Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  However, in the years immediately preceding his death in 1994, Kim produced several volumes of memoirs that offer a somewhat franker, more down-to-earth account than his sycophantic writers had provided in earlier official biographies.

  To be sure, many exaggerations and distortions remain even in the newer volumes. For example, whatever quantity of disbelief the reader has managed to suspend may come crashing down at an account of bandits capturing Kim’s father and two companions. While the bandits smoked opium in their camp, Kim wrote, one captive put out the lamp and helped the other two escape before “attacking the rascals, some ten in all, with skillful boxing. Then he made off from the den of the bandits.” It was, enthused Kim, “a truly dramatic sight, resembling a fight scene in a movie.”

  Indeed. No doubt it is a fight scene in at least one of the countless North Korean movies glorifying Kim and his family. Hwang Jang-yop, a leading North Korean intellectual who defected to South Korea in 1997, reported that Kim’s autobiography had been “created by artists who had been writing scenarios for revolutionary novels and films. Thus, it made for very interesting reading. When Part I was published it was a huge hit. This was only natural, since its contents were literally scenes straight out of the movies that had been made for the same purpose, and its plot was as interesting as any novel or film.” Hwang termed the series a “masterpiece of historical fabrication.”1

  But there is gold among the dross in the memoirs. Some passages can be checked against the recollections of contemporaries—and those passages are found to offer more truthful portrayals than we had been accustomed to getting from Pyongyang2. Of course that does not provide the elusive verification for other passages dealing with different phases of Kim’s youth. But at least it suggests that Kim, as he worked with his writing staff to produce those memoirs in his seventies, had some notion of straightening out his story in the time remaining to him.

  Combining what was previously known of Kim’s formative years with a careful reading of the memoirs, tossing out the preposterous, tentatively accepting the plausible while intuitively making allowance for exaggerations, adding in the testimony of contemporaries where available, it is possible now to see a picture that is reasonably complex and believable.

  Parts of this picture show Kim as the regime had sketched him—but on a more human scale. Toning down some of the official claims has enhanced their credibility. Thus, we can see in Kim Il-sung a youngster genuinely consumed by patriotic anti-colonialism who, while still in his teens, embraced communism as the key to independence and justice for Koreans.

  Other parts of the picture were only recently uncovered. Who, for example, would have imagined that the man whose rule wiped out nearly every trace of religion in North Korea—except worship of himself—had been until his late teens not only a churchgoer but, moreover, a church organist? The young Kim was both. Experience in church-related activities played a considerable role in training one of the most successful mass leaders and propagandists in the history of the world, not to mention providing a model for his own eventual elevation to divine status.3

  ***

  The Great Leader–to-be was born Kim Song-ju on April 15, 1912, at the home of his maternal grandfather in the village of Chilgol. The nearby house of his paternal grandparents at Mangyongdae, where he spent several years of his childhood, is his recognized family home. Mangyongdae has since been incorporated into nearby Pyongyang, the provincial capital that became the capital of Kim’s Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

  Kim’s regime enshrined the mud-walled, thatched-roofed Mangyongdae farmhouse as Korea’s answer to the manger in Bethlehem or Abe Lincoln’s log cabin. I visited there in 1979 and found the parking lot and the pedestrian paths packed with thousands of visitors, mostly Korean. A guide said that Kim’s paternal forebears had lived at Mangyongdae since the time of his great-grandfather, a poor tenant farmer who worked as a graves-keeper for the landlord. The name Mangyongdae means a place blessed with countless scenic views. As Kim said in his memoirs, “Rich people and government officials vied with one another in buying hills in the Mangyongdae area as burial plots because they were attracted by the beautiful scenery.4

  The river Taedong runs past Mangyongdae. Nearly half a century before Kim’s birth, that river had been the scene of an ugly incident that represents the unhappy beginning of Korean-American relations. In the context of a push by confident and condescending Americans of the period to open far-flung “heathen” nations to Christian proselytizing and trade, an armed merchant ship in 1866 intruded into the forbidden waters of the Taedong. The General Sherman, aptly named for the American Civil War commander who had laid waste to much of Georgia, headed upriver for Pyongyang, firing its guns, capturing one local Korean official and stopping to permit a missionary— who was aboard as the expedition’s interpreter—to preach and distribute leaflets.

  Then the American captain of the General Sherman made the mistake of running aground. An incensed mob of local people descended on the ship, tore it apart and hacked the intruding foreigners to pieces. Kim Il-sung was to claim after taking power that his great-grandfather had been a leader of the people who attacked the ship.5 True or not, there is no denying that the Sherman incident lived on in the memories of Korean nationalists. Although Korean scholarship suggests the Sherman expedition was an act of piracy by known tomb robbers, the incident stimulated a more heavily armed intrusion in 1871 in which Americans massacred some 250 Koreans. By 1882, Korean rulers saw that the better part of valor was to accede to a treaty with the United States, arranged by China, which removed the centuries-old isolation of the “hermit kingdom.”6

  Kim Il-sung’s father, Kim Hyong-jik, managed enough upward mobility to rise out of the peasant class into which he had been born. He attended—but did not finish—middle school, and he married the daughter of a schoolmaster. He worked first as an elementary school teacher and later as a traditional herbal doctor. While those accomplishments translated into some social cachet, they did not put extra food on the table. Clearly the family was never affluent.

  Kim Hyong-jik married at fifteen to a bride, Kang Pan-sok, who was two years older. The Chilgol Kangs were educated people who included Christian clerics and church elders in addition to teachers and schoolmasters. According to Kang Myong-do, who defected to the South in 1994 and described himself as a member of the Chilgol Kang clan, the Kangs felt the marriage was an unequal one in view of the groom’s father’s work as a graves-keeper and the fact he owned only a little over two acres of reclaimed farmland. But one thing the families had in common was that they were Christian churchgoers.7

  Kim Hyong-jik entered middle school at sixteen and fathered the future Great Leader at seventeen, still living in his parents’ home. The whole family worked at extra jobs to pay the teenager’s school fees.8 Hyong-jik’s mother— Kim Il-sung’s paternal grandmother—arose before dawn to make breakfast so she could be sure her son would not be late for classes. The North Korean president wrote in his memoirs that his grandmother on occasion awoke far too early. Preparing the meal in the middle of the night, she then stared for hours out the eastern window of the house, waiting for signs of sunrise so she would know when to rouse the student and send him off. A clock was a luxury then; Kim’s family did not have one but the neighbor family behind their house did. The grandmother sometimes sent her young daughter-in-law, Kim’s mother, to check the time at the neighbors’ house. Kang Pan-sok “would squat outside the fence waiting for the clock to strike the hours. Then she would return and tell grandmother the time.”9

  Despite the family’s incessant hard work, “such things as fruit and meat were beyond our means,” Kim recalled. “Once I had a sore throat and grandmother obtained some pork for me. I ate it and my throat got better. After that, whenever I felt like eating pork I wished I had a sore throat again.”10 He remembered his father’s younger brother, Hyong-gwon, then eleven or twelve years old, throwing a tantrum over food. Hyong-gwon could not c
ontrol his disgust with the coarse gruel, made of millet and uncleaned sorghum, that was the Kim family’s regular fare. He banged his head against the bowl, bloodying his head and sending the bowl flying across the room. The future president sympathized. The gruel always tasted bad and, to add injury to insult, the cereal’s coarse husks pricked the throat as they-went down.11

  More significant in shaping Kim Il-sung’s thinking than the family’s poverty was the timing of his birth, less than two years after Korea’s annexation by Japan. Heirs to a proud civilization, Koreans for centuries had condescended to Japan as a cultural Johnny-come-lately. The many Japanese borrowings from Korea had ranged from ceramics and architecture to religion. Patriotic Koreans after 1910 observed as National Humiliation Day the August 29 anniversary of the ignominious Japanese takeover.

  Independence from Japan was the ardent desire of most Koreans in those days.12 Kim recalled that it was a consuming passion for members of his family. His father and two uncles were all jailed at different times for pro-independence activities. Kim himself was a patriot long before he became a communist. “No feeling in the world is greater, more ennobling and more sacred than patriotism,” he explained.13

  For his family as well as other Koreans, patriotism meant implacable hatred of Japan. Kim recalled that his own patriotic consciousness had caught fire before his seventh birthday during the momentous March 1, 1919, uprising against Japanese rule. Joining his family among tens of thousands of demonstrators who thronged Pyongyang in the mistaken belief that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson would champion their cause, “I shouted for independence standing on tiptoe squeezed in between the adults.”14 From then on, the determination someday to take on the foreign aggressors guided even his play, by Kim’s account. The assertion has been enshrined in the official mythology. When I visited Mangyongdae the guide identified a sand pile surrounded by a manicured hedge as the site where the Great Leader–to-be had wrestled older children to practice for his life’s work.

  The patriotism of Kim’s family members, like that of many other Koreans, was linked with Christianity. Protestant and, to a lesser extent, Catholic churches flourished in Korean communities following the 1882 treaty with the United States. Pyongyang, in particular, was such fertile ground for American mission work that the city became known as Korea’s Jerusalem.15

  Following Korea’s annexation, the Japanese authorities distrusted Christians. There was some irony in this, since missionaries often were prepared to render unto Caesar and ignore politics if only they could continue with their religious activities. The American missionaries’ own government had connived in the Japanese advance into Korea in exchange for Japanese recognition of U.S. interests in the Philippines.16 But Japanese authorities repressed Korean believers, squandering what might otherwise have been an advantage.17 A number of Christians became identified with the independence movement. Christians were involved in planning the March 1 uprising.

  Kim’s Il-sung’s own religious training and background represent a side of his early life that he had been reluctant to recall—and finally acknowledged in his memoirs only with considerable hedging about. For example, although both his parents were churchgoers, Kim was intent on assigning them the role of atheistic holy family of the Korean revolution. He insisted that both had been nonbelievers. While some sources have described his mother as a devout woman who served as a deaconess, 18 her son claimed she had gone to church only to relax from her exhausting workaday toil, dozing during the service.19

  Kim’s father attended Sungsil Middle School, founded in 1900 by American Presbyterian missionaries in Pyongyang. But Kim said his father had enrolled there only out of the desire to have a “modern education” in a school where he would not be required to memorize the very difficult Nine Chinese Classics, which were taught at old-fashioned Confucian schools.20 Kim described his father as a young man consumed by patriotism who exhorted schoolmates: “Believe in a Korean God, if you believe in one!”21 After the family moved to Manchuria, his father went to every service at a local chapel and sometimes led the singing and played the organ, teaching his son to play also. But this, insisted Kim, was just a chance to conduct anti-Japanese propaganda.22

  Acknowledging his exposure to Christianity, Kim said he rejected its doctrines while still young. “Some miserable people thought they would go to ‘Heaven’ after death if they believed in Jesus Christ,” he wrote. At first “I, too, was interested in church.” Later, though, “I became tired of the tedious religious ceremony and the monotonous preaching of the minister, so I seldom went.”23 Kim maintained he was “not affected by religion” despite his youthful connections with the church. Nevertheless, “I received a great deal of humanitarian assistance from Christians, and in return I had an ideological influence on them.24

  At age seven Kim moved with his family across the Chinese border to Manchuria. A wrenching move for the youngster, in the larger picture that was part of an exodus that eventually planted Korean communities around the globe, from Tashkent to Osaka to Los Angeles. The Korean diaspora came almost to rival those of the Jews and the overseas Chinese.25

  Since the latter half of the nineteenth century, waves of Koreans had emigrated in search of better lives. Many had gone to Hawaii and North America. There, Kim said, “they were treated as barbarians and hired as servants in restaurants and rich men’s houses or were worked hard on plantations under the scorching sun.”26 Others had gone to the relatively wide-open frontier spaces of the Russian Maritime Province and Chinese-ruled Manchuria. Oppression by the Korean rulers of the time propelled the first wave of Korean migrants to those places, around 1860. A famine in northern Korea a decade later accelerated the trend. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Japan’s move to absorb Korea as part of the expansion of its Northeast Asia empire triggered another wave of emigration.27

  Manchuria once had been reserved as the sparsely populated homeland of the last Chinese imperial dynasty and its nomadic Manchu clansmen. As the dynasty weakened and migratory pressures built, however, China had opened vast stretches of the region to settlers. Koreans could become no more than tenant farmers in most of Manchuria. The Japanese, though, in 1909—the year before they completed their conquest of Korea—extracted from a Chinese government in its death throes a very favorable treaty. Among other things it enabled Koreans to own land in Manchuria’s Jiandao Province, immediately adjoining the Korean border. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans made the move to Manchuria before Kim’s family did so. The majority went to Jiandao, where the Korean settlers far outnumbered the Chinese.

  Economic betterment was an important incentive for those early-twentieth-century emigrants. Considering conditions back at Mangyongdae, it could well have been a factor luring Kim’s father to Manchuria. As in the 1860s, though, there were settlers whose motives for fleeing across the border were political. Hoping to continue their struggle against oppressive Japanese rule, some determined Korean patriots found sanctuary in Manchuria.28 The region’s mountainous areas, in particular, were relatively lawless and free-wheeling places. Chinese warlords, Korean independence fighters, agents of the new Soviet regime in Moscow and assorted bandits all competed for spoils and influence against the encroaching Japanese. Kim described his family as among the political exiles who were driven from their homeland and left to drift “like fallen leaves to the desolate wilderness of Manchuria.29

  Kim’s father had become a medical practitioner by reading “a few books on medicine” and obtaining a diploma from a friend in Pyongyang.30 While working for the independence movement in Manchuria, the elder Kim supported his family by treating patients with traditional herbal medicine. Kim said he often went on errands for his father—but in connection not so much with the medical work as with pro-independence activities. He took food and clothing to some jailed Korean patriots on one occasion, he wrote; and often went to the post office to pick up his father’s newspapers and magazines from Korea.31

  He told of having been
the leader of a group of mischievous children in the Manchurian town of Badaogou. One playmate belonged to a family of “patriotic merchants.” The family’s storage shed was full of weapons and clothing awaiting shipment to Korean independence fighters. One day that boy injured himself when a detonation cap exploded while he was playing with it. The victim’s brother wrapped him in a blanket and carried him to Kim’s father’s home dispensary for treatment, Kim recalled.32

  An ordeal that Kim looked back on as a rite of passage to manhood came shortly before his eleventh birthday. His father sent him from Manchuria back to Korea, alone, he said. He had been attending local Chinese schools and learning the Chinese language as spoken in Manchuria.33 Now, though, the elder Kim instructed him that “a man born in Korea must have a good knowledge of Korea.” Kim rode trains for parts of the journey but walked much of the 250-mile distance, carrying a map his father had drawn with a list of places to stop overnight, he recalled.

  His father had taken some precautions, telegraphing innkeeper acquaintances to alert them that the boy would be arriving. Kim described those innkeepers as “under the guidance and influence of my father34 —a claim in keeping with what outside biographers describe as a massive effort to depict Kim Hyong-jik as a leading light of the independence movement rather than the minor figure they believe he actually was.35 Whatever the father’s importance in the movement, it does seem that he had many friends. Kim Il-sung said he learned from his father “the ethics of comradeship.”36 It appears that as his career progressed he made assiduous use of both his family connections and his father’s example of cultivating friendships.

  Kim’s anecdotal recollections of his “one-thousand-ri [250-mile] journey for learning” dwell, understandably, on sore feet and hospitable innkeepers. At the foot of Mount Oga, “I fortunately met an old man who cured my blisters by burning them with matches.” An inn in Kaechon offered a mattress and two blankets for 50 chon. The night was cold, but to save money Kim asked for only one blanket; the kindly innkeeper gave him two blankets anyhow. At Kanggye, Kim’s instructions from his father said to wire home. The telegraph fee increased after the first six characters, so he kept his message to just six: “kang gye mu sa do chak”—“Arrived safely in Kanggye.”37