Every Falling Star: The True Story of How I Survived and Escaped North Korea

Every few months Sungju returns to Gyeong-seong to check and see if his parents have returned to look for him. He and his other brothers don’t find anyone, and Sungju describes visiting their old home “like walking into an old grave” (209). But one day, when they return from Gyeong-seong back to Pohwang, Big Brother and his men are nowhere to be found. Sungju and his brothers go back to Eodaejin to see if they could perhaps make a home for themselves there after so many months of training, fighting, and growing.

They enter the market in Eodaejin, intimidating other kotjebi by stabbing them with metal chopsticks (a strategy Big Brother taught them) and spreading the word about how they were trained by a “man-gang” for the past year until the rumors snowball into mythic stories. Sungju realizes that, given their triumphs, they’ve become legendary. He reflects on the stories he heard about Kim Il-sung as a child and wonders if those stories were inflated in the same way.

Chulho drinks and hangs around people in the market, befriending them to get news and information. He hears various reasons for the cause of the famine, including that the United States detonated a nuclear device on the shores of Joseon. But as the gang tries to sort out conflicting stories, they realize that the truth is likely somewhere in the middle.

Young-bum is approached by a fish merchant who asks if Young-bum and the rest of the gang would be willing to load and unload crates of fish while scaring off other kotjebi. The merchant tells them they can even sing or perform while they do the job for extra cash. The boys mourn the fact the Myeongchul, who dreamed of one day having a legitimate job like this, did not live to see this day. Sungju befriends the city’s merchants, who tell him about prisons along the Joseon and Chinese border, many of which are full of pregnant women who are forced to abort their fetuses because they may have been conceived with Chinese men. He also learns that in South Korea, defectors from Joseon are often tortured and killed.

Sungju then reflects on his own father’s mysterious expulsion from Pyongyang and on how little he truly knows about Joseon’s oppressive regime. He notes how “the worst thing anyone could do is make [a person] stop believing in something higher, something good, something pure” (216). When he says this to Sangchul, Sangchul wonders if perhaps God and hope are actually the same exact thing.

Sungju and his brothers struggle to save enough money to buy food during the winter, so they steal produce and goods from government farms. After several successes sneaking past the guards that protect the farms, the brothers are caught one night and shoved into a shed full of animal and human feces to torture them before they are released.

Not long after, Chulho is approached by a merchant who asks him if he and his brothers would steal pears from a nearby farm, promising they can keep half in return. Sungju has a sinking feeling about the idea, but when put to a vote, his brothers opt to take the job, outweighing his dissent. Not willing to be separated from the group, Sungju reluctantly agrees to come along.

Once they reach the farm, Sungju devises a plan to sneak on to the pear farm when the guards go for a smoke break. But the temptation of money and fresh produce leads the boys to move too early. Unsik and Sangchul are caught by the guards, wrestled to the ground, and taken to a nearby shed. Sungju realizes the only way forward as a group is for the rest to turn themselves in. The next morning the guards take them all to the guhoso, or jail.

The jail, separated by gender, is full of fellow kotjebi inmates aged 10 to 18. After a failed attempt to escape, Unsik is tied to a pole for more than a day as a form of torture. They are barely able to find space to sleep in the crowded jail, and Sungju watches as older boys steal food from younger boys, essentially starving them to death. He is also kept awake by the sounds of the girls in the facility next door at night, who are continuously raped by the guards.

The corrupt manager of the guhoso approaches Young-bum about stealing cigarettes and money for him from the nearby market. Young-bum and Chulho agree in hope of escaping, but the manager keeps Unsik, Sangchul, and Sungju at the jail as collateral. Sungju tells Young-bum to impress the manager so they can gain his trust and have an easier time escaping the jail later.

Young-bum’s successful stealing does impress the manager, but not in the way they had hoped. Instead of giving them more food and leniency, he signs them up for military duty despite their young ages.

Sungju hatches a plan to get all the guards drunk enough that they pass out, giving him and his brothers a chance to escape. One day the boys steal as much food and alcohol as they can, watching as each guard passes out before hopping the prison fence and running for the train station.

The gang sneaks onto a train headed to the city of Gilju, where they join up with a smaller gang as they regain the strength they’d lost in the guhoso. Despite the relative safety and friendliness of this new place, they move on to another city, Kimchaek. Not long after their arrival, Sungju has a strange encounter with a “nightflower,” who repeatedly tells him a cryptic message: “This world is not for the living anymore. Tread lightly, for all the dragons now fall” (239). At first Sungju is intrigued by this woman who may also be a seer, but his interest turns to horror when she informs him that she can see the dead, and that she can tell he is surrounded by death. A stranger interrupts their conversation and tells Sungju that the girl sustained a head injury and he should ignore her, but he finds it hard to shake her message.

Still, the gang moves on one more time, to a place called Eorang, where, once the gang feels at home, they attempt to steal from a government farm once again.

Sungju and the gang make their way into the countryside. One night Sungju has a nightmare in which he sees Young-bum’s deceased grandmother walking away with a faceless child. When he wakes up, the ominous words of the seer back in Kimchaek echo in his head.

The gang steal from a nearby government potato farm, but the guards chase after them. While running away, Sungju hears what he thinks is the sound of a club. When the gang regroups, Young-bum is nowhere in sight, and Sungju realizes something bad has happened to him. He insists they must go back to look for him, and they find Young-bum beaten by the guards, who tell them to take their friend and leave.

Sungju and the other boys carry Young-bum to the nearby Orang River as he struggles to breathe and eventually dies. Given that Young-bum was Sungju’s closest friend, Sungju reels from the grief and shock of his passing. Eventually Sungju sees blue lights from afar, which he takes as a sign that Young-bum has passed on to the afterlife. The boys care for his corpse before burying him.