How I Became a North Korean by Krys Lee Read Free Book Online Page B

the only book we need.”
    I flipped the book open and traced the lines across the page.
    He was so eager that he leaned toward me until his shirt touched his rice and told me that the son of God could walk on water and multiply five loaves of bread and two fish into a plentitude that fed entire villages.
    I wondered if my new husband was sick or prone to imaginative spells.
    â€œHas anyone seen this man do it—walk on water?”
    He regarded me with fatherly amusement. “You’ll grow to have faith.”
    He lectured me on how unholy my country was. While he drew circles in his daughter’s bowl of rice with chopsticks, he spoke of famine and poverty and what it did to people, as if he had crossed the river and personally witnessed it. He wondered out loud how we lived without technology. What he said wasn’tuntrue, not exactly. Even after all the honest and rule-abiding ones had died in the famine, most still experienced winter hungers that gnawed at the stomach, then ate what they could in the summer. Too many of us knew violence and corruption and the addiction of homegrown
bbindu,
our medicine that I later learned was called opium, which helped you forget about food. But the way he looked at me as he spoke from some high-up place offended me. It was as if I were being branded as a North Korean, part of a mass of people who were all the same.
    I said, “I’ve eaten meat more than a few times, and always had money to buy cold buckwheat noodles at the market.”
    I took delicate bites on purpose, my mouth hardly moving, while his rotated from side to side like an ox’s. Maybe I hadn’t had much schooling, I added, but I knew my letters and had owned a cellular phone and a stiff silk
hanbok.
A friend had once given me a gold watch as a gift.
    â€œGold? Real gold?” He spat out a mouthful of rice onto the table. “Your friend’s a man.”
    The girl screamed, “A man?” as if her father was exempt from this category.
    â€œIf he treated you so great, why didn’t you marry him?”
    I wondered if his jealousy could be useful to me.
    â€œIt was my uncle,” I said at last.
    He leaned in closer. “You can tell me anything.” He was testing me. I had been tested before. “You don’t have to hide from me.”
    I didn’t forget to compensate him with a kiss.
    His daughter and I shared the bedroom after her
abba
was called by “one of his associates” to guide a Christian group touringthrough the Yanbian province and had to leave for a few days. Anything that delayed my first night alone with him was good news.
    â€œI’m entrusting Byeol to you,” he said. “She never recovered after her
eomma
left.”
    His guide work had forced him to travel around the region, leaving Byeol at the mercy of his local Christian friends. But now he had me. Our marriage was also practical.
    I linked my arm in his. “You can trust me, I took care of my
abba
until the very end. I know how to take care of people.”
    He crouched over the black and white tiles of the kitchen, digging up a book of recipes. “You know, I try to get the tourists to help your people at their hideouts. Some live for years in underground caves like moles.” There was sympathy in his voice but also a vein of satisfaction in telling me this.
    Â â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢Â 
    My name is Jangmi now, I reminded myself the next morning as I made his prescribed breakfast for Byeol. But one bite of the salted mackerel that I had been craving sent me gagging to the bathroom. The girl noticed, how could she not? She watched everything I did. I told her I had a chronically weak stomach. That morning, I learned that unlike my
eomma,
I wasn’t immune to morning sickness.
    When the girl left for school, I tried to better understand the man I had married and went through his belongings—as his wife, I considered this fair—and saw the care