The Frog in the Well
The Frog in the Well
Kiyoshi Hirawa
A knock or a kick?
The first thought of every North Korean when footsteps approach the front door.
Nowhere was this more true than in Kilju, tucked within the isolated reaches of North Hamgyŏng Province, a region infamous for three things: the dark Siberian spruce forests, the elusive Eurasian lynx, and Hwasŏng–the notorious political prisoner camp known for working inmates to death.
Sitting on a broken chair in his apartment, Jun Kim heard the soft padding of feet and saw the sliver of light under his front door flicker.
Knock or kick?
Then another thought, wry and mournful.
Am I going to die in prison because of a bobblehead?
* * *
The bobblehead had been attached to a balloon. A renegade balloon. Along with a cell phone.
For months, political activists in South Korea had been floating giant homemade balloons across the demilitarized zone into North Korea. Thin and shimmery, the balloons were a few stories tall and dropped contraband that most countries would only shrug at. Bible verses. Feminine hygiene products. An occasional candy bar or Hollywood DVD. And political pamphlets, of course, extolling democracy and condemning tyranny.
Jun had witnessed the tempting descent of several balloons, but he ignored them. It would take more than a candy bar or a DVD to risk his job. He’d been a driver for a construction surveyor for the last couple of years, a plum gig for someone who just completed his mandatory military service, and rarer still for someone with a dubious songbun, or family classification. Any disgrace–attempted defections, anti-government activities, imprisonment–risked tarnishing the family songbun, funneling descendants into more grueling or dangerous jobs.
“Not this pit.” Chol Pak pointed through the windshield and past a mammoth construction site. “The other one.” A second excavation pit was a few hundred yards away, much deeper than the first.
“Government offices?” Jun asked.
“Apartments. For government workers.” Drivers didn’t normally ask their kisulwŏn, or technicians, any questions, and technicians didn’t normally answer. But Jun and Chol were friends, or at least, tepid colleagues. Perfunctory friendship was the norm above the 38th Parallel, bonds forged from shared proximity rather than shared passions. “Pull over there.”
Jun eased the truck to a stop. Chol called out to a couple of construction workers, who dropped their shovels and came running. One dragged a tripod and a Soviet-era optical level from the truck bed while the other yanked out a surveyor’s staff.
“Careful. Careful!” Chol chastised them. “That staff’s already got a hairline fracture.” He looked back at Jun. “Be about an hour.”
Jun nodded and leaned back in his seat, feeling the stares of quiet jealousy from the construction workers. Geunyang, he mumbled. Whatever. They still had their lungs. He slid his hat over his eyes and ignored them. An hour. Plenty of time for a nap, and the truck was more comfortable than the mattress on his apartment floor.
A clunk on the windshield jolted him awake. His first reaction was panic, wondering if a party official had ventured out of the city to check on the project.
But no, there was only a miniature face staring at him through the windshield.
Chan Ho Park, Jun immediately recognized. The Korean Express.
Jun got out and gathered the bundle from the windshield. He gave a quick glance skyward and barely made out a balloon drifting under the clouds. Instead of letting the balloons lose helium and descend, South Koreans had started equipping them with electronic altimeters, which released small parachutes carrying contraband.
This particular parachute offered Jun some very unexpected paraphernalia. The first was the Chan Ho Park bobblehead. The second was a cell phone. And the third was a single piece of crisply folded paper. Jun looked around to make sure no one was watching, then pocketed the bobblehead and cell phone.
He climbed back in the truck and unfolded the piece of paper, certain it was propaganda. Instead, the mysterious sheet contained ten names, a phone number, and a challenge:
역대 최고의 한국 야구 선수 10인
1. 박찬호
2. 이승엽
3. 류현진
4. 김광현
5. 추신수
6. 김현수
7. 손승락
8. 이대호
9. 박용택
10. 김병현
더 나은 목록이 있다고 생각하시나요? 저에게 문자를 보내서 당신의 의견을 말씀해 주세요.
010-0247-1691
Jun read it again, stunned.
The Top 10 Korean Baseball Players of All Time?
And then that ending, including a phone number?
Think you have a better list? Text me and make your case.
He leaned forward to peer up through the windshield, searching again for the balloon, thinking, 이게 뭐야?
What the hell?
* * *
Jun kept the parachute’s contraband stuffed in his pants until he got home. It was stupid, he knew. He’d actually walked to one of the construction dumpsters, overflowing with rebar, and started to slip everything over the side when a coughing fit doubled him over. Dropped him to a knee, in fact. After gasping himself to his feet, he crammed everything into his pockets and shuffled back to the truck.
In his dim apartment, Jun set the Chan Ho Park bobblehead and the top ten list on the stainless steel counter. It was an old autopsy table, repurposed from a demolished morgue, and it paired unsettlingly with the cast-iron sink salvaged from an abandoned hospital. Some nights, when he couldn’t stop coughing, he gripped the counter and tried desperately to avoid vomiting precious calories into the sink.
As he ate his corn rice and soybean soup, Jun pondered the balloon’s parachute. He didn’t know who’d sent the phone and list, but he knew he was being baited. There was no question that Chan Ho Park was number one. But Lee Seung-yeop at number two? And the others? Son Seung-rak was a borderline top ten player at best, nowhere close to number seven. And even if Kim Byung-hyun was the first Korean to win a World Series, he didn’t belong in the top ten.
He was being provoked, Jun knew, but why?
He fingered the flip-phone, then finally opened it and powered it on, not expecting a signal. After a few blinking moments, however, there it was. A stunning, single bar of service.
Jun closed the phone and tapped it against his palm. A gift or a gambit? A moment’s deliberation, then he flipped it open again.
당신이 만든 목록은 형편없네요. 양의지는 어디 있죠? 그리고 강정호는요?
Your list sucks. Where’s Yang Eui-ji? And Kang Jung-ho?
Jun hit send and powered off the phone.
* * *
Jun didn’t mention the balloon or his illicit text when he picked up Chol the next morning. He didn’t think Chol would turn him in, but he also didn’t want Chol to have to lie for him. It was the foundational uneasiness of most North Korean relationships–don’t screw it up for me, and I won’t screw it up for you.
Chol directed them to three more surveying sites before they stopped for lunch. As they leaned against the back bumper of the truck, picking through their kimchi, a seasoned dish of cabbage or radishes, Chol looked up at the sky.
“Did anyone respond?” he asked.
“Respond?” Jun felt his stomach drop.
Chol munched his cabbage and wiped his mouth. “The phone from the balloon. Attached to the doll or whatever. Did anyone answer? Or respond?”
Jun said nothing.
“I saw you through the optical level yesterday,” Chol explained. “You were going to throw the phone in the dumpster, but you didn’t, so I figured you took it home, probably called or texted someone.”
With nothing to lose except Chol’s respect if he kept lying, Jun told Chol about the bobblehead, the list, and the phone.
“So you texted the number?” Chol marveled.
“Yeah.”
“That was stupid.” Chol was not unkind, only a would-be scientist who followed the unforgiving compass of logic.
“Why?”
“Only two possibilities. One, the phone’s from South Korea, but the Party can still intercept your calls or texts. And that means prison. Or two, the phone–and the balloon–is actually a decoy, a trap, deployed by the Party to identify troublemakers. And that means you just texted the Bowibu,” explained Chol, invoking slang for the North Korean secret police.
“What if it’s from South Korea and nobody detects it?”
“Then you might make a connection with someone you’ll never meet or see.” Chol crumpled the wax paper that had wrapped his lunch. “You think that’s better?” He found his canteen in the truck and drained it. “We’re frogs, Jun, frogs. And we’re never getting out of this well.”
Every North Korean knew this aphorism–A frog in a well does not know the ocean–but Chol’s words still cut deeply. Jun had always known he was trapped, though he’d never thought of himself as a frog, a pathetic creature ignorant of the world around him. He lapsed into silence.
“How do you even know about South Korean baseball, anyway?” Chol asked. “We don’t get any games.”
“I grew up in Sinuiju,” Jun explained. “My dad bought a Chinese TV on the black market, and we’d catch KBO broadcasts–the South Korean pro league–from Dandong, just over the border. And every once in a while, we’d get a tape of a game from America or some homemade highlights.”
He remembered hearing his father excitedly describe Hyun-Jin Ryu or Kim Hyun-soo, recalled the delight in his perpetually fatigued voice, and perhaps for the first time in his life, Jun wasn’t hungry.
Chol cleared his throat. “When did your father depart?”
Jun’s father had married a Chinese woman. Even after Jun was born, they’d lived in secret for decades until they were discovered and Jun’s father was sent to Kwan-li-so, the Korean gulags. When someone departed, it marked the last time any family ever saw them.
Jun didn’t answer and Chol tried a different approach.
“You gave your lungs to get this job, right?” Chol asked.
Jun was suddenly wary. “Why?”
“Because,” Chol said, getting back into the truck. “It seems foolish to waste such a sacrifice.”
* * *
That evening, in his apartment, Jun powered on the phone. There was a single text.
그럼 당신의 목록을 들어볼까요
Let’s hear your list, then.
Jun pondered responding as he washed for the night. Instead of a shower, he scrubbed his hands and lathered his feet in a shallow basin with cold water. The apartment’s power was sporadically reliable, but tonight it seemed steady, so he plugged in the phone and slid it under the mattress on the floor, alongside the bobblehead. The hiding spot was laughable. If the Bowibu kicked down his door, they’d find both items before Jun blinked awake. Still, the hiding spot somehow offered comfort, a rebel base for his feeble resistance.
As he lay on the mattress, he thought about Chol’s words. A waste of a sacrifice.
Except, Chol’s assertion presumed that his sacrifice was intentional, premeditated. It wasn’t. During his last year of military service, he’d been backing a fuel tanker into a garage when the fraying wiring caught fire. The truck erupted in flames and partially exploded, knocking an inspection clerk unconscious.
Ignoring his own burns and bruises, Jun dragged the clerk to the exit and pounded on the door before returning to search for anyone else injured in the garage. In their panic, the soldiers dragged the clerk out and slammed shut the door, not realizing that Jun was still inside. When more senior officers arrived and deployed a rescue team, Jun had inhaled five minutes of burning fuel, oil, and plastic. Since that day, he felt like he’d never stopped coughing.
Later, he found out that the inspection clerk was the nephew of a colonel–not important enough to completely escape his songbun, but enough to earn a driver position after his military service ended. And his own apartment, at least, as long as he could afford it.
Jun cleared the perpetual phlegm in his throat, contemplating his apartment and its cracked concrete walls. And the peeling ceiling that dropped dust with each overhead step. And the mattress whose stuffing had to be rearranged every night.
We’re frogs, Chol had said. And we’re never getting out.
Jun reached under the mattress and flipped open the phone. His fingers flew and he punched send before he reconsidered.
1. 박찬호
2. 류현진
3. 추신수
4. 이승엽
5. 양의지
6. 김현수
7. 박용택
8. 오승환
9. 김광현
10. 강정호
당신은 야구에 대해 잘 모르시는군요, 그렇죠?
You don’t know much about baseball, do you?
Jun shoved the phone back under his mattress, and for the first time in many lonely evenings, he smiled.
* * *
The next afternoon when he got home, Jun powered on the phone before he washed up or started dinner. This time, there were many more text messages.
제가 당신보다 더 많이 안다는 걸 장담합니다.
그리고 양의지를 왜 그렇게 높은 순위에 올려놓았습니까?
그리고 김현수는 왜 이렇게 순위가 낮죠?
Jun grunted, irritated. Really? This person was so sure that they knew more than he did. Yet they questioned why Yang Eui-ji, the greatest Korean catcher ever, was ranked so high? And why Kim Hyun-soo, an outfielder with minimal MLB experience and no records, was ranked lower?
Do you even watch the KBO down there? Jun messaged back. He walked over to the counter to chop vegetables, but the vibration of the reply came back almost immediately. Jun walked back over, saw the message, and almost dropped the phone.
제가 한국에 있다고 생각하는 이유가 뭐죠?
Jun sat down and stared at the message, actually re-read it aloud.
What makes you think I’m in South Korea?
Jun leaned against the wall for a few minutes, then messaged back, Because no man in North Korea would take such a stupid risk.
This time, the reply buzzed before Jun stood back up.
내가 남자라고 생각하는 이유가 뭐죠?
Jun looked at it in disbelief.
What makes you think I’m a man?
Utterly bewildered, Jun thumbed the keys. Whoever you are, you obviously don’t intend to see your elder years.
A pause, then the coup de grâce.
내가 올해를 넘겨서 살 거라고 생각하는 이유가 뭐죠?
What makes you think I intend to live past this year?
* * *
“What’d she mean by that, did she say?” Chol asked, distracted. They were watching a site manager direct a crane overloaded with steel beams.
“Cancer, apparently.” Jun marveled at the crane’s height. “Small cell lung, whatever that means.”
“Means she really doesn’t have the rest of the year.” Chol frowned and put his hand out the truck window, testing the wind. They were parked on an embankment overlooking the iron girders of the building, waiting. The site manager was new and had requested Chol re-survey part of the project; the last manager had been arrested for slow progress. “If she even exists.”
“You still think it’s the Bowibu?”
“I think you’re a fool to think otherwise. A terminal illness? It’s the perfect cover.”
Jun felt the phone deep in his pocket. “She’s real, I think. She sent a picture.”
“Really? Let’s see it, do you have the phone?”
Jun lied and shook his head. “At home. Hidden.”
“No way it’s real, gotta be AI.”
“Looked pretty real to me. She grew up in Hyesan, caught some of the Chinese re-broadcasts of games, just like I did when I was a kid.”
Chol tensed and peered up at the crane, looking from the site manager to the bundle of beams which had started to sway in the wind.
“Problem?” Jun trusted Chol because he saw things others didn’t.
“Maybe.” The load steadied as the crane continued to hoist the beams. Chol looked over at Jun. “So she sent you a photo? You didn’t send her anything, right? No pics, no personal information, right?”
“Of course not,” Jun lied again. In truth, he’d told her his name and age. He’d also sent her a photo, too, after she’d asked if they could talk in person, though he hadn’t committed to meeting. “You really think it’s a trick?”
The swaying crane caught Chol’s attention again. “Do you know why frogs are so easy to catch?” he asked, watching. “Because they’re predictable, easily baited, and don’t recognize predators.”
Jun said nothing.
“I think you sent her a photo. And your name, too, probably some other stuff. And I think you probably have the phone on you somewhere.”
Jun started to deny it, but a coughing fit sent him out of the truck. Leaning over, he fought but failed to contain his lunch, gushing vomit turned red by the radishes. At least, he hoped it was the radishes. Snorting, he crawled back in, dug the phone out of his pocket, and laid it on the dashboard.
“Do you know why,” Jun asked, “the frog in the well still jumps?”
Chol started to answer, then bolted out of the truck, shouting and waving his arms at the site manager. Jun stared through the windshield and saw the load of beams swinging wildly. The crane operator was fighting both the wind shear and the pendulum effect when the rigging suddenly shrieked and snapped.
Steel beams rained down as screams rose up above the dust cloud.
In the aftermath of impossibly twisted metal and impossibly flattened bodies, Jun would remember two things.
First, the arrest of the site manager by the police. Handcuffed. Hooded. Weeping and protesting. Thrown in the back of a truck.
And second, the angry shouts of the newly-appointed site manager, yelling at the crew to clear the scene so the crane could start hoisting again.
Jun grabbed the phone off the dashboard before Chol returned.
오늘 밤 만날래?
Do you want to meet tonight?
The reply came back instantly.
언제 어디서?
When and where?
* * *
When the Bowibu arrested Jun’s father, they hadn’t knocked on the door. They’d simply kicked it and grabbed him as he was crawling under a mattress. Agents had already snatched Jun’s mother at the market. Halfway through boot camp, Jun’s commanding officer told him that his mother had been deported and that the police had dragged his father out by his cowardly, bloody ankles.
Jun had never forgotten or repeated that story.
After completing his military service, Jun moved into a garden-level apartment, a concrete box that collected every sound and scent from the parking lot. Unlike most tenants, Jun kept his window and shades open, deciphering and savoring each mysterious moment and sensation.
Jun fingered the shirt reserved for weddings and smoothed a pair of heavily mended trousers worn to a dozen funerals. His watch beeped just as he glanced down. It was time. He looked over at the door. No knocks. No kicks.
Jun flipped open the phone and scrolled up to the first top ten list. Then flicked back down to his own list.
His father’s baseball lectures rose like ghosts.
Number ten. Kang Jung-ho. 5-time KBO All-Star, finished third for MLB Rookie of the Year.
A truck rattled as it pulled into the parking lot. Jun’s head jerked up. A delivery vehicle or a military truck? He returned to the phone.
Nine. Kim Kwang-hyun. 3rd in wins in KBO history, KBO MVP, 5-time Korean Series champion.
The shouts of playing children vanished. Playing hide-and-seek or just hiding?
Eight. Oh Seung-hwan. 427 saves, most in KBO history, nicknamed the “The Final Boss.”
A sharp metallic clack sounded, followed by a scraping grind. The back of a police truck opening or the closing of an apartment’s storage unit?
Seven. Park Yong-taik. The Eternal Bear. Ten straight years of hitting .300, multiple KBO Golden Gloves, all-time KBO hits leader when he retired.
Muttering voices argued. The private conversation of two friends, or strategic planning by two agents?
Six. Kim Hyun-soo. Olympic gold medalist, World Baseball Classic All-Star, .312 KBO batting average, .273 MLB batting average.
Boots stomped up the steps to the front door. Soldiers or repairmen?
Five. Yang Eui-ji. Generational catcher, nine KBO Golden Gloves, 2-time Korean Series MVP, World Baseball Classic fixture.
The front door of the building slammed, followed by a soft whimpering. A broken-hearted lover or a guilt-ridden informant?
Four. Lee Seung-yeop. KBO and Japan Series MVP, most home runs in a season, most home runs in KBO history when he retired.
The tromping feet became departing echoes. A wrong turn or construction workers returning home for the night?
Three. Choo Shin-soo. MLB All-Star, most home runs, steals, and OBP in MLB history by a Korean player.
Silence. The peace of the evening or 침묵 속의 불안감, the unease within the stillness?
Two. Ryu Hyun-jin. The Monster. MLB All-Star, KBO Rookie of the Year and MVP, KBO Triple Crown winner.
The hallway door creaked open, but didn’t slam shut. A considerate neighbor or the covert Bowibu?
One. Park Chan-ho. The Korean Express. First Korean-born MLB player, first Korean MLB All-Star, most MLB wins by a Korean.
There was a soft padding of feet, then a flicker of light under the front door.
Jun rose and waited.
A knock or a kick?
Kiyoshi Hirawa is a poet, writer, and former police officer who was wrongfully terminated after reporting sexual misconduct and rape committed by fellow police officers. Hirawa’s writing focuses on mental health, trauma, resiliency, hope, and providing a voice for the unheard, ignored, and overlooked. Hirawa grew up on Braves baseball and still has dreams about being the fourth starter in the rotation behind Maddux, Glavine, and Smoltz.
Chet Parmar is a self-taught artist in his spare time, specializing in pencil, ink, and digital drawing styles. A Bay Area native and San Francisco Giants fan, he hopes to watch a game at every MLB stadium during his lifetime (six down so far). You can find his work on Instagram: @chubbycheetah80
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