Krys Lee - How I Became a North Korean

But I wasn’t daydreaming anymore. My dark dreams were real, the pain was real, and I was struck, and struck again.

The two black suits in my room moved with grace for such large men. One of them knocked aside my tray. Stew splattered and dried anchovies scattered across the floor. I backed away against the bedpost; there was nowhere to go. They didn’t hurry. I begged; it didn’t help. The hand that slapped me across the head came down so slowly; the pain wasn’t as bad as the waiting.

“Save me?” said one man. One of his eyes was welded shut and his knuckles were tattooed with Han characters.

My plans had been discovered.

“Some guy’s offered to buy you and any others from your country. What have you been saying to our customers?”

Something was about to change. The snowdrifts blocked me in, and I shivered in the cold.

The week waiting for Missionary Kwon brought out the worst in us. Gwangsu began talking to himself about escape, Cheolmin started kicking Gwangsu in the shins, Yongju ground his teeth while sleeping, and Bakjun began masturbating all night without bothering to take it somewhere more private, or at least it seemed that way to me each time he interrupted my sleep. Only Namil was unaffected, as long as he got three square meals a day. I waited for a chance to use Missionary Lee’s cell phone or for Missionary Kwon to expel me for challenging him in front of the Bangs — whichever came first. If anyone could help my friends, it was my mom — I just needed to reach her.

The day Missionary Kwon returned, Namil was napping on the floor as stiff as a mummy, the Bible spread over his eyes; Bakjun was staring down at the words as if they were Egyptian hieroglyphs. While I drew Bible scenes on cardboard cards for them, Cheolmin ran back and forth across the room, slamming his body into the walls. He halted and screamed, “There’s a hole in my stomach! I can’t take it!” then ran again.

“You can, you can and you will.” Yongju stopped recopying the Book of Isaiah into a notebook. “We have to.”

Missionary Lee wiped at the sweat beading on his forehead and upper lip. “It’s Missionary Kwon’s orders. I’m sorry.”

He had banished Cheolmin from lunch for the second time that week for not memorizing his daily Bible verse.

“He won’t know if you let me eat or if I piss in my pants, since he’s never around.”

“I made a promise. It’s my duty.” Missionary Lee looked fatigued. “And if you keep using such language, I won’t have a choice but to report you.”

“He’s never been to school, so how can he read?” Bakjun bit off the skin from his thumb. Of course he was also talking about himself. “And now he has to memorize the Bible?”

Memorize wasn’t exactly the right word for it. In the missionaries’ defense, outside of the daily Bible verse the boys were assigned, they weren’t expected to know much more than the Bible’s stories in the right order. But it was a strange new world for them, even if the version we were reading was in their Joseon language and not the Korean two cousins removed that was spoken in South Korea. Seeing it through their eyes, it had become strange for me, too. I wondered about the mysterious ways of God and about how long you could keep a group of teenage guys locked up without consequences.

Namil said, “Do you always have to do what Kwon wants you to?”

“All promises are a promise to God.” Missionary Lee clapped his hands together and brightened. “How about some snacks? I can do that.”

The rare treat went wrong when Cheolmin grabbed the last Choco Pie and knocked over Bakjun’s bottle of Coke. I set it upright in a flash, but a quarter of it had spilled, and everyone scrambled to rescue their notebooks and Bibles.

“You stupid ganna saekki .” Bakjun kept his voice low so it wouldn’t carry to Missionary Lee’s room, where he was resting. He was always resting those days, which should have been a sign. “That was mine! When do we ever get to drink this stuff?”

Bakjun was sweeping the spilled liquid into his palm when Cheolmin smashed the crown of his head with his elbow.

I locked Cheolmin’s arms behind him the best I could. I wasn’t about to push my luck with a guy who’d begun talking about returning to his country and joining a legendary gang.

Bakjun’s eyes narrowed into flints. The tension in the air scared me; for the first time I sensed that in the confined space, there was nowhere for their energy to go. I released Cheolmin and sprinted to the middle of the room, threw my arms wide, and said the first thing I could think of.

“Once upon a time it was the darkest night ever imagined. God dipped his hand into that darkness and when he opened his arms”—I spread mine out—“he divided the dark from the light.”

“This is stupid,” said Cheolmin.

“Listen to Daehan,” said Yongju. “You two can have my Coke and Choco Pie.”

“The light was as bright as the white in a burning fire, a dove’s wing, the streak of a missile across the sky. That was how bright it was.”

I described Adam as he wandered through the unruly topiary of nature and showed them how lovely he was, how innocent. Soon enough I was there with Adam and Eve, strolling through Eden, the sting of orchids thick in my nose, the green foliage wrapped around the trees like a sarong, listening to the larks and nightingales. I admired those fateful apples, so luminous that they reflected Adam back to himself like a mirror. I was singing one of the greatest songs that man has ever known, and I was flooded with love and hope. But whether that love was for the story, for comfort, or for faith, I didn’t know anymore. I continued until the fate of the world’s first man and woman unraveled and the end came: “Dust you are, dust you will return.”

I opened my eyes. No one had moved.

“It’s not a bad story, when you say it that way.” Bakjun cuffed me on the head, sending happy tingles through me.

“I’ve never heard a nightingale sing,” said Yongju. “I like the sound of it. Nightingale.”

Cheolmin spat into the air and caught the descending blob in his fist. “Those Bible stories are a load of shit. Everyone knows that.”

“Everyone?” I said. “Have you talked to the entire world’s population and checked? Do you have any idea how many of us have infiltrated the planet? In China alone there are more than two billion homo sapiens wreaking havoc…”

“There he goes, acting like he’s intellectual when he’s just a homeless Joseon- jok . There’s easier ways to get out.” Cheolmin flashed both palms covered with tiny drawings at me, his version of crib notes.

Namil slung an arm around me, so close that his unwashed hair trailed its oiliness across my cheek. “At least he knows something. At least he’s saying something worth listening to.”

“And where’d your fancy long words and your fancy learning get you, dongmu ?” said Cheolmin. “Here, with us.”

I slung my arm over Namil’s shoulder. “I enjoy learning.”

“‘I enjoy learning,’” Cheolmin parroted back in a squeaky voice that sounded nothing like mine. My stomach tightened. I was exposed again in a circle of boys and there was nowhere to hide. I prepared myself, curled up roly-poly on the floor to protect myself from his fists, but they never came.

Instead, Yongju asked, “Who’s your real enemy? Who are you really angry at?”

He approached Cheolmin gently, like a rustling leaf. “Daehan’s one of us, too, and right now we’re all we have.”

No one had ever defended me before; no one had ever been on my side. I was touched; I was speechless.

Maybe my life would have spun out differently if Yongju hadn’t crouched on the floor and put his arm around my shoulders and one around Cheolmin’s. But he pulled me into his musk and amber, drew me into the secret fraternity of men, until I was drowning in the oceanic span of his long arms, finally lost.