Under the Same Sky (6 page)

The journey to my uncle’s town usually took three days. But now the train seemed to wander aimlessly across the countryside like a heat-dazed snake. The electricity went out frequently and the train would make a sad, droning noise as its systems died. Eventually it slid to a stop on the tracks. We often waited for a day or longer for the power to come back up.

There was no room for Bong Sook or me to play, and we had no books with us to help pass the time. It felt claustrophobic being stuffed into the car with so many other unwashed bodies. “The train is so slow,” my father said, shaking his head. “I hope we have enough food to last.”

The passengers were people like us, neither rich nor dirt poor, fleeing their homes on a rumor or a hope. “There is food in the south,” one woman told us. “My cousin will welcome us.” But she had no way of knowing this, not really. She was in the same situation we were: down to our last chance.

Instead of reading or playing, I watched the other passengers. They were my movies, and I studied them for hours. The first thing I realized was that the famine had produced many, many thieves. I saw people who probably had never stolen a thing before take food from the pockets of fellow passengers. Children waited for old men to fall asleep and then rifled through their pockets. People pushed their way down the aisle, noses bleeding, their faces raked with cuts, the losers in some battle over food scraps.

The mood of the crowd was sullen. It wasn’t like the carefree trips I remembered. Travel, to me, had always been fun: there were cousins and aunts and presents and food waiting for us on the other end. But now we were going to my uncle’s to beg. Everything was so different. People would go to sleep leaning on someone’s shoulder and wake up in the morning to find that that person had died during the night and had to be pulled out of the clench of bodies. It was what I would imagine traveling during the American Depression was like. Even though Bong Sook and I were still kids, we could see the darkness in people’s faces.

As the train swung southward through half-abandoned villages, we swayed along with it, staring mutely out the windows. There was very little to say. People lay in the aisles of the cars, too weak to lift their heads for morsels of food; others were taken out to the fields on either side of the railbed and left to die. As we passed stations, I saw corpses piled up outside them, people who’d been waiting and had expired in the heat. When the train passed those stations, you could smell the bodies, a stench of putrefying flesh that had one virtue: it cured your hunger pangs for as long as you breathed it in.

And yet the train pressed on. Three days, four, one week. It felt as if the city had disappeared, or the engineer could no longer find it.

After ten days we still hadn’t arrived. The crush inside the train got dangerous. At every stop, more and more people clambered on to escape the stricken countryside.

Chapter

T
HE TRAIN CHUGGED
forward, on the last leg of the journey. We went through the rice and corn farms of the south, the faces of the locals registering shock at the malnourished faces in the broken windows. After three weeks, my father recognized the outskirts of my uncle’s city—there were no announcements anymore—and with a feeling of exhaustion and joy, we pushed our way off at the station.

It was just after midnight, and pouring rain. We still had five miles to go, and there was no other way to get there other than walking. That five-mile walk, dazed with heat and pain . . . it was as if it would never end. It must have been worse for my father, because it never occurred to me that we might be turned away when we reached my uncle’s house. But he knew that food was scarce everywhere and that our welcome wasn’t guaranteed.

When we found the house, we rushed up to the door and knocked. It felt like I would collapse unless the door opened that very instant. Finally, when it did, my uncle stood in the doorway, staring at us in shock and surprise. He was dressed in sporty clothes that looked foreign and new. His expression changed to one of happiness and he swung the door wide.

“Brother, come in,” he said.

We ate like kings that night. Seafood, noodles, white rice. We stuffed our bellies and laughed. It was heaven. Before going to sleep, I fervently wished that we would never leave this place.

I was reunited with my two cousins. I explored their neighborhood hand in hand with them. I ate my first blackberry. My older cousin—he was the prince of our family, smart and handsome and destined for the army—took me on a tour of their house and, in the kitchen, proudly showed me an enormous metal box called a refrigerator. I had never seen one before. Truly, my uncle was blessed.

I saw the ocean for the first time. Everything in the south seemed bigger, richer, and happier.

After spending one week at my paternal uncle’s, we went to Kang Suh, where my father dropped us off with my mother’s relatives before he headed home to Hoeryong. In Kang Suh, a surprise awaited us.

We hadn’t seen my mother for several months, and something had happened to her during that period. I’ve puzzled over this many times in the intervening years: What things did my aunts and uncles say to my mom that would end up causing such pain and disruption in our lives? Did they tell her she wasn’t like her old self? Did they encourage her to stand up to my father? Did they disparage him for not taking care of his family?

Whatever it was that caused the change, my mother was a different person. She had put on a few pounds and dressed better than before. She wore shoes with heels now, and stylish, well-fitting pants, and brightly colored blouses that looked like they were from China. Obviously her family had treated her well. But it was her personality that had undergone the most startling transformation.

Somehow, my sickly mother had been replaced with a dynamo. She talked more in those first few weeks than she had in years. My mom had always been smart—she read constantly, mostly books about health and nutrition and philosophy—but now she offered us bits of wisdom she’d been storing inside all those years. “Stop eating when you feel like you want to have one more spoon of rice,” my mom told me once, which I later interpreted to mean, If you fall in love with power, you’ll never be satisfied and ruin your life. It’s funny that I remember that particular saying above all others. She herself would soon ignore it, with dreadful consequences.

My mother had always left most of the big family decisions to my father, as was traditional in North Korea. But now she was outspoken, ambitious, fired up with the possibilities of life. I was so happy to see my mother was happier and more at peace with herself.

When my mother had arrived at my uncle’s doorstep, she was a thin, depressed thirty-nine-year-old woman who was fleeing starvation and an unhappy marriage. To give her something to do, my uncle, who owned a factory that made household goods, bestowed on her his excess inventory. There were pencils, as I recall, and sunglasses and other small consumer items. In the bad economy, the stuff was just collecting dust in a building nearby.

My mother didn’t see the pencils and sunglasses as throwaways. She saw them as her salvation. The famine, and the almost complete governmental breakdown that accompanied it, had given my mom the big chance she’d been waiting for all her life. Before the disaster, it was illegal to start a small business. But as the country threatened to come apart, Kim Jong Il and his ministers decided to allow a little private enterprise, so as to save at least some of its citizens. My mother leapt into the breach.

I wonder if she ever saw the irony in this: that the disaster that threatened to wipe out everyone she loved also freed her. I don’t think so. There was no room for such thoughts in my mother’s whirring brain. She was fighting to save us.

My mom took the items from the Kang Suh warehouse and went to rural districts where people didn’t have the chance to buy such things. She sold them door to door or at small markets, making a decent profit. She was traveling, meeting new people, reinventing herself as an entrepreneur. She was as independent as she’d ever been in her whole life. From what I found out later, I’m sure my mom dreamed of becoming fabulously rich, of parlaying her meager profits from the sunglasses and pencils into larger and larger hauls.

My mother was a dreamer. She was also, it turned out, a terrible businesswoman.

After another trip to the countryside, where my mom had managed to sell my uncle’s dusty old inventory, she thought,
Why should I leave this place with empty hands when I can go back to Kang Suh with unique products from the country? I’ll sell them in the city and double my profits.
My mother spent the
won
she’d earned on local handicrafts and brought them back to Kang Suh.

This is where her plan backfired. The goods didn’t sell. My mom had to go back to my uncle and ask for more inventory to start over again. This caused friction: my uncle wanted to know where the profits went from the first batch of goods. She defended her scheme to double down. My uncle, in so many words, told her she was acting like an idiot. The sophisticated people of Kang Suh didn’t want the crude homemade things she’d brought back. But my mother had seen her fortune, and she wouldn’t give up.

“She always wanted more!” my uncle cried to us.

We shuttled between Mother’s relatives and my paternal uncle’s house, so as not to overburden either family. On one of these trips, while we sat in the grass next to the railroad station in Kang Suh, waiting for the next train, my mother pulled out three cucumbers she’d purchased and passed one each to Bong Sook and me. We munched on the thick green vegetable, savoring the juice that flowed down our throats. That cool, tart liquid was so refreshing. We ate the cucumbers down to the bitter ends, which were inedible, and looked for somewhere to throw them.

Amid the throng of other travelers I noticed a plain young woman in her early thirties watching us. She had a baby strung to her chest, maybe one year old, very small, making no noise. The woman turned to my mother and asked for the cucumber ends.

“These?” my mother said. “But they aren’t good to eat.”

“They’re for my father,” the woman said. “We’ll take anything.” My mom nodded and we gathered up the six nibs. The woman bowed slightly as I tilted them into her cupped hands. I watched as she walked several yards to where someone was lying in the grass. I followed her.

After taking a few steps I saw an old man, wearing a red ribbon with thin gray stripes and a medal hanging off it, a five-pointed star in light gold on a pale blue background, surrounded by a circle and then gold bars that suggested intense beams of light. I knew this medal from the countless war movies I’d watched: it was called the Hero of the Republic, and for many years it was the highest award a North Korean could earn. Only those who’d performed some extraordinarily heroic action in the Korean War had received it.

I stared at the medal in awe. I’d never seen one in real life. Then I looked at the old man as his daughter tilted his head up and tried to feed him the bitter nibs. He spat the cucumber back up. Perhaps there was something wrong with his digestion. Or perhaps he was tired of the long journey.

The Hero of the Republic medal usually ensured respect and a comfortable life. Even at five years old I knew that. The old man and I stared at each other. He was breathing so shallowly, like a fish that has mistakenly jumped onto the shore.
If a Hero of the Republic can die,
I thought,
what chance is there for Bong Sook and Mommy and me?

Chapter

T
HE ATMOSPHERE AT
my paternal uncle’s had changed since I’d first visited with my father. At dinner our first night back, after our father had dropped us off and headed back home, my chemical sensor went off. I began to pick up a feeling of unease in my uncle’s family.

I didn’t have the words to express what I was feeling, but suddenly I knew.
Auntie wants us to leave.

The next day, my uncle found us playing in the yard and asked if we wanted to go blueberry picking.

“Yes!” I cried. I hadn’t had blueberries since I’d last been here. He smiled and went to the kitchen. “Wife, do you have cups for us to go looking for blueberries?” She whipped around.

“Why do they need blueberries? Are you going to pick everything and leave nothing for us?”

I was the baby boy, I had always been cherished, my needs seen to first. Now I felt the sting of being unwanted. Hated, even.

I didn’t understand it. I wanted to leave, but to leave was to starve. We stayed there for a month or so before moving on.

I knew then the panic that I’d seen on the train had spread everywhere in North Korea. Not only had the state abdicated its role in our lives. So had family. Blood meant little or nothing. There was no force on earth that could stop the famine.

I felt older than I was. The chaos around me was so strong that its waves seemed to overwhelm my mood sensor. You couldn’t help but feel them.

In August, we returned home to Hoeryong. My father greeted us at the railway station. His face lit up with joy, and he embraced us. He’d never been away from his children before, and his voice was filled with happiness as he spoke our names.

The mood in our little detached house lifted despite the gnawing hunger in our bellies. My mother now had a thousand and one schemes to save us from the famine. She would buy candy from the market and sell it in the rural villages. She would purchase corn, turn it into noodles, and make a killing in the city market. Sometimes the plans were so complex I couldn’t follow them.

My mom began to go on trips to the north of the country to make her deals. She was gone for weeks at a time. Sometimes she’d say she would be back on the sixteenth of the month and not return until the twenty-eighth. At first, my father welcomed her newfound vitality, but soon I could feel the tension rise. No words were spoken, at least ones that Bong Sook and I could hear, but it was like climbing higher and higher in an airplane. The pressure in your ears begins to grow. My mood sensor was on high alert.