I @mentioned Yang in our WeChat group chat at eight AM my time and PM their time, telling her I dreamed of her being a North Korean spy. In my dream she was only revealed as being from North Korea, not necessarily a spy, but when it comes to North Koreans – we say they are all spies, including those young waitresses who perform dances for politicians and rich customers in Korean restaurants on the border. I wrote, Yang, could you have been a North Korean spy all these years and I just didn’t know about it until some random god sent me a message? Then I wrote, things finally made sense now because you ate an abnormal amount of kimchi the time we went to that seafood BBQ. I chuckled to myself and patiently waited for everyone’s replies. I secretly believed the three of them had their own group chat since, unlike me, they all still lived in China and would only talk in our group chat when the topic concerned me. Not sure how I was supposed to feel about that.
Yang quickly replied, saying yeah, I’m a North Korean princess. Send $50K my way or I’ll let my dear supreme leader know that you ate your own snot in third grade.
I said I dreamed of you because I missed you.
Ew, Yang said.
I doubled down. I said there’s no shame in being North Korean. You guys are rich now. Last time I came back home, modern buildings lined the river shore on their side. Oh, I’m sorry, your side.
Lu joined in. Girl, you joke, but I’m kinda bitter when I look at them now. Remember how we waved at the North Korean fishermen from the ferry when we were children? They used to look at us like how we looked at Hong Kong in the 90s. Now they look at us like how we look at Hong Kong today – nothing special.
Fei @sked me, did you see that gigantic pink coin-shaped thing when you came back? They say it’s a luxury hotel or something. Like, what the fuck.
I said, yeah. What the fuck.
~
You will grow up hearing three rumors if you come from where I’m from. Number one: the border patrol once caught a North Korean man who tried to swim across the Yalu River. When they apprehended him from the algae-infested water, the first thing he asked for was food. They put him in an interrogation room and left him with a whole pot of steamed pork buns. When they checked back later, the man was lying prone on the floor, with no breath. No heartbeat. All the buns were gone but one, half-eaten in his hand. The doctor came and told everyone his stomach exploded within his body. After that, the border patrol had a new rule: never give a North Korean refugee more food than a kid’s meal. Fei told me this story when we were little. She said her uncle was a member of the border patrol. I then told other people including my parents. They said yes, they’d heard of this before. Their colleague’s uncle worked in border patrol.
Number two: the female owner of that Korean restaurant you always order takeout from is a North Korean spy. This rumor would vary depending on which neighborhood you live in. Sometimes they’d say the food at a certain Korean restaurant was not on a par with what it used to be because the previous owner was secretly arrested for spying activities, and the new owner assigned by the government was only there to deescalate the impact. I was too young to order takeout from any restaurant when I lived at home, but a friend who later emigrated to America told me her English tutor who owned a café on the riverside was detained for snooping on classified military secrets. He’s Canadian, she said, he made the best coffee in the world because it was authentic North American coffee. I said why would a Canadian guy be interested in China/North Korea-related secrets, like, they’re so neutral in everything. She said, are you fucking stupid? What she said was, in fact, not a rumor. I saw the article years later in the Washington Post. They said he was innocent. To this day I still can’t decide who to believe.
Number three: the North Koreans who study here all come from élite families. Older people said it was an honor and privilege for the North Koreans to send their children to China. Here, they would learn all the knowledge and skills they should need to become future leaders. Though, these élite children would all go back to their home country in a mere couple of years in case they became too “corrupted” by the popular culture. This rumor rang half true because nearly every young adult from where I’m from can tell you a story about that one North Korean kid they went to school with, and none of them had bad grades. “He barely spoke.” They’d always start their story with this sentence. I have nothing to negate this observation of North Korean kids, as I once had a crush on one who indeed barely spoke. We were in different classes in high school but went to the same after-school oral English program taught by real Americans. He had fair skin, slender limbs, and the face of an Arctic fox in dental braces. He was quiet but friendly, especially to our little sis gang that would make up our current day WeChat group. This was when our gang had five members. We asked him why he needed all this extra credit in English it’s not like he’d be able to use it. He just smiled. Oh no, Fei said, it means he’s going to use it and that’s scary. It’s scary if a North Korean needs to understand English. I said shut up Fei but agreed with her in heart. He, again, just smiled and turned his head away. The following Friday, Lili threw herself off of the sixth floor of our high school building. We were not invited to her funeral and my parents ordered me to go to school all the same. After school, I decided that I would just sit on the high stairs facing the entrance of the English tutoring center and not go inside until my parents come to pick me up. The setting sun made the cemented stairs glow like rose gold. I let my legs dangle from the edge of the stairs, merging into the street view. Then I felt a tap on my left sneaker. May I sit with you? A pale fox face looking up from the sidewalk with his index finger lifted next to my shoe. I nodded. He walked up the stairs and sat twenty inches to my right, letting his legs dangle like I did. He said if you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t have to. It wasn’t until that moment did I realize that I did very much want to talk about it, but we just sat in silence with those twenty inches between us. It also wasn’t until that moment did he look more like the protagonist of a Japanese romance drama than a communist heir. We sat there, exchanging not a word until the sun fully set and the street lights came on, giving the stairs a cool silver shade but no longer warmth. He helped me up as I complained about my legs falling asleep. We said goodbye to each other and it was the last time I saw him. If he reappeared today and told me he was a North Korean prince, I think I might just send him all the $6,000 in my bank account in a heartbeat.
~
My mom called me at six, AM my time and PM her time, telling me my uncle got arrested. She was panicking a little but I panicked more because she knew how bad the situation was, and I didn’t. I always tend to think worse of a situation if it happens far away from me. She said my uncle who worked in the railway system posted on his WeChat Moments that he witnessed Kim Jong Un’s train trip to China. The visit wasn’t exactly a secret but a sudden decision to avoid planned assassination, and a well-trained eye could deduct from my uncle’s post the exact train number and schedule of the world’s most hated man. I said what? Is he fucking stupid? My mom said yeah, what are you gonna do about it. Your uncle must have really wanted those likes. Now she’s trying to pull some strings and see if she could bail him out. I hung up the phone, the story of that Canadian café owner crossing my mind. I thought shit, shit, shit. In an instant, I remembered Yang was now part of the police force. I sent a message into the group chat, “Guys, guys, emergency! My uncle got arrested for posting about Kim Jong Un. Do y’all have connections that might help especially @Yang?”
I waited for a while; no one replied. I entered, “@all.”
A long ten minutes passed. Fei broke the silence. She said, “Are you sure it’s ok if we mention his name here? Group chats are monitored. Can you try withdrawing the message?”
“Are you saying we might get arrested for talking about my uncle’s getting arrested for talking about that guy?” I said.
Fei replied, “I don’t think it will go that far, but you’re abroad and we’re not. Withdraw the message. We’ve all seen it. Let me call Yang.”
I sat up straight in my bed, my head full of random fragments of memories: That time my ninety-year-old grandma thought the war had broken out when the gutter pipe atop her roof fell apart and made a thunderous sound. My dad asked her, “What war?” And that time I went through the U.S. customs, the first thing the officer asked was, “Have you been to North Korea?” I said course not, so he smiled and said, “Sorry I had to ask, seeing the city you come from.” And and all those nights when the five of us skipped after-school programs and sat on the limestone stairs cascading into the eroding river bank drinking beers. Leaning into each other as if we were XOXO gossip girls on the granite steps of the Met, we casually killed the ants crawling onto our thighs and squinted our eyes looking for evidence of any human activities from across the dark water. We could see none.
The man sleeping next to me woke up and gently pulled my elbow, “Is everything ok, babe?”
I put down my phone, turned my face towards him, and asked in the most genuine tone, “What kind of life do you think the North Koreans are living?”
He looked confused.
I said, “Yeah, I dunno either.”
~
My mom called me again at six the next day. My uncle was finally released after 24 hours of detention. Did Yang help in the process? She couldn’t be sure. None of the officers would say much besides telling him not to ever do it again. Is he OK? Yes, he’s doing ok, still a little unconvinced of the need for his detention. Don’t worry. This page has been flipped over.
I subsequently called Yang. I told her I didn’t know if she helped in my uncle’s case but I appreciated it if she did. I added that I knew she probably couldn’t talk much on the phone and I felt silly for not knowing earlier. She was outside eating seafood BBQ with her coworkers. The sound of fresh-out-of-water clams sizzling on the grill was in the background. She said no problem. It wasn’t that big of a deal.
I asked, “Which one? My uncle’s thing or us talking about my uncle’s thing?”
She laughed, “Are you fucking stupid?”
I laughed, too. I still didn’t understand which one it was. Maybe neither was a big deal. Maybe both were big deals and she was just being cordial.
We laughed for a while, then I said, “You looked so sad in my dream. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you that sad. Your swiveled face. So much desperation. You told me it was you who pushed her off the school building and that you had no choice because she found out you were in fact North Korean. My heart felt bad for you there, truly, like, did you have to swim across the river?”
She took a sigh. I could hear empty shells clank as they were disposed into the basket by her coworkers. I missed those yellow shells. Just as I was about to ask her whether she ate a lot of kimchi this time, she said, “I miss her, too. Fuck you. I miss her, too.”
~
Claire W. Zhang is a writer currently residing in Long Island, NY. She writes long short stories and short short stories with the goal of confusing or provoking her readers. Born and raised in China, she had very little idea of what writing creatively in a second language entailed until quitting her career in business for which she was trained for ten years, holding a BS, an MS, an MBA, in finance, project management, and other related shits. She recently earned an MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute, which she swore would be her last degree.