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You might think after reading this so far that I spent all day sleeping in the train station and all night staying warm by the fire, except there was more to it than that. I went outside, too, because even when it’s cold, you gotta have quiet time to yourself with just your own thoughts, and you don’t get much noisier than that train station unless you’re in the back of the bus going on a field trip like we did to the art museum last fall. So I’d take myself on walks if I weren’t too hungry-weak, and sometimes I’d go visit the statue of the Dear Leader at the school just to see if he’d ever look at me like he done that one night and make me feel so cozy, except he didn’t.
Sometimes I’d walk toward the part of Chongjin where Granny lived, and if I felt really brave, I’d go right up to her street and peek down to see if maybe she was feeling better now and taking a walk out in the cold, except she weren’t. I never got the nerve to go all the way up to the house, though, on account of Uncle threatening to murder me if he ever seen me again. And that’s a funny difference between a threat like his and the curse the mudang put on me, ’cause you might think the threat is scarier on account of it coming from someone who’s yelling and saying he’s gonna kill you. Except the good part about a threat is if you keep your side of it, you don’t have to worry none, which is why I never went up to Granny’s house to see if she was there. But even today I like to imagine what she’s doing. I figure she’s probably got plenty of food again, and she don’t hurt no more from that table falling on her, and she can get around just fine. And maybe Uncle married himself a really nice daughter-in-law to take care of Granny, and then Uncle got sick and died, so now it’s Granny and her daughter-in-law both living together. Oh, and all them pretty things she had to sell, she got them all back once the famine ended, so now the house is just as fancy as ever.
Anyway, I figure I got a better education living at the train station than I ever woulda at the Chongjin school. I was a fast learner, too, on account of you dying if you didn’t catch on quick enough. I once heard a man in America say it don’t matter what you learn so long as you learn something, but I’d say that’s all stuff and nonsense. Here’s what I mean. Let’s pretend you had a boy of your own and you wanted him to be real smart, so you told him to go out and learn as much as he could. So he went to that train station in Chongjin and lived with us flower swallows a while. He’d be sure to get a whole lot smarter, but some of the things he learnt, he’d probably wish he could unlearn, except that’s not the way it works. Like one of the things I got real good at was how to tell if someone catched the sickness. We didn’t have no other name for it, but we all knew what it meant, and we was all scared of it, especially in the winter on account of that being when it hit the worst. Sometimes you’d get to feeling poorly, but then you’d get better after a few days, so you’d know it weren’t the sickness. But if the whole week went by, and you went from regular-sick to really-sick, the people around you would start to worry, and if they were smart they wouldn’t sit by you none or offer to share none of their food. And you wouldn’t mind on account of being too weak to think on food or stuff and nonsense like that anyway. It’d take several weeks start to finish, but you’d finally end up with what we called The Stare, and you’d sit there with your eyes half open, and folks could come right up to you and say, “Watch out, your foot’s on fire,” or whatnot, only you wouldn’t budge. And you wouldn’t move even if folks got to poking and prodding you, and you wouldn’t never open your eyes more than half ever again ’cause in another day or two after that you’re dead.
See, I could tell you all about the sickness on account of me learning so much about it, but it’s not the kinda thing that makes you a better person knowing, and sometimes I think one of the reasons most kids in America look so happy is they never learnt that sorta stuff and nonsense, so they don’t have as much to worry over. ’Cause if I get a little sniffle, even if Miss Sandy tells me it’s just a cold and I hafta go to school, I worry it might be the sickness. Kennedy told me them kinda diseases are less common here, and even if you do get them, you could just get yourself to the hospital and they’d give you medicine to make it go away, and she’s studying to be a doctor so of course she knows all about these things. But I still worry. At first Miss Sandy thought I was just wanting to get out of going to school, but then I explained things to her more proper-like, and so now she takes me to the doctor if I’ve been sick for over two or three days just to proof to me it ain’t the sickness, and it never is thankfully.
But I got it once, and that’s probably why I’m even more scared of it than normal. Some things you only know you’re supposed to be afraid of, like maybe you’re always forgetting to buckle your seatbelt in the car and Miss Sandy gets a little angry on account of having to remind you so much (except it’s not mad-angry, it’s more like she’s tired from you being so forgetful), but then if you was ever in an accident like Pastor was, he said he won’t never forget his seatbelt on account of it saving his life once. And I don’t want to get in no accident neither, but when I get in the car I’m not thinking about that, probably on account of it never happening to me. I figure that’s what it’s like with the sickness. Like once, Becky Linklater was gone for three whole days, and when she came back to school she told me she’d been sick, so I asked if she’d gone to the hospital for medicine, and she said no, she just had a stomach bug. And then I asked weren’t you scared, and she gave me a funny look (but not mean-like) and said no, she just stayed home with her grandma and watched movies all day.
Anyway, I got through my first few days feeling poor, and back then you just had to wait to see if you’d get better all by yourself or if you’d get worst, and that’s how you’d know it was the sickness. And that’s what happened to me, only one of the harder things is when you’re feverish or whatnot the other kids don’t want you near their fires, so you’re cold as you’ve ever been in your life, but they don’t let you warm up. And it’s not their fault, not really, they just don’t want to catch the sickness neither. And I know Kennedy says they’ve got fancy medicines and stuff and nonsense like that in America, but back home if you catched it, there weren’t much for you to do except wait for it to get worst and finally The Stare would take over and that’s how you’d know you was about to die.
I’ve gone through lots of scary things, some I don’t even think on no more, but that sickness was close to the worst. You know some people are real brave, like Pastor, and I figure I’ll be braver too once I’ve lived as long as him ’cause he’s already a grandpa and whatnot. And Pastor says when he dies, everyone’s gonna know it’s his time and there ain’t gonna be no reason to try to keep him from flying off to heaven, and that’s why he’s not scared of it none. And he knows what it’s like to nearly die ’cause did you know Pastor’s been shot before? I swear on the Dear Leader. It happened a little before I came here, and when he told me about it, first I thought he was joking. Then he told me to ask Miss Sandy and she said it was true. And I don’t think she knows how to lie on account of her never learning when she was littler. He still has a scar from the bullet and everything. And that’s not all. A long time ago when he and Miss Sandy first married, folks would threaten to beat him up or maybe even kill him on account of him having brown skin and Miss Sandy peachy ’cause did you know way back a long time ago Americans didn’t tolerate that sorta thing? So anyway, Pastor’s gone through all those times of nearly getting himself killed, and then he was in the car accident I told you about, too, only he says he’s not one bit scared of dying. And I believe him on account of the way he talks about heaven, and it’s almost like he’s already seen it and he’s just waiting for all of us to get there together.
So there are people like Pastor who talk about dying just as if it’s like walking next door to visit a friend, except you don’t never come back and your friend’s house is a castle with everything you could want for the rest of your life. But back in the old days, I didn’t know all that much about heaven ’cause the grown-ups all said different things. Like sometimes if Papa was out later than normal and the sea was all choppy, I’d ask Mama what would happen to him if he died, and all she’d say was, “Don’t you know it’s bad luck to talk like that?” So I’d ask my sister, only she didn’t know about that sorta stuff and nonsense neither. And I guess the first I heard about heaven in the old days was when I asked Grandmother what happens when you die, and she said your spirit joins all the others and you get to be with your ancestors, which sounded boring to me at the time on account of them being so old and dead.
And then once I got to Chongjin, Granny was different. She’d talk about heaven as if it was gonna happen right here on earth, and we just had to wait for the Dear Leader (and the Great Leader, too, on account of him already being dead but her not remembering that most days). And them Leaders, well, they were gonna do things like give food to all the hungry and build beautiful buildings, and there’d be public singing and dancing and whatnot, and they’d even make winter shorter and more tolerable for us all. And the thing I liked about Granny’s version of heaven was you didn’t even hafta die to get there. You just had to be patient and wait on the Dear Leader, only she never said how long the waiting would take, and I don’t suspect she knew there’d be a famine so bad during the in-between time neither.
So anyway, when I first come down feeling poor, I waited and didn’t get better none. That’s when I had to admit it was probably the sickness, which meant I was gonna die in another few weeks. And you might think it made me feel sorry for myself on account of me being so young, but being young never stopped nobody from dying in the famine, so I was used to that idea already. Once I became a flower swallow, I figured I’d die eventually, and it was just a question of whether it’d be the hunger or the cold that’d do me in first, only I hoped it weren’t the sickness on account of people with The Stare looking so spooky, like they was already dead except their bodies didn’t know it yet.
And that’s another thing that makes the sickness so bad. You know you’re headed that way, but the first couple weeks you still feel like yourself enough to wish you weren’t. I thought about Mama and Papa those days more than I had all year, and I wondered if they were already drowned, and maybe heaven was like what Grandmother said ’cause now living forever with my ancestors didn’t sound so bad, not if my parents and sister and Grandmother would already be there. Except I didn’t know about people all getting along so well in heaven, so I assumed my sister and I would still get into fights and wondered if I was bigger than her yet.
Pastor says there’s lots of people in America who think that once you die you don’t know nothing no more, so you don’t even realize you’re dead. You just stop existing altogether, and eventually your body gets buried and rots, and when he said that, I told him that’s the saddest idea of them all. But then he said there’s one version even sadder, only it’s true, and that’s when people die before they get a chance to know all about Jesus. But I’m not gonna write any more about that here on account of all the good people I knowed back home who died that way. And maybe Pastor’s wrong ’cause in my opinion I’d rather turn into nothing than go through his version of it.
Well, I was getting sicker now, and you’d think I’d be scared of dying, but more than that I was scared of The Stare and being mostly dead but my heart still going and my brain stuck in a body that didn’t work. ’Cause what if it wasn’t like sleeping the regular way where you don’t even know you’re doing it but more like them bad nightmares where you know it’s a dream but you can’t wake yourself up?
So I was about halfway through the sickness. That’s a point when you’re always cold but sweaty too, and your legs feel like you got little demons on the inside poking out at you, and sometimes you can’t use the outhouse none, but then all of a sudden you gotta use it every ten minutes. And when I say use the outhouse, that’s just the polite way of putting it on account of there not being something like that at the train station for us flower swallows to use. And I couldn’t tell you how long it’d been since I ate, ’cause I didn’t have no energy to beg or steal none. The Pyongyang-perfect truth is I was so sick I’d stopped thinking about food altogether. All I knowed was I was cold, and I hoped I’d have a few more days ’til I took on The Stare on account of that part scaring me the most.
Once Pastor read us a verse about not even a sparrow dying if God didn’t want it to, which sounds kinda mean the first time you hear it ’cause if that’s the case, why do any of them die at all? But Pastor went on to say the verse is supposed to make us feel brave. What he means is since you gotta die one day, isn’t it best knowing you ain’t gonna do it ’til God says it’s time? And when he said that, I got to thinking about me being a flower swallow and how close I got to dying. And everyone who saw me back then woulda expected that to happen, and I was expecting it too and just hoping The Stare part wasn’t quite so terrifying as it looked. But as Pastor would say, God musta had other plans on account of me not dying after all.
The way it happened was two boys’d just come in from outside, and one of them said, “This has gotta be the coldest day of the year,” and I hadn’t come up to The Stare yet so my brain still worked all right except slower than normal. And when I heard him say that, I thought on what that blind old lady told me the year before when I started being a flower swallow in the first place. She said I’d find my healer on the coldest day of the year, except she didn’t say which year, and wouldn’t now be the perfect time for me to get myself healed?
The only problem was I didn’t know where to look. I figured I had to do something, though, ’cause I was so near The Stare at that point. So I sat for a while mulling over it, and that’s harder to do than you might think on account of your brain feeling like icicles and your whole body aching so even when you try to think, half the time all you can do is wonder if you’ll still feel so awful-like once The Stare comes. But finally I figured I’d go look for the blind lady’s house again, and I hadn’t forgotten about her being an angel and not living there no more, but maybe she’d come back on account of today being the coldest day of the year like that boy said.
The problem was I was so sick I didn’t get very far until my muscles sorta froze up, and my feet did too, and I had to sit down outside there in the cold. And that’s when I felt it coming on, The Stare I mean, ’cause all of a sudden I stopped caring about the angel and her blessing, and it was like my whole brain quit just like my body had. And I sat there, and I couldn’t tell you what I thought about on account of you not really thinking once you get to that point, and I’d never heard of nobody surviving The Stare, but I wasn’t thinking about that neither since my brain had shut off. That’s why when you catched me looking out the window in class the other day and asked me what I was thinking about, and I said nothing, and you said you can’t ever think about nothing, that’s not entirely true. Except I didn’t wanna argue with you right then on account of the rest of the class not needing to know about The Stare and getting frightened silly.
Anyway, that’s what happened to me right before she came, Teacher, and I’d seen her before near about every day, the kokemi I mentioned earlier who stole the sickest and littlest and sold their meat to Crazy Wu. And she come up, only like I said, I was past the point of feeling scared no more, and you coulda told me I’d be soup by tomorrow, and I wouldn’t have blinked. That’s just the way it works when you’re inside The Stare. So the kokemi picked me up, and I already told you she didn’t carry a bag like a normal kokemi woulda, but she picked me up in her arms, only she couldn’t get me very far. She put me down and told me, “Wait here. I’ll get you some help.” And then do you know who came over? Crazy Wu. Only he didn’t turn me into soup, and he didn’t even laugh and show me those toothless gums like he sometimes did. He said, “Oh yeah, Miss, he’s right bad off. You sure you wanna take him back?” And she said, “We have to try.” So Crazy Wu (I found out later that his name was just plain Wu without the Crazy part attached, only I never did get used to it that way), well, he carried me to this building where they store the coal behind the train station, and the kokemi told him to put me down real careful-like, which he did.
“You reckon he’s hungry?” Crazy Wu asked, and that’s another way you know I’d got all the way to The Stare by then on account of me not caring whether it was flower swallow soup or not the kokemi spooned into my mouth, but I ate some. It was good, too — not just tasty, but I could tell it was making me stronger on account of me snapping out of The Stare for a minute and realizing who I was with, and it wasn’t ’til then I got scared.
“It’s all right,” the kokemi said. I wanted to believe her on account of it being too terrifying to imagine getting your whole body cut up and cooked into stew for Crazy Wu to sell. But if you’d lived months hearing every day that someone was a kokemi who chopped up kids and sold their meet to Crazy Wu, and then all of a sudden you snapped out of The Stare and found yourself trapped in a room with the kokemi and Crazy Wu both, I swear on the Dear Leader you’d be frightened, too.
But she told me not to waste my energy being afraid. She was here to help me, and so was Wu. So after I’d eaten a little more, I asked her, “Are you a kokemi?” and she chuckled and said no. When I asked who she was really, she said, “You can call me Auntie,” so that’s what I did.
Auntie kept on feeding me soup in little sips at a time, and she told me I was real sick, but maybe with rest and warmth and the right kind of food, I might start to feel better in a few weeks.
And you know what, Teacher? That’s exactly what happened.