ONE
North Korea
June 25, 1950
I didn’t want to step into the river,
but I had to. He was floating away.
“Youngsoo!” I
stomped in waist- deep, gripping my toes against the sharp- edged
clams on the rocky floor. Rushing water swirled around me. I grabbed
my little brother’s hand and dragged him back to shore.
“Sorry, Noona,”
Youngsoo said, calling me older sister in Korean. “I leaned
out too far with my net.” It wasn’t the first time he’d lost
his balance and tipped over while fishing, his stomach smacking
against the water. He shivered in his wet uniform.
“I told you not
to go in too deep. Hold still.” I wrung the ends of his shirt and
straightened the red scarf around his neck, then took a step back and
frowned. What would Omahni say? I could already feel our
mother’s punishment stick snapping against my calves. “How could
you have fallen in right before your Sonyondan Club meeting? Your
scarf is so wet, it’s almost black!”
“Don’t worry.
It’s just a scarf,” he said, looking at his feet.
I stared at him.
Everyone knew the red scarf was the most important part of the
communist youth club uniform. Red had become sacred. It fluttered in
the star of our new North Korean flag. Mothers tied and retied it
cautiously around their children’s necks. And red armbands stood
out on the white of the villagers’ clothes like a bloodstain.
Youngsoo hung his
head low. “I almost caught a fish, Noona. It slipped out of my
net.”
“I know, I know,”
I said impatiently. “Every day you almost catch a big one.”
But then a pang of
regret shot through me, knowing how hard he tried despite always
coming home with an empty net.
“I’ll make it
up to you tomorrow. What kind of fish do you want? Trout? Salmon?
Catfi sh?” He puff ed up his skinny chest like a little man and
extended his arm toward the river. “Just name it, and I’ll catch
it for you.”
Before I had the
chance to give him a stern sideways glance, the kind Omahni always
gave me, he smiled earnestly, a piece of black plum skin caught in
his teeth. I sighed, wondering if this was how he always kept our
mother from staying mad at him too long.
A bell chimed from
the schoolhouse on the hill. The teacher, Comrade Cho, stood in front
waiting to close the doors, a red band cinched tightly around his
upper arm. Stragglers from Youngsoo’s third- grade class sprinted
past us as we headed up the slope.
“You can’t be
dumber than the fish if you want to catch them!” a boy shouted at
us, his red scarf knotted perfectly.
Youngsoo pushed up
his sleeves. “At least I’m not dumber than you! And my sister is
smarter than everyone! Right, Noona?”
I groaned. Why did
he have to drag me into this?
“Your sister
can’t be that smart! She doesn’t even go to school anymore!”
the boy called back, laughing from the hilltop.
My shoulders
stiffened. He was right. When I’d turned twelve two months ago,
Omahni had pulled me out of school to look after my little brothers.
I glanced at
Youngsoo—so drenched and disheveled. Did he even know how lucky he
was?
“You’ll be
late.” I couldn’t look at him anymore. “Just go.”
I pushed him up the
hill. Omahni said that skipping even one communist youth club meeting
meant Youngsoo’s name—no, our family name—would go on a
government watch list.
And then terrible
things would happen.
“What a beautiful
day to labor in this socialist paradise!” Comrade Cho announced as
the students approached. “Don’t forget to continue gathering
scrap iron for weapons and bullets, or else your parents will have to
pay a fi ne. Your work is important in making the Fatherland strong!”
Youngsoo joined the
wave of red running up the hill, then disappeared inside the A-frame
timber schoolhouse. Looking at it, I felt a twinge of loss.
Not for the Girls’
Sonyondan Club that I no longer attended, joining my parents at
grown-up Party meetings instead.
Not for the new
teacher, Comrade Cho, who gave candy to students for reporting
anything anti- communist their parents said at home.
Not for the kids in
class, who were loyal to the Party first and family second, and could
never be trusted as friends.
But for all the
learning I was missing. Math. Geography. Science.
When I could escape
from my chores, I hid behind the willow tree by the school window and
eavesdropped on the class.
Today, though, was
not a day for escaping chores. I picked up my laundry basket and
balanced it on top of my head. The sound of wooden paddles beckoned
me back toward the river, and like a funeral marcher, I went.
Downstream, mounds
of laundry littered the bank. Women squatted on flat boulders jutting
from the sandbars. They scrubbed pants with thick bar soap, their
shoulders pumping like pistons, then beat them with fl at paddles as
if spanking their children. Without any men nearby, the women
gossiped about husbands and mothers-in-law as they lifted their
shirts to wipe their faces. I looked away.
“Yah,
Sora! What are you so embarrassed about?” asked Mrs. Lee, her
cheeks ruddy from the sun.
I smiled, tight-
lipped, and found an open area to set my basket. My long tan skirt
was soaked from saving Youngsoo.
“Why’s your mom
sending a girl to do a woman’s job, huh?” a farmer’s wife
shouted.
“Who else is she
supposed to send—her sons? Anyway, Sora’s not such a little girl
anymore, right?” Mrs. Lee said. “Look, she’s even starting to
get little breasts now.” She poked me in the ribs, and I jerked
like a string puppet.
They laughed
heartily. My cheeks burned, and I hunched my back to hide my chest. I
gazed up at the schoolhouse as if it might somehow reach down to save
me, the straw basket pressing against my shins. But it wouldn’t,
and the laundry wouldn’t wash itself.
I took out my
brothers’ dirty clothes—Jisoo’s cloth diapers, Youngsoo’s
muddy uniform pants—and crouched in the shallows, joining the
drumbeat of women. I plunged my raw knuckles into the soapy water,
hiding them beneath the cloudy white.
A grandmother came
running from around the hill, splashing along the river’s edge
toward the rest of us, and I watched the waves ripple over my hands.
At first I hardly noticed the whispers, the way the women huddled
around her. But their murmurs grew, and I looked up at them—their
mouths agape, their brows creased—and suddenly everything felt
wrong.
The women started
hastily packing unfinished laundry into their baskets. I rushed to
rinse Youngsoo’s uniform pants. Something was not right. I needed
to go. The last time a message had spread this urgently, the
landlord’s son was found floating facedown in the river, his body
bloated like a blood sausage. I lifted the basket onto my head and
hurried onto the main road through the village center, stumbling past
a row of thatched- roof houses, my breath coming fast and hard.
“Noona!”
I spun around and
saw Youngsoo running along the bank. He stopped short before crashing
into me.
“What are you
doing here? Were you sent home? Was it the wet scarf? Are they
putting us on a list?” I asked, my voice rising with panic.
“No, something
amazing happened!” Youngsoo’s eyes shimmered like the river, and
he practically sang the words: “We don’t have to go to school
anymore!”
My stomach
clenched. “What do you mean, Youngsoo? That’s impossible.”
“Comrade Cho told
the whole class that ‘because of the current situation, there will
be no school until further notice,’ ” he said, carefully
repeating his teacher’s words. “He even said that ‘today will
be a day to go down in history.’ ” Youngsoo jumped high in the
air, hollering and hooting at his sudden change in luck. “No more
school! No more school!”
My palms turned
cold and clammy.
“We need to go
home,” I managed to say. “Come on.”
We walked past
streams flowing into rivers, then through plains and pastures until
we could see the rice- straw roof of our home. The house was
square-shaped to block the bitter winds cascading down the mountains
in winter, and it sat squat in the countryside, fifty miles north of
Pyongyang, the capital. Although it looked like every other farmhouse
in the valley, it was unmistakably home, the rounded edges of the
worn, thatched roof hugging the house like a mushroom cap. Around it,
fields of corn and millet stirred in the hot wind.
We hurried inside.
A broadcaster’s voice and the hiss of static rushed to greet us. I
set the basket down and stepped into a pair of house slippers.
Abahji sat
as motionless as a rock, leaning in to the radio. Deep lines creased
his forehead. I had never seen our father look so grave.
Beside him, Baby
Jisoo looked up from a pile of clean clothes, yawned once, then went
back to his favorite pastime: pulling socks over each of his feet.
Youngsoo and I sat
on the floor beside Abahji. I quieted my breathing to hear, but I
couldn’t understand the announcer’s words through the heavy
static. I turned to Youngsoo and shrugged, unable to explain Abahji’s
pensive face.
All at once, the
signal cleared, and Youngsoo’s eyes brightened as if he had just
solved a riddle.
“That’s what
my teacher was talking about. That’s the reason there will
be no more school!” he shouted, pointing at the radio. “War! War!
Starting today, we are at war!”
