"Every Falling Star" by Sungju Lee and Susan McClelland, Chapters 7–12

“Why didn’t you tell me people were being executed out in public like this, for crimes...that seem so...”
“Petty?” she asked.

I studied my mother’s face: her eyes, which were lined in dark circles and creased in the corners with wrinkles she didn’t have a few months earlier; her cheeks, which were sinking into her mouth, making her cheekbones look severe.

I put down my textbook about Kim Il-sung’s childhood that I wasn’t really reading anyway and asked him haphazardly if he knew where the students were going.

The wistful, hazy days of summer soon fell over Gyeong-seong.

An ache had formed in my stomach, a wanting, a yearning, a desire that could not be filled.

Every third or fourth day, Young-bum and I would slink off into the fields and lift rocks as weights, hoping to become like our classmate Min-gook, whose body was agile and strong.

“But what will people think?” I asked, truly aghast.

“We’re not going to die,” I scoffed. But as I said this, I had that sinking feeling again that I already knew this wasn’t true.

The first time I saw a snake, I jumped into some ferns, screaming so loudly I scared a couple of magpies, which squawked at me before flying away.

He pointed at the brown snake that had tiny yellow and green flecks, then to a rock about the size of my head.

My father had to pry open my eyelids to make me look.

My father would answer their questions as if he were one of the government representatives who delivered information to us on Joseon’s Central TV station back in Pyongyang: formal and evasive.

He always skirted around the men’s questions and toed the party line, which in the case of this famine thing was that Joseon’s enemies were responsible and that all of us had to be strong and consider what we were going through as an Arduous Walk, like what Kim Il-sung did when he ousted the Japanese.

Eomeoni would slap us across the back of the heads and tell us not to be so rude.
“They’re sick,” she’d admonish.

I pulled myself into a tight ball and covered my ears with my hands. I started to rock back and forth on my haunches, humming to myself.

I searched the train station, peering into the haggard faces of people waiting for trains.

I skulked outside and drew enough water from the well to fill the empty pot.

I then used my fingers to jimmy open my eyes.

“What are you doing here?” Young-bum asked, his voice faltering when I fell into his house like a bouncing ball that didn’t stop until it hit the far wall.

The main room was smaller than mine, and it was just as sparse because most of his family’s furniture, dishes, and clothes had been sold, too.

“She’s sick. She’s not dead,” he assured me. “She has tuberculosis. She...”

The way the women went on, I imagined this kotjebi to be some kind of wild, rabid dog with foam frothing from its mouth.

“Are you taking me to the hospital?” I then quipped. “Is the hospital my new kitchen?”

You get sick here, you fend for yourself—not like in Pyongyang, where I’m pretty sure they make sure their future generals never get sick.

“You can’t go back to Pyongyang,” Young-bum continued, his voice light and soft as if he genuinely wanted to comfort me.

The men were wrinkled, sunken, and walking around on bowlegs; the children had runny noses, swollen stomachs, and open sores; the women, who like my own eomeoni, I could tell from their fine features and graceful movements, had been beautiful once like swans, until their skin became first pallid from malnutrition and then blue from dirt and their hair began to fall out.

Instead, I turned and skulked away, back to the side of the market where other boys like me, their faces downcast and their bodies disappearing in their oversize clothes, sat on cardboard boxes or on the bare ground and waited for someone to help them.

“Here is the hierarchy out here,” the slim man said. “Army is on the top. You’ll only see them if you try to steal from certain government farms. Then the police, followed by the Shangmoo. Then there are workers, followed by merchants, followed by you, kotjebi. There is only one group of people lower than you.”

The two men then started howling and laughing again, loudly, like wolves, a cacophony that moved across the market.

My feet inched toward the edge of the precipice. I took a deep breath and counted to ten.
But then I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t jump.

I looked up at the waning moon poking out from behind a rain cloud.

“I’ve nowhere to go except the guhoso, where the men in the market say diseases run rampant.”

“Please let me stay here, and I will help you look after your grandmother,” I said, thinking fast, hoping to convince Young-bum that if I stayed, I could be an asset. “I’ll help you steal.”

“If I think about that, I’ll die,” he finally said in a contemplative tone.

Morality is a great song a person sings when he or she has never been hungry. You can walk the noble road, Sungju. But if you die because of it, nobody will remember you were a noble person. Just a fool.

“You’re a coward. You’re...What’s the word? Compliant. Easy. If your life hadn’t taken a different turn, you would have made a perfect general. You’d do whatever they asked of you, without thinking twice.”

“You were being raised to be one of their military officers, not because you were good but because you obeyed. But whether you saw it or not, your job, if you had been successful in becoming a general, would have been to protect their interests, no doubt about it. And one of their interests is to suppress people like me.”

At midmorning, when the market was at its most crowded and the din of people bartering over prices was at its loudest, Young-bum stopped and flicked his fingers, indicating for me to stand back.

He kept right on walking like the other kotjebi thief had, out of the market, nonchalantly, as if he hadn’t just stolen from someone.

The man was engrossed in fixing what looked like a radio.