Krys Lee - How I Became a North Korean

“All this big country,” Missionary Kwon said afterward in the car. The wind carried his words out the window into the green hills. “How do you feel?”

“I feel safe with you.” My words came automatically. I knew what men needed to hear.

I knew he needed to be needed by us. And we did need him, he who put food on our table every day and had paid for my escape, who decided when we would be allowed to make the last dangerous crossing. But he couldn’t bring my baby back. In that sense there was nothing he could give me.

But that wasn’t true, either. When he said suddenly, “Your child is with God,” I was filled with gratitude.

I asked, “Is that your son?”

He nodded at the photo hanging from the mirror.

“How old is he?”

He smiled briefly. “Only fourteen, and he already speaks better English than I ever did. He’s taking English, taekwondo. And he’s already a black belt.”

“And your wife?”

His eyes lingered on my face, and I felt his interest rise.

“He’s with his eomma in Seoul. We’re no longer married. Let’s just say it’s a difficult situation.”

On the drive back, he stopped in town to pick up a carton of ice cream from a small corner shop. When he got out, his eyes darted left and right as if he was the hunted one.

Once the road became an empty road to nowhere, soybean fields on both sides, he kept glancing my way. His clean, earthy smell reminded me of newly churned farmland. He had desirably pale skin and wasn’t a bad-looking man, though he was thick in the waist and had large yellowed teeth. I took stock as I dipped into the carton of mint chocolate chip, its sweetness so bruising that it stung my tongue. Holy men were still men.

Then he said, “I recently got someone to South Korea.” As if he knew precisely what to say to me.

“To South Korea.”

“Yes, through my people. I’m capable of doing that, and more.” He seemed awed by who he had become.

“Why did she get to go?”

He slowed the car. “What makes you think it’s a she?”

I considered his hand, that mighty hand that I swore would be the last in the sequence of hands in my life. I wished all those hands to be dismembered, strung up, hung on a laundry line to dry and shrivel in the sun.

Instead I drifted my hand to his thigh, and waited. I did what I had to do to live.

• • •

I didn’t know then that Daehan had called his mother and that people outside of Missionary Kwon’s organization were starting to move and work for us. I was too used to thinking of myself as alone.

It happened the way I expected. The next night Missionary Kwon walked quietly into my room. He was dressed the way he always was, in a dress shirt, jacket, and slacks. The man seemed to sleep in uniform, so determined to preserve this upright image of himself. He had me follow him to the front door, turned the key, and led me outside into the monsoon rains. I ignored the large umbrella he held out and descended the slippery steps, letting the rain cleanse me. The mud sucked at my slippers and water turned my nightdress into a river. I was alert and ready until I smelled the sweetness of my breasts becoming moist with milk, and my weak leg buckled despite the walking stick. He gripped me by the shoulders and helped me into the backseat of the car. Water pooled under me. As he unzipped his slacks, I prepared myself.

“It’s a solitary life, a hard life for any man, even a religious man.” His face was half in shadow. He tossed his tie over his shoulder. “You seem to understand that about me.”

I tried to remember what my former self would have done and said, and let her guide me.

As he undressed me, my teeth began to chatter. The nub of the seat belt dug into my back, and our breathing steamed up the windows.

He said, “For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may show his mercy to all.”

He prayed for God to forgive his weak flesh as he pulled down my underwear with his thumbs. His mouth tasted of tart tangerines. The car smelled like a wet towel. My other self, my old self who knew how to survive, kept her eyes fixed on the roof of the car above her and thought about how she might benefit from this exchange. Tried to visualize a future. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me at all.

But it was me when we walked up the stairs, my arms and legs heavy, my back bruised by the seat-belt buckle. I tried to focus on the present. Left, right, left, right. One mossy step at a time.

Until I saw Yongju pacing across the common room. His slouching shoulders, the delicate outlines of his worry, were excruciating to see.

“I checked on you, dongmu, and you weren’t there!” He rushed up to me, relief on his face. How did you—”

As he grasped my hands, Missionary Kwon came in and locked the door behind him.

Yongju’s breathing became fast and shallow. Or was it mine? I was wet and chilly, but my cheeks flushed with heat.

“There was a medical emergency.” Missionary Kwon folded his arms together. “Everything’s fine now, so you should go back to your room.” His voice stayed even.

“ Dongmu, ” I said, but Yongju didn’t stay to listen.

I followed him to the supply room, too anxious to keep a careful distance. I could have touched him if I’d reached out, but I didn’t.

“I do what I have to do,” I said.

“You don’t have to explain.”

But I needed him to know what time had done to me. I wanted someone, finally, to know me. “You don’t know how it was for us. At the worst of it, my abba continued to go to work at the shoe factory though it stopped paying its workers. All the machines were turned off, but he kept going until he died. My eomma ? She would boil soup thickened with bits of bark and weeds. The doctor had no medicine for her pneumonia. Then she started taking bbindu and the eomma I knew disappeared.”

I watched his bowed head and told him how afraid I had been, traveling across the country in boy’s clothes, hiding from train conductors and sneaking across the border and walking for hours to trade and sell the scraps I had. How my father died from the Great Hunger and left us. “One thing sustained me: the dream of leaving. Now it’s the only thing I have left.”

I had never spoken so much about myself. Fierce, clipped words tumbled out. I was exhausted, but I didn’t know what he would say once I stopped speaking.

His head was still bowed, his fists clenched. It made me sad to look at him for too long.

I said, “I hear my eomma ’s voice in the rain.”

What hurt the most was the way he gazed at me: with understanding. He stepped closer and his lips brushed across my hair. Almost a light kiss, as if a breeze had passed across it. How could he, knowing what he knew. He uncrossed my arms that were tight around my torso and wiped the corners of my eyes. Tears, another weakness. I looked at the other country that he was for me, at his outrageous idealism. At his innocence.

The oppressive rains that night would be imprinted on my memory. My nose was full of the ripe bouquet of our rank smells and I tried to escape it, attempting to escape from myself.

The windows were misted over, distorting the trees into swollen, distended shapes that swayed in the wind like naked bodies. Rain stippled my perspective, but I thought I saw a human smudge and pressed my face against the plastic. It was Jangmi, kicking up puddles of water with her feet, holding her nightdress up high from the sludge. I was alarmed and amazed that she had somehow freed herself. She hadn’t been broken after all, only hoarding her strength. Maybe her mouth was open, drinking the rain. Maybe she was thinking of me. I thought she was alone.