The Moth Presents All These Wonders

by Catherine Burns

  But as he got into the car, he saw me.

  And he tipped his fedora and said, “Mr. Glow. I got to go.”

  And then so did I. I had to go home.

  GEORGE DAWES GREEN, founder of The Moth, is an internationally celebrated author whose critically acclaimed novels include The Caveman’s Valentine, The Juror, and Ravens.

  This story was told on July 24, 2014, at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. The theme of the evening was Something Is Eternal. Director: Catherine Burns.

  We were coming down the steps when they were coming in. A new family was moving into our three-flat building that we lived in in Chicago. They were moving into the garden apartment, which is really small for a family.

  I stopped, talked to the husband. My wife talked to the wife. And our two-year-old daughters introduced themselves on the porch. They had a two-year-old, and we had a two-year-old.

  Me and the father smiled looking at our little girls. Kids introduce themselves by what they have: “This is my doll,” “This is my bear.”

  The father said that they were moving from the shelter down the street and were happy to have a place to call home.

  I told him, “I know how it is, man. If you need anything, just give a knock upstairs. Anything.”

  We left, and they went inside.

  The very next day, I get a knock at the door. The father was asking for money for train fare to go downtown.

  I told him, “No problem. I’m headed downtown to go to work. We could just walk together. I’ll swipe you through, too.”

  We walked down the sidewalk and down the long line of three-flat buildings like ours. There’s a big apartment building across the street. The neighborhood in Uptown in Chicago is really diverse. It’s Asians, Africans, Europeans, Americans, all of us.

  You can get Starbucks coffee from one building and a fifth of Henny from another. There’s Mexican food, Thai food, an Ethiopian restaurant, or you can get some Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, all on the way to the train. We live in the Starbucks area.

  We’re walking on past this big church with a shelter in the basement, and then it’s the corner store. Guys hang out at the corner store. There’s been some shootings at the corner.

  I ignore the guys at the corner. They sell drugs on the corner. There’s gangs in Chicago, if you haven’t heard. I’m from Detroit, so I’m not clueless, but I know if you’re not from a certain area, it’s best just to keep your eyes open and go unseen. They ignore me, I got nothing to do with what they’re doing. None of my business.

  So I’m a little concerned when my new neighbor knows all the guys on the corner really well. But we talk on the train, laugh. He’s a good guy. His name is Jessie.

  Another night I get another knock on the door. This time it’s the mother from downstairs. It’s after midnight. My wife works late, she isn’t home. The mother’s asking to borrow twenty dollars for baby diapers.

  First, it’s after midnight. The baby should be sleeping. The store’s closed. The other thing, did she forget that we have a baby, too? So when I give her a couple of diapers to make it through the night, she looks disappointed, which makes me suspicious.

  Another night my wife also wasn’t home. Knock at the door, and the mother, she just hands her daughter over to me. She’s in a panic, in a fluster, and says she has to go across town for an emergency.

  I’m holding her daughter, and she doesn’t even wait for an answer. She just leaves. I look from the window, and I see her get in the car with a man who isn’t Jessie.

  I knew it was drugs. I’m going to be real wit’cha, I knew it was crack. You know, you ain’t that wide awake that late at night, unless it’s drugs, or the pursuit of some drugs.

  The thing is, I have a heart towards people with addictions, because I got some of my own. It’s not drugs, but I’m no stranger to community rooms and church basements.

  In the morning my wife cooked breakfast for us, and the girls played in the living room. My daughter, Zoe, brought every toy she ever got into the living room to play. (You know, kids are show-offs.)

  I said, “Zoe, which toy you going to give Ashley to have?”

  Zoe gave me that look like, What?

  But Zoe is generous. She gave her a doll that was better than I expected. It was this little plush doll with a bonnet and pigtails.

  My wife called Ashley’s mom, and told her that we’ll keep her an extra day, and that night I put them under the Dora the Explorer covers and tucked them in.

  One day I’m coming home from the train from work, and I pass by the corner, and the corners are empty. It’s kind of nice, like a regular neighborhood. I pass by the church with the shelter, the big apartment building across the street.

  I get to my house, and all the guys from the corner are sitting on my porch, smoking with Jessie.

  I just stood there for a second.

  I can’t ignore it now.

  The thing is, I came up in a rougher neighborhood than this Uptown neighborhood in Chicago. You know, this is a pretty nice neighborhood to me. I work hard so my family can have a different experience than I had around drugs and violence. I want better for my family.

  It’s at a distance I can ignore at the corner, but not on my porch. But I don’t say anything. I just go inside.

  They were smoking in the garden apartment, and it was coming into our place, and my wife isn’t as passive as me. She don’t really play that.

  She went downstairs and banged on the door like the police and told them, “Y’all got to stop smoking down here. My daughter’s coughing.”

  So they just went out to the porch. I went downstairs to talk to Jessie.

  I’m like, “How many people you got living down here now?” He said it was just them, but the guys from the corner will come in and out. They hard to get rid of. They like roaches.

  I told him, “Man, I’m going to tell you, y’all going have some problems, because my wife—she hates roaches.”

  Cindy had seen one of the guys from the corner selling drugs in front of our place. And she yelled out the window, “If I see it again, I’m calling the police!”

  She told me when I got home. I’m like, “Baby, you can’t go yelling out the window to a bunch of drug dealers and gang members that you’re going to call the police. If they get caught, who they gonna point to? You smarter than that.”

  But she was just frustrated.

  Cindy saw some guys selling drugs again, and she told me she’s going to call the police.

  I stopped her.

  You don’t call the police. I have this programming in my mind. I grew up in Detroit in the crack era, the eighties. You don’t call the police.

  First, there’s a distrust that the police will actually do something to help the situation. Another thing is the threat of retaliation from the person you’re telling on.

  Snitches get stitches.

  But I think about that little girl, and all those men coming in and out of that tiny apartment—the dazed look on her face when I see her, and how when she stayed with us, she didn’t want to go home. I’ve got to confront this stupid way of thinking. I can’t just ignore it.

  One night another knock at the door. My wife wasn’t home. I’m a little frustrated now. I’m thinking it’s the mother or the father downstairs, and I opened the door mad, but it’s the police.

  I could see them all in this little foyer, with vests and badges, and they tell me to go back inside and lock the door. One of the officers I see has a battering ram. I go back inside.

  I hear them bust down the door: BOOM! I can hear scuffling and wrestling down below. The police are yelling and cussing. I go in to check on my daughter, and she is still asleep. She didn’t know anything was happening.

  I can hear the guys from the corner screaming at the police, and then it just goes silent. I look from the window, and I see that the police are carting everybody up from the basement to a wagon, all the guys from the corner, then the family, Jessie, his wife, and the
ir daughter.

  One of the officers has Ashley in his arms. She’s in her pink pajamas against his dark blues and blacks, and she has that little doll that Zoe gave her.

  I want to go out there and tell the officer, “Hey, I can just keep her until everything is taken care of.”

  But I don’t want to go out and have the officers think I’m a part of everything else that’s happening.

  We all look the same to the police.

  My wife’s not home. I go out, get arrested, and then my daughter’s in some officer’s arms. I think the best thing is to stay where I am. It’s none of my business.

  The next week corners are empty. No smoke in our apartment, nobody on our porch. About a week after that, same guys on the corner. They don’t say anything to me. They ignore me, and I ignore them. We live in two different worlds. But I don’t know if that’s really true.

  I get to my place, and I hear the landlord downstairs. I go down there to check on him, see if he going to discount my rent for all the stuff we’ve been putting up with. And I’m surprised to see the family, Jessie, his wife, and Ashley. Our daughters play on the porch while me and Jessie talk.

  Jessie says, “You didn’t have to call the police.” I tell him I didn’t.

  And I didn’t. I don’t call the police. I can’t be a part of putting more black men in prison.

  I looked at him, and I said, “But I should have done something, because you need help.” And he’s nodding.

  He said they have to leave. They hadn’t paid rent for like a year.

  I asked him what he was going to do. He didn’t know. He asked if we could keep Ashley just till he got himself together.

  I wanted to say yeah, but we struggling to make it ourselves. We can’t just take their little girl. It don’t work like that.

  We looked at our daughters playing on the porch. And I looked him in the eyes, and I said, “Take care of that little girl. And if you need anything, give me a call. Anything.”

  SHANNON CASON is a writer and storyteller. He is a GrandSLAM champion, a MainStage storyteller, and a host with The Moth. Shannon also hosts his own storytelling podcast with WBEZ Chicago, called Homemade Stories, where he shares interesting stories from his life and some of his fiction, too. He is a husband, father of two beautiful girls, and he lives in Detroit. Please find more about his upcoming projects at shannoncason.com.

  This story was told on May 6, 2016, at OZ Arts in Nashville. The theme of the evening was Fish Out of Water. Director: Meg Bowles.

  I was packing my suitcase when there was a knock at the door. I knew who was there, so I ignored it and kept packing. But she kept knocking, so finally I gave up, and opened the door.

  She was one of the evangelical Christians that I had been working with for the past six months.

  She said, “He’s dead.”

  For the moment I was confused. I thought she meant God.

  This was Christmastime, and there had been a lot of these Bible-study meetings lately, which is why I didn’t want to open the door. It was exhausting, pretending to be one of them for months. And this was my last day teaching. I just wanted to get out of there.

  Then she pointed at the ceiling and, now whispering, said, “He died.”

  Then I knew she meant the other god in that world, Kim Jong-il, the then–Great Leader of North Korea.

  So the place was Pyongyang. The time was December 2011. I had been teaching at an all-male university in Pyongyang founded and operated by a group of evangelical Christians from around the world.

  Now, religion is not allowed in North Korea, and proselytizing is a capital crime. However, this group of evangelical Christians had struck a deal with the North Korean regime—an unofficial one—to fund the education of the sons of the elite in exchange for access.

  They promised to not proselytize, but they were getting a footing in a country of 25 million devout followers of the Great Leader. If he were to fall, then they would need another god to replace him.

  To be allowed there, I pretended to be one of them. But I only got away with it because the real missionaries were pretending to not be missionaries.

  Why did I go to such an extreme to be there? Writing about North Korea with any depth or meaning is impossible unless you are embedded there. A full immersion was the only way. I had been going to North Korea since 2002, returning there repeatedly, but all I ever got was propaganda. And if I were to just write whatever they showed me, then I would be the regime’s publicist.

  The only other way to get to the reality of North Korea is through the defectors who flee North Korea. They tell their stories to journalists, often years later. And I feel bad for saying this, but I have traveled to all the surrounding regions and talked to many defectors, and it was always difficult to tell how much of these stories to believe. Because the worse the story, the more reward there is for them, and verification is nearly impossible.

  But this was also personal. I was born and raised in South Korea into a family that was torn apart by the Korean War. In 1950, when North Korea bombed South Korea, my grandmother was living in Seoul, and she packed up her five children, including my mother (who was then four years old), to flee.

  All the southbound trains were jam-packed, so the family secured seats in the back of a truck.

  When the truck was about to pull off, somebody shouted, “Young men should give up seats for women and children!”

  My grandmother’s first child, my uncle (who was then seventeen) got up and said, “I’ll get a ride, and I’ll join you in the next town.”

  He never arrived.

  Later the neighbors reported seeing him with his hands tied, being dragged away by North Korean soldiers.

  In 1953, after millions of Koreans died and families got separated, an armistice was signed, and the Korean War paused. Along the 38th parallel, which is an artificial division originally created by the United States with the help of the Allies, the five-thousand-year-old kingdom of Korea was split in half.

  From that point on, like millions of mothers on both sides of Korea, my grandmother waited for her son to come home.

  Over seventy years have passed, and that border—which Koreans thought was temporary—is still there. Even though I moved to America when I was thirteen years old, this family history haunted me. Later, as a writer, I became obsessed with North Korea and finding out the truth of what was really going on there.

  So I went undercover as a teacher and a missionary.

  When I got there in 2011, they were preparing for Year 100. The North Korean calendar system begins at the birth of the original Great Leader. To celebrate the occasion, the regime had shut down all universities and put the university students to work in construction sites, supposedly to build Great Leader monuments.

  In actuality, however, the then–Great Leader was dying, and his young son was about to take over. They scattered all the youth to prevent any possible revolt. Outside, this was the time of the Arab Spring, and they didn’t want a North Korean Spring.

  The only ones who did not get sent to the construction fields were my elite students. But the campus was a five-star prison. The students were never allowed out. The teachers were only allowed out in group outings with minders to visit Great Leader monuments. Every conversation was overheard, every room was bugged. Every class was recorded, every lesson plan had to be preapproved.

  I ate every meal with the students, and they never veered from the script. They went everywhere on campus in pairs and groups and watched each other.

  In order to get to know them better, I assigned letter and essay writing. Although many of them were computer majors, they didn’t know of the existence of the Internet. Although many were science majors, they didn’t know when a man first walked on the moon.

  The vacuum of knowledge about anything other than their Great Leader was shocking, but I was under a strict set of rules to never tell them anything about the outside world.

  One night at dinner, a student s
aid he listened to rock and roll on his birthday (usually they all said they only listened to songs about the Great Leader). When he blurted this out, he looked around to check who might have heard him, and he froze. And the fear that I saw on his face was so palpable that I knew that whatever punishment that would result from this slip was something beyond my imagination, so I changed the subject.

  What really disturbed me was that I had been waiting for that slip in order to understand their world better. But when that slip happened, I became so nervous and worried for him that I began to question what it was that I was doing there.

  Then I began to notice something strange about my students. They lied very often and very easily. Their lies came in different tiers.

  Sometimes they lied to protect their system. There was a building on campus called Kim Il-Sung–ism Study Hall, where they went to study Great Leader-ism every day, and they had to guard this building 24/7. So I would see them guarding the building all night, but if I asked them, “How was your night?” they’d say they slept well and felt really rested.

  Sometimes they would just regurgitate lies that they had been told. For example, they’d say that the scientists in their country could change blood types from A to B.

  Sometimes they lied for no apparent reason, as if the line between truth and lies just wasn’t clear to them. They would tell me that they should have cheated better than they did, or they’d say a hacker in their country gets rewarded if he hacks really, really well.

  Initially I was upset and repulsed by these rampant lies, but as I spent months with them in that locked compound, I began to understand their predicament, and I felt such empathy. They were so easy to love, but impossible to trust. They were sincere, but they lied.

  But if all they’ve ever known were lies, then how can you expect them to be any other way? It’s as if their great humanity was in constant conflict with the inhumanity of their system.

  But then I was there, pretending to be something I’m not, in order to get to the truth of the place. In that world, lies were necessary for survival.