Under the Same Sky (31 page)

One night, Grandma turned to the back of her Bible and picked out a hymn. We began to sing it together, her voice frail and reedy, mine faltering over the words. The hymn was “Father, I Stretch My Hands to Thee.”

Father, I stretch my hands to Thee,

No other help I know;

If Thou withdraw Thyself from me,

Ah! whither shall I go?

I felt something pierce my heart.
This
I understood; this was my life. The thing that had been haunting me, the feeling that I was a hunted animal whose luck was running out, came over me again. That night, alone in my room, I began to cry. I closed my eyes tightly and attempted to talk to God for the first time. “I don’t know who you are,” I said. “I don’t understand the Scripture. But I’m surrendering myself to you. If you fail me, I have nothing left to fall back on. Please help me. Please show me the way.”

Was that a prayer? I didn’t know. Exhausted, I curled up in the wool blanket that was my mattress and quickly fell asleep.

Over the next few weeks, I read more and more of the Bible, and the strangest thing happened. My worries, my alienation, began to melt away. I felt refreshed in my soul.
What’s happening to me?
I wondered. I found it hard to believe that the Bible stories I’d been hearing in the churches I’d visited were real.

The world was changing for me. The sun that shone through the glass was the same sun. The trees outside my window were the same trees, the food was the same I’d been eating for weeks. But I had new eyes to see all of these things. The world had lost its terrors; I felt like a child who’d come home after a long, painful journey.

I was in no less danger of being caught and taken to a labor camp. But I felt God walked beside me now. His love covered me like a thick, warm cloak. I knew He would never forsake me.

I didn’t understand the Bible intellectually at that point. (I would struggle with concepts like the Trinity for months.) But in my soul, I was no longer a fugitive. God had shown me that He was everywhere in the world, and that He cherished me beyond reason.

My first experience of Him was one of a deep and transforming love.

Chapter

A
LL OF GRANDMA’S
dumplings and rice and beef with orange had an effect: I was getting chubby. Uncle took me to a Korean-style sauna one afternoon and noticed a thin roll of fat around my belly. I hopped on the scale. Four pounds heavier than the week before.

I began skipping rope in my room at four in the morning. Downstairs was a store, so they didn’t care. I tied a clothesline from my doorknob to my dresser and jumped back and forth over it. I ran on the street—two, five, ten miles. I would jump over trash cans, and people actually stopped and stared at me in surprise. I was getting stronger.

One of the places I ran to was the Yanbian University of Science and Technology. It lay behind a stout black steel fence. The first time I went, I looked through the railing at the gleaming green grass with all these young students playing and studying and chatting on it. It was too perfect; it looked fake. I couldn’t believe anyone could live this way, studying and flirting in this beautiful world. I started ending my daily runs at the fence, and for five or ten minutes I would stare at the students. Why were their lives and mine so different? Did they always have to be that way? I was afraid to speak to the students, afraid I would discover something in them that told me:
This is why you are kept outside.

Then I would run home.

It’s strange, but I measured progress in material things: a new shirt, sunglasses, cigarettes of my own. My great desire was a cell phone. To be without one in China was to be a nobody. I even knew which model I wanted, a Nokia with a sliding cover. I would see someone pull one out and think,
When I have a phone like that,
I will be happy.
It wasn’t so much the physical object that entranced me as it was the idea that I could reach anyone I wanted, anytime I pleased. It didn’t occur to me then that I had, in fact, no one to call.

I still felt closed off. I didn’t know how much I’d been affected by my time in North Korea, but I was far from the swaggering boy I’d been in the markets.

Eventually I got to know one of the ministers at a church, and one night he put his arm around me and said, “Joseph, do you know how amazing it is that you survived? You must pray to God and thank Him and ask Him what He has planned for you after such a miracle.”

I did wonder about that, and I asked God, “Why me?” No answer came, but I felt compelled to make the most of my new life.

My pastor told me about a missionary who was going to visit me at Grandma’s. She wanted to give me some encouragement and an allowance as a refugee. When she arrived, I was startled by her appearance. The woman was of average height and very overweight. Her clothes and eyeglasses weren’t fashionable; even after only a few weeks in China, I knew what was stylish and what wasn’t. I thought,
Why are you dressed like this?

We sat in the living room and she asked me, “What do you want?”

I’d never thought of that before. I had new shoes and a jacket. All my needs were taken care of, except for a cell phone. And that was too much to ask for.

The silence went on and on. Three minutes later, she said, “Joseph?”

It was summertime. I looked up. “A soccer ball?” I said.

The woman laughed out loud, then her eyes filled with tears. I didn’t understand. I thought I’d offended her. She nodded and left shortly afterward.

Two weeks later, she picked me up in her van. We were going to the mall to buy me a soccer ball, along with some clothes. I was so excited that someone had taken me zooming along the highway on a glorious sunny day. It made me feel special. After we’d picked up the items at the mall, we headed back home. On the way, the missionary told me why she’d cried the last time she saw me. She said that whenever she visited North Korean refugees, they immediately asked her for one thing: money. Unlike me, these refugees often had no sponsors, and were living hand-to-mouth in the mountains. They asked for cash to help them survive, and not just a little cash either.

So when I asked the missionary for a soccer ball, she had been moved. It might also have been the fact that South Korean teenagers my own age were taking exams and preparing for college and good careers, while my only thought was for a simple toy. In fact, I never thought to ask for money or anything extravagant; it would have been rude and, honestly, I didn’t need any at the moment. All my needs were being met.

Then the missionary turned to me and asked if I wanted to go to America. My response was automatic. I said no.

She was shocked and a little angry.

“Do you know that this is a one-in-a-thousand chance? I have many refugees who would die to go to America. Why do you say no?”

America was big and strange and far away to me. It was thousands of miles from my mother and sister. And I’d always been taught that it was the enemy, full of big-nosed, big-eyed, vicious people who’d killed my countrymen. I guess I was still brainwashed from all those years ago.

“I have a special feeling for you, Joseph. You’re not like the other boys. Please consider this.”

She told me she’d be back in a week for my decision.

Chapter

W
HEN I GOT
home to Grandma’s, I showed her my new sneakers and the soccer ball. I didn’t talk about going to America. It was such a new and unexpected idea, like defecting to the enemy, that I wouldn’t have known what to say. And I was afraid of hurting her by announcing that I might leave China.

That night, confused and unhappy, I opened my Bible. I began reading in Matthew, one of my favorite gospels, and soon came to chapter 26, verse 39, which describes Jesus at Gethsemane. “Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed . . . ‘Yet not as I will, but as you will.’” I closed my eyes. I knew exactly what was in Jesus’ heart at that moment. He’s physically spent, hopeless, filled with black despair. His body fails him; he can’t take another step. And so he delivers himself into his father’s hands.

In my own small way, I needed to do the same thing. “God,” I whispered, “I don’t know what to do. Do I stay with Grandma or go to America? I feel powerless to decide. I leave it in your hands.”

No voice or vision came to me as I lay on my bed that night. But my confusion melted away, and I found in its place a conviction that my way in life was through America. It was clear in my heart that I had to go. I felt relief and joy wash through me. I put the Bible down on the desk next to my mattress and finally fell asleep.

I knew nothing about America except that it was full of people with large eyes who hated North Koreans. I tried to picture a typical American city, but I couldn’t do it. All I could do was multiply what was outside my window: shopping malls many times bigger, streets many times busier. (Even then I somehow knew that America was big.) I decided to research the United States by watching a lot of movies. Grandma’s TV had about two dozen channels, and I would flick through them for hours on end, looking for movies with white people in them.

Uncle found me watching a movie one day.

“What are you doing?” he said as he sat next to me on the couch.

“Learning about America,” I said. I could talk to him in ways that I couldn’t to Grandma, who feared I would leave her.

He looked at the screen in confusion. “America?” he said. “This movie is German!”

“But it has white people!” I protested. It was some kind of action film, and I’d been staring at the houses in it with fascination. I couldn’t believe the places these people lived.

He laughed. “Lots of places have white people,” he said. “Don’t you know this?”

I shook my head. Uncle took the remote and searched for American films. The first one he came across starred Sylvester Stallone. An early scene in the movie really impressed me. Nothing much happened in it. Stallone wakes up one morning, takes a shower, dresses in a black leather coat and black leather gloves. He opens the refrigerator and takes out bread and a bottle of wine. He eats the bread and drinks some wine and gets up and leaves.

This was astonishing. America was so advanced, he didn’t even have to wash his own dishes. I washed the dishes three times a day at Grandma’s. Three times a day, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, there were several main dishes, side dishes, soup bowls, glasses—I was at the sink for hours. If I went to America, I was sure I wouldn’t have to wash another glass.

North Korea had trained me to think of concrete things. The obvious dishwashing gap between American and Chinese life impressed me to no end.

I watched more Stallone films. In them, the bad guy lost and the good guy won. Always. This was familiar to me from North Korean spy movies, and I liked that. Another thing that impressed me was that when the good guys shot their guns, the bullets went through walls. My old gun obsession flickered. Americans can shoot through
bricks?
Those must be very powerful guns. Everything in America seemed
more.
Of course, when I went to live in America, I found out the bricks were actually drywall, which explained everything.

One last thing impressed me about Stallone: I really liked his leather gloves.

I went to my underground church and spoke to the pastor. After the service, we went for a walk. He had his arm around my shoulder. I asked him if I should go to America.

“Yes, I think you should. There you can study.”

That didn’t move me. I’d never been interested in studying.

“And in America you can go to a store twenty-four hours a day, any time you want. There is always something happening, even at night.”

I thought about that. It wasn’t an abstract thing.
Life goes on twenty-four hours a day there.
At the moment he said it, I felt my desire for that kind of unlimited freedom grow inside me.

America was limitless, I decided. I wanted to see what that was like.

The missionary woman didn’t return the next week, or the week after. I thought,
She’s forgotten about you, Joseph.
You missed your chance.

I began to pray. “Jesus,” I said, “I’m not sure if I want to go or if it’s just curiosity. If it’s your will, I will respect that. But please guide me down the correct path.”

The thing that anchored me to China was Grandma. Going to America would take me away from her, and I knew that would hurt her terribly. I was the second refugee she’d taken care of, the ghost of the other North Korean she had lost. “If you weren’t here, Joseph,” she told me once, “I’m not sure how I would go on.” That weighed on me awfully. I felt I was losing one person after another: my father, Bong Sook, my mother, and now, possibly, Grandma. Was there something about me that made it impossible to stay with the people I loved?

As the weeks went by, the desire to leave burned hotter and hotter inside me. But there was no word from the missionary.

Finally she called Grandma and arranged a time to see me. We went out to eat. Over lunch, she said: “Joseph, I’m sorry I’ve left you alone for so long. There are so many refugees who need my help. I haven’t forgotten about you or my offer. But I have another possibility as well.”

“Yes?”

“You know Shenyang? It’s a city about a day’s train journey from here. They have a Christian school, for Chinese students only. If you don’t want to go to America, I will try to get you a Chinese ID so you can study there.”

I thought of the school behind the fence, the students on the lawn, studying. This appealed to me.

“I feel I will go,” I said.

She smiled. “Good, Joseph.”

“But only if I can take Grandma with me.”

The woman’s eyes were watchful.

“Very well. But in order to get into the school, you’ll have to practice your Chinese at a shelter I know of. You don’t speak it well enough yet.”