Every Falling Star: Chapter 20-Epilogue

Instead, he was wearing the outfit of the Worker Peasant Red Guards, a dirty and tattered khaki Mao-collared jacket and matching pants. He smelled of earth and dew. He worked the farms.

At first, his face was taut. I sensed he was more afraid of us than we of him.

Hungry, we timidly ventured into Ranam Market, hoping to stay on the outskirts, away from the gang whose leader had defeated me in battle.

For nearly a week in Pohwang Market, my gang met up with other kotjebi gang members, who egged us on to fight, sometimes me alone against their leader. A few times, though, all of us waged war.

“But you lack a lot of skills,” he said, “skills that if you don’t hone, might get you killed.”

“We’ll teach you how to use these to both annoy kotjebi enough so that they leave you alone and, if necessary, really hurt. But I’m a bit of a pacifist,” Big Brother added. “Exert only the force that is necessary to help you survive. No more. There has been too much death already.”

So he put Min-gook in charge of building our endurance. Min-gook would have us run, barefoot, across the hills, marathon distances, in the heat of summer.

“Listen to the merchants. Most people talk and talk and talk and never hear a thing anyone else is saying. But try to really listen. Like when we bring food back every night to share with one another, try to bring home one story each to divvy up between us.”

“Several of the fish vendors have asked if we could load and unload their crates and chase other kotjebi away,” Young-bum explained. “In return, they’ll give us food every day and some won if we don’t steal from them.”
“Just what Myeongchul wanted...a legitimate job,” Unsik said in a hushed voice.

They were tired—I could tell by their sluggish gait—and stayed close to the outskirts of the farm, rather than weaving in and out of the trees the way the day guards did.

Watch for the spotlight then. It should float over you, because it floats across the periphery of the trees every two minutes.

The older kotjebi made the youngest boys sleep near the drafty door and windows.

You three remain behind as collateral to make sure your gang will come back.

When the manager saw it all, his greed came well before his responsibilities, just as I had hoped. He jumped up and down and clapped, his jowls flapping like flags.

What I didn’t know then was that we had all become dragons, too sure of ourselves and too coddled. We weren’t as sharp as we had been.

It took us a couple of hours to clamber up the mountain, digging our hands into the huecos to pull ourselves up, thrusting our bare toes into the crevices to give us support.

The mountain had a flat top with two large polished patina boulders set side by side, touching each other.

Then one morning by the train station where I was sleeping, as some magpies woke me with their haughty chatter, I heard Young-bum whisper to me: “Go back to Gyeong-seong.”

For the last months of winter I helped my grandfather make his medicines, grinding herbs into fine powders with a wooden pestle-and- mortar hand grinder he had made himself.

He’d administer whatever medicines were needed, and I’d help him bandage wounds and set broken bones.

One rainy afternoon, I found my grandfather in one of his sheds, nailing planks of wood together, and then those planks onto a flat piece of plywood, creating a box. Then he poured sand into it. “We have no notebooks,” he explained as he waved his hands over the contraption. “This,” he said with a wide smile, “will be how you study at the house of your grandmother.”

We’d swing on an old tire tied to a tree on a fraying rope and leap off into the stream.

One time, I thought about Pyongyang and wondered why I was ever in such awe of our capital city, why everyone held it in such great esteem.

I came to realize then and there that gilded castles in the sky aren’t ever buildings. They’re people. My gilded castle was here, all along, with my friends, my brothers, Chulho, Min-gook, Sangchul, Unsik, Myeongchul, and Young-bum.

His speech was curt. I got the sense he really didn’t want to talk.

I was going into China, a China full of steep mountains with crags and holes.

I tried to pretend nothing was a surprise to me, that it all was normal. But in truth, my sense of sight was on overload. Everything was overwhelming, and I started to feel as though I was getting a bad headache.

I could understand her Korean, but it was hard. It moved the words up and down, rising at the end, not lilting like a flower past bloom.

This time the words were in an even different Korean dialect than what I’d been hearing, one that was more full, robust, the syllables of the words more drawn out.

I finally wrote that my family was from Gyeong-seong; that my parents and grandparents were poor potato farmers; that I went to school only until grade four; after that, I had to work the fields; and that I was illiterate and unable to write anything more.

I could tell by his broad shoulders and stocky stance.

As a North Korean defector with South Korean citizenship, I would be considered a traitor by the government of Joseon and would be imprisoned.

Not long after I arrived in South Korea, my father told me why we were kicked out of Pyongyang, but I cannot write it here. You see, my father was in the military. He and his story are known by the regime. Disclosing the reason would identify him and put the few relatives of my family still in North Korea at risk.

When my father left Gyeong-seong in the winter of 1998 for China, he did become trapped, as my brothers and I on the street speculated.

Unlike my journey, which my father paid a small fortune to orchestrate, my father’s exodus from North Korea to South Korea took six months.

His second daughter was supposed to go to the United States to study. She deferred a semester to teach me.

To help gain diplomatic experience, I interned in 2014 with Canadian member of Parliament Barry Devolin as part of a program funded by HanVoice, a North Korean advocacy organization.

Since then, my father, other defectors, and I have, on our meager salaries, helped rescue other defectors trapped in China.

North Koreans in China live perilous lives, flirting in an underground work economy and suffering abuse, poverty, and depraved living conditions.

A portion of the proceeds of this book are being donated to the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights to help North Korean refugees in China.