Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  Dong told me that the name of his gang was a Korean word that means downpour or deluge. “Every member of my gang wore formal shoes—leather shoes with laces. Of course, the other kids had only cloth shoes. Leather shoes were rare. Just by wearing those, we showed we had prominence.”

  The shoe discussion led Dong to digress away from the topic of gang life into courtship customs. For a son, the arranged and rather formal first date between a man and woman of marriageable age, he told me, “a guy might borrow leather shoes to impress the woman.”

  It took me a moment to realize that Dong was relating a standard North Korean joke, whose humor derived from its essential if not literal truth about the material advantages of the elite. “The three things you need for that first date are leather shoes, a Seiko watch and a gold tooth,” Dong went on, getting wound up. “Sometimes you would even borrow the gold tooth. At night the guy would take the girl to a bright spot and show those things off as he made arrangements for the next meeting. He would say, ‘We have to meet tomorrow at eight,’ and he would tap his Seiko watch. ‘We have to meet here.’ He would tap his leather shoe on the ground so she would look at it when he said ‘here,’ and then he would grin widely at her so the light would glint off his gold tooth.”

  As Kim Dae-ho grew up he had a life quite different from Dong’s—except for the fact that he also became a juvenile gang fighter. Born across the border in China in 1959, Kim was a member of an ethnic Korean family. He formed few memories of China before his parents, motivated by patriotism, moved the family to South Hamgyong Province in North Korea when he was three. His father went to work in a food factory. His mother stayed home to keep house and care for Dae-ho and his younger brothers, of whom eventually there were three.

  The parents quickly realized that the lifestyle they had left behind in China was more prosperous, and they “couldn’t forget” about the differences, Kim told me. “In China we had candy stored in the kitchen for snacks”—but not in North Korea. “My mother used to cry when, as an elementary student, I ripped my pants and she had to mend them. We were so poor. That’s why she cried.”

  Starting his education with nursery school and kindergarten, where he began to learn about Kim Il-sung’s greatness, little Dae-ho soon came to wish he had an elder brother. “When I got in a fight, a kid with his elder brother could beat me up.”

  Worse, Kim Dae-ho recalled being subject to “invisible discrimination from fellow pupils with more stable backgrounds. Having no relatives in North Korea I was at a disadvantage. You have to write a paper on your family. Other people could write about a father in the party, an uncle on the Central Committee. I had no relatives and my parents weren’t party members, so the discrimination continued.”

  Not only other children but also teachers and officials meted out different treatment depending on a pupil’s family background, Kim Dae-ho told me. “Even when looking over our home-work the officials would praise children of high officials.” (Recall the slavish praise of Kim Jong-il by his teachers.) The highlight of a youngster’s life was supposed to be donning the bright kerchief of a member of the children’s corps. Even there, though, “the children of the elite got in earlier. There were two inflows of eight-year-olds. The first group got in on April 15, Kim Il-sung’s birthday. I was part of the second intake, on June 6. The reason given for letting the first group in early was that they were better students, brought up more uprightly.”

  Kim Dae-ho blamed such discrimination for having affected his personality. “I became rough and aggressive. I beat up children of high officials and disobeyed the teacher often.” He grinned and added: “Since I was very rough, kids were afraid of me and the teachers didn’t know what to do with me.” Mean-while some older youngsters were bullying him in turn. Junior high students, some of them repatriated from Japan, had formed gangs. “I did some dirty work for them, got on trains to steal from people, did some shoplifting. You couldn’t say I was a gang member, because I was only about ten years old. They would bully me and demand that I bring money from home.”

  Eventually each group gave him something serious to think about. “In third grade I bullied so many kids that my classmates decided to gang up on me. I realized then that kids no longer feared me. They would throw stones at me, or spit at me.” The older gang members, around the same time, “took me to the railroad, stripped me to my underwear and made me lie on the track.”

  After thinking things over, the boy gave up his pose of ferocious loner in hopes of becoming a leader. “I made friends and created my own gang,” he told me. Indeed, from the sound of it—and despite his lack of family connections to fall back on in the event of punishment—he seems to have become a junior-grade godfather in Tanchon, the South Hamgyong Province city-where he lived. “I retaliated against gang members who had used me. As I got older they came and asked for food or tickets. I got my revenge by ordering my gang members to beat them up. I had friends not only in my own school but in all the schools of the city. At a parent-teacher conference, teachers told parents to keep their kids from associating with me. But if the kids obeyed, I’d beat them up. So parents would come up to me and ask for good treatment for their kids.”

  Members of gangs “mostly were children of high officials and more prosperous people who came from Japan,” Kim Dae-ho told me. “Even in my group, lots were kids of high officials.” As for weapons, “in elementary school we used rocks. In the upper grades we learned taekwondo and fought with our fists and feet. I had a fight with the son of a military security officer. The kid brought a knife, so I asked my friends to bring me one. They brought me a straight razor. The kid ran away He didn’t come to school the next day; by coincidence he died of accidental gas poisoning. Otherwise, there was the occasional minor stabbing but nobody got killed in our fights.”

  Due to his family’s unhappy circumstances, Kim Dae-ho told me, he was slow to develop feelings of worship for the country’s leader. But when he reached sixteen he realized that his career choices might soon start to narrow very drastically. The dream of most North Korean males was to join the army. That was the standard route to becoming members of the party and, when they were mustered out following a decade’s service, being considered for responsible civilian jobs.

  Only youngsters of acceptable class background by North Korea’s standards, and whose “loyalty” was unquestioned, would be accepted into the army. Kim Dae-ho s family background was merely undistinguished; it was not positively bad as it would have been if, for example, his forebears had been big landlords or prominent collaborators with the Japanese colonial regime. But his credentials were lacking in the personal loyalty department, so he proceeded to immerse himself in the organized adoration of Kim Il-sung. Still he found that ordinary expressions of loyalty wouldn’t persuade the army recruiters “because I was known as a gang leader.”

  So what did he do? “I went to the recruitment center and wrote an oath in my blood,” Kim told me. The oath read: “I will sacrifice my life for the nation and I will do my best in the army.”

  When I interviewed Kim Dae-ho he was slender and appeared rather studious. To look at him, he was no Bruce Lee type. It had been a little difficult for me earlier in the interview to picture him taking the lead role in a real-life North Korean version of West Side Story. Now I suppose my jaw must have dropped as I wondered whose idea the blood oath had been, and about Kim Dae-ho s sincerity in signing it. When I asked him, though, he didn’t hesitate to reply. “I truly believed in it and it was my idea to write it in blood,” he told me.

  The blood-oath gesture had the desired effect. Kim entered the army in 1976 and became an artillery spotter, stationed near the front line in Kang-won Province. He was promoted to sergeant and singled out as a model soldier, honored with a chest full of commendation medals. When he finished his army service in 1985, his record qualified him for something that at first glance might have looked better than the farming or coal-mining jobs to which most army veterans were assigned
: He went to work for an atomic energy agency. We shall hear more from him in a later chapter.

  A third North Korean who talked with me about juvenile rumbles was Ahn Choong-hak,2 who said that the gang fights sometimes involved as many as fifty or sixty boys at a time. But Ahn added that there had been a crackdown starting in 1974. It “became a social issue. The authorities suggested that South Korean spies were organizing the violence. Participants were portrayed as dissidents. So people became afraid to join in and by 1976 gang fights disappeared, as far as he knew.”

  Before that happened, Ahn was involved in his share of youthful hijinks. But I think his personal story mainly goes to show that one’s family background could be very good—yet still not good enough.

  His family had quite good songbun, which is precisely why the Ahns were relocated to Kaesong, near the Demilitarized Zone, in 1961. As we noted briefly in chapter 6, their move was part of a mass shift of families of “good” background to replace large numbers of locals, who were shipped north to live in remote areas where there was less danger that they could be enlisted to serve the enemy. Kaesong had been under South Korean rule until the Korean War, and the families that were moved out were considered suspect or worse in terms of loyalty to the North Korean regime.

  Ahn found the atmosphere in Kaesong “always tense. There were always rumors of spies caught around our area. People from other provinces weren’t allowed to enter freely. When I was in third grade, the teacher who had taught me in first grade suddenly disappeared. I heard other teachers say it was because she was the daughter of a landlord’s concubine. I had felt a special affinity for her.”

  Ahn’s father was a university-trained civil engineer (his education alone signaling elite status) who traveled a lot in his work. Ahn’s mother tailored suits at home. Alas, Kaesong did not suit her. She was constantly ill, blaming the city’s “bad water.” When Ahn was a fourth-grade pupil, his father managed—it was difficult—to get the authorities’ permission to move the family back to their home city, Hamhung.

  If the second move pleased his mother, it didn’t help the emotional well-being of the son. “Kids in Hamhung made fun of my Kaesong dialect, which is almost like Seoul dialect,” Ahn told me. He reacted, as children often do in such circumstances, by becoming a troublemaker. “My dad disciplined me a lot for misbehavior. He didn’t want the whole family resettled on my account.”

  Ahn’s boldest exploit came in the first year of senior middle school when he and two friends decided to go to the capital. North Koreans were not allowed to travel without permits. In particular, the regime was at great pains to avoid migration or casual travel from the outlying areas to Pyongyang, a city of strictly controlled population that served both as seat of the top echelons and showcase to foreigners.

  “We got on a train secretly” Ahn told me. “In the restroom of a North Korean train, above the toilet, is a loose wooden plank. There’s a space above it, under the ceiling. We hid there and replaced the plank. But Public Security is on to that trick. The police caught us when we reached Sunchon. They took us off the train and planned to send us to a rehabilitation center for a month. But there was such a big crowd of offenders waiting for the bus that we were able to escape. We walked to Pyongyang and stayed four days before we sneaked onto another train to go home.

  “In Pyongyang,” Ahn recalled, “my school uniform didn’t look so good. If you see the difference between Pyongyang kids and provincial kids you get angry and want what they have. I beat up some Pyongyang kids and took a nice uniform from them.”

  Back home in Hamhung, Ahn said, “I got a big spanking from my dad for that exploit.”

  Facetiously, I asked Ahn why he had not thought to excuse himself by saying he was emulating the Great Leader’s boyhood “1000-ri Journey for Learning.” He replied: “I would have been branded a dissident for breaking the rules and presuming to compare myself to Kim Il-sung. When I was in the third grade of elementary school my friend Yong-il had a bowel movement and it froze. He said, ‘It looks like Mount Paektu.’ Others reported him and he had to write statements of repentance in his notebook for a couple of months. After all, Mount Paektu was where Kim Il-sung participated in the anti-Japanese struggle.”

  Ahn somehow managed to avoid ruining his family’s good name. He was a good athlete. A newly established physical education college recruited him. (He found the coeducational classes, which were something new to him, “exciting.”) After college he was supposed to go to work as a coach, the job for which he had been trained. But Ahn “wanted to join the army, because in school we were trained to want to become heroes, forerunners of national unification. Kim Il-sung was very good at instilling that kind of patriotic feeling in youngsters. Besides, it’s very prestigious to become a member of the Workers’ Party, and once you’ve enlisted and served in the army you have more chance of acceptance by the party.”

  He succeeded in enlisting in the army in 1974. Like Kim Dae-ho, he became a model soldier. After hauling missiles and artillery around the vicinity of the Demilitarized Zone, he drew the cushy assignment of driving the Eighth Division commander. His dream of life after the army-was to enroll in Kumsong Political University, an elite school that trained spies and infiltrators. But when he spoke to an official of the State Security Department about his future, the man advised him to forget that idea and just take a normal job after mustering out.

  Puzzled and disappointed, Ahn went on home leave back to South Ham-gyong Province and asked his parents if there was anything in the family background that might explain why his career suddenly had run up against a brick wall. They insisted that there was nothing, but he didn’t believe them. He then went to the home of his father’s older brother. There, a female cousin told him the truth. Their grandfather and three of their uncles and aunts had moved to the South during the Korean War. The cousin had heard the dry rattle of that skeleton in the family closet when it tumbled out to thwart her plans to marry a Public Security lieutenant. The young policeman’s seniors had pressured him to break off the engagement. The family’s songbun, it transpired, was good enough to get Ahn’s father into engineering university, good enough to get Ahn into physical education college and the army—but not good enough for the police, or the spy service.

  “I was devastated,” Ahn told me, his passion obviously still burning many years after the event. “My first reaction was to feel shame at having such traitors in my family. I had always sworn to destroy such people.” Remaining at his cousin’s house, Ahn got drunk and awaited his uncle’s return home, falling into such a noisy rage that the police came to inquire what was happening. Seeing his army uniform, they checked with State Security found he had been granted special leave from his unit and sent him back to his parents’ house. There, his rage unabated, he grabbed his mother’s sewing machine and threw it onto the ground in the garden before walking away from the house, vowing never to return.

  “Ihad always pitied those who couldn’t succeed due to their family background,” Ahn told me. “To realize that was my situation just tore me up.”

  THIRTEEN

  Take the Lead in World Conjuring

  It is an immutable law that in the course of this historical struggle, capitalism fails and socialism and communism emerge victorious.

  —KIM JONG-IL, ADDRESSING FILMMAKERS IN 19681

  The ink on Kim Jong-il’s diploma was hardly dry before he had plunged into the political struggles that would become, under his leadership, his country’s counterpart to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

  The similarities are striking. In China as in North Korea a relative of the top leader—Mao Zedong’s fourth wife, former movie actress Jiang Qing, played the role in China—unceremoniously rooted out “bourgeois” literary and art forms and the officials responsible, replacing both with “revolutionary” new ones. Organizations of radical young zealots—the Mao-quoting Red Guards and the Kim Il-sung–quoting Three Revolutions teams, the latter led by Kim Jong-il—carried t
he attack to authority figures in non-arts fields and their old-fashioned ways of doing things.

  The parallels do not go much farther, however. Mao used but did not always fully control China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, part of which was a bottom-up affair, relatively spontaneous and genuinely revolutionary if horribly misguided and destructive. Kim Il-sung and his son, on the other hand, kept tight, topside control over a movement that was revolutionary mainly in the sense that it sought to change people’s thinking permanently. Serving the very conservative goal of protecting and perpetuating the existing regime, North Korean mind control soon surpassed in thoroughness all other twentieth-century totalitarian political movements.

  While it is generally thought that Kim Il-sung only began to push his son’s selection as his successor in the 1970s, a former elite official of the regime who knew Kim Jong-il well and had frequent contact with him said systematic preparations actually began a decade earlier—even as the junior Kim was concluding his university studies.2 It certainly does seem that someone had big plans for the youngster—in view of the high-level work he was immediately assigned in the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party, the regime’s nerve center.

  In Pyongyang’s account, “it was not by chance that Kim Jong-il began to work at the Central Committee.” That seems a huge understatement, but the official version does not intend an indirect reference to his birthright. Instead, the claim is that the youngster was selected for work in the exalted “general staff of the revolution” purely on merit.3 Indeed, Pyongyang’s version has it that Kim Il-sung “refrained from doing anything that could be viewed as a bid to groom his son as future heir or to impose him on the population as such.” The junior Kim was merely “trained to think and behave as a dedicated servant of the people.4