To Nowhere

Chapter 2.2: Iseul Seok

America really... sucks. We get no choice where to be and no further support than placement. And they call this the "land of the free." But I have no right to complain, I have food to eat and my brother, Minjun, can finally rest comfortably. Wanting anything more than that is just greed. I'd be lying if I said this wasn't what I pictured, but I'd also be lying if I said I wasn't hoping for the dreamland my mother tried to cheer me up by promising.

7 years spent on running and hiding really makes it hard to settle down. For Minjun, the hardest part is the language. I've been studying English since I was 9, when we first began our trip from North Korea to the States. My brother was only 3 then, meaning there was no way he could make progress like I could. He took a long time to start picking up on things and honestly can't even qualify as conversational yet.

I can tell he's nervous to start school, but he's good at dealing with it. Minjun is undoubtedly the silliest person I know and I'm sure that despite the language barrier, he'll make a friend one way or another. As for me, well, I'll be fine, I suppose. I guess I haven't thought much about how it'll be to go back to school, especially in an entirely different country. 7 years ago is really just a smudge in my memory, all I can vividly remember is the painstaking hunger I fought day by day.

Our story is too long to be told, I think, and too repetitive to be listened to. It began with walking across an iced over lake, walking through a hostile country, then walking in snow all the way to another country, being sent back to our home peninsula, before fulfilling my late father's dream of getting us to the US through some program. And that might not seem like a lot, but consider the fact this took 7 years, not including the time it took for my parents to plan, and most of which was spent finding some way to get fed.

The three of us, my mother, brother, and I, don't have to worry about that anymore, though. Now we have to learn about this mysterious country and try our best to fit in. The first step in that, Minjun had declared, was to create our "American identities." A while back, when we would watch pirated western shows in English, Minjun would talk about how different names sounded between our languages. I tried to tell him that names can be universal, but he insisted that if we want to be a part of them, we have to seem like them. That was a pretty good point, I decided. "Marco" is what he chose to be called, and he assigned me "September," which I didn't even know could be a name. To this day, he still won't tell me where those names came from.