SEVENTEEN
Two Women
Born in December 1949 in mountainous Yanggang Province, not far from the scene of Kim Il-sung’s daring 1937 guerrilla attack on the town of Pochonbo, Lee Ok-keum was just one among millions of North Koreans who would be raised to revere the Fatherly Leader. But by the time she and her family fled to South Korea in 1994, their lives had come close to intersecting with Kim’s in a way that would have been hard to predict. When I interviewed her that year I found her a simple woman, modest and soft-spoken— yet quite helpful to my research, thanks to a homemaker’s steel-trap memory for prices and other details of living standards.
Lee’s family still owned a rice farm when she was born. Like so many other youngsters of that time, she lost her father during the Korean War. That left her mother to do the farm work along with five children (three older, one younger than Ok-keum), both before and after the farm collectivization that came in 1955.
In 1959 the family gave up farming and moved to the county seat, where Lee’s mother got a job doing road repairs. That work hardly paid enough to support the whole family, so an uncle suggested that the eldest son halt his education after the seventh grade and get a job. He did drop out, but it turned out there were no unskilled jobs available for him. Thus, after a time, the young man entered the army. Army enlisted men made very little. The brother didn’t send money home.
Although the family budget was tight, Lee positively recalled the 1950s and 1960s as a time of optimism and of satisfaction, to a degree, with developing living standards. “After the war Kim Il-sung put all his effort into developing the economy,” she told me. The main problem then was that “the people didn’t have money to buy goods.” Lee’s mother brought home around thirty won a month, and much of that went to clothe the five family members who remained at home. Clothes in the stores were too expensive, so she used her wages to buy cheap, synthetic material—natural fibers were priced out of her range—and hired a tailor to make it into clothing.
A family member’s wardrobe, like those of most other North Koreans both then and later, would consist of no more than one outfit at a time— basically a uniform. “Here in South Korea people change clothes every day,” Lee marveled. In North Korea, she said, “you just wear one outfit until it’s too tattered and filthy to wear any longer. Before I came to South Korea I had three outfits to wear outside the home: one for winter, one for summer and one for autumn and spring. At home we wore pants. I had two pair and would wear one while washing the other.”
Lee’s first uniform, of course, was a school uniform. “There was no kindergarten then,” in the mid-1950s. “We started with elementary school from age seven. Schools were different then. Although we learned about Kim Il-sung, we also studied history and classical literature. We had much more freedom to study what we wanted. That changed from 1965, the year we really started to idolize Kim Il-sung.”
That was the year when, having completed the four years of elementary school and three years of junior middle school, Lee enrolled in a two-year vocational school that was divided into agricultural and mechanical programs. “I took agriculture, but after about three months I decided to switch to mechanics. If I’d stayed in agriculture I’d have had to go to a farm. So I studied tractors and such.” The mechanical training was “only theoretical,” she recalled. The students had no hands-on experience with machinery parts.
At that time there was no high school for her to attend. Lee was sent off to a job not as a mechanic but as a food-processing worker. On the mechanical side of the graduating class, “everyone had a similar experience,” she said. “After graduation there was no correlation between what you had studied and what your work assignment would be.” At the food-processing plant she helped to make soy sauce and related products as well as candy. She lived at home then and contributed her salary to household expenses. The following year she moved to a textile plant.
After two years of factory work, Lee volunteered for the army. Her second brother was also in the army at the time, driving for an officer, and during one home leave he introduced her to his close friend and fellow driver Yeo Man-cheol, who took a fancy to her. (Although North Korean women, because of all the privation they had to endure, tended not to age well, my guess from looking at Lee during our interview was that she had been pretty as a young woman.)
“Since I didn’t have any dowry I resisted him,” Lee recalled. “But my mother was very sick. We had no way to treat her.” High-quality medicines were in short supply and doctors were under instruction not to prescribe, for any patient, medicine that the pharmacists were unable to supply to that person. “You had to be elite class or know someone in the hospital to get the right prescription,” Lee said. “Without connections, you’d go to the hospital and they would write a prescription but what they gave you wouldn’t cure you. If you had a liver problem, it was accompanied by digestive problems. They’d just give you indigestion medicine even though they knew your basic ailment was in the liver. The problem was a shortage of medicine.”
(The regime not only acknowledged but boasted that some people deemed especially important got state-of-the-art medicine. Kim Il-sung, referring in his memoirs to one special case, wrote that “Kim Ryang-nam was one of the people who rendered distinguished service in the creation of the Mansudae Art Troupe and its development into one of the world’s first troupes under the personal guidance of Secretary Kim Jong-il.” When Kim Ryang-nam “contracted a fatal disease, Kim Jong-il organized an efficient medical team to provide him with intensive medical treatment around the clock; he also transmitted his diagnosis to our embassies in foreign countries in order to obtain adequate supplies of expensive medicines, and sent special airplanes to countries which were said to have a developed pharmaceutical industry. Kim Ryang-nam underwent operations ten times and this intensive care lengthened the span of his lifetime by almost two years.”)1
Soldiers were considered more important than widowed road repair-women. Thus, the People’s Army had “plenty of medicine,” as Lee recalled. Yeo, smitten as he was with Lee, managed to obtain appropriate medicine for her mother. After that, “Mother persuaded me that he was a good man,” Lee recalled. They married in 1973, despite Lee’s worries about having no do-wry “The basic do-wry then was a suit for your husband-to-be, underwear for him, presents for his family and basic necessities for the household. I think it’s more these days. Lack of a do-wry doesn’t keep you from marrying, but sometimes your in-laws may be a bit harsh on you for not bringing enough. My in-laws were a little mean, but not all that harsh. I understand.”
The young couple set up housekeeping in the northeastern industrial city of Hamhung. Yeo moved from the army to the Public Security force—the police. Lee (keeping her maiden name as Korean wives do) worked for ten years in a nursery and then started working from her home, as a photographer, in what was called a neighborhood cooperation scheme. “That brought in good money, so the government abolished the job,” she told me with unexpected sarcasm. “Then I turned to mending clothing.”
Meanwhile, like most other North Korean women, she was taking care of the housework for her husband and children. It’s no wonder she learned to rattle off figures for the grain ration entitlements of various categories of people: as of 1975, 600 grams for workers; 300 for non-workers including babies and pre-school children; 400 for elementary school pupils, 500 for older students through high school, 700 for college or university students. It was after 1975, she told me, that the youngest children’s rations were reduced to 100 grams each for up to eighteen months of age, 200 grams after that. From that year, “you had to be twenty-three months old to get 300 grams.” Then, starting in the early 1980s, “10 percent was cut from rations with no specific explanation, probably due to food shortages.”
From 1990, the food shortage became far worse. “That year we started selling the sewing machine and other possessions and asking for help from relatives in Pyongyang,” Lee said. From 1993, there was
nowhere left to turn. In August that year food rations ended entirely in South Hamgyong Province, where the family lived. “I never saw rations resumed,” said Lee. Seven months later the Yeo family was in South Korea, unable to ignore the fact that their son came up only to the shoulders of South Korean youngsters a year younger. “He was 148 centimeters (four feet eleven inches) tall when we arrived and he grew 6 centimeters in just two months in South Korea,” she told me.
Of course Lee took minute mental note of what was available in the stores over the decades. The quality of goods improved from 1967, she told me, and the North Korean shoppers’ heyday lasted until around 1975. During that time “it was possible to buy goods in stores with money you had.” It was after 1975 that the authorities stopped rationing items such as shoes and clothing. While rationing normally bespeaks shortages, in that case the end of rationing did not mean plenty—it was just the opposite. “You had to go to the stores, where it was ‘first come, first serve,’ and the stocks of those items weren’t sufficient.”
From around 1977 to 1978, products were mainly displayed for show, Lee told me. And from mid-1987, “everything in North Korea is a display. You can buy maybe an eraser or a bobby pin. If we go to Pyongyang now and see goods in the stores, they won’t sell to us.”
I asked Lee what explanation consumers had received. The authorities “don’t know the word ‘explanation,’” she replied bitterly. “Sometimes in speeches they told people that although times were hard we should be loyal to the loving father Kim Il-sung.”
Did the black market make up for the lack of goods in the official stores? “Take my family and socks,” Lee told me. “Each family member needs about one new pair a month. When we could buy them in the stores we paid three and a half to four won a pair for nylon socks. In the black market, you had to pay forty-five to fifty won. So for the average worker one month’s pay would go for one pair of socks. In fact we just had to keep wearing old, ripped socks.”
If 1987 was tough on North Koreans in general, due to the increasing shortages, it was the beginning of special hardships for Yeo and Lee and their family. Yeo lost his job as a policeman that year. That happened after the family’s next-door neighbor was involved in a road accident, injuring someone, Lee told me. Ordinarily the neighbor would have had to pay a fine of a month’s or half a month’s salary. “But my husband let him off because he was a neighbor. The neighbor was grateful and gave my husband a bottle of ginseng liquor as a show of gratitude. Public Security inspectors found out. Also, while my husband was drunk, he got into a fight with a colleague at Public Security.”2
The Yeo-Lee couple’s pretty daughter had been one of the elementary school pupils singled out by county party officials as candidates for Kim Il-sung’s and Kim Jong-il’s mansion service corps. The officials had not contacted the parents but had simply told the girl that if she made the final cut she would start at age sixteen or seventeen and work until her marriage, which the party would arrange. They asked her not to have a boyfriend in the meantime. Some other girls in South Hamgyong Province, where the family lived, started in the mansions corps around thirteen or fourteen. Those were usually the prettiest ones.
Lee had been delighted to think her daughter might be accepted into the corps. “I thought they worked as comedians, actresses, singers and dancers to cheer up Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il,” she told me. She had no idea at the time that sex might be part of the job. “I only knew we would have a more comfortable life.” A girl’s selection was “considered a great honor, and also an economic benefit. She could send 1,000 won back to the family each month.” That was many times an average factory worker’s wage.
After Yeo Man-cheol lost his police job and took up a new career as a distributor of imported materials, “it was very hard for us to get by,” his wife Lee told me. To make matters worse, people around them and “the system” began to treat not only Yeo but also his wife and children differently. His disgrace inflicted on all of them a big drop in socioeconomic status. Particularly affected was their daughter.
In 1991, when the daughter was seventeen and graduating from school, she failed to make it through the final selection process for the mansions corps. Out of seventy girls in South Hamgyong Province who were finalists to join the unit that she hoped to enter, eight were selected. Her exclusion was a major blow to the family. The country was in the midst of a prolonged food shortage. Lee’s fingernails had started to grow back-ward from malnutrition, she told me; neighbors advised eating dog to reverse the condition. The household had counted on the girl’s income to stave off hunger.
Instead, the daughter went to work as a kindergarten teacher. When she applied for what many North Koreans considered a better job, as a typist, she was turned down—because of her father’s problems with Public Security, she was told. Whether or not those same problems had been the reason for her exclusion from the mansions corps, it was clear that she and other family members were expected to suffer indefinitely for their father’s sins. That and the hunger that became progressively worse through the early 1990s helped persuade the family to defect, Lee told me. They had illegally listened to radio broadcasts from South Korea that suggested life there was better. Chinese traders, who had been operating in the border area of North Korea since the late 1980s, had confirmed that information.
It was only after the family had crossed over the Chinese border in March 1994 that one of them read in a South Korean bookabout the duties that many of the mansions corps women actually were expected to perform, including sleeping with the Great or Dear Leader. The mother told me that she had realized only then what a close call it had been for her daughter. “I was very relieved that she hadn’t been accepted,” she said.
Born and raised in Sinuiju on the Yalu River across from China, Shu Chung-shin was twenty-five in May 1997 when she joined her husband’s family in defecting as a group of fourteen to South Korea. “I didn’t know where they were going,” she told me. “I just followed. Everything was arranged by my father-in-law, who had a brother in America. Uncle-in-law bought a vessel from some Chinese and in that we came to South Korea.”
Shu had worked as a dancer. “I attended a college of arts for five years and learned dance,” she said. “After graduation, I worked with an art troupe doing propaganda. We went around Sinuiju. We were told that Kim Jong-il had organized the dance troupe. I never met him, but I did see him at the 1989 World Festival of Youth and Students, at the stadium. There was a shortage of dancers. So the order came to Sinuiju to get more dancers. We danced in the stadium for the opening and closing ceremonies.”
The family defected after having grown weary of the consequences of a bad background. “My grandfather-in-law on my father-in-law’s side was a church preacher. Father-in-law’s mother and younger brother had fled to South Korea during the Korean War. He wanted to follow them. The father of my mother-in-law was a landlord. So the authorities were watching us. In North Korea, if you are from a bad family background, they follow you and spy on you. Eventually somebody realized that the old woman next door was spying on us. The family had given this woman food. Grandmother-in-law was so annoyed! She said, ‘How can you do this?’ There was a big fuss, and we worried about the children’s future. That was just the last straw. Father-in-law actually had been preparing for eight years. At first he wanted to cross the border by land so he arranged excuses in advance, staying away for a while on business. There was a spy following him. He didn’t know that at first. When changing trains at Sinuiju station, he saw he was followed. So he gave up on the land route.”
Shu herself came from a background that had become, as time passed, problematic: Her family were former residents of Japan. Generally returnees from Japan “are regarded as rich,” she noted. “Families from Japan or from America receive money from our relatives. Officials expect bribes. If they don’t get them, they find something to criticize. My mother did some business—she bought goods from China and resold them. But the police came and
confiscated all the goods. She asked for them back, but they didn’t return them. She had to give the police ten packs of cigarettes, or they would insist on splitting the goods. She gave them the cigarettes.” Her father also had many problems, Shu told me. “He was a surgeon. He took pride in his work. But he was not allowed to be a party member, even though his assistants were members. He had to leave the room before meetings started. In school, we had a session to draw our family trees. Where you filled in the names, there was a place to check if they were party members. My schoolmates proudly checked there. When I got home I complained to my father. I think that hurt his feelings.”
I asked if Shu had been a loyal believer. “The new generation in Sinuiju is different from the old,” she said. “They prefer friends from overseas and they’re very open-minded. For example, they like wearing jeans. The authorities forbid it, telling them that jeans came from America originally— and in the Korean War, GIs wore them while they killed North Koreans. Younger generation people reply, ‘What’s the problem? If you have correct ideology, what do jeans matter?’ There’s no organized anti-government activity. Still I heard a rumor that when Kim Jong-il visited Sinuiju he supposedly said he was worried about the young of Sinuiju in case war breaks out because they are like capitalists in their attitudes, so he must do something. Anyhow, my mother taught me to follow the party’s teachings. Although I’m of the new generation, I accepted her advice. Because of our family background I knew I had to be very careful. I trusted the regime. It was only when I came to South Korea that I realized I’d been lied to. For example, Kim Jong-il had been born in Khabarovsk, not on the holy Mount Paektu.”
In their vulnerable position, her parents had wanted their daughter to marry someone of good family background. They were dismayed when Shu picked a man with many strikes against him politically. “I had a lot of trouble from my parents,” she told me. “But we were in love, and I insisted on going through with the marriage. I had met my husband when I was seventeen and in college. He was twenty-three then. We married when I was twenty-four, in 1995. He was a student. After our marriage, he worked as a physics teacher at a middle school. In South Korea now he studies theology. No one had followed his grandfather’s example and become a minister, and his father wanted one of the children to do that.”
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty Page 46