Krys Lee - How I Became a North Korean

“The miracle of technology and a little tenacity,” I said. It was clear that Dad hadn’t been able to reach her yet.

As we walked inside, words came tumbling out of me. I rattled on about the horrific airplane food, how I’d learned to make four new sailing knots on the flight over, how I’d lost my map and didn’t know what to do with myself anymore. I told her about my epic journey to her door and that I couldn’t bear the inanity of school anymore and wanted to figure things out. I said that Dad kept forgetting to water the plants so even the cacti would have died without my intervention, that I was sorry but I’d stopped practicing the violin the day she left for the airport.

“Lots of high schoolers are still stuck at the id stage of development,” I said. “The word cool should be banned from the dictionary.” I told her I missed her.

She gave my ear a hard, loving tug. “Did you eat? You need some stew, or dumplings. There’s nothing good here. But your favorite eatery — Songbokui’s — is still open. And the same woman’s there, the one with the dyed red hair you were always trying to learn recipes from when you were too small to reach the stove.”

“All I’ve been doing today is eating,” I said. “But I’d give up a kingdom for some juice or milk.”

I didn’t add it up, her quick, nervous speech, the way she’d blocked the door until I squeezed in past her, and the jittery way she steered me into the kitchen, rushed me through a glass of orange juice, then steered me right back to the common room. Not yet. I was too busy taking in her pale pink slippers, the table with cat claws for legs, a purple vase on top of it. The space with its feminine airs was so different from the darkness that I’d left behind. I was happy to see her well settled and devoted to her work, but I also resented how she had managed to make a bright, cheerful life without us.

“How is your father, that silent, no-talk man? Still all laughs?”

The way she said it — as if he were some man from her distant past, a silly man safe to mock — made me feel protective of him.

“He’s doing all right. Still discovering the universe in a stopwatch. He misses you, you know.”

“Daehan, now, you know what I’m going to ask you.” She pulled on a down jacket. “It’s dangerous, the way you are. Why are you suddenly here in the middle of the school semester and how did you get here? How could your abba not tell me you were coming?”

“It was Abba’s idea.” I told her it wasn’t exactly his fault and that he had tried calling her several times after he’d bought the ticket, which was when I learned that she had suddenly ditched her cell phone.

“There were work problems.” Her jaw went tight. “How can that man pull you out of school one day and send you across the globe without checking with me first?”

So much had happened in the few days we hadn’t talked and I didn’t know where to start. The suicide attempt that wasn’t actually a suicide attempt didn’t seem like a good place to begin, and I wasn’t ready to tell anyone about Adam. She ruffled my hair as if I were a surly poodle that required humoring. She knew me better than anyone else and normally would have questioned me with a sushi knife’s precision, sensing that something was wrong.

Instead she said, “Let’s get something to eat,” and didn’t listen when I told her once more that I’d already eaten a camel’s weight in food.

“Come on, put on your shoes,” she said. “What if I hadn’t been at home? I can’t believe your abba .”

The unfamiliar helium in her voice left me dazed. Her behavior, flying from one world and landing in another, all of it unsettled me.

“How rash of him.” She began to sniffle. “Something terrible could have happened to you.”

“I won’t go back, Mom.” That one sentence came out in English.

“After a few weeks here, you’ll come to your senses. You can do anything with that wonderful brain God has given you — I won’t let you ruin it,” she said, and slipped into black flats. “Goodness, I have so much to do and now I’ll be worrying half the time about you.”

That was when I heard a cough.

It was a small apartment; there weren’t many places to hide. I headed in the direction of the cough and opened the bedroom door, but there was no one there.

“Who is it?” I said. “Who’s here?”

My mother seized me by my shoulders, trying to pull me out of the room, but I had shot up in the past year and I pulled away and flung open the wardrobe doors one by one.

Behind one of them was a man. Deacon Shin from our church in California, folded up like a broken chopstick and squeezed in between my mom’s dresses. The severe-looking, graying man with round eyeglasses didn’t look so different from my dad, but he was crucially not my dad. A man who was talkative and sang solos in the choir, who was the first to rescue a cat stuck in a tree and volunteer to flip burgers at church barbecues. A man not my dad, but a man who had somehow become closer to my mom than my dad. Nearly five thousand miles closer. An arm’s length closer. The other life beyond the missionary work.

Deacon Shin released a long, painful breath. He said, “Daehan.”

“I can explain,” my mom said, as if there were any possible legitimate explanations for our church deacon hiding in her closet.

I ran out of the bedroom. The hypocrisy, it was too much for me.

I don’t remember how I wiggled out of my mother’s grip and spun past her. I don’t remember where I struck her to get away or in which exact moment I understood that the read-a-book-in-bed companionship that my dad offered wasn’t enough for my mom. I remember Deacon Shin immobile in the closet, his lips kissing his knees, how my mother’s voice cracked as she called out my name. I remember how the walls and door of my mom’s bedroom seemed to part for me but not how my hiking boots magically appeared on my feet.

She reached for me, saying my name. I fled down the stairs, skipping steps as the patter of my mom’s feet followed me down.

Even back then I had a vague understanding that our country was no stranger to hunger. I knew that some hungered for what was known: noodles in steaming anchovy broth, the food rations that had stopped for most people years ago, the security of orderly routines. Others hungered for things they’d seen in bootlegged South Korean television shows: heating in winter, glamour, chocolate cream pies that came individually wrapped like birthday presents. Then there were hungers that I hadn’t dared to hunger for. Freedom to travel. Freedom from surveillance, from fearing that what you said and did was being watched and that someday you would be questioned about it. Now a strange new hunger invaded me. Where, I wondered, as we drove past bare blue mountains in the Toyota truck that picked us up outside the city, where was Abeoji?

“Mr. Rhee is going on a business trip north, and he is kind enough to take us where we need to go,” Eomeoni said, as if it wasn’t four in the morning.

My dongsaeng ’s teeth chattered so violently she couldn’t speak. Her face matted with dried tears made me feel even more helpless; I could do nothing for her. Instead of our abeoji, the stranger I had found in our apartment was driving us up as far north as he was able, where, I guessed, we would be met by another car. This man, who had swiftly arranged this late-night disappearance over the last few hours, was more powerful, more resourceful than I’d thought.

I knew and Eomeoni knew and the man knew that his name wasn’t Mr. Rhee and that this business trip was a lie so extravagant it wasn’t worth telling. I wondered who had been paid off and what fortune exchanged for our escape, and how the man had managed to extricate Eomeoni from wherever she was being held. Most of all, I wondered what had happened to our abeoji .