The Accusation: Forbidden Stories From Inside North Korea

by Bandi

  All the same, he tried to put the dream of a writing career aside, choosing instead to live among the workers. But literature refused to relinquish its hold on him, and he wrote stories and poems in whatever spare moments he could find. His talent was simply too great to remain undiscovered. Spurred on by recognition and encouragement from those close to him, he joined the Chosun Literature and Art General League, and soon became a regular contributor to its various periodicals.

  And yet, something began to weigh on him: the great famine of the early to mid-1990s, exacerbated by floods but stemming from the disastrous economic policies of previous decades, which the government insisted on referring to by the officially mandated code words “the Arduous March.” Witnessing scenes of misery and deprivation, in which many of his friends and colleagues perished, provoked him to reflect deeply on the society in which he lived, and his role there as a writer. A writer’s strength, he found, is best deployed within writing. And so he began to record the lives of those whom hunger and social contradictions had brought to an untimely death, or who had been forced to leave their homes and roam the countryside in search of food. Now, when Bandi picked up his pencil, he did so in order to denounce the system.

  In this, Bandi took upon himself the role of a spokesperson denouncing the misery inflicted on the North Korean people by North Korean–style socialism, a system riddled with internal contradictions in which individuals were classified according to a social standing determined at birth and could be condemned as guilty by association. One by one, he collected instances in which citizens were forced to swallow this painful reality, without being able to breathe a word of complaint, and threaded them into his stories. These stories each described and denounced a real situation, which can be difficult to combine with literary excellence; but Bandi considered it his duty as a writer to produce work whose literariness would, in a sense, live up to the reality of the events he described. Needless to say, it was a long and difficult process.

  As time went by these stories and poems gradually built up into a sizable body of work, yet their readership was always limited to a single person—Bandi himself. Even before he picked up his pencil, Bandi would have been aware that, in his society, no other situation was possible. Yet still he carried on writing, in patient hope of a time when things would be different, when his denunciation of the North Korean system might circulate freely in the world outside its borders. The realization of this dream was set in motion by the defection of one of his close relatives. The manuscript’s journey is detailed below, and is based on the testimony of Do Hee-yun, representative of the Citizens’ Coalition for Human Rights of Abductees and North Korean Refugees, into whose hands it came.

  On an otherwise ordinary day, one of Bandi’s relatives came to call on him. Broaching the subject cautiously, she let him know that in three days’ time she would attempt to flee to China. Bandi had himself considered defecting, but thoughts of his wife and children had always held him back. Now, he saw his relative’s planned escape as an excellent opportunity to make his writing known abroad. He described his works to her, judging that it would be safe to reveal their dissident nature to someone who intended to flee the country, someone to whom he was close enough to trust.

  Into the hands of this woman, who intended to escape from North Korea entirely alone, he pressed a manuscript of stories and poems criticizing the system under which they had both suffered. But since there was no guarantee that her escape would be successful, and they could not risk having the manuscript fall into the hands of the North Korean border police, she went back home that day empty-handed, promising to send for the manuscript once the route for her escape was set.

  Once again, Bandi had to hide his work—work that he was determined would someday be seen—in some deep, dark place. Several months went by.

  Though his relative escaped over the border to China, she did not get far before being picked up by a group of Chinese soldiers. Luckily, these soldiers took note of her smart appearance, so different from that of the other defectors they’d encountered, and deduced that she was from a high-ranking family. Rather than sending her back over the border, they demanded a bribe of 10 million North Korean won, or 50,000 yuan (around $7,500).

  Explaining that she didn’t carry such large amounts with her, the woman asked to be allowed to contact various people who might be able to get the money together for her. While this negotiation was going on, the unit commander went to Yanji, where he met up with a man he’d heard of, a blogger who wrote about North Korean refugees. The commander informed the blogger that a female defector was being held by his unit, and asked him to inquire about her connections, as his and his men’s intention was to release her once they had received the bribe money.

  As it turned out, this blogger was an old acquaintance of Representative Do Hee-yun. Learning of the situation, Representative Do immediately turned his attentions to rescuing the woman, Bandi’s relative, from being sent back to North Korea. But the considerable expense involved was a problem; it was enough of a struggle for Representative Do to scrape together the funds needed to run his human rights organization. After racking his brains for some time, he called on a man who had occasionally donated to his cause, and explained the situation to him. The man loaned him the 10 million won, asking that it be paid back later if everything turned out as hoped. With this money as a bribe, Representative Do was able to secure the woman’s release and arrange for her to be brought from China to South Korea. In this way, Representative Do became a part of the writer Bandi’s story.

  But the connection did not happen immediately. Once the woman had been formally admitted to the Republic of Korea and sent to the Settlement Support Center for North Korean Refugees, Representative Do promptly forgot all about her. She was, after all, only one of many defectors whom he had helped, and who very rarely got in touch with him after being discharged from the Support Center.

  This time was different. After she left the Support Center, the woman contacted Representative Do several times, on her own initiative, eventually arranging for him to visit her in her new home, situated in one of Seoul’s satellite cities. There, she presented Representative Do with an envelope of money, explaining that this was the only way she had of expressing her gratitude. Representative Do refused to accept the envelope, knowing that what she was offering him was a part of the resettlement funds which she had been given to use while she found her feet in a new country.

  But the woman’s stubbornness was equal to Representative Do’s. She asked him to do a favor for her, and to take the envelope as the fee to cover this. When Representative Do asked what kind of a favor she had in mind, the name “Bandi” came up. The woman said, “If I’d fled the country with that manuscript in my possession, the soldiers would have found it and both Bandi and I would now be dead,” and “I promised him I would get it out somehow, so he will be waiting.” The woman also explained in detail just how prominent a state writer Bandi was.

  Representative Do found himself seized by a strange feeling, a premonition that the opportunity being presented him was one that was unlikely to come again. The woman wrote a letter, which she asked Representative Do to pass on to Bandi. He would trust whoever carried that letter, she said, enough to give that person his precious manuscript.

  As he left the woman’s house, carrying both the letter and the envelope of money, Representative Do decided that he needed to at least give it a try. But this was no simple task. At that time, the situation at the border was thorny, and it would not be easy to find someone who would be able to travel unmolested all the way to where Bandi was living.

  And in fact, the plan might not have come off at all if it hadn’t been for one of those remarkable coincidences that sometimes come about in life. A Chinese friend of Representative Do informed Do that he was going to pay a visit to one of his North Korean relatives, who just so happened to live in the same small city where Bandi, thanks to his social status, also had his home. The Ch
inese friend assured Representative Do that he would be able to call on Bandi, too, during a meal or break time, and make the visit short enough that it wouldn’t attract attention. Representative Do agreed to the plan, but warned his friend that he ought to disguise Bandi’s manuscript by sandwiching it between North Korean propaganda books such as The Selected Works of Kim Il-sung or The Legacy of Works by Kim Jong-il.

  Several months after his relative’s successful defection, then, Bandi received a visit from Representative Do’s Chinese friend, who gave him the letter wrapped in a plastic bag.

  After reading the letter carefully, Bandi appeared lost in thought. He seemed to be hesitating over whether or not to trust this messenger, but after a while he went off to fetch the manuscript bundle from its hiding place. Later on, the Chinese man described the look on Bandi’s face as he’d handed the manuscript over as that of a man compelled to act as he did, “as though it made no difference whether he died like this or like that.”

  And so the manuscript traveled via China to reach Representative Do, concealed by The Selected Works of Kim Il-sung.

  At the time of this writing, over 28,000 North Korean defectors have entered South Korea. A great many of these have since written books—memoirs, poetry, and occasionally some fiction—criticizing North Korean society and its bankrupt system of hereditary dictatorship. Twenty-eight are members of a subsidiary of PEN International, the North Korean Writers in Exile PEN Center, which was formed at a general meeting of the parent organization in 2012.

  At the 78th PEN International literary forum, held in September 2012 in the South Korean city of Gyeongju, Do Myung-hak spoke of his experience writing poetry in North Korea.

  “I wanted to write poems filled with truth, poems that I myself truly felt impelled to write. In August 2004 I was arrested by a Bowibu [secret police] officer and taken deep into the Chagangdo Mountains. My satirical poems, which I had written purely to gain comfort from the act of giving literary expression to such thoughts, aware that they could never be published in North Korea, were condemned as reactionary. In prison, the guards kicked me with their combat boots until I was half dead. Sleep became impossible for me.”

  Do Myung-hak suffered this agony, too great to be imagined by those in the civilized world, merely for writing satirical poetry; Bandi’s work goes beyond satire—it is close to a direct denunciation of the North Korean system. On top of this, after Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994, Kim Jong-il instructed the North Korean literati to produce “Great Leader Eternal Life Literature,” and poetry cherishing the memory of Kim Il-sung began to pour out. But even in such a period, the writer Bandi filled his literature with ridicule and denunciation of Kim Il-sung.

  These were works that could not be written without risking one’s life. Risking one’s life to resist a system of oppression can be interpreted as having a premonition of that system’s end. In this sense, the literature produced by resistance writers who live within North Korea, exposing the face of the nation to the world, is in itself the beginning of an epoch-making upheaval, showing that cracks are now appearing in the hereditary dictatorship, which has seemed until now an impregnable fortress.

  The South Korean publication of Bandi’s story collection criticizing the North Korean system recalls the case of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was banished from the USSR for criticizing the communist system in work which was published abroad, and who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970. Solzhenitsyn voluntarily enrolled as an artillery officer after the outbreak of the Second World War, and sent a letter to a friend criticizing Stalin. When this was discovered, in 1945, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, and he spent the next eight years in exile, including time in a forced labor camp. After being “rehabilitated” in 1957, he began to write One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, based on his experiences during those eight years of banishment, and when it was published in a Russian literary magazine in 1962 he became known around the world.

  His maiden work was his representative work, however, as the antiestablishment inclination of each subsequent work blocked the route to uncensored publication within the USSR itself. In protest, Solzhenitsyn sent a letter to the 1967 Soviet Writers’ Congress calling for the abolition of censorship. Ultimately, this frustration led to his publishing Cancer Ward abroad, and this proved to be an important work in the decision of the Nobel Committee. Once his works were available abroad, the Soviet Writers’ Union struck Solzhenitsyn from its membership in 1969.

  The overseas publication of The Gulag Archipelago, which exposed the inner workings of the Soviet forced labor camps and became his other representative work, led to Solzhenitsyn’s being forcibly banished from his home country, the USSR, in 1974.

  For a writer, the loss of the motherland can be as grave a wound as death. But though they share the unhappy experience of having their most important work published only in a country that is not their own, Solzhenitsyn appears to have fared better than Bandi, who has to risk his life in order to write. Solzhenitsyn was able to write under his own name, with everything aboveboard, and to have some of the work which bore his name, and which criticized the system he himself suffered under, published at home, but the situation which Bandi is faced with does not allow for this.

  Rather than himself trying to escape from North Korea, the writer Bandi has sent his work out as an envoy, risking his life in the process. Surely this is because he believes that external efforts can transform the slave society he lives in more quickly than internal ones. On handing his manuscript over, Bandi said that even if his work was published only in South Korea, that would be enough for him. This work should be heard as an earnest entreaty to shine a spotlight on North Korea’s oppressive regime.

  Footnote

  * Biographical details have been altered in order to protect the identity of Bandi.

  A Note from Do Hee-yun

  Representative of the Citizens’ Coalition for Human Rights of Abductees and North Korean Refugees

  Bandi was born in 1950. He followed his parents to China to take refuge there during the Korean War. He spent his youth in China, before returning to North Korea, where he became affiliated with the Chosun Writers’ League Central Committee. Having always shown a predisposition toward literature, Bandi came to prominence in the 1970s, as his work was published in North Korean magazines.

  The focus of Bandi’s writing changed forever after the deaths of many people close to him during the so-called Arduous March, which began with the death of Kim Il-sung in 1994. The experiences of this time, including seeing many North Koreans leave their homeland just in order to survive, made him resolve to share with the outside world a true likeness of North Korean society as he himself saw it. Though life in North Korea was lived behind an iron curtain, Bandi held fast to the belief that his writing would have its day, and had produced a considerable body of work by the time a relative living in Hamheung province came in secret to see him and disclosed her decision to try to escape from the country by crossing over to China. Bandi was aware that he could not try to escape himself, for he had a wife and children, but three days later, when his relative left, he gave her the manuscript he had in his possession.

  The relative who accepted the task of smuggling out the manuscript explained to him that, as there was no guarantee she herself would be able to get away safely, she would prepare her escape route and then return to collect it. Making this promise, she left.

  Though disheartened, Bandi had no other option. Several months later, an unfamiliar youth came to his house and, without saying a word, handed him a letter wrapped in a plastic bag. The content of the letter was as follows:

  It’s Myung-ok. I’m sorry this is late. I’ve come to a convenient place now. The one who helped me make it here safely will send someone to you. With my letter. When you get it, please give them the item which you gave to me last time. You can trust them. Since it’s something that only you and I know about, there were two items which you gave to me that time, you know. Since you will
also have to try living in a good world one time, when you think of the family you left behind you will shed only tears. Such a day will surely come. Dear one, you and I will surely meet again …

  In the meantime, stay well.

  Myung-ok.

  Bandi hesitated for a moment before fetching the manuscript from out of the small cupboard in which he had hidden it and handing it over to the young man, putting his trust in the letter. The young man accepted the package and immediately left the house. The manuscript that had been in Bandi’s possession was now going to South Korea, to a land of freedom and hope.

  And now The Accusation is now going out into the world to illuminate the darkness which shrouds North Korea, just like a beautiful firefly, the pen name this writer chose for himself.

  In Place of Acknowledgments

  [An untitled poem included with the manuscript of The Accusation]

  Fifty years in this northern land

  Living as a machine that speaks

  Living as a human under a yoke

  Without talent

  With a pure indignation

  Written not with pen and ink

  But with bones drenched with blood and tears

  Is this writing of mine

  Though they be dry as a desert

  And rough as a grassland

  Shabby as an invalid

  And primitive as stone tools

  Reader!

  I beg you to read my words.

  —Bandi

  OTHER TITLES FROM PROFILE BOOKS

  Gone to Ground: One woman’s extraordinary account of survival in the heart of Nazi Germany