Krys Lee - How I Became a North Korean

I gazed beyond the woman’s shoulder to the bowl. “But I’m not like that. The food will go to waste anyway, so I thought—”

“They say an old granny was killed by one of you. She was always helping your kind, then one of those she’d helped robbed her and took everything she had in the house, which wasn’t much.”

I hadn’t robbed or stolen from these people; I was sure I could never kill anyone. “Even the broth — that’s all I need. That’s all my baby needs.”

The woman picked up a bowl of leftovers from the table. My hands were outstretched and waiting when cold noodles hit my face.

“Not for your kind.” The woman wiped her hands on her apron. “I’ve had enough of you. Get out before I report you and they haul you back to where you came from.”

The border between the two countries was long, and on the winding road heading south for the random town I’d settled on, all I saw from the bus were the mountains veiny with snow. In fact, there was nothing left to distract me from my fear. I’d turned off my cell phone from the outset. The idea of my mom with another man made me shiver with shame, and I didn’t know what to tell my dad. Returning home meant facing school and Adam, but going back to my mom’s wasn’t an option, either. I wondered why God was testing me.

I arrived at dusk, the Tumen River as thick as a blanket in front of me. The lights in the storefront windows of the town went out like dominoes in slow motion; the lights of cubicle-size residences lit up one by one. I stared up at those low-rise apartments, convinced that no one could possibly be as unhappy as I was. I wandered aimlessly with my backpack, the hallway lights tattooed across my mom’s face in my mind.

By late evening I knew too well the dusty stores along the main strip with dusty products and the ubiquitous red neon signs advertising everything from adult entertainment to car parts. I wore layers of new clothes I’d bought from a local store to disguise myself and kept a cap low over my face and ducked away anytime I saw someone who looked remotely like my mom. When a bundled homeless granddad rattled a can in my face, I told him, “No, I’m like you,” and the man shot me a venomous look as if he were deeply insulted. I tried to check into a run-down motel, but the manager insisted on taking down my identification card or passport number as was the law, which would help my mom track me down and lasso me in. I checked into a bathhouse instead. Only then I finally gathered the courage to call my dad.

I lay down across the common room’s heated floor in the corner, flipped open my cell phone, and used my phone card to call home. On the second ring, my dad picked up.

“Daehan? Where are you? Your poor eomma is nearly dead from worry. Do you have any idea what you’ve done to her? I was about to fly out and look for you.”

“Dead from worry? She’s perfectly fine. Believe me, she’s more than fine.”

As I realized all that I could never tell him, I felt the distance between my dad and me growing into a big fat canyon.

“I’m fine, too. I’m just checking in so you won’t worry about me.”

“Go back to your eomma now, wherever you are. We just want you home.”

“I’d rather stay where I am. I need time.”

“Time for what? Did something happen?”

“Dad, I need time on my own to figure things out.”

“None of this would have happened if your eomma hadn’t suddenly changed phones without telling me. She never tells me anything. Don’t do anything to yourself, please! Daehan, for us!”

“Dad, I promise I won’t do anything stupid. Double promise, in front of God. I just need time.”

He didn’t understand. “Don’t do this to us. You’re a good boy; there’s nothing to figure out. You need to come home.”

I apologized and apologized, then hung up.

I wanted to be far away from my parents and from everything that had happened. To know that I was capable of surviving on the streets because I was one hundred percent masculine. That was probably mainly behind my move to the streets a few nights later, though I told myself it was to save my yuan for emergencies. It was as if I was onstage and Adam and his friends, the kids at Bible camp, were my audience.

After walking through the whole town I took up residence in a half-abandoned building made of cubicles of shops. I used my canteen to sprinkle water on the floor and wiped it down with toilet paper, stacked up my worldly goods, and pondered what God was trying to tell me.

• • •

I was shaken awake and blinded by a flashlight. I scrambled up, wishing I had my slingshot and marble in hand and ready to shoot, until I saw they were kids around my age. I became excited; I was lonely for people. But these guys had mean looks.

One with Chinese characters tattooed down his wrist spelling out “Of the Universe” said, “Don’t you see the lines drawn showing what’s ours and what’s yours?”

“Lines, what lines?” I strained my eyes at the floor.

A stocky kid pushed me down to the slab of cement. “Still can’t see it? The line I’m about to make on your face.” He told me to leave.

“There are so many other rooms,” I said. He didn’t look convinced. “I’ll just move to another room.”

“Every one of those rooms are ours.” He spat on my foot. “This is our territory.”

I was groggy, frightened, and my thoughts returned to my mom’s apartment, a place I finally decided was worse than the cold and the grime. After much searching, I found an apartment building complex at the edge of town left in mid-construction, as if the developer realized that there would be no buyers around by the time it was finished. Rusted wires poking up as high as bamboo shoots from the cement floor and the concrete pillars made it a pretty bleak obstacle course. Lying down, I saw sleeping pigeons above me roosting on the skeletal roof.

I prayed daily and tried not to lose my way. I washed in the public bathroom and reminded myself, as I stepped around puddles of urine, that at least I wasn’t in high school. I approached restaurants and collected the day’s leftovers in exchange for running errands. Hurt and anger rattled in my head like loose marbles, so I disciplined myself with a regimen of push-ups. I willed the asphalt into packed dirt, the town into a state park, the food scavenging into foraging in the forest, reimagining this as a familiar Boy Scouts trip. I added details to my map of the town in my notebook. Maps help you find your way and guarantee that if you’re careful you won’t stray off course. I was sure that with a map I could avoid future suffering.

The next week I began collecting cardboard for a few coins from the recycling center, but during a bathroom break someone stole the entire day’s stack from me, along with my precious parachute cord, the most durable of ropes. I reminded myself that though Job had been enslaved for seven years I’d had less than two weeks of setbacks. I found work in an eatery instead, where the severe thin-lipped lady complimented me on my system of washing and stacking. My diet improved dramatically. At night I set the alarm on my watch for an early wake-up, which reminded me to call my dad the next day. I tried not to think about my mom.

• • •

I was lonely. A few weeks passed with only the sour-faced owner of the eatery for company. She liked how I worked but more than once said, “You talk more in an hour than I do in a week.” I can’t pretend I didn’t think of home.

At night I reread the same two books: Three Kingdoms and a book on baduk -playing strategies. I became a fountain of speech for myself, a delirium of quotations and epiphanies. I talked to God. I began to hear God everywhere: in honking cars, the beating of pigeon wings, a water fountain’s bubbling, the whoosh! of a school swing. He was north, south, east, and west for me. He was the boy peeing against a wall, the umbrella pines fanning mightily in a private conversation, and I was the sky and the earth and they were me, and the night wasn’t so scary anymore once the roofless building filled with the Word, the Word being God. One night, in that deep peace I would never feel again, I heard footsteps.