Under the Same Sky: A Memoir of Survival, Hope, and Faith

by Joseph Kim

North Koreans are very superstitious: they believe in haunted places and ghosts and omens.

In North Korea, when you go to school, you aren’t ranked academically, but by your ability to fight.

I would catch my parents looking at Bong Sook and me with terror in their eyes. At first I thought it was strange, but gradually I realized they were observing us for signs of starvation. The thought that they might die wasn’t what worried them. Their greatest fear was to not be able to feed us.

During that time, North Korea was a place where corruption was so common it wasn’t even called corruption, it was just life.

Everyone in the West talks about the oppressive, invasive government of North Korea, but what I experienced then was more frightening to a child: a complete absence of authority of any kind. A child wants someone to be in charge of the world. But it was clear from the train that the people in charge had abandoned it to the masses. No one was enforcing the rules any longer.

“Stop eating when you feel like you want to have one more spoon of rice,” my mom told me once, which I later interpreted to mean, If you fall in love with power, you’ll never be satisfied and ruin your life.

it was the tofu or boiled egg that every family is supposed to eat before leaving on a journey. (Eggs roll fast, which means the trip will go quickly, and tofu is perfectly square, which means everything will go according to plan.)

Was he ashamed that his son had become a thief? Today, I understand that to ask that question is to mistake North Korea for a normal country. Morals simply didn’t exist there in the late 1990s. My father was a highly ethical man, but what morality is there in watching your children go hungry?

In North Korea, sharing food means more than it does in the West, especially in those hard times. It means, You are one of us.

North Koreans are addicted to motion pictures; even Americans can’t compete with our unslakable thirst for them.

The movies showed why our social system was correct: the rich had earned their terrible treatment by betraying the nation. The peasants had fought like crazy to give us our freedom. It made sense that they should now reap the rewards.

This was a popular legend of North Korea, and it was supposed to teach us two things. First, that the desires of the rich are cruel and unrealistic, so unrealistic that they demand summer fruit in the middle of winter. Second, that a child’s devotion to her parent, if strong enough, can work miracles. The bond between North Korean parents and children, we believed, was stronger than in the corrupt West, where the young dumped their aging parents in old-age homes like so much rotted firewood.

I didn’t realize it, but the training I was getting in those schoolyard brawls would be worth far more to me than the little geometry I learned.

My father signed a paper when he left the military, promising he would never use the skills he’d learned there in civilian life.

Hunger is humiliation. But hunger is also evil.

Whether he willed himself to die or his body and mind simply gave way, it’s hard to say. To me, they are almost the same thing.

“Poverty makes you mature,” he said in his next breath. It was a North Korean saying: even as life hurts you, it prepares you to accept the next bit of pain.

“In normal life, you can be a romantic. But in economics, you must keep a cold heart.”

didn’t know it, but this was the moment that determined the rest of my life. This, far more than my father’s death. My father wasn’t able to protect us; the famine had taken him as it had thousands and thousands of others. And his brothers and sisters could offer us no protection. An epidemic had killed his siblings when he was just a boy, which meant that there were no paternal relatives nearby to save us now. Small Grandfather and my uncle were the only ones. It’s strange to think that your fate was written before you were born, in a tiny virus that swept through a village where your father had lived as a child.

It was then I realized why Small Grandfather had sent my mother and sister to China: he didn’t want to work.

Later I would realize that my mother hadn’t taken my sister to China to find work. She had taken her to China to sell her.

The idea that most people are good if you give them enough to eat and a warm place to sleep was foreign to me.

We were called Kkotjebi, “wandering sparrows,” because of the way we would bend over and look for grains of rice or kernels of corn on the ground.

The reason there were any manhole covers left in Hoeryong at all was that they were state property, and the penalty for stealing even one was public execution.

The Saro-cheong was the North Korean Department of Youth, which was in charge of young adults between the ages of fourteen and twenty-eight—their welfare, their schooling, their behavior.

What the government promoted as saving the youth of North Korea was really enforced starvation. They wanted you to die out of sight of everyone else.

The Saro-cheong in Hoeryong didn’t operate out of the goodness of its heart. Its “humanitarian” mission was actually a cover for a much less innocent activity: a labor racket. Its officials made money by the use of free work. Ours.

And that’s how I became part of the Association for Redistributing Wealth in Hoeryong.

THE ASSOCIATION WAS a brotherhood of thieves.

“If your mind is strong,” he told me, “you can survive anything.”

Really, the entire nation shut down at 8:45 for at least an hour. If you ever wanted to invade North Korea, that would be the time to do it, because half the country would be at a neighbor’s house waiting for a show to begin.

To be cut off from the ones you loved was one thing. To be oppressed by their companions was worse.

On a hot day the water was clean and fresh on our faces. There was no soap or shampoo, but when I felt the first shock of coolness, I had a sudden urge to live longer.

But river water was like the promise of another kind of life.

A famine can cause people to do odd things. Nothing is pure, and you must look at people’s motivations again and again if you hope to discover only a piece of what is happening within them. The most cunning thought can be mixed with a sudden desire to save a stranger. The person who takes you in from the streets and saves your life one day can watch you take a piece of chicken at the next night’s dinner and say to herself, “This boy is smothering my children.” Rage appears alongside charity. Generosity and pure selfishness are not so far apart.

“Kwang Jin, if you ever go to China, the churches will give you money.” “What’s a church?” I asked. He looked dumbstruck. “Um, it’s a place where they worship God.” I didn’t understand either of those ideas—worship or God—so

In North Korea, there was no concept of doing things for other people out of kindness. Unconditional love was not something I was familiar with. You did things because of family obligation, or because of hunger or greed, or because there was no other choice. But what he was describing—people freely giving their hard-earned cash to complete strangers—was plain crazy.

I thought of Christians as bizarre people, almost another species. I wanted to meet them, touch them, to confirm that such creatures existed.

I still thought like a street person. I said to myself, If one church gave me twenty yuan, I’ll hit every church I can find and clean up. Ten churches meant two hundred yuan.

I’d observed that North Korean refugees who’d been in China a while looked different. Their faces are different. Smoother. Lotioned. North Koreans tend to hunch their shoulders and walk stiffly, but after a month or so in China they walked faster while appearing more relaxed. Their shoulders unclenched; their posture improved. Their clothes, of course, looked smart and modern.

The broccoli fascinated me. Soft miniature trees. White broccoli cost more than green.

Each of these little discoveries was rewarding for me. You don’t recover your humanity all at once. It’s like climbing out of a deep pit, one shaky handhold at a time.

“If you pray to God for something selfish,” he said, “he won’t hear you. If you ask him for a Mercedes-Benz to drive fast and catch girls, it will never arrive. But if you want the car to drive old people to the doctor, if you want to do good, he will hear that prayer.”

Everything about Christianity was backward. What I’d learned in life was that if you didn’t constantly put yourself first, you would die.

You can even yearn for a prison, so long as it contains the people and places you love.

If I went to America, I was sure I wouldn’t have to wash another glass. North Korea had trained me to think of concrete things. The obvious dishwashing gap between American and Chinese life impressed me to no end.

“You know how you look, Joseph?” “Trendy,” I said. “No, you look like a North Korean refugee.”

For some reason, I’d gotten it into my head that Americans ate only beef and bread and butter, so I thought, Here’s my chance to have a last piece of green vegetable.

In North Korea, if you have food and a place to sleep, you are beating the odds; you can feel satisfied with your life. In America, there are so many shades of gray between the black and white that is a North Korean life.

I’d never really been hugged before—there is no culture of embracing in North Korea—and I didn’t know what she wanted.