Under the Same Sky (12 page)

One day my father came home from work looking excited. “We should go to the river,” he said. “My colleague told me there are small snails there that you can boil and eat. The river is full of them!”

We’d never considered snails as food before. But the thought of having meat, which we hadn’t seen in months, was too tempting to resist. We all began dreaming of this exotic new food, how it might taste—like miniature shrimp, firm-fleshed and delicious, or like ocean fish, briny and bracing?

That weekend, my father and I walked to the river carrying empty buckets. I hadn’t thought of what he meant when he said “the river.” It was the same place my friends and I went swimming. It was summertime, and they were sure to be at our favorite spot. I hoped they wouldn’t see me. That would be embarrassing.

I needn’t have worried. My father led me to another section of the river that was shallower than our swimming hole. And we found that his colleague had been speaking the truth. There were snails everywhere, clinging to the rocks and small boulders that lined the bottom of the river. We began to gather them. I felt along the mossy rocks until I found a shell under my fingertip. I plucked it off and tossed it in the bucket. Soon the dark gray things were making that rich clicking sound of shell on shell. I thought of the feast that awaited us.

At about four o’clock, we headed home with our haul. My mother met us at the door and took the bucket. While my father and I washed up, she rinsed off the snails and poured them into a pot of water already near boiling on the fire. She stoked the flames underneath, and soon the snails appeared at the little cave of their shells, trying to escape the heat. I looked at my father. He nodded, so I picked up a shell. It was so small. Holding it between my index finger and thumb, I sucked the snail out of its home.

“Father!” I cried. “It tastes awful!” And it did—slimy and eel-like.

My father looked at me sternly.

“Eat it anyway.”

I closed my eyes and swallowed miserably. “Do we have salt at least?”

My mother shook her head. Salt was a luxury far above our station. The disappointment of the snails soon gave way to simple ravenousness and we ate the meat. I thought,
No wonder my father’s friend told us about these things. They’re disgusting.
But I ate them until I thought I would throw up.

Dogs began to disappear from the streets. Before the famine, you would see them on leashes outside the homes in Hoeryong, with their own tiny houses by the front door. They ate scraps and guarded the property. Really, their lives were pretty bad. But when the famine came, you never saw dogs walking the streets anymore.

Rats were next. Before we got hungry, perhaps one in a hundred families had ever tasted rat. I remember one girl, Oon Hwa, whose father used to trap rats in the market and take them home for dinner. We would laugh at her, saying, “Her father eats rats! She probably does too!” But now the rodents became sought after, though my friends never admitted they’d tasted rat meat.

By the spring of 2001, it seemed that even the lowliest sources of food were drying up, leaving nothing remaining. My father left his job, which meant we had no more government farm to supply our food. My parents argued often now, and my father would sometimes kick my mom out of the house, usually after she admitted she’d lost the latest loan he’d arranged for her. One day, after I hadn’t seen her for a week, I was walking to school when I saw my mother by the side of the road. She motioned me over, her face strained and her eyes filled with sadness. “Kwang Jin,” she said, “take these.” She had somehow found enough money for a new pair of shoes, which she stuffed in my school bag, and ten candies. I gobbled up two of them and put the rest in my pocket. My mother embraced me and I walked away, leaving her crying by the roadside.

My heart was torn with childish grief in those days. I didn’t understand why my mother couldn’t live with us.

Mothers and sons have a powerful bond in Korean culture. My father used to tell me this fable: In famine times hundreds of years ago, there was a son who could no longer afford to feed his mother, so he put her on his back and made his way to a mountain, where he planned to abandon her to die. She knew what he was doing but said nothing until they got close to the mountain, when she finally spoke: “Son,” she said calmly, “I have been snapping branches from the trees and dropping them behind us. After you leave me, follow them home and you won’t get lost.”

Finally, that spring, my mother left Hoeryong for the house of one of her friends in the north. I think she was glad to get away from my father and the constant tension.

I wonder now what my parents’ marriage would have been like without the famine, without the stress of having nothing to feed their children. Would they have made it? Would they have been happy? Were the cracks that split them apart geographical ones—the result of living in North Korea? Or were they fault lines that lay deep inside their love affair all along?

When summer came, the three of us remaining in Manyang hoped that the harvests would bring us relief. But instead the famine grew more intense. With no job, my father had no money to buy food. His concern deepened. Would we survive until the fall harvest from our little farm? Alone, without my mother, the responsibility for saving us weighed on him even more.

Bong Sook and I spent our days in the mountains, leaving home in the predawn darkness. Alongside us on the road, barely seen, were other figures with bags hanging from their hands. They were villagers headed to the same hills, hoping to forage their evening meal. To make the journey easier, Bong Sook would tell me stories or we’d talk about the good days when we could buy snacks anytime we felt like it, about the Sundays when the TV channel started broadcasting at 9 a.m. and we’d stay home all day eating corn cakes and watching movies. It made us feel happier for a moment or two.

We worked all morning, then took a break around noon and munched on anything we brought with us—root vegetables or leftovers from the night before, if there were any. Any edible weeds we found we put in a plastic bag. We usually managed to fill the bag after a ten-hour day. It would be near midnight before we headed home to collapse on our sleeping mats.

One day, as we were walking to the mountains just after dawn, we saw a peasant woman walking ahead of us, an infant tied to her back. (This way, the woman would be able to pick weeds without putting the child down on the ground.) I noticed something in the toddler’s hands: corn chips.
Where on earth did she get them?
I wondered. Instantly I felt a wild desire to steal the treats out of the baby’s hands and devour them.

Hunger is humiliation. But hunger is also evil.

Finally, after a few months, the mountains had nothing left to give. When we told my father, he nodded slowly. He looked like he was aging: his face was lined, his back no longer as straight as it had once been. His skin was yellow from the cirrhosis and his belly had swollen like a pregnant woman’s.

There was nothing left to do, nothing left to sell. The heat pressed through the ceiling and there seemed to be no oxygen in the house.

I spent the days in and out of a delirium I didn’t want to wake from. The weaker we grew, the less terrifying death seemed.

Chapter

A
S OUR FAMILY
sank further and further, old people from the neighborhood stopped me on the street and told me: “You have a wonderful sister. You should be thankful for her!” I must have toughened up by this point, because I remember the old people waiting for me to heartily agree, but I just stared at them, a frown slashed across my face.
Why don’t they mind their own business?
What concern is it of theirs if my sister is good or not? Aren’t we almost starving, Bong Sook or no Bong Sook?
Perhaps I was feeling a bit guilty about all she was doing for us, and about my tiny contribution to the household.

I couldn’t trap animals. I was useless at business. My brain produced no ideas for new sources of food. It was mostly dormant, shuttered for lack of nutrients. I was just a stomach.

The reason the old people were so impressed with Bong Sook was that she had come up with a way to save us. She took up where my mother left off, buying and selling noodles to help us survive. And at least in the beginning, she proved a much better businesswoman than my mom. The old people were always running into her on the streets as she bicycled this way and that in pursuit of food to feed our family.

Every night, Bong Sook would take my father’s old bicycle and head off to the local market to get corn. She bought twenty pounds and took it to a nearby factory, where she laboriously ground the kernels into flour to make noodles. Part of that process involved adding water, so her twenty pounds of corn resulted in twenty-five pounds of noodles, which she stuffed into plastic bags to keep them moist. The next morning, she got up, dressed, washed her face, and loaded the noodles onto the rickety black bike parked outside. She pedaled for about two hours, until she was in the farthest depths of rural North Korea. Then she would knock on farmhouse doors, asking, “Any corn noodles for you today?”

The country people had less access to fresh noodles and would pay her a few
won
for a handful. Sometimes the farmers had no cash and would pay her in corn instead. She would give them a pound of noodles, and they’d give her a pound and three ounces of loose corn.

Her profit was minuscule. And the whole enterprise, as my mother had learned to her chagrin, was risky. If you didn’t sell the noodles the first day, they began to lose moisture, which meant she had to give the buyers more noodles in each pound. The longer the noodles remained unsold, the drier they got, and the slimmer Bong Sook’s profit.

The trip out to the rural districts had its dangers, too. Noodle girls were often accosted. I remember one girl was hit on the head with a rock and woke up to find her noodles gone. Another was raped near Hoeryong, and I’d heard stories of girls being beaten when they refused to hand over their goods. There were few police far out in the country, and discharged soldiers, dressed in their old uniforms, unable to find work, had turned to robbery. How could girls like my sister hope to defend themselves in those distant places where no one even knew their names?

That winter, I woke one morning and saw Bong Sook’s big brown eyes staring at me in the gray gloom. The wind howled outside. Sometimes it sounded extra-cold; it seemed as though its edges were sawing away at the door, trying to get in. I put my cheek down on the mat and felt the heat flow through my face.

“Kwang Jin?” she said.

“Yes?”

“I will go in ten more minutes.”

I nodded and we stared at each other, saying nothing. It was enough to be warm and with Bong Sook and not to be going to school. I thought of the long day ahead, spent inside, doing nothing. I didn’t have the strength to go out and play.

“I wish I didn’t have to go,” Bong Sook said.

I stared at her silently. It was so unusual for her to say such a thing, to admit that her life was hard. I was stumped for a response.
Don’t go,
I wanted to say.
Stay here with me and we’ll talk about old times.
But if she didn’t go, we would end up eating the noodles, and Bong Sook would have nothing to sell.

The ten minutes was up. Her eyes were sad. I knew that as we spoke, the noodles were beginning to dry out.

“Five more minutes,” she said.

“Five more minutes,” I repeated. I didn’t know how to comfort my sister. I wasn’t good at such things. I kept wishing I had a secret cache of money that I could use to buy a month’s worth of corn—I imagined being a rich trader with thousands of
won
in his pocket. More and more, my daydreams of being a spy or a heroic soldier were giving way to ones where I surprised my family with truckloads of food. That way, I could keep Bong Sook with me and retrieve my mother from her journeys.

Five minutes later, Bong Sook lifted herself off the floor, wincing at the joint pain that seemed always to go with long bouts of hunger, and got dressed. Soon she was gone, and from my mat I could hear the sound of the old bike clattering down the road. I pictured her pedaling along the roads, the baskets of noodles bouncing on either side of the back wheel. I hoped she would come home soon with a pouch full of corn.

Chapter

M
Y FATHER KEPT
telling us his wonderful stories, even in the darkest days of the famine. Kim Il Sung and his battles against the Japanese. My father’s adventures as a soldier in training. But in the late spring of 2001, the subject of his stories began to change. The adventures of Kim Il Sung disappeared, never to return. Now my father would take me aside at night, even when the electricity was still on, and tell me about the rituals of North Korean funerals.

Mourning in North Korea is complicated, and everyone must play his part precisely in order for the dead person to be sent on to the next world without losing honor. The oldest son is very important in all of this. He is the
sangju,
what you might call in the West the master of ceremonies. The
sangju
must take the lead in all of the rituals, or the spirit of the dead parent will feel alone at the moment he or she is leaving for the afterlife.

My father stressed each step in the grieving process, repeating himself on successive nights. “First, the body is laid out in a straight line,” he would say. “You must cover it in a white sheet. If you can find something to screen the body from people entering the house, that is good.” In front of this screen the
sangju
stands with a photograph of the dead person as incense burns on a table next to him. In the old days, he would dress in the traditional Korean costume, with each region having its own style—in Andong, for example, a long, belted coat made of the finest hemp, called a
top’o
—but such things were impossible to obtain in 2001. Any black coat would do, along with a black ribbon or armband. The
sangju
isn’t allowed to leave the side of his loved one except to use the bathroom. He is the dead person’s guard; he cannot depart. It is a special feature of Korean culture that the
sangju
is there not only to protect the dead person, but also to atone for letting his parent die.