by J. M. Lee
“The Yanks insisted on a ridiculous version of the story,” the colonel huffed one day. “They said they were working in open waters when our patrol ships blasted them with fifty-seven millimeter machine guns. They called it an illegal military provocation! They screamed about retaliation. You see, it was the first time in their history that another country seized their warship. So they dispatched the USS Enterprise and several hundred bombers and fighter jets. But we weren’t cowed at all. No, sir! While they threatened us publicly, they were engaging in twenty-eight behind-the-scenes negotiations with us. Finally, on December 23, 1968, they released a statement apologizing for their violation of our territorial waters. We returned eighty-two men and the one body but kept the ship and their equipment. They begged us to return the ship. It’s been thirty years now, but we’ve been resolute.”
Every time we went to the ship, I studied the English apology and the Korean translation. The words and sentences in the two languages organized themselves in my head, and new words embedded in my mind. One day, near the end of summer vacation, the senior colonel showed us the communications room. I spotted a complicated piece of equipment with numerous buttons and switches. I opened the equipment panel and saw smooth, shiny diode parts. I flipped through the English signal corpsman’s manual and started to read the fundamentals of radio frequency out loud, hesitantly.
The senior colonel blinked his sleep-crusted eyes, amused. “If the Yanks heard your English, they would say you are very polite and formal, since you’re learning it through apologies and manuals.” He took us to the end of the narrow hallway. The cabin was laden with all kinds of gear—hats, boots, galoshes, compasses, lighters, and fountain pens, all piled on shelves. The senior colonel rummaged around and showed me an old, crinkly, water-logged notebook.
The Possibilities of the Impossible
—Odysseus, returning to Ithaca
Seawater had eroded the words inside. Careful script floated among blue ink spots. When I return to you, read a fragment, and another sentence stated abeth, tonight, too, I will see you in my dreams. I found another fragment: your dress on our wedding day.
“They’re letters from a man called Odysseus to a woman named Abeth,” I announced.
“His name wasn’t Odysseus,” the senior colonel corrected me. “His name was Captain Knight Miecher. He was the signal officer of the USS Pueblo.”
“He left his notebook behind,” I murmured.
“He wanted it back, but I couldn’t give it to him. Not to an enemy fighter.” The senior colonel sounded wistful.
“But you wanted to?” asked Jae-ha.
The colonel’s eyes darted around. He rubbed his wrinkled mouth. “Strictly speaking, we were enemies, you know. When I volunteered on the do-or-die squad, we had the following mission. We had to get on the boat quickly and subdue them, then take away their weapons, cut communications, then bring the boat back to Wonsan. We pursued them on a torpedo boat and battered them with bullets. The men were running around, panicked, and that’s when we jumped aboard.”
“And they surrendered, just like that?” Jae-ha leaned forward. The senior colonel hadn’t gone into the details before. “Or did they attack?”
“They were destroying electronics with axes and hammers. And burning classified documents. Anything they didn’t have time to get to, they threw overboard. I ran up to the bridge, kicked open the door, and aimed my machine gun. I was going to let them have it. Inside were four men, who pointed their pistols at me. They were yelling something at me. I looked behind me, and that’s when realized I was alone. My comrades had gone below deck, where most of the enemy soldiers were. I could shoot, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to get all of them before they shot me dead. I thought of my wife. I thought I was a dead man.”
Jae-ha’s eyes grew wider in excitement.
“We were screaming at one another, unable to understand what the other was saying,” continued the senior colonel. “It was tense. We were about to start shooting. But then an officer said something to the others. They yelled back at him. He reached out and took one man’s gun, and the rest of them laid down their weapons. I didn’t know what to do. That’s when our support troops made it onboard and took over. One American sergeant died under fire and thirteen were wounded. I received the highest accolade for my role in the capture. But if it hadn’t been for that officer, I would have ended up a corpse.”
“And then what happened?” Jae-ha asked breathlessly.
“We brought the USS Pueblo into Wonsan. I still had my gun on the captain. I was drained, but still tense. The sun was beginning to set. We couldn’t communicate, of course, but he told me his name was Knight Miecher. I paused, then said, ‘I’m Park In-ho.’ He offered me a drag on his cigarette. He took out his wallet and showed me a photo of himself with a smiling blonde, holding a young boy. His wife, you see. I showed him a picture of my wife, too.”
The senior colonel paused for a moment. “In Wonsan,” he said quietly, “we searched the men and confiscated their belongings. I took Captain Miecher’s watch, ring, and dog tags. This notebook had gotten wet from the skirmish. He looked at me pleadingly but there was no way I could let him keep it. All the confiscated items were kept right on this ship. By the time I got my hands on the notebook, he had already been taken to Pyongyang with the other captives.”
“Did you ever see Captain Miecher again?” Jae-ha asked.
The senior colonel lifted his cap off as he shook his head. A warm breeze floated upstream and puffed his white hair. He smoothed his white cotton ball of hair before replacing his hat on his head. “He went home eleven months later. It never sat right with me, you understand? Like I was interfering with his marriage. Or maybe stealing a piece of it away.”
“You should return it to him,” I interjected. “He should have this back.”
“I told you, he went home decades ago. I’m never going to see him again. We were around the same age. There isn’t much time left. Assuming he’s still alive, he must be well over sixty.”
“I’m still young,” I said. “I can get it back to him.”
The senior colonel looked down at his wrinkled hands. “That’s true,” he murmured. “Maybe you can.”
The sun was setting on our way home. Darkness mingled with the scent of cut grass along the riverbank. The sun dipped in the river, turning it red, before sinking slowly. Gray mullet leaped out of the water, flashing their silver bellies, their backs speckled with open wounds from underwater fights with thin, slippery fins. We ran by Chungsong Bridge, Pyongyang Grand Theater, the Youth Alliance building. The streetcar squeaked atop the silver rails, passing emaciated dogs and dazed-looking people. We hurtled along. Jae-ha’s tanned calves glowed ahead of me.
“Do you think Captain Miecher’s still alive?” I asked, panting.
“I don’t know. But even if he is, it’s impossible to meet someone who lives in America.”
Waist-high grasses brushed against our legs as we ran.
“Just because it’s extremely unlikely doesn’t mean it’s impossible,” I reasoned. “Coincidences and miracles happen all the time. If Captain Miecher is alive, he would be meeting someone right now. His wife or children or his soldiers, if he’s still in the military. Meeting someone is ordinary for him, right? But if that someone is us, that’s when it becomes a miracle. You can break down the probability of an occurrence as either the probability of something happening to someone or the probability of something happening to me. There’s a lottery winner each week, but it would be a miracle for me to win.”
“But not everyone can win the lottery,” Jae-ha argued.
“It’s more likely than you think,” I explained. “Because we can be connected to anyone in the world in just six steps. You can be linked to Jiang Zemin or even Fidel Castro.”
“What? That makes no sense,” muttered Jae-ha.
“Sure it does. It’s simple math. Look. Let’s say you know one thousand people. If each of them knows another thousa
nd people, it’s 1,000 × 1,000 = 1,000,000. Of course, you have to suppose that everyone you’re talking about knows different people, but in that way you can get to know a million people by going through one person. In just a few steps, we can be friends with everyone in the whole world.” I had learned about this theory in a science magazine I found on the USS Pueblo. It included a profile of a Harvard psychology professor named Stanley Milgram. In 1967, he sent 160 Omahans a letter for a stockbroker in Boston, asking them to send it to someone they knew would be able to deliver the letter to the stockbroker. Forty-two letters were delivered to the correct destination, after going through an average of 5.5 people. Though everyone was scattered, people were linked together. That meant that a Chinese drug lord was linked to a Wall Street banker, and a Taliban soldier was linked to the person collecting tickets at Disneyland. That also meant that I had to be linked to Captain Miecher somehow. I would return his notebook to him.
With my first exposure to English on the USS Pueblo as the catalyst, I grew interested in studying the language in earnest. I memorized an entire English textbook. I went on to read books in English, then branched out into French, Russian, and Japanese, though I didn’t necessarily understand what I was reading. Languages interested me, with their specific symbols and limited phonetic symbols that operated in a regular grammatical system. I lost myself in the study of phonetic symbols, rules, and sentence patterns. Even irregular verbs or idioms and their unconventional uses were linked to a loose framework of rules; these complications, I found, were beautiful. In the library, I read about superstring theory and the theory of complexity, the Riemann hypothesis, Gödel, and Gauss, all in English. My world expanded as I discovered the Annals of Mathematics, the Journal of the American Mathematical Society, and Physical Review Letters, published by the American Physical Society.
I was partial to the single copy of Newsweek, that thin, shiny magazine beckoning with color photographs of the outside world. I read about Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, the rebirth of terrorism, the snare of globalization, IMF relief loans to South Korea, Steve Jobs, and Wall Street. Jae-ha’s theory was that Newsweek was placed in the library so we would learn about the IMF bailouts to South Korea and America’s struggles in Afghanistan. I just wanted to wear jeans and drink Coca-Cola. The word “dollar” reeked of abundance. That was what a capitalist must feel like, I thought, as I murmured the word under my breath.
THE CREATION OF BEAUTY
On January 1, 2000, Father read the New Year’s editorial of the Rodong Sinmun out loud, his voice trembling with emotion. “Thanks to the people’s struggle, the Arduous March that continued for many years has finally entered a march on the double.” The four-year-long march—the march of death, hunger, poverty, and blood—was officially over. We survived, but Father had aged dramatically. That year, I entered the fourth grade.
One afternoon near the end of spring, I sat in the quiet rest area at school, studying the go board and its nineteen vertical and horizontal lines. A warm breeze danced gently in through the open window. I could see the flag flapping outside. Jae-ha walked in and perched on a tall round stool next to me. He spun counterclockwise. “It’s almost summer.”
He spun once, twice, three times. When he twirled, his face split in half, his teeth glistening white like fruit seeds. Six, seven . . . I thought of the senior colonel, his white hair and his tanned, lined face, his pressed uniform, colorful insignias, and gold epaulets. Nine, ten . . . “Do you think the senior colonel’s still there?” I asked.
“Even if he is, we won’t have time to go to the USS Pueblo this summer,” Jae-ha reminded me. “Did you forget? Everyone in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades has to practice for the mass games.” Twenty-two, twenty-three . . . Jae-ha stopped spinning. He cocked his head and swallowed, looking green. “I hope it doesn’t kill us.” He hopped down, swaying.
The seat of the stool continued to spin. I waited until it halted and placed my palm on it, measuring it. It was the length of my palm and two joints on my pointer. “My palm is precisely fifteen centimeters and the end of my index finger is two centimeters. So the radius of the seat is 15 + 2 + 2 = 19 centimeters. The circumference is 19 × 2 × 3.14 = 119.32. So when the stool spins once it moves 119.32 centimeters.”
“So?”
“The stool spun twenty-three times. So you moved 27.4436 meters while sitting still.”
That year was the fifty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Workers Party, and the mass games would incorporate more than 100,000 participants, ten times more than the usual. The festival would showcase the glory of the nation’s youth to the entire citizenry. Tens of thousands of students from Kim Il-sung University and Kim Chaek University of Technology were to practice under the glaring sun over six months in the Rungnado May Day Stadium, as would students in the upper three grades at our school.
My math teacher recommended me for the design committee, which was in charge of arranging hundreds of colored rectangles in the correct place, enabling the scenery to change during the performance. Midnight blue and white would become waves lapping the ridge of Mount Paektu, waves gathering and spreading out, lightning cutting across the scenery and a rainbow unfolding overhead. “A good grasp of geometry is required to create these scenes,” explained my math teacher. “This special performance will show everyone the creativity and math skills of our youth. It won’t be easy. You’ll have to create more than thirty original scenes and lay out when and in what order twenty thousand performers will hold up which cards.”
After design, the images were assigned to specific schools, and each individual student was given a part. The students then pasted colored paper on cardboard to create hundreds of colored squares to be bound into a large book. On the back of each page were detailed instructions on the various movements; some required raising the card up, while others had them moving the card from side to side or waving it. My school was to be the middle of the scene, composing the Dear Leader and the Great General’s faces. Jae-ha spent a full three days making his cardboard book. He had told me earlier that he wanted to be the Dear Leader’s eyeball, so I placed him in the center of the Dear Leader’s eye. He would be silver, the twinkle in his eye, surrounded by twenty thousand others forming the Dear Leader’s noble face. I mapped out the Dear Leader’s expressions in my notebook.
One late afternoon, Jae-ha came up behind me as I scribbled in my notebook. “What are you calculating this time?”
“The orbit of Kwangmyongsong-1, which will be launched into space from Rungnado May Day Stadium on the day of the performance. When you drop an object here on Earth, it gains speed every second it falls. The satellite can use the power from that and circle Earth forever. So the energy needed for a satellite that enters orbit is zero.” I was about to expand on the structure and flight principle of the satellite, propulsion device, and orbit design, but stopped short when Jae-ha laughed.
“We’re not launching a real satellite, Gil-mo,” he said kindly. “It’s the mass games. Kwangmyongsong-1 is part of the scenery. You can’t really send it into orbit.”
I ignored him. I would finish my calculations and launch my satellite at the stadium, watching as it entered the quiet orbit of space and began its endless, oval journey.
Practice began before dawn and continued late into the night. Students fainted under the hot sun and gymnasts ruptured ligaments. But practice continued. Once each school mastered its part, the entire group of 100,000 assembled at the Rungnado Stadium every day for three months. Students sat in seats marked with coordinates and opened and closed 150 different cards to enact an enormous scene. Below the premier’s seat, the head conductor from the Physical Education Guidance Committee oversaw the actions of each school with flag signals. In order to open and close the cardboards in perfect unison, one had to memorize all the cardboard numbers and their sequence to revolutionary songs. When done correctly, the background became a huge screen.
Jae-ha picked me up at dawn every morning, his bag weigh
ed down by his colorful cardboards. At noon, we got a short lunch break, though only three or four out of ten could afford to bring lunch. Some filled their stomachs with water, but as we weren’t allowed to go to the bathroom during practice, they ended up pissing in their seats. Hunger and full bladders turned lips white, which flaked like salt. The sun burned faces raw before turning them dark. Through it all, the music blared on, students opened colorful cardboards, and the choreography continued. One board signified nothing, but twenty thousand boards moving together created something beautiful. And I had designed it. As the performance date drew near, the students grew withdrawn, hungry, and exhausted. Nobody laughed or talked anymore. Three days before the performance, we were all given a special distribution of extra corn and flour.
On the morning of the performance, before the sun was even up, the Rungnado Stadium was boisterous from students assembling by school and by grade. Laser lights, an enormous projector and a slide projector, and sound equipment were installed throughout the stadium. The director’s voice boomed from the speakers. “Tonight, this important performance will determine the republic’s fate. The Dear Leader will watch the performance with a special delegation, headed by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, which has come to apologize for the evil aimed at the republic and to normalize relations. With this performance by the ever victorious Workers Party, we will show that we stand united behind the military power of the republic and the Dear Leader.”
Later, we were given two hours for lunch to allow sufficient rest. Jae-ha came down from the scenery section, settled at the bottom of the stairs, and shoveled boiled corn in his mouth.
“So if we perform for the Yankees,” I asked Jae-ha, “does that mean we’re now friends?”
Jae-ha’s mouth was full of salted radish. “I don’t know, but I wish they could come every day if it means we could get a special distribution each time.”
