Free Stars Between the Sun and Moon by Lucia Jang, Susan McClelland Page B

the movie ended, with the lights still low, I snuck back outside.
    A week later, I took Sumi and Mihwa with me to see Chunhyangjeon . We snuck in the same way, huddling together in our seats and looking around every so often to avoid capture. No guards came.
    Once I was confident I would not be caught, I allowed myself to attend the movies often and to fall in love with the stories. And once film had entered my life, I became inspired again. My fuel was the dream that one day I would tell stories myself. For a while, I returned to doing my assignments promptly at school. I penned poetry and wrote short stories. I imagined my characters and storylines coming alive on film.
    At first, all of my poems and prose were about devotion to Kim Il-sung. But then, when I was fourteen, I discovered my father’s romance novels, tucked away in the bottom of one of his chests. I dove into them immediately, reading avidly.
    â€œThe couple’s eyes met across the crowded room at a concert. The man, a loyal soldier in the military, gave his closest friend a message, written on paper, to give to the woman. The friend gave it to the woman’s sister.”
    In one of the books, the two messengers also fell in love.
    I would read these books secretly until I heard the door creak open to signal my father’s return from work. Then I would quickly slip them back, imagining as I drifted off to sleep at night what it would be like to be kissed.
    My years at school passed in these ways. Ever since Grade 6, I had been one of four girls regularly singled out for mutual critique, another part of saenghwalchonghwa.
    In the mutual critique, a girl in the class chose another girl as the one who had committed the most wrongs that week. Both girls stood, and then the accuser outlined for the accused everything bad that she had done. Almost always, I was criticized for doing exactly what I had written in my Life Reflection Journal.
    â€œComrade, you are late for school and disrupt the class,” one of the taller girls, with whom I barely spoke, said to me as I hung my head in shame. “And your uniform is wrinkled.”
    I looked down at my pleats. Even though we had been given new uniforms the year before to celebrate Kim Il-sung’s birthday, I could never get my green pleated skirt to look like it had when I first received it.
    â€œAnd your socks are dirty,” my classmate scolded, pointing at my legs.
    It was true. I only had two pairs of socks, and I often ended up wearing the same pair for weeks at a time. In spring my socks had mud on them from my walks home, and in autumn pieces of leaves stuck in them, from when I rolled down the hills.
    â€œComrade, you fall asleep in class,” a large student told me at the end of one week. “And you didn’t sweep the classroom when you were supposed to. You had your comrade do it.”
    All of it was true. I had started off my school years wanting to be an example for my great father Kim Il-sung but I had turned into a lazy adolescent. As I once wrote in my Life Reflection Journal:
    Communal living is like a firepot for refining your ideology  . . .  it is also the school for revolutionary thoughts—Kim Il-sung .
    My mother has four children. She can’t look after everyone every single minute of the day. But I am not a good daughter. When my mother wants me to go to school, my bones and muscles are slow moving, I can barely tug my socks over my feet. I am always late for school, because I am slow at everything I do.
    One movie that made a deep impression on me was The Fire Spreading Around the World. It was about Kim Il-sung’s uncle, who was tortured by the Japanese during their occupation of Korea. I thought about Daechul, the neighbourhood boy, throughout the film. We had never seen him again, and we heard his entire family had been sent to a concentration camp.
    In the film, the Japanese tortured our great leader’s uncle by forcing him