The moonlight stretched pale across the water, making the waves look like a road of silver shards. Chul-hae gripped the oars of his small wooden boat, his hands raw and scarred from years of fishing nets. Behind him, the coastline of his village disappeared into the blackness. Somewhere back there, his mother was holding Sun-hee and little Dam, the children who were supposed to be asleep but had run off to the cemetery to fetch the stray puppy they called “Ginam.”
That name still pierced Chul-hae’s heart. Ginam, his first son, dead at five from pneumonia. No medicine, no doctor, no hope. Only straw clutched in his mouth as the boy’s small chest stilled.
Tonight, Chul-hae whispered to the waves, he could not lose another child to hunger or disease.
The sea was rough, as he had predicted. If the patrols noticed his absence in the morning, they would assume he had drowned. He clung to that small chance of escape.
To track the patrol boats, he tuned the shortwave radio—the battered South Korean device that had drifted ashore years ago, tangled in storm wreckage. Its crackling sound was both a lifeline and a curse. It reminded him that there was another world beyond the DMZ, a place where shoes and warm fish and houses with electricity were not dreams but ordinary things.
Static gave way to a familiar voice. It was deep, steady, and broadcast everywhere—through loudspeakers in villages, in factories, even in classrooms. The voice of Kim Jong-un.
“The cause of building a powerful country … is being reviewed proudly now that our state has attained a remarkable status,” the leader declared.
Chul-hae froze, his hand on the radio dial.
“Now no one, by whatever means, can do harm to the absolute status and security of our state,” the broadcast continued, “and no force can reverse the powerful current towards an era of prosperity, which we have created by ourselves.”
The words drifted out across the sea, grand and distant, so far removed from the empty rice bowls of his hut, from the cold grave of Ginam, from his mother’s tired smile.
Chul-hae spat into the water. Prosperity? His wife had died from exhaustion, collapsing after a fourteen-hour day at sea with him. His children were barefoot. His mother was starving.
The radio carried on. “The truth is that socialism we chose is the one and only right road. We will not allow the destiny of our country to be left to any foreign forces’ devices.”
Destiny. Chul-hae thought of his daughter’s words: “I want to move to the South and buy some shoes.” He thought of Dam’s dream: “I want to eat warm fish in a new house.”
What destiny could he offer them here, under banners of victory that masked graves of children?
A dog’s faint bark carried over the wind—Sun-hee and Dam, hurrying back from the cemetery with the puppy, stubborn in their belief that Ginam had returned to them. Chul-hae’s chest tightened. He should wait for them. He should not leave. But if he waited, patrol boats would come.
His grip on the oar tightened until his knuckles whitened.
From the radio came Kim’s final proclamation: “I extend a warm militant salute to the generals, officers and soldiers of our army, who have been dispatched for overseas military operations.”
Chul-hae shut the radio off. The sea was his battlefield now, and survival was his war. He pushed the oars deep into the black water, steering south. Behind him, faint and small on the shore, two children and a puppy might even now be running, calling his name.
But the tide had already taken him.
All names of people and organizations appearing in this story are pseudonyms
Kim says N. Korea’s ‘absolute’ status cannot be reversed on founding day
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