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You know how for some people, it just sorta seems like sad things follow them around no matter where they go? Back in the old days, in the fishing village, I thought maybe I’d be that kinda person, and when I got curst by that mudang I was sure of it. Then I got to Chongjin, and everything changed. I had food and meat every day, and it weren’t perfect living with Granny, but it was still better than it was for most of my classmates, so I thought maybe it was my turn to be the lucky one for a change. Sometimes, especially after word got around school that I had a generous granny, I thought I was as happy as anybody could be. ’Course now I drive around with Pastor and his wife and see all the Christmas lights, and there’s presents under their tree at home, and I even got a stocking that’s gonna have treats in it for me to have on Christmas morning, and Miss Sandy’s talking about cooking up three whole hams, that’s how many people are coming over for Christmas dinner, and I have to kinda laugh at myself for not even knowing what happiness was back then. Because if I were to go back to Chongjin now, even back to when there was plenty of food and I was the most popular boy in my class, I’d actually be feeling pretty sorry for myself most days.
That night when Uncle and me fought was just the beginning, and pretty soon there weren’t even no angel to slip a sticky bun in my hand. Granny started passing Uncle things to sell or trade for food, pretty things like jewelry or little whatnots she had perched around the house on shelves, and each time she gave them up, she looked a little older and a little skinnier than before. Not too long later and her house was hardly any different than what we had lived in back in the old days, once all the pretty things started getting sold off, and all we had in return was a little bit of food we had to make stretch ’til next time. Then one day it turned out that there weren’t nothing left to sell, and Granny was still saying things like, “The Great Leader will take care of us. We just need to be patient. You’ll see.” And I know Uncle got mad with her talking like that ’cause I seen him making fists and twitching his jaw like he was having a hard time keeping his temper from getting lost on him.
It’s funny the things you learn in a famine, things that boys or girls who never got that hungry before wouldn’t even guess. Did you know, for example, there’s a special kind of soup you can make out of not much more than water and tree bark? It’s awful sour in your mouth, and it makes your stomach do a kinda twist, like it wants to get itself tied in a knot, but you eat it anyway ’cause you ain’t got nothing else for that whole day. You know how I said Mr. Mittens and I liked to hunt for bugs in the old days? Turns out there’s hardly any bug you can’t eat. They make an awful crunching sound, but once you get used to it, especially once you feel how nice your body feels after a beetle, you start to think of them like a treat. Maybe like popcorn, except you don’t get a whole bowl full of them, and they’re not covered in that orange and yellow juicy stuff that makes it taste so good on account of the extra salt or whatnot.
That reminds me, we went to the school library the other day, and I saw a book about all kinds of flowers you can eat, so I peeked through it, and it turns out it’s nearly all wrong. There’s lots of flowers it says aren’t eatable, but I think it really means they just don’t taste as good as the others. When I got to Medford, and I seen how some people here like to grow flowers in their gardens, I remember being confused at first ’cause everyone I talked to before said in America there was plenty to eat, so I wondered why they had to grow their own food instead of getting it from the stores. And then, if they were gonna grow their own food, I wondered why they didn’t plant berries or carrots or something yummy like that. If you had never lived through famine, you’d look at them gardens and see something pretty, but I look at them now and I could tell you right away which flowers are the first I’d eat and which I’d save until I was really high on the starving scale on account of them tasting so bad.
There’s another thing about famine that’s not really interesting like that, it’s just sorta sad. It’s that even if you’re a pretty nice person, you’ll do a lot of awful things for a little bit of extra food. Like once, I saw a kid catch a grasshopper, but before he could eat it, three big teenagers, they beat him up for it, and then they turned to beat each other up to see who got the biggest part, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they wasted more energy fighting than they woulda got from ten grasshoppers or more.
Uncle was meaner during the famine, if you can believe that. Since we was living so long off the pretty things Granny gave him to sell, there were lots of times we got a few days’ worth of food at once and had to make it stretch out. So Granny would be real careful-like and separate everything into different dishes and keep things covered up so we wouldn’t eat through them too fast, but it’s Pyongyang-perfect truth I seen Uncle sneak some of it out before it was time. I don’t really want to tell you this, on account of you probably never having lived through famine so not quite understanding how it was neither, but I did the same thing too, and I didn’t even think it was wrong. Sure, if I’d have thunk about it, I woulda figured that me and Uncle taking extra food meant Granny was getting the least out of all of us, but there comes a place high enough on the starving scale when those kinds of worryings don’t even go through your mind. I think that’s how you can tell if you’re actually famine-starving or just hungry-starving. If you’re hungry-starving, you’d probably steal food from somebody if you were bad off enough, but you’d feel awful bad about it afterwards. Once you get to famine-starving, though, you don’t feel nothing.
With all that sneaking around, I never even worried about Granny catching me. She was getting weaker, you know, and spent more and more time in bed. She kept muttering strange things, telling me how sorry she was, how maybe the angel who brought me to her doorstep shoulda left me with my mama in China where there’s always plenty of food. And it was weird to hear Granny say that, ’cause before it’d always been about the Great Leader being like a good shepherd and giving food to his sheep at the right time.
I did worry about getting caught by Uncle, though, so I never sneaked nothing if he was home. But one day, he come in and went right to one of the covered bowls, and he lifted the lid off, and I knowed what was gonna happen even before it came. He kinda let out this great giant roar and lunged at me, calling me a thief and pig and even a murderer on account of taking food out of Granny’s mouth. And I was already so high on the starving scale I was too tired to run away, so I had to lie there and let him knock me around a little bit. Well, then he forced my mouth open and said he was gonna cut out my tongue so I couldn’t steal food from Granny no more. And I was crying on account of being so scared, only it wasn’t real crying because I was at the point on the starving scale where you don’t make no more tears. I was just sorta making the noise of it. Then Uncle got this wrench-like thing out, and I swear on the Dear Leader he really woulda pulled my tongue straight out of my mouth except for Granny, she got herself out of bed and grabbed that wrench out of his hand. I never seen her act so strong, not even in the meat-eating days, and she looked at her son and said, “Go strip us some bark.” And then she sat me on her lap even though I was pretty big for that sorta thing by then, but I didn’t mind.
Nice as it was having Granny petting my head and talking so sweet to me, I wondered what would happen when Uncle came back, ’cause he was the kind who would hold a grudge for longer than most people would even remember. He was out quite a long time, though, so I started to suspect maybe he woulda cooled off by the time he got home, except he didn’t. He stormed in, and it musta been after sunset ’cause Granny and I were both laying in bed and probably woulda slept through the night if he hadn’t waked us up. And he dumped some bark on the counter, only he had something else in his hand too, and I remembered enough from growing up with Mama to know a switching branch when I seen one, only like I said, I didn’t have the energy to run away.
I kinda jostled Granny and hoped she’d wake up and make him not act so mean, but by the time she was up, Uncle was going at it so hard she couldn’t have stopped him even if she had been twenty years younger and eating meat every day of her life.
So Uncle was doing his thrashing, and my mind worked pretty slow those days, which I figure was lucky for me ’cause half the time I was too groggy to really feel much, and the other half of the time, I was still so hungry I was thinking more about bark stew than about Uncle and his stick.
Uncle, he finally throwed down the switch and plunked in a chair. I knowed he expected Granny to get up and boil that bark, and I wondered how she found the energy to do that sorta thing, with her being so old and frail and whatnot. Well Granny got up and started the water heating, and when the soup was ready, we sat down around the table like we was a regular family having a regular meal, and no one said anything about Uncle and his stick. And no one said anything about winter coming on and whether or not there would even be bark to strip off the trees in a month. And Granny lifted her spoon and said, “Our thanks to the Great Leader for his abundant gifts,” which was her normal way of telling us it was time to eat. Only Uncle, I figure he’d had enough of her Leader-talk by then ’cause he stood up and spilled the whole pot of tree broth to the floor and started cursing worst than the cowboys do in the Western movies Pastor lets me watch with him if I promise not to tell Miss Sandy about it.
Anyway, once Uncle got a little more calm, he apologized to Granny for spilling the soup, which I thought was pretty decent for him to do. And he said, “I just get so angry,” so she told him, “Have patience, Son. The Great Leader will take care of us all.”
Well, I thought it was kinda nasty, but he yelled back that Kim Il-Sung was dead, and I expected her to faint or whatnot, but instead she said, “I know that. I just sometimes forget,” and she closed her eyes and said the same thanksgiving prayer over the spilt soup, only this time she said it to the Dear Leader (the living one), but that made Uncle madder.
“Want to know why we’re all starving? Do you know that those Americans are shipping food over, enough food to feed the entire province? But Kim Jong-Il’s taking all of it for himself, and that’s why he’s the only fat Korean to be found in this whole gosh-darn country.” Only he didn’t use those words. It was a lot worse than that, trust me.
And Granny, if you’d have knowed her, you woulda never expected her to act so sassy, but she stood up at the table, and she pointed a finger at him, and she was near a foot shorter than Uncle, but I still got the impression she was looking down at him, and she said, “Shame on you. Shame on you for believing that kind of blasphemy against our good shepherd ...”
And I figure it all got to be too much for Uncle, so he toppled the table over on account of being so angry, and you’d think that mighta been the worst part, except it weren’t ’cause everything came crashing down on top of Granny, and she musta been so surprised by it she didn’t even make a sound.