Under the Same Sky (7 page)

By the fall of 1996, my parents’ dreams were collapsing, and they took their anger out on each other. My father had borrowed money for my mother’s schemes, sacrificing his ideals, and she’d betrayed him. Her new name in the house became “thief.” She fought back, asking why my father couldn’t feed us. Her depression returned.

Their fights sometimes went on all night. It made it hard to play or to read books with Bong Sook. My sister and I were always on edge, expecting another blowup.

One night, my father lost his mind completely and began beating my mom during an argument over money. He slapped her with a thunderous crack across the nose and she collapsed to the floor. He began clubbing her with a closed fist, grunting, no longer speaking human words.

My sister and I watched, holding each other. We cried out for my father to stop, but his handsome face was like stone, dark stone.

Chapter

W
E WERE HUNGRY
all the time now. Our soup, with a few bits of grain or corn in it, kept us alive, but we were desperate for something more substantial. We tried eating wild plants and raspberry leaves, which were incredibly bitter and which you had to force down your throat with water. My father, whose wages had remained constant, couldn’t buy anything in the market because inflation had pushed prices beyond working people’s means. We were beginning to waste away, and the dull knife of starvation probed at our guts.

One night I heard my parents whispering on the other side of the main room. I could hear the desperation in their voices, and I realized they were discussing selling the house and moving into the abandoned office where my father once worked. The company could no longer afford to pay him or any of his fellow employees, so people were taking what they could: stealing equipment or inventory to sell at a pittance.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The detached house was the great joy of my father’s life. He’d taken such pride in crafting every piece of furniture inside, every lintel and every cabinet. I could feel his sadness in my chest.

My parents began to spread the word that they would consider offers for the house. There were no real estate brokers in North Korea, no For Sale sections in the newspaper. You had to spread the news by word of mouth. So my parents told their friends and neighbors, and my father his former colleagues, that they were selling. I don’t think they put a price on the house; it was assumed they would take almost any offer.

The idea of making money from the sale of our home gave my parents hope. Unfortunately, everyone else had the same idea. People were willing, even eager, to become homeless if it meant surviving for another month. They were hawking their places for whatever they could get and moving into shuttered offices or factories or just camping out in fields. There was suddenly a glut of houses on the market.

Nobody could afford to buy our whole house, even for the price of a sack of cornmeal. After only ten days, my father divided the house in two and sold half to a young couple. The house had two rooms, and now it had two one-room apartments. The new couple were under thirty and just beginning their lives together. The price they paid was enough to buy us cornmeal for seven or eight days. Though it must have been devastating for my father, he never showed any bitterness toward the couple. In fact, they became good friends of ours. We visited them in their half of the house and shared meals with them. It felt weird, but with families camping in the wild grass, weird was better than the alternative.

Still, the famine pursued us. There were days when all we had to eat was a handful of wild mushrooms in water. So we decided to travel to my maternal grandmother’s, where we hoped to find food.

Usually, my mother would have planned a trip like that for months, since it took all that time to notify the person you were going to see of your arrival, to get train tickets, and to tell the school your kids wouldn’t be attending. But we didn’t have normal lives anymore; your schedule was decided by what you needed to do to get food that day. It was frightening how these major decisions were made the night before, in a moment of panic.

My father told us he would be staying behind. My parents made it seem as though he had to work, but I knew they were separating again. Another mouth to feed wouldn’t be welcome at my grandmother’s, and my father’s pride would be hurt by showing up at his mother-in-law’s house, destitute.

The morning of our departure, my mother gathered our bags by the front door, one big one for each of us. My father watched us, his hands behind his back, his face lined with sadness. I’d been calm until the last moment, but as we said our goodbyes, I felt a wave of fear wash through me. “But . . . but what if we never come back here?” I said to my mother. “What if we die on the way there?” I don’t know what made me say such an awful thing; perhaps it was the tofu or boiled egg that every family is supposed to eat before leaving on a journey. (Eggs roll fast, which means the trip will go quickly, and tofu is perfectly square, which means everything will go according to plan.) Since we didn’t have any tofu or eggs to eat, I got nervous and blurted out the words about dying.

My mom erupted. “Are you crazy? Why would you say such things?” I looked at her, stunned by the vehemence in her voice. But nothing about the journey was right. Usually you wear your best clothes and set off with a warm meal in your belly. We were doing none of that. We’d sold our good clothes and were wearing the only outfits we had left; I was dressed in a dark coat, dark slacks, and a soiled, much-washed white shirt. Honestly, we looked like vagrants.

At the railroad station, huge crowds were waiting for the next train. My mother managed to get us on the second one that came through—when she wanted to be, she could be fierce. There was nowhere to sit down, so we stood pressed up against the people we’d boarded with.

The dumb thing I’d said at home immediately cursed the journey. As the train got under way, moving down the track at a snail’s pace, the car swayed and someone dropped a huge suitcase on my foot.

“Yow!” I cried. It felt as if the bones had been smashed. My mother scolded the man with the bag, but she could barely reach me through the bodies stacked inside the car. I couldn’t even reach down to massage my foot, but howled and wept as the other passengers looked at me with blank faces.

The trip should have taken an hour or two at the most. We arrived six hours later, pulling ourselves through the mass of bodies at the Hokseung station.

The wind swept across the train platform and instantly I was cold. On past visits, we would wait for the local train that branched off and took us very close to Grandmother’s house. But we saw no one waiting on that platform. “That train doesn’t run anymore,” an old man told us.

My mother looked at him anxiously. “What? But we have to get to Undok.”

“Then you better start walking.”

Our grandmother’s house was a couple of hours away on foot. My mother’s face grew grim and she picked up our suitcases and marched out of the station. Bong Sook and I followed, me limping on my smashed foot.

“Mother, I’m hungry,” I said. Outside the station there was a street with private houses that doubled as restaurants. One house would sell soup and radish kimchi, the next corn and bread. We stopped at one and bought a bowl of soup with some kimchi, along with a couple of potato side dishes. We stood there on the road and dug in: the food was delicious, little globs of fat floating on the soup’s surface.

In two minutes, the food was gone. We felt refreshed and began the long walk. We arrived at our grandmother’s house around midnight and could hear the TV as we walked up the path. There were two houses in my grandmother’s compound: a big one where my aunt and uncle lived, and a second, much smaller house for Grandmother. We hoped they had enough to feed us.

We knocked on the door of the big house and my aunt and uncle let us in. Exhausted, we dropped onto our sleeping mats. The next morning, Grandmother greeted us, her expression a mix of love and worry. She was in her early eighties, tiny, stooped, and skinnier than I remembered.

Mother was telling Grandma about the journey: the packed cars, the slow train, the local that didn’t run anymore, the restaurant food that gave us the strength to walk.

Grandma’s face froze. “Which restaurant did you stop at?” she asked.

“The second one from the station,” my mother said. “Why?”

Grandmother’s expression was one of fear and disgust. Bong Sook and I looked at each other. Was it wrong for us to have eaten something?

My mother and grandma disappeared into the other room, where I could hear them murmuring.

“Bong Sook, what’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Go play with your cousins.”

I was happy to, but Grandma’s reaction still bothered me. I ran off to find my cousins.

It was a couple of days before one of them spilled the beans.

There had been rumors going around for months about a restaurant by the railroad station. They said that the owners of the place had been kidnapping homeless people and travelers and killing them. They would then chop them up, strip the meat from their bones, and add it to their soup.

“Which restaurant?” I asked quickly.

“Some say the fourth from the corner,” my cousin said, watching my reaction closely. “Some say . . . the second.”

I felt my stomach do a flip.

“Cousin,” she said, “what shape were the fat bubbles?”

My tongue felt covered in greasy fur. Had I eaten a human being? If I did, I was now a cannibal. And what was worse, the soup, I remembered, had been delicious.

“What shape?” she repeated.

“Why does it matter?”

She looked at me hopelessly.

“When you boil meat, the fat rises to the surface.”

“Yes, yes,” I said. “I know
that.
”

“OK,” my cousin said. “But were they circles or triangles?”

“What kind of a question is that?”

She frowned impatiently. “Fat from pork, beef, or chicken forms a circle,” she said, as if she was repeating some famous science equation, like the law of gravity. “Fat from a human . . .”

“Triangles?”

“Yes,” she said. “Triangles.”

I racked my brain to remember what the fat blobs looked like. I could see the heavy wooden bowl and the few corn noodles floating half submerged in the cloudy soup. I could see small chunks of vegetables and the tiny bits of yellowish fat on the surface. But no matter how hard I closed my eyes, I couldn’t for the life of me remember the shape.

When I saw Bong Sook, we talked softly about the soup that day.

“Are you sure there were no triangles?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “There weren’t.”

But the truth is, we couldn’t remember. Some days, I would say to myself,
Who knows if the circles and triangles are even true?
But folk stories, rumors, and superstition were all North Koreans had. There was no authority to consult to see if you’d consumed a human being or not.

Chapter

I
SPENT MANY SAD
hours with my grandmother. Like my father, she liked to tell stories, but her tales were very different from my dad’s, which were heartwarming and always triumphant. Grandma’s stories were filled with melancholy. Most of them centered on how, during Japan’s occupation of our country in the early twentieth century, her father had sold her off to a rich family when she was only thirteen.

It turned out that my great-grandfather was an alcoholic who sold his own children to buy bottles of corn moonshine. Grandma went off as a maid to the big house, but the family there worked her hard while feeding her only small meals twice a day, barely enough to live on. When they sent her to the river with a basket of dirty clothes perched atop her head, she would run to the foothills of the nearby mountains and desperately search for blackberries to eat. When she found enough to stop the dizziness that always afflicted her, she would go back to the house, saving the small portion of rice the rich people gave her. And what did she do with this rice? She gave it to her father.

I always wondered why Grandma did this. Was it out of love or fear? Did her father force her to give up her small pittance of rice? I’d like to believe she did it out of a noble character, saving the man who had sold her like chattel. Ironically, she would tell me these stories over meals of rice and soup, her long face creased with wrinkles. The meals were so small she would have only three bites of food before it was gone.

Though she had so little, barely enough to survive, Grandma always fed me a spoon of rice or two sips of her soup while telling me her stories. As I swallowed the soup, I thought about Grandma’s life, so full of bitterness and scarcity. She’d been hungry her whole time on earth, and she was hungry now. “Kwang Jin,” she said, “even though the Japanese occupation was horrible, we had more to eat then than we do now. How can this be?”

We heard more and more stories of orphans being stolen and eaten by ravenous people in the countryside. The orphan children called
Kkotjebi
(“wandering swallows”), figures dressed in dark rags who haunted the roadside markets, a consequence of the famine, were told not to sleep in the open, lest they be kidnapped and consumed. Townsfolk warned us about buying meat (as if we could afford meat!) if we didn’t know where it had come from. There were cases of people eating their own newborn infants. A kind of mass insanity spread from town to town.

Soon after we arrived at Grandma’s, the news came that authorities had arrested the owners of one of the restaurants near the train station for serving human meat. But there were no newspapers or official bulletins, so we didn’t know which house it was. Some people said it was the first house, others said the fifth, still others the second.

It was an inauspicious omen for our stay with Grandma.

The first week or so, we ate well: cornmeal, rice, and soup, along with side dishes like radish kimchi. I would wait all day for the main meal. One day my uncle came home from work and saw me lying on the floor. “Instead of sitting around,” he said, “why don’t you clean up the house or chop wood for the fire? If you do this, you’ll become more likable, and this will help you survive.” His tone was warm and kind; he was trying to help me. That day I chopped a load of firewood, which my aunt thanked me for, smiling broadly. Everything was going well.