Krys Lee - How I Became a North Korean

Once I was beaten by an old farmer for no reason, except that he could. I was no longer a privileged Pyongyang man but a North Korean that you could abuse without punishment, and the locals knew it. I learned that a North Korean man in China was less than a man, less than the dogs or cats that every Han Chinese person seemed to raise. You could be murdered for working too slowly. Entire villages of our women were said to be held captive, slaves in bed and in the field, which made me think of my eomma and dongsaeng . Some of our people who I briefly met had lived in hiding for years. I had never thought of myself as an angry person, but I was getting angrier. I lived inside the mouth of a giant beast, and that beast was China.

Hope was a distant island. The other boys only aspired to be like ghosts, invisible, and thought about how to get food and smoke and drink. They lived in the present tense, too afraid to desire more. But Daehan was different; he was educated and spoke in the future tense, and he gave me back a little hope.

“You want to see something?” Cheolmin said to Daehan.

He had ignored Daehan all week, like the others, but tonight Daehan had brought leftover meat from a town market over two hours’ walk away and started a small fire the size of a pear blossom for grilling. He trudged into town and coaxed vegetables to grow in the stubborn mountain soil, laboring at any job he could. As a Joseon- jok, he was safe from everything, it seemed, but loneliness.

“Don’t let him show you,” said Gwangsu, who was a mere baby when his abeoji was taken away, maybe to the camps or to jail, for stealing food. His eomma had been seized after they crossed into China.

“Keep your mouth shut, saekki-ya, ” said Cheolmin.

With a ballerina’s agility, Cheolmin leaned against a tree and pulled off a shoe a few sizes too large and two pairs of socks. He braced his foot up high so close to Daehan’s face that even in the dark, he must have seen that it was blackened with frostbite.

Daehan studied the foot respectfully. “That’s rough. How did it happen?”

Cheolmin told the same story he recounted each time he got drunk, but with every telling the number of guards at the river, the water’s depth and temperature as his foot broke through the ice, changed. I had told them very little, holding that terrible night close to me, though the others already knew about me because of Namil.

I said, “We have to leave. And we will. Someday it will happen.”

Cheolmin, the angriest, most unpredictable of us, poked Bakjun in the side. “You know what our dongmu from the great city of Pyongyang keeps saying? He says he’s going to find his eomma and dongsaeng . How’re you going to do that in China? This country’s as big as Mars!”

“You can’t talk to him like that. He’s older than you! Don’t you have any respect for your hyeong ?” said Daehan, when it was obvious that Cheolmin didn’t. He added, “If he says he’s going to find them, he’s going to find them.”

• • •

The next day, in the stubborn, practical manner I would come to associate with Daehan, he thrust at me a written list of possible steps to take, some that I hadn’t thought of and others that I wouldn’t dare attempt. He trailed after me when I went twig hunting and silently watched me kick the face of a granite rock slope until I was too tired to go on. We said nothing to each other and in the easy silence walked back together.

A week later he said, “Why don’t we walk to the nearest city? I know it’s a long way, but there’s supposed to be a church there.”

“A church?”

“That’s where Christians gather.”

“Christians? Those South Koreans that the boys say are generous with handouts?”

“They’re not always South Koreans, and they’re far more than an easy handout.”

From his lengthy monologue, I gathered that these Christians could help our people reach a safe country. I hadn’t known that churches were illegal in China and most Christians clustered underground in house churches; I hadn’t known much. The Chinese border of the Joseon-speaking people was an exception. Contact with Christians could mean death if I was caught by the police and repatriated, since my country feared Christianity, he said, so I could wait nearby while he met the pastor in charge.

The next day, as the night became a vein of light rimming the horizon, we washed at the nearest icy brook the best we could and made the four-hour walk into the city together. He rambled on, as was his habit, through the valleys of bare trees and narrow dirt roads while circumventing the villages of mud huts and small towns. I didn’t mind. I was a quiet person and liked to listen.

“Did I tell you about,” he would begin, and I would learn many things, interesting things, about animals I’d never seen such as orcas and emperor penguins, and robots that defeated any man at baduk . He was an educated Joseon- jok with more of a future than us, but in his rare pauses his smile turned south, as if his bright energy were a vast production of effort made to convince himself.

As we passed in the distance a farmer working in a cornfield, Daehan said, “You have a hyeong, too?”

“No.” I swallowed. “Only the dongsaeng you already know about.”

I was grateful when he pressed no further.

The crisp air and sunlight flushed through us, then the city was upon us. We walked in silence as the huts turned into towering apartments and the yeasty smell of a beer factory. There were so many cars that I was afraid to cross the street, afraid of being recognized as North Korean. Numbness spread from my heart to my hands as the words dongsaeng, eomeoni, abeoji rang in my ears like restless bells. Maybe it was the same for Daehan, for he had become quiet.

When Daehan saw me hold back, he said briskly, “Follow me!”

He crossed the street at an even, steady pace with the cars.

“Look at the budding trees!”

He was himself again, pointing out the cloudless sky, the swinging pigtails of two girls in an apartment’s playground, his words fleeing darker subjects. Brown hills rose from behind brown apartments, and magpies scattered as we passed.

“Straighten up and look like you belong here,” Daehan said.

I realized I was hunching, trying to make myself invisible.

“With your height it’s not hard.”

I said, “You’re different from the other Joseon- jok kids on the streets.”

He looked at me. “You must feel a whole world between you and the others — it’s like putting a beluga whale in with a group of panthers.”

“Why do you stay? I can’t help wondering. You’re too educated and you have other options.”

He looked wounded. “You mean you don’t want me here?” His hands mined down deep into his pockets.

It was as I had suspected. He needed people, and for reasons known only to him, he had no one.

• • •

The redbrick church looked like a giant eye, a tower of sight. As we stood looking at it from across the street, I waited for Daehan to lead us.

“Not to worry.” He patted my arm as if he were the older one. “I was practically raised in the church. You’ll be safe here.”

“Let’s go, then.” I was grateful for his confidence, his vocabulary of hope.

Daehan’s overgrown hair curled up at his collar, his skin was brown and flaky, and his black clothes a shade of gray despite our morning wash, but he strode inside as if he were entering his own house.

I took one step forward, then another, and was blinded. Searchlights, spotlights, but it was only the sun beaming down through a skylight. The building was plain inside, and a painting of a bearded man hung on the wall.