Stars Between the Sun and Moon (3 page)

Chapter Three

On a dreary
afternoon in the sixth month of our second year in the mountains, as spring rain pounded like cows' hooves on our wooden plank roof, my father announced he was taking me somewhere.

It was a Wednesday, the one day he didn't go to the factory. Usually even when he was home, it was as if he wasn't there. He stayed in his room doing engineering sketches, wearing a face like stone whenever he emerged. What was conveyed through his silence was that my sister and I were our mother's responsibility, not his.

But this Sunday was different.

“Where are we going, Abuji?” I asked eagerly. Once I'd put on my navy-blue wool coat and red boots, my father slipped a plastic bag over my head. He'd cut holes in it for my nose and mouth, so I could breathe, and for my eyes, so I could see.

“Somewhere special,” he said, his tone serious.

Water from the puddles in the road seeped through the holes in my plastic boots, soaking my feet. My toes were numb by the time we reached our destination.

Taking my hand, which he had never done before, my father pulled me around the corner and we emerged in front of a store. We stepped inside and took off our rain gear. When I looked up, a woman, older than my mother and wearing a floral shirt and pants, gestured for us to enter.

My eyes moved to clotheslines stretching from one beam to another. T-shirts, slacks and wool sweaters hung from wooden clothes pegs. I noticed a pretty blue dress with a white lace collar that looked as if it would fit me. My heart beat faster. Was this why we had come? But the woman was unpacking things from some boxes in the corner and setting them on the floor.

My father picked up a box of red pencils. “Abuji, do you need these for sketching?” I whispered, as the woman put the other items away.

“No,” my father said, handing the box to me. “I thought you might want to draw pictures when you listen to Chunbok and Manghil.” He smiled. I smiled too. I had listened to the popular talk show at my grandparents' house since no one there ever paid me any attention.

“First thing though, as soon as I get home, I need to replace the speaker for the PA system so we don't miss a government broadcast,” he explained. “Then, we can listen to Chunbok and Manghil.”

My father pulled a small wad of won from his pants pocket and handed it to the old woman.

She wrapped the box of pencils in some paper.

“Where did you get the money in your pocket?” I asked my father as we put on our boots.

He winked. “You are a smart little girl. How do you know about money?”

“Well, I sometimes see Umma putting coins into a wooden box underneath the stove. She also showed me some won.”

“I get some money from my job,” my father explained. “I can use it to have your mother buy extra clothes or food items at government-approved stores like this one. The profits made at the store are given to the government. If anyone sells things privately, then they would be a capitalist.”

Back at home,
after my father and I had changed into dry clothes, he motioned for us all to gather around. He had replaced the old speaker with the new one. At first, all we heard was static. But soon there were sounds: a car horn, a train whistle, a man talking in a gruff voice about the Japanese. Finally, a lone, deep male voice came through as clear as day. I mouthed the word to Umma: “Manghil!”

Manghil: We are on the farm. The time is
monaegi
, rice planting, season. Ladies and gentlemen, hello. You're all really hard at work.

Chunbok: Can we finish all the work today?

Manghil: Of course, we can finish the whole plot in just half a day.

The conversation between
Chosun's top personalities unfolded, with Chunbok and Manghil performing a little skit about how wonderful it was to feed the people of Chosun. I sat completely still, my heart full. They ended with a song.
“May is upon us, it is a beautiful season, let's go and plant rice, let's go and plant some rice.”

“When will I be old enough to plant rice, chili peppers and sweet potatoes?” I asked Umma as my father had turned the radio off. Scattered on the floor in front of me were my new pencils. On a piece of my father's white sketching paper, I had drawn pictures of vegetables.

“When you are at school,” she replied.

“But when will that be?” I had been pestering my mother with this question since we arrived in the mountains but she had always changed the subject. Now she moved to sit beside me.

“I was a kindergarten teacher before you came into this world,” she said quietly. “I will go back to being a schoolteacher when we return to Yuseon. But not until after…” My mother stroked her stomach. “After I have another baby.”

“But we no longer have a home in Yuseon,” I exclaimed, jumping up. “The government gave it to that other family when we moved here. Where will we live?” I didn't want to leave. I wanted to go to school in the building with the playground next door and ride on the
baeguneh
with my schoolmates. I had watched them with envy for so long.

“We'll live with grandma,” my mother said.

I gasped. “Do you want that?” I asked, leaning in so my father wouldn't hear.

My mother blanched at my directness. “Whatever you feel about your grandparents,” she answered after a long pause, “they are good, good people. Your grandfather is a leader, carrying out his revolutionary responsibilities. You must never say anything bad about them, ever.”

My brother Hyungchul
was born in the late fall, just before Chunbok and Manghil announced on the radio that the harvest season had finished. Not long afterwards, my sister and I started packing up our pots, pans, bedding and pillows. On a chilly day in the twelfth month, when I could see my breath in the crisp air and my fingertips tingled in my thin woollen mittens, the gasoline car and the frog man returned to take us to the train station.

The journey went quickly. When we arrived at Yuseon, my father instructed my sister and me to stay where we were, nestled beside each other on the vinyl seats in the compartments. Out the window, I could see people in dark factory clothes, their pace stiff and quick. Their drawn faces and heavy eyes revealed their exhaustion. In the mountains, everything had seemed to sparkle, even when charcoal clouds filled the sky. But everything in Yuseon was grey.

My eyes filled with tears. I didn't want to live with my grandmother. I didn't want to see my cousin Heeok. My sister, sensing my distress, touched my hand with her own sticky palm. “Big sister,” she said. “You sad?”

I squeezed her hand and nodded. “Don't tell Abuji,” I said softly, my spirits lifting.

My sister finally was growing up.

My grandmother's house
was one of the eight houses built together, with a front door painted the pale blue of a planting-season sky and sliding doors dividing the long and narrow house into three sections. While my mother unpacked our things in the room where we would sleep, I washed my grandmother's dishes, scrubbed the floors underneath the yellow paper and then swept the rooms reserved for her other sons and daughters when they came to visit. There were so many rooms, and my job, my grandmother told me, would be to clean them once a week. I wouldn't have time to play with my sister, I soon discovered. All I did was work.

When I was in the rooms farthest away from the main room, where my grandmother read the serials in the newspaper, I felt as if I was lost in a forest before dawn, with the mist drifting off the river. Every small noise on the streets outside made me jump. I swept slowly, alert to anything alive, including in the cobwebs I had to remove.

Although my mother and I did most of the cooking, my grandmother was clearly in charge. My halmuni had only to rub her stomach and my mother would put the new baby down and start boiling some rice with cabbage underneath. I dropped what I was doing to slice the cucumber while the white rice cooked. When she finally ate, she did it slowly, taking breaks to savour every bite. I watched with wide hungry eyes. My portions were smaller than they had ever been, and I could barely finish a few spoonfuls before my grandmother would order me to do another chore.

At night, my insides growled, keeping me awake. Pain ricocheted through my body. My stomach swelled from starvation. During the day, my head felt fuzzy, and my movements slowed. But I wasn't allowed to lie down. My grandmother would spank my bottom with the broom handle if she saw me doing anything except completing her list of chores.

After some time had gone by, my mother went back to her job as a kindergarten teacher, taking Hyungchul with her. She left him in the daycare located down the hall from her classroom. “Your school is not built yet,” she told me. “When it is, then you will go.”

One day, I followed Umma to the corner of the street, not wanting her to leave me alone with my grandmother. Sunyoung trailed behind me. My mother saw us out of the corner of her eye, stopped and turned.

I could see, even at a distance, that her lips were quivering, as if she was about to cry. Sunyoung gripped my shirt. Our bodies shook in the cool air.

“Come back,” I yelled, raising my right arm toward her. But she turned away and resumed her walk to school.

Whenever my grandparents
headed out to visit my cousins during the day, they would lock Sunyoung and me inside the house. Halabuji always locked the pantry, too, leaving Sunyoung and me with no food. As I listened to them walk away, I would bang my head against the door. My sister tugged on my tights, asking me what was wrong.

On those days when my grandparents were gone, often from morning until early evening, I'd race through my chores, my sister helping as best she could. Then we would lie down together on the ground and I would re-tell stories Umma had told me while my sister picked lice from my hair.

“There once were seven brothers who were left alone, a lot like you and me,” I told her one day, as we pressed our bodies together under the duvet to keep warm. “One brother could see for a thousand
li
,” I said, stretching my arms as wide as they would go. “The second brother could hear a whisper from a thousand
li
away. The third brother could lift an entire train with one hand. The fourth brother could travel a thousand
li
in a few footsteps. The fifth brother could breathe fire, and the sixth brother could smell fire from a thousand
li
away. The seventh brother could make himself small like an ant or as large as the biggest giant.

“These brothers were locked in their home all alone while their Umma and their Abuji worked. They were lonely. They didn't know what to do, until one day the strong brother ripped the door from its frame, and the brothers went out into the world.

“From that day on,” I told Sunyoung, as she hung on every word, “the brothers helped the other villagers. The brother who could see such a distance spied on the rich, to learn who was greedy and who was a capitalist. He reported to the fast brother, who would race over to get the rich, greedy people's rice or cabbage and give it to those working hard in the factories, who needed more food for energy to work even harder. The brother who could smell fire alerted the strong brother, who would then fetch water from the well to put the fire out. The brother who could breathe fire made fires in the middle of the village to keep everyone warm in winter. The brothers worked together to help others.”

“I like that story, big sister,” Sunyoung said when I was done.

“We're like those brothers,” I whispered, snuggling into her warm neck. “We just don't know yet how to get outside.”

“I fly,” Sunyoung said, flapping her arms. “Like sparrow.”

My cousin Heeok
had contracted rickets due to a vitamin D deficiency, my mother told me one evening. I was glad, though I concealed it. I hated Heeok so much for the candy and gifts she got from my grandmother that I no longer played with her. But I had noticed how she limped when she visited my grandmother's house. Her legs were starting to resemble those of the frog man who drove the gasoline car. “Heeok is an
angibal
,” I heard Halmuni say to Halabuji one night. “We need to help her, so she does not bring us shame.”

“
Angibal
means a person with crooked feet,” my mother explained when we were alone. “If Heeok doesn't get better, she won't be able to work when she is older. The Party won't hire her. She'll be too slow, too weak, too broken. No one will want to marry her, either. Her rations will never grow because she will never get to work.”

For the next few months, my grandmother paid a young man in the neighbourhood to go to a nearby city to buy walleye pollock. My mother would boil the fish, and at least three times a week my grandparents would spend the afternoon at my cousin's house, making sure she ate it. Their hope was that the oil in the fish would contain enough vitamin D to straighten out Heeok's legs.

One afternoon in the middle of the fifth month, just before my seventh birthday and just after the birthday of our great father and eternal president, Kim Il-sung, my grandmother forgot to turn the key in the metal latch. I scurried over to the window and watched as my grandparents waddled down the street like the geese I'd see in the summer by the river. When they turned the corner, I grabbed my sister's arm and told her to put on her pants, and a jacket. Once we were dressed, we headed outside.

The ground was wet from planting-season rains. As my sister drew lines in the mud, I ran to the storage shed beside the house. My grandmother had left some of last season's cucumbers in a bucket of water. They had been frozen for the winter and the water was still icy cold, despite the warmer temperatures outside. I reached my bare hand in and pulled one out, yelling with pain as I bit into the skin. The cucumber was ice cold. But the shooting pain in my teeth and gums was not enough to stop me from eating it. I gave my sister one, too. After the cucumbers were gone, I lifted the plank of wood that covered the hole in the ground where my grandmother kept vegetables in summer and milk in winter. With my teeth, I pried open the cap on a bottle of goat's milk. I gulped down three quarters of it before handing the rest to my sister to finish. Just as I did so, a woman called out from the house next door, asking what I was doing. My body began to shake. The muscles in my legs and arms pulsed, as if my body wanted me to flee.