Every Falling Star: Chapters 13-19

At midmorning, when the market was at its busiest, Young-bum and I sauntered up close behind a woman who had a bag slung over her shoulder.

While she didn’t come right out and say it, Young-bum and I both knew she was saying we should bear our hardships the way our eternal leader had borne his. Hunker down like Kim Il-sung did in the Learning Journey of a Thousand Miles.

As we neared the end, I heard “The sound of thunder at Jong-Il peak” lines from the Boy General song, sung by that voice with the cascading falsetto that I knew belonged to Sangchul.

Young-bum and I pushed our way through the crowd that had gathered around Sangchul on the grassy knoll at the end of the platform, a crowd full of odors of unclean clothes, hair, and bodies.

After Myeongchul performed, Sangchul would sing, usually partisan songs such as “We Are Kid Scouts.”

I turned onto the dirt path leading into the woods. It was dark under the canopy of evergreen boughs and leaves, almost pitch-black the farther I went into the forest, in part because of the moonless night and the clouds rolling in.

Branches of evergreen trees ensnarled me, and burrs dug their way into my clothes and scratched my skin.

He then laid out the items from the envelope his grandmother had given him: photographs of people who I assumed were his mother, father, grandmother, and aunt.

As I neared, I saw that their hair was tousled, like their clothes, and their eyes were glossy and red, as if they’d just woken up.

“Old Korean proverb meaning it always looks brighter somewhere else.”
“And how does that pertain to me?”

“That we’re not airy-fairy whimsical. We’re very practical. And we’re very hard workers.”

“The greatest art is born from adversity.”

“He certainly is happy,” I mused.

Next, Sangchul sang “We Are Kid Scouts” followed by “Let’s Make Impregnable Village.”

He had a knack for adding a pinch of salt in the right place, or a dried green radish somewhere else, to spruce up any dish, including corn rice.

“I have fear dreams several times a day in which I am sure my parents are dead, their executions watched over by some school class in another city. Then I wake up from my daydream or night dream and tell myself: fear dream. You had a night fear dream...but same thing. Not real. These are in your mind. Now, dreams that are premonitions of things to come, these are from somewhere else...not your mind...like a voice in your head telling you not to go down a certain alleyway.”

But no matter how well Unsik looked after the place, one thing about boys living together in a confined space with no adults hollering at them to bathe is that they also stink.

Although we never said so formally, it was understood that we were no longer celebrating holidays, like the Day of the Sun or our birthdays. I thought it was just plain economical to forget, not having to buy any eggs or pork or to skip a day making money to party.

With that Chulho swagger of his, he grabbed some fried tofu off a tray a woman was carrying and sauntered right out of the market.

A woman sashayed in front of me and I leaped back in shock.

He pilfered some fresh buns from the lady who on my first day in the market had told me I was kotjebi.

I followed him as he sidled out of the market with a handful of twisted bread, not stopping until he reached a low bridge on the far side of the train station.

I stifled a laugh.

But Chulho had a lot of puffed-up bravado inside him.

He instigated a lot of fights, and he was always nursing a sliced-open side or a knife wound on his hand as a result.

For more than eight hours I meandered through the market, stealing candies and twisted bread.

As I reached for a twisted bread, the leader of the gang that ruled that section of the market, a tall wiry guy with a long neck, tapped me on the shoulder and flicked his head, indicating “Let’s go.”

My strategy, if I ever could implement it, was that when my opponent was on his knees or swerving, unlike the others, who just kept hanging on to me, I would let go, move back, and do my tae kwon do patterns.

They were pajang-jebi, Hyekchul explained, whose modus operandi was to knock over a vendor’s stand and then steal the items as the merchant scrambled to pick things up.

Unsik, with his distinctive whistle, climbed a tall post in the market and perched himself at the top. His job was to whistle—“one long”—to let us know if the Shangmoo had caught our scent. Two short whistles meant the police were following us.

Hyekchul and his posse had paid them a small fortune of their hard-stolen won to do spells to bring their families back together.

Hyekchul and his boys still had hope, lots of it, that soon they’d see their mothers and fathers. The fortune-tellers promised them. I was now a full-blown skeptic.

Rajin-Seonbong Market was beside the harbor. A large freight ship, with crates piled high with what Chulho said were English markings, was moored there.

I led my gang into the market, which was much like all the others: stalls upon stalls, manned mostly by disheveled men, who I suspected had had big government jobs until all went to rot up here, and a few of their wives; people hawking wilting produce, likely taken out of underground freezers where it had been stored since harvest season; and a few professional vendors, who were better dressed and more filled out.

He was skittish as he looked around, not yet noticing me, reminding me of a field weasel.

“Who are you?” he asked in a voice that made me take a step back. It was like a gale, like the voice of the man who had taken over my house back in Gyeong-seong and eventually threw me out the front door.

“Who is your leader?” I called out, mustering up the strongest, most authoritative voice I could find.

He put up his hand to indicate I had won. But I wasn’t about to give him any concessions.

Unsik lit the pine tree stick dipped in resin that he carried with him in a plastic bag around his neck.

Then we looked out the front door at our surroundings of barren fields.