Under the Same Sky (17 page)

But it wasn’t to be. After a few months, my aunt came to me and asked if I could contribute the coal to the family’s budget. My dream was crushed. The money she would make would be insignificant, yet she wanted it anyway. I had to press the bitterness down into my heart and say nothing, but for days I was upset and close to tears.

The miners, most of them, were kind to me. They knew there was nowhere beneath this place, nowhere else to fall to. After a few weeks of my pitiful hauls, they found me an easier job. I was shown how to work the oxygen pump, which was a converted bicycle wheel attached to a pipe that carried air down to the men in the tunnels. I spun and spun the wheel for hours, until I could no longer feel my right arm. All sensation ended at the shoulder. At around two o’clock on my first day at the wheel, I unconsciously slowed the spinning. It felt like I was on the edge of blacking out.

Suddenly the metal pipe attached to the contraption began to chatter. The miners down in the shaft were shaking it to let me know that I wasn’t pumping enough air. If I didn’t wake up and spin the wheel faster, they would die. I fought off the blackness in my mind and picked up my pace. As the sun began to sink in the west, the bucket rose from the shaft and the miners gathered around. I could see they were angry, but when they saw me—God knows what I looked like by the end of the day—their eyes softened. “Try to pump a little harder tomorrow,” my uncle said. I nodded yes.

What I remember most about those days were the candles. Every morning, we would light one and drip some wax onto the bottom of an iron bucket and set the candle there, so it wouldn’t tip over. Then the miners tied the bucket handle to an old rope and lowered the bucket into the mine. Bit by bit the flame grew smaller in the blackness. If there was no oxygen, then there was no work. If there was no work, the miners’ families would go hungry. Many of the men had children at home who were so malnourished that a few days without food would kill them.

When the candle remained lit, the miners would gather their tools and descend. Other times, though, the flame would flicker and disappear, and we knew that no one could survive down there, even with me pumping what little oxygen I could through the pipe. A feeling of desolation would go through us, and we’d pull the bucket up in silence. No one spoke. Being a young boy, I was fascinated to discover that fire needed oxygen to burn, but the others were thinking only of their loved ones.

That image comes back to me when I try to explain my homeland to people who’ve never been there. The basic ingredients of life had disappeared. My schoolmates, my beloved television, my house and family, all had vanished like the candle flame, swallowed up by darkness. If we’d been capable of it, the miners and I would have laughed at the thought that even the oxygen had disappeared from North Korea. What was next, water? Sunshine?

I’d witnessed this kind of thing once before, on the train to my uncle’s town with my father and Bong Sook at the start of the famine. One morning on that endless journey, I was half awake and daydreaming when I saw a North Korean soldier stirring from sleep. He cried out. During the night, someone had stolen his jacket. A few of us passengers watched him closely as he looked around wildly for the missing uniform. But it was gone.

In normal times, stealing a soldier’s jacket would have been not only illegal but unthinkable. Your brain wouldn’t even form the thought,
Boy, that army jacket looks good.
What if I
. . . As we watched the soldier, we worried about what he might do—perhaps he’d call the police and accuse us of stealing. Perhaps he’d beat us and leave us by the tracks to become food for wild dogs. Passengers began to edge away from the man.

But instead of anger, a look of what I can only describe as hilarity appeared on the soldier’s young face. He began to laugh, a total-body laugh. More people woke up and stared at him. We didn’t know what to make of his reaction, and the strangeness of it has stayed with me over the years.

It was only when I was working in the mines that I realized what the soldier was feeling at that moment. The reality he’d known since he was a baby had disappeared. Food was gone. Authority, too. Many hundreds of people were piled onto a train to nowhere. And people were stealing the uniforms off the backs of the Korean People’s Army. His laughter seemed to say:
No, this can’t be real.
I refuse to believe it!
What mad world is this I’ve found myself in?

This is what people don’t understand about North Korea in those days. We didn’t “give up” hope or “lose” it. We grasped it tightly with every bit of strength we had. What was missing were the few molecules of air that hope nourished itself on. Those were sucked away by the strange place we happened to inhabit, by the unseen powers we never met or spoke to. The candle went out and blackness flooded in.

Under those conditions, hope was a superhuman effort. I began to have more sympathy for my father, who had been broken by this country. I know now I was too hard on him. How can you be expected to breathe when there’s no air?

After my mother and I had lived with my aunt for some months, she asked us to leave her house. So another connection to our family was cut. As we gathered our things, my mother again talked about going to China to make money.

I could see that I was soon to be alone.

Chapter

B
Y THE SPRING
of 2003, we were back in Hoeryong. My mother went to stay with a friend as she prepared for another trip to China. It was best we separated. She couldn’t care for me, so she told me to find my way to Small Grandfather’s house.

I still couldn’t comprehend that Bong Sook was gone and that her fate was so dark. I clung to the hope that she was married to a kind person who was treating her well. Many nights, I’d have imaginary conversations with this Chinese man.
Please take care of Bong Sook. She deserves so much better than what she got in life.
The old people in Manyang were right: Bong Sook wasn’t an ordinary sister. I realized that only when I had lost her.

As I wandered Hoeryong those first few hours after we returned, what I thought about the most was the last time I saw my sister, that lackluster “Bye” that I gave Bong Sook when she must have known the truth. Why didn’t she rush to me and give me a hug? Why didn’t I embrace her?

I had no idea our goodbye was for the last time. It’s haunted me ever since.

Someday, Bong Sook,
I said to myself,
I will find you.

I wasn’t prepared for life on the street. We had arrived in Hoeryong without extra clothing or money. I was dressed in the black coat I’d asked my mother for the year before, the one inspired by my crush on Hyang Mi.

I no longer had the figurine Hyang Mi had given me. I no longer had anything from that life. All I’d managed to save was the coat, and it was so torn and stained it was hardly fashionable anymore. But I was thirteen and there was something exciting about being on my own. I was free for the first time in my life.

I walked three or four miles in and around Hoeryong looking for something to eat, but found nothing. I had no idea where to look for food or how to go about asking for it.

That night I walked toward Small Grandfather’s house. Just beyond its walls was a cornfield where I’d often listened to the stalks waving in the wind, making that dry rustling sound that corn makes. I had the strangest feeling passing by the path that led to the front door of his house. My mind made a right turn at the gate and walked up the path as I had done so many times before, even as my body walked on toward the rows of green corn. My mind slipped through the front door and made its way to the right where my room was. It drank in the warmth of the room wafting up from the floorboards. It prepared for sleep.

But I didn’t knock on Small Grandfather’s door—I was afraid to. Soon I was in the field next to his house, hidden deep in the cornrows, looking for a place to bed down for the night.

The stars were out by the time I found the right spot. It was in one of the furrows of dry dirt that were angled up on each side, leaving a narrow valley in the middle, perfectly sized for my thin shoulders. I lay down and looked up at the sky through the husks just beginning to sprout the light brown tassels that show the corn is getting ripe. The plants moved above me as gusts of warm wind came sweeping down the rows. I was snug against the warm earth.

Small Grandfather’s house was five hundred feet away. I imagined him and his wife settling down for the night, talking in low voices. Were they wondering where I was? Did they know I was back in the city? Did they worry I’d had nothing to eat that night, or had thoughts of me passed from their minds months ago? Small Grandfather had probably erased me from his memory the moment I’d left his home. He wasn’t one for remorse.

But I wasn’t unhappy. I thought,
This is better than my old sleeping mat!
I could see the beautiful stars, the universal consolation for North Koreans who had no roof over their heads. I was pleasantly tired and soon fell asleep, my furrow of earth holding me in its snug embrace.

The first enemy of someone sleeping rough comes at about one in the morning. You feel a chill. You’re aware in your dreams that something is stealing over you. Your skin becomes aware, even if your mind is still asleep. Then the cold dew wakes you up. From being warm and dry, you’re now miserable. I opened my eyes at about two. The rows of corn were black now, with just the fringes edged with moonlight. My good mood had disappeared. This was my first true moment of being homeless.

I tossed and turned, trying to fall back to sleep, but the dew had mixed with the dirt and turned its topmost layer muddy, and my clothes were getting dirty and matted. Eventually I stood up, my sleep over for the night. My skin was covered with a thin film of soil. I was famished. At three or four in the morning, I started walking to the Hoeryong city market.

When I got there half an hour later, the lane where the sellers stood in their little stalls was deserted. A sense of loneliness came over me. It felt as if I was the only one awake in Hoeryong and no one knew or cared that I was hungry.

When the sun rose over the hills people began to stream in, sellers who set up their humble stands or stood by the side of the road holding their products: combs, sunglasses, clocks, onions, cucumbers, cornmeal. The soup makers came with their pots filled near to the brim and placed them carefully on the ground.
Kkotjebi
arrived, tiny black-faced figures in oily, ragged clothing, begging for a bit of food or watching for their moment to steal. Nobody gave me so much as a second glance.

I hung around the market that day from dawn until dusk, unable to speak. Other homeless children came and stood beside me. It was a hot day. We smelled like rotten fruit.

Some of the homeless kids cried out to the customers, “Can I have the last of your soup?” In North Korea, you didn’t beg for a full meal. You asked for the leavings of a bowl of soup, one swallow of cloudy water at the bottom of the wooden cup. A few of the
Kkotjebi
found people willing to give them the dregs from their bowls. Not much, only a few calories to last an hour or two. The rest of us watched them drink, our Adam’s apples bobbing as they swallowed, as if we were eating too. But I said nothing, rooted to the ground in a peculiar fear, feeling my hunger pangs grow sharper.

If I asked for soup, I thought, my condition would somehow become permanent. I feared the words would act as a spell, turning me from a normal boy into a
Kkotjebi.
Unlike some of the other children here, who’d been abandoned when they were four or five, I had been cherished by my parents until I was a teenager. I had plenty of happy memories, and this gave me hope.

But it also made it harder to believe I was truly homeless. And so I was silent.
If you keep this up,
I told myself,
you surely will starve.

That evening, when the sellers had all gone, I went to a friend’s house. He let me sleep there for one night. I didn’t even ask about staying longer—more than that, I knew, and you became a burden. Before the famine, if you arrived at a friend’s place at lunchtime, your hosts always invited you to eat. But now it was considered rude to show up unannounced. You were asking to be fed. That you could not do.

The second day, I was back at the market, but still unable to force any words past my lips.

I slept in the cornfield and returned to the market on the third day, telling myself,
Say something. Ask for the soup and maybe you’ll eat.
But still my mouth stayed shut. I felt embarrassed by what I’d become. Layers of dirt and coal soot coated my face, giving it a shiny patina that made me look like a scary doll. My filthy toes, crusted with mud from the road, stuck out through the holes in my shoes, which had begun to decompose in the rain and slop. My eyes appeared bigger because hunger had stretched the skin around them, and lice had made a home in my ragged, foul-smelling clothes.

I hadn’t bathed in a week or two. My last bite of food had been three days before. Yet I still thought like a teenager from a fairly well-off home who went to school and had crushes on girls. Like a boy who had a father to protect him and a sister who gave him her rice and claimed to be full. But I wasn’t that boy any longer. I had to accept it.

As the afternoon of the third day wore on and the customers began to grow scarce, the hunger pains were like knives scraping down my rib cage from top to bottom. I walked to the far end of the market, away from the path that my classmates would take home from our school. I feared seeing someone I knew. That first look of recognition when they spotted me among the
Kkotjebi.
The beautiful Hyang Mi staring at me with a look that said,
You are not human anymore, and I am sorry for you.

Around me, the other
Kkotjebi
called out, “Can I have the last of your soup?”

The merchants who were selling soup and corn noodles and rice looked at me angrily as I stood, swaying slightly, at the side of the road, trying not to pitch forward into the mud. They knew that just the sight of me, let alone the smell, robbed their potential customers of their appetite. They used the same bowl for all their customers, and if one of them saw it being touched by a
Kkotjebi,
they might turn away and go to the next vendor.