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After I got myself throwed out of Uncle’s house for good, I went back to the schoolhouse on account of not knowing anything else to do, and I made myself a little bed of leaves ’cause the snow hadn’t fallen yet, but it was coming real close on account of the trees having lost near everything on their branches. And you’d think I woulda been miserable on account of the cold or on account of the hunger-weakness at the very least, but I don’t remember thinking about that stuff and nonsense. You know what I was thinking? I was thinking that maybe this was what it was like to be a real orphan ’cause I’d already come to figure if Mama or Papa were still alive after that flood they woulda found me by now, even if Chongjin was a big city with lots of folks going every which way.
And then I thought about Granny and the angel who she said brung me to her porch after the flood and how maybe it really had been an angel, only if it was then why weren’t it looking out for me now? And that got me kinda sad on account of me never knowing much about angels back then, so I didn’t know they couldn’t never die, and I got to worrying that maybe the angel who was supposed to take care of me had gotten so hungry it went over to China looking for food, or even worst maybe it starved to death. Sometimes I still wonder if something like that coulda happened, and I wanna ask Pastor, only it makes me pretty sad to talk about, and I’m trying to do a good job of not thinking on things that get me crying on account of it being two and a half weeks since the last time.
And one of the things that got me feeling even more lonesome on top of that was realizing how I started the day out as Chong-Su who had a granny who loved him and cooked for him when she could, but by nighttime I’d become a flower swallow. And flower swallow can be so confusing of a phrase that me and Miss Sandy took a whole afternoon once to figure it out once. When I first come to Medford, it was pretty hard on account of me not knowing English, only Miss Sandy was real patient and sat down with me little bits each day until I started to figure things out. Well, even now there are still some parts that don’t make sense to me, or even more often there’s something I hafta tell her only I don’t know which words I’m supposed to use. And when that happens, she calls this friend of hers, Kennedy, who grew up in China but knows Korean on account of her parents hiding North Korean runaways in their house.
So one time, we had to call on Kennedy ’cause Miss Sandy had taken me clothes shopping in Boston, and I was asking her about the homeless people there and wondering where all the homeless kids were. Miss Sandy said in America they have nice families who take in those kind of children. She said that’s what happens to kids who don’t have no families, and the ones who have families but they’re too poor to live in a house usually find something called a shelter where someone lets the kids and parents live there free, which I think is awful nice of them, don’t you?
Well, I was trying to tell Miss Sandy about the kids back home who didn’t have no place to go, except I only knew the Korean word for it, and so I didn’t know how to explain it proper-like. So Miss Sandy called Kennedy, and I got to ask her my question on the phone, and she told me the way to say it in English would be flower swallow, and then Miss Sandy had to explain to me that a swallow was a kind of bird. So then we had to call Kennedy back ’cause neither of us could understand why a homeless kid would have that sorta name. Closest guess I could figure was those of us on the streets knew what kind of flowers was best to eat, like I already told you, but that still didn’t explain the swallow part.
So Kennedy explained it to me in Korean and then I put Miss Sandy on the phone so she could tell it to her in English, and what Kennedy said was we’re called flower swallows ’cause we’re always looking for food and never staying long in one place (like a bird). And that part’s not too bad when you think about it, but it don’t explain the flower part. That piece is sadder on account of it referring to the way we just kinda sprung up out of the dirt like a flower, but too much rain or someone running by who wasn’t careful where they was stepping and we’d be nothing more than a few pieces of torn leaves and maybe a petal or two.
And Miss Sandy thought it was a beautiful name on account of it being so poetic. She said it was tragic-like but still so much more dignified than any word she could think of. And then I asked her what a flower swallow would be called in English if there weren’t them nice families who let the kids live with them, and she said they’d call them street children or street urchins. And then she explained to me how an urchin is a kind of spikey ball that lives in the sea, only I didn’t know what she meant ’til I saw some at the aquarium, and neither of us could figure out what that had to do with being homeless. But I prefer the name street children on account of it still reminding folks we’re human and not some other sort of animal, even if urchins are so colorful and a swallow does chirp awful pretty-like.
Well my first night as a flower swallow, I started out at the school in this little area next to the back wall, and it was blocking the wind so I wouldn’t get so cold. But that same wall was keeping out the moonlight, too, and that made me nervous of the dark and whatnot. And I wished again Ji-Hoon was there and decided if I seen him again, I’d let him share a bug with me if he asked, and maybe we’d talk about our families ’cause I didn’t know nothing about his. When it’s cold and dark and you’ve just gotten kicked out of the only home you’ve had in years, you don’t mind if it’s a bully you’re talking to as long as there’s someone else there saying something. He coulda told me my daddy was an ugly ’Pansie, and I probably wouldn’t even try to bust him for it, but if he said something nasty like that about Granny I would, even if it meant going back to being lonesome.
Anyway, Ji-Hoon weren’t there, and my only company was a statue of the Dear Leader in the front of our school, and the moonlight was shining on him just so, and it was awful pretty. Looking back, it reminds me of the Easter play I seen last spring at Pastor’s church where Jesus comes up out of the grave and there’s lights shining all over him and fancy music playing loud enough to give you shivers. I was in the front row on account of Miss Sandy helping with the choir, and so I seen the man playing Jesus up close. He still had a little pretend blood on his face, and I figure he shoulda been more careful to wash it off ’cause Pastor never said so but I knowed Jesus wouldn’t have been bloody anymore when he came out of the tomb.
The statue of the Dear Leader weren’t smiling or nothing, but he still came acrost as kind. Kind but powerful, too, and I guess that’s what I mean when I say he reminded me of that Jesus play. And I remember thinking the Dear Leader looked exactly like Granny always said, like a shepherd or maybe a really nice father that just wanted to do what was best for his family, including me. And his eyes were only stone or whatever it is they make those big statues out of, but I coulda swore he was looking at me, and his arm was stretched out. Not high up like that green statue in New York we seen in our history book about all them immigrants, but more like this picture Miss Sandy has up of Jesus reaching out for Peter when Peter’s drowning on account of him forgetting he couldn’t walk on the water like the Son of God. And it looked like the Dear Leader was calling me, like he was saying, “Come to me, Woong.”
And he looked so fatherly and inviting that I left that place out of the wind, and I walked over and wouldn’t have been surprised if the statue actually said something to me ’cause I knowed his eyes had been telling me, “Come to me, Woong.” I sorta hoped he had more to say, maybe something helpful like where I could find another old lady who liked young boys and still had food to spare. He didn’t say no more, only it was comforting being there so close to him, even better than it woulda been having Ji-Hoon by me I figured.
So I curled up at the Dear Leader’s feet, not in the front part where people would notice me when they come to school but behind on a little platform I hadn’t ever seen before on account of us kids never being allowed to play around the statues of the Dear Leader or his dad neither. And I bet Pastor would say that’s a dumb superstition ’cause they’re only stone or whatever you call that stuff they carve it from, and why in the world shouldn’t a kid play nearby? But then Miss Sandy goes and says I shouldn’t put my dirty dishes on top of the Bible on account of it being disrespectful, and I don’t see much difference, do you? Except one’s a book and one’s a statue that’s even taller than a man.
And that reminds me of something kinda funny ’cause before I moved here, I growed up thinking the Dear Leader was really as tall as he was in all them statues. No one ever told me he was just normal height or maybe even shorter than normal if you account for all them Americans like Pastor who are so tall they hafta duck down to walk beneath the chandelier in the dining room. There’s another funny thing they teached us about the Dear Leader, only I’m not sure I’m supposed to talk about it here, so if someone asks, I’m not trying to use rude humor or nothing. But once when I was in school in Chongjin, we were looking at pictures of the Dear Leader’s house, and my teacher was saying, “See, he’s so benevolent” — this was the teacher that liked to use lots of fancy words before she disappeared — “that he created this sanctuary to welcome leaders from all over the world who make pilgrimages to pay him homage.” And then one of the boys asked where the outhouse was, and our teacher got real mad and thought he was making a rude joke and said, “Don’t you know the Dear Leader never ...” and then she used this big sciencey term that means the same thing as using the bathroom, only I don’t remember it no more. She was so mad at that boy for not knowing the Dear Leader didn’t poop that she marched him to the front of the class and slapped him four times (which was a lot for her but not so much as the other teachers woulda done). But I was glad he’d been the one to ask ’cause nobody ever teached me that about the Dear Leader before, and Pastor laughed when I told him and said it was stuff and nonsense, only why would my teacher have lied about something like that?
Pastor says it’s evil the way we North Koreans were trained to bow to Kim Jong-Il and his dad all the time, and he says that’s idol worship, which I figure is the next worst thing to devil worship, only I didn’t see it that way in the old days. The way I seen it, we weren’t worshipping them the same way you might think of it, but we knowed the only way to get out of the famine and bring an end to the hunger was if the Dear Leader helped us out. And some people like Granny said the Dear Leader was eating only plain rice for dinner, but then people like Uncle said that wasn’t true and if it was, then why was he still so fat? And Granny told him that even if the Dear Leader chose to eat lobster every day, it was his right, but he knew we were suffering so bad up north that he couldn’t bring himself to eat more than rice. I remember thinking that plain rice sure was better than tree bark, even though it had been so long since I tasted rice, I sorta forgot the feel of it in my mouth.
So I spent that night under the stars with the Dear Leader standing guard over me, except it didn’t seem like he was watching me no more on account of me being beneath him and his eyes still going straight out, but it was comforting all the same. And maybe that don’t make sense to you if you never growed up with the Dear Leader’s picture everywhere and all your teachers and your granny calling him the good shepherd. But do you remember how you invited them grown-ups to talk to us about when bad guys flew the airplanes into those tall buildings, and Becky Linklater’s mom said she felt so scared she slept with the American flag for a whole week afterwards and most of the class kinda giggled about that? Well I didn’t giggle, ’cause I remember that night under the stars and the Dear Leader and how even though I wasn’t out of the wind, I still felt ’least twenty degrees warmer than I had before.