Every Falling Star

by Sungju Lee

  Toward midnight, the man and I were on our way again. There was no moon, and it was cloudy, which the man said he was happy about. “So no one can see us,” he said. At least he was talking again.

  We met a chain-smoking border guard at the edge of the Duman River on the outskirts of Hweryeong, far from the bridge that connected Joseon with China. The guard spoke fast and in a low voice. “You have to cross the river as quickly as you can,” he said as I slipped off my shoes and tied them together. I then draped my shoes around my neck to keep them dry. The stranger handed the guard a wad of won. “Go,” the guard said, turning around and walking up the hill.

  I waded into the cool water, cooler than the snow I would put on my feverish head in the winter as a child. I held my bag of food from my grandmother over my head as my feet began to slope downward and I slowly sank into the mucky part of the river.

  “Follow me,” the man ordered, obviously having done this before. I walked right in behind him, my toes gripping the bottom of the river like the talons of ravens grab their prey. The water was low, but the undercurrent was strong. A current, I thought at one point, that could wash me right out to the East Sea.

  On the other side of the river, I put my shoes back on, and then, soaking wet, followed the man as he walked at a very fast pace into the woods and then into the hills.

  We walked so far, so fast—a steady march; run is the best way to describe it. I was on my own arduous walk, but going in the opposite direction than Kim Il-sung had gone as a child. I was going into China, a China full of steep mountains with crags and holes.

  At sunrise, the man stopped at the door of a wooden farm shed on top of one of the mountains: a shed like the one in which Myeongchul died. A shed that overlooked a pear and sunflower farm. We went inside, and he told me I could lie down. I did. Within seconds, I fell into a deep sleep.

  “Wake up, adeul,” I heard my father’s voice say. I sat bolt upright, my body shaking from the tremor of having been disturbed deep inside a dream. For a moment I thought I was back in Pyongyang and everything I had lived in the past four and a half years was a dream.

  But then I smelled perspiration mixed with greasy, boiling soybean oil and cigarette smoke. I looked around. The shed was lit by a kerosene lamp set to low, and I saw the faces of two men. The stranger who had led me across the river was sitting closer to me than the other man, and his face was lined in stubble and his eyes dark, as if he hadn’t slept a wink. He was dressed for outside, wearing his thick wool coat. Night had fallen, I could see that much as my eyes darted toward the small window and then back at the man. I must have slept all day.

  The other man, who was older, with gray hair and a round, full face, waved to the table beside me, on top of which was a steamy twisted bread stick, a bowl of rice with pork, and some candies.

  “What is this?” I demanded as the men moved the table toward me.

  “Food,” the man who led me across the river said. “You need to eat to keep your strength up. I’m returning to Joseon,” he said matter-of-factly. “This man, who also will not tell you his name, will take you to your father.”

  All of a sudden I felt sick. “I thought you said you were one of my father’s friends?” I was filled with the heavy weight of knowing that this was a trick, just as my grandparents had feared. I had gone along with it because I wanted to believe, deep down, that I was wrong. “You don’t know my father at all,” I said before the man could reply, my voice weighted with hopelessness.

  “No,” he said, passing me the steaming twisted bread stick and gesturing for me to eat. “I never met your father. I’m just a delivery person, and I have my own family in Joseon. This is my business, taking people back and forth. I’m what you call a human smuggler. A broker.”

  “Take me with you,” I pleaded.

  “No,” he replied, a little too quickly. His mind was made up. He was a brick wall.

  “Are you taking me to jail?” I turned and asked the other man. “Are you going to hurt me?”

  “Shush, boy,” the second man said, coming over and stroking my shoulder. I brushed his hand away. “I really am your father’s friend … your father’s best friend. Your father is in Hangook. I am taking you as far as I can go, and then shortly after that you will meet your father. I promise you can trust me. I know that people have let you down.”

  “You mean my father has let me down,” I snapped, though I did not intend to.

  “People have let you down,” he repeated. “Trust will be hard. But do try to trust me. If we are to make it to your father, you need to.”

  “Where is Hangook?” I asked. I wanted to go back to Joseon right then and there. I wanted to hear my grandfather’s deep voice and my grandmother’s sweet singing when she thought no one was listening.

  “It’s in Daehanminguk,” he answered as he gave the man who had brought me over the river some Chinese yuan. “I need you to change.” He passed me a pile of neatly pressed clothes. As he turned up the lamp, I pulled the clothes apart and saw a pair of navy-blue slacks, a light blue cotton shirt, a new wool coat, and a pair of shiny black loafers. As I examined the clothes, the man who had brought me over the river opened the door and shut it quickly, sending a gust of air and a golden leaf around the room. He didn’t even say goodbye.

  “Why do I need to change?” I asked, pinching my eyes shut, remembering Young-bum and his school uniform.

  “Promise not to ask too many questions,” the man said with a smile.

  The man brought me a bucket of water and then helped me wash my hair. After I cleaned the dirt from the crossing from my face and body, I changed into the new clothes.

  The man then took a photograph of me. A flash on the camera nearly blinded me.

  “What’s that for?” I asked as he tucked the camera into a bag. “Jail?” Maybe I was in prison now.

  “Remember, knowing less is more in this case,” he replied, smiling again. He was a heavier man, with soft eyes that danced in the light from the lamp. Any other time he might really be one of my father’s friends, I thought watching him. I might even trust him.

  “Just go along with everything I say, and you will be safe,” he repeated.

  The man made me stay in the shed for nearly a week, where I was left alone during the days. I wasn’t allowed to go outside, light one of the lamps, or peer out the window. At night, the man would come and sleep beside me on a mat. I did have plenty of blankets and meals, delicious meals, of noodles and pork, tofu and seaweed, even moon cakes.

  On the morning of the eighth day, or rather before dawn on the eighth day, the man and I traveled by foot down the mountain and then along dirt paths and on a road to Yanji. “Yanji is in the Yanbian Korean prefecture,” he explained, “where many Korean families have lived since before Kim Il-sung, escaping the Japanese.”

  The Yanji train station was bustling with people, many of whom spoke Korean in dialects my ears strained to understand. As well, I heard a choppy language, which the man whispered to me was Mandarin. In Yanji, there were also cars, trucks, tractors, and motorbikes. The exhaust and all the people made me feel nauseated. I gripped the man’s arm tight, fearing I would faint.

  In the train station, there was electricity and shining lights all around me, lights I had not seen since Pyongyang, lights that hung low from the ceiling. Many of the people at the train station wore bright colors, too, as they did on parade days in Pyongyang. The women wore tight dresses that revealed every curve of their bodies, in shiny satin materials, in blues, reds, and yellows. I tried to pretend nothing was a surprise to me, that it all was normal. But in truth, my sense of sight was on overload. Everything was overwhelming, and I started to feel as though I was getting a bad headache.

  “After we take our seats,” the man whispered into my ear as the whistle from an approaching train and the sound of screeching wheels drowned out most other sounds, “just pretend to sleep. I will do all the talking. Keep your eyes shut at all times.”

  As I
sat back in my seat, my head pounded. I heard a ticket taker come up to the man and say something in Mandarin. I heard the ruffling of papers and then the ticket taker’s shoes shuffling off.

  I didn’t open my eyes until the man who claimed to be my father’s best friend nudged me. He leaned over and whispered into my ear that we were getting off at the next station. I rubbed my eyes, pretending that I had really slept the entire way. As an announcement in Mandarin came on the loudspeaker, the man slipped a small envelope onto my lap. He whispered again into my ear when the intercom overpowered other noises. “Inside is your passport. It’s a book that will help you travel. You show it to the people who ask to see it. We’re going to take a taxi to the airport. I will walk you through the airport to your gate. After you get on the airplane, do not say anything, not even a word. If you do, your accent will reveal where you are from, and you will be caught and sent to jail—you will be sent from China to North Korea. As soon as the airplane lands, you can say anything you like. Your father is waiting for you when the plane lands.”

  I swallowed hard, nodded, and bowed with a smile, as if this man and I had just had a lighthearted conversation.

  At the airport, people moved past and around me, not noticing me or seeming to care.

  The man and I finally reached a point where he needed a ticket to pass.

  He had me take out mine and the little book he said was a passport. He then pushed me toward a woman standing behind a tall desk. I looked down the entire time she examined my passport and plane ticket until I heard her say in Korean for me to move on.

  I followed the other people, people who I hoped were on my plane, down a bridge and onto a vehicle, a big bus with wings, a large white swan. I’d never been on a plane before. I’d only ever seen airplanes in the sky, in Pyongyang. I found the seat number that matched the number on my ticket. I sat down, clutching to my chest the bag my grandmother had given me, filled with food, including a jar of my grandfather’s honey.

  “Where are you from?” I heard an older female voice say in Korean. I opened my eyes and looked over. She was sitting beside me, looking at me. Middle-aged, I thought. A mother, but a mother wearing bright red lipstick, and her eyes were lined in heavy black pencil. Her hair was long, stretching down her back. I’d never seen a woman wear makeup like this before.

  “Where are you from?” she repeated, smiling, revealing straight, perfectly white teeth.

  I started waving, remembering not to speak until the plane landed. She furrowed her eyebrows. “You don’t talk?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Mute?”

  I nodded.

  I could understand her Korean, but it was hard. It moved the words up and down, rising at the end, not lilting like a flower past bloom. She passed me a piece of paper and a big fat pencil with a red tip. “Write,” she said, “where you are from.”

  I started to perspire. This was a trap. The woman was the police. I looked over again, and she was smiling at me.

  I wrote down the only place I knew in China. The place the man said my father lived: Hangook.

  She looked up after reading and smiled.

  She then turned away and looked out the window.

  I gripped the sides of the seat as the airplane started to move, inching away from the bridge and then moving faster—soon so fast that I felt sick all over again.

  I closed my eyes as the wheels left the ground.

  For two hours, I felt every movement, the back and forth, as when I floated in the East Sea in Eodaejin.

  Then down.

  “Welcome to Daehanminguk,” a voice said over a loudspeaker.

  This time the words were in an even different Korean dialect than what I’d been hearing, one that was more full, robust, the syllables of the words more drawn out. As the plane came to a stop, I remembered what the smuggler had said about my being able to talk as soon as the plane landed. I turned to the woman who had been sitting beside me, smiled, and said hello: “Annyeonghaseyo.”

  She made a tsk-tsk sound with her mouth and said I shouldn’t play games. She then pushed her way in front of me as we lined up to get off the plane.

  I followed the people into the terminal, staring at all the signs in Korean that lit up the walls, thinking we must still be somewhere near Yanji. I was confused as to why I had to take an airplane if I wasn’t really going anywhere. But I brushed the worry aside, reminding myself that my brothers and I took the train just to get from one end of Cheongjin to the other.

  In the terminal, I searched every male face for my father’s, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. I wondered if maybe after all this time I wouldn’t recognize him.

  I got whisked up in the crowd, which was headed somewhere, so I followed.

  I came to a stop at the back of a long line, where people were showing their passports to people behind more tall desks. This time I handed my passport and ticket to a man, slim and tall, whose hair was cut short, his bangs pushed off his face. He was wearing a skinny tie with his button-down shirt. I stifled a laugh. His costume looked funny.

  The man opened my passport and looked at the picture and then me.

  He then stared into my face, as if studying every line, making me uncomfortable. I blushed and looked down. “I have to meet my father,” I eventually said, just wanting to speak to fill the silence between us, to get him to allow me to go.

  “You have to come with us,” he finally said.

  “No, why do I have to go with you? I have to meet my father,” I said, looking up.

  “Because your passport … Sir, you need to come with us.”

  Two men in black uniforms emerged from a door behind the man and headed straight toward me. I turned and ran, at top speed, like Chulho and Mingook racing toward the moving freight train.

  I saw a door, over which was a lit-up red sign, and ran up to it, hoping it would just open and I could escape. But when my body hit the door, it wouldn’t budge. I couldn’t find the doorknob. I slapped at the door, hoping somehow it would open, as the two men caught up to me.

  I felt their heavy hands on my back. They grabbed my arms, and before I knew it, they had me lying facedown on the floor with my arms behind me and my wrists cuffed together in some metal device from which I could not escape.

  “Where are you from?” asked the man behind a metal desk in a brightly lit room.

  “Joseon,” I said in a low voice. I wrung my hands together. They were no longer cuffed but were sore. “Joseon,” I repeated.

  “You’re from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea?” he asked, his face and voice heavy with shock.

  I nodded.

  “How did you get here?”

  “By airplane,” I said.

  “How did you get on the plane?”

  “With that,” I said, pointing to my passport that was in front of him.

  “Where did you get this passport?” he asked, waving it in the air.

  “Well … I found it on the street,” I lied. I didn’t trust this man, that’s for sure.

  “This passport is fake,” he said.

  “No, it must not be true. There is my picture in it. See.” I opened it and showed the man the photograph that was taken of me in the shed. “I have to meet my father,” I pressed on.

  “What is your father’s name, son?”

  “Why do I have to tell you?” I was now afraid. Maybe this was Joseon and I was in prison. Maybe this was my interrogator, prying me for information about my family.

  “Do you know where you are now?” he asked.

  “Of course. I am in Hangook,” I answered with confidence.

  “Do you know where Hangook is?”

  “Yes, it is in Daehanminguk.”

  “Do you know what Daehanminguk means?”

  “Yes,” I replied more slowly, cautiously, trying hard to hide my growing distress. Where was I really? “It’s the name of a city in China,” I finally said, hoping, so hoping, that this was true.

  “
No, Daehanminguk is what you would call Namjoseon.”

  I stopped breathing and found myself slipping off the chair and onto the floor. When I was in North Korea, South Korea was called Namjoseon, not Daehanminguk. When it finally hit me that I was in South Korea, I remembered the stories I’d heard on the street about how police in the South got us to like them, tell them our secrets, and then killed us. I shimmied onto my knees and put my hands up into the air the way I did when I prayed with my mother. Trembling, with saliva now dripping down my chin, I pleaded with the man to send me back to Joseon. “Don’t hurt me, just send me home to my grandparents. I am just a child,” I begged. “Please do not kill me.”

  The man got up then and said I was going to be transferred to Daeseong Gongsa, “the investigation center for people from North Korea.”

  He then departed, leaving me still kneeling.

  The dinner I had that night at Daeseong Gongsa was the best I’d had since my birthdays in Pyongyang—chicken and pork and many side dishes. But the meal tasted bittersweet, for all I could think about was that this is what police in the South did: Fatten us people from Joseon up, then slaughter us as the Chinese do their dogs.

  The next day, another tall Korean man led me to a room with a big desk in it. A man wearing a skinny tie sat on one side. This time, I didn’t laugh at his outfit. He had me sit across from him. He passed me a pad of paper and some pencils and said he wanted me to write down everything I knew about North Korea. “You can draw or write … whatever it is you can. A map of your home, your city, the names of your relatives …”

  I stared at the paper and pencils as the man stared at me, tapping his foot and glancing every now and then at a clock on the wall. At midday, I was given yukgaejang, a hot spicy meat stew.

  “Please give us anything,” the man finally said midafternoon. My pads of paper were still white. I hadn’t written or drawn a thing.