Krys Lee - How I Became a North Korean

The guys had often talked about how their women could at least gain a modicum of safety in China by marrying, and envied them for this.

As soon as I spoke, Yongju cuffed my head for the first time. “You can’t call that a marriage — the reality’s more often a kidnapping and selling.”

Before I could redeem myself, Jangmi made space on the flat-faced boulder that the others had taken to reserving for her and urged Bakjun to come closer to the fire. The next minute she said breathlessly, “You’re wonderful!” when I fanned the fire from a sputter to a proper flame. I couldn’t tell whether she was being sincere or calculating; it was hard to tell with her, and I wondered, even as she ruffled Namil’s hair, then mine, what she was after. She was too sweet, too friendly; she reminded me of the girls at school who ignored me until they wanted tutoring before exams. But apparently everyone else was bedazzled by her.

In a word, I was jealous. She was naturally the center of attention, and it drove the rest of us out to the headlands of one another’s sight, watering down our tight intimacy. At some moment that eluded me, Yongju and Jangmi had slipped from formal speech to speaking in banmal, though she was at least four years older than him and they hardly knew each other. And there was the way he looked intently at her, as if no one else was there but the two of them. He’d said that Jangmi reminded him of his mother. He’d said that he admired strong women. The way he made any excuse to be near her reminded me of me.

“You look like you need a drink.” Namil, who was drunk as often as possible, offered me the bottle of strong Chinese liquor that was being passed around. The boys shared every scrap they had with one another; their generosity continually surprised me.

“You know I don’t drink.” I was underage and liked to draw thick black lines between right and wrong. I had great faith in the stability of those lines.

“I know, that’s why I’m telling you to drink. If you did, you wouldn’t be so… so—”

“The precise word is uptight, ” I said. “It’s often been used to describe me.”

“That’s it! That’s the word!” Namil twitched with laughter. I’d come to see that his happiness was more like a constant buzz of fear, and he was even happier when he was drunk.

“I shot down a crow once, with a rock.” Gwangsu’s pupils became so large and black that there was almost no white in his eyes. “This arm here’s my lucky arm. Then I cooked up the bird and ate it. Really!”

“ Meojori! You’d better pick juicier stories to tell than that. There’s nothing to eat on a crow,” said Bakjun.

“How would you know?”

Cheolmin said, “I know. I killed one when I was a kid just for fun and I pulled it all apart. I tell you, nothing but feathers.”

I passed around a plastic bag of sunflower seeds given to me by a market vendor I’d run favors for. The boys had hands and maybe even hearts that made beef jerky look soft, but they were easily impressed when I made several throws in the dark and each time caught a seed in my mouth. Namil pulled out two packs of cigarettes that he’d bought with money he’d begged from a South Korean tourist, a feat he regularly managed. A South Korean could have provided more important things, like help and information, but the boys passed the packs back and forth as if nicotine was all that mattered, blowing smoke rings at one another and sighing with each inhale. I was always halfway with them and halfway elsewhere, Danny and Daehan the orphan at once.

“Is it enough for you?” said Yongju. “A cigarette from a South Korean tourist?”

Namil grinned and blew a perfect smoke ring. “ Dongmu, it’s a full pack, and foreign, too! Back home, I’d pick stubs off the ground and smoke them.”

Yongju blew the smoke away. “Don’t you want more? You can’t live like this forever. You’ll get older, and if the police catch you, as they inevitably will, you won’t get a kid’s treatment when you get sent back.”

Namil pulled up his canvas pants and scratched at his legs, the skin cracked into dry cobweb patterns.

“That’s the future,” he said calmly, though he’d tensed at the word police. “I can’t read the future.”

Jangmi said, “The future’s the only thing that matters.”

I felt sick and surprised and guilty when, for a fleeting moment, I wished we had never met her. I nodded vigorously her way. “There must be all sorts of routes out, if you meet the right people.”

Cheolmin’s spit landed near my shoe. “You think you’re so smart, so why don’t you tell us how we can find them?”

Watch this, Namil mouthed at me, then scrambled behind the trees. It was as if getting to a safe country was so impossible for them that he didn’t bother to give it another thought.

Namil reappeared a few minutes later behind Bakjun and said in a deep voice in Mandarin, “Security!”

Bakjun leaped up and hung briefly in midair like a basketball player. Bakjun, who had grown up sleeping near electricity conductors in the winters and breaking into storage sheds for food, had been caught in China twice, sent back, and escaped again — his body was a web of scars from all the beatings. When he saw it was Namil, he grabbed the bottle from Gwangsu, who was balancing it on his thigh with two hands, one of which looked as if a dog had bitten through it. Bakjun held the bottle as if to smash Namil in the head, a sudden surge of the violence and anger that lurked inside them. Only the others pulling him away stopped him.

I was listening for something else.

That was when I heard it for sure, a noise outside of our circle. I stood up and listened to the forest. When pine needles crackled, I held up my hand.

“There’s someone out there!” I pointed at the trees across from me. “Who’s there?”

The others scattered before I finished my sentence, fleeing kidnappers, security, whoever might be after them. The underbrush thrashed, then two people stepped out into the light of the fire, an elderly couple who could have been our grandparents. Their faces were bruised purple and their hands so filthy that they looked half mole, half human. When the halmeoni let go of the lapels of her coat I saw a wide tear across the front of her blouse. Apart from the homeless drug addicts in downtown Los Angeles, I had never seen elderly people in such a sorry state. Their shuffle forward was more an exhausted cringe, as if they expected anyone, even me, a mere kid, to unleash vitriol their way. Their animal smell grew stronger as they approached me and I soon saw why. The man was bleeding from the mouth, and when he opened it to speak, a thick sap trickled out. There were great gaps where his teeth should have been and one incisor hung from his gums by a fleshy string.

I didn’t know what else to do except to hand the woman a soiled towel and promise her some lamb skewers.

“My husband can’t eat them. He can’t eat anything anymore.”

I was shocked, wondering whether her husband would bleed to death, and raced through my limited medical knowledge to see if there was anything I could do. From the shadows where they were watching, the others slowly returned.

Yongju took her hands in his. “Halmeoni, what happened?” His voice was velvet, as if she were actually his grandmother.

“We’ve been walking for hours.” The halmeoni clutched his hands. “The farmer we were working for was — he was being inappropriate with me. My husband tried to stop him, but the ganna saekki used a hammer on his teeth, and now the bleeding won’t stop.”

She cried silently as if the sound itself had been beaten out of her.