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

be better than here.
    Over the next few days, I made meticulous preparations. I packed my Chinese passport; I raided my beloved survival kit and withdrew my Leatherman Squirt PS4, not much bigger than a toothpick; a Bic pen sawed in half to save weight and a notebook the size of my palm; a multi-use plastic bag that served as a tent, SOS signal marker, and hydro bag; a military meal kit; a parachute cord, the sturdiest of ropes; vitamins and a sleeping aid; two changes of clothes. On my person, I would keep a money walletstitched into my underwear, zip-up military Gore-Tex combat shoes and all-terrain tiger-striped military pants—the basic pattern American soldiers donned during Vietnam. Once packed and prepared, I felt more secure. A few days later, armed with my supplies snugly fit into a backpack and a suitcase of goodies for my mom, we left the house at sunrise.
    The streetlights flickered on and off as our car curved away from Loma Linda. Good-bye to the neighborhood’s manicured lawns, the thick blanket of smog, to my teachers’ and school counselors’ expectations, to the habit of excelling. I couldn’t even remember why I had wanted to go to Harvard. I felt buoyant as we drove past a grove of corporate-owned orange trees that seemed to stand between me and a new life. China. The word rolled off my tongue. My backpack bounced on my back. It was happening, it was real. I was crossing borders for the second time in my life. I believed I was prepared.
    I often think about borders. It’s hard not to. There were the Guatemalans and Mexicans I read about in the paper who died of dehydration while trying to cross into America. Or later, the Syrians fleeing war and flooding into Turkey. Arizona had the nerve to ban books by Latino writers when only a few hundred years ago Arizona was actually Mexico. Or the sheer existence of passports, twentieth-century creations that decide who gets to stay and leave.
    Borders aren’t a random obsession of mine—unlike my affection for the double helix or Burmese temples—since they’d already changed my life. My family was Joseon-
jok,
ethnicKoreans who’d lived alongside the Han Chinese in northeastern China. That is, except during the madness of China’s Cultural Revolution when my grandfather crossed into North Korea, where my mom was born. If my mom and her family hadn’t recrossed while they still could, I might have been born in North Korea. As it was, I still had relatives on both sides of the river, and having grown up in northeastern China until I was nine, I could pass for a North Korean from the Hamgyong region when I spoke Korean, like many in the Chinese border towns.
    Still, when the plane landed in Yanji and I didn’t see my mom anywhere, I felt disoriented. The airport’s fluorescent yellow and blue plastic chairs, the glass-walled facade, the tidal wave of concrete wasn’t the China of my memory. I felt, suddenly, American, though my only passport was Chinese.
    The ground tipped as I scanned the pointillist painting of black-haired heads before me. I blamed jet lag for the vertigo of crossing, for that shift when language jostled out of place, and my mind sought to reverse the order of words in my head and became part of another geography again. Thankfully, I remembered that I was supposed to call my parents with my phone card once I landed. Plans, another anchor.
    My mom didn’t pick up the phone, but my dad answered in one ring. He said, “You haven’t met Ku
ajeoshi
yet?”
    â€œKu
ajeoshi
?”
    â€œEomma must have lost her cell phone on her last work trip, but I’d already bought the plane ticket.” He took a deep breath. “I didn’t want to worry you.”
    He told me that this Mr. Ku, his old school friend, was holding a sign with my name on it. He would drive me all the way to my mom’s town. I felt dismayed. There was little worse than hours of interrogation by