0544373170 (N) by Joseph Kim

Author:Joseph Kim
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Retail, Personal Memoir, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780544373174
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2015-06-02T04:00:00+00:00

There are only two things you really need as a homeless person: food and heat. Heat keeps you alive at night, when the temperature falls below freezing. On those nights you have to be inside or you will die. Occasionally, Kkotjebi found electrical transformers on the street and huddled against them for warmth, but these units were badly serviced and their wires frayed over time. Some orphans were electrocuted on cold nights.

I never did this, but I was always on the lookout for ashes. Housewives would throw out the coals that heated the floors of most North Korean homes onto a pile in the back of their houses. Sometimes the ashes were still warm. If I saw a pile of fresh coal ash, I would lie on top of it and press my cheek against the surface, absorbing the heat. It was soothing and smelled like my old house in the July 8th neighborhood. I slept and dreamt of a time when I had a roof above my head and people who loved me. The only downside was that the coal ash would stick to you. That’s how many of the Kkotjebi acquired their black faces.

Heat you needed for only a few hours a night. If you got desperate, you could gather some of the increasingly hard-to-find tree branches and start a fire. But food you thought about constantly. How to get it, how much there will be, what it will taste like when you do get it.

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