Krys Lee - How I Became a North Korean

“After I crossed, I learned that the stars in the sky are mere pictures. Something like that.”

“You mean they’re real?”

He stopped laughing after I heaved up my food, the sea scent of octopus scorching my tongue. He forced me to continue.

When he spotted a hut inside the fold of mountains, we made a long arc around it. People were dangerous, and their grunting, barking animals more dangerous still. Brambles grabbed at my pants. The mountain was alive. The roots of its trees seemed to rise and snarl my feet and trip me. Mud sucked at my shoes and I sank into the mountain’s flesh. I would have lost my will, and my way, if it weren’t for Daehan.

The rain stopped, but the moon and the stars were hooded by clouds and were useless guides. I scrambled in the dark behind Daehan, who took to the mountain slope the way I imagined a goat would. My hand groped around a prickly tree, then around boulders. I was so tired; I wanted to rest on the wild grass. It was soft under my hand, beaten down by the rain into a pillow.

The wind carried the smell of wilderness. I looked around; the musky smell was too close. The undergrowth of the bushes’ dark outlines rustled, was set quivering, and then I saw it: the bristly shadow, a pair of eyes glowing faintly out at us.

“What’s that?” I whispered.

“I don’t know,” Daehan whispered back.

I lowered myself, kept to the ground. Maybe it was a squirrel or a rat. Please let it be a rat. But the eyes were too high up. A deer? It was large and seemed to grow larger in front of me, as if it wasn’t an animal at all but some monstrous creature come to track me down. I waited, alert with fear, watching it watch me. But when the clouds blew in another direction and the moon was bright again, Daehan clapped his hands.

“No, no, it’s a woman,” he said. “A pregnant woman, I think, from the silhouette.”

I saw her for the first time. Jangmi, her eyes wide and bright with fear.

That April I woke up each morning in the cave as dark as a mother’s womb. It was damp and smelled worse than a gym locker room, but the choir of breathing tickling my ears was reassuring. When I shifted, my back scraped against layers of stones and paper and my tarp, which I’d laid underneath us to keep the moisture out. The warm bundle beside me moved, too. It was Yongju. I made sure it was always Yongju beside me.

Everything changed when Jangmi came. The next morning, when I wiggled out from under the filthy blankets, there was a gap beside me where Yongju should have been. I crawled toward the morning light, one hand out in front as I tried not to wake anyone up. Outside I saw what I’d feared.

Jangmi was sitting on a boulder, her hands folded over her swollen belly as Yongju dusted off dirt and silvery threads of cobwebs from her hair. They looked as if they’d been up and talking for hours. He gently pulled her hair back into a loose knot as if to see better her heart-shaped face and skin carved out of a perfect piece of marble. She clearly spelled trouble, and I found myself praying that he was only giving her hair a final cleaning. He murmured something and she looked like a queen speaking to her audience when she responded. That was when I squeezed in between them and slung my arm around Yongju’s shoulders.

I said, “What are you two doing up?”

Yongju flushed as if I’d caught him kissing her.

“What are you doing here in the mountains with us?” she said, though the sweetness of her voice reminded me of blooming cherry blossoms. She’d learned the night before as we walked back that I was a Joseon- jok .

Yongju’s eyes followed her hand stirring from her swollen belly to her too-perfect equation of a face. Mine did, too, for very different reasons.

Bakjun came out from our pit on his hands and knees. “How’s our nuna doing?” He circled her like a hungry dog.

“Very well.” She looked at Yongju. “ Dongmu, thanks to you, I slept perfectly well. It was such a terrible night in the rain — I didn’t know where to go.”

Yongju flushed again. “You must be hungry, dongmu .”

She looked swiftly from the trees as gnarled as gnomes to our ragtag assembly emerging from the dugout. In that one sweeping glance that I would associate with her, she assessed how best to proceed.

Then she said quietly, “My baby is hungry,” which seemed impossible. When she had come back to the cave with us the night before, all she had done was eat. Over our breakfast of stale bread and tiny potatoes that I had cajoled alive, I watched my friends go from trying to please her and making her comfortable to flirting wildly with her. I was confounded. It made no difference that she was years older than them or pregnant. Their comments got bolder, and Jangmi didn’t discourage them. It was as if she wanted to keep her options open.

That was, until Cheolmin tucked his eggplant-shaped face over her shoulder and said, “Where’s the father? When did he stick it to you?”

Her hands flew to her stomach as if to protect her baby.

“You little street beast!” Yongju cuffed Cheolmin across the head. “Don’t ever talk to a woman like that again.”

A sound rattled in Cheolmin’s throat and his eyes narrowed. I tried to do my duty and distract him, pointing up to a bird’s half-completed nest cradled in a pine tree. “There’ll be other babies soon.”

Everyone turned their full attention to the sparrow building a home, as if the nest was permanent.

• • •

I tried not to think about home or the past. And despite my stretches of guilt and gloom after I’d called my dad from the nearest village’s public phone, reminding me of my messy life in America, the all-consuming task of securing the basic essentials was a topography so different from what I’d known that the past usually felt like a distant dream. I was also busy keeping up my part of an imagined bargain so that my friends wouldn’t be tempted to get rid of me. I made myself chef, head gardener, wood collector. I started taking long solo trips to my former base and, as a last desperate measure, began asking for Missionary Kwon at the café he’d mentioned. I led my friends to edible roots and berries, treated burns, scouted for danger, and became their unofficial Mandarin teacher. There were dozens of species of plants to be flummoxed by, a bounty of bird-watching opportunities, my mouth to censor so I didn’t give away the American part of me. I was surrounded by allies, puzzles of new knowledge, and my dulled, depressed senses were pricked alive by discomfort.

One day I splurged, dug into my emergency funds, and brought back dozens of cheap lamb skewers from the market stalls in town. We were careful with fires, and it was late at night when we headed farther out from our dugout so that no one would discover us. I started a tiny fire, more embers than a fire.

Yongju sat on a layer of newspapers beside Jangmi as if he were her guardian. He said, mainly in her direction, “On nights like this, it feels as if we’re the only people remaining on the planet.”

“No, dongmu, ” she said. The way she gazed at him made me nervous. “It’s more as if the entire world is elsewhere and we’ve been forced out. I’m not just a lump of flesh waiting to get arrested. I’ll walk to South Korea if I have to.”

Yongju’s eyes lingered on hers for a little too long. “I’ve considered it myself. But we don’t have national identity cards if the police catch us on the way, and then there’s the terrain we’ve never seen and the language, and so much more. It’s impossible.”

“Others have done it.”

My mind raced for ways to wedge myself into their conversation. “You could marry for protection.”