Krys Lee - How I Became a North Korean

“You had an accident.”

“I wasn’t always not there!” He stroked the end of his thigh. “I lost it in a factory. In South Korea. I went there to make money — all the healthy Joseon- jok in China leave to make money if they can — but I came back with debts and one leg.

“South Korea, it’s war there. A bad, bad country.” He frowned as if the country of wealth and opportunity had deliberately deprived him of his leg.

“Come closer,” he said, though I couldn’t get much closer.

His gaze slid away from me as if he required permission to look, so I unzipped my dress and unclasped my bra and revealed myself under the hard fluorescent light. He couldn’t stop looking now. I needed his looking. For him to become the father to my baby. I took his hand and planted it on the curve of my breast. It was dangerous not to encourage him. He stared downward; I kept my eyes fixed ahead and waited.

The morning after I’d nearly drowned, I woke up to my nose filled with the familiar smells of frogs and lizards preserved in formaldehyde. My own bedroom. My eyes still closed, I tried to block out other thoughts by reciting the order of my books lining my three shelves — one-third Mandarin, one-third Korean, one-third English — then the names of the beloved finger puppets I’d made myself, until the alarm clock rang and I hit it before the cuckoo bird said “cuckoo.”

It was no good. It was still Sunday, I’d still been rescued lying facedown in the water the day before with only my mind sinking to an imaginary bottom. I’d turned myself into a public fool. Tomorrow was still Monday, which meant school. I got up and knocked down my academic awards from the walls, pulled my clothes lined up from light to dark from their hangers, then collapsed onto the bed. The mess didn’t change anything. I was still me.

The dark living room I marched through was part of a double-car garage converted into what was probably the smallest house in Loma Linda. Since my mom left on the church mission, he’d swept all her potpourri, porcelain figurines, and other pretty collections into Costco boxes, which he’d stacked in the closet, leaving our house as bare as a box, the way he liked it. The coffee-stained carpet and the dorm-room disrepair left by the families before us looked even sadder than before, a place any sane person would want to leave.

I was startled and sorry when I saw my dad in the kitchen. He had a five o’clock shadow and was wearing the same plaid shirt and pants he’d had on the day before. This was the man who rarely let me hug him because of the potential exchange of germs. I had done this to him.

I said, “Morning, Dad.”

His eyes stayed fixed on the sizzling tofu in the pan as he muttered to himself, “Time made man and man made God to help him understand time.”

He set down orange juice in front of me and a plate of tofu with scallions and garlic, stir-fried in his special sauce.

“Look, I have a plan,” he said.

“Thanks, Dad.” I immediately began eating, my mind solely on the prospect of school. On Monday. The day before, when I’d made a one-man show of myself to all of Bible camp, seemed a mere preview of what awaited me.

I kept my mouth full of food, my head low to the plate. I waited for him to ask me about the day before, dreaded it, in fact, and it seemed he was waiting for me to explain. The soft wedges of tofu caught in my throat. How could I tell my dad that he had an idiot of a son who’d nearly drowned with his life vest on? How did you explain that?

When I finally did look up, he was gazing at the flat California sunshine coming in through the window, poking between his teeth with a green plastic toothpick. He sawed it back and forth, then cleared his throat. His eyebrows knitted together and he turned his milky brown eyes on me.

“Maybe it’s because we never gave you brothers or sisters,” he said. “I’m very aware that I’ve failed you as your abba in some way or other, and I’m not confident that I have the skills to make the necessary amends.”

I was so surprised that I didn’t know how to respond, and I always had a response.

“Frankly, your mother was an accident in my life, having a child was an accident. I suspect Mother Nature meant for me to be a bachelor. I’m not good at this.”

I knew that any topic that diverged from fact made him more uncomfortable and awkward than he already was, but something still collapsed inside me. “So you regret having me.”

“Don’t be immature, Daehan,” he said sharply. “I want you to be safe. But you clearly aren’t well here. There’s no reason you should feel well here, with me.”

His facial expression didn’t change once.

“Well, you’re getting your wish. You’re going to China for a few weeks. It’ll be good for you. I thought about it for a long time last night and purchased an airline ticket online for you, Beijing onward to Yanji. I’ll call your eomma once she’s back from her work trip. You’ll be better off with her.”

It was a trip I’d fantasized about for years; I also felt rejected. What was worse, we weren’t the kind of family who could afford last-minute airline tickets. I wondered what meager savings account he’d broken into.

“So you’re going to send me away. Get rid of the problem.”

“But you wanted to go!” He scrubbed at his face with his knuckles. “It’ll be good for you, time to rest and recover. Help us, help your parents. Why can’t you be a good, normal kid?” he said sadly, as if normal wasn’t what I keenly wanted to be.

He began clearing the table, then turned back with a plate balanced in each hand. “I want to know one thing. Did you think about us at all when you jumped? One thought about your parents, what it would do to us?”

“Dad, it was an accident. I wasn’t trying to do what you think! It wasn’t like that, I promise!”

• • •

As I tapped my glass with the fork, the stubborn rhythm of his voice thinned out for me. Ping! Ping! The bright notes lifted my spirits, lifted me out of the kitchen, to elsewhere. After all, elsewhere had to be better than here.

Over the next few days, I made meticulous preparations. I packed my Chinese passport; I raided my beloved survival kit and withdrew my Leatherman Squirt PS4, not much bigger than a toothpick; a Bic pen sawed in half to save weight and a notebook the size of my palm; a multi-use plastic bag that served as a tent, SOS signal marker, and hydro bag; a military meal kit; a parachute cord, the sturdiest of ropes; vitamins and a sleeping aid; two changes of clothes. On my person, I would keep a money wallet stitched into my underwear, zip-up military Gore-Tex combat shoes and all-terrain tiger-striped military pants — the basic pattern American soldiers donned during Vietnam. Once packed and prepared, I felt more secure. A few days later, armed with my supplies snugly fit into a backpack and a suitcase of goodies for my mom, we left the house at sunrise.

The streetlights flickered on and off as our car curved away from Loma Linda. Good-bye to the neighborhood’s manicured lawns, the thick blanket of smog, to my teachers’ and school counselors’ expectations, to the habit of excelling. I couldn’t even remember why I had wanted to go to Harvard. I felt buoyant as we drove past a grove of corporate-owned orange trees that seemed to stand between me and a new life. China. The word rolled off my tongue. My backpack bounced on my back. It was happening, it was real. I was crossing borders for the second time in my life. I believed I was prepared.

I often think about borders. It’s hard not to. There were the Guatemalans and Mexicans I read about in the paper who died of dehydration while trying to cross into America. Or later, the Syrians fleeing war and flooding into Turkey. Arizona had the nerve to ban books by Latino writers when only a few hundred years ago Arizona was actually Mexico. Or the sheer existence of passports, twentieth-century creations that decide who gets to stay and leave.