Krys Lee - How I Became a North Korean

The Dear Leader stood up, and everyone averted their eyes. He said sharply, “Why aren’t you dancing?” His mood turned from the moment before.

The Dear Leader’s words worked; they always worked. The lights dimmed and strobe lights flashed, and my parents began dancing in the hall that could have been in Paris or Pyongyang.

I don’t know how many crimes my abeoji committed, or what he did on his business trips setting up trading deals in China and beyond. I don’t know who my abeoji ’s lovers were, or my eomeoni ’s real birth date. I don’t know if they ever tasted wild blackberries. I don’t know why my abeoji so hungered for power and money, if he was ever deeply lonely. Or why it has taken so many years for me to be able to speak about them. This I do know: Their affection was fierce; battle was the way they demonstrated their love for each other. They were also gentle to each other; they were kind. Still, maybe her hand finally sought him and landed lightly across the outer bone of his hip, quieting his agitation.

She said, “Calm yourself, my love. People are watching.”

He murmured, “We will always be together.” Always confident.

It was only nine, but soon enough it would be midnight. Shadows stretched as long as train tracks across the walls; the disco ball flickered in and out. They danced, sidestepping across the parquet. At least, those who hadn’t disappeared last year. Names that no one spoke in public because they had been banished, imprisoned, or killed. Or maybe, just maybe, escaped. These people I had grown up with were individuals, and they were the same, for they wanted to summit from official party number twenty-four to sixteen; they wanted the Dear Leader’s approval; they wanted to be safer. The dancing continued until those around my eomeoni began to drag along to the music. But she never allowed herself to drag.

My eomeoni only became more correct, resembling more with each hour the actress who looked as if she couldn’t possibly have bowel movements like the rest of us. She watched the clock. Midnight. Not long before we were to flee our country. The more the Dear Leader observed them, the more skittish my parents became. Must flatter, must be safe, must not let my face betray, must enjoy myself. I don’t want to see it, it’s all I can see: my eomeoni, in the end, a weak woman, and my abeoji, weaker still. The regime that would go on.

Finally, the Dear Leader’s hands clamped down on their shoulders, one on my abeoji ’s, one on hers. “My turn!” he said.

A dance, then what next? Other entanglements, the violation of a marriage? It had happened before. The Dear Leader had no right! My abeoji ’s narrow lips would have turned south. We learned to hide our thoughts behind well-trained faces, but he was unable to hide his even in front of our leader. Maybe that was the tipping point to the Dear Leader’s mood. Our fickle leader, our Great General, he owned every right.

My abeoji stepped back, finally retreating. The Dear Leader was drunk, now angry, and made his decision. He reached as if brushing off lint from my abeoji ’s suit lapel, then motioned a bodyguard over and casually withdrew a revolver from the man’s jacket pocket. He aimed it at my abeoji ’s heart.

All I can do is watch.

The bullet spun out from the barrel, its lead body spiraled and chipped through the breastbone, punctured the pericardial cavity, the diaphragm, then penetrated the left atrium of my abeoji ’s heart. His hands fluttered as if releasing a dove into the air, a delicate, useless protest as the bullet carved a path through him. He fell forward, his muscles twitching. My eomeoni’ s hands covered her eyes, and the other people fled to the far corners of the hall. The gun disappeared back into the bodyguard’s suit.

The Dear Leader said, “No one steals from me!” He had made an example of my abeoji .

Dark liquid seeped from him, his scalp dampened against my eomeoni ’s hands that were now in his hair. “Won’t someone help?” she cried as the great muscle of his heart leaked blood. Blood filled his white shirt, spread to the collar, stained her nails, and infused her hands with the smell of bitter wormwood. In that towering city of my childhood, a traitor, a husband, a father, was there, still there for her, beating, beating, then gone.

One thing I know for sure: 2009 was the start of irreversible changes in my life. That Friday in early March, I opened my locker and discovered my very first love letter. I was sixteen, and church and the Boy Scouts had been the composite of my social life since my family had emigrated from the Autonomous Korean Prefecture in China when I was nine years old. Nothing like this had happened to me before. As I opened the envelope and skimmed the note doused in cologne, my heart went pitter-patter and my palms became slick with sweat. It was unsigned, but I knew the handwriting. It was from Adam Thomas, my physics lab partner. A guy with the long-limbed quickness of a deer and an unruly smile to match his wavy hair.

I’d never had my feelings reciprocated before; or rather, I’d never shared my feelings so that they could be reciprocated. It was a secret I could barely admit to myself. But I trusted that the note asking to meet me was sincere. I’d shot up six inches in the last year and I was confident of my worth, though only a few seemed to recognize it — namely, my mom and dad. Adam and I had been partners the entire semester without once being separated, a pairing that in fact he’d insisted on. Maybe this is the most important thing about faith: I believed because I wanted to believe.

I was the kind of kid who usually spent weekends pestering my youth pastor with earnest questions, occasionally singing hymns in downtown Redlands with our youth group while brandishing a “God Is Salvation” placard, or reading fat tomes and pretending that school dances were beneath my intellectual interests. But that evening I tried to tame my curly hair that exploded like firecracker sparks from my head and camouflage myself in the ugly jeans and overpriced sweatshirt that my peers approved of.

I was so nervous I entertained not showing up that night, but I did finally drive to the hill where the lawyers’ and doctors’ kids lived. Streetlights and McMansions surrounded the park without a scrap of trash or a wink of graffiti in sight. It was as if the town’s entire sanitation force was dedicated to these hills. Even their palm trees smelled like money. None of it made me bitter. I knew that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven.

I got out of the car and waited with my right profile — my best side — facing outward. My anxiety doubled as it became ten, fifteen minutes past eight, but I tried to be accommodating even if I wasn’t exactly an easygoing person. I could learn. I was anxious and hopeful for the first time in months and feeling mostly luminous. I debated whether he might be amenable to attending church. I began wondering if it was just one more joke on me and I should go home.

They came quietly across the grass, and by the time I heard the crunch of gravel, it was too late. I tried to squeeze back into the car, but two guys all bluff and brawn twisted my hands behind me before I was halfway in. As they dragged me away into the dark, I saw that there were four of them in total. The ringleader was Adam.

When I reached out for him, he shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. “Thanks to you, I flunked the midterm. I’ll owe my physics grade to you. It was a stupid move, turning me in.”

“I didn’t turn you in!”