Brother's Keeper Read online

  Copyright © 2020 by Julie Lee

  Map by Chelsea Hunter © 2020 by Holiday House, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  HOLIDAY HOUSE is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  Printed and bound in May 2020 at Maple Press, York, PA, USA.

  www.holidayhouse.com

  First Edition

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lee, Julie (Children’s fiction writer), author.

  Title: Brother’s keeper / by Julie Lee.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Holiday House, [2020] | Audience: Ages 8–12. (provided by Holiday House.) | Audience: Grades 4–6. (provided by Holiday House.) | Summary: Twelve-year-old Sora and her eight-year-old brother, Youngsoo, must try to escape North Korea’s oppressive Communist regime on their own in 1950. Includes historical notes, photographs of the author’s mother, glossary of Korean words, and timeline.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019052526| ISBN 9780823444946 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780823448098 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Korea (North)—History—20th century—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Korea (North)—History—20th century—Fiction. | Family life—Korea—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Fiction. | Refugees—Fiction. | Korean War, 1950–1953—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.L417262 Bro 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052526

  ISBN: 978-0-8234-4494-6 (hardcover)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Part I: Home

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Part II: Escape

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  PART III: Busan

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two

  Fifty-three

  Author’s Note

  Glossary of Korean Words

  Timeline of the Korean War

  Acknowledgments

  For my mother and my daughters

  PART I

  HOME

  one

  North Korea

  June 25, 1950

  I didn’t want to step into the river, but I had to. He was floating away.

  “Youngsoo!” I stomped in waist-deep, gripping my toes against the sharp-edged clams on the rocky floor. Rushing water swirled around me. I grabbed my little brother’s hand and dragged him back to shore.

  “Sorry, Noona,” Youngsoo said, calling me older sister in Korean. “I leaned out too far with my net.” It wasn’t the first time he’d lost his balance and tipped over while fishing, his stomach smacking against the water. He shivered in his wet uniform.

  “I told you not to go in too deep. Hold still.” I wrung the ends of his shirt and straightened the red scarf around his neck, then took a step back and frowned. What would Omahni say? I could already feel our mother’s punishment stick snapping against my calves. “How could you have fallen in right before your Sonyondan Club meeting? Your scarf is so wet, it’s almost black!”

  “Don’t worry. It’s just a scarf,” he said, looking at his feet.

  I stared at him. Everyone knew the red scarf was the most important part of the communist youth club uniform. Red had become sacred. It fluttered in the star of our new North Korean flag. Mothers tied and retied it cautiously around their children’s necks. And red armbands stood out on the white of the villagers’ clothes like a bloodstain.

  Youngsoo hung his head low. “I almost caught a fish, Noona. It slipped out of my net.”

  “I know, I know,” I said impatiently. “Every day you almost catch a big one.”

  But then a pang of regret shot through me, knowing how hard he tried despite always coming home with an empty net.

  “I’ll make it up to you tomorrow. What kind of fish do you want? Trout? Salmon? Catfish?” He puffed up his skinny chest like a little man and extended his arm toward the river. “Just name it, and I’ll catch it for you.”

  Before I had the chance to give him a stern sideways glance, the kind Omahni always gave me, he smiled earnestly, a piece of black plum skin caught in his teeth. I sighed, wondering if this was how he always kept our mother from staying mad at him too long.

  A bell chimed from the schoolhouse on the hill. The teacher, Comrade Cho, stood in front waiting to close the doors, a red band cinched tightly around his upper arm. Stragglers from Youngsoo’s third-grade class sprinted past us as we headed up the slope.

  “You can’t be dumber than the fish if you want to catch them!” a boy shouted at us, his red scarf knotted perfectly.

  Youngsoo pushed up his sleeves. “At least I’m not dumber than you! And my sister is smarter than everyone! Right, Noona?”

  I groaned. Why did he have to drag me into this?

  “Your sister can’t be that smart! She doesn’t even go to school anymore!” the boy called back, laughing from the hilltop.

  My shoulders stiffened. He was right. When I’d turned twelve two months ago, Omahni had pulled me out of school to look after my little brothers.

  I glanced at Youngsoo—so drenched and disheveled. Did he even know how lucky he was?

  “You’ll be late.” I couldn’t look at him anymore. “Just go.”

  I pushed him up the hill. Omahni said that skipping even one communist youth club meeting meant Youngsoo’s name—no, our family name—would go on a government watch list.

  And then terrible things would happen.

  “What a beautiful day to labor in this socialist paradise!” Comrade Cho announced as the students approached. “Don’t forget to continue gathering scrap iron for weapons and bullets, or else your parents will have to pay a fine. Your work is important in making the Fatherland strong!”

  Youngsoo joined the wave of red running up the hill, then disappeared inside the A-frame timber schoolhouse. Looking at it, I felt a twinge of loss.

  Not for the Girls’ Sonyondan Club that I no longer attended, joining my parents at grown-up Party meetings instead.

  Not for the new teacher, Comrade Cho, who gave candy to students for reporting anything anti-communist their parents said at home.

  Not for the kids in class, who were loyal to the Party first and family second, and could never be trusted as friends.

  But for all the learning I was missing. Math. Geography. Science. When I could escape from my chores, I hid behind the willow tree by the school window and eavesdropped on the class.

  Today, though, was not a day for escaping chore
s. I picked up my laundry basket and balanced it on top of my head. The sound of wooden paddles beckoned me back toward the river, and like a funeral marcher, I went.

  Downstream, mounds of laundry littered the bank. Women squatted on flat boulders jutting from the sandbars. They scrubbed pants with thick bar soap, their shoulders pumping like pistons, then beat them with flat paddles as if spanking their children. Without any men nearby, the women gossiped about husbands and mothers-in-law as they lifted their shirts to wipe their faces. I looked away.

  “Yah, Sora! What are you so embarrassed about?” asked Mrs. Lee, her cheeks ruddy from the sun.

  I smiled, tight-lipped, and found an open area to set my basket. My long tan skirt was soaked from saving Youngsoo.

  “Why’s your mom sending a girl to do a woman’s job, huh?” a farmer’s wife shouted.

  “Who else is she supposed to send—her sons? Anyway, Sora’s not such a little girl anymore, right?” Mrs. Lee said. “Look, she’s even starting to get little breasts now.” She poked me in the ribs, and I jerked like a string puppet.

  They laughed heartily. My cheeks burned, and I hunched my back to hide my chest. I gazed up at the schoolhouse as if it might somehow reach down to save me, the straw basket pressing against my shins. But it wouldn’t, and the laundry wouldn’t wash itself.

  I took out my brothers’ dirty clothes—Jisoo’s cloth diapers, Youngsoo’s muddy uniform pants—and crouched in the shallows, joining the drumbeat of women. I plunged my raw knuckles into the soapy water, hiding them beneath the cloudy white.

  A grandmother came running from around the hill, splashing along the river’s edge toward the rest of us, and I watched the waves ripple over my hands. At first I hardly noticed the whispers, the way the women huddled around her. But their murmurs grew, and I looked up at them—their mouths agape, their brows creased—and suddenly everything felt wrong.

  The women started hastily packing unfinished laundry into their baskets. I rushed to rinse Youngsoo’s uniform pants. Something was not right. I needed to go. The last time a message had spread this urgently, the landlord’s son was found floating facedown in the river, his body bloated like a blood sausage. I lifted the basket onto my head and hurried onto the main road through the village center, stumbling past a row of thatched-roof houses, my breath coming fast and hard.

  “Noona!”

  I spun around and saw Youngsoo running along the bank. He stopped short before crashing into me.

  “What are you doing here? Were you sent home? Was it the wet scarf? Are they putting us on a list?” I asked, my voice rising with panic.

  “No, something amazing happened!” Youngsoo’s eyes shimmered like the river, and he practically sang the words: “We don’t have to go to school anymore!”

  My stomach clenched. “What do you mean, Youngsoo? That’s impossible.”

  “Comrade Cho told the whole class that ‘because of the current situation, there will be no school until further notice,’” he said, carefully repeating his teacher’s words. “He even said that ‘today will be a day to go down in history.’” Youngsoo jumped high in the air, hollering and hooting at his sudden change in luck. “No more school! No more school!”

  My palms turned cold and clammy.

  “We need to go home,” I managed to say. “Come on.”

  We walked past streams flowing into rivers, then through plains and pastures until we could see the rice-straw roof of our home. The house was square-shaped to block the bitter winds cascading down the mountains in winter, and it sat squat in the countryside, fifty miles north of Pyongyang, the capital. Although it looked like every other farmhouse in the valley, it was unmistakably home, the rounded edges of the worn, thatched roof hugging the house like a mushroom cap. Around it, fields of corn and millet stirred in the hot wind.

  We hurried inside. A broadcaster’s voice and the hiss of static rushed to greet us. I set the basket down and stepped into a pair of house slippers.

  Abahji sat as motionless as a rock, leaning in to the radio. Deep lines creased his forehead. I had never seen our father look so grave.

  Beside him, Baby Jisoo looked up from a pile of clean clothes, yawned once, then went back to his favorite pastime: pulling socks over each of his feet.

  Youngsoo and I sat on the floor beside Abahji. I quieted my breathing to hear, but I couldn’t understand the announcer’s words through the heavy static. I turned to Youngsoo and shrugged, unable to explain Abahji’s pensive face.

  All at once, the signal cleared, and Youngsoo’s eyes brightened as if he had just solved a riddle.

  “That’s what my teacher was talking about. That’s the reason there will be no more school!” he shouted, pointing at the radio. “War! War! Starting today, we are at war!”

  two

  “War is no cause for celebration, son,” Abahji said. He shifted on his woven sitting mat, rubbing his knees.

  Youngsoo wiped the grin off his face with the back of his hand. He turned bright pink and dropped his gaze to the floor.

  “War?” I said, my eyes wide. It was the last thing I expected. “Who are we fighting with?”

  Abahji stared at the chipped edge of the low dining table.

  “South Korea,” he said.

  The room was muggy, but I shivered and drew the collar of my short jeogori closer. Miss Chun, my old teacher, had once shown a World War II newsreel to our class. It showed soldiers running across hillsides with guns; planes strafing overhead; bombs exploding into giant mushroom clouds. But worst of all, it showed wandering women and children, their clothes in tatters, their hollow faces staring out at me.

  “Where is the fighting now, Abahji?” I said. My eye twitched nervously, like butterfly wings, and I pressed my hand over the flutter.

  He sighed and shook his head. “Near Seoul.”

  Seoul. The capital of South Korea.

  Youngsoo searched my face, but I wasn’t sure what to think. North Korea fighting South Korea. If South Korea lost, would all of Korea become communist, like the North? What if another country swooped in and conquered us both while we were at war with each other?

  We’d been conquered before. Japan had ruled Korea before the communists. I couldn’t remember much, but I knew the emperor of Japan had banned our Hangul language, confiscated almost everyone’s land, and ordered us all to take Japanese names. My father became Yosuke, not Sangmin; my mother became Chieko, not Yuri. We were treated like an inferior race. Japanese soldiers even kidnapped several girls from the high school. The entire village had mourned, including a Japanese family who lived across the river—proof that not all Japanese were evil, according to Abahji.

  After the war, the Russians liberated one half of Korea, the Americans the other half, and the Japanese went home. But our country was left split in two: part communist, part democratic.

  The radio blared again:

  “On June twenty-fifth, the army of the South Korean puppet government launched an all-out offensive along the thirty-eighth parallel against the northern half of Korea, resulting in the declaration of war.”

  “But the Korean people need not fear, for the valiant North Korean army has captured the town of Kaesong and will soon enter Seoul to save the South from the U.S. imperialists. Reunification under communism will soon be possible through the military genius of our Great Leader, Kim Il-sung!”

  Abahji looked at our frozen expressions, then straightened his back and cleared his throat. “No worries, my little ones. The fighting will never reach us here. Seoul is almost two hundred miles away.” He smoothed the back of my hair and pinched Youngsoo’s cheek, but we stayed as stiff as two wooden dolls.

  Abahji chuckled and turned down the radio. “Now, let me see if I have another Grandfather in America story.”

  I sighed in relief when I saw Abahji’s smiling crescent-moon eyes return. Surely he was right—the fighting would never reach our small northern village. Youngsoo leaned in closer, all trace of fear gone from his face.<
br />
  “Oh, I’ve got one,” Abahji said. He paused for a second as if relishing the moment. “When your harabuji was in Hawaii working with the sugar planters, he heard that an American president had promised a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage to every citizen. Can you imagine that?”

  “What’s a garage?” Youngsoo asked.

  “It’s a house for a car,” Abahji said.

  “A house for a car!” Youngsoo rolled on his back, squealing and laughing.

  A garage. I couldn’t fathom such a thing. It was hard to believe that my grandfather had ever lived outside our borders—especially now, when you needed permission just to travel to another village for a day. You had to fill out paperwork at the village center asking who, what, when, where, why, and how long the trip would take. And if you didn’t report back once you’d returned, the secret police could send you to a labor camp. The state worked you to death there.

  “Why didn’t Harabuji stay in America?” I demanded.

  “You know the answer to that, Sora,” Abahji said. “He was the eldest son. It was his duty to return to Korea with his earnings and care for his family.”

  Just like it was my duty as the oldest daughter to give up school to take care of Jisoo and Youngsoo while Omahni and Abahji worked in the field.

  It wasn’t like this before Jisoo was born. Back then, I had gone to school, studied, and played with friends. Now it was my responsibility to stay home and watch the baby. At least Harabuji had been allowed to go.

  I whipped around to Jisoo. “Stop playing with those silly socks. It’s almost time for lunch.”

  “No!” He scooped up the socks and ran away.

  I caught him near the wooden chest and carried him toward the table. He squirmed and kicked and knocked me in the chin. I lost my grip, and his bottom hit the floor.

  Jisoo wailed just as Omahni walked in from the kitchen carrying a tray of rice and marinated vegetables. She cut her eyes to me. “Yah, Sora. Be more careful with the baby.”

  “It was an accident,” I said, keeping my gaze on Jisoo. Omahni picked him up, cradling him like an infant. He stuck his tongue out at me. “Omahni, he’s not such a baby, right?” I pressed. “He’s two years old. Pretty soon he’ll start school, and I won’t have to stay home and watch him anymore.”