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

by Chol-hwan Kang; Pierre Rigoulot

  Then it was up to the presiding security agent to decide whether the self-criticism had been satisfactory. If it had been, the prisoner could proceed to the next step: criticizing someone else. If his criticism was found wanting, the agent would ask a member of the audience to expand on the criticism proffered. If the accused tried to defend himself, a third prisoner, and, if necessary, a fourth, was selected to take up the assault. Self-defense was never wise, because the review couldn’t end until the prisoner admitted his faults. Once a prisoner relented, we moved on to the next preselected case. The session lasted from an hour and a half to two hours, running from 9:00 P.M. until about 11:00 P.M., which wasn’t always enough time to get through all ten cases. If time ran short, the agents consolidated the wrongdoing of an entire team, or several of its members, into a single presentation. A member of the guilty team would then present the self-criticism on behalf of everyone involved.

  The sessions were so conventional and formalized that it was hard to take them seriously—despite the perfect silence imposed by the hard gaze of the guards. We were like bored kids in a class they find meaningless. The smallest distraction would set us off. It happened several times that audience members let out an audible fart in the middle of a self-criticism. A little nothing like that was all it took to shatter the ceremony’s contrived solemnity and send the guards into a fit of rage. Sometimes they pretended not to hear, but other times they demanded to know who the culprit was. “Who farted?” they screamed. “The person who farted stand up!” If no one confessed, the guards kept us seated there until the criminal was identified, which eventually he always was. The prisoner would then be pushed toward the self-criticism table to expiate his fart with a mea culpa, at the end of which he usually received a week’s worth of supplementary work details.

  We dreaded these long meetings that shortened our nights needlessly. They were too much of a sham to ever take seriously, but that’s not the way camp authorities saw it. They were always reminding us that “work alone can’t root out your rotten ideology. You need control.” What they meant was ideological control, and maintaining it was in part our responsibility. Hence, on arriving at adulthood, we were given three notebooks in which to trace the development of our ideological healing: “The Politics of the Party Notebook,” “The Revolutionary History of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il Notebook,” and the “Life Assessment Notebook.” All three accompanied us to the criticism sessions, so we could jot down all the lessons we learned.

  To help advance our edification and reeducation, we also attended two classes a week to learn revolutionary songs and deepen our understanding of the life and thoughts of Kim Il-sung. The curriculum (called “the teachings”) consisted largely of listening to articles read out loud from the Rodong Sinmun newspaper, of which three copies arrived weekly at the supply office. We weren’t allowed to read the paper ourselves, because the direct word of the Party was reserved for security agents. Reprobates that we were, it would have been dangerous to expose us to more than a few preselected articles, and even these needed to be interpreted for us by the agents. With our rotten ideology, we were quite capable of misunderstanding their true intent. To say “interpreted” really gives the agents too much credit. All they ever did was pound us over the head with the Great Leader’s most tired platitudes. “I read you this article because the Americans and their puppets in Seoul are once again threatening war. The imperialists’ appetite for conquest threatens the peace, and to withstand it we must be ideologically armed.”

  I don’t know whether the guards believed everything they said, but when they raised the possibility of a new war, some of us got nervous. We had always been told that if “the imperialists and their lackeys” ever invaded North Korea, the camp’s personnel would kill us before the enemy arrived. I still had hopes of leaving Yodok one day. I had no desire to be shot by guards without having the pleasure of seeing them run for their lives. These sorts of threats sent a chill up my spine, but they made very little impression on the older veterans. Whatever Will Be, Will Be was their motto, and whatever happened outside the camp was of no interest to them.

  Still under the rubric of our ideological reeducation, the agents sometimes tested our allegiance to Kim Il-sung by making us sing endless verses of “The Song of General Kim Il-sung.” Part of the song goes, “In North Korea a new spring is everywhere on its way.” “Pang-bang kok-kok” means “everywhere, without exception.” I remember one old prisoner in the camp who had emigrated from Japan, like my parents, and who spoke Korean with a heavy accent. Instead of singing “pang-bang kok-kok,” he accidentally used a slightly different semantic form—“yogi chogi,” four syllables that mean “scattered in disorder” that have a rather negative association with filth and trash. The people who heard his slip began to laugh so hard they cried. As a consequence, he was criticized and labeled an “ideological deviant” and was almost sent to the sweatbox.

  At the beginning of every year, we had the privilege of having Kim Il-sung’s extended New Year’s address read to us. The speech was the focal point of a two-day event featuring an absurd recitation contest. It could have been worse, though. It was January—a time when the thermometer often dipped well below 0˚F—and instead of being outside, we were gathered in a well-heated room. On the first day, we transcribed the speech in one of our notebooks, while the guards walked around to make sure we were making an effort. The next day, we worked on memorizing the speech by heart. The biggest challenge was figuring out how to doze off without being caught. The guards really only expected us to study the Great Leader’s message and to regurgitate a few quotes. To keep us honest, they picked a handful of prisoners to recite what they had learned. The top three contestants won prizes—considerable ones, given our condition. The winner got a coat, the runner-up, a pair of socks, and the second runner-up, a pair of gloves. The kids’ recitation contests were held in class, with the winner receiving a short reprieve from the usual work schedule.

  My memory of these speeches has blurred somewhat, but I remember that they always started with an account of the previous year’s accomplishments in agriculture, industry, the armed forces, and so forth, and ended with a list of “goals for the future.” Somewhere in the middle came a nod to the Koreans residing in Japan, who under the clairvoyant leadership of Han Duk-su were continuing to lead a courageous battle in the heart of enemy land. There was also the inevitable mention of the South Koreans, who were suffering a cruel separation from the motherland and toiling under the yoke of America’s lackeys.

  Many other leaders’ birthdays were important enough to serve as a pretext for pedagogic celebrations or breaks from the normal routine. On such days, candy was dispensed to all the kids in the country, sometimes even to those in the camps. I remember Kim Il-sung’s seventieth birthday in 1982. As soon as I got my candy, I ran home to show it to my grandmother. By this time, her faith in the Worker’s Party was long gone. “Ah, yes,” she said. “We gave them everything we had, and in return we get years in the camp and a few cheap candies. There’s something to celebrate, my child. And a big thank you to Kim Il-sung!” I ate the gifts anyway. They were the first goodies I’d tasted in a very long time.

  The other birthdays were less solemn events, occasioning the dispensation of more modest rewards, but they were greatly appreciated. On January 1 (New Year’s Day), February 16 (Kim Jong-il’s birthday), September 9 (anniversary of North Korea’s declaration of statehood), and October 10 (anniversary of the Party’s founding), we would gather to watch an edifying television program or a revolutionary film. We were let off work early to see the screening, but sometimes we were so tired, we immediately fell asleep.

  I remember one movie about the life of Kim Il-sung in which the main actor looked just like the Great Leader himself. He was taking his troops through the vast Manchurian plain, frozen solid by cold and snow. The fierce struggle of Kim Il-sung’s partisans and the cruel treatment meted out to them by the Japanese were supposed to arou
se our sympathy, but they wound up doing the opposite. We were struggling as hard at Yodok as Kim Il-sung’s partisans in the frozen plain; what we saw on the screen was parallel to our own condition. The dungeons, brutalities, inhumane guards, and meager food supplies depicted on the screen didn’t move us; we were living with these things every day. Except our misery wasn’t inflicted by enemies but by our own compatriots!

  I remember another film about a man named Kapyong, who signs up to be an auxiliary in the Japanese army. There wasn’t a kid in the country, Yodok included, who hadn’t seen the movie at least a dozen times and knew every word by heart. In the movie, Kapyong goes to work for the Japanese out of necessity and from a lack of political consciousness. Then he meets Kim Il-sung, sees the light, and is transfigured into a true patriot. He then sings a lament about the humiliations he has suffered at the hands of “Fascists.” In the theaters back in Pyongyang, all the kids would sing along with it. At Yodok we did the same thing, except that during the refrain, instead of bemoaning the fate of “poor Kapyong,” everyone substituted their own names.

  The propaganda was so grotesque, the teaching method so crude, we were bound to reject it. Like every education institution in North Korea, the camp’s school had a room dedicated to the study of Kim Il-sung’s revolution. On one wall hung a huge portrait of the Great Leader, and everywhere you looked were photos illustrating the different stages in his heroic life. It was forbidden for anyone to enter the room with bare or dirty feet. We had to wear socks—and not just any socks. For this occasion we had to put on the special pair given to us on Kim Il-sung’s birthday, the pair reserved for visiting the holy sites. What did it matter that we suffered from the cold in winter and waded in puddles during the rainy season with only rags around our feet? Wearing Kim Il-sung’s socks for such workaday purposes would have been a sacrilege. The Party’s code of conduct required that we reserve them for the Kim Il-sung annex, no matter how much we needed them in our daily lives.

  One day I came to school having forgotten that the Wild Boar had scheduled a visit to the Kim Il-sung room. I was wearing my ordinary socks, which were full of holes and barely holding together after half a dozen darnings by my grandmother. I was panicstricken, especially when the Wild Boar asked everyone who “accidentally” forgot their socks to raise their hands. Fortunately, I wasn’t alone. Two-thirds of the class had their hands up. The teacher was outraged. He ordered the scatterbrains to go outside and line up. Then he came out and kicked his way furiously along the row of children. He was wearing canvas army boots and let them fly with all his strength. During beatings, it was common for us to exaggerate our pain in order to win sympathy, but this time we had no room for exaggeration. The cries of pain were real. The blow I took to the stomach was so violent that I collapsed on the spot and lost consciousness for a half hour.

  A couple of years was all it took for the camp to utterly change a child. Instead of turning us into stalwart admirers of our Great Leader’s regime, as it was intended to do, the camp taught us how to rebel, jeer, and mock anything vaguely whiffing of authority. Within a year or two of arriving, a prisoner lost every scintilla of respect he might have had for the Party. Our disdain spread like gangrene, beginning with the guards, then slowly, inexorably, making its way up to the great leaders.

  I think the camp also changed me psychologically. As a child I was outgoing and restless. When people meet me today, they find me reserved and somewhat distant. Growing up in the camp made me shut myself off from the world. I learned about suffering and hunger, violence and murder. For a long time I was angry at my grandfather. Only around 1983 did I begin to realize that not he but rather Kim Il-sung and his regime were the real causes of my suffering. They were the ones responsible for the camp and for filling it with innocent people. All during my childhood, Kim Il-sung had been like a god to me. A few years in the camp cured me of my faith. My fellow prisoners and I were the wayward sheep of the revolution, and the Party’s way of bringing us back into the fold was to exploit us unto death. The propaganda, which exalted North Korea as the people’s corner of paradise, now struck me as revolting.

  THIRTEEN

  PUBLIC EXECUTIONS AND POSTMORTEM STONINGS

  Having reached majority—as defined in the camp—I was obliged to begin attending a ceremony I would have preferred to skip. Yet few things were optional at Yodok, least of all the things that were most awful. Many public executions had taken place over the preceding years of my internment, but as a child I was not allowed to see them. Two of my more curious friends had once sneaked into an execution and described it to me afterward. The story left me feeling hollow and disgusted, which is the way my father and uncle always looked when they came home from one of these events, their faces hard and unnatural. They would skip their dinner and just sit there, never saying a word about what they had seen. If I pressed, they just shook their heads, and observed that “Yodok is no place for human beings.”

  The first public execution I saw was of a prisoner who had attempted to escape. We were dismissed from work early that afternoon so we could attend the execution. The whole village was there. The skies were rainy and gray—as I always remember them being on execution days. The event took place at a spot called Ipsok, a beautiful little elbow on the river, which turned into an island during the heavy rains. Ipsok means “large elevated boulder,” which is exactly what the spot was: an enormous rock, as big around as a house, standing by the shore.

  Three desks were set up for the occasion: for the head of the camp, the village chief, and the military guards. As the prisoners arrived they took their seats on the ground in front of the desks. Farther off, a small truck was parked under a tree. I was told that that was where they were keeping the condemned man. I felt anxious. The older veterans sat chatting. A few wondered aloud about who the man might be. Most talked about other things. Several prisoners used the time to gather herbs. Attending a few executions was all it took to render the experience perfectly banal.

  Finally, the head of the camp stood up to read the condemned man’s resume. “The Party was willing to forgive this criminal. It gave him the chance here at Yodok to right himself. He chose to betray the Party’s trust, and for that he merits execution.” During the silence that followed, we could hear the condemned man scream his final imprecations in the truck. “You bastards! I’m innocent!” Then suddenly his cries stopped. We saw two agents pull him down from the truck, each holding an arm. It must have been ages since he had last eaten. All skin and bones, it looked as if he were being floated along by the guards. As he passed in front of the prisoners, some shut their eyes. Others lowered their heads out of respect. A few of the prisoners, especially the younger ones, stared widely at the barely human figure, hardly able to believe their eyes. The unhappy being who walked to his death seemed no longer a member of the family of man. It would have been easy to mistake him for an animal, with his wild hair, his bruises, his crusts of dried blood, his bulging eyes. Then I suddenly noticed his mouth. So that’s how they shut him up. They had stuffed it full of rocks. The guards were now tying him to a post with three pieces of rope: at eye level, around the chest, and at the waist. As they withdrew, the commanding officer took his place beside the firing squad. “Aim at the traitor of the Fatherland . . . Fire!” The custom was to shoot three salvos from a distance of five yards. The first salvo cut the topmost cords, killing the condemned man and causing his head to fall forward. The second salvo cut the chords around his chest and bent him forward further. The third salvo released his last tether, allowing the man’s body to drop into the pit in front of him, his tomb. This simplified the burial.

  That unfortunately wasn’t the worst spectacle that I beheld at Yodok. In the fall of 1986, a condemned prisoner who didn’t have enough pebbles stuffed into his mouth, or had somehow managed to spit them out, began proclaiming his innocence and screaming that Kim Il-sung was a “little dog”—one of the worst things you can call someone in Korean. To shut him up, one
of the guards grabbed a big rock and shoved it into the man’s mouth, breaking his teeth and turning his face into a bloody mess.

  In October 1985, two prisoners were executed by hanging. The victims were members of an elite military unit that had succeeded in fleeing the country. They were well trained and very familiar with the terrain. One of them got as far as Dandong, China, at the mouth of the Yalu River, before he was stopped by Chinese security forces and sent back to North Korea. The Korean authorities had searched for them everywhere, even in the camp. For two weeks, Yodok’s prisoners were mobilized in the effort and forced to scour the camp grounds every afternoon. In our heart of hearts, we were grateful to the fugitives for the work-free afternoons. We thought of them as heroes. Their escape had accomplished the unimaginable. All of us were rooting for them and hoping they might tell the world about what was happening at Yodok. But it was not to be.

  It wasn’t until we were called to Ipsok one morning that we learned they had been caught. Adding to our surprise were the gallows that had been erected in place of the usual execution posts. Our two heroes were brought forward with their heads sheathed in white hoods. The guards led them up to the scaffold and slipped nooses around their necks. The first fugitive was nothing short of skeletal, but the second one, the one who had gotten as far as Dandong, looked like he still had some reserves of energy. Yet he was quicker to die. The other one clung to life, wriggling at the end of his rope like some crazed animal. It was a horrible sight. Urine started trickling down both their pants. I had the strange feeling of being swallowed up in a world where the earth and sky had changed places.