How I Became a North Korean Read Online Free

always watching.”
    There were already people rowing out into the lake’s endless silver gray, bobbing up and down with each slap of water, no bigger than twigs. The kids ahead of me waded in and pushed off in double kayaks until it was my turn. My hands felt as thick as winter gloves. Finally my single kayak’s plastic belly scraped against the sandy bottom and I floated away from the shore.
    The other kayaks paddled ahead. I watched a blue heron dip low, thrust its needlepoint beak into the green water, and burst back up with a tiny fish. My fear magnified everything on the lake. A bird’s shadow was the size of a baseball field, the murmuring water around me resembled the voices of people. Entire civilizations seemed to be speaking, but not to me. There was a disturbed motion from deep down in the water, and I thought of the Loch Ness monster, of Grendel’s lair. I felt a desperate hope that the bright cerulean sky would split apart like a badly stitched bedspread as the Lord and his procession of trumpeting angels marched through, with Michael the archangel in the lead, making his stunning entry. They would clarify my life.
    I was leaning over when a motorboat zipped by, the kayak’s bow jumped, and I was pitched out. Water plunged up my nose and into my mouth and lungs. I flapped my arms and clung to the straps of the life vest.
    â€œIsn’t that Danny?” said some faraway voice. “What’s he doing this time?”
    Air bubbles rose in front of my stinging eyes. The sun became a distant spot. My arms flailed for the paddle, but it was already floating away. I descended into the dark. All sound was sucked down deep into the lake, and I was seized with the certainty that someone was waiting for me. It became silent.
    Only then I blinked, astonished to find myself conscious again. Fish were investigating my dream legs, my dream body that had landed in their watery garden. I bounced in slow motion across a bedrock littered with broken glass and cigarette butts. I vaulted across a path—if a moving mass of dead andliving matter can be called a path. I wondered if this was the path to heaven, and I leaped buoyantly from a bed of waterweed that was kissing the bottoms of my feet.
    My delusions grew. The algae gave way to a podium and a man behind it barely visible in the murkiness. Someone was waiting. The plants hushed, the fish arced away. The shadow closed in on me. Tiny pieces of coral scraped against the soles of my feet. I was fearful, ecstatic, and reached for the hand of salvation, but suddenly there was no shadow, no water, no peace. Only rough human hands came pumping down on my chest and a mouth over my mouth, in a long, unwelcome kiss.

3
Jangmi
    I n late February or early March, I walked across the frozen Tumen River toward a man from China, ready to give my unborn child a different life. Of course my crossing had actually started much earlier, maybe with the Great Hunger or even before I was born. The China beyond the river that day was as dried up and brown as my country. I walked with the eyes of men and women following me from both sides of the shore. I remember being hopeful though the riverbanks were still hoary with the remaining snow.
    A border patrol who the man from China had bribed followed me across. There were broad, dark patches where the ice looked as thin as glass, but I was from a border town. I had smuggled goods in and out since I was fourteen and knew how to read the river. I looped around where the ice became dangerously clear until I was standing in the center of the frozen river and facing the man from China: a Joseon-
jok,
so he spoke our language. He had an eager smile and a small head—he was small everywhere,it seemed—and he limped slowly forward as if needing my permission to come closer. With every step his left leg swung out rigidly in a semicircle until we faced each other. He was nervous; his right foot kept making circles on the