Krys Lee - How I Became a North Korean

Daehan pointed to it. “That’s Jesus, God’s son.”

What he said meant nothing to me. Still, the church was beautiful: Sunlight soared in through the high windows and cast its warm spell over the burnt-honey varnish of the long seats he called pews. I passed a large wooden cross hovering over the podium, seemingly midair.

Daehan skidded down the empty aisles and approached the doors at both sides of the central platform. I followed. I was suddenly terrified. There could be a security patrol lying in wait behind the doors, or even the Dear Leader himself, though that was absurd.

“Is anyone there?” He tried the door to the left.

I was ready to flee when the door opened, Daehan jumped back, and a stooped man with a thick rug of hair ambled out.

He looked us over. It didn’t matter that I had tried to wash in the icy stream or clean my wool coat and trousers; my new life must have marked me like a prison uniform.

The man said, “What can I do for you?”

Daehan propelled himself forward.

“We’re looking for the leadership of this church. The pastor, preferably.” He sounded polite and educated.

The man said he was the pastor and that we had caught him just in time; he was on his way out. His eyes were wide and frank, and I had no choice but to trust him.

Daehan spoke rapidly, braiding together words so foreign that at first I wondered if it was a Korean dialect. Only much later did I understand that he was trying to gain the pastor’s trust with his Christian credentials.

I couldn’t wait. “I heard that you help… people.”

The man smiled, but the language of his body turned wary. His eyes, perfectly shaped black stones, stayed trained on me.

As if he were afraid we would be seen, he quickly led us into the back to his office. Twenty young men could have slept in his office. I was starting to measure space by the number of people it could hide. The pastor’s books had outgrown their shelves and littered the room’s available surfaces. Across his desk were scattered a collection of pens and files piled like felled logs.

The pastor pushed his eyeglasses up the bulbous slope of his nose and looked kindly at me. “Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

Daehan studied the bookshelves and pretended not to listen. For the first time I tried to form a coherent narrative of who I was, where I came from, and what had happened to my family. It embarrassed me to talk about myself at such length, and my speech circled back on itself as I wondered if this was how it had actually happened and, especially, how much to reveal, whether I should change dates and places to protect myself. The discomfort of I, I, I. It struck me that, for the pastor, the most important thing about me was that I was North Korean.

He listened patiently, his large head bobbing to indicate he understood. After I stopped speaking, he said to Daehan, “Was this your idea?” He said it as if he meant: What do you want from me?

Daehan’s lower lip jutted out in a dogged way. “My eomma always taught me the church was for the poor and needy.”

The pastor thought for a moment, then asked us to wait. “I have something for you.”

When he returned, he looked serious and sad, as if my weight had become his, and I felt hopeful that this man could help me. He set a plastic bag down on the floor between us.

“Son, I think these will fit.”

They were clean clothes, including a worn, padded coat. He patted me awkwardly on the shoulder, then handed me a few boxes of rice cakes and an envelope. Money, I guessed, from the envelope’s feathery heft.

“We collect regular donations for the North Koreans who come to us for help. Many donate, the community, guests, South Korean groups. This should aid you a little.”

But I didn’t want supplies to sustain me for another mere week or two.

“I need help. I need to find my family.” I clutched his hands.

When he tried to pull away, I didn’t let go.

“I’ve been told that Christians are good people.” I looked into his eyes. “You must know what it’s like for me. I have lost everyone I love. Everything was a lie, and everything here is new and foreign. I’m a university student surrounded by crass, ignorant kkotjaebi from our country — we don’t have a single cell in common. Imagine waking up to rats and eating food out of the garbage. All I’m capable of here is enduring each day, but it isn’t enough to endure. If you help me to South Korea, there are things I can do there, good things, and I promise you that I will — I will—” I couldn’t finish.

“Please, child, don’t cry.” He offered me a clean handkerchief.

“Please.” I began lowering myself to my knees, but Daehan forced himself between us and stopped me.

“The answer’s self-evident,” said Daehan. “The only moral thing to do is to help him escape out of China.”

“You think it’s that easy?” The pastor looked enraged, then discouraged. “When I was a university student, I used most of my modest funds to shelter and feed the first famine victims crossing the river. That was in the nineties, when the hunger was at its worst.”

His eyes became sad and were no longer focused on me. I realized that I was just one of the thousands who had come to him since with swollen abscesses and scabby skin, clutching his hands the way I had held his.

“My children, there have been massive crackdowns since then, you see.”

One hand rubbed at his temple and he kept his chin angled to the ground.

“We are here to preach and spread the word of God to the Han people, but if we help a North Korean, we’re expelled or, worse, the church is shut down, and all this effort, our life’s work, comes to an end. Many, many people are terribly hurt as a result. God is with you, my child, but for the sake of the church, it’s dangerous for me to be here with you like this. I’m afraid there’s nothing more I can do for you. You see, there are too many of you now.”

• • •

In an eatery I forced down an octopus ball with a second bottle of baiju . Why not? There were only four hours of walking ahead of us. I felt reckless, and wanted to be drunker than I had ever been.

Daehan tried to steal my bottle away. “It’s an ideal time to go back home, don’t you think? You realize this isn’t very discreet.”

I was so drunk, I walked through a crowd without fear for the first time. Rage churned in my gut.

Still, I wasn’t drunk enough not to be afraid when an official-looking truck passed us and turned at the next corner. The kind of truck that might gather up our people and force us back across the river. The smoky octopus came up and invaded my lungs, and Daehan followed me as I fled the city, my hand tight around the plastic case in my pocket that held a razor blade, the one I had crossed the river with to use in case we were caught. I still had choices.

When we reached a one-lane country road, it began to rain. We walked past houses sprinkled across the unfriendly land like an afterthought.

Daehan was mostly quiet, but suddenly he said, “It must be freeing to be old. You know, to be so old someday that you’re too exhausted to feel. To be without dreams.”

“You talk about age,” I said. “In our country most people are young and without dreams.”

I looked at the peaks ahead and felt the long night descend. There were rumors that one of our people had walked down the paved road right into a patrol, giving them no choice but to arrest him. Poor, foolish man, the words came with each thundering beat in my head, and I wondered out loud what might happen if I walked blindly, right now, to the country that Daehan called South Korea, our Nam Joseon.

“You know that’s suicide,” Daehan said fiercely. “Don’t give up.”