Stars Between the Sun and Moon (6 page)

My grandmother leapt up, dropping her book on the floor. She stepped on it, crumpling a few pages as she rushed toward me. She pointed a shaking arm. “Sunhwa-ya, give me that.”

“No,” I replied, taking a few steps backwards. A grin slid across my face as I pretended to open the lid. “I'm going to eat this,” I taunted.

“Sunhwa-ya,” my grandmother pleaded, her eyes now teary. “Please stop.” Her legs collapsed, and she fell to the floor.

I was contrite. “It's a trick,” I said, putting the container down and running to her side. “I would never hurt myself. I'm sorry I scared you.”

“I don't want to lose another child,” she said softly, her eyes darting back and forth, her body trembling.

“But you never lost a child,” I stammered.

“Yes,” she said, her eyes staring out at nothing. “The house burned. The baby died. I am a bad mother.”

It was hard to leave Hoeryong and my grandparents after that golden summer. As we drew close to Yuseon on our train ride home—the cement houses, the streets upon streets of apartment buildings in which Party officials lived, the rows of factories with their black metal gates, the endless low-rise homes in the suburbs—my world turned grey, even though the sun shone.

Chapter Eight

“Daechul and his
father have been taken away by the Boweebu,” my friend Sumi told me, pulling me aside in the schoolyard as I arrived for the first day of classes.

“No,” I exclaimed, placing my hand on my chest. I wondered what the Boweebu, the state secret department, would do to a child not much bigger than me. “What for?”

“Daechul's mother was a spy. She was put in prison last summer. Didn't you know?”

I sighed with relief. “I heard some men talking, but I didn't know who they meant. I feel better now. We're safe.”

By now another friend, Mihwa, had joined us. “She betrayed the revolution and our great father, Kim Il-sung. She got what was coming to her.”

“What do you think the Boweebu will do to them?” I asked.

“I don't know,” Sumi said. “It's a bad family.”

“I saw a movie once about prison,” Mihwa said. “The cells were dark, and the people were hung upside down by their feet and tortured.”

“How were they tortured?” Sumi asked, her eyes wide, eager to learn the details.

“The guards used whips and chains to beat them on their backs and their legs.”

I shook my head to drive away the image. On noodle nights, Daechul would smile and run faster on his stocky muscled legs than children twice his size. Earlier that summer, though, his face had become sullen, his eyes surrounded by dark circles. His movements had slowed. He had lost so much weight that his ribs poked out underneath his sweaters. I should have realized, I chastised myself, that Daechul was the boy about whom the men had been speaking.

I had felt safe earlier, but my relief was short-lived. “Anyone could be a spy,” I thought, looking around the playground.

My anxieties grew as the days went by, and I started to get headaches from worrying so much. I was constantly tired, and I became slower at everything I did, including my homework and my chores. A few times the goat kicked me for falling into her or nicking her skin with the edge of the can as I was milking her. Once, I stood up and kicked her back, spilling the milk I had collected. I fell behind in completing my math exercises and copying out phrases in Korean to help me with my penmanship. As I struggled to finish my homework in the mornings, my mother would leave for work, not wanting to be late herself. I was left alone, often arriving at school after lessons had already begun.

I tried to listen to the teacher once I got there, but her words all ran together. All I could think about was sleep, spies and prison.

“I hope this
cheers you up,” Umma said as we settled onto hard metal chairs about halfway down the aisle of the movie theatre. It was the first time I had ever been to the cinema. It was an overcast late afternoon, and my mother had said she could not take any more of me walking around the house under a dark cloud.

The film was
The Flower Girl
, written, my mother whispered as the lights dimmed and a beam of light hit the wall in front of me, by our eternal father Kim Il-sung.

The screen came alive with moving pictures of a young woman, wearing a traditional
chima
and
jeogori
with a bow, walking through the mountains and picking purple and pink azaleas. All of a sudden, she was in a city, selling the flowers. I slid forward in my chair.

“You,” said an old man with a long white beard to the flower girl, “will meet a nobleman.”

But the film was not so happy. The flower girl's little sister, no older than Sunyoung, wanted to look at something that was burning in a long rectangular box. The landlady slapped the tiny girl so hard she fell backwards, hitting a boiling pot of water. The water splattered into her eyes, blinding her.

I jumped up and screamed. My mother told me to shush and urged me back into my seat. But I continued to sob.

The film was set just before the revolution. The flower girl's family was very poor, and they lived in a shed that belonged to their landlord.

“What is a nobleman?” the flower girl eventually asked her mother.

“They say a nobleman helps the poor like us, to make us rich,” her mother replied. “If only such a man were to appear to you, as if in a fairy tale.”

At one point in the film, the flower girl sang:

“Every spring the hills and fields bloom with beautiful flowers, but we have no country, no spring. When will flowers bloom in our hearts, on the hill path Brother was dragged along? Spring comes and flowers bloom every year.”

The flower girl's mother died following that, and her blind sister nearly did, too. But her brother, who had been imprisoned seeking revenge against the landlord and his family for blinding their sister, escaped and became part of the revolution. In the end, the flower girl's nobleman is her brother, who helps to liberate Chosun from the Japanese.

I cheered and cheered, my joy filling the theatre, when the peasants overtook the landlords.

On Saturday mornings,
just as my parents did at their work places, I went to school to take part in saenghwalchonghwa. I had a Life Reflection Journal, and, in it I had to record all of my transgressions for the week. I would flip through my book of Kim Il-sung's quotes, choose one to copy out and then write my life for that week in review like this:

Great Leader Kim Il-sung said as follows
:
Study is a battle. To a student, studying is the foremost duty and is a matter of life and death.

This week, my uniform was wrinkled. I didn't have time in the morning to use the big iron to smooth down my pleats. I was late for school twice. I kicked the goat when she kicked me. I didn't play with Sunyoung or tell her a story. I must try harder to be a better person.

Great Leader Kim Il-sung said as follows
:
The oppressed people can only liberate themselves through struggle. This is a simple and clear truth, as confirmed by history
.

My little baby brother, Hyungwoo, who was born in the first month instead of the twelfth when he was scheduled to come, was crying. But instead of rocking him, or trying to get him to stop, I put my hands over my ears and continued what I was doing, rewriting a poem. I was not a good daughter. I did not help my mother.

I faithfully recorded all my transgressions each week for the saenghwalchonghwa with one exception. My greatest travesty was never divulged, not even by classmates who knew of my secret. Since watching my first movie,
The Flower Girl
, I had been consumed by the images I saw on the screen. At first, in my dreams, I saw the flower girl as she walked in the snow in her shoes made of straw. Even at school, when I should have been focusing on my studies, I imagined the work camps where prisoners were forced to carry big blocks of wood on their backs, blocks so heavy that blood flowed down their faces.

Children were not allowed to go to the cinema without an adult. But I soon learned to sneak in through the back, when the theatre was dark and the guards were not looking. The first movie I saw on my own was the love story
Chunhyangjeon
. I sat in the second row, my body hunched down in my seat, glancing around the theatre after every scene to make sure the guards hadn't seen me. As the movie ended, with the lights still low, I snuck back outside.

A week later, I took Sumi and Mihwa with me to see
Chunhyangjeon
. We snuck in the same way, huddling together in our seats and looking around every so often to avoid capture. No guards came.

Once I was confident I would not be caught, I allowed myself to attend the movies often and to fall in love with the stories. And once film had entered my life, I became inspired again. My fuel was the dream that one day I would tell stories myself. For a while, I returned to doing my assignments promptly at school. I penned poetry and wrote short stories. I imagined my characters and storylines coming alive on film.

At first, all of my poems and prose were about devotion to Kim Il-sung. But then, when I was fourteen, I discovered my father's romance novels, tucked away in the bottom of one of his chests. I dove into them immediately, reading avidly.

“The couple's eyes met across the crowded room at a concert. The man, a loyal soldier in the military, gave his closest friend a message, written on paper, to give to the woman. The friend gave it to the woman's sister.”

In one of the books, the two messengers also fell in love.

I would read these books secretly until I heard the door creak open to signal my father's return from work. Then I would quickly slip them back, imagining as I drifted off to sleep at night what it would be like to be kissed.

My years at school passed in these ways. Ever since Grade 6, I had been one of four girls regularly singled out for mutual critique, another part of saenghwalchonghwa.

In the mutual critique, a girl in the class chose another girl as the one who had committed the most wrongs that week. Both girls stood, and then the accuser outlined for the accused everything bad that she had done. Almost always, I was criticized for doing exactly what I had written in my Life Reflection Journal.

“Comrade, you are late for school and disrupt the class,” one of the taller girls, with whom I barely spoke, said to me as I hung my head in shame. “And your uniform is wrinkled.”

I looked down at my pleats. Even though we had been given new uniforms the year before to celebrate Kim Il-sung's birthday, I could never get my green pleated skirt to look like it had when I first received it.

“And your socks are dirty,” my classmate scolded, pointing at my legs.

It was true. I only had two pairs of socks, and I often ended up wearing the same pair for weeks at a time. In spring my socks had mud on them from my walks home, and in autumn pieces of leaves stuck in them, from when I rolled down the hills.

“Comrade, you fall asleep in class,” a large student told me at the end of one week. “And you didn't sweep the classroom when you were supposed to. You had your comrade do it.”

All of it was true. I had started off my school years wanting to be an example for my great father Kim Il-sung but I had turned into a lazy adolescent. As I once wrote in my Life Reflection Journal:

Communal living is like a firepot for refining your ideology
 . . . 
it is also the school for revolutionary thoughts—Kim Il-sung
.

My mother has four children. She can't look after everyone every single minute of the day. But I am not a good daughter. When my mother wants me to go to school, my bones and muscles are slow moving, I can barely tug my socks over my feet. I am always late for school, because I am slow at everything I do.

One movie that made a deep impression on me was
The Fire Spreading Around the World.
It was about Kim Il-sung's uncle, who was tortured by the Japanese during their occupation of Korea. I thought about Daechul, the neighbourhood boy, throughout the film. We had never seen him again, and we heard his entire family had been sent to a concentration camp.

In the film, the Japanese tortured our great leader's uncle by forcing him to stand outside on cold winter days. Water was thrown on him, and icicles formed on his face. He was also forced to walk over a burning hot iron plank and a bed made of sharp nails. Tears dripped down my cheeks as I watched the images on the screen. Anger grew inside me as it had when the flower girl's sister was blinded by their landlord. But when I imagined the Boweebu doing similar things to Daechul and his mother and father, I didn't feel the same rage. They deserved their torture, I believed. They were not loyal.

In my revolutionary history classes at school, I was learning about the brutal thirty-six years of Japanese occupation, during which Korean capitalists enslaved workers and Korean landlords profited from the blood and sweat of farmers. Landlords and capitalists were the most evil people in the world, we heard. Landlords beat their tenants, deprived them of food and then sold the girls to horrible men in the pubs. Capitalists, who ran the industrial plants, treated workers badly and stole our country's natural resources, including iron and magnesium. “These capitalists are like leeches who suck the blood out of the factory worker,” Sumi, Mihwa and I would recite to each other during break times.

One night, my mother was late getting home from school. I cooked the wheat rice for our family and served kimchi. We ate in silence, even Hyungchul and Sunyoung, who usually fought with each other over who had the largest portion.

When my mother got home, Sunyoung and I were in our long johns, brushing our teeth.

“Let me show you something,” Umma said, pulling the two of us into the main room. She carefully shut the door to my father's room, where he stood as usual at his table drawing a new boat. Then my mother sang a song for us as she glided around the room, her thin arms waving in the air like butterfly wings.

On her third twirl around the room, she whisked me into her arms to show me how the dance went. I giggled. It felt like we were back at my grandparents' farm in Hoeryong. Just as my mother let go of my arms to take Sunyoung's, my father threw open the door to his room. It banged against the wall, toppling some dishes that crashed into pieces when they hit the floor.

My mother stopped abruptly, her skirt billowing out around her. Abuji's face was red, and his chest was puffed out just like the military
ajussi
we saw marching on the streets.

“Did you stay late at work to dance?” he bellowed, making me jump.

Umma stood still. “Yes,” she said, lowering her head. “We are practicing a song to sing at the concert.”

“I've told you my opinion. A woman can only get into trouble by being involved in the arts. I forbid you to continue. Do you understand? No more singing teams at work!”

Still in a rage, my father grabbed the broom and started hitting my mother across the back of her legs. Sunyoung and I ran to join Hyungchul and Hyungwoo in the room in which we slept. They had already pulled the duvet up so only their eyes showed. As Sunyoung and I huddled in the corner, she clamped her hands over her ears. I listened to the broom handle smack hard against my mother's skin.