Under the Same Sky (10 page)

My first concern, of course, was finding a new best friend. There I got lucky. Kim Il lived maybe two minutes away; I had to wait until school started in the fall to meet him, but it was worth it. Kim Il was eight years old, like me, and we quickly became inseparable. I liked him through and through. His family was unusual. His mother was so tall and white-skinned that we called her “the Russian,” and his father owned a motorcycle, which was a very exotic thing to have. His family was probably one of the richest in Manyang.

Kim Il was tall and strong. He was the number-two fighter in my school. At the beginning, I was the lowest, number forty out of forty kids. My accent, my clothes, and even my haircut marked me as a kid from the sticks, and I was called “country boy.” I think I had my first fight on my first day of school.

But I was lucky, too: Kim Il’s mother ran a popular restaurant with the most delicious Korean barbecue for a hundred miles. Whenever Kim Il and I got hungry, we’d head there. His mom would see me and smile and instantly prepare my favorite dish, white rice with pork side dishes and white rice. Kim Il’s parents had only one child, and they treated me as their second son. In North Korea, sharing food means more than it does in the West, especially in those hard times. It means, You are one of us. I was very touched by this.

Kim Il and I spent whole days together, exploring and talking and doing dares. By that time, we were tired of playing spies. Spies weren’t fun anymore; we were too old for that and wanted to do something involving real danger. So we played a game,
yeon chee gee,
using some sort of mystery metal that we found lying around our houses that we could form into different shapes, like stars or animals. We’d put our metal fish or wolf in the middle of the main road. We’d do a quick round of rock-paper-scissors, and the loser had to dash into the street and grab the fish, dodging the speeding cars going by.

I was becoming stronger and more daring. I don’t know if this was inside me all along or if I just wanted to survive.

It’s hard to overestimate how much movies sustained North Korea during these hard times. They were all we had to look forward to. North Koreans are addicted to motion pictures; even Americans can’t compete with our unslakable thirst for them. Even the most remote towns had a movie theater, and everyone knew someone with a TV. When feature film time, 8:45 p.m., rolled around, the streets would empty. All cooking, tinkering, idle conversation, hoeing of weeds, stopped. We watched the same movies over and over again. Later, we would listen to the neighborhood storytellers recount the plots, despite having seen the films with our own eyes.

Movies were our fantasy and our drug. I never really absorbed much government propaganda through the radio or from newspapers. The main indoctrination tools in Manyang were ten-foot concrete billboards with slogans carved into them. They were specifically designed for a country that often lost power. Even if the electricity went out and there was no radio or TV, the billboards would always be there to remind you to be grateful to the state. The mottos carved in the concrete were a way to tell what was happening in the capital.

One said, “I will protect my leader even if I have to sacrifice my life!” Another read, “In order to succeed, you must run ten times faster than the others.” This one dated from just after the Korean War, when the whole country had been devastated. The world didn’t believe that poor North Korea could catch up to the more advanced countries in Europe and elsewhere. This motto meant that if an American capitalist worked one hour, we would work ten. It was a way of saying that North Koreans can do anything.

I’d always liked that saying, but when the famine came I bitterly resented those billboards and public monuments. That’s because to build their statues, the government would ask starving families to donate copper or iron or cement. You had to sacrifice your pots and pans for the glory of Kim Jong Il, and if you didn’t have any, you had to spend precious time looking for scrap metal when you could be hunting frogs. You might even have to trade food or valuables so you would have something to give the government collectors when they came around. I often saw people scrounging in the garbage dumps on the outskirts of town, pawing through mounds of scrap paper and filth, trying to find a bit of metal to fill their quota. Meanwhile, their children were back home, half starved to death. When I saw these poor people, I would ball my fists in helpless fury.

But movies? I surrendered myself to them utterly.

Many of my favorite films were set during the Japanese occupation of Korea. They showed how some rich North Korean families treated their servants like dogs and even helped the Japanese when they oppressed Korea, while Kim Il Sung and the peasants fought to drive the foreigners from our country. The movies showed why our social system was correct: the rich had earned their terrible treatment by betraying the nation. The peasants had fought like crazy to give us our freedom. It made sense that they should now reap the rewards.

One animated film in particular stays in my mind. In it, a rich landowner suddenly has a hankering for strawberries. He asks his loyal servant to go to the mountains to pick him a few. It’s late winter and the servant knows there are no strawberries in the mountains, but he goes anyway, and spends all day climbing and looking for fruit to take back to his master. There isn’t a single plant to be found, however, and the servant returns at night with empty hands. His furious master then beats and whips him to death. The next day, the servant’s young daughter is sent to the mountains to find strawberries. And there, in the middle of winter, she does find a plant, with one ripe strawberry hanging off of it, so red against the bright white glare of the snow that it shines like a ruby. She brings the strawberry home to the man who killed her father.

This was a popular legend of North Korea, and it was supposed to teach us two things. First, that the desires of the rich are cruel and unrealistic, so unrealistic that they demand summer fruit in the middle of winter. Second, that a child’s devotion to her parent, if strong enough, can work miracles. The bond between North Korean parents and children, we believed, was stronger than in the corrupt West, where the young dumped their aging parents in old-age homes like so much rotted firewood.

Because of movies like those, I felt lucky to live in North Korea. More than that, I was ready to die for my country. Despite the struggles we faced, we were still better off than the feral people who lived in South Korea.

This patriotic faith was soon to be tested. Our new house didn’t bring good luck. The famine was unrelenting, and we soon had to do the same thing in Manyang that we’d done in July 8th. In 1998, we sold half our house. This time, since our home was much closer to the city center, we got enough food in payment to last a month. We moved our belongings into the remaining two rooms, and considered ourselves lucky.

We thought this was how the rest of our lives would be: living hand to mouth, only half nourished, often dizzy, too weak to really flourish. But we were alive.

My family had survived the first onslaught of the famine.

Chapter

T
HE YEAR
2000 turned out to be “the good year,” at least in comparison to what came before and after. More crops appeared in the market. Prices came down. My family gradually knit itself back together. The famine, at least for us, receded.

My father had found a new job, working as an accountant in a service company that fixed televisions and other consumer products. We bought things slowly: new clothes, pots and pans. I heard fewer stories about bodies appearing outside our neighbors’ doors in the morning, and the electrical outages didn’t happen as frequently. Most important from my point of view, we bought a television. This was one of the most joyful moments of my boyhood.

Every evening, some families from the neighborhood came to my house to watch TV. They’d start arriving at around 8:15, to get a good seat and gossip about what might happen on their favorite shows. By 8:45, when the popular dramas began—either a movie or a Chinese soap opera—some of my schoolmates had arrived. I was a bit of a tyrant: if a boy or girl wasn’t nice to me that day, I would say, “Yejoon, don’t come over to watch the movie tonight.” What a terrible penalty! They would pout and beg but I always remained firm. The next day, you can be sure, they were as sweet as could be.

My family now ate tofu and corn with a bit of white rice thrown in, as well as rabbit—rabbits were easy to raise and bred like crazy. My corn pancakes reappeared on our table. I was grateful; the first time my mother served them again, I swore I had never tasted anything so good.

Hunger no longer tormented my family, and so everything should have been good with us. We’d survived a disaster that had carried off hundreds of thousands of people and nearly destroyed the country. But life isn’t that way; when a problem disappears—even death!—a new one hurries to take its place. And soon one arrived in the house in Manyang: my grades.

In North Korea, grades range from 1 (failing horribly) to 5 (perfect). I routinely got 1’s and 2’s in school, except for phys ed, where I was always at the top of the class. I was just a terrible student. I can’t really explain my lack of motivation. During the past few years, academics had seemed pointless, but I don’t know how much of my awfulness at school had to do with the famine. A bit, certainly. The past few years had shortened my focus to the next twenty-four hours: what was I going to eat for my next meal?

I had also missed a lot of school during the famine years, pulled out of class to scavenge for food or to help plant an emergency garden. But I can’t blame all my 1’s and 2’s on hunger. It was more and more in my nature to be rebellious. The famine only accelerated this tendency.

Instead of school, I was concerned with other things: gaining respect by fighting stronger boys, for example, who picked on me for being a country bumpkin. I was often forced to defend myself more than once a day, scrapping in the dust of the schoolyard while my classmates—connoisseurs of the art—watched how I took a punch and what I gave back. Everyone at the school had been together since first grade except for me. I wanted to be accepted, to be popular. Good grades weren’t going to get me those things.

There was one boy in particular who tormented me that year. His name was Jung Choon Hyuk. He wasn’t much taller than me, but he was a dangerous, sneaky fighter. Choon Hyuk wasn’t very popular when I arrived; I think he saw his chance to rise in the rankings and to have some fun being mean to the country boy.
If I whip the new kid,
he must have thought,
maybe more people will like me.

And he did whip me. We fought twenty times that fall and winter, and he beat me every time. This was a terrible disappointment to me, but it was worse for my few friends, who cheered me on fervently, only to find me lying spread-eagled in the dust every time. They were nasty fights, with Choon Hyuk trying to scratch my eyes out and cutting my cheeks. I would rake his face with my fingers, too, and by the end we’d both be bloody and dirty. But no matter how hard I tried, and no matter the technical advice my friends gave me—
Hit him with your forearm, not your fist! Kick him in the privates!
—I never walked away the winner.

So I dreaded going to school. It was a bore, and Choon Hyuk was always lurking, hoping to rack up another win. I didn’t want to be there.

This broke my father’s heart. As a boy, he had survived an epidemic that nearly wiped out his family. He lost almost all his brothers and sisters. But instead of being defeated by this tragedy, he’d studied intensely and gradually worked his way out of rural poverty, rising to become a respectable man.

My father tried again and again to get me to read my textbooks, but I refused. As far as he was concerned, I was failing him. I was his only son. He wanted me to use his own life as a foundation for bigger things. He would say to me, “Oh, Kwang Jin, I can’t wait until the day you pull up in your big car and I come out the door and you give me a big bag of fish.” Only important, powerful people in North Korea had cars, and fish was a delicacy in the North, far beyond our means. This was how he saw me in twenty years: as an important man in the government, an army general, or a diplomat. I’m sure the famine had only intensified his desire for me to become a member of the elite, someone who need never fear starvation.

But as I saw it, my father had served the state for so many years—a Party member at twenty-four!—and what had it gotten him? A dead family, nearly. When the famine had come, the government had abandoned him, its most loyal servant.

I was failing him. But in 2000, I began succeeding on my own terms. I grew a few inches and put on ten or so pounds, and I could hit. I began training for my fights with Choon Hyuk, getting up early in the morning to run for miles while the sun was just breaking over the hilltops. I bribed an older boy named Lee Hyeon Chul to teach me martial arts. He was two or three years older than me, the smartest boy in his grade as well as the best fighter. I bribed him by fixing the ski poles we used to propel our sleds down the hillsides in deep winter. In return, Hyeon Chul showed me his martial arts moves (he was famous for throwing his opponents over his head during the initial tug-of-war that started every fight) and taught me how to kick my enemy even when I was lying on the ground. The two of us soon became friends, and a rumor went around our school that we were in fact cousins, a rumor I did nothing to discourage. This meant no one could intervene in my fights, because Hyeon Chul would beat them up.

But being a sidekick also meant new threats. One day my friends and I went swimming in a nearby river. Afterward, as we walked home along the packed-dirt road, laughing and daydreaming of our dinners, one of Hyeon Chul’s biggest enemies suddenly appeared, coming from the other direction. When he reached us, he picked me up as if I were a sack of rice and body-slammed me on the ground, then continued walking as if nothing had happened.