by Young-Ha Kim
In a book called Film Art Theory, Kim Jong Il wrote, "Film literature, a Juche-oriented study of human beings, was born by reflecting on the need of an independent era. It puts forth human beings as the owners of the universe and their own destinies and contributes to helping them fulfill their responsibilities and roles as such. It illuminates both the true nature of autonomy and the human issues arising from it." Although Ki-yong knew that paragraph word for word, not a single person he met on that strange set was the owner of his own destiny. If purgatory existed, as the Christians believed, the set embodied it. People there lived a life without urgency, in a twilight zone, neither a part of the world they were in nor a part of the world beyond. Time stood still, and mass unemployment, contagious diseases, and great depressions didn't exist.
Lee Sang-hyok pointed at the three-story Hilton. "You will all go into the hotel and settle in. In your room, you will each find a card describing your mission. You must act according to those orders. Pedestrians and officials in the stores will be observing you. If you speak in our accent or make a mistake because you don't know how to act like a South Korean, you will be arrested. You have to understand that South Koreans are vigilant about reporting suspicious people. As you know, once the Korean Central Intelligence Agency or police officers capture an agent, they conduct vicious torture. You must overcome even that torture." He grinned again.
The punishment implemented on the set would probably be harsher than its model, even though it was supposedly a replica of Southern torture. Ki-yong was given a bundle containing three million won, issued by the South's Bank of Korea, and entered the hotel. The bored clerk at the front desk handed him a form. Ki-yong wrote down his name, address, and phone number. The clerk took the paper back and asked whether he smoked and which room he preferred. Even though Ki-yong had been practicing, it was still awkward to respond to this capitalist way of questioning, to voice his personal preferences. Ki-yong replied as calmly as he could and succeeded in receiving the key. He entered his room and placed his luggage next to the closet. First things first. He opened the card containing his mission. He was supposed to purchase a couple of basic necessities from the supermarket, open a bank account and make a deposit, and buy lingerie for his wife at the department store.
Jong-hun, his roommate, had a different mission—to order beer at the nightclub and buy a novel at the bookstore.
"Will they really torture us?" Ki-yong wondered.
"I think so. We were tortured before in the mountains, remember?" Jong-hun was referring to their infiltration training. Agents disguised as the South's special action team captured them, strung them upside down from a tree, and poured water spiked with red pepper powder into their nostrils. Ki-yong didn't want to experience that ever again.
Ki-yong went over his lines again and again, as if he were learning a foreign language. "I'm not sure what my wife's size is, could you help me? I'm not sure what my wife's size is, could you help me? I'm not sure what my wife's size is, could you help me?"
"You have a great accent. I can see how you got into Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies," Jong-hun exclaimed at Ki-yong's authentic Southern intonation.
His accent was the one thing that gave Ki-yong confidence. Even his diction teacher at the Liaison Office 130 had praised his intonation. His teacher was a Southerner from Puan, in North Cholla Province, and one day, after they had become friends, he blurted out: "If you do go down South, please don't bring back an innocent kid playing on the beach." Ki-yong saw the naïve vulnerability of such a boy shimmering quickly over his teacher's face like a hologram.
Ki-yong exited the Hilton. It felt like everyone he encountered on the street was glancing at him surreptitiously. A lot of what Lee Sang-hyok had said was probably true. He was certain that there were undercover officials, grading his every move and utterance to announce at the critique later. He walked through the doors of the supermarket. In the North, customers paid for their items first, then received the goods from the clerk, who would take them out of the display case. He wasn't used to first picking out the groceries himself then paying for them. He selected a couple of apples and put them in a plastic bag. A bored clerk, who was leaning against one of the fruit displays, weighed them and stickered the price on the bag. Ki-yong added a can of Dongwon tuna and four bags of Samyang ramen into his basket and headed to the checkout. The cashier was staring at him. He fumbled through his pockets and tried to hand her the cash. She looked at his basket, pointedly. Ah! He quickly put the basket on the counter. He was grateful that she had helped him, preventing him from being dragged off to the torture chambers, but couldn't thank her—someone else was waiting behind him. She handed him a large plastic bag containing his purchases. He headed out. The clerk called after him: "Thank you." Hearing that, he hesitated at the doors, caught off guard because no clerk in any store in Pyongyang thanked a customer. What is she thankful for? I'm the one who bought the food.
Ki-yong went into the bank, about sixty feet away. There was a single teller at the window.
"How can I help you?"
"I would like to open an account, please."
"Please fill this out," the clerk said, pushing an application toward him. It was a South Korean form, used by Cho-hung Bank. He filled it out, using the name, address, and citizen ID number that he had memorized.
"Your seal, please."
When he gave her his seal, she stamped it in three different places on the form.
"How much would you like to deposit today?"
He gave her a million won from his wallet. She put it in a drawer and recorded it in a booklet. As he reached out for the booklet, Ki-yong's eyes met the teller's. Her eyes were saying something to him, like the checkout clerk in the supermarket. He opened the booklet. On one of the pages, there was something written in pencil, a seven-digit phone number in the South and someone's name. Under the name she had written, "Please tell them I'm doing fine. Thank you." He looked up at the teller again, but she avoided his gaze and started rummaging around in her desk. "Thank you for coming in," she said.
Ki-yong was confused. Maybe she really was asking him to send a message on her behalf to her family in the South, but it was possible that this was merely a ploy to test the strength of Ki-yong's ideology. He hesitated, and that moment's pause weakened his ideological resolve. He turned around and left. On the street, he stopped and looked around.
Don't ever stand around purposelessly in the South. It's the most visible thing you do. Just keep moving, Lee Sang-hyok would often remind them. Ki-yong walked toward the department store at an even pace. Inside, he found the bathroom. As he lowered his zipper and urinated, he slid the booklet out from his pocket and looked at it again. "Please tell them I'm doing fine. Thank you." With his thumb, he rubbed the words forcefully, erasing one woman's desperation. But the ominous dark mark wasn't completely gone. He ripped the page into shreds, put it in his mouth, and chewed. The paper bits were as tough as dried anchovies. He worked his teeth and tongue, macerating the paper with all his might. After a long while the wad finally yielded, becoming soft and mushy. On the count of three, he gulped down the gob of pulp, made pliable with spit.
TWENTY YEARS LATER, he's standing in the middle of the real Seoul. What happened to all the people who were on that set? They were living my life, the one I will be forced into when I return. Will I have to work there until the day I die? Will North Korea exist long enough for me to work on the set?
Ki-yong passes a street lined with jewelry stores and pauses in front of a Lotteria. He's thirsty. He goes in and orders: "Coke. A small. Light on the ice."
"A small Coke. One thousand won, please. Thank you."
He orders fluidly, like water flowing along in a creek. But immediately after he came south, ordering food at a Lotteria was very intimidating. In that dark tunnel beneath Pyongyang, there weren't any fast food joints like McDonald's or Burger King. In 1986, even in the South, these restaurants were a brand-new form of eatery that had been
around only for a few years. The first time he went to a Lotteria, Ki-yong paced outside, trying to figure out what the word "self-service" meant. It was stamped on a poster hanging on the wall inside. Some people walked toward the cashier, while others headed over to a row of trash cans with their trays, threw out whatever was on them, and left without paying. Everyone, even junior high school students, acted as if everything came naturally. Nobody hesitated, as if they had all received mass instruction on what to do at a fast food restaurant. He couldn't ask anyone what he was supposed to do. Finally, he went inside and sat down at a table. Even though he sat there for a while, nobody came to his table. Only after he remained there for a long time, watching people ordering at the counter, did he finally understand what "self-service" meant. How could you call that service, when the customers did the ordering, fetched the food, and threw it out after they were done? But he got used to it. And there were many other things that he had to absorb, things he hadn't learned on the underground set in Pyongyang.
MA-RI AMBLES DOWN the street. Although she isn't one to agonize over important issues in her life, this is different. Sometimes, she wants to shout "Time!" like in a basketball game, and this is that kind of moment. She isn't losing the game yet. She's still in the lead by a good margin, but her opponent is pursuing her doggedly, and she can feel the whole thing tilting in his favor. If it continues like this, the lead will undoubtedly flip and it could be hard to get back on top.
Where did it go wrong? Every time she updates her résumé to apply for a new job, she tries to pinpoint the exact moment her life started to veer off track. She wonders if her problem isn't her unexciting professional experience, but her family issues, and her thoughts naturally flow to her mother.
Ma-ri's mother suffered from depression starting in her late twenties. She didn't know it was a disease until the end of the 1980s. Once she discovered it was an illness, she started taking medication, but it never did much to make her better. Her depression pressed down on her entire family like a thick blanket. Ma-ri's father's heart grew heavy every time he thought of his wife lying immobile in their room, dark behind closed curtains. Like many people suffering from depression, Ma-ri's mother tossed and turned night after night, lying awake, consumed by increasingly negative thoughts, which made it even more difficult to fall asleep. It was a vicious cycle. Ik-dok went to church to seek advice from a Catholic priest and only then realized that his wife was suffering from an illness, but this newfound knowledge didn't really change anything. Although a graduate of a college in Seoul, he'd gone back home to Kwangju and worked in the family's wholesale liquor business. He was immersed in an environment that made it difficult for him to understand silly illnesses like depression. He could only compare it to the melancholy that washed over him during a post-binge hangover. Such drinking was to be expected to a certain degree, since he dealt with lazy bums and tough guys as a liquor wholesaler. Though he himself wasn't a lazy good-for-nothing, he always maintained good relations with them, something he had to do to thrive in that world.
Ik-dok always ranted: "You know how people pour some liquor on the ground to ward off evil spirits when they're out drinking? That's basically what taxes are—whatever's left after you pour some out for the evil spirits. Why can't they just collect all of it when you sell the alcohol, instead of slapping on the VAT?" It wasn't an exaggeration to say that his entire life was a battle against taxes. If you had to find one phrase that described Jang Ik-dok's life philosophy, it would be "No documentation." He didn't believe in receipts or accounting books, and instead had his own system, a notebook filled with a code of letters and numbers and a personal network of business contacts and friends. Even though knives and personal contacts took the place of modern contractual relationships, it was, in its own way, an efficient and rational system.
"The government's like a bandit. It's better for you if you don't bump into it," Ik-dok once said to his daughter after he slipped a couple of folded ten-thousand-won bills to a cop, who had stopped him for a traffic violation. "Every time you do, you find yourself out of cash."
"The fine would be thirty thousand won. Do you really need to do this? Why don't you just pay the ticket when you get it in the mail?" Ma-ri asked.
He stared at his daughter, baffled. "But then I'll be in their records!"
Neither Ma-ri nor anyone else could change his mind. If they tried to correct him, they endured an entire day of his bandit theories. His long-winded speech would go: "Let's say a bandit is ruling a village for a week, okay? Before the day's gone, he's going to take everything. But if he's in power for a year, he'll wait until fall harvest to steal things and will probably let the villagers live. If he rules for ten years, he'll even make plans—feeding the villagers because you can't have them all die of hunger, giving them clothes and other things. If he's there for thirty years, then he's going to be meddling in your business, telling you to have children or whatnot. What I'm telling you is that the government is the bandit that rules for thirty years."
"So if we're going to live under a bandit anyway, it's better to be under one that's going to be in power for a long time?" Ma-ri would ask.
Her father would grin and reply, like a riddler, "No, it's just an example. And don't go around saying that your dad said so."
Logic wasn't important to him. Ma-ri thinks he latched on to any old rhetoric to evade taxes. Back then, with the National Security Law in full force, you could be taken in and interrogated for that kind of talk.
In some ways, he was like a ghost, the way he went out of his way to avoid the government in any shape or form. For several years, he earned hundreds of millions of won a year, but he always kept his business slotted in the simple VAT taxation bracket, the category for the smallest businesses. He would just register several businesses and disperse his earnings. But he did not forget the tax officials' hard work, and visited them with monetary gifts at holidays. He was able to avoid taxes by employing all sorts of shady tactics, but even he couldn't do anything about his wife's depression. He felt powerless when he came home to his wife lying in their darkened bedroom, curtains drawn. He dragged her out and forced her to go on walks and take Chinese herbal medicine, but none of it worked.
He wondered, guiltily, if it was his fault, since he was the one who brought her to this place, away from Seoul where she had been happily attending college. A native Seoulite, his wife would never have imagined that she would follow her husband down to Kwangju and live the life of a liquor wholesaler's wife. When he grew frustrated and angry at the whole situation, he wanted to give up and get a divorce. But what was done was done. Deep down, Ik-dok knew he was not the reason she was depressed, but he didn't feel any better about it.
They had children despite it all. Ma-ri, the baby of the family, earned good grades. Ik-dok bragged about his smart daughter, who was often at the top of her class. Soon, Ma-ri was admitted to a college in Seoul and left home. Their eldest son, Jong-sok, suffered a brain injury when he was five, when he ran after a fire engine and was hit by another fire truck following close behind. Despite several bouts of neurosurgery, he was diagnosed with serious developmental delay. The second son, In-sok, was a quiet, somber child who liked to read and play alone. He would always find a hiding place in the storage room stacked with soju crates and snuggle into a nook for a whole day. He knew the storage room so well that nobody, except for their dog, could find him when he went off inside by himself. In-sok was fairly competent in school, but he didn't go to Seoul for his education. Instead, he went to a public university nearby so he could remain with his parents. But Ma-ri had always been different. She wasn't at all like her mother; rather, she inherited her father's preternatural optimism. She was a happy, outgoing girl who liked to show off and brag and had a competitive streak.
But her mother's depression affected her severely. She dreaded coming home and seeing her mother lying in bed, pulling the covers over her head instead of acknowledging her children's hellos. Seeing the shape
of her mother under the covers, Ma-ri would worry that she had died, but a secret part of her wished that her mother was lying quietly dead in her bed. She didn't think there was any hope for her mother. Turning away from her, Ma-ri would bump into her eldest brother, grinning idiotically at her. There was nothing malicious about him, but sometimes he would masturbate in his room without realizing that the door was open, so she thought of him more as a giant orangutan than a human being. He gained weight steadily, reaching 330 pounds by the time she left home. After that nobody knew how much he weighed. He detested getting on the scale, and nobody could force his huge bulk onto it. He even had his own bathroom—ordinary ceramic toilets would shatter under his weight, so they ended up installing a custom-made toilet constructed of strengthened plastic. Ma-ri always thought he wouldn't have gotten so obese if their mother hadn't been depressed.