Park Chul spoke again. ‘The novel is a descriptive genre, but poetry is a lyric genre. Poetry is to do with human emotions, not with human psychology. To refer so explicitly to tears in a poem would promote “pessimism on the part of the individual”. Besides, in verse, you can only have tears of loyalty. Yet Comrade Kyong-min proposes not only to refer to the tears of an individual, but of our Supreme Leader himself. Heaven forbid! If we are accused of promoting “pessimism on the part of our Supreme Leader”, each one of us will have to face the consequences.’
No one said a word, perhaps at the terrifying mention of ‘consequences’. One man shut his notepad, as if to acknowledge that the meeting was over.
I rose again to speak. ‘Of course you are right to say that tears of loyalty, which must be shed by an individual, are the only tears permitted in poetry. But the poetic work in discussion here is to be composed in the genre of epic. Epic poetry is a narrative genre, just like the novel. Moreover, the focus of the work is not on our Supreme Leader shedding tears, but on how he has continuously exercised restraint and held them back. It is due to this forbearance that his tears were made manifest as Love, Sunshine and Immortal Life. Therefore, I do not see a problem.’
Supervisor Park, visibly annoyed that an employee of his should speak out in defiance, refused to change his stance. ‘Referring to our Supreme Leader’s tears once or twice? There’s nothing wrong with that. But you’re talking about an epic poem, whose length will require repeated references to our Supreme Leader’s tears. Have you ever seen such a thing in any of our nation’s poems? Right now, as our nation pulls through this time of famine and bad harvests, the Party slogan is “The journey is hard but let us go forth in laughter”. And you propose to write a poem about our Supreme Leader shedding tears?’
At these words, even the cadre who had earlier been close to tears upon hearing my proposal nodded in agreement. Everyone now looked to Director Im. Pushing at the table with both hands, he stood up and spoke gravely. ‘This is the plan. Starting from today, Comrade Kyong-min will put all other duties aside for six months and compose an epic poem according to his proposal. But he will make sure to avoid excessive references to our Supreme Leader’s tears. At the United Front Department, you have assumed a South Korean identity and this allows you some leeway. We’re not restricted by Writers’ Union rules and don’t have to go through their censorship or approval process. We just have to judge among ourselves at the UFD as best we can. The current proposal is excellent in terms of its literary merit. Let’s make this work.’
Director Im dismissed everyone from the meeting but asked me to stay behind. The two of us were alone in the room.
‘Don’t pay any attention to what Supervisor Park says,’ he told me. ‘I’m sure he’s jealous. What achievements can he boast of? You have six months of hard work ahead of you. You should take a week off. Go and recharge yourself. Where would you like to go?’
I told him I wanted to visit my hometown. After meeting the General, I had been thinking a lot about my friends back home. It was glorious enough to have been admitted to the UFD, but I had even become one of the Admitted. How much everyone would admire me! I said that revisiting my place of birth would help me equip myself emotionally for the task ahead. Im Tong-ok granted my request without hesitation.
GOING HOME
2
I PHONED MY childhood friend Young-nam from Pyongyang Station. We had been best friends in nursery school, where we were in the same class, and we had remained inseparable all the way to the end of primary school.
‘You’re meeting me at the station, right?’
‘In your wildest dreams!’ His response was as predictable as ever, and I burst into laughter.
Young-nam’s nickname was ‘Jappo’ – short for Japanese expatriate. Like me, he had been born in Sariwon in North Korea, but all the kids called him Jappo because his parents were immigrants from Osaka in Japan. They had arrived in Sariwon in the 1960s, as part of the repatriation of Koreans from Japan referred to as the ‘Great Movement of the Korean People’. At the time, in a bid to promote the North over the South as the homeland of a unified Korea, Kim Il-sung welcomed into North Korea around 100,000 ethnic Koreans who had been living in Japan.
After the Korean War, the circumstances of the Cold War made North Korea a more attractive choice in terms of its economic superiority, and this enabled Kim Il-sung to pursue a policy of embracing expatriates. Using these immigrants as evidence of people choosing Socialism over Capitalism, the North Korean state fervidly referred to them in propaganda campaigns. On the surface, it looked as if Kim Il-sung was gaining significantly from a propaganda policy based on an embracing celebration of Korean ethnicity. In reality, however, the arrival of the immigrants caused unexpected ripples in North Korean society. Actually, it was what they brought with them that had the greatest impact. The Japanese products that the immigrants brought with them were regarded as wondrous goods from the outside world, never before seen by ordinary North Koreans. Until then, they had believed that any product of Kim Il-sung’s Socialism must be the best in the world, but now they were exposed to the state of progress in Japan. The immigrants settled all over North Korea, according to their wishes or ancestral connections, and an unofficial new slogan was seized on nationwide: ‘Capitalism may be rotten to the core, but they do make good products!’ Almost instantaneously, North Korea became caught up in a fever of all things ‘made in Japan’.
It became a fad for North Koreans to pick up labels or packaging thrown out by the ‘Jappos’ and display them in their homes like treasure. The immigrants naturally came to be regarded as a privileged class through their enjoyment of Japanese products, and they were soon firmly entrenched in the comfortable middle class of North Korean society.
They were admired not only because of the products they possessed, but also because of their Japanese cultural traits. Whether it was their characteristic forms of greeting, language, manners or even their eating habits, their way of life was considered sophisticated and prosperous. In contrast, the official reward of higher status in return for loyal service seemed not as exciting. Increasingly, those who did not have family outside the country to send in Japanese products tried to emulate the Jappos at least in cultural terms.
Children were all too sensitive to this trend, complaining to their parents that none of their older relatives had had the foresight to run away and settle in Japan. The North Korean state had built the legitimacy of Kim Il-sung on the basis of his credentials as an anti-Japanese resistance fighter, and so it was a great irony that his immigration movement caused ordinary North Koreans to admire Japan. Korea had been freed from the ignominy of colonial servitude under the Japanese, but now it had been ‘colonised’ again by the Japanese or, more specifically, the Jochongryon, the organisation run by the UFD that represents people of Korean origin in Japan. In effect, the Japan taboo reinforced by means of institutional communalism had begun to fade away from the public consciousness.
To North Koreans, for whom even ordinary clothes were a uniform dictated by the state, the notion of a private car for individual use was inconceivable. Nevertheless, this very privilege was freely given to the Jappos, whose private cars, speeding along empty roads in Pyongyang, were more than just a mode of transport in the eyes of North Koreans. They introduced the dangerous suggestion that one might control the speed of one’s journey, instead of goose-stepping in line to the whistle of the state. In this way, the presence of these immigrants offered a daring invitation to flout the traditional framework of loyalty.
The North Korean state’s jealousy eventually led to oppression of the Jappos. The immigrants, who had experience and memories of living in a Capitalist society, were assigned to the ‘wavering’ class, reserved for those whose ideas were perceived to be a risk to the state. Their career prospects were severely restricted. Kim Jong-il even legally prohibited Jappos from driving white cars. The reason for this seemed petty: it was because white
cars were the same colour as the background of Japan’s national flag. In Party lectures, cadres alleged that Japan only exported white cars to the world, yet within their own nation they were fixated on red cars; and the reason for this was that they wanted to paint their national flag on the world map as a symbol of their central position in the world. It was clearly a warning from above that a Jappo could not be trusted in the same way as a Korean.
Despite these efforts, the preference of many North Koreans for the ‘Mount Fuji people’, as opposed to the ‘Mount Paektu people’ and the anti-Japanese feats of Kim Il-sung, did not disappear. My friend Young-nam was therefore a member of a group of people who were generally admired, in contradiction to the official stance. Moreover, his family was once the wealthiest in Sariwon.
Nevertheless, life became very difficult for his family after the death of his grandparents in Japan, when their supply of Japanese money and goods came to an end. As they were immigrants from Japan, Young-nam and his parents had no prospect of entering respectable careers, because the assignment of jobs was controlled by the Workers’ Party. They had to start selling off their possessions one by one and, eventually, they became impoverished and lived in a much worse state than the local North Koreans.
The one thing I remember clearly from my childhood is that we had a Yamaha piano at home, given to our family by Young-nam’s father when he was still a wealthy man. I remember my mother telling me that when Young-nam’s family first settled in Sariwon, my father helped them secure a new apartment through the allocations made by the Workers’ Party. As the piano had arrived in the house before I was born, I grew up assuming that everyone had Japanese pianos, just as everyone had a portrait of Kim Il-sung on their wall at home.
One day, however, when I went to a friend’s house to play, I realised that they did not have a piano. I was astonished. When I came home, I ran into the house and shouted at my mother, as if I had just witnessed something incredible: ‘Mum, did you know? They don’t have a piano at home!’
She replied coolly, ‘They probably didn’t want a piano in the house. They prefer reading books.’
It was only when I began my first year at Dongri People’s Primary School that I came to understand that the possession of a Japanese Yamaha piano was a very big deal indeed. The kids – and the grown-ups too – referred to me as ‘the boy with the Japanese piano’ or ‘the doctor’s boy’. Most kids at school lived in ‘harmonica apartments’ built in the 1950s, so-called because each floor had flats that were packed closely together like the square holes in a harmonica. We lived in a large flat on the third floor of an apartment block set aside for officials. My mother, who was the head doctor at a medical centre for the exclusive use of Party cadres, hoped that my two older sisters would become teachers and that I would one day become a famous pianist. She finally cajoled my father into finding me a famous piano tutor.
One day, my father brought a tutor home with him. The man had a long face and spoke with the heavy accent characteristic of Hamgyong Province in the north. But what amazed me more than his accent was that he was an ethnic Korean from China. And he stank of cigarette smoke, which I didn’t like. Worse, he was a chain-smoker, and my sisters didn’t like him much at first, either. But he didn’t seem to care. Bending down, he pulled my ear to his mouth and said emphatically in his phlegmatic voice, ‘My name is Choi Liang. Did you hear that? Two syllables. Choi Liang!’
His loud voice frightened me as much as the stench of smoke did. When my father announced that the man and his family were going to move in with us, I was devastated. I pretended to need the toilet, ran outside, and sobbed.
Choi Liang became my first proper mentor. He had been a violinist in China’s Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. During the Cultural Revolution, he’d fled the Red Guards’ assaults on the educated by coming to North Korea, along with many other ethnic Koreans. His first job in North Korea was as a violin tutor at Pyongyang Arts School. At the time, he and Paek Go-san were considered to be among North Korea’s leading violinists. Paek Go-san had taken both the top prize for his category and the honorary prize in the Tchaikovsky International Music Competition of 1982. In 1978, he had also been the first Asian to be appointed a lifetime member of the panel of judges for the violin section of the competition.
Paek Go-san had a younger brother called Paek Do-san, who had insulted Choi Liang by referring to him as a ‘dirty bastard’, a common derogatory term used by Koreans to refer to the Chinese. Choi Liang, infamous for his short temper, punched him in the face. For this Choi Liang was banished to the countryside until my father rescued him from rustic exile by hiring him to teach me music. Choi Liang’s wife, son and daughter moved into our house with him and our quiet home burst into unaccustomed life as it became home to our two families.
In my early years, teacher Choi Liang seemed to me the cruellest of men. He started me off with ear training and he went about this task without mercy. Several hundred times a day, I would have to strain to discern the note or interval he sounded on the piano. Gradually, I learned to pick out the notes and intervals without hesitation. Eventually, he moved on to chords and by the end he had taught me how to arrange music for a string quartet.
My father tried very hard to get Choi Liang hired as a professor at Sariwon Arts School. However, his foreign birth proved too great an obstacle for the post and he was taken on as a lecturer instead. Even so, because he was one of North Korea’s leading violinists, students flocked from all over the country to study with him. Choi Liang frequently invited them to our house and even showed them my string quartet arrangements.
I still remember very clearly what Choi Liang had to say about string quartet arrangements, as he often repeated this piece of wisdom: ‘Above all, the score should be covered with black notes everywhere. Semitone intervals should be used with care, but as frequently as needed. Understood?’
More than just an education in music, Choi Liang instilled in me great artistic ambition. Every day I listened to his anecdotes about Beethoven, Mozart and the fame that surrounded them even after their deaths. While other children aspired to become Party cadres or to drive cars for Party cadres, I dreamed of becoming Dvořák, and of achieving world renown for the composition of my own New World Symphony. I once mentioned this dream to my mother and she gave me a fierce telling-off, saying that if I shared these thoughts with anyone else, our entire family would be accused of Revisionism or Moral Corruption. She made sure to give me a terrific fright by saying that if I didn’t keep these thoughts to myself, I might be arrested.
My mother was troubled by the realisation that her thirteen-year-old son had grown enamoured of the music of Dvořák. I had come to love his works because of the tape recordings that Choi Liang had smuggled in with him from China, and because the only other kind of music I had access to was the stuff I heard at school. It wasn’t just that the music was limited to revolutionary anthems. Rather, after having been exposed to the thrilling world of harmonic possibility, I found it frustrating to listen to North Korean songs of perfect victory that did not allow for any suggestion of imperfection through musical dissonance or tension.
Once, in singing class at school, I couldn’t contain my thoughts any longer. I volunteered to do the accompaniment for the session, and played as I wished instead of following the prescribed pattern. My pedalling on the organ (there was no piano at school) wasn’t perfect but I knew that I had played well and without mistakes. In spite of this, our music teacher punished me for my deviation by humiliating me in front of the class, making an example of me as someone who knew nothing whatsoever about music. In my heart, though, I believed it was the school – not me – that lacked an understanding of music. As a result, I could not stop myself from beginning to doubt everything else the school taught us to regard as the most accurate and objective form of knowledge, whether this took the form of the revolutionary history of Kim Il-sung, linguistics or any other subject.
As time went on, I was confirmed in
my conviction that Western music was artistically superior to the North Korean music I was being taught. It wasn’t that I preferred one set of stylistic rules to the other. Western music had its rules too; but what it had that North Korean music didn’t was the infinite possibilities of breaking an established rule, to make a new one of your own. With Choi Liang by my side to explain the intricacies of musical rule-breaking, I grew more confident that the transgression of expectation and rules was not unmusical, but, rather, that this was part of the essence of musicality.
From dawn to dusk, I listened to Dvořák. My father worried about my hearing and took my headphones away from me several times; but I was so desperate that I once took a stethoscope from my mother’s bag and held it against the speaker of the tape player so that I could listen under the blankets at night. My father was proudly supportive of my ambitions and was convinced that I was destined for great things, but Choi Liang was stubborn in his honesty.
‘This boy will never become a good pianist,’ he said. ‘His fingers are too short. He does have creative talent, though, and I recommend that he should train to be a composer.’
I entered Pyongyang Arts School at fifteen. I was determined to become a world-famous composer, fulfilling the dream that Choi Liang had sown in me. But my sudden encounter with a book from the ‘100-Copy Collection’ resulted in my musical ambitions being replaced overnight by literary ones.
The book was the Collected Works of Lord Byron. As part of North Korea’s ‘Hundred-Copy Collection’, the print run of this book was restricted to one hundred copies. In North Korea, the circulation of foreign books is restricted in this way so that only the ruling Kim and his family, his closest associates and select members of North Korea’s elite have access to them. Each of the books in a hundred-copy set has a stamped number on the first page to show which of the hundred copies it is. Books bearing the ‘No. 1’ stamp are, of course, offered only to the ruling Kim. It is thus considered a mark of high status among cadres and other members of the elite to possess a book stamped with a single-digit numeral, or the closest number they can get to it.
Dear Leader Page 5