Stars Between the Sun and Moon (5 page)

Chapter Six

There is a
tradition in Chosun in which families soak potatoes in pails of water from the time they are harvested until the following summer. Just as the
deulgukhwa
were blooming, my mother brought our pail in from the pit in the ground where she had stored it and where the potatoes had remained frozen for the winter. We spent an evening together peeling the potatoes, and the next morning, using a heavy stone grinder she had borrowed from a neighbour, my mother ground the potatoes to powder. On certain summer nights, we would meet at a neighbour's house with lots of other families. The neighbour would take the powder everyone had brought and put it into a noodle machine. Then my umma and the other mothers would cook the noodles in big pots on open outdoor fires.

These were the only nights of the year when I knew for sure that my belly would be full. We were supposed to feast on rice cakes on Kim Il-sung's birthday, the fifteenth day of the fifth month, but we rarely did because we couldn't afford to buy them. Kim Il-sung's birthday was also an occasion on which we were rationed pork. Even so, the meat we received was enough to feed only one person, not all of us.

On potato noodle nights, I played hide and seek with the other children on our street. At midnight, I would still be awake, lying on my mat, my stomach full, my legs tired from all the running, listening to the distant calls of wolves in the hills.

The weekend after Sunyoung's disappearance, someone called for a noodle night. On that night, however, I didn't play with the other children. Everyone stared at me as I walked beside my mother, Sunyoung on the other side. My mother gave our remaining powder to the older woman with the grinder. “
Jal mugssumnida
, I will eat this well,” the woman said, as was customary.

I bowed politely, my face red with shame. I felt everyone knew I was a bad big sister. My mother had said it was not my fault that Sunyoung had run away. I was not responsible since I had been sick. But I felt I had let her and Sunyoung down nonetheless.

Sunyoung and Hyungchul, now a toddler, ran off to play with some of the other children. I sat on a stump and listened to the adults talk. Mostly the conversation revolved around our great father and eternal president. But then, as the crescent moon of August crept up from the horizon, and fireflies flickered their lights near the river, some of the men began to talk in whispers.

“The
Boweebu
—the security bureau—came and took her away,” I heard one of them say. I inched my body closer, eager to hear more.

“She was going to the mountains and sending codes to the south,” someone else said.

“She was a spy!” one man exclaimed, shaking his head.

“She was not loyal to our great father and eternal president,” my father interjected, clicking his tongue.

Everyone nodded.

“She's in prison now,” continued the man who had brought up the subject.

“What is her name?” I thought to myself, hugging my knees to stop myself from leaping up and yelling the question out loud. “Who are you talking about?”

“Her father was a capitalist. Her head was never right.”

“She has a son,” I heard my father say. “About Sunhwa's age.”

“Who could it be?” I wondered, my mind going over all the children I saw at noodle night.

“I hope the son and his father have told the Boweebu that they do not support the woman,” another man said.

Everyone nodded again.

That night, I could not sleep. I listened to the crickets rubbing their legs together, my eyes wide open as I stared into the dark. My head hurt from the way my mind kept churning over all my fears: fears that someone who lived close to us was a traitor.

The night before
I started school, my mother washed my hair and body with laundry soap. I cleaned the dirt from underneath my nails with the same wooden stick I used to pick lice.

The following morning, I woke before the others did and tiptoed over to the wall, where my father had nailed a peg for my clothes. I felt grown up. The top pegs held my mother and father's clothes, the bottom peg mine, including my school uniform. I ran to the outhouse and dressed after washing my hands. I couldn't eat my rice that morning, though, because my stomach was queasy from nerves. As I waited for my mother to finish eating, I squished my feet into my new black leather shoes, tossed my backpack over my shoulder and waited for her outside.

When my mother and I arrived at the school, we were instructed to stay in the yard with the other mothers and daughters. I gripped my mother's hand as we stood underneath a tree. There were four Grade 1 classes, two all-boys' classes and two all-girls' classes, my mother explained. As we waited for the school official to tell me where to go, I spied on the people around us. Some of the mothers wore navy skirts and high-heeled black shoes and had their hair in tidy buns. These women looked clean beside my mother. Their daughters, whom my mother said would also be in Grade 1, were twice as tall as I was. The fathers and mothers of those girls must hold important jobs in the Party, I thought, for some girls had bellies that looked like they might explode. I squeezed my mother's hand tighter and tried to duck in behind her. “If I get into a fight with one of these girls,” I thought to myself, “I will surely lose.”

I started to tremble as my mother released my hand. My name had been called, and a school official was escorting me to the line for my class. I closed my eyes tight and made a wish that I would end up with the girls who were my height and skinny. In the end, that was what happened. The larger girls were in the other class.

The school official
had us walk single file to our new classroom, then sit on the floor cross-legged, facing the photograph of Kim Il-sung on the wall. After the bell rang three times, our teacher arrived. We called her
Sunsangim
, an honorific title indicating a person with great power. Once she had introduced herself, she proceeded to guide us in what would become a morning ritual: a dedication to our great father and eternal president.

“The beloved father is watching over you,” Sunsangim told us. “So sit upright and behave properly.”

She then recited a story from Kim Il-sung's childhood: “Once our great father and eternal president's straw shoes were falling apart, and his mother gave him money she had saved from sewing for new shoes. She told him to buy the best rubber shoes at the market. But instead, he bought new shoes for his mother.”

“Ohhh,” I hummed silently. “He is such a good man.”

“We must try to be like him,” Sunsangim concluded.

“Once our great father and eternal president's mother fell ill,” Sunsangim told us another day. “She needed a special fruit from a distant mountain. Only that fruit, a prune, would cure her. Kim Il-sung, just a young boy at that time, went in search of the fruit. He walked for days with no water or food. On the brink of starvation, he found the fruit, and he saved his mother.”

Now that I was in my first year of school, I vowed to dress nicely, to write neatly, to do well in my studies, to be thoughtful to others and, when someone was in trouble, to help them. I wanted to possess all of the virtues of Kim Il-sung. “I want to be like him,” I told my umma that night.

“I want to be just like our great father,” I told the stars as I stared out the window.

From my first school day on, I said, “Thank you, dear father,” whenever I passed in front of the eternal president's portrait in our home. I said, “Thank you, dear father,” before every meal. “Thank you, dear father,” I recited after every good mark I received in math or Korean lessons. “Thank you, dear father,” I muttered every night before hopping under the duvet and nestling my head next to Sunyoung's.

In the mornings, when our class leader went to the front to lead us in the oath of allegiance to our eternal president, I was determined to stand straighter than anyone. My voice, I vowed, would carry the most dedication. “I promise to study hard, to model harmonious group behaviour and to pay allegiance always to our beloved father. I swear I will,” I recited.

In the song that followed, I opened my mouth wide, articulating everything with perfect pitch: “Our leader, standing atop Goonhaham Rock, takes out from his sheath a general's sword. We have victory over our enemies! He takes out the sword, and at the sound of the sword, unleashed from the sheath, the Japanese tremble.”

The autumn days turned crisp, and the biting winds snapped at my cheeks. I read the textbooks on Kim Il-sung's childhood in the dim light of our house until my eyes closed and my head toppled forward onto the pages.

Every night before bed, I took a cloth and dusted the frame around the portrait of Kim Il-sung, as Sunyoung looked on. When I was done, we would both bow and say: “Thank you, father.”

Near the end
of my first year, Sunsangim divided us into groups of four and had us line up shortest to tallest. I was a year older than the other students, because I had been started late, but I was still one of the tiniest, so I was very upset when the teacher placed me at the front of one of the lines. The child behind me, a short wide girl with a round face, stuck her tongue out at me when Sunsangim wasn't looking. “We're shorter than you,” she whispered into my ear, pointing to herself and the two other girls. “But you have to go first.”

The other girls pointed at me and stuck their tongues out, too. Anger bubbled up from deep inside me. I felt like hitting the girl behind me.

As Sunsangim explained the activity, my anger subsided. We were to run to the wall on the far side of the room and then back.

“
Yoy, ddang
—ready, go,” the teacher said. I leapt forward, running with my head high, my arms pumping, my legs the longest gait I could stretch them into.

“I am going to come first and show those girls that being of service to our eternal president is the only way to live,” I vowed, as I kept my eyes focused on the chalkboard on the other side of the room.

Suddenly, I crashed into a cement chair placed to divide the two sides of the room. The blow sent me backwards with such force the air was knocked out of me. I landed on my back with a thud and started choking.

A few of the girls stopped running, but the teacher waved for them to finish. Sunsangim came to my side and told the teaching assistant to fetch my mother, who was in the kindergarten a few classrooms over.

As my breathing returned to normal, the teacher lectured me. “You were not looking. You were too focused on the goal you would achieve. The chair was placed there to see who would falter.”

I wanted to apologize, but all I could do was stutter.

“You were consumed with your anger, too,” she continued. “You were not thinking clearly. You allowed your emotions to cloud the purpose of the work you needed to achieve.”

I gasped at her words.

“I see much even when I am not looking,” she said, answering my unspoken question. “You have failed our great father today.”

I glanced at the girl with the round face, my face steaming again in anger. Her father, I had heard, was a factory supervisor, a loyal and devoted Party member. “I will always be an outsider,” I thought to myself, my heart heavy. I wanted to cry beneath the classroom portrait of Kim Il-sung, begging him for his forgiveness.

Chapter Seven

During the summer
holidays between my first and second year of school, which stretched across the eighth month, my mother decided to take my sister, my brother and me to her parents' house in Hoeryong. Umma was pregnant again, the baby set to come near the end of the twelfth month. Unlike in her other pregnancies, Umma was tired all the time and could keep little food down. She vomited after nearly every meal. The only thing that agreed with her was corn rice, and only if she ate it right before bed.

Whenever my siblings and I had a fever or a winter cough that stayed in our chests for weeks, my mother would worry that she had caused it. She had not been given the seaweed soup or white rice after our births that would make her breast milk full of nutrients and vitamins. “Your father and I couldn't afford these things from the black market,” she told us. Because she believed her own milk was deficient, she had weaned us early, feeding us goat's milk instead. None of us were truly healthy, and my mother said we hadn't had the right start in life. Anything bad that befell us was because of her, she believed. She was not a good mother.

That summer, my mother was worried that the child inside her would not live. That was the reason we were going to her umma and abuji's farm, she told us. They had so much food, and my mother would have help with us so that she could rest.

The last time
we had visited Hoeryong was in the first month of that year. My abuji had come too, for a few days' holiday. It had been very cold and we needed to bundle up. All that showed above my scarf were my tiny black eyes when my father, my sister and I tried tobogganing. We abandoned our outdoor fun to head inside, but it was not much warmer there, even by the stove. My grandfather pulled the squashes he had harvested in the fall out of storage. My sister and I cut them open and then into slices, which my halmuni baked. Once we had eaten the flesh of the squash and the seeds and had licked our fingers clean, we all felt warm inside. That night, the full moon had shone across the virgin snow, causing the shadows to dance.

From our earlier visits, I knew that in springtime Hoeryong was covered in white apricot blossoms. The air would be full with their powdery scent, and their fuzz floating in the air. To me, Hoeryong was a city of lights, with crimson-lipstick smiles on women with perfect teeth and men with rosy cheeks who bowed ever so slightly when they passed my parents on the street.

“This is the hometown of the tireless eternal fighter and revolutionary comrade, the wife of Kim Il-sung,” a female voice announced as we disembarked at the main station. “Welcome to Hoeryong.”

I was tired, since we had left home in the middle of the night. I could barely move my legs, let alone carry my bottari, which contained a few changes of underwear and some rice. We could not afford to hire a car, so we walked to my grandparents' farm. The cement houses in the main city and the sandy-dirt road were a blur. My legs dragged, my head slipping to one side as my eyes closed.

But as soon as the road widened and I saw the swallows dipping in and out under the apricot trees, I woke up. I knew we were close to our destination.

My maternal grandfather had retired from his job at a factory, where he had worked with amputees from the war. Now he was a watch guard for a farm run by many families, and he brought home lots of food. My grandmother also maintained a farm, on which she grew scallions, chili peppers for kimchi, eggplant and cucumber. As we walked past the apricot trees, planted so evenly they looked like schoolchildren lining up for an assembly, my mouth watered. We often starved at home, our rations failing to last. But not at my grandparents' house, whether in winter or summer. There we feasted.

I also felt
wanted at my mother's parents' house. From the time I was a tiny child, just learning to walk, I would hide in one of the cupboards as soon as I arrived. Everyone, including my aunts and uncles, would drop what they were doing to look for me.

“Where am I?” I would call out to my halmuni when I spied her through the crack in the door.

Borimahnti
means pig, or a gluttonous girl. “Where is that borimahnti?” my umma's sister Hyegyung would call, clapping her hands to her face and squealing as she opened the cupboard door and looked into my eyes. She would always pretend she had not seen me and shut the door.

“Oh, borimahnti,” she would call out. “Oh, borimahnti, where are you?”

When I finally emerged on my own, my mother's family feigning that they had given up the search, my aunt would ruffle my hair and smile while my halmuni pretended to chide me. “You had us so scared, so very scared that we would never be able to find you,” she would say.

That afternoon, my grandmother served a meal as soon as we reached the farm. I gobbled down my food so fast I had moved on to seconds while Halabuji and Halmuni were only halfway through eating.

After three bowls of rice, I ran outside to climb an apricot tree. When I had gone as high as I dared to go, I picked some fruit and sucked out the juice. Sunyoung moaned from below that she wanted to join me.

“Climb!” I called out. “Climb.”

“But I don't know how,” she cried. “Help me!”

“Put your feet in the ridges in the bark,” I called, juices from the fruit dripping down my chin. “Remember the tiger story? Your courage is your rope. Just open your eyes and climb.”

I continued eating as Sunyoung struggled up to join me. Every now and then she would cry out in terror or pant from her efforts. When she was nestled beside me, sucking on apricots, I softened. “I like it here best,” I confided.

“Me too, big sister,” she said.

“I wish we lived here.”

When we returned to the house, my mother and my halmuni were seated cross-legged on the floor, reading books they had bound themselves with thick tape, using serial stories from the
Hahmbook Ilbo
newspaper of Kim Il-sung's life.

“What does it say?” I asked my grandmother, stretching out beside her on my stomach. I felt full for the first time in a long time.

“This one is called the
Outskirts of Baekdu Mountain
,” my halmuni answered. “Our great father and eternal president Kim Il-sung is said to have been born there. The main characters are Jang Chuljoo and Myung Hyuk, a man and his wife, and their small child.”

My mother picked up the tale. “There are actually four people in the story, and they all make military uniforms,” she continued. “Everyone is starving from the Japanese occupation, digging up whatever herbs and roots they can find to eat.”

“The book is set in the 1930s, Sunhwa-ya,” my halmuni said. “Very old. Very old. Long before you were born. Long before . . . ” Her voice and her eyes drifted, and her hands started to tremble. My mother had told me after our last visit that my grandmother had the shaking disease that affected so many old people.

“But despite their hunger, the couple dedicate their lives to the dream of liberation from the Japanese,” my mother concluded, taking over for her mother. “They are an example of how we are all supposed to live.”

The next morning,
after bowls of white rice, I felt so happy to be in the countryside, eating whatever I wanted, that I started to sing.

“In order for flower buds to blossom, he gives, he gives, he gives us this warm sunshine. Thank you, eternal father. Thank you.”

“What song is that?” Sunyoung asked as we walked with our grandfather and Umma on the paths between the fields.

“It's the song from school,” my mother hummed, her eyes shining. She began to sing along with me in her lovely strong voice.

“Maybe you're a singer, too!” my halabuji said to me when we were done.

“No,” my mother said sharply, her smile gone.

“But Sunhwa-ya sings like you. Maybe you can tell her teacher, and she can be placed on the singing team.”

“No,” my mother said sternly. “She can never sing at home, never.”

“I'll sing you a song, then.” My grandfather leaned over and winked, distracting me from my mother's sudden change of mood.
“Gold child
 . . . 
once the gold child was riding a horse on the way to the market. He fell off and into a stream.”
He repeated the same two lines over and over.

I giggled. “What a silly song. Where did you learn it?”

“Don't ask such things,” my mother hissed.

“Ah, Sunhwa-ya,” my grandfather whispered, “it's a song from before the revolution.”

“Oh,” I replied, eager to learn more.

He laughed, a deep guttural sound. “The first song I learned after liberation was about Kim Il-sung and the south mountain. It is more like a ballad.
“The green pine trees in the South Mountain are persecuted through the bitter winter; mired under the snow and frost. The balmy and warm spring will come back, and we'll come back to life. Do you know that it will come back to life when the warm spring comes back, do you know my people? Do you know my people? Even though we have been through so much, in springtime it will come back to life.”

While he sang, my grandfather's hands and arms swooped through the air. When he was through, he pointed at my mother but looked at me. “This song is better for you!”

“Yes,” my mother agreed stiffly.

“It was a song composed by our great father and eternal president's father, Kim Hyong-jik,” my grandfather said to me. “It means that the Korean people who were persecuted under the Japanese occupation are to have hope. They will have spring again.”

One morning when
Sunyoung and Hyungchul were so lazy their eyelids dropped and thunder clapped outside, eventually sending down a rain so heavy it created deep ruts in the muddy earth, I decided to explore the many cupboards my grandfather had built into his home.

I opened one small closet, coughing on the particles of dust and rubbing my stinging eyes. When my eyes cleared again, I was looking at shelves piled high with cameras, lenses and containers with words on them I could not read.

“Ehem!” I jumped and turned quickly to face my grandfather, who was standing at the closet door.

“I'm so sorry,” I said, bowing, then trying to skirt past him.

“Sunhwa-ya, it is fine. I am glad you discovered my little secret. Come, let me show you.” He turned on an overhead light that shone red and then shut the door.

“I used to be a photographer. A war photographer,” he said, picking up a camera and letting me look through a tiny hole. I could see my grandfather's nostrils at the other end.

“Once, when I was in the middle of a field with people dying around me, I couldn't take the suffering anymore. I walked to a river. There was an apple vendor—his body had been ripped to pieces by bullets,” Halabuji continued. “I closed my eyes and aimed my camera, shooting, shooting, shooting. I turned my lens on the river. There were apples floating, bobbing in and out of the corpses. We were all so hungry,” he said, wiping his eyes. “I started picking up the apples to take home to your halmuni and umma. I was wrong to do this. I lost my senses. I cared not for the dead but just for the living.”

I didn't know what to say, so I looked down at my slippers.

“Hoeryong was bombed during the war. We endured endless air raids that shook the beams of our houses and left sick and dying people littering the streets. Your grandmother, who loved to sing and dance, fell quiet. She would sit in the corner like a child, holding a pillow and rocking herself back and forth.

“One bomb landed right next door, destroying our neighbour's house. We ran in every direction. Your grandmother had gone to grab her youngest child, who was just a baby. But once we had made it to the hills and were reunited, your halmuni opened her arms, and in them, she was carrying only a pillow.”

I gasped. “What happened, Halabuji?”

“She had left the baby in the house, and we couldn't return for a full day due to the fighting. The South Koreans and the Americans were everywhere, dropping bombs and killing people.”

“What happened?” I whispered, grabbing my grandfather's pant leg and tugging on it.

“When we returned, the city was black from the smoke of the fires, even though it was mid-morning. The house beside our own was nothing more than ash.”

“No,” I gasped, pinching my eyes shut. “The baby was killed!”

“Halmuni has never been normal since,” my grandfather said, his own face wet with tears. “That look she gets in her eyes, you know, where she drifts off and her body begins to shake, and then her eyes become frantic.”

I nodded.

“Well, that look and the pacing she does, that is what she did when she saw the burned house. But Sunhwa-ya, the baby didn't die.”

“How?” I exclaimed.

“I don't know. I saw a tiny sparrow land on the roof of our house just as I pushed open the door, which had been blown off its hinges. And inside was your aunt Hyegyung, sucking her knuckle, lying in her own filthy diaper. But she lived.” My grandfather wiped his face with his hands. “You can look in this room whenever you like, but never touch the chemicals up there,” he said, pointing to the containers on the shelves. “Those are for developing photos, and they are poison.”

On one of
the last days of our holiday that summer, I decided to trick my halmuni. She was in a particularly good mood, humming the revolutionary songs I had been teaching Sunyoung while she made us porridge, then hanging the duvets over the clothesline to air.

I snuck into my grandfather's special closet as I saw Halmuni about to sit down and read one of her serial books. I grabbed one of the containers I was forbidden to touch and walked towards my grandmother.

“I'm going to eat this for lunch!” I said to her.