Krys Lee - How I Became a North Korean

I patiently answered what I could. But on the evenings when her abba was home, she only turned to me and said, “I wasn’t asking you. I was asking Abba.”

I almost told him in time. I was starting to show despite my mother’s genes, but he assumed it was because I often ate three bowls of rice, though I knew that there was always more, and because of my unbearable cravings for the fruit and sweets that were everywhere around me. I ate, then felt overwhelmed by the desire to sleep all day.

“Believe me, there’s always more in this country,” he would say, laughing, and even I wasn’t sure whether it was my greed or my growing baby that drove this hunger.

It happened after he came back from a three-day tour, at dinnertime. I had planned to tell him that night. When my body refused the stew I made with the dried pollack he had brought home, Byeol pointed at me with her spoon and with her mouth full of the bukeo stew said, “She doesn’t eat fish. It makes her run to the bathroom and throw up.”

My throat tightened; he bit into a fresh green pepper dipped in spicy gochujang, looking concerned. “Are you sick? When did this happen?”

“From the day after you brought her home.” Byeol frowned. “And she doesn’t eat bean sprouts or spicy tofu or pickled lotus, either. All of them make her run to the bathroom and throw up. If you have to marry, why don’t you marry someone healthy? She’s sick all the time!”

She made her best exasperated expression. Seongsik forgot to close his mouth and gochujang trickled out and stained his chin a dark red.

I said quickly, “I’ve never liked fish.”

I rested my hand on the bridge of his clenched knuckles and made my first silent prayer: Please let this man weaken at my touch.

• • •

He didn’t weaken. Instead he stopped speaking to me for the rest of the evening and didn’t come to bed. I couldn’t sleep. The bed might as well have been made of stone.

Outside, Seongsik and Byeol moved around like red-eyed rats. When I shifted from right to left, the electric blanket beneath me crackled and the blanket above chafed against my skin like pumice. I curled up with dry heaves, but nothing came up, not even my fear. How could I be afraid when I had always taken care of myself with so little help? But I found myself jumping at a branch tapping against the windowpane.

After what felt like hours, Seongsik switched on the light. I shrank from the walls covered with pictures of Byeol, his spiteful face, all of it bathed in an antiseptic yellow.

“You know how much yuan I’ve spent on you?” He limped to the foot of the bed, his fists positioned on his hips. “Whose baby is it?”

I tried to get up, but he pushed me down by my shoulders. That was what I had become: a woman prostrate before a man. There was no love in his look, no credit earned in the weeks we had spent together. I was owned, and my owner was distraught and capable of punishment.

“I trusted you,” he said. I begged him to calm down, but he threw aside the blanket, exposing me.

“It’s the past — it has nothing to do with us.” I clutched the edge of his trousers. “Please, I’m completely yours.”

“You’re using me,” he said as if he hadn’t heard me. He bit down on his knuckles, leaving teeth marks. “All that money and time, and you’re going to leave me.”

“I won’t. You must believe me.” I slapped at my forehead. “Where would I go?”

“You’re such an actress — you’re evil, another Jezebel! A Salome come to see my head on a silver platter!” He shouted insult after insult.

“And what about your past and everything you hid from me?” I felt reckless, myself again, able to finally say something true. “I’ve been a good woman for you. I’ve been a good eomma to Byeol.”

He banged his head against the wall twice, three times, making an angry red dent on his forehead.

“We were supposed to be happy,” he said.

How easily the idea of happiness, the possibility of it, slipped from his lips.

“You cost me a lot of money. I had plans for us.” His agitated fingers spun through his hair. “You don’t deserve to be saved.”

“You think you can save me, don’t you? You think you’re some kind of savior?”

“You’re talking back to me? A North Korean woman?”

He punched the heaped-up bedspread with his fists.

“You’re going to leave me anyway, so why don’t you leave now and wait for the police to do their sweeps? Everyone knows where you people hide — they feel sorry for you, until they don’t. Let the police take you to the detention center and send you right back so your government can do what they want to with you, and you know best what they do to an unmarried woman with child. Then you’ll wish you had been nicer to me.”

I covered my eyes. “Please, just stop.”

I was unable to breathe.

He turned to leave. His retreating back, his thin, tuber neck. This man was all I had.

I closed my eyes as one person, opened them as another. Somewhere inside me there was another self hidden from sight. She was watching this other woman pull him to her, gather his chapped brown hands together, and take his index finger between her lips.

“Don’t leave me,” that other woman said. A thin trail of saliva still connected her lips to him. “Don’t leave your wife.”

• • •

A person can get used to almost anything to survive. That was what China taught me. But I never got used to the fear. The next morning Seongsik claimed that he forgave me and that nothing had changed for us, but that wasn’t true. He didn’t turn mean, not exactly, but distant, as if I had failed some unspoken test and was no longer worthy of his attention. That day he didn’t once step on my heels like a clumsy mutt, and he left the room each time he made a phone call, speaking in a low whisper. At night, he left a wide gap between us on the bed, and forbade me to come any closer. His cold gestures alarmed me, and I began to wake up late at night clawing at the air, trying to escape the truck repatriating me. I was desperate for him to enforce his rights, make my body laundry scrubbed against a wooden board. I was ready to sacrifice my body to keep my baby safe. My baby.

I was sitting on the floor one morning, a textbook on the Han language spread open on my lap, when Seongsik came in and covered the pages with his hands.

“You’re learning Chinese to leave me. You were never planning to stay,” he said as if he had just realized this. “That’s all you’ve ever wanted, to get to South Korea.”

“No, never. Why would I want something so dangerous?” I tucked my trembling hands between the pages of the book. It was the first time he looked at me directly since he had found out.

“Everyone warned me about trusting a woman from your country. I’m such a babo ! I never listen.”

His words churned deep in my lower stomach and sickness overwhelmed me. The world tipped from one side to another, then righted itself again. I needed Seongsik. But how to convince him that he needed me?

We withered.

“You aren’t eating,” Seongsik said at breakfast the next day after Byeol had been packed off to school.

I tried to meet his eyes across the bottles of soy and oyster sauce that he had moved into the center of the table.

“Why aren’t you eating? It’s perfectly good food!” He was so agitated that his words ran into each other.

“I don’t feel very hungry.” Overwhelmed by the fishy, beany smell, I had pushed the pungent dwenjang stew far from me.

I rested my hand on his thigh. He pushed it off and went to the common room.

“You think I’m stupid, don’t you?” He pressed his face against the window. “Some kind of bank account to use up?”