Under the Same Sky (2 page)

This was true of many people I met in those times. And it was true of me.

Chapter

A
S A VERY
young boy, I was quiet and introverted. It was hard for me to talk easily with people, and this made it difficult to make friends. But I found that I’d been given something that went some way toward balancing out my shyness: an ability to gauge other people’s emotions without the use of words. I think of this gift as a kind of chemical mood sensor inside me. It was as if people’s feelings left their bodies as invisible particles and sailed through the air between us, passing through the pores of my skin before being absorbed into the mood sensor, which identified them for me.

At that time, my family—my handsome, confident father, my sickly mother, my beloved older sister, Bong Sook, and I—were living in a small “pigeon coop” apartment in Hoeryong, a city known for its white apricots, its beautiful women, and for having the best pottery clay in North Korea. I still remember the emotions that flowed into me then from my parents and sister. Few words we spoke come back to me now, only shades of light and blackness, sadness and joy.

My mother emitted dark energy. In the middle of the day, I would find her motionless on her sleeping mat. She would stay there for hours, completely still. Why she was like this when my friends’ mothers were always bustling around, making tofu and sweet snacks, gossiping loudly in the stairwells or shooing us away from their doors, I didn’t know. She did tell me once that she’d come down with pellagra—a disease caused by a lack of vitamin B3—while pregnant with me. She’d also eaten a fish the week before my birth and gotten really ill. “The neighbors didn’t think I was going to live,” my mother said. I couldn’t understand what the pellagra or the fish had to do with her lying on the floor all these years later.

I absorbed her sadness into myself. When she was like this, I felt listless too. I would often lie down beside her and sink into a miserable slumber. In those rare moments when she laughed, I wanted to laugh with her.

The truth was, my mother was depressed about her life and her marriage, and this resulted in a sad and spiritless woman whose moods permeated our tiny pigeon coop. Her sickness, or her distress about her own life, also caused her to become a clean freak. “Kwang Jin,” she would call to me as soon as I walked in the apartment. (My name, Kwang Jin, means “moving forward with brightness.”) “Hurry up and wash your hands!”

Bong Sook, on the other hand, had the complete opposite effect on me. Seven years older than me, sweet and uncomplaining, she never failed to light up my mood sensor like sunshine. In those years, before I fell out of favor with my father, I was the prince of the family. The nice things Bong Sook did for me (and what
didn’t
she do for me?) I came to expect. Whenever I was hungry for more rice, she would take some of hers and put it on my plate, saying, “Look, Daddy, you gave me too much.” When she came home from school, she would be sure to bring me a little snack, ice cream or candy, from a shop along the road. When my socks needed washing, she would wash them. When I was bored, she’d sit me down and read from one of her textbooks.

Bong Sook didn’t get the same love I did as the baby boy. When my father swept through the house and picked one of us up to swing around and around, it was always me. When he chose one of us to drape across his feet while he lay on his back, allowing us to feel like we were flying, I was always the one. When the family bought a new bike, it was handed to me.

But Bong Sook never got jealous or spiteful. When my father went out of town on business, he would always return with gifts (a toy gun for me, a doll for my sister) and North Korean candy—boiled sucker balls, white with light brown stripes, sticky and delicious. If he pulled ten pieces out of his pocket, I would get five and Bong Sook the same. But she wouldn’t eat them. She would take one herself and hand me three, which I would gobble up in no time. The last piece she would hide away for a day when I was feeling sad. Then she would dangle it in front of my eyes and laugh before letting me tear off the wrapper and pop it in my mouth.

Bong Sook did this without the slightest resentment—or so I have long believed. But did she? Or did her heart flutter with secret jealousies? Did she long for my father to pick her up just once and swing her around the apartment, chortling with glee? I wish I could ask her now.

One of my first memories is of my sister’s school uniform: a white blouse, a scarlet-red scarf tied around her neck, and a royal-blue skirt. I was out playing with my friends near the stairs of the apartment building, and I recall the whirl of activity: cars passing and honking, pedestrians pushing along the sidewalk, my friends laughing and dodging among the people. And then, through this tan-gray blur, something, just an outline of a body, appeared at a distance. Somehow I knew it was my sister. I must have been three or four years old. Out of all the cold and unfamiliar things in the world that weren’t Bong Sook, Bong Sook had magically appeared. This filled me with happiness.

And my father? He provided light, kilowatts of pure energy. My father had risen far from his poor peasant boyhood, having been named the second-highest official in a district in Undok before becoming a successful accountant for a military school in Hoeryong. This had given him a shining confidence in all of life’s possibilities. At least for the first few years of my boyhood, he could send a surge of hope through me just by walking in the door.

Men like my father were, I think, especially vulnerable to the storms that awaited us. It’s impossible to confirm that such men died at higher rates than cynical or skeptical types—where in North Korea would one find such statistics?—but I believe they shared a dark fate. Their simple belief in life must have cost them dearly.

Chapter

B
Y THE EARLY
spring of 1994, when I was almost four years old, my parents wanted to leave the pigeon coop. We didn’t pay rent; we knew an old woman who had an extra room she let us stay in. But my parents felt threatened by the woman, who was always knocking on our door and asking my mother pointed questions. Mother wasn’t used to being harassed, and this upset her terribly. The old woman—she wanted, I think, to show my family who was boss—would even ask my father to bring her wood and coal and to do odd jobs around the house, hinting that if he didn’t obey her, there would be consequences. My parents began to think about leaving. They wanted to go someplace where we could afford our own home.

I didn’t want to go. I loved the little building where we lived. Every morning, I would tear off and go running around the apartment complex with the few friends I had, making all the noise we wanted to. We were left to our own devices for most of the day and would explore the nearby streets for hours on end. Three blocks felt like a dozen miles to us, with each more distant street full of mystery and danger and exotic smells. We would meet in the stairwell and play rock-paper-scissors, or run outside and find a tree and play hide and seek. Each tiny corner of the building’s stairwell held memories embedded in the dirty, chipped cement. Here was the stair where I sprained my ankle and couldn’t play for three weeks; there was the step where I ate pillow bread, a North Korean specialty, and ice cream that Bong Sook had brought me, a rare double snack. It was the only world I knew.

There were shops along my street, everything you could want: a barber, a grocery, an ice cream parlor. There were no rich people in our neighborhood to support fancy stores and no poor people to pity. At 5 p.m., when the day’s TV programming began with news and cartoons, we’d all rush over to the apartment of the one friend whose parents had managed to buy a set. There we’d sit in a row and eat homemade popcorn and candy. The residents of the apartment building were very close. All the kids would play together and anyone who had extra food would gladly share it with their neighbors.

We were all alike, one big North Korean family, or so it seemed to me. I wanted to stay.

One cold afternoon that fall, my father came home from work on his bicycle, pedaling fast. We didn’t own a car—hardly anyone in North Korea could afford one—so my father’s bicycle was a treasured possession. I spotted him a block away on our cluttered street, leaning over the handlebars, his lean and handsome face—so different from my round one—shining with sweat. Right away, my mood sensor understood something: my father was very excited.

“Come, Kwang Jin,” he called to me from half a block away. “We’re going to see the new house.” He lifted me and set me down behind him on the bicycle seat. Off we flew through the loud and congested streets, headed toward the country.

My father was determined to leave the inner city. He had a good job and a spotless reputation. As far as we knew, North Korea was doing well economically, through its citizens’ hard work and the generous help of food and fuel subsidies from Russia. My father was thirty-seven years old, smart, incorruptible, and loyal to the regime. He’d joined the Workers’ Party of Korea at the young age of twenty-four, a major accomplishment. Everyone wanted to join, but few were accepted, and my father had no family connections to help him.

All in all, it was high time to build a house.

Now my father powered steadily through the traffic, his strong back flexing with each pump of the pedals. A couple of blocks away was a broad highway, lined by branching elms, yellow flowers, and the tall concrete statues the government put up with slogans carved into them. I knew these slogans well: CHUN LEE MAH flashed by as we sped onward. It meant, “We must work a thousand times harder than other countries!” It was one of Kim Il Sung’s favorite sayings.

I held on to my father’s shirt so as not to fall off. I watched the trees and buildings flow by. The small apartment buildings fell away and cars became harder to find, replaced by peasants with carts and oxen. I had never been so far away from home except for our trips to see Grandma and Grandpa for New Year’s.

Our destination was an hour away: the July 8th neighborhood, named after the date Kim Il Sung came to visit. This is how many places in North Korea are named: by some event far in the past related to the Great Leader and his ministers. The farther we went, the quieter the roads became. The homes I saw now were rough-looking farmhouses with mud splashed on the walls. My father tirelessly pumped the pedals of the old black bike.

By the time we pulled up to our new plot of land, he was sweating beneath the thin material of his shirt. He turned and plucked me off the seat and set me down. Happiness and anticipation were written all over my father’s face. How much this house meant to him! We walked over and inspected the site.

It wasn’t much to look at, really. The foundation had been dug deep in order to keep jars of kimchi cool in the winter—in North Korea, even the houses are designed around that most sacred of foods. The walls were slowly going up. It was a two-room building with a basement. No bathroom. We would use an outhouse for that, as do most North Koreans.

There were three or four workers mixing cement to bind the cinderblocks together. And this is what my father delighted in most: the walls were surrounded by nothing but air. We were going to escape the apartment building and live in something modern and new. My father’s house stood on its own, touching nothing, touched by nothing.

Father began walking the dimensions of the small plot, squatting down and pointing at something in the foundation, shouting questions at the workers. I fooled around with some loose bricks and placed one on top of two others. Then something caught my eye. Behind the rising walls of the house, I saw a hill. And on the hill were little mounds, like gophers or beavers might build, only bigger. I stared at the mounds, my nerves tingling and then suddenly still.

I knew what those shapes were. Graves.

In North Korea, a grave is just a small, round mound of earth with a stone or wooden tablet stuck into the dirt saying who is buried there. As I looked out beyond the house, I saw the rising foothills of a mountain range that reached perhaps 2,500 feet in the air, with veins of snow snaking down toward the valley. At the foot of the mountains was a huge cemetery. And next to the cemetery was our future home.

Father has decided to build a place near a cemetery,
I said to myself.
Why would he do that? Does he even know about the graves?
I was afraid of the dark, and often felt panic on my nighttime trips to the outhouse.
How much worse will it be to face these graves on the way to pee every night?

Much worse,
I thought.

But I said nothing. My father was my hero; I wanted him to be happy. For him, I would live with the dead.

While my father inspected the property, I played with broken bricks and watched the men slap cement onto the walls with trowels. There was space for a big yard and garden, but all I could think of was the boys in the apartment building I was going to leave. Them and the cemetery. My father issued a few orders and then we turned around and pedaled home.

My father had many reasons for wanting the house. Somewhere in his mind, having grown up in a poor backwater like Undok, he equated unattached houses with the rich and the well-connected. Now, after becoming a rising star in our little community, he had a chance to build such a house. He was like ambitious men everywhere: he wanted his success to be visible.

But the house was also for my mother.

Years later, I visited my maternal grandparents. Several aunts and uncles were there, gathered around, talking about my mother when she was young, and how she pursued my father to the point of recklessness during the time they both worked for the same farming organization. “How you used to chase him around that office!” her brother cried out at one point, trying to coax a smile from her. What had happened to that headstrong girl, they were saying, what became of that mad love? I glanced at her face; she looked down, her lips tight. I turned to my father. His eyes were downcast too; he looked pained, uncomfortable. He didn’t want to be reminded of how things had turned out. My mother didn’t chase him around anymore. That feeling had died before I was born.