The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag

by Chol-hwan Kang; Pierre Rigoulot

  As our bundles were being loaded into the five large crates allotted us, I saw my sister take hold of her favorite doll. This gave me an idea: I hurriedly grabbed one of my aquariums and stocked it with a selection of my most beautiful fish. I then hugged the aquarium fast against me, just as I saw my sister do with her doll. One of the agents noticed me and said that taking “that”—gesturing to the aquarium with his chin—was out of the question. The brutality of the order, handed down by someone I didn’t even know, threw me into a raging fit. I ranted and raved, yelled and bawled so much the agent finally relented. My swell of tears gradually abated, but the fate of the fish left behind still worried me. When I was first told of the strange goings-on at my house, several of my more treacherous friends said I would probably be sent to “a nasty place” and so would do well to give my fish away to my pals. At the time I hadn’t taken their offer seriously, but now, on the cusp of my departure, I regretted it.

  A truck was stationed in front our building. The men began loading the crates and the few small furnishings the agents didn’t want for themselves: a low table, some kitchen utensils, and a 125-pound bag of rice, the maximum the camp would allow. The rattle of the engine, the lamentations of some, and the orders of others began waking the neighbors. One by one, lights came on in the surrounding apartments. I could see people staring from behind their windowpanes. Some worked up the courage to come down for a closer look. The gathering crowd kept a reserved distance, but it wasn’t the sort of assembly the agents liked much, and they now did their best to move everything along more quickly. A minor panic ensued when my father bolted back to the apartment to fetch a few last-minute things. That reminded me of my favorite comic books. Like all the kids, I loved the story about the battle of the hedgehog army, in which the hedgehogs and squirrels join forces to defeat the wolves, rats, foxes, and eagles, all representative of the horrible world of capitalism. I begged the security agent—I think he was the same one who had given way to my earlier temper tantrum—to let me go get it. But by now he’d had enough of my antics and screamed for me to get in the truck. This time I was scared and obeyed without protest. So much for the hedgehog army. At least I had my favorite fish.

  My family climbed one by one into the back of the truck, except for my mother, who, to my great surprise, remained standing on the sidewalk. I still remember the immense sadness in her face, streaming with tears. “You’re not coming?” I asked. “No, not right away, my love. I’ll join you soon.” In a hurry to wrap things up, the agents brusquely confirmed my mother’s words and kept everyone going about their business. Reassured, I squeezed myself up against my aquarium, which I topped with a plank of wood to keep the water from sloshing out. After a final good-bye, my attention turned to the novelty of riding in an automobile, a rare event in the life of a private North Korean citizen.

  My poor mother! It must have been terrible for her. Much as she tried, she couldn’t hide her sadness. Yet her little nine-year-old son had understood almost nothing. He had climbed into the truck quite happily, his fish pressed to his chest. His mother didn’t know so many years would pass before she would see her son again. The daughter of a “heroic family,” she was spared a trip to the camp where her children and husband spent the next ten years. Shortly after our imprisonment, the Security Force made her get a divorce and terminate all ties with our family of “traitors.” She was never asked her opinion, never even gave her signature. She suffered greatly and longed for her lost family throughout the long years of our imprisonment. I later learned she had repeatedly appealed to the Security Force for permission to join us in the camp, but her requests were seen as aberrant and never granted.

  We started out just as the day was breaking. The truck was a Tsir, the powerful Soviet-built machine that was standard equipment for hauling away prisoners. The Koreans called it “the crow,” a symbol of death, for though white remains the traditional color of mourning in Korea, black is the color of funerals. It was a covered truck, and during the first leg of the trip, my sister and I were not allowed to peek outside. Once we were out in the country, however, the agents let us watch at the passing scenery as much as we wanted. The ride was bumpy, traversing rutted, packed-earth roads. I was holding up fine myself—my one real concern was keeping the water from sloshing out of the aquarium—but Mi-ho started vomiting. Grandmother found her a plastic bag, then spread blankets on the truck floor for her to lie on. Our crates and furnishings were in the forward part of the bed. Two armed security agents stood guarding the back.

  At one point my grandmother asked the agents what they intended to do with her youngest son, the one absent member of the household. She said he was innocent and that they had no reason to arrest him. The agents agreed. Now that I think of it, Grandmother must have been pretty desperate. She must have known the guards were powerless to decide anything. All she was looking for was a little consolation, and in some way, perhaps she found it. Yet when our questions turned to the place we were being taken to, the guards claimed ignorance. They did try to cheer us up, though, and even showed a little benevolence, but they swore up and down they didn’t even know what a camp looked like. “All I know,” said one of them, “is that it’s not too bad a place. Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

  Keeping us calm was apparently the guards’ main responsibility. It was common knowledge that people in our situation often preferred to take their own lives. The guards wanted none of that. Suicide was a manner of disobeying, of showing that one had lost faith in the future traced out by the Party. The soldiers’ good cheer was intended to preserve the utopian myth long enough to get us to our destination. But it did little to stanch my grandmother’s crying or to keep my father from sinking into morose silence. Was he thinking about his wife? Remembering the house in Kyoto? His happier days learning photography with his friends? Grandmother’s unshakeable desire to leave Japan and return to the Fatherland of the Revolution? Everything had gone from bad to worse since that decision in which he hardly had a word. The arrest must have seemed to him like the latest in a series of steps on the descent to hell.

  He was sitting in front of me, hollow-eyed, lost in thought. A little farther on, the truck came to a stop and one of the agents jumped out. A minute later he was back, escorting an elderly woman around my grandmother’s age. She was well dressed, all in black, without luggage. We all figured she was an acquaintance or relative of the guard, hitching a ride. She was silent at first, but after about fifteen minutes she started talking and then never stopped. It turned out she, too, was on her way to Yodok, her story running parallel to our own—from her decision to emigrate from Kyoto to the precursory disappearance of her husband, accused of espionage. She had no children and was now entirely on her own, unable to understand why she was being taken away. When she started criticizing the Party, the two agents, who had been standing silently by, ordered her to shut up. But she continued, only less loudly, and the guards, whose only concern was avoiding problems, pretended not to hear.

  “How will I survive there without children or a husband?” she kept asking.

  “If we’re sent to the same camp, you can count on us: we’ll stick together,” responded my grandmother.

  The woman thanked her, her nerves a little soothed. She’d packed twenty hard-boiled eggs for the journey and now began handing them out to everyone in the truck, including the security agents. When I got my egg, I crumbled up the yoke to feed it to my fish. But as I prepared to sprinkle the yellow crumbs onto the surface of the aquarium, my grandmother slapped me hard across the face and ordered me to eat. It was the first time she had ever raised her hand against me. I was devastated but did as I was told, eating the powdered yoke I had designated for my beloved fish. The hours passed slowly. When I grew bored, I climbed up on the crates and looked out through a little Plexiglas window. But most of the time I stayed seated, stunned by the memory of that slap and grieving the death of several of my fish. I wanted terribly to cry but fought back tears
with all my strength. I covered the aquarium again and held it tightly in my arms, looking straight ahead, forcing myself to think of nothing. The dirt road continued to climb through twists and hairpin turns. The old strategic route, originally built by the Japanese to connect the eastern and western parts of North Korea, was known to be extremely dangerous. With all the bumps and turns, I, too, lost my stomach. Finally, toward midday we reached Wolwangnyong, the King’s Pass, 3,000 feet above tree line. North Koreans also call it the Pass of Tears, because it’s the last stretch of road on the way to Yodok. It was two o’clock before we arrived at the perimeter of the camp. When the truck came to a halt, none of the adults wanted to look outside. Over the last several hours they’d had plenty of opportunity to get used to the landscape, but Lord only knew what they would see if they looked out now. They didn’t move, so I didn’t move either, and we all just sat there, waiting for something to happen.

  FIVE

  WORK GROUP NUMBER 10

  The two security agents climbed down from the back of the truck. Outside, I could hear them whispering to other people. In a moment, one of the guards returned and asked for the passports of the adults and the birth certificates of the children. He took the documents and disappeared. Twenty minutes passed under heavy silence, then the guards returned. They climbed back into the truck and we slowly set off again. Curiosity was getting the better of me, and encountering no objection from the guards, I climbed up to look through the peephole.

  In front of us, soldiers were swinging open a gate. On the archway above it I could make out the words, “Border Patrol of the Korean People, Unit 2915.” The sign didn’t impress me much at the time, but I now realize it was yet another link in the interminable chain of lies, a way of camouflaging the camp to look like an army barracks, distracting the attention of the outside world. A crude lie it was, considering how far Yodok is from the border. The gateway was the only opening in a long concrete wall. Above it rose two watchtowers. Farther off, the walls gave way to a series of steep bluffs, fringed with barbed wire deep into the horizon. The view reminded me of movies I had seen in school about detention centers built by the Japanese during their occupation.

  Not far from the gate stood a guard station equipped with cannons. I was looking around in wide-eyed curiosity when the truck stopped again. The gate closed behind us, and a group of guards began walking toward the truck. Their uniforms were reminiscent of those worn by the People’s Army, only they were a slightly lighter shade of khaki, and their four-pocket jackets extended straight to their pants. Our guards provided them with the spelling our of names, then we set off again. The next time we stopped was a quarter of an hour later. Outside, there was a great bustle; I could hear voices, whispering. It was like a welcoming committee had gathered in our honor. One of our guards then climbed down from the truck and started shouting abuses. How brutally he spoke! How dare he address people so crudely? The guard fired off so many orders and insults, I grew panicked and began shaking. My father had to put his hand on my shoulder to calm me down.

  The guards then pulled the canvas cover off the truck and we all stood up. I was still holding my aquarium in my arms. I had the vague impression that this was to be a decisive moment. The canvas was like a theater curtain that had been prematurely drawn. A new scene, indeed a new act, had begun, and none of us were ready for it. I would have liked to know more about the roles we were expected to play. But I didn’t have long to inquire because the men and women standing around the truck were already stepping forward for a closer look. How frightfully filthy they all were, dressed like beggars, their hair caked and matted with dirt. Panic took hold of me again. Who were these people? Were they the same people I had just heard making all the commotion? Could it really be they whom the guards had addressed so brutally? To my astonishment, a number of them recognized my grandmother and came forward to greet her. As we stepped down from the truck, one old lady—a former friend, I suppose—ran up and gave her a hug, and for a long time the two women stood holding each other’s hands, sighing deeply and crying.

  “I was so worried when you disappeared,” said my grandmother.

  “No one told you?”

  “We heard nothing.”

  “And now you’re here, like me! After all we did for the Party!”

  As I stood watching, two boys came up to me. I thought they were my age, but it turned out they were actually two years older.

  “The camp is no place to grow big and strong,” said one of them. “A lot of kids stop growing here.”

  The adults went on trading news and whispering in each other’s ears, holding back the tears as best they could. What a sight these people made with their threadbare rags, their overgrown hair, their filth. How out of keeping their appearance seemed with the civility of their manner and their politeness toward the new arrivals. The welcome would probably have gone on for some time had not the guards intervened. They reestablished order in a wink, commanding all the prisoners back to their barracks and work details. That put an end to my somewhat abstract fascination, bringing me back to reality and my all-important fish. Alas, half of them were already dead. At a loss for what else to do, I started counting the victims. The few prisoners who had managed to tarry stepped closer and stared silently at the extraordinary spectacle standing among them: a child in the middle of the camp, crying softly over an aquarium in which floated, stomach up, the most fantastical assortment of exotic fish.

  In a moment, a man who appeared to be the warden cut through the small crowd. “These things are going to stink to high heaven,” he bellowed. “Go dump them somewhere far away!” He then turned to my parents and pointed toward a group of huts about a hundred yards off. “That’s where you’re living,” he said, gesturing for us to follow. We had hardly walked ten paces when we were stopped by the sight of a man running toward us at full speed. It was my third uncle. He had already been in the camp for a week. The Security Force had picked him up at his conference. Before our arrival, he had been living in the bachelor’s quarters, a very peculiar dwelling, of which more later. My grandmother—though she had hoped her youngest boy might escape the camps—felt a great joy at suddenly seeing him there, and as she kissed him, warm tears ran down her face.

  We approached the designated hut. My father pushed the wooden door in silence. We joined him, and what we saw left us stunned. This was where we were going to live? Under a roof of bare wooden planks, with dried earth for walls, and packed dirt for our floor? The guards ordered a few prisoners to help us finish our resettlement. It didn’t take long; all we had were our two dressers, a low table, our clothes, and 125 pounds of rice. It was painful to look at these furnishings, infused still with the memory of our luxurious Pyongyang apartment. In the heavy silence our eyes wandered among the accoutrements of the past and the bleak surroundings of the present.

  The hut was a four-family building. Our unit, the largest of the four, had a partition down the middle splitting it into two rooms. The dividing wall stopped short of the ceiling, so that a single bulb hanging directly above it could illuminate both spaces. I later discovered that the partition was built for the benefit of families who didn’t get along; it was permissible to take it down. The camp also had smaller-sized huts that were constructed for two and three families which, due to their low roofs and little squat openings for doors, were usually referred to as “harmonicas.” Every hut was surrounded with a patch of fenced-off dirt where the prisoners could grow whatever they wanted. Or rather whatever they could, for they worked so hard during the day, they had neither time nor energy at night for anything but sleep.

  All of the camp’s electricity was generated by a little hydroelectric plant located inside the camp’s perimeter. The limitations of the system soon were apparent: the water froze in the wintertime and was too scant in the summer. Outages were therefore a frequent occurrence. Our immediate concern on our first night, however, was figuring out how to start a fire without matches or a lighter. Fortunate
ly, our neighbors came by and taught us a few of the camp’s basic survival skills. They demonstrated how to chop down a tree quickly and safely, how to keep a flame alive on a pine-resin-soaked wick, how to cook cornmeal over a wood fire, et cetera. There were no faucets in the huts, so all the water had to be drawn from the river that was a ten-minute walk—or a little longer on the way back, when the bucket was full. To a well-fed person these trips would be boring and uncomfortable but constitute an insurmountable test. Weak and undernourished as we would soon be, however, they were nothing short of exhausting. The other thing we didn’t have was heating fuel. That was what we had used in Pyongyang, but no such luxuries existed in Yodok. Instead we had to forage for wood that was dry enough to catch fire. Our room had a wood-burning furnace that, when topped with a caldron, doubled for a stove. Preparing the food was the family’s responsibility, and since Grandmother was old, the guards assigned her to this task. She had done well to bring a few kitchen things from Pyongyang: the only utensils the camp provided were beat-up mess tins.