Every Falling Star: Prologue-Chapter 6

My father and I are setting up the toy soldiers to reenact one of the decisive battles in which our eternal leader, Kim Il-sung, ousted the Japanese army from our country, Joseon—or, as most in the West know it, North Korea.

My father and I are setting up the toy soldiers to reenact one of the decisive battles in which our eternal leader, Kim Il-sung, ousted the Japanese army from our country, Joseon—or, as most in the West know it, North Korea.

“Okay, your general will be our eternal leader, Kim Il-sung,” my mother snaps. She is very testy today.

Designate one of your soldiers to be in charge of relaying your general’s orders to your troops who are trapped on the other side of the Japanese.

I also know that yellow, orange, and white balloons dance across the cloudless azure sky.

My entire unit is polished, walking in precision, servants to him, our eternal father, protecting our nation from South Korean invasion, ruthless Japanese expansion, and the American culture of excess that threatens our way of life.

On those mornings, I’d don my school uniform and leave the apartment with my father, holding his hand as I skipped down the stairs.

But I would often stop and watch him as he walked down the road. His gait was crisp.

Traversing winter storms, mountains covered in ice, and jagged crags, and encountering attacking falcons and hawks and predators, including tigers, he passed through many valleys full of death.

“We must give our all in the struggle to unify the entire society with the revolutionary ideology of the Great Leader Kim Il-sung. We must learn from the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung and adopt the communist look, revolutionary work methods, and people-oriented work style.”

North Korea was founded in 1948 after a long battle between our Japanese oppressors and the liberation army of Kim Il-sung.

After school, I would go to tae kwon do lessons at the most rigorous sojo in all of Pyongyang. “It’s where the boys who will become military leaders start their training,” my father told me each and every time he came to watch me do my tae kwon do patterns.

If my unit caught a member of the opposing army, we’d lock him up in the makeshift prison of the twisted iron of the jungle gym.

While I was very much content fulfilling my obligations as a child to attain the goal of being a military leader, the truth was that I was also lonely.

I was also studying at the top elementary school to gain entrance to an engineering program at the university, as my father said that being a general who is also an engineer meant I could help the regime better.

I wanted a sibling, a brother. And so, in quiet moments, like then, when only the tick-tock of the clock in the foyer could be heard, a loneliness grew out of me like a rose aching to bloom.

My mother had opened the windows wide so we could share in the mourning, which came in big waves, as I imagined the sea would do against a rugged, sharp shoreline.

“I usually...,” I started and then stopped. “I’m embarrassed to say.”
“You usually what?” he probed.

In history class, I had learned that the best way to get political prisoners to reveal their secrets was to make them laugh and trust their interrogators. I couldn’t tell whether my grandfather was goading me, getting me to admit to him what I did at night so he could decide the best way to punish me.

“The moral of the story,” my grandfather told me, stroking my forehead in much the same way my mother did when I had a fever, “is that good deeds lay a foundation for a house of great wealth and luck. Greed and ego, however, lay a foundation of destruction. The house that is built on such a foundation, one day, no matter what, will be torn down.”

The clickety-clack sound of the train lulled me into a fitful sleep in which I felt my muscles twitch.

Their skin sagged, their eyes were sinking into their faces, and their complexions were bluish, almost gray, like the clouds that rolled off the East Sea in February.

Once outside, the boy grabbed hold of my mother’s wedding chest and, despite his frail appearance, hoisted it without any help onto the back of a pull-cart.

When my father emerged, his face was red, and he looked weary, as if he were losing a military battle but wasn’t quite ready to surrender.

“Abeoji, are we really on vacation?” I eventually asked, looking deep into my father’s eyes. But then, as I studied his eyes, which were the color of varnished oak, I felt guilty.

In these sessions, we also had to condemn our peers for what they did wrong. The goal was to help us become good citizens, of course, and follow the rules of the country, the so-nyon-dan manager explained to my father, as if we didn’t know this already.

“We will be having an election to decide the student council president soon,” he said as we trudged back through the snow, past some low buildings that he waved a hand toward and said were other classrooms.

“I’m sure you know from your schooling in Pyongyang that part of our education is to learn to agree with the decisions made by those in authority. We’ve discussed it and decided that, because you are from Pyongyang and attended such a distinguished school before coming here, we would like you to be the student council president.”

I knew that my elite upbringing destined me to be a leader. Part of my education was to accept my responsibility.

In Pyongyang, my classmates had always been the same since I was seven. No one ever left, until, well, me, and no new students ever came. I guessed it must be the same up here. My face suddenly felt flushed, and I wrung my hands together.

He plopped himself down on the edge of Young-bum’s desk and introduced himself as Chulho. I gasped and tried hard not to show my dismay.

His lanky body reminded me of a flagpole.

“There are no rations here,” he finally said, folding his arms across his chest. “Surely you know that. The government isn’t providing for anything anymore.”

I remembered the mock interrogations we would do in class in Pyongyang. This felt like one of those times—but different. I wasn’t sure if this interrogation was real or not.

“A what?” I finally asked, deciding I’d feign that I hadn’t quite made out what he’d said.

“I guess these children and their families must have done something wrong against the government, like give military secrets to the South. That’s why they’ve been abandoned and have no food. That’s why some people up here have to eat squirrel. Thank you for clarifying,” I said to Young-bum.

I turned my attention back to the students standing in front of me, smug in the knowledge that I’d finally figured out why Chulho and Young-bum say life is so terrible up here. It’s because people outside Pyongyang are bad.

“Today, students, we are going to an execution,” the so-nyon-dan manager announced into a bullhorn with no emotion, almost casually, as if an execution were something the students went to regularly.

The judge listed the man’s crimes, the main one of which was that he had stolen copper and electrical wire from a local factory and was caught trying to cross the Duman River into China with the goods. The judge said the man had committed high treason, and for that, the prisoner was sentenced to death.

Next, police officers dragged a woman with shorn hair who looked about my mother’s age toward the other pole.