Every Falling Star

Every Falling Star

YA/adult nonfiction
"It was a school day in January 1997, about ten months before my
tenth birthday. I was returning from the tae kwan do sojo, walking
home on a sidewalk layered with an icing of powdered snow. As I
approached my apartment building, two things happened that were omens
that my life was about to take a drastic turn--for the worse."
Sungju Lee, author of the memoir Every Falling Star, has that
right. Previously he and his parents had lived a life of relative
privilege in Pyongyang (North Korea). At home they tell him that they
are going on a long vacation. He must leave behind his beloved dog,
Bo-Cho.
Their vacation place turns out to be a hovel with an outhouse
for a toilet. Sunju's school turns out to be poorly equipped and
taught in comparison to his old one. But his family has enough food.
So it's hard for him to believe his classmates' warnings of poverty
and extreme hunger.
Eventually Sunju drops out of school to help his father forage
for food--squirrels, chipmunks, and other critters. Right before his
eleventh birthday his father decides to go to China to sell his
military medals and begin to smuggle goods. He doesn't return. Then
his mother leaves to try to get food from a relative.
Alone and starving, Sungju joins up with other boys to survive
as well as they can on the streets.
This is not a book for more sensitive kids. I think it's one
that needs to be read by folks well above its target demographics. We
are told so little about North Korea other than that it poses and
imminent threat to us. Books like Every Falling Star can help us see
a bigger picture.
On a personal note, when I was ten a refugee from North Korea named
Alla Lee arrived in Massachusetts with her teen age son, Boris. My
mother hired her to take care of Harriet and me when she was teaching
college. In Korea Alla had been a college professor. I was not told
specifics of why she fled her native land--only that because of
politics she and Boris might be killed if they returned. Even though
this story is set decades later, it gave me an understanding of the
danger she had escaped from. The Episcopal church mom was director of
religious education in condemned that act. Julia Seibert was
entrusting her daughters to a heathen Chink. Alla was as Episcopalian
as Mom and they didn't even get the country right. They also
predicted that Boris, who was too shy to ask a girl to dance, would
molest us or sell us into white slavery. Another reason not to get
confirmed the next year.
A great big shout out goes out to the immigrants and refugees who flee
unbearable horrors and all who aid them.
jules hathaway


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