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Pastor says whenever a bad thing happens to you, you should think about all the other bad things that didn’t happen to you and thank God for those. Even though by this time I was about as low as I’d gotten so far, I figure there were some good parts too. Like when the gang broke up and Min-Ho moved, it was only the beginning of winter, not the middle of it. A few kids was dying in the train stations, but not every day. Not even every week, ’least not at first. I was older, too, like I already said, which meant I got a place closer to the fire and stayed warmer than I woulda been sleeping outdoors.
The train station was an interesting place to live, with people coming and going but mostly going and the trains getting so full sometimes people even jumped on the tops and traveled that way. You never knowed when a train was coming neither. Sometimes it’d be every other day real regular-like, but then it could go a week or longer of nothing, and those were the worst times on account of the crowds growing with more and more people waiting to get out of Chongjin. Sometimes I liked to sit and watch them when there weren’t nothing better to do, and I imagined stories about their lives if I had the energy. Like if I saw a man holding hands with a little girl, I got to thinking maybe there was a mama waiting for them in another city, and she’d been making food for a week just for their visit. Or maybe I’d see a woman looking lonesome all by herself, and I’d think that maybe she had a little boy in another village with a relative who agreed to feed him, and she was about to go visit him for the first time since he moved away.
Pastor says there’s some places in America where folks don’t get no seasons at all. It just stays warm-like all year round. And as nice as it sounds on the one hand, especially if you’re a flower swallow and hafta live on the streets, I think it’d be real hard on account of not knowing how many months had passed or what year it was. It was hard enough trying to figure how many years I spent in Chongjin altogether, and that’s even with all them winters to count. Miss Sandy says I’m lucky, and if she could forget her age and come up with a new one, she’d go and make herself ten years younger. Only that doesn’t make much sense to me on account of her having kids so old and already being a grandma, but I think she was teasing anyway.
One of the hard parts of living in the train station was there were so many flower swallows looking for food I had to go back to eating just every couple days. That’s when I missed the gang the most, plus at night when you hear all kinds of strange sounds and don’t know how much longer you have ’til morning on account of the moon being outside and you being shut up inside. But at least there was the fire, and I won’t never complain about that.
When I first moved to Medford to live with Pastor and I seen the houses with trees in front, I figured they did that so if they ran out of wood they could just chop down their front-yard trees and have enough fuel to last quite a good while. But Pastor explained to me how most people use other things than trees to heat their homes in America and how much safer it is that way. At first, I thought it’d be hard to get used to, except it weren’t, probably on account of Pastor or Miss Sandy taking care of it automatic-like so none of us have to worry about things like chopping wood or adding fuel to fires like we did in Chongjin.
I never joined no gang at the train station, even though I probably coulda if I really tried for it. I did get to talking to some of the other flower swallows like me. None of us ever became friends or shared our food like me and Ji-Hoon done, but it made it less lonesome than if I’d lived there all by myself. The boys who’d been there longest sometimes gave advice to the new ones like me. Like one day, this bow-legged man set up a little stall to sell soup to the travelers, and at the end of the day he had a little left over, and he came up to where a group of us were sitting and said, “You want some soup? It’s healthy for your bones.” And the way he talked showed off that he got no teeth, and I got to thinking maybe that’s why he was selling the rest of the soup instead of eating it all himself on account of it being too hard for him to chew. But I could smell it had meat in it, and it’d probably been a few months since the last time I tasted any of that. I was gonna ask him how much it cost ’cause even though I didn’t have no money, I found sometimes if you asked real polite-like, people’d offer you a little taste for free on account of feeling sorry for you. And that was one of the other bad parts about me going back to the train station, ’cause I was bigger then, so it was harder to get people to feel bad enough for me to share. Still, I figured it was worth a try, but the boy sitting next to me, he hissed in my ear, “Are you mad? That’s Crazy Wu. Do you know what he puts in there?”
And one of the other boys started teasing me, and another told that one to shut up. By then Crazy Wu was gone anyway, laughing to himself as he went over and pestered another bunch of kids, only none of them took his soup neither. So I asked the boy next to me why not, and that’s when he told me what Crazy Wu put in his soup, and I felt sick and pretty scared too how that sorta thing could really happen right here in Chongjin.
So even though I didn’t have no more gang, I still learnt from some of the other flower swallows things like why I shouldn’t eat Crazy Wu’s soup. Another thing I found out is you could make your energy last a lot longer if you stayed awake at night by the fire and slept in the train station during the day. And it weren’t so bad waiting up all night as you might think ’cause lots of other flower swallows stayed awake with you, and we didn’t talk much, but it made it so you weren’t so scared of the nighttime if you had a fire and a bunch of other boys around. I guess I should say there was girls too, and it weren’t like school where the boys all played by themselves, and the girls kept to themselves. We all just sorta mingled together, except it was usually the boys who got the spots closest to the fire on account of them being bigger. But even that had its disadvantages, and I was glad I weren’t one of the ones who slept right next to it on account to me always being scared I would roll too close and get burnt. That’s what happened to one kid, only it weren’t the fire that done him. It was this thing called a transformer, which is a kind of huge electrical something or other that lets the trains run better. The train people kept it in this shed where one gang controlled it and wouldn’t let nobody else sleep there, because that transformer do-dad kept things plenty warm. Then one evening I heard some awful scream, and then a bunch of yelling, and two seconds later, everyone’s talking about a boy who rolled over onto the transformer in his sleep and fried himself to death, but thankfully the curious ones made a big crowd right away that blocked the view so I didn’t have to see it when they carried his body out. And for the rest of the week, the kids was all wondering if the boy who got himself killed would end up in one of Crazy Wu’s soups, and some said yeah that’s why Crazy Wu offered to help carry the body outside, but others said no on account of it being too burnt for eating. But for the next few days when Crazy Wu set up his stand of soup to sell, I did notice a kinda burning smell that made my stomach roll around like a little kid trying to learn to summersault.
Other things I learnt at the train station without nobody teaching me but just by watching instead. Like one day, a lady had a bread roll in a plastic bag, and she took it out and ate it. We all looked at her, and the funny thing is when you get that hungry and someone else is eating in front of you, your mouth sometimes makes the motions like it’s pretending you’re tasting the food, too. When she was done, she just tossed the plastic bag to the ground, and she weren’t even two steps away before a bunch of boys jumped for it. Two of them got kicked out of the fight pretty quick, and the last two went at it for quite a while until the winner took the bag — it was a little torn but it still worked — and he wrapped it around one foot, and we all were jealous for the rest of the night because most of us had bare feet by then. In the middle of winter, a plastic bag for a boot is about a thousand times better than going bare. It’s funny, Teacher, because you know how the school made us go to that assembly last month on the 3 Rs, and it was all about reduce, reuse, and recycle? You’d never see an assembly like that back home, ’least not during the famine, on account of there being so little left to recycle anyway, and then we’d know to reuse it without being teached, like how if someone gave you a plastic bag you could pretend was a shoe.
I already told you how there was so many people at that station, but after a little while it got like it does at school, where you got to recognize people’s faces even if you’d never talked to them and didn’t know their names or stuff and nonsense like that. Some of them were fun to watch, like a little boy with only one arm who was near as small as I’d been when I got to Chongjin, and he’d run after travelers waving his good hand. You might think people’d be scared of that, but he was the best beggar of all of us and his stomach never did that thing where it pops out like a balloon on account of being full of nothing but air. Other folks you learnt to stay away from, like I already mentioned Crazy Wu and the soup he sold. And there was another too, except I had to ask Kennedy on this next part on account of the word being so strange and not making much sense when you try to tell it in English. But there was a lady there at the station we saw nearly every day, and we called her a kokemi, only I didn’t know how you’d say that here, which is why I needed to ask Kennedy.
Well, she said the closest thing in English would be boogeyman, but then I explained to her it was a lady and not a man. She said she didn’t think there was a good English word to describe that, which is why I’m gonna go back to using the Korean.
Anyway, back home, no matter where you growed up, old folks would tell you stories about the kokemi and how they’d come and put you in sacks if you was misbehaving. Whenever I used to think of kokemi, I figured they were old and wrinkly and so ugly you couldn’t really be certain if it was a man or a woman, except the one at the station was a teenage girl and didn’t have a single wrinkle on her face. But we knowed she was a kokemi on account of the other flower swallows saying so. They told us all about how she’d search out the weakest and the littlest flower swallows and take them away with her, only she didn’t put them in no bags like the old kind of kokemi would. A little boy once asked someone what she did with them, and the older one said, “Are you stupid? She sells them to Crazy Wu, of course,” and we all knowed what that meant. And I got to thinking she was awful pretty looking for being so evil, but maybe that’s why it worked out so well ’cause what kid with half his brain would willingly go with an old man or old woman with a wrinkly face and a bag over their shoulder like the regular sort of a kokemi? And I figured she must be smart to disguise herself that way, but then something didn’t make sense.
“How come she picks the little ones?” I asked once, since a bigger kid would have a lot more of him to go around, and a boy said, “The meat’s juicier, dumb head,” and we didn’t talk no more after that.