Who Has A Real Castle Where I Can Hide?

One night a general’s jeep chattered to a halt in front of the orphans’ hut. The general threw open the door and flashed his light so that he could see the children lying on the floor. Normally, children who were taken away on such occasions came back sworn not to tell what had happened, but they did tell. Was it better or worse to be taken? Better. Sometimes they got food although sometimes they only got what came out of the man, the white stuff.

The general’s flashlight reached Na Cheon who did not realize that it was her half-brother, Jae-Hwa, in her father’s uniform and brigadier’s hat. He snatched her up and drove to the not-human-insect-women’s hut to rescue her mother. Then he drove down a long road and told them he had killed his father and Chin Ho, too. He beat them to death with a skillet. Next he used the skillet on the guard at the camp’s fence. Then Jae-Hwa pushed his stepmother and sister out of the jeep and ran it into the fence to make a hole. There was a tremendous flash and blue fire all over the jeep, but Jae-Hwa had leaped out, returned, grabbed them, and said if one fell, the others must keep running, and if one was swept away by the river, the others must keep struggling, but he would carry Na Cheon on his shoulders and hold his stepmother’s hand and they would escape to China and find a South Korean who would get them to Seoul where the Americans would keep them safe.

China was not worse than Camp 22 but similar. There was desperate hiding, there were days when Jae-Hwa went out to look for South Korean helpers and came back not having seen one, or having been told it was all a myth, there were no South Korean helpers, but if he wanted to work and eat, he could work and eat. So he would take apart bulldozers and lower their transmissions and axles and engines into solvent tubs and wipe the solvent off and put the bulldozers together again and be given food and return to the place in the rocks where Na Cheon and her mother hid and share it with them.

One day a man told Jae-Hwa to go into the alley behind the garage. A blind man sat there smoking a cigarette. He said that he would help Jae-Hwa and one more reach South Korea, but that was it. Two, not three.

Na Cheon’s mother said she would stay in the rocks. Na Cheon said she would stay with her. Na Cheon’s mother said no.

“But why?” Na Cheon cried.

“Because he can carry you if he has to, and he cannot carry me. I am too used up. Look at me! I am dead!”

Na Cheon and Jae-Hwa saw her face wasted away from her teeth, her eyes fallen deep inside her head, her patches of baldness, her inability to stand up.

They left her. For the next three months they traveled under the floor of truck beds, on night-long icy walks, on horses, and once in a container house that was being moved south in a convoy of container houses to create a new camp near a mine. A Chinese woman snuck into their container house and taught them Chinese phrases that she said would save them if they were ever found out: We come from Jilin Province where there is no food. We are father and daughter. We want to live. We will do whatever you want if only we can go to Beijing.

Why Beijing? Because there they would live in a tiny apartment across the street from the South Korean embassy and one day there would be a car crash at the changing of the Chinese guards, giving them a chance to run through the gate and be safe for the rest of their lives.

Na Cheon made it through, too small for the Chinese guards to grab. Jae-Hwa was caught. She never saw him again, but when she thought about him, she pictured him in her father’s uniform, wearing her father’s hat. That hat kept Jae-Hwa safe if only in her mind. There in her mind he had a house and children, including a little girl like Na Cheon, and a jeep and men who served him and non-humans insects to punish. But then she remembered her mother singing tearful songs as they walked away from the place in the rocks, and she didn’t want to think anymore. “Think nothing!” She told herself. “Stop!”

They said in Seoul she must be eight. Okay, eight. Her name could still be Na Cheon. Okay, too. She was near the American base because Americans paid for the house in which she stayed. Very slowly for her own good, they said she was starved a little less and a little less and grew strong enough to go outside.

There a large man in a uniform took her hand and touched each of her fingers and said, “One…two…three…four…five.” The next time she saw him he did it again and said, “Four are fingers. Other’s your thumb.”

She took his hand and said, “One…two…three…four…five!”

“That’s right!” he laughed.

“Fingers…thumb.”

“Right again! You’re a smart little booger.”

Also there was a ball on a grassy field with no weeds. The girls and boys kicked it and screamed. At first she couldn’t run, but eventually she could a little bit. She even kicked the ball a few times, but like so many things, this made her cry. She didn’t like kicking the ball.

The American woman in the house where she lived gave every girl going into the showers a little dab of green jelly. Na Cheon ate it. The other girls laughed at the bubbly vomit spewing out of her mouth. The American woman took off her own clothes and got into the shower with Na Cheon and washed her hair for her. She was a heavy woman with enormous blue-veined breasts, a fat belly creased like a stairway, fat behind, great big thighs and enough hair to cover a whole head between her legs. Na Cheon pressed her face between the American woman’s breasts. The American woman said she mustn’t do that. Na Cheon thought this was a game and pressed her face there again. The American woman slapped her.