by J. M. Lee
The first time I was allowed to accompany him into the room where he washed and shrouded corpses, I strode in calmly. I took in the glistening metal gurney, the shiny wet wooden floor, the bright white incandescent lights, the sting of alcohol, the cool air, and the body lying neatly prone.
Father glanced at me nervously.
“Death is 0 and life is 1,” I announced.
“Gil-mo, death isn’t as simple as the binary system.” Father straightened his white cap and stepped toward the body. “I help lead the dead to Paradise,” Father said as he wiped the man’s forehead with an antiseptic-soaked cotton ball.
“But we’re already living in Paradise,” I reminded him.
Father shook his head. “Paradise is where souls go to live. When people die, their souls survive. Just like a heart can die but the medals of revolutionary martyrs that hang over it stay constant. Or how a pair of eyes can die but their glasses remain.” He always knew how to explain things so that I understood.
About a year later, I wandered into the work area in Father’s absence. I picked up a cotton ball, soaked it in alcohol, and wiped down a corpse. Father showed up. Horrified, he slapped the back of my hand, making me drop the cotton ball on the floor. Eventually, Father gave up hitting the back of my hand to make me stop. I was decent at it, since I wasn’t afraid.
Though his career as a doctor was cut short, Father still respected and loved the Great Leader and the Dear Leader. The Great Leader’s blessings had allowed him to deliver the deaths of revolutionary martyrs, labor heroes, and merited actors. In fact, Father was part of a thirty-eight-person team of undertakers, doctors, chemists, and biologists that sealed the Great Leader in his glass coffin on July 8, 1994.
Hardships continued. The following summer, floods and drought battered the nation. On January 1, 1996, Rodong Sinmun’s New Year’s editorial began with an exhortation: “In remembrance of the hardship and indomitable spirit of the anti-Japanese partisans who shared insufficient food together to struggle against the Japanese military, we must continue on with the spirit of the Arduous March, which was born in the dense forest of Mount Paektu.” People went hungry and began to die. Hardship and death formed an equation: when hardship reached an extreme, deaths increased; as death mounted, hardships grew exponentially. Father delivered many deaths, then more and more. As the years passed, crowds thinned from the streets. Father listened to an old, static-filled radio, singing along to the revolutionary songs broadcast by the Propaganda and Agitation Department.
“I want to believe that our hardship will be overcome,” Father sang. “I want to believe that our future is bright. Even though the day-to-day is difficult, we tighten our belts and follow the General.”
Our rations diminished. I yearned for rice—white, gleaming rice. Hunger gnawed at us. Numbers became a tangled spool of thread in my head. When I managed to untangle them, I realized I was even hungrier. Official statistics had that 220,000 died from starvation from 1995 to 1998. But my own calculations revealed that the official statistics had to be multiplied by 9.8 or 11 to arrive at the true number. That meant that two to three million died during those years.
HOW TO PROVE HUNGER
In the spring of 1999, I went to Pyongyang First Middle School to take a test, pursuant to a special action of the Party Central Committee that decreed the admission of students with superior mathematics skills. Father walked me there. The school was a 2,800-square-meter, ten-story building in Sinwon-dong in the Potong River District, with a music room, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a library, and twenty labs holding thousands of pieces of scientific equipment.
A teacher placed a sheet of paper on a desk, patted my shoulder reassuringly, and motioned for my father to leave the room. The door closed behind Father. I wrestled with the numbers on the paper, losing track of time. Eventually, I looked up. The teacher’s mouth was hanging open. “Young man, where did you learn all of this?”
I rubbed my eyes, suddenly tired.
Father was brought back in. “He’s never learned anything in a formal environment,” he explained. “Because of how he is, he wasn’t able to attend primary school.”
“Your son just solved a problem that is given to first-year math majors at Kim Chaek University of Technology,” the teacher exclaimed. “He would have no problem with the fifth-grade curriculum! He’ll be critical for the revolutionary task specially mandated by the Dear Leader.”
“What kind of revolutionary task requires the participation of a child who’s never been to school?” asked Father, looking stunned.
“The International Mathematical Olympiad,” explained the teacher. “As the Great General is promoting math and sciences, we decided to enter. It’s open only to students under twenty who are not in university, so that takes out scholars at Kim Il-sung University and Kim Chaek University of Technology. That’s why this school will represent the republic. Your son is probably in the top one tenth of one percent of the country. If we teach him well, he will become a revolutionary pillar, raising our flag throughout the world.”
Two weeks later we received an acceptance letter. The day before school started, Father brought home a paper-wrapped parcel. Inside was a new school uniform. He also had a large ration bag filled with rice. For the first time in two years, each member of our three-person family ate a bowl of rice that night.
The next morning, Father helped me with my uniform. “Pyongyang First Middle School is the alma mater of the Beloved and Respected Leader,” he told me. “It’s where talented youth from all across the country come to study. Dr. Kim Man-ho, the biology teacher, is a former professor at Pyongyang Medical University, and Ahn Chi-woo, the math teacher, holds a doctorate. They’re university-level instructors. You know Dr. So Sang-guk, the head of the physics department at Kim Il-sung University? The one who launched Kwangmyong-song-1? The Dear Leader generously gave him a sixtieth birthday feast. You’ll grow up to be a math genius like him. Just forget about all the death, all right?”
He tied a red Children’s Union scarf around my neck and stood back, beaming at me with pride. “You know how much the Great Father loves us, right? You must work hard to be his honorable son.” He reached over to embrace me but caught himself just in time. He had remembered that I couldn’t stand being touched.
On my way to school, I took note of the date, the day of the week, the temperature, the direction of the wind, the time the sun rose, the signs on stores that were still closed, people’s clothing, and license numbers. I spotted one that started with 216. February 16, the Dear Leader’s birthday. 2 + 1 + 6 = 9. This was a good sign.
The principal thought it would be best for me to build mathematical knowledge systematically through the general curriculum, so I wasn’t placed in the class that was actively practicing for the Olympiad. It would be to our advantage for me to appear when I was older, as I was already three years younger than my classmates.
Jae-ha was the only friend I made in school. He had been at Sinuiju First Middle School when he transferred here under the same special measure. His skinny, tanned physique marked him as a country boy. After classes, he raced to the rest area, to the go board on the table, where he had become a fixture. Nobody could beat him, neither the math teacher who had taught at Kim Hyong Jik University of Education nor the physics teacher who used to work at the Scientific Isotopic Research Institute. Jae-ha defended his position fiercely. In a mere three months, he had won a legendary 372 games out of 372.
One day, I went up to the board, composed of nineteen lines across and nineteen lines down. I wanted to arrange the black and white stones in a symmetrical pattern along the corners, so that they would mirror each other if I folded the board in half or quarters. “Nineteen times nineteen is three hundred sixty-one,” I said, gesturing at the board. “Three hundred sixty-one meeting points.”
Jae-ha shook his head. “It’s not three hundred sixty-one. It’s three hundred sixty plus one. The earth circles the sun in three hundred sixty degrees. Th
e last one is the sun.” He rolled a white stone between his fingers. “The four corners of the board are the four seasons—spring, summer, fall, winter. And the four intersections are the spring equinox, summer solstice, fall equinox, and winter solstice.”
I grabbed a handful of stones and placed them in three piles on the board.
Jae-ha stared at them, then took twenty-five stones and put them down next to my pile. He had understood me. “If you subtract the first pile out of the second, it’s 5 − 1 = 4. If you subtract the second pile from the third, it’s 13 − 5 = 8, which is 4 × 2. If you subtract the third from the fourth it’s 25 − 13 = 12 = 4 × 3. If you calculate it the same way, the fifth pile is 41. 41 − 25 = 16 = 4 × 4.” He laid out ten stones on the board.
“Can you move only one to make it five across and five down?” he asked.
I was in my element. I picked up the stone at the very bottom and placed it gently on top of the middle stone. The shape with bilateral symmetry was now symmetrical on the top and bottom, too.
“I love symmetry,” I announced. “Symmetry never changes.”
“Symmetry exists between people, too,” Jae-ha pointed out. “Friends are symmetrical. Because friendship doesn’t ever change.”
That was the day we became friends.
The Arduous March continued, as did skipped meals, people who no longer smiled, and the growing number of shuttered stores. Everything was silent. We were hungrier the more we talked. To take my mind off food, I solved inequalities, geometry problems, numerical progressions, and equations, and sought solutions and proofs.
At school, I worked on problems, my pencil speeding across the paper. Jae-ha came up behind me. “What are you doing?”
“I’m mathematically proving the Battle of Pochonbo. Considering all the variables, like the gravity of the leaf, the buoyancy of the water, the Great Leader’s weight, the height of the tide, and the speed with which the leaf becomes wet, I’m trying to figure out how many leaves he needed to cross the river.”
Jae-ha looked around, then leaned in close. “Do you really believe that the Great Leader crossed the Yalu River on a single leaf and crushed the Japs?” he whispered. “The Battle of Pochonbo is a complete lie. The Great Leader’s brigade of partisans crossed the river on a raft and attacked the police substation. That much is true, but it was after the Japanese police had already fled. So then they burned down the firehouse, the township office, and the post office. They ended up only killing Japanese civilians and children! A restaurant owner and the son of a policeman died in the chaos.”
I ignored him. I was certain that things were either mathematically possible or impossible. Everything was provable, from the fact that we lived on a sphere to the fact that if we folded the space we were living on, we could move to another star in the universe. Crossing the Yalu on leaves wasn’t impossible. I knew that. I just needed to prove it.
Our world was constructed of shiny go stones and numbers. We challenged each other to different problems, changing variables and sometimes destroying what we were working on. We would collapse into a fit of giggles. Jae-ha was especially excited for me to join the Olympiad preparation class. “When you get there, you have to try a Coca-Cola,” he insisted. “And a McDonald’s hamburger.”
I didn’t particularly want to, but told him I would.
We spent time in the shady school garden, where we watched a kingdom of ants. They cut up dead cicadas with their strong jaws, tossed the carcasses on their backs, and waddled across the garden in a long, shiny, black line. We peered down ant holes. When we felt that the universe within would suck us in, we fled across the playing field. We leaned on either side of a large oak tree, creating an isosceles. Summer vacation was upon us.
Banks tosses an old, yellowed notebook onto the table, then picks it up to shove it under my eyes. “This was in your backpack. It says 1968. That’s long before you were born. Where did you get this?”
I don’t speak. He grabs me by the throat and shoves me against the wall. My legs go limp. I can’t breathe. Blood rushes to my head.
The door opens. Angela.
Banks drops me. Angela rushes over to peer into my eyes. Banks kicks the cell door open and leaves in a huff.
Angela helps me to the chair. She unwraps the bandages on my leg and cleans the wound. She applies a new bandage. “You need to tell them about this notebook.”
“Why?”
“They won’t stop until you do.”
“I have to meet Mr. Knight Miecher.”
“Who’s that?”
“I don’t know,” I answer truthfully. “But I have to return the notebook to him.”
“How will you do that, when you don’t even know who that is?”
“I just have to figure out the probability of meeting him. There are six billion people in the world. Two point two million people are in the republic, and there are 280 million Americans. So what are the odds that one citizen of the republic meets one American?”
“But that would be less than one out of several million, or even tens of million,” Angela points out. “Maybe even less. Chances are you won’t ever meet him.”
“Even with those odds, something that needs to happen is bound to happen. No matter how rare it may be. Even the least possible thing isn’t necessarily impossible.”
Angela shakes her head. “Probability is relative, depending on the time and place and person,” she says.
“I believe in the numbers.”
Angela looks annoyed. “Numbers aren’t everything.” She picks up the notebook and flips through it. “How did you end up with this?”
I close my eyes. I’m back in Pyongyang. It’s 1999. Sunlight shatters on the pavement. The Taedong River is teeming with gray mullet, their scales flashing. I see the dark cabin of the USS Pueblo, moored to the riverbank.
THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
Jae-ha and I walked down the light-dappled streets of east Pyongyang. Leaves had fallen with the rain and the breeze rolled them along on the ground, their pale underbelly flashing the sky. The streetcar ran along the damp road, sounding its horn. Cars smelled of metal and gasoline. We were on our way to confirm a legend.
“It’s a huge ship, bigger than a whale,” Jae-ha said. “It’s in the Taedong River. Senior Colonel Park In-ho is still guarding it. That’s the soldier who captured it thirty-one years ago!”
He turned silent as we crossed Okryu Bridge and then Taedong Bridge. Gray apartment blocks loomed over us as we passed Pyongyang Grand Theater. Emaciated dogs scampered along the riverbank, their tongues lolling. A young man, sweating through his white shirt, walked under green Chinese juniper trees with a woman. We passed by Chungsong Bridge, erected where the General Sherman, the American steamer, sank under siege by Pyongyang residents in 1866.
An enormous steel mass appeared.
Jae-ha perked up. “The USS Pueblo has a displacement of nine hundred six tons. Fifty-four meters long, ten meters wide, and armed with machine guns! She can travel up to twelve knots.”
The gray ship was menacing. I was sure it could swallow us whole. My heart hammered at 125 beats per minute. The ship’s steel body had corroded somewhat, and the two tall transmission towers were bent. We used the stairs toward the stern to hop on board. An old man in a tall cap and white dress uniform was standing on the top deck near the machine gun. He looked like a tin soldier, a small, worn, useless part of the large ship. Colorful medals glinted on his chest.
Jae-ha strode up to him. “Are you Senior Colonel Park In-ho, the hero who captured the USS Pueblo?”
The old man nodded, looking at us curiously.
“We’re students at Pyongyang First Middle School,” explained Jae-ha. “We came to hear your story.”
The senior colonel straightened, though his shoulders remained stooped. He balled his thin hands. “It was off the coast of Wonsan on January 23, 1968,” he began. “I was a soldier on a Navy SO-1 patrol ship. Just after noon, an unidentified vessel ap
peared. It was a converted cargo ship, the USS Pueblo. An American National Security Agency spy ship loaded with cutting-edge wiretapping devices.” The old man’s waxy face flushed as he spoke about how he aimed the artillery at the vessel, demanding over the radio that they identify themselves; how the American flag was raised; how four torpedo boats arrived from Wonsan; how the Yanks claimed to be conducting a hydrographical survey before fleeing to open waters; and how he was one of seven do-or-die squad members who leaped on a torpedo boat to chase them down. When they caught up to the USS Pueblo, they boarded her and captured eighty-two out of eighty-three men (one was killed in the skirmish), then steered the ship back to the harbor. He was sprightly now, his voice strong and clear. “We made these artillery marks,” he said proudly, shoving his finger into a dark hole in the body of the ship.
He tried to pat my head, but I ducked away. He led us down a narrow hallway and brought us into a cabin converted into a display area. American navy uniforms, personal effects, and hats were on display. Yellowed documents in English were displayed in a glass case, including an apology from the American government declaring that it would cease spying activities, evidentiary documents about USS Pueblo’s surveillance activities, confessions and apologies by the spies, and an open letter sent to the American president. The mess hall was now a multimedia theater, where black-and-white footage was shown on a loop.
Every day, we walked along the Taedong River, following the gray mullets swimming with the current. Unlike the Potong River, which slapped and swished against the banks, the Taedong was silent; it came from 450.3 kilometers away, carving bluffs and gorges on its way to Pyongyang, carrying anthracite, zinc, and brown alluvial soil, and teeming with different species of trout, gray mullet, carp, catfish, and cornet fish. When we approached the USS Pueblo, the senior colonel would wave out a small paint-flecked glass window.
