by B. R. Myers
Similarly, every act of kindness depicted is meant to demonstrate the unique goodness of the race. When a mother in the historical film Sea of Blood (P’ibada, 1968) skips supper so that her child may eat, much as mothers around the world do every day, the North Korean viewer sheds a tear at the unique intensity of a Korean mother’s love.† The celebration of the race’s selflessness routinely trumps the dictates of realism. In one popular movie a KPA soldier with a shattered leg goes under the knife. He worries that he will be crippled for life, but when he wakes up his leg is fine. Wait: the medical staff around him are hobbling! It turns out that they have donated parts of their own flesh and bone to reconstruct his limb.48
Happiness, 1978
For decades romance was but the spoonful of sugar helping the propaganda message go down. Now that the party must compete with smuggled South Korean videos and DVD’s for public attention, the romantic element has come to the fore, but when one person falls for another, it is usually because the other is such a model citizen. In a television drama broadcast in 2001, an aging bachelor in Pyongyang shows little interest in the young beauty he encounters in a hardware store until he finds out that she has volunteered to work in the same collective potato farm. (Since the launch of the “potato revolution” in the late 1990s, the regime has glorified citizens who relocate to the remote northeastern region where most potatoes are farmed.) He proposes marriage to her that very day, she accepts, and they go off to celebrate with his mother and her aunt. Naturally, no fathers are in sight.49
Lovers are rarely shown even touching each other; the Text draws the line at encouraging adult instincts. Where the Soviet or Chinese hero’s celibacy reflects his total mastery of himself, the North Korean hero’s is the cheerful abstinence of the child race. Special pride is taken in the chastity of the peninsula’s womenfolk, who in historical narratives are shown fending off lecherous foreigners. Even scenes of childbirth are evidently taboo. To be sure, the more “literary” kind of fiction hints at a sensual element:
The two walked side by side on the waterway embankment.… Full of merriment Ch’o’ae walked close at Su’ungi’s side. He felt as if his heart would burst from his ribs. From Ch’o’ae’s slim and firm body, and her soft and gleaming hair, which came down to just below her ears, came a fragrance that chased the smell of dank water far away. Smelling this rich fragrance and feeling her soft body next to his, he walked on, exhilarated. Each was silent, as if trying to hide the excitement bestowed on them by this time together. Only the sound of their footsteps broke the deep silence of the night.50
And Hong Sŏk-chung’s novel Hwang Jin’i (2002), which deals with a famous sixteenth century courtesan of that name, is downright raunchy in parts, but then, more latitude has always been granted to those depicting the decadent, Chinese-influenced “feudal” past. (The book may also have been written with a view to the ROK market.)51
But judging from refugee testimony, North Koreans are no fonder of the solitary activity of reading than South Koreans are.† Most get their romance from films and TV dramas, which still depict love in a twee and formulaic manner reminiscent of Bollywood, with girlfriends summoned by bird-call imitations, courtship conducted while bobbing around a tree, and so on.52 The childishness of the love exalts it. As the DPRK’s most influential writer once said of his characters, their “love is permeated with Korean morality, in contrast to the greasy love of Western people.”53 What may look to outsiders like a simple love story is thus as much a part of the Text as everything else.
While the party does not explicitly deny the existence of conflict inside the republic, it contends that conflict is not “typical” of North Korean life and therefore unworthy of depiction. There are few of the harsh clashes between rural and urban values, older and younger generations, chauvinist husbands and progressive wives, etc, that were so common in Soviet propaganda. Though divorce and light spousal abuse have ceased to be taboo topics, they are attributed to such innocuous reasons as one partner’s excessive dedication to the workplace: “You only know about production, not about living,” complains the wife in the TV drama Family (Kajǒng, 2001).54
Mid-level bureaucrats are sometimes criticized as a social class, but individual North Koreans are never singled out as true villains. (The media, for their part, never report on crimes committed in the DPRK; since the 1960s, victims of political purges have simply become non-people.) There are, however, plenty of mildly flawed individuals to be found in narratives: girls who spend too much time on their appearance, say, or men who “abandon” their mountain village to chase dreams of life in the city. Being Korean and thus inherently virtuous, these characters are easily reformed. A soldier who fails to sweep the floor of his tent sees that a comrade has done the job for him—and bursts into tears of repentance. (This plot device is now so stale that even Kim Jong Il has complained about it.)55 As a result, a serene and idyllic quality attaches to most portrayals of contemporary life. Depictions of the food shortage treat it, as we shall see in a later chapter, as a period of dramatic belt-tightening that is now over and done with. When storytellers want to criticize downright illegal or subversive activity they must resort to fables or cartoons with animal figures. (This is one reason why the North’s animation industry is so advanced.) A warning against fleeing to China, for example, is expressed as a tale of a squirrel who ventures too far abroad.56
The lack of conflict makes North Korean narratives seem dull even in comparison to Soviet fiction. Rather than try to stimulate curiosity about what will happen next, directors and writers try to make one wonder what has already happened. Films introduce characters in a certain situation (getting a medal, say), then go back and forth in time to explain how they got there.57 Nowhere in the world do writers make such heavy use of the flashback. But we should beware of assuming that people in the DPRK find these narratives as dull as we do. The Korean aesthetic has traditionally been very tolerant of convention and formula. (South Korean broadcasters rework the same few soap-opera plots every year.) According to refugee testimony, however, most North Koreans prefer stories set either in the “Yankee colony” or in pre-revolutionary times, with real villains and conflict.
The country’s favorite movie, by all accounts, is The Flower Girl (Kkot’ p’anǔn ch’ǒnyǒ, 1972), which was filmed a few years after the staging of a “revolutionary opera”—allegedly penned by Kim Il Sung in his youth—under the same title.† The virginal heroine’s white-bloused form graces the republic’s currency, and she is routinely invoked by bachelors as the kind of woman they want to marry. (Some credit for the character’s appeal must go to the beautiful Hong Myŏng-hŭi, who acted the part while still a teenager.) Set in the colonial era and filmed in nightmarish Technicolor, the film follows its flower-selling heroine as she weeps her way through one family crisis after the other: her brother is dragged away by the police, her little sister blinded by the landlady, her mother worked to death, etc. Everything from the heartbreak-laden plot to the flower-girl motif reflects the influence of the Japanese schmaltz (itself influenced by Victorian England) which dominated Korean theaters during the colonial period.†
From The Flower Girl, 1972.
At last the girl’s brother, having escaped from prison and joined Kim Il Sung’s partisans, returns to exact revenge on the landlord. Although the heroine pledges to join the revolutionary struggle, it is not her sudden access of fighting spirit but the purity and naivety that she displays throughout the film that have made her an ethnic icon. This, the movie says, is how hard it was to be Korean in this evil world—before the Leader set the race free.
† The collapse of the information cordon that once sealed the North off from the “Yankee colony” has changed little in this regard, since the ROK’s media has strongly xenophobic tendencies itself. See for example the South Korean newspaper article “Oegugin bŏmjoi kŭpchŭng” (Drastic increase in foreigner crime, Chosun ilbo, October 18, 2007), which is accompanied by an illustration of a Korean gir
l fleeing in terror from knife-wielding big-noses.
† When I was screening the film to my South Korean graduate students, one of them turned smilingly to me during this part and said, “Typical Korean mother!”
† In 2005 it was reported that South Koreans read the least (only about three hours a week to Americans’ six) among the thirty nations whose consumer habits were surveyed by a consultancy. See “Indians ‘world’s biggest readers,’ ” BBC News, June 27, 2005.
† It is claimed that Kim Il Sung conceived and staged the story in Manchuria during the anti-Japanese struggle, but the fact that it was not mentioned until the 1960s, when Mao’s international fame as a poet was burgeoning, speaks for itself.
† Popular “new kabuki” plays performed by visiting Japanese troupes in the 1910s and 1920s helped to engender a Korean tradition of weepy and formulaic “sinp’agŭk” narratives, the influence of which can be seen in South Korean films and TV serials even today. Ho, Han’guk yŏnghwa 100-nyon, 22-24.
CHAPTER THREE
THE PARENT LEADER
Western journalists routinely claim that North Korea is essentially a Confucian country.1 A “Confucian version of George Orwell’s 1984,” writes one, a “Confucian museum, covered by a thick but superficial layer of Marxism-Leninism,” writes another.2 Scholars such as Selig Harrison and Thomas Hosuck Kang agree that the regime’s longevity can be attributed in large part to its skill in exploiting this age-old tradition.3 In fact the DPRK’s official culture clashes with the sage’s teachings in all significant respects. Confucius demanded rigorous self-cultivation through study; the Kim regime urges its subjects to remain as childlike and spontaneous as possible. Confucius considered no race better than another; the DPRK regards the Korean people as uniquely virtuous. Nor does the Workers’ Party condone the rites of ancestor worship that are still taken so seriously in the southern half of the peninsula.
To most observers, the North Korean regime’s heavy use of family symbolism is sufficient proof of Confucian tendencies. But almost all cultures espouse respect for one’s parents, and kinship metaphors have been part of political language since time immemorial. Indeed, there was once a father figure in every communist country. In order to prove a Confucian influence on the DPRK’s personality cult, one would have to demonstrate that there is something distinctly Confucian about it, a task doomed to failure. Contrary to what so many outsiders take for granted, the leader depicted in official propaganda is hardly a father figure at all, let alone a patriarch.
Before discussing this any further, let us summarize the current version of Kim Il Sung’s mythobiography.†
On April 15 in 1912, the first year of Juche, in the Man’gyŏngdae district of Pyongyang, a son was born to Kim Hyŏng-jik and his wife Kang Pan-sŏk. It quickly became clear to all in the village that this was no ordinary child; more upright and virtuous than his playmates, he climbed a tree in a naïve effort to catch the rainbow. When only seven, he saw the police arrest his father for anti-Japanese activities. After his release in 1923 the family resolved to leave for Manchuria. Mature beyond his years, the boy vowed not to return to Pyongyang until Korea’s independence had been restored.
In Manchuria Kim Il Sung devoted himself wholly to the anti-Japanese struggle. By the age of sixteen he had already formed the Anti-Imperialist League and purged the Korean revolutionary movement of narrow-minded nationalists and xenophiles alike. At a conference of revolutionaries in 1930 the eighteen-year-old Kim set out his brilliant new ideology of Juche Thought, explaining that man is the master of all things, and that a revolutionary strategy for Korea must reflect the country’s unique conditions. Two years later he founded the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army. Basing his headquarters first in the Tumen River region, then on sacred Mount Paektu, he launched a series of crushing attacks on Japanese troops. After a particularly bold strike on the Korean border town of Poch’ŏnbo in 1937 the KPRA found itself under threat from a counter-offensive. Kim rescued his troops in the winter of 1938/39 by leading them on the now-legendary Arduous March along the Yalu River valley. Not once did he rest or slacken in his concern for his men, who under his brilliant leadership won every battle. In 1942 his wife Kim Chŏng-suk, a revolutionary fighter since childhood, bore the General a son. The couple named him Jong Il.
On August 9, 1945, the General led his army in a final concerted push through the enemy’s border strongholds, at the same time ordering secret fighting units to rise up across the peninsula. The Japanese held out for all of six days before falling to their knees on August 15. As the victorious army advanced southward people rushed weeping from their homes to greet its commander. Arriving at last in Pyongyang, Kim restored its ancient status as the nation’s capital by setting up his government there.
Alas, the American imperialists had already invaded the southern part of the peninsula, installing the reactionary Syngman Rhee as “president” of the new colony. On June 25, 1950 the Yankees, determined to crush Korean socialism forever, launched a surprise attack on the DPRK. Under the General’s brilliant leadership, the Korean People’s Army dealt them such a savage series of counter-blows that they retreated whence they came, finally signing an abject declaration of surrender on July 27, 1953.
In the years that followed Kim Il Sung worked day and night, waking every morning at 3 am as he rebuilt his country into a shining model of self-reliant independence. Juche Study groups sprang up around the world as foreigners sought to emulate the DPRK’s spectacular progress in all fields. But for all his many duties, the Leader found time to visit factories and farms, solving their problems at lightning speed while touching the hearts of the workers with his parental concern for their welfare. Unfortunately this selflessness took a toll on his health, and on July 8 1994 he passed away, plunging the masses into a grief such as they had never known. It was no small comfort for them, however, to know that the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il would carry on his father’s legacy.4
Although the DPRK came close to another war with the US in the last years of Kim Il Sung’s life, the resolution of this crisis is generally credited to his son, who by then had assumed command of the armed forces. Yet the summary above should not mislead anyone into thinking that the personality cult skims over the latter half of the Great Leader’s life. The problem, for my purposes at least, is that only the first half forms a linear story. The second falls apart into undated tales of “on-the-spot guidance” and other anecdotes that are too numerous to count, let alone summarize. They play such an important role in official myth that new ones are constantly being generated.5
A personality cult comes into being when a one-man dictatorship presents itself as a democracy. The goal is to convey the impression that due to the ruler’s unique qualifications and the unanimity of the people’s love for him, his rule constitutes the perfect fulfillment of democratic ideals. In this respect at least, the Kim cult resembles the cults of Mao and Stalin. In most others it is closer to the leader cults of fascism. Where the Chinese and Soviet cults derived their respective leaders’ greatness from an unequalled grasp of dialectical materialism, the North Korean cult derives Kim’s from his embodiment of ethnic virtues: he is the most naïve, spontaneous, loving, and pure Korean—the most Korean Korean—who ever lived. As one propagandist recently put it, Kim Il Sung is “the symbol of the homeland.”6
Blank-eyed as always, the young Kim takes from his mother the gun with which he would start his war of liberation.
To eliminate all doubt that the Leader’s virtues were inborn and not acquired, the Text plays up his impeccable lineage (crediting his great-grandfather with leading a famous attack on an American gunship in 1866) and the very young age at which he began manifesting his virtue.7 His father Kim Hyŏng-jik (a rather pallid hero of the resistance for whom the Text can work up no real passion) is rarely shown teaching his son, let alone disciplining him.8 With very short hair and a soft, pale-moon face marked by small and feminine features, the boy Kim recalls the children pi
ctured in imperial Japanese schoolbooks. Usually he looks cheerful, showing the dimpled smile to which the Text constantly draws attention. In some pictures, like one in which he receives a gun from his mother, he seems to sense the responsibility weighing on his young shoulders, but even here his eyes are blank: because true Korean spontaneity ends where an intellectual expression begins, Kim is never shown thinking.9 Anything that might be seen as having diminished the leader’s artlessness and naivety is downplayed or ignored altogether. Love of the race leads him spontaneously to Marxism, an ideology that the Text praises but (for obvious reasons) is loath to explain.
One may well ask how a leader can pose as the embodiment of naivety on the one hand and a brilliant strategist and revolutionary on the other. In the 1940s and 1950s writers made ludicrous efforts to explain away this contradiction, claiming, among other things, that Kim’s best ideas came to him in his sleep.10 The propaganda apparatus soon realized it would be better simply to divert public attention elsewhere. While the leader’s genius and invincibility on the battlefield are accorded all due praise, only his ethnic virtues—his naivety, his purity, his spontaneity and solicitude—are constantly shown in action.