what they said about our Dear Leader — Japanese sushi the price of a car for a dinner party, women my age dancing naked in front of him — stories I dismissed as Western lies. I tried to study Chinese, but how could I when there was so much to discover in magazines and on television? I had a television for the first time in my life.

I wanted to buy everything. I learned there was an ink to make your eyelashes thicker and longer, and that this was supposed to be attractive. You could have your legs operated on and made thinner in South Korea, endless tubes of color could transform anyone into a beauty. I paid attention. I wanted a life beyond marrying a man who offered so little. I tried hard not to think about my eomma squatting at the market selling potato and corn cakes — how would she survive without me? Would the official report of my death keep her safe from questioning? Would Seongsik accept the baby as his, at least for the time we had together? How would I escape this marriage and find my way to Nam Joseon, a country that Seongsik called South Korea? Smuggled VCDs had showed me that in Nam Joseon, South Korea, whatever its name, scrawny women owned rooms heaped with clothes and cars with heated seats. A safe country.

By the afternoon, I found myself eager for his sour-faced daughter to return home from school.

When Byeol opened the door, bringing the early smells of spring with her, I offered her baked sweet potatoes to snack on and asked, “Do you need help with your homework?”

Dots of red spread, like bloodstains, across her cheeks. “I never need help.”

Everyone needs an eomma, Seongsik had said with an expectant look, but the way the girl’s face drained of sunshine when she saw me made it clear that she was not that kind of daughter. Still, an hour later as she read to her broken dolls, I thought, My baby must be a girl.

I tapped on her book. “Our lovely girl, what would you like for dinner?”

She smiled sweetly and asked for fish again.

“Wouldn’t you like bibimbap instead?” I had seasoned and cooked mixed vegetables while she was at school, checking my reaction to the different root vegetables.

“I want fish. Abba told you my favorite food is fish.” She kicked her tiny schoolbag across the floor and looked prepared to kick me next. “All I ever want is grilled fish.”

So I made her the grilled fish, breathing through my mouth and hardly able to look at the gills and silver ribbons of skin that I had once hungered for. I turned the dead creature from one side to the other, expecting it to flop over and gaze at me with its bulging eyes. When I wouldn’t eat it, she looked triumphant, though she clearly had no idea what she had won.

• • •

He was damaged goods; I should have known as much. At the time, it shocked me to see such misery even across the border.

When he returned home after several nights away, the dreaded event happened. He bribed Byeol with sweets and successfully lured her to a yo spread out on the common-room floor, then he stood by the bed and stripped off his slacks and striped sweater, finally ready to claim his reward. Clothed, he had looked like the shabby men from my hometown. But naked, he was half man, half machine. His right leg was kept intact with a leather garter belt, and beneath the thigh, a metal leg ran down to a steel ankle and ended with a foot in the shape of a shoe. This wasted leg thrust forward in my direction like a challenge. I tasted the metal in my mouth. I shouldn’t have been surprised; what kind of man married a fugitive from the country across the river, with no rights and no money, forced to live on his fickle mercy? The silence between us filled with what we thought we knew about each other.

“I guess it comes off?” I said jauntily. I approached and sat at the bed’s edge.

He gave me a smile like dried seeds. I patted his knee. Its strange, hollow sound made me jump.

He nodded. “You can rely on me,” he said, and made a sound between a gasp and a sob. “Everyone likes me. I may not be much to look at, but they know I’m a good man. It takes time, but maybe you’ll like me, too. And I’m very clean and I’m a good cook.” Despite myself, I felt sorry for him.

“Well, then. You don’t always go to bed with it on, do you?”

“All right, then,” he said. “All right.”

He took it off. He held the fake leg in the air and asked me to set it beside the bed. The leg made a dull thud.

“You walk on it all day and the pain goes all the way up.” He spoke slowly now. “You’re not afraid?”

“I’m not scared. I don’t scare easily. It was only startling.”

“I’m damaged goods, I know,” he said. It embarrassed me to hear my thoughts echoed. He stroked the remains of his right leg. “I’m sorry.”