by Young-Ha Kim
The first time Ki-yong felt doubt about the slogan was at Lotte World. Right after he came to the South, the "This is Lotte World" ad was always playing on TV. Fireworks burst above a lake while actors danced around in Snow White and raccoon costumes. He didn't understand why South Korean children were so fond of raccoons. Only later did he find out the raccoon was the mascot for Lotte World. He bought an all-day pass. A ticket that got you into all the rides—this was a concept similar to the logic of his world.
But when he actually entered the theme park, it wasn't the brilliant shows or the heart-stopping rides that shocked him. He was amazed that so many people patiently lined up for popular rides without fighting. Everyone waited for their turn, their faces elated with expectation. Nobody cut in line and even if someone did, nobody got angry. Everyone had to line up like that in Pyongyang, too, for the boat to cross Taedong River or to enter the School Children's Palace. There were always people who cut in line. Young soldiers doing ten years of service did it for the long years they would sacrifice for their country, the Party members did so out of a sense of privilege, and some did just because they knew someone up ahead. So tension mounted as the lines got longer. People became irritable and were poised to explode at the littlest thing. Cutting in line wasn't the only problem. Sometimes, without notice, people were turned away, for the simple reason that all the items were gone, or because of unforeseen circumstances. Then the line that had been building for hours would just melt away.
Of course, he wasn't a wide-eyed hick who confused Lotte World with paradise. But sometimes, riding the subway past Chamsil station, the stop for Lotte World, he felt a little off balance—a wave of gentle nausea. He remembered the frightening thought that flitted through his mind while he was at Lotte World—that a socialist paradise might be a lie and Lotte World might be the true paradise. Shocked by his audacity, he tried to repress it by scrambling onto an inane raft ride with no line and bouncing down a darkened tunnel.
He passes stores selling musical instruments that line the second floor. A pimply-faced kid stands next to the ponytailed owner of one store with a covetous look on his face as the owner plays Gary Moore on an electric guitar. Ki-yong stops in front of a store selling harmonicas. He looks at the harmonica's double set of reeds, capable of producing two layers of sound.
The apartment building where he was born and grew up had a long, dark hallway, with faint light coming in through each end. Doors lined the hall on each side, opening into small apartments. People called these harmonica apartments. If looked at from above, the layout would have resembled harmonica reeds. There wasn't any privacy. The walls were thin, and you opened your front door practically into the apartment across from yours. There were few light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and even those were low-watt bulbs, so it was always dark in the middle of the hall, and the corners that never saw sunlight smelled like mildew. Ki-yong's home was near the middle of the harmonica. It faced west, so in the evening the waning sun lengthened into the apartment. Sometimes wind blew in from one end of the hall and dashed through the window on the opposite side, and the apartment building would wheeze. The wind, breezing through the narrow hallway, would sound a higher note and retreat when encountering open doors or objects. Sometimes it would slam doors shut and hum toward the end of the hallway and the sunlight, lowering its tone. Only when someone in the apartment at the very end of the hall came out and closed the window did the harmonica ever stop sighing.
Ki-yong's father enjoyed fishing and often took his son to Taedong River. Father and son would sit quietly, their fishing poles drawn. They would dump the fish they caught in a bin and walk home. His father was an engineer who constructed dams. He designed the dams at Yalu River and Imjin River and was respected as the foremost expert in the industry. Hydropower plants were a very important resource for North Korea, which suffered from a dearth of electricity. The locations of dams and hydropower plants were shrouded carefully to guard against American bombing operations, so his father lived under layers of surveillance, so much so that when he went to Moscow to study, briefly in the 1970s, he wasn't given much freedom. He had to report everything that happened on a daily basis to the security agent.
Not long after Ki-yong came south, he realized that all such security measures were useless. America knew exactly what North Korea was up to. The higher-ups in the North probably knew this too. The spying was not protection from America, but an exercise of habitual bureaucratic routine. Up north, anything could be classified as top secret. Even the quality of the river water was confidential information. Without any sanitation facilities, factory discharge laced with heavy metals and daily sewage poured into the river. But any language that chipped away at the legend of the socialist paradise was prohibited. Even uttering something that was legal, depending on who said it and in what way, could be considered taboo, and innocent acts sometimes led to being branded as a spy for American imperialists.
"Are you cold? Do you want the heat pouch?" Ki-yong's father offered.
"No, I don't need it."
His father slid the hook out of the fish gills and tossed the catch in the bin. The fish was a decent size. "Look. It flaps around because it's out of the water."
"Is there a fish that doesn't?" Ki-yong asked.
His father tossed his line back into the river. The fish flopped around in the dry bucket. "No. If there is no water, fish open their gills and flap around, then die. When you're building a dam, you sometimes erect beams and pump water out through a tunnel, so that you can pour in concrete. The fish that don't manage to get out are left dying at the bottom. Comrades are happy to gather them up and make stew, but there are so many you can't eat them all. So they rot. And smell. It's quite disgusting; it makes you want to vomit. So listen carefully to what I am saying. Don't be a fish; be a frog. Swim in the water and jump when you hit ground. Do you understand me?"
That was the last time they went fishing together, right before Ki-yong was selected as an operative trainee of Liaison Office 130. His father sensed what his son's future would hold. His father's advice to become a frog was prescient. Ki-yong adapted well to this chaotic South Korean society, able to survive on his own even after Lee Sang-hyok was purged in a factional struggle.
That day, holding the fish bin with his father, Ki-yong silently padded down the hallway of the harmonica apartment building. It was right after sunset so the hallway was darker than usual. The smell of cooking wafted from each apartment, mingling in the hallway. Some families were making soup seasoned with soybean paste, and others were boiling vegetables. His stepmother, who had been waiting for them, took their bucket. Water was already boiling on the stove.
"Did you two go visit with the King of the Ocean?" his stepmother teased them about their long absence.
His father laughed and started to peel off his jacket. "We had to catch at least one to save face around here, didn't we?"
His stepmother expertly slit the fish's belly and scooped out its guts. She cleaned and scaled it, cut it into three or four chunks, and dropped them into the boiling water seasoned with red pepper paste. Ki-yong's younger brothers gathered around the pot, their spoons already in their mouths. His stepmother scolded them, glancing at his father and Ki-yong. It was before food became scarce, though there was always more food available in Pyongyang than in other regions.
His stepmother was a middle school teacher. Sometimes parents would bring her rare gifts to ask for favors, so their family was better off than other households. Though his stepmother worked the same hours as his father, she had more duties since she had to keep house, too. His younger brothers' pockets always jangled with nails. They picked them up from construction sites and played a variant of marbles with their friends. They would try to throw a nail and hit another, and if one were pushed out beyond the line, the striker would take that nail. Their pants always had holes in them, ripped by these sharp nails, but their stepmother mended the pockets under a dim light without complaining, even tho
ugh they weren't her own children. "You can't carry such sharp things in soft material," their stepmother once said, and the youngest one retorted, "Mother, there's a Chinese saying that a gimlet in a pouch pokes its way out!"
"Children, that's not what that means!" Father interjected, looking up from the paper and shaking his head. Though he studied water and dirt, he was knowledgeable about Chinese classics. He explained, "It means a talented man commands attention without trying."
The younger children giggled and wrestled around in the tiny room, and it was hard to tell whether they understood the point. By now, they probably finished their mandatory ten years in the army and were assigned to jobs, and his stepmother would still be leading her life somewhere.
Unlike his stepmother, Ki-yong's birth mother came from a very good family. She was from Chaeryong in Hwanghae Province. A right-wing faction murdered her father, so the family was given the respect due to a family of a political murder victim. Most members from such families ended up in key positions in the Party and the People's Army.
His father's background wasn't as illustrious. He was a Communist prisoner of war who chose to return to the North after spending time at the camp on Koje Island in the South. The returned prisoners of war weren't welcome anywhere. Only a tiny minority was given any opportunity for education and work, to showcase the generosity of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung. Ki-yong's father was one of the lucky ones. He studied hydraulics in Moscow and returned to Pyongyang in 1959, immediately becoming a functionary in the hydropower department of the Pyongyang Electric Power Design Office.
Ki-yong's father, a returned POW, and his mother, a member of the Workers Party of Korea, were a most unlikely pair. Ki-yong never heard the story of how they met. Nobody spoke of it. In any case, they met and married. Their relationship didn't seem to have been forced on them. If his father's status had been higher, that might have been a possibility. This unlikely couple was assigned a newlywed apartment typical of Pyongyang—a living room and one bedroom, narrow and long—and held a simple wedding ceremony at the groom's workplace. Nobody forecast a terrible ending. They were on good terms and didn't seem to have any problems. In the photograph taken that day, Ki-yong's young, shy mother linked arms with his father, looking happy.
They had Ki-yong a year after the wedding and two more boys after him. Ki-yong's first memory is of Father standing in front of a bright window with a big, mischievous smile, kissing his mother on the nose. His mother frowned, saying it tickled, but her expression frightened Ki-yong. After that, he would burst into tears whenever she frowned, and when he got older he would turn and run away. The adults thought it was funny and would ask his mother to frown, dissolving into laughter when Ki-yong got scared. But later, after his mother met her tragic end, people said that Ki-yong must have seen something ominous that only a young child could detect.
His mother went crazy, very slowly. She worked at the Party External Commercial Management Office. She usually dealt with transactions having to do with China, Hong Kong, or Macau, focusing on numbers and money. She would sometimes go to Beijing on long business trips. Her job, dealing with foreign currency and traveling abroad, was coveted by other families of political murder victims. But it proved to be a post that overwhelmed his mother, who had frail nerves.
Ki-yong never found out what really happened. People said that she had been sacrificed by the inner politics of the Party External Commercial Management Office, or that she had been falsely incriminated by other families vying for that job, or that she had been involved in a very serious fraud and received a severe reprimand from her supervisor. Ki-yong didn't want to know which it was. Anyway, his mother left that job, and after taking some time off, she became the manager at a foreign currency shop, which catered to people who bought foreign goods with foreign currency acquired through various channels.
If one took her background into consideration, it was an assignment that was almost shameful, but she went to work every day without revealing her true feelings. She did receive a good salary, and there were quite a number of people who slipped her an extra something to get certain items. But she didn't allow exceptions or give anyone special treatment. She didn't forgive herself if the numbers didn't match up. She stayed at the shop long into the night until the numbers matched, working the abacus over and over. Since there wasn't any corruption and it looked like she was working hard, nobody thought she had such a serious problem. They would just cluck, saying, Comrade Yu Myong-suk is so conscientious.
The store was on the way to Oesong Middle School. On his way home from school, Ki-yong sometimes stopped by to say hello. His mother would whisper that someone at the back of the line was criticizing her. "Listen carefully. Those women always say negative things about me behind my back."
Ki-yong listened in on the women's conversation; it wasn't true. They were just chatting about their lives. They were happy, exuberant because they were buying expensive items with foreign currency—but to his mother, everything was a secretive plot.
"Mother, they are not talking about you," Ki-yong would say, but his mother would frown and shake her head.
"I can read lips. I learned to do that in the People's Army. But it doesn't matter if they talk behind my back. The Great Leader and the Party support me."
Even then, Ki-yong didn't think she was suffering from a disease. He didn't think much of it, really, since he expected her to hear all sorts of complaints on the job, having to face people and their demands on a daily basis. She was normal at home, waking up before the 7:00 A.M. siren, efficiently cooking breakfast for the family, eating with them, and leaving for work with Father.
When Ki-yong turned fifteen, his mother grew suspicious of his father. Or it may have been that she had been suspicious of him for a long time. A note she found in his pocket triggered her doubts. A pretty feminine script looped across the paper, "A flower blooming, hidden on an unknown road. Do you know this nameless flower? Please know my feelings when you smell this flower as you walk along a bumpy road." Father explained that it was the lyrics of the song "We Will Go with the Song of Happiness in Our Arms." While Mother knew the song as well, she believed it was a love letter, that a tramp in love with her husband had written the note under the guise of a song. Father told her that he had heard it on the radio and liked it, and asked one of the workers under his supervision to jot down the lyrics for him, but Mother's suspicions weren't dispelled. One day, when Ki-yong and Father were fishing at Taedong River, Father slid a cigarette between his lips and said, "I'm worried about your mother."
Since their home was a two-room apartment, no secret could be kept from the children. The layout forced them to grow up quickly. Ki-yong realized that Father was not asserting his innocence. Instead of saying he was hurt by her suspicions, he was saying he was worried about Mother. Ki-yong understood vaguely what that signified but didn't show it on his face.
Mother also lamented about her situation to Ki-yong. "Since you are the eldest son, you have to take my side no matter what happens. Your father was always popular with women. His nose is always in a book, so when women chase after him he doesn't know what to do and just ends up going along with them." Mother stopped and lowered her voice, looking around. "Shh. They're listening in next door, those sneaky rats."
"Mother, please stop!" Ki-yong spat out.
Mother looked bewildered, then sank into a deep despair. "You don't believe me either!" she accused.
Ki-yong looked away. It would have been preferable to deal with some other problem. He wouldn't have minded if Father had really cheated on her, he hadn't been a party member, or he had committed a more serious offense. For a moment, Ki-yong wished he had a different mother. He wanted his mother to be a comforting, warm, unsuspicious, mature woman.
She shot at him, "I knew it. You're on his side because you're a boy."
Mother threatened Father that she would complain to the Party and to his bosses. Father ignored her. One weekend, leaving Mother alone at home,
Father took the three boys to the ice skating rink. The two younger ones glided on the frozen pond, blissfully ignorant of the situation at home. The large thermometer hanging at the rink indicated a temperature of fourteen degrees. Little kids rode on sleds while the older ones skated, and when they got hungry they gnawed on corn on the cob they had stashed in their pockets. Ki-yong had put on Father's skates; they were a little too roomy. To this day, he remembers clearly what Father said to him at the rink. "What is Juche Ideology?"
Ki-yong hesitated, then reeled off what he'd learned in school. "It is a revolutionary ideology putting forth that humans have creativity, consciousness, and independence, and decide their own fate."
Father looked tired. He squinted as the low-hanging winter sun shone on his face. "Do you really believe humans are that mighty?"
Ki-yong couldn't believe his ears. This was forbidden talk, something that was near impossible to hear at school. "Pardon?"
Father lit a cigarette. The spark from the match jumped to the cigarette paper and flared brightly before it extinguished.
"The ancient Greeks believed that the world was composed of four elements."
"We learned that at school."
"What are they?"
"Water, fire, air, and earth. Greek philosophy soon became dialectic materialism..."
Father cut him off. "That is right. As you know, I make dams to capture water. Of those four elements, I studied water and earth. I don't know much about the rest. I was never interested in how humans did what. Juche Ideology ... well, it is probably right. It's a good thing for a human to create his own destiny through creativity, consciousness, and independence. But remember when there was a flood in Hwanghae Province two years ago? If the dam floods over and bursts, humans are the same as dogs or pigs. They're just swept away."