Every Falling Star: The True Story of How I Survived and Escaped North Korea

by Sungju Lee

Most people in the United States remember where they were on September 11, 2001. For people in Joseon, the day everyone remembers is July 8, 1994, or year 82 in the Juche calendar.

In history class, I had learned that the best way to get political prisoners to reveal their secrets was to make them laugh and trust their interrogators.

“The moral of the story,” my grandfather told me, stroking my forehead in much the same way my mother did when I had a fever, “is that good deeds lay a foundation for a house of great wealth and luck. Greed and ego, however, lay a foundation of destruction. The house that is built on such a foundation, one day, no matter what, will be torn down.”

“Morality is a great song a person sings when he or she has never been hungry. You can walk the noble road, Sungju. But if you die because of it, nobody will remember you were a noble person. Just a fool. Our enemy is death now. You know how Kim Il-sung said that children are the kings and queens of the nation?” he asked.

“I think, when we stop dreaming, we’re just as good as dead,”

“I think the worst thing anyone can do to another human being isn’t take away their home, their job, their parents. I think the worst thing anyone can do is make them stop believing in something higher, something good, something pure, a reason for everything—hope, maybe. God, maybe.”

“Maybe hope and God are the same,” he said dreamily. “Maybe. And maybe the best oppressors know to take away our physical security, then our connection to loved ones, then hope, then dreams, and finally God dies along with everything else,” I whispered. “Then we’re dead until a savior comes along.”

“My grandfather told me that love burns brighter than any star, so bright that love can be seen and felt from one end of the earth to the other. One day, when those children on other planets see our dead earth, it will be your light they see, not Kim Il-sung’s or Kim Jong-il’s. But the light of people like you.”

I came to realize then and there that gilded castles in the sky aren’t ever buildings. They’re people.

Inside, we already know the things that will happen to us in life. We spend our days just waiting for them to be revealed .

“Home,” I whispered in my father’s ear when we finally stopped crying, “is not a place, but people. I came to realize that as a street boy. You are one of my homes. And this time I am never letting you leave again.”