The Reluctant Communist

by Charles Robert Jenkins

  A few days later, he showed up with forty-four pounds of nylon string and said the Organization needed our nets. That was a bit of a benefit, I suppose, being given so much nylon, considering that usually we scavenged our nylon from the linings of old automobile tires. But we quickly came to hate being given so much nylon, since it seemed like the whole time we were there that all we did was make fishing nets. Once you get good at it, it is not difficult to weave the one-inch holes with your little bamboo needle, but it is hard on your eyes and hard on your back. They told us that we had to make five hundred meters (about 550 yards) of net. And we had to do it in about a year’s time. That was almost impossible, but we did it.

  We had learned to improvise some of the materials we didn’t have. Back in the previous house, we would scavenge lead from old car batteries, melting and shaping the sinkers ourselves to weigh down the bottom of the nets. But here, we didn’t have a junkyard nearby, so we made the sinkers out of clay that we would harden in a fire. Likewise, back at the old house, we actually had enough access to wine bottles to make the floats for the top of the net out of real corks. Here, we had to cut the floats from pine bark instead. We had become experts in backwoods fishing wisdom, such as this: What is the secret ingredient to toughen up your nylon net, transforming it from something that will last for a few seasons into something that will last for a few decades? Pig’s blood. After you have finished weaving your net, take the whole thing and soak it in a vat of fresh pig’s blood. (Yes, a few gallons of pig’s blood can be hard to find, but the benefits are great enough that it is worth befriending a butcher, or buying and killing your own pig, or doing whatever it takes.) Once the nylon fibers are thoroughly soaked, let the net dry in the sun. After it is dry, steam the whole net on a stove in a large pot partially filled with water. (Keep the net out of the water by placing it on a few pieces of wood inside the pot itself.) Once the blood has fully cooked into the nylon, take the net out and let it dry again. When you are done, the net will be shiny, black, slick, resistant to snags, and very strong.

  Near our house, there were a bunch of other houses. They were all off-limits. A leader told us, “See that road? Don’t go down it. See that house? Don’t go near it.” We didn’t know who lived there, but we guessed they were filled with Republic of Korea Army prisoners. One day, Abshier and I were at our house. Dresnok and Parrish were at the lake, which was about three hundred yards away over a hill. About a week or two before, we had seen the army digging a hole on the side of the mountain. Dresnok and Parrish came back and said, “Hey, the hole is now a bald spot of dirt. Let’s go check it out.” We walked over there, and a dog was digging up the fresh dirt. That’s when we saw them: two dead human feet sticking right up out of the ground. We didn’t believe what we were seeing, but we took a closer look, and sure enough, there was no mistaking it. From the size of the grave, about two by five yards, it could have held five to ten people, depending on how deep it was. We decided to get the hell out of there and leave it alone. We swore we would never tell what we saw. A few days later, however, we saw a woman running down the hill from where the grave was. She was screaming her head off, and we knew exactly what it was all about. A little while later, people from the army came around and killed every dog in the neighborhood.

  In January of 1968, we heard on the news that North Korea had captured an American surveillance ship called the U.S.S. Pueblo. A group of cadres came by a few days later just to brief us about it. They were boasting. They gave us a pamphlet in English they had already printed up, titled, “Aggressive American Spy Ship Captured by the Heroic North Korean People’s Navy,” or something like that. In the text of the pamphlet, it said that the ship had been “captured on the high seas.” We knew when we read it that they probably didn’t want to be saying that since they would have had no right to board another country’s ship in international waters. And sure enough, they came back a few days later with a new pamphlet exactly the same as the old one, except with that phrase taken out.

  Contrary to some rumors and accusations that have been aimed at me, I had nothing to do with the Pueblo incident. None of us four Americans had anything to do with the Pueblo whatsoever. Not only did we not participate in any interrogation of the Pueblo’s crew, we never met any of them or even laid eyes on any of them. There is no way the North Koreans would have trusted us enough to go anywhere near that boat, let alone speak to the sailors. All we knew about the fate of the Pueblo was the boastful propaganda that the Korean news would run throughout the year until the crew was released in December. And since then, of course, a one-sided presentation of the Pueblo incident has become a favorite part of anti-American North Korean history and lore. (When the North Koreans made a movie about the incident in 1992, I played the captain of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Enterprise, which was dispatched to the region at the height of the crisis.)

  While the Pueblo was dominating the news in 1968, a leader named Major Han showed up, and we resumed our studies. In March of 1969, we moved again, to a house in Hwachon, which was about twenty miles outside of Pyongyang. This house was a dump. It was only two big rooms, and the walls and floors were pounded mud. There was barely enough room for four beds, so we got rid of the beds and slept on the floor. One night when we were sleeping, it was raining hard, and one of the walls of the house simply collapsed—it just fell away. Rain was blowing in all night, so all four of us crept to the other side of the room, trying to keep dry. The next day, as we were repairing the wall, some farmers offered to help. They started building the wall by stacking cinder blocks one on top of another and then pushing the towers of blocks as close to each other as possible. When we showed them that the wall would stand a lot better if they interlocked the bricks in rows rather than stacking them in columns, they acted like that was the most brilliant thing they had ever seen in their lives.

  After moving to Hwachon, a cadre came by to tell us that the five won we were getting every month was being suspended indefinitely. Around this time as well, Major Han and others started dropping hints about us becoming citizens and entering society. They said that if we continued to study well (which was hilarious, since we were the worst students of all time), we could someday be more free. As part of this process, they had us write our autobiographies. My life story came out to one hundred forty-three handwritten pages. Dresnok’s and Parrish’s were about the same. Abshier, in typical fashion, topped five hundred pages and would have kept going if we hadn’t told him that the North Koreans really don’t care what types of artwork adorn the walls of Chicago’s Union Station or whatever the hell he was going on and on about.

  Our house was exactly ninety yards from the river. We had to carry so much water back to the house that we measured it. Another fifty yards downstream was a worksite for a nearby prison. Just about every day guards would bring work details of ten or twelve people at a time to dig sand for cement. The prisoners dressed in rags, got almost no food, and received brutal physical abuse from the guards. Guards would make the prisoners line up on their knees and kowtow to them to receive a single cigarette. Then the guards would hand them a cigarette and a single match. If they could not light the cigarette off of one match strike (and North Korean matches are horrible), then they just blew their chance for the day. But this passed for easy time in North Korea. This prison was not for the worst offenders. It was for people who had, say, fought with a work team leader or expressed doubt about the government (as opposed to criticizing it). The people there could reasonably expect to be released someday after their ideological reeducation was deemed a success.

  Often we would head down to the work site to see if the guards had any kerosene, gasoline, or cigarettes they were willing to barter. On New Year’s Day of 1971, we headed down there to see if they had anything new. Since it was a holiday, the mediumsentence prisoners were given a rare day off, so the guards filled the work detail with harder-luck, long-term inmates who were in for serious crimes against the government, like trying to escap
e North Korea or criticizing the government. Crimes like that were usually given a fifteen-year sentence, but the work was so brutal, it was as good as a death sentence, and everybody knew it. All four of us were heading up the riverbank when one of the guards we knew started blowing a whistle while he turned to us and waved us away. At the same time, we saw one of the prisoners running the other direction. We headed back toward home double time, but not before we heard a rifle shot ring out and saw two more guards head slowly in the direction the inmate had headed. The next day, with the regular prisoners digging as usual, we came back to the guard and asked him what happened. “He was making a run for it,” said the guard, “so we stopped him.” “Did you take him to the hospital?” we asked. “The hospital?” he laughed. “Hell, no.” “What did you do to him?” we asked. “We took him back to the prison and made him dig his own grave,” he said. “Then we shot him.”

  In 1971, some cadres showed up unexpectedly at our house with two Japanese men. I think the first one’s name was Osada. He was stocky like a welder and had gold teeth. The second one’s name I do not know. The cadres told us that these Japanese were going to live there from now on. None of us were too excited about that, not because we didn’t like them—we didn’t know them—but because of the crowding. That night, the Japanese told us they were on a merchant ship bound for South Korea when they encountered engine trouble. So they got into a smaller boat to go for help while the rest of the crew radioed in. But, they told us, their smaller boat’s engine went out, so they drifted for a few days, and when they hit land, they were in North Korea, not South, and the Organization, believing them to be spies, wouldn’t let them out.

  The next day, however, there had been some change of plans. Maybe the Organization decided us mixing together wasn’t such a good idea after all, since leaders showed up and carted the two Japanese men away. We never saw them again. Their story sounded pretty suspicious to us, too, and we Americans concluded they were probably spies of one sort or another, but on whose side, we had no idea.

  Toward the end of 1971 and beginning of 1972, the cadres really stepped up our studies. They told us if we studied hard, they would give us our own houses, real jobs, an opportunity to fraternize with women, all of these things. We couldn’t care less about the citizenship—in fact, none of us wanted it—but women, houses, and a “normal” life (which itself is something of a joke in North Korea), those seemed like things worth working for. The Fifth Workers’ Party Congress had happened in the fall of 1970, and we had to memorize all of the goals and achievements that came out of that meeting. They were planning on putting electricity and running water in all houses nationwide, for example. They gave us a booklet of about one hundred pages, and we had to memorize everything in it, word for word. It was in question-and-answer format, and we had to be ready for any question. Some of the answers went on for a paragraph or two. Some went on for pages and pages. What is the main task for agriculture? What is the main task for industry? How will the people accomplish party goals for electricity? coal? hydroelectric power? How will the party improve women’s rights? Every day, I would go outside in the cold and read the answers out loud to myself. It was the only way I could learn. Finally, a cadre came to the house around March of 1972 and laid about fifty questions facedown on the table. Each of us had to pick three and give our answers.

  I guess we all passed, because on June 30, a guy we called the Tall Cadre showed up and said that thanks to the benevolence of Kim Il-sung, we had been granted North Korean citizenship. “What if we don’t take it?” I asked. He lowered his head, looked over at me from under his eyebrows, and said, “Then you won’t be here tomorrow.” I took that as a threat that I would be banished to Kumok-ri, a remote area that was legendary as one giant prison, rather than executed, but I did not know what would happen, and I did not take the risk of finding out either way. I accepted the citizenship without another word. Citizenship papers in North Korea at the time were booklets, like passports, but smaller. The pages had your photo, date of birth, registration number, occupation, and affiliation. My booklet said I was an office worker with the Peaceful Unification Committee. That was news to me.

  4 | Cooks, Cadets, and Wives

  Although none of us really wanted citizenship, our lives did get a bit better after we had it. We were never actually put into regular society, though (not that we realistically thought we would be). But, for starters, not only was our pay reinstated, but we also got a raise from five to ten won per month. Additionally, we each received our own homes, as had been promised. They were still modest places. They each had two four-mat rooms and a kitchen. Like almost all of the houses I have ever lived in, they had unreliable electricity, no hot running water, a coal-burning floor heating system, and no indoor bathroom.

  But before we moved, they gave us one final surprise: We were not going to remain together. We were getting split up into two twosomes. Dresnok and I moved into neighboring houses in a small town called Li Suk in an area outside Pyongyang called Sung-gun-li, while Parrish and Abshier moved to a different town. The cadres claimed Parrish and Abshier were more than one hundred kilometers away (though we would soon discover that they were really only in the next valley over, about a half an hour’s walk). This caused an afternoon of confusion as we scrambled to split up the few chickens and rabbits we had been keeping until then. I was sad to see Parrish and Abshier go, but after the four of us had been living on top of each other for so long, having some space to ourselves was a welcome relief.

  Actually, we weren’t really by ourselves. You are never really alone in North Korea to begin with, but as part of our new living arrangement, the Organization issued us each a North Korean woman as a cook. Each one was supposed to live with one of us to cook, clean, and keep an eye on us. To tell the truth, they were basically supposed to be unofficial wives, fulfilling all of the roles that wives traditionally fulfill. Since they were North Koreans, however, there was never any chance any of us would actually marry any of them, since the Organization would not allow one of its daughters to be the spouse of pigs like us. (Why it was okay for them to be our consorts, however, was yet another contradiction to their twisted logic that I was never able to unravel.) In line with that sentiment, the North Koreans thought that they had ensured there was no chance that we could tarnish the supposed purity of the North Korean race by producing halfbreed children. All of the cooks had already been married and divorced by their husbands because they were believed to be infertile. (When Abshier’s cook got pregnant in 1978, the Organization must have decided that this policy was not such a good idea, after all, since she disappeared overnight, and within two years, the other cooks had been moved out.)

  Lee Sung-ji was my cook. From the very first moment, however, she and I did not get along. Her ex-husband was the police chief of a small town named Hong-ju, south of Pyongyang. He divorced her at age twenty-eight after years of unsuccessfully trying to have children. The very first thing she said when she arrived at my house and learned the nature of her new assignment was, “I am not cooking for any American dog. They killed my father.” It mostly went downhill from there. True to her first declaration, she hardly cooked at all, which was supposedly her primary reason for being there. And she never cleaned anything. But more than that, our personalities never meshed. We clashed all the time.

  At first, she tried to blackmail me into buying her things at the Pyongyang Shop. She threatened to turn me in to the cadres, for example, for rules that I had broken. I told her, “Go ahead. You do just as many freedalisms as I do, and I will rat you out worse.” Then she threatened to have sex with Dresnok to make me jealous. I just laughed at that one. “Go ahead,” I told her. “You are going to have to find something I care about if blackmail is going to work.” So finally she settled on simply bribing me, which worked a lot better. She had some bee boxes that were producing a fair amount of honey that she could sell for won, so she had quite a bit of money coming in. She always wanted me to buy
her things at the Pyongyang Shop, things that locals could not get their hands on, like nylon sweaters or Seiko watches. I had access to the Pyongyang Shop but no money. So instead of threatening me, she gave me a cut of her action, and in return I bought her some of the stuff she wanted from the foreigners’ store.

  We found out where Abshier and Parrish lived faster than anybody counted on. One day, only about a month after we all split up, Dresnok’s cook and mine were out shopping in another town a few kilometers away when they noticed two houses that looked exactly like theirs. They went up to the doors, knocked, and started talking to Abshier’s and Parrish’s cooks. It didn’t take them more than two minutes to put it all together. Later that afternoon, Abshier and Parrish paid us a surprise visit. It had only been a few weeks, so there wasn’t much to catch up on. The biggest news was that they both seemed to get along with their cooks, while Dresnok and I were having a hell of a time with ours. That night, we went to check out their houses. (That’s what we said, anyway—we really wanted to see how good-looking their cooks were.)

  Dresnok turned stoolie on all of us that night and ratted out the fact that we had made contact. He said he got scared that someone would see his shoe tracks in the mud, and since nobody in the whole country had feet as big as he did, they would know instantly he had been somewhere he shouldn’t. So he went straight to our leader and confessed. The next day, the Tall Cadre came and bawled us out something fierce. He must have yelled for an hour straight, made us do extra self-criticisms, increased our studies, and didn’t let us leave the house. While we pushed the rules as far as we could as often as we could, this infraction really mattered to the Tall Cadre. At one point, he slammed his fist down on a desk and cracked the five-millimeter-thick desktop glass.