A Pyeongyang Love Story

North Korea Love Story: A Pyeongyang Love Story follows Ki-Dae, a boy risking everything for one forbidden night of connection.

A voice on the loudspeakers, trembling with worship. Another attack repelled, another miracle performed by the Great Leader, who crushed missiles in his hand and saved his people once again.

The American Imperialists. The Japanese Dogs. The Cowered Nation to the South, below that fictitious wall where some supposed paradise exists. Lies. Mindless slaves. A place where so many have gone never to come back. Their minds overtaken by the virus, the corruption, the disease…

Ki-Dae dreamt of roosters. They crowed in his sleep. He felt their feathers, green and indigo and proud, a crimson crown upon their heads. White hens, fat with eggs. Clucking happily.

Waking and wishing. For food. Yes, but these days, for that other thing too. A shameful thing which he would not tell his mother. He would do his own laundry, rinsing furiously. The shame.

An explosion. Most times he could contain it. Last night, it came awake. He woke up wet. His underwear felt cruel and haunted. Yet his visions of her…the girl on the green hillside, as she wore her white hanbok and spread her father’s ashes and cried. The boy (in the drama the boy’s name was Min-Jun) held her, and loved her, and she became Sarang.

Sarang-i–Sarang-hae.

School.

His mother was at market.

His brother was by now somewhere near Baekdu Mountain, deep within North Korea, at the base of the high rocky cliffs where the stone giant in the shape of their Great Leader’s Father watched from above.

Silence. Their father gone—no explanation, only a photograph and a shame that lingered heavier than memory. Some whispered he was a defector; no one dared repeat the word aloud.

“Look for Father’s axe,” June-Ho said with his mouth. His eyes said different words. “Find the axe and cut down the tree and gather the apples.”

There was no axe. There were no apples.

Ki knew his hyung meant their secret place, the one they used as children.

Ki-Dae searched near the crumbling shed, a rotten box of wood that leaned by the brush that produced nothing but the bark of twigs, the fantasy of meat. Next to the rusted metal pole, their “tree”, the hole held a memory of stones–the rocks removed except to cover something.

Pure shock. Like finding one million bank notes–or better yet–the mythic green paper of the Americans.

A thing that could get him killed, chained inside a dark hole, made to live on centipedes.

Ki-Dae touched it. The plastic had protected it from rain.

In that morning shadow, he opened the bag and cracked open the case. Flash of silver, its contents stored in rainbows, a product of filth and destruction.

A thing of light.

Forbidden beauty.

For days after, Ki-Dae sat still in the home, listening carefully within a shut closet for practice to sharpen his senses. He spent hours scanning the streets with his eyes.

Finally, he decided he had absorbed the patterns of the air and wind, the streets and the sky.

He set the volume on level 1, waited, and breathed.

A button was pressed, a soft whir as the tray ejected.

His mother had attained the device the year before. She sold rice-cakes in the market, and in the market, everyone knew that happiness tasted like chocopies, or had the words “SAMSUNG” written in silver across the frame.

The first time, the screen lit up like a forbidden sun and he nearly screamed. The world inside it was impossible. It stung his eyes. He could not breathe.

The episodes passed with the final episode hanging in suspense. Would Min-Jun’s mother survive from cancer? Would he tell the girl (in the series, her name was also Sarang) that he loved her?

Ki-Dae was satisfied, for a time, to have seen it, to have known it. He was grateful, but he could not move on.

He dreamed of roosters and hens and eggs that he would never eat.

He stared into the sky as if it were a giant TV screen, glowing beneath winter blankets in secrecy.

Then one afternoon, like a madman, he made up his mind:

He would show Sarang the K-drama DVD.

The plan was humiliating. Terrifying.

Ki walked to school stiffly, every step a risk. Soldiers leaned on jeeps. Teachers watched. Anyone could stop him. There would be searches. Inspections. Eyes. Ears. Noses sniffing out traitors.

The K-drama DVD had a hole in its center, like a ring. Too big for his finger. But perhaps the right size for something else.

As he walked to school that morning, Ki-Dae looked to see the old man dying of hunger by the side of the farm road. A forsaken man, banished from his own home for such a crime as the one Ki-Dae was now committing.

That morning, the man was covered in flies. He had died already.

Ki-Dae, as well as his other classmates, marched to school and only looked. Then all turned their heads. There was nothing to see there.

He arrived early, heart pounding, barely able to breathe. He took his seat and sat, awkwardly, feeling the forbidden disk being pushed upward.

The chairs scraped against the floor, like nails clawing against a cliffside.

His teacher’s voice felt like an accusation as they were ordered to stand for the anthem.

Ki-Dae had not thought this through enough. He suddenly wished to get down on his knees and confess everything: the afternoons spent watching, the nights dreaming, the wretched plan to now to risk the life of the one he loved in order that she might know his sins.

The anthem began. Ki-Dae stood slowly, fearing the object might drop from its location and fall out of his pant leg.

His body broke out in cold sweat.

Three rows in front of him, he saw Sarang, her hair black and shining. The back of her head was impossibly beautiful.

They began to sing and Ki-Dae heard her voice only.

His panic dissolved with her voice, he felt determined as they sang to their Great Leader.

Then, out of nowhere, she turned and met his eyes, as if she had felt his stare, had read his signals, or perhaps knew everything that he planned to do.

Would she betray him? Would she lead him to a dark hole filled with centipedes?

Without sound, her lips formed a single word, a part of the anthem, but on this morning, for Ki-Dae only.

“Love.”

The notes of the anthem swelled. He felt the sharp edges of plastic bite into his skin, his forbidden flesh, the circle flattened and pressed hard against his trousers’ fly.

A disk that contained the story that would destroy all the lies they had been taught to believe.

Ki-Dae would show Sarang the story.

But he could not tell her the end.

A small act of defiance, and one more North Korean defector fiction that refuses to stay silent. If you enjoyed this North Korea Love Story, explore more from Kimchi x Kafka — Klickitat Street, a reflection on memory and home, or This Isn’t Just a Souvenir, a story of unexpected connection while traveling in Yangshuo.