The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  I could only smile like an idiot. She shrugged and gave me back my passport.

  The airport was a bit of a mess, especially around the baggage claim area. It was dark inside, like some bus terminal out in the country. The passengers milled about in the small space, waiting almost an hour for their luggage to emerge. The conveyer belt looked filthy, made of repurposed tires shabbily fastened together. I sat down on the lowest step of a stairway, ready to wait it out until the crowd thinned.

  Finally, a short man in a windbreaker who appeared to be searching for someone came up. He looked at me and said, in clear, North-accented Korean:

  “Are you Mr. Hwang?”

  I said I was.

  “Do you have much luggage?”

  I said it was all so chaotic that I was waiting for more people to leave.

  I wasn’t surprised the man was North Korean. He looked nervous, so I teased him a little. He must have been a section chief in the Committee for the Peace ful Reunification of the Fatherland, and, perhaps trying to disarm me with friendly intimacy, had showed up conspicuously chewing gum. I’m sure it was intentional, because I never saw him chew gum once we were in Pyongyang. I was probably the first South Korean he had ever spoken to. His hair was slicked back like an actor from the 1930s, and his hitched-up collar against his deeply tanned face made him look like a country mouse who had smartened himself up for a jaunt in the big city. I heard later that, every Friday, the Party administrators went to the communal vegetable farms outside Pyongyang to do volunteer labor.

  “Please wait while I bring the car around.” He slipped away. I sat there alone again, thinking that there was no turning back now—I really was headed for North Korea. He grabbed my bags without asking and put them in the back of a waiting Benz. The man sitting behind the wheel grumbled in lieu of greeting: “We’ve been here every day since Wednesday. You’re not an easy man to find!”

  He was quite different from the first handler. There was a sharpness about him, a touch of frost. It was he who recognized me first, apparently, when I was crouched in the corner of that airport.

  “Since when do you wear glasses?” he asked, as if he’d known me for years.

  “I’ve had these about a year now.”

  “You’re more handsome than in the photographs.”

  The handler next to me said, “Today is Saturday so we must stay for two nights in Beijing. Is that all right?” He explained that the only flights to Pyongyang departed on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays.

  The shadows of poplar trees along the avenue whipped past in the car’s headlights. We reached the Beijing Hotel, which had been enlarged three times since it was first built in 1915 and was bleak and empty-looking compared to the cozy compactness of Japanese hotels. In any case, my mind was running so far ahead to the land of the North that I barely paid attention to the foreign land around me.

  In the oddly stark atmosphere of my room, the handler and I clinked glasses filled with some alcohol he had brought with him. I listened to him rant about China, because we didn’t have much else to talk about. But amid his complaints about the chaotic social changes and the revolution that had lost all meaning, he repeatedly exclaimed: “You have to admit, it’s not easy keeping this many people fed.”

  The next day was a Sunday. I was taken to see Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden Palace, but historic tourism had never really interested me. It was more fun people-watching: young people kept coming up to ask if I had any US dollars to exchange, and a young woman trailed us for a while, nagging me to hire her as a sexual companion. I saw many young people who looked like they were trying to imitate Western fads and seemed embarrassed to bump into a foreigner. I wasn’t a psychologist, but I too was born in a place rife with self-consciousness, which made me recognize it right away. On my way back from North Korea, I would see the same vaguely anxious faces during the demonstrations that would later grow into the Tiananmen protests. The protesters had made a model Statue of Liberty to lead a march with, and I couldn’t help feeling cynical about this, given my serious reservations about capitalism at the time. It was only when I was in exile in New York and heard the news of the ensuing disaster that I understood: what I had dismissed as naïveté was the longing of Chinese youth for a freedom that lay beyond the world they knew.

  ~

  The next day at the airport, I saw many Korean Japanese waiting for our flight; a few young people in neat suits were no doubt North Korean students studying abroad. There was also someone who seemed to be a Korean American. I could tell which regions they were from by their accents.

  A tall, demure North Korean woman in a blue uniform greeted us inside the plane, her face as softly pale and round as the moon.

  “Would you like a drink?”

  “What do you have?”

  “Pear soda, spring water, and beer.”

  I ordered spring water. The label said Shindeok Springs. A little later I was offered a stick of chewing gum on a tray, Jindallae brand. It was stamped with an intricate logo of an azalea, just like the ones on old cigarette cartons, and wrapped in some sort of paraffin paper instead of foil. The gum crumbled to pieces as I chewed but it softened after a long while. It turned out to be all right. These cheap products, so confidently offered by the crew, felt like a sneak peak into the North.

  It took about an hour and a half to fly from Beijing to Pyongyang. Just when I thought we’d had enough drinks and candy we were presented with a meal. My tray contained two slices of Castella sponge cake, some thick sausage from a government-run farm, and a boiled egg with some salt. It was like children’s picnic food or a sports day lunch. I peeled the egg, thinking of train trips where I would have offered an egg like this to the person sitting next to me. Soon my handler tapped my arm and said, “We are now in the airspace of the Fatherland.”

  I rushed to look out the window. The valleys of the rugged mountain range stretching down from the north looked like wrinkles, and the places the sun didn’t touch were still covered in heavy blankets of snow. Something hot rose up in my throat, and tears spilled down my cheeks. Our land! The native soil I’d been unable to set foot on for so long unfurled below me. As we dropped in altitude on our approach to Pyongyang, I could see villages and hills. Much of the mountains had been cultivated into terraced rice fields and orchards, and the straight lines of irrigation canals crisscrossed and converged in large man-made reservoirs. It was still early spring, the branches were bare, and the stretches of yellow earth were seemingly endless.

  ~

  The plane landed at Sunan Airport north of Pyongyang. I had to wait inside the plane with my handler while the other passengers disembarked. “Your visit is not to be made public until Pastor Moon arrives with his team. I hope you don’t mind a modest welcome.”

  Outside the window I could see a little girl in a blue coat holding a bouquet of flowers, a knot of people standing behind her. As I came down the stairs, the girl took a step forward and raised one arm in the Young Pioneer salute, hand angled over forehead, that I would grow accustomed to seeing.

  “We welcome you, Mr. Hwang Sok-yong, to your fatherland,” said the girl in a clear, confident voice.

  “Why, thank you,” I murmured as I accepted the flowers and kissed her cheek. “You remind me of my daughter.”

  A man who seemed to be in charge of protocol gestured to a tall old man standing nearby. “This is Comrade Baek In-jun, chairman of the Korean Federation of Literature and Arts.”

  Baek In-jun patted my back as he hugged me. “Welcome! It’s been too long!”

  I was embraced in turn by the novelist Choi Seung-chil and the poet Choi Young-hwa. My heart was fit to burst at the thought of them being my fellow countrymen and, furthermore, writers who shared the same love for our language. We were driven into the city. The first thing I noticed was a painted slogan at the entrance to an orchard that read “Let’s live our own way,” which would more or less sum up my impressions of the North.

  I was brought to
a visitor’s residence on the outskirts of Pyongyang. It was surrounded by fruit trees, and beyond that was a lush forest, making it hard it to tell where we were. Later I guessed it was only about ten minutes from downtown Pyongyang, somewhere in the northwestern suburbs. I was told it was an artists’ retreat as well as a visitors’ residence, used not only by writers but composers, screenwriters, and playwrights who needed to concentrate on finishing a piece of work. In my later visit to North Korea with my family, we would once more stay here in Seojaegol, where some of the houses had foreign flags flying out front, as if diplomats lived there. I also stayed for a long time in Cheolbongri, where there were four or five residences for foreign VIPs spaced widely apart around the reservoir.

  This one was a single-story Western-style house. A carpeted hallway led to a large room with a piano that doubled as a parlor and movie screening room. Beyond that was a dining room, a row of bedrooms, a study, a bathroom with a tub, a recreation room with a pool table and table tennis, and a library with three walls of shelves filled with books. My own spacious quarters lay closest to the foyer. The vestibule led to a living room and study, and another room led to a bedroom with a bathroom attached, much like a hotel suite. The study had a shelf of reference books, including an encyclopedia; an easy chair; a television; and a refrigerator in the corner with a Chollima logo. Inside a stationery box on the desk were a fountain pen, pencil, ballpoint pen, a ream of papers, a thick notebook, and a notepad.

  I opened the fridge: pear soda, tangerine juice, omija berry juice from Mount Kumgang, blueberry juice from Paektu Mountain, Ryongsong Beer, Geumgangsan Golden Ale, mineral water, and Shindeok Springs. There were some plain cookies, sandwich cookies, gummy candies, and sticks of taffy that I remembered from my childhood. The spring water and omija juice were the best and the taffy was good. It was made in the traditional way, by boiling down barley malt, and was not too sweet. The floors were neatly covered in woven straw mats from Kaesong. Kaesong was known for traditional handicrafts and light manufacturing, and these mats had been their designated product since the Korean War armistice.

  The bedroom had a wooden bed, a built-in wardrobe, two chairs and a little table with coffee, ginseng tea, Chinese jasmine tea, black tea, and an electric kettle. There was a dresser with a bottle of toner, creams, lily perfume, pomade, and camellia hair oil. There was pine-scented soap and ginseng toothpaste in the bathroom. Only one thing stood out in contrast to hotel rooms around the world: framed pictures of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. I’m aware that this was hardly a reflection of how ordinary, or even high-ranking, North Koreans lived, but I’ve gone into detail about the room and its objects because it reveals North Korea’s aspirational ideal of a rich life, dreamed up outside of the world market and made of homegrown, domestic products.

  They kept my room stocked with sweets, as well as snacks and chocolates. The North Korean author Choi Seung-chil, our companion in the residence, always slipped handfuls of sweets into the pockets of visiting professors or researchers from Kim Il-sung University or the Academy of Social Sciences, bidding visitors to give them to their grandchildren. He whispered to me that such items were rare in North Korea: children got to eat candy only on Kim Il-sung’s birthday, or as holiday rations once or twice a year.

  There was a small banquet on my first day at the residence. Seven of us gathered: Baek In-jun, Choi Young-hwa, Choi Seung-chil, my handler from Beijing, the people who worked at the house, another handler who assisted me with outside events, and myself. I never asked my handlers from the Party for their names or rank, and they never disclosed them to me. The Workers’ Party of Korea was said to have 2 million members, which was about a tenth of the entire population. I gave them nicknames in my usual teasing way, because I found it a little awkward not knowing what to call them. The man who met me in Beijing had said he was from the mountains of North Hamgyong Province, so I called him Mountain Man; the short and neat housekeeper said to have previously headed a middle school was Headmaster; and the man in charge who sang folk songs in a deep voice and who was, to quote the others, “a man of the people,” became Comrade Farmhand.

  There were two more men who assisted Comrade Farmhand and me with outside events. One of them was a handsome fellow with a pale face who had majored in French literature in university. I wondered if I should nickname him French Actor, but when I heard that his sixteen-year-old eldest daughter was good at the violin, my teasing took a new tack and I suggested that we betroth her to my son, the idea being that they would get married after reunification. We half-jokingly fretted that our children might wither into a spinster and a bachelor if reunification didn’t come soon, and we vowed that we would do whatever it took to make sure it did. He therefore became My In-law, a nickname that he reciprocated. His team helped with my tour of North Korea with the other artists, putting up with endless hassles as they took care of our housing, transportation, and food. Sometimes at events, when I got so emotional that I’d well up, they too would start crying as they stood behind me.

  The novelist Choi Seung-chil was a Hamju native who had graduated from Kim Il-sung University and worked as a reporter at Rodong Sinmun before his debut on the literary scene. After Liberation and peninsular division in 1945, his two daughters, college students at the time, had protested the establishment of what would become Seoul National University and had fled north across the newly demarcated border along with an aunt. Choi Seung-chil began writing fiction and became a full-time author affiliated with the Joseon Writers’ Alliance. He was earnest, warm, and ten years older than me, born in 1933. I used the honorific seonbaenim with him. He never attempted to force his ideas on me, and would instead wait patiently until I understood him. We often talked late into the night about life and its complications. He told me stories about what had happened to some of the Southern writers who had disappeared in the North, talking of their fates in a grim, sometimes regretful tone. He also criticized the formulaic way of writing that some of the North’s writers insisted on. I visited his apartment and met his family, and up until my last visit to Pyongyang in 1991, he always stayed with me as a companion at the visitors’ residence. Later, when I was imprisoned in South Korea, I heard that he had died of a brain aneurysm.

  Baek In-jun, a tall, wide-shouldered man with neatly combed hair and a back that was as straight as a rod, was seventy at the time; he had attended Yonhee College (now Yonsei University) and Rikkyo University before being conscripted into the Japanese military. He said he had roomed with the poet Yun Dong-ju during his Rikkyo days in a boarding house in Takadanobaba, Tokyo. Arrested for participating in the Korean independence movement, Yun Dong-ju died after being subjected to live medical experimentation in a Fukuoka prison. Baek In-jun knew by heart some of the poems Yun Dong-ju had written in their boarding house. One evening, perhaps a bit drunk, he recited Yun’s “Easily written poem” in a low voice:

  Night rain whispers outside the window.

  The six-tatami room is another country.

  To be a poet, I know, is a sad calling,

  but here I go scribbling down another line of poetry.

  Carrying an envelope sent to me, heavy with

  tuition money and the scent of sweat and love,

  I clutch my college notebook

  and head to the old professor’s lecture.

  When I think about it, I lost first one, then two,

  then all of my childhood friends.

  What more could I wish for

  than to settle to the bottom, alone?

  Life is difficult, they say.

  That writing a poem should come so easily

  is a shameful thing.

  The six-tatami room is another country.

  Night rain whispers outside the window,

  I light a lamp and hold back the dark a moment,

  the last of me waiting for the dawning of an era.

  I extend a small hand to myself,

  a first handshake in tearful solace.

  The
poet and vice-chairman Choi Young-hwa was a thin, frail-looking man in his sixties who surprised me with his strength. I’d heard that he sometimes snatched his grandchildren’s candy for himself but if any of his writer friends got into trouble, he would run around, heedless of the consequences, trying to get them out, even voicing his objections directly to the Party. He accompanied me to many of my events despite his wife being hospitalized for cancer. He was known to buy a whole case of beer when a group of younger writers came to call late at night, which they would drink “until they fell over,” arguing over literature and bellowing songs until dawn.

  The permanent staff included the cook, the driver, the Headmaster in charge of housekeeping, the women who took care of the meals and cleaned up after us, and the writer Choi Seung-chil. The other staff came and went as required. The chef was a young man who had just turned thirty and had served in their equivalent of the marines, where he had learned to cook, presumably Chinese cuisine, based on the flavor of his food. He had once been a weightlifter and bragged about how he used to clear up to ninety kilos. When drunk, he liked to dance to the fast Western dance music popular with young people. He had a tattoo on his bicep but was an otherwise simple and uncomplicated young man.

  And then there was Hye-sook. She was a young woman of twenty, assigned to the visitors’ residence with her mother. She said her home was in Nampo by the western coast near Pyongyang. Her mother seemed to go home every two or three days, but Hye-sook almost never left. Her father was a technician and her younger siblings attended middle school. Hye-sook had graduated high school and had not gone to college yet. She said she wanted to go to teacher’s college if she had the chance. I wondered if she played an instrument, because I’d heard that North Korean youth studied at least one performing art in school. Hye-sook said she specialized in artistic gymnastics and had performed many times. She mostly served our meals, made our tea, collected our laundry, and saw us out of the residence or welcomed us back at the gate. She didn’t say much but was a very warm person nonetheless. Whenever she read a book or set the table, she put on electronic music with a fast beat that she said was all the rage in Pyongyang. She once escorted us to a circus performance; after I complimented her on how pretty she looked in her formal hanbok, she spent the rest of the evening hiding from us in shyness.