Krys Lee - How I Became a North Korean

Much later I heard the stories of others: older women who recalled the seven years they dated their husbands before permitting a peck on the cheek; a receptionist at the Koryo Hotel who relived the illegal kiss she shared with an English teacher from Canada, who had, before he left forever, bequeathed her his final, stingy gift of loneliness. But that night there was only the way I cleaved to Myeonghui.

My right hand was a feathery pressure on her hips; my lips memorized her eyes, her nose, her lips. And though she was a proper girl from a good family, she sensed the strangeness of the night and allowed my arms to embrace her collarbone like a necklace. She must have known we were saying good-bye. This first kiss would remind me, whenever my hometown seemed an impossible dream, of who I had been.

Seongsik’s daughter was eight years old, the same age I’d been when I quit school as the famine swept through our country. That first day when he tried to show me the bedroom, Byeol stretched her arms and legs across the width of the door frame and blocked me from passing.

“Where are you going?” she cried. “That’s where Abba and I sleep.”

It was the only other room in the apartment. I was relieved, the dreaded inevitable moment postponed. Seongsik lifted his daughter up again from behind, so her arms and legs as round as Pyongyang dumplings spun in the air. He said, “Now, we’ve talked about this.”

The girl lurched backward as Seongsik struggled to hold her. I remembered being eight again and became afraid. I had licked the last of the ground-up cornmeal and bark from my bowl, then ate from my eomma ’s bowl as well. She had let me. My schoolteachers began stealing food instead of coming to school, and our family cracked open like an egg. After Abba died, Eomma left our one-room row house and went to China for the first time, and I sulked behind my aunt’s back so I wouldn’t cry. I tried to hide how afraid I was of never seeing her again. I remember needing her. I remember loving her.

Would I be a good eomma ? Was anyone ever capable of being a good eomma ? The girl called Byeol — a strange name, a star in the night sky — had uneven bangs that her father must have cut for her, and those bangs touched me. I decided I would cut the girl’s hair next time.

I gave her hair a light stroke, so as not to scare her.

“I had lice last week,” Byeol said. “Really bad. These tiny white bugs were crawling all over the comb.” I removed my hand.

Seongsik put her down. “You going to behave?”

She ran into the bedroom and flopped on the bed. “This is my room.”

“All right, we’ll sleep together, just for tonight. I’ll spread a yo on the floor.” He sighed. “Remember, she’s only eight. You know what eight is like.”

I was grateful, and relieved, when Byeol jumped up and down on the large raised bed, refusing to leave us alone. The bed was lined with a hospital ward’s worth of dolls, some missing an arm or a leg, one headless, another bald. She snatched the one intact doll with straw-colored hair and breasts shooting out like rockets and held the doll’s lips to her ear. She peered over its head at me.

“She says she doesn’t like you,” she said. “She says none of them like you. They were going to throw them out — they didn’t have a home,” she sang as she jumped in circles around her abba, marking her territory. “I rescued them. Kind of like Abba rescued you.”

You couldn’t say something like that to an eoreun; I was over twice her age. It was as if she had slapped me. I understood she was threatened by me, but I couldn’t even reprimand her; I had no such power. All I could do was wait and see what my new husband would do.

Seongsik looked from me to his daughter. He combed his fingers through his hair so roughly it looked as if he would rip out what was left.

“I’ve got the money to buy her new dolls, I do, but the church insisted,” he said, and fled the room.

Once he left, a spring came loose and my body became alert and capable. The walls were only walls, the dolls only dolls. The girl flopped backward onto the thin mattress and pretended to sleep, but I squatted down to her level.

“If you make it difficult for me, it will also become difficult for you.” I kept my voice light, friendly. “But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can get along. I can be a nice person, really. You might even like me.”

“You’re not a nice person, I can tell,” the girl said flatly.

“You don’t know me.” My eyes crowded with tears, but I didn’t let them fall. “You don’t know how I’ve suffered.”

“I am nice. Everyone says so. I look like my eomma .”

“Are you being nice to me, Byeol? What do you think? I’m not trying to replace your eomma . I want us to be friends.”

Byeol only made dizzying circles on her back, making a mess of the bed.

“Lots of people are nice to me, almost everyone I meet.”

I leaned in until our noses nearly touched and said gently, “There is always an exchange between people, and right now that exchange is between you and me. It’s your choice. It can be easy or it can be hard, but I want it to be easy for both of us.”

The girl sat up, her lips pursed into a stubborn knot that mirrored her father’s. “What about my abba and you? What does he get, when you’re only a North Korean?”

I straightened. I was sure that men wanted only one thing.

“Don’t worry about your abba, ” I said. “He knows what he wants.”

• • •

Seongsik surprised me the next morning, tucking a dethorned red rose behind my ear. “A rose for a Rose,” he said, blushing like a boy.

He hadn’t told me about Byeol’s existence, but he was a romantic. He insisted on music to match the mood of the weather and the light of the day, and he announced Classical! Rock! K-pop! changing the small discs as each piece startled me with its strangeness. I wondered how many months he had replayed these scenes to himself since his wife had left him, living alone with an imaginary woman he courted nightly in the dark. He was so eager to love me, this man, and I was prepared to use that love.

Before dinner he told me to fold my hands together while he conducted a conversation with someone who wasn’t there. I finally found the courage to ask about the American bastard framed and hanging above the television, and he said, “That’s Jesus Christ,” with reverence in his voice. Only then did I connect his monologue to the air with the picture. “God’s son who gave up his life for us.”

“Jesus Christ?”

“Jesus, Jesus,” said Byeol, suspicious. “You mean you don’t know Jesus Christ?”

She pushed a plate of bean sprouts my way, then gave me a strange look when I pushed it back toward her. The smell was too strong for me. Seongsik retrieved a large black book and placed it in my hands as if offering me a letter signed by the Great Leader himself.

“It’s the Bible,” he said. “It’s the only book we need.”

I flipped the book open and traced the lines across the page.

He was so eager that he leaned toward me until his shirt touched his rice and told me that the son of God could walk on water and multiply five loaves of bread and two fish into a plentitude that fed entire villages.

I wondered if my new husband was sick or prone to imaginative spells.

“Has anyone seen this man do it — walk on water?”

He regarded me with fatherly amusement. “You’ll grow to have faith.”

He lectured me on how unholy my country was. While he drew circles in his daughter’s bowl of rice with chopsticks, he spoke of famine and poverty and what it did to people, as if he had crossed the river and personally witnessed it. He wondered out loud how we lived without technology. What he said wasn’t untrue, not exactly. Even after all the honest and rule-abiding ones had died in the famine, most still experienced winter hungers that gnawed at the stomach, then ate what they could in the summer. Too many of us knew violence and corruption and the addiction of homegrown bbindu, our medicine that I later learned was called opium, which helped you forget about food. But the way he looked at me as he spoke from some high-up place offended me. It was as if I were being branded as a North Korean, part of a mass of people who were all the same.