Under the Same Sky (9 page)

“I’ll say. I think today they were better than ever.”

All the while their eyes watched Bong Sook and me.

I said nothing. I thought,
If I was in your position, I would save a bite or two for you.
But my cousins had no such compunctions. They gloated over their pancakes and the store-bought snacks their mother got for them. I hated them. I thought of ripping the pancakes from my young cousin’s hands and eating them in front of his face, slowly. I was used to this kind of warfare: didn’t my friend Hyo Sung and I once taunt each other in the game we played with origami paper? But it seemed crueler to me when the stakes weren’t toys, but life itself.

When we felt strong enough, Bong Sook and I would go to the mountains to look for anything edible. The plant varieties here in Undok were different from the ones back home: strange-looking floppy-headed mushrooms, for example. This was the only contribution we could make to the household, and we bent over the fields searching for particularly succulent things.

“What should we look for?” I asked my sister.

“Anything a rabbit nibbles on,” Bong Sook said.

“But the rabbits are all gone, Bong Sook. People have eaten them.”

“Well, look for what they ate when they were still around.”

I stood there.

“I never watched them when they were around. I was too busy playing. Please tell me.”

So Bong Sook showed me what to look for, and I found some dandelions and a few harmless weeds. We brought them home and my mother made them into a stew. My cousins, their bellies full of more delicious things, shook their heads no when my mother asked if they wanted to taste her cooking.

This sense of not being wanted was the air Bong Sook and I breathed. For the first time in my life I wished I could turn my mood sensor off. I wanted to feel nothing.

Chapter

T
HE STRANGE VISIT
to my grandmother’s lasted through the first half of 1997. That summer, my father came to get us. It was time to try our hand at farming.

A year or two before, after the famine began, Kim Jong Il had introduced a new approach to saving his people: “private” farms. Government officials realized they couldn’t let the famine run rampant or they would lose all their citizens. I believe this was their motivation for what little they did:
If everyone dies, who will we rule over?

One of the biggest problems for Kim Jong Il and his ministers was that hunger was killing the nation’s farmers. When Bong Sook and I went foraging in the mountains, we passed through farm country. We saw fields where crops had never been planted, or where weeds had sprung up on good farmland and choked the rows where cabbage and peppers should have grown. The farmers had become too weak to work, or they were dead and buried and their families had fled to the cities. We passed row after row of attached “accordion” houses, where not a single face could be seen at the windows. Under such dire circumstances, fewer acres of farmland were being worked and less food reached the markets.

The government came up with a plan. It would grant portions of land to companies, and they would allow their employees to farm them. Each employee would get a small plot to grow his own corn, string beans, radishes, peppers, and cucumbers.

The plan did save a lot of families. It saved mine, at least for a little while.

That summer, my father, Bong Sook, and I (my mother was away with her relatives again) left for our designated plot, about two and a half hours’ walk from our house. When we reached the farm, we cleared the ground by hand. It was hard, thirsty work: pulling out tall weeds by hand, removing rocks, and hoeing the dirt into rows. At the end of the day, we walked home exhausted, but finally with a bit of hope in our hearts. We did this for many days, returning to plant the seeds and give the rows a good dousing of water.

Later that summer, we returned to the farm and stayed there. There was no food at home, so we camped out beside the rustling fields, surviving on eggplants, string beans, and peppers while waiting for the main corn harvest, which would begin in mid-August. My father made a makeshift tent out of discarded plastic and wood planks, and we slept next to our farm.

We had only enough eggplants and peppers to sustain us for a few days. The only option left to us was to start looking for frogs, a great delicacy in the rural districts. When we first arrived, we could hear them croaking from the streams and the thickets of ash and poplar. But soon after amateur farmers like us began our great frog hunt, the woods went silent. One evening that first year of farming, a friend of my father’s who had a plot of land near ours came by and, seeing me, assumed a worried look.

“Kwang Jin,” he said, “I’m missing my number-five frog. Have you seen him?”

I was mortified.
Frogs have numbers?
I was convinced I’d eaten this man’s property. He was joking, of course, and burst out laughing at my confused expression. He knew we’d eaten every frog we could find. We roasted them over the fire outside our tent. The protein made us strong enough for a day’s work.

Next came grasshoppers, which we caught with our hands as they leaped through the hot afternoon air. I stuck them on small sticks and roasted them over a roaring fire. When the grasshoppers began to brown, I pulled them out of the flames and blew on them. When they had cooled down, I bit into them, their bodies crackling under my teeth. Delicious. I even ate the heads. I would have offered some to Bong Sook, but she wasn’t a meat eater and the whole thing repulsed her.

Then came my first taste of what would eventually save my life: thievery. It was during our farming adventure that I first started to steal. I considered myself canny, or at least I had always wanted to be, like my friend Hyo Sung. I realized that if the three of us began eating the early corn, in a month or two most of our crop would be gone. We would have very little to bring back home for the fall and winter.

I decided we weren’t going to touch our corn. I would supply all our nutritional needs by stealing from other fields. When I announced this to my father, he looked sad. I expected him to say something like, “Son, stealing isn’t the right thing to do,” but he was silent. As he watched me sneak away from our tent that first night, I tried to read his eyes. Was he ashamed that his son had become a thief? Today, I understand that to ask that question is to mistake North Korea for a normal country. Morals simply didn’t exist there in the late 1990s. My father was a highly ethical man, but what morality is there in watching your children go hungry?

As the sun sank behind the hills, I ran off along the dusty road that bordered our little camp, putting distance between me and our farm. My father had asked me to steal from government plots and not from those owned by individual families—his last line of moral defense. He warned me especially not to take anything from the fields next to our own. Those belonged to his coworkers; he knew their families and could picture the faces of their children. I wasn’t to take any corn from their mouths. But farther on were anonymous fields owned by government agencies or assigned to other companies. My father’s mercy didn’t extend to them.

My heart was beating like crazy. After I’d jogged for fifteen minutes or so, I turned sharply and ran into the rows of corn by the roadside. I was only a few feet into the dark rows when I began twisting the ears from their stalks. I wasn’t a very sly burglar; I didn’t have the technique that I would develop later on, when I’d become as close to a professional thief as you could get in North Korea.

Before the famine, we thought raw corn was inedible. No one would touch it. But I was so hungry now that I ate two ears right there on the spot, tearing off the husk and pushing the kernels against my teeth and taking that first delicious chomp. I went down the ear of corn, clearing a row. We called this way of eating “playing harmonica,” because that’s what it looked like.

I unbuttoned my shirt, leaving only two buttons secured at the bottom. Then I tore ears off more stalks and pushed them inside. The husks were rough and scratched my skin, but I was too worried about getting caught to care. When I’d gotten about ten ears, I rebuttoned my shirt, dashed out to the road, and hurried back to the camp.

I returned to the tent with my shirt stuffed like some monster with a giant torso. I carefully undid my buttons and the unshucked corn came tumbling out, hitting the ground with a hard thump. My father said nothing, but he and my sister each plucked a fat ear from the pile, cooked them, and began playing harmonica. I felt happy watching them. I wasn’t the spoiled younger son anymore. I was helping my family to survive. To steal, I thought, was a victory.

I did make mistakes. One moonless night, I crept away from our tent and searched for a field to go into. I tried never to hit the same field twice, and so I always varied the amount of time I spent jogging down the road. This night, I turned quickly at the end of a long row and made two more turns before finding a promising field that I had never seen before. I ran in, played harmonica, and ran out with a full shirt. Every time the corn rustled, I was sure it was a farmer coming to beat me with a club. The lack of moonlight made things worse; in a cornfield, you can’t see more than three or four feet ahead, and the rustling of the corn seems to cover up a dozen oncoming men. I could never relax in the rows.

Finally, I dashed out to the road, my bare feet pounding away, afraid to look back. I arrived at the tent and unloaded the corn. My father and Bong Sook ate. My father asked me to describe the route I had taken to the farm. As he munched on the last of the ears, I told him.

He looked at me. “Son,” he said, “that’s our farm.”

I had zigged and zagged and ended up stealing from our own crop. I felt awful.

In my second or third week as a corn thief, I found a field about half a mile from our camp and began my usual routine. I was munching on my second ear of corn when I saw movement out of the corner of my right eye. I turned my head. Something was rustling the corn, the plants shivering each in turn.

Something’s coming,
I thought. For a split second, I thought,
Wild animal.
North Korea has foxes and leopards and wild boar, but of course most of them had been hunted to near extinction by then.

So what is it?

I stopped eating, holding the corn next to my mouth as if I could hide behind it.

The stalks a few feet away from me parted and a woman stood in front of me, breathing hard. She looked like a giant, taller than the corn stalks, dressed in long pants and work boots. (Fear probably caused her to grow in my eyes—looking back, I’m sure she was just an average-sized woman.) My mouth was open, but I was too terrified to speak. I thought the woman was going to beat me or slash at me with a knife or do I don’t know what. But instead she stared at me, and I slowly realized that her eyes weren’t furious or scolding. They were sad.

“How old are you?” she said in a quiet voice.

“S-seven,” I stammered out.

I had the strange feeling that she wasn’t seeing me, that her gaze was regarding a different figure. She dropped her eyes.

“Go home,” she said. “And don’t come back here.”

I dropped the half-eaten corn and ran.

I’ve thought about that day a lot since then. It happened to me more than once—to have an adult stare at me without saying anything, to escape punishment for inexplicable reasons. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that I rarely had the chance to bathe and my face was covered with grime, with only my eyes staring out. The dirt made every North Korean child of the same age look more or less identical.

I always had the feeling that this woman had seen in me someone she knew who had died. A son? A nephew? Somewhere, there’d been a young boy who was no longer here on earth. And she felt pity when she saw this—a child so hungry he would eat raw corn.

The famine would soon force me to become a wanderer all over the North Korean countryside. During that time, I never saw one of the haunted spirits that I’d heard so much about. My fate was different: to become a ghost for other people.

Chapter

B
ACK HOME, THINGS
fell apart again. The corn we’d saved up went faster than we could have imagined. We were forced to sell the other half of the house and leave for the neighborhood of Manyang, closer to the center of Hoeryong, where my father’s former workplace was. It had been abandoned when the economy collapsed. We would now squat in his old offices.

I had to leave Hyo Sung and the dragonflies behind. I said goodbye to him in front of his house. I wasn’t that sad to be leaving him, honestly. I’d never figured out how he won all those games and took all that origami from me, and that rankled me. I didn’t know that I would see Hyo Sung again once our lives had changed unimaginably.

When my family first arrived at our new place, I wanted to turn around and go back. It didn’t look like a house. It was a long accordion building, dark and abandoned-looking, with no glass in the windows. When we walked in the door, we discovered a wreck: there was dirt everywhere, and abandoned bits of bicycles littering the floor, along with crooked nails and old tools. This had been a combined bike and shoe repair shop before the economy had collapsed. There wasn’t even a floor to sleep on. And no kitchen. Worse still, this wreck of a building was packed with human beings. Every doorway had three or four faces staring out at us, and there were more faces at the windows. I had a strangled feeling in my chest, composed of claustrophobia, humiliation, and fear. I looked at my father forlornly. How was it possible to live in such a place? He didn’t meet my eyes.

My dad set to work immediately. He scrounged up scraps of wood and hammered them together to make crude bunk beds for the four of us. He found a small barbecue grill somewhere and started a fire. My mother promptly crouched over it, heating a pot of creek water over the blazing sticks of wood. Our portion of the building had four rooms, which was a change for the better, and I enjoyed roaming through this enormous space. But it was a place for desperate people. The real houses faced away from the busy unpaved road that lay fifteen feet beyond, giving their residents some privacy. Our home faced the road, like the other commercial spaces. When cars went past, billows of dust would come whirling in our doorway. And people passing by could stare in our windows as if we were for sale.