How I Became a North Korean Read Online Free Page B

strange sexual desires or be violent, the farmer could be as old as my grandfather. Rumors traveled through the markets, and I had heard of such marriages. But the harmless-looking man who had arranged our brief meeting a week ago on the frozen river, this sometimes tour guide with his seesaw limp and sun-beaten face, he was real. Even though my
eomma
was famous for not showing until her fifth month, I was afraid my body would start to betray me; leaving wasn’t a choice anymore. It was Eomma or my baby.
    After the broker that the Joseon man had hired bribed a chain of local officials, after I bribed still others to register me dead of tuberculosis to protect my
eomma
,
I left while she was sleeping; it was safer for her not to know much. I packed the essentials, nothing personal, and passed the village walls without looking back. I believed I was good at not looking back.
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    Maybe it was two or four in the morning when I finally crossed, but all the hours feel the same when you’re terrified and ready to end your life if caught. Against the mountain peaks rising like dull knives, the moon stalked our half-naked group wading across the shallow river. The moonlight made us as translucent as ghosts; it was as if we were shedding our very selves to become someone else.
    â€œIt’ll hurt,” the broker leading us out had warned.
Hurt
wasn’t the right word for crossing in early spring. Pain needled up my legs. I blew out white clouds too thick, too visible; I tried to stop breathing. Halfway across, I heard what sounded like a gun. We dropped deep into the water, and my hands rose up to beat away a bullet that never came.
    Like the thousands before me since the famine, I shadowed the broker’s exact watery steps to avoid the mantraps along the shore and the gaze of China’s cameras. I could only ask myself: Why didn’t I cross before the river’s sudden thaw? Finally, shivering, colder than I have ever been, I dragged myself up the muddy bank and kneaded my numb fingers and toes. When I found them still there, I felt light, almost happy. I looked for the man who would be my husband, for now. His thin arms, his chestnut-brown face, anything to reduce the scale of that country suddenly too large for me.
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    That was how it happened for me, the impossible dream of crossing.
    But the Dear Leader’s arm had vast reach, and even as Icrossed the river and disappeared to marry the Joseon-
jok
man, we weren’t exactly married. We who entered China, and all the children created from these marriages, didn’t officially exist.
    The broker had received the extra cash that he demanded, and the Joseon man named Seongsik left me overnight at his friend’s house. “Only until our wedding,” Seongsik said, and blushed.
    I was too scared to sleep and too exhausted not to, and my throat was so tight that I couldn’t keep my food down. The next day, he returned to gaze at my pale face as if marveling that I was his.
    â€œWe’re starting out on fertile land, for luck,” Seongsik said. I followed him out of the house, fearful that I looked like someone from across the river despite my new clothes. He was referring to the field set up for our wedding ceremony, but when we got there, it looked like nothing could ever grow out of it.
    â€œIt’s farmed by my church deacon,” he said.
    The shoes he had me wear, more slender towers than shoes, threatened to send me tumbling into the mud.
    â€œChurch?” I didn’t know what a church was yet.
    He caught me as I wobbled. “Don’t worry. Just do what I tell you to.” He held me tightly by the arm and pulled me along as if he were leading a cow.
    I didn’t like being told what to do, but he had paid too large a sum for me. Already twice that morning he worried out loud about the broker’s sudden last demands. And I was grateful. How