“Deep down in the ocean, there lives a sea creature.”
Jong-su sat cross-legged on the floor. The lights were off, the living room dark. The moon hung heavy in the late autumn night sky.
“But this is no ordinary sea creature, my friends. This is Imugi, the giant sea serpent from ancient times who lurks at the bottom of the East Sea.”
On the floor in front of Jong-su sat a captive audience – his four-year-old son, Dae-hyun, his niece and nephew, and a few kids from the neighborhood.
“The Japanese made a slimy deal with Imugi many years ago, which gave them ultimate control over the wretched beast. Ever since, Imugi has been creeping along our shores and into our rivers, to spy and hunt and prey on our people.”
The kids wiggled with a mixture of fear and delight. They’d heard this one before, but it hadn’t grown stale. This was a toned-down version. Jong-su’s previous iteration had sent one of the neighborhood boys home with soiled underpants.
“Imugi is an immortal monster who can never be killed, only tamed. And the only ones who can tame Imugi – are our fearless Supreme Leaders!”
Jong-su’s wife, Hana, smirked wryly from the kitchen as she mixed corn flour, cabbage and minced mackerel in a bowl.
“Back in the days of the Great Struggle, when Eternal President Kim Il-sung was rebuilding our nation from the ashes, Imugi came faring through the sea on the attack. The nasty beast prefers to strike when its victims are at their weakest.”
A framed photo of Kim Il-sung hung on the wall behind Jong-su, alongside photos of Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un.
“Eternal President sensed the attack coming using his future-prediction mind control abilities. Then, before Imugi could reach our shores, our Great Leader sailed five-hundred kilometers across the East Sea, dove to its depths and wrestled the serpent into submission with his bare hands!”
The kids erupted in cheers, their energy bouncing off the walls. Hana shook her head as she heated a pan atop an electric coil burner, then filled the pan with cooking oil.
“During the Arduous March Years, when Dear Leader Kim Jong-il was taking us through those turbulent times, Imugi came back to sow chaos upon our nation. Armed with intelligence from his elite underwater spies, our Respected Leader tracked down Imugi in his secret one-man submarine, then pummeled the beast into oblivion with his fists!”
Hana dropped round fish cake discs into the pan. The hot oil cracked and sizzled upon impact.
“Now, during our Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un’s historic rise, Imugi remains a bigger threat than ever. Our President’s Resilient Reign against foreign enemies near and far has made him a constant target. As soon as Great President Kim Jong-un assumed leadership, Imugi came knocking once again. So our Supreme Leader strapped a rocket to his back, rode his magical whale to the middle of the East Sea, then blasted the beast back to the shores of Japan! But the threats kept coming. The sneaky Japanese had figured out how to clone Imugi into a million little evil sea monsters. Supreme Leader was riding his whale on a nightly basis, slaying the bastardly clones left and right. The Supreme Leader’s whale even got into the fight, going pound for pound with a thousand clones in a ten round mixed martial arts showdown. Roundhouse tail whip! Spinning back fin! Blowhole armbar! Together, they–”
“Okay, kids,” Hana called from the kitchen, her voice cutting through the drama. “Eomuk’s ready!”
Hana set the fish cakes onto the kitchen table, then flashed a smile at Jong-su. He had a tendency to get carried away with his stories, and she always found a smooth transition to reign them in. The kids scurried over to claim their snacks.
For most of their marriage, Jong-su and Hana never had the privilege of hosting nieces and nephews and neighborhood kids. They never hosted much of anything, for that matter. Hosting meant providing a snack or meal for your guests, and things were too tight in their household to pull off this feat. The tides had turned, though. Tonight’s stories and fish cakes were a celebration. Through many years of dedication and toil, Jong-su had received a promotion at work. And the next day marked the beginning of his new position.
Jong-su tossed and turned endlessly that night. He couldn’t find that comfortable position where the mind shuts down, the body is at peace and sleep washes over the soul like a warm bath. Jitters from the new job, he supposed. During the tiny window when he did succumb to some sleep, he had a dream. He was a kid again, playing soccer with friends on the field behind the old textile factory. Suddenly, he heard his father calling out to him from a distance. His father’s voice was worried. He ran towards the sound of the voice, but couldn’t catch up to it. His father had something urgent to tell him, but the faster he ran, the more the voice dissipated, until he could hear nothing but a faint echo of his father trailing off into the valleys beyond.
The next morning, Jong-su talked at length with Dae-hyun about all the fun things they would do together upon his return. Before he stepped out the door to leave, Dae-hyun handed him something.
“This will keep you safe, appa.”
Jong-su looked down at the item – a circular felt patch with a red star at its center and text that read Together with the Party. He tucked it into his shirt pocket and secured it with the button.
“Thank you, adeura.”
~
It was still early morning when Jong-su arrived at the northern fishing pier of Chongjin. The air was thick with the smell of salt and decaying fish and wisps of smoke from the coal factory downwind. Government officials clad in patched uniforms stood watch while port workers unloaded their catch into rusted metal carts. Traders bartered in low voices over baskets of seafood destined for local markets and foreign supply lines.
Jong-su located the Chilseongho, the boat he would call home for the next few weeks, and set about unloading his gear. She was a sight for sore eyes to any outsider accustomed to modern fishing technology of the twenty-first century, but to Jong-su and his contemporaries, she was just another vessel of the Chongjin fleet. The Chilseongho was built in the seventies and fused traditional sampan features with Soviet trawler design. She stretched twenty meters long with a five meter beam, a wooden hull and a thirty-eight horsepower single engine. Large light bulbs secured with brackets hung from lines strung taut across the length of the vessel. These would be used to lure the precious sea commodity Jong-su and his crew were after – the Pacific flying squid.
In his father’s heyday, squid was not hard to come by. It was as abundant as the electricity that once coursed through the country uninterrupted all hours of the day. Crews could haul a full boat of flying squid in under a week without straying more than fifty kilometers from port. Squid was what had allowed Jong-su’s father to keep their family fed through the famine. When the system collapsed and men scrambled to find any semblance of a half-decent job, the squid and his fishing skills remained. It was a dangerous job, but risking life on the high seas was a welcome alternative to watching your family starve.
Something had changed, though, with the Pacific flying squid. The creature had become more and more elusive over the years. His father had experienced the beginning of the decline, and now Jong-su was in the thick of the collapse. Hushed rumors swirled through the ports and markets and coastal villages of the root cause of the dwindling stocks. Fingers were pointed at Japanese sabotage, ancestral wrath and angry spirits of the sea. But Jong-su and the fishing crews of Chongjin did not need to dream up fanciful reasons for the squid’s disappearing act. They had witnessed the root cause in action. They saw it each time they went out – the massive, state-of-the-art squid jiggers of the Chinese distant-water fleet trawling up and down their grounds in pairs. Droves of them came every season in organized flotillas, with their bright lights and giant drag nets, and swallowed up the squid like black holes of the sea.
One thing that had not changed were the quotas. As the newly appointed skipper, Jong-su now bore the burden of meeting the state-imposed squid quota each time the Chilseongho went out. No matter the declining stocks, Jong-su and his crew were to go out, and stay out, until quota was attained. Failure was not an option. Jong-su had to answer to the boat's owner, who in turn had to answer to the local fisheries cooperative. The cooperative, burdened with its own impossible quotas, reported directly to the Ministry of Fisheries. Behind the Ministry loomed the Party, with its endless appetite for statistics to trumpet at rallies and in the press. Each layer of authority passed down the pressure, and at the very bottom were men like Jong-su and his deckhands.
~
The sky was slate gray when the Chilseongho pulled out of port. Jong-su stood at the helm as his crew stowed the last of their provisions below deck. The wind picked up, carrying with it the cold bite of autumn, as the factories and soot-streaked buildings of Chongjin faded behind them.
The crew settled in for the slow journey due east. There was little for the men to do as Jong-su charted their path toward distant waters where a semblance of squid colonies still remained. They slept, smoked tobacco in silence, played cards and hummed songs alongside the rhythmic thrum of the diesel engine.
On the second morning, with the sea stretched endlessly around them, something caught Jong-su’s eye in the distance. A dark shape broke through the waves, sleek and massive, and for a moment he thought it might be one of the Japanese submarines he had seen on prior runs. Then it rose higher, arching gracefully through the air before crashing back into the sea with a thunderous splash. A rush of awe overtook him. He had seen many such whale breaches over the years, but they never failed to stir the boylike wonder of nature inside of him. This was his favorite part of the job. He got to see things others didn’t.
By the third day at sea, the men had arrived at their destination and the familiar rhythm of squid fishing took hold. The crew worked through the long, bitter nights, the Chilseongho’s deck illuminated by the harsh glare of the lights strung overhead. The men baited lines, hauled nets, gutted squid and hung them to dry on racks.
Things were going better than expected. Each catch was bigger than the last. Jong-su had taken them far, farther than they had ever gone before, to a new spot where he suspected they would have success. It was a risky move that was paying off. Jong-su was determined to meet quota and prove himself in his first run as captain. After a week on the water, the Chilseongho was well on her way to exceeding quota and Jong-su began to prepare for their return trip. He thought of the big smile Dae-hyun would crack when he walked through the door, and of the delicious kimchi jjigae Hana would prepare as she always did upon his return from sea.
As the crew gutted the final hauls and began to pack away their gear, a thick fog rolled in. It soon coiled around their vessel like smoke from an unseen fire, and they could not see more than a few hundred meters ahead. At Jong-su’s direction, one of the deckhands went to start the single engine, but the machine groaned in protest. The deckhand yanked the starter cord again, his knuckles white against the damp handle. The engine sputtered and flailed, coughing up a harsh metallic wheeze before falling silent again. Jong-su stepped in and yanked several times, to no avail. He gathered himself, braced his boot against the deck, then pulled with all his strength. The motor caught for a brief moment, rattling to life with a staccato roar, but then stuttered and died just as quickly, leaving an eerie silence in its wake.
A chill ran through Jong-su’s veins. He exchanged uneasy glances with the other crew members. The sea, unnervingly still, seemed to hold its breath around them. Under normal conditions, an engine failure was a devastating blow. If you were lucky, another jigging crew nearby might allow you onboard and haul you home, in exchange for a cut of your catch. But in these conditions, it was a full-on disaster. There was no radio on board the Chilseongho. Even if there was, there was no one for the men to call, no coast guard standing at the ready for a rescue. Only a handful of other crews ever ventured as far out as the Chilseongho now lay, and the odds of flagging one down were near zero.
The first day adrift was one of grim determination. The crew assessed the damage and debated theories of what might be wrong with the engine, each man trying to mask his unease with action. Jong-su tried everything he could think of – tightening bolts, cleaning the fuel lines, even resorting to banging on the casing as if sheer force might coerce the engine back to life.
By the third day, the tension among the crew had thinned into quiet despair. The men had plenty in the way of food, but their water soon ran out. The barrels of fresh water they had carried aboard had dwindled to nothing. They sat in clusters on the deck, their expressions hollow. The sun beat down mercilessly, sapping their energy and baking the salty air into their skin. By the fifth day adrift, their throats were parched and their tongues swollen. The salted, drying squid mocked them from its racks, an abundance of sustenance rendered useless in the absence of water to wash it down.
Delirium began to set in among the men. Whispers rose like faint echoes, growing stranger as the hours stretched on. Jong-su noticed the youngest deckhand staring fixedly at the sky, murmuring something inaudible. Another leaned against the rail of the stern, his cracked lips muttering to himself as he stared at the horizon. Jong-su tried not to look at them, tried to focus on anything but the creeping madness taking root among the crew, but the deckhand by the stern turned to him. “Do you hear it?” he whispered, his eyes wide with a glassy intensity.
“Hear what?”
“The water,” the deckhand said, grinning through split lips. “It’s calling us. It wants to take us home.”
Before Jong-su could react, the deckhand stumbled over the rail and plunged into the cold, black sea. The splash echoed in the silence, and then – nothing. The water closed over him, its surface rippling like silk. Jong-su froze, his breath caught in his throat, every nerve in his body screaming for action. But no one moved. The crew stood paralyzed, bound by exhaustion and an unspoken fear. The sea, vast and unrelenting, stared back at them, indifferent.
Jong-su’s mind wandered as he sat on the deck, his weakened, dehydrated body slumped over. The sky was clear, the wind still. The autumn sun drenched the sea in a dance of golden light. Water lapped against the hull of the Chilseongho in a quiet rhythm. The faint cries of seabirds echoed like ghosts across the vast emptiness around him. He thought about his family – his dear Dae-hyun and Hana, his mother and father, his sister and niece and nephew. He thought about his childhood, of the happy years when their family was healthy and whole. He thought about his first run as captain. He had done well, he thought, very well. He had met quota. His owner would have been pleased.
Suddenly, Jong-su noticed movement in the water beyond. A shimmer rippled through the golden expanse, subtle at first, like sunlight bending over a wave. Then it grew, a long, sinuous shape undulating just beneath the surface. He squinted, his heart thudding as he gripped the railing. It wasn’t a whale or a school of fish. The sheer size of the shadow made that impossible. It moved with an unnatural grace, too deliberate for the chaotic thrash of marine life. Jong-su’s pulse quickened. The shape rose higher, the water bubbling and foaming around it. Then, with a surge that sent waves rocking the Chilseongho, it broke the surface.
Imugi the giant sea serpent towered before him, its scales gleaming like polished obsidian, iridescent and shifting with the light. Its eyes, huge and luminous, locked onto him, glowing like twin moons. Jong-su staggered backward, his eyes wide with primal fear.
Imugi tilted its head, a smile curling at the edges of its massive jaws. Jong-su braced himself, expecting a roar, a lunge, some monstrous display of power. Instead, the serpent spoke. Its voice was deep and melodic, like the resonance of a drum beneath the ocean.
“Jong-su,” Imugi said, the syllables of his name rolling like thunder across the waves. “Are you ready to come with me?”
~
Hana held Dae-hyun’s hand tightly as they wove through the narrow paths of the small outer market of Chongjin. The air was filled with scents of dried fish, fermented vegetables and the tang of salt carried inland from the nearby sea. Vendors called out their wares as patrons shuffled in and out of stalls and bartered with fervor.
Dae-hyun tugged at Hana’s sleeve. “Eomma, when is appa coming home?” he asked, his eyes wide.
Hana knelt down, her heart tightening at the innocence in his voice. She brushed a stray strand of hair from his face. “Dae-hyun, my dear,” she began softly, “Like I told you before, appa is fishing forever with the spirits now. He watches over us from the sea.”
The boy frowned, his small hands clutching hers. “But I want him to come back.”
Hana gathered herself, her voice steady despite the ache in her chest. “I know, sweetheart. So do I. But he’s not coming back. We can see him only in our hearts and dreams now.”
Dae-hyun dropped his head to the ground, his little brow furrowed. Hana pulled him closer as they walked onwards, the buzz of the market fading to a dull hum.
Hana was part of the ranks now, of the countless others whose husbands, brothers and sons had been claimed by the ever bountiful and unforgiving sea. The elder widows of Chongjin whispered of the Mul Gwishin – the water ghosts who lingered just beyond the waves. They spoke of hearing their husbands’ cries late at night, their voices carried in with the wind, howling and full of sorrow, longing for reunion in the cold embrace of the deep.