The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  My first night in the North was unforgettable. The release of the tension of the past months must have caused me to drink more than I normally would at the reception—I have no memory of going to bed. I was awakened by thirst around two or three in the morning. My surroundings were silent except for the cries of a scops owl in the distant forest. Its call sounded no different from what you would hear coming from Bukhan Mountain in Seoul, or the hills of Gwangju or Haenam; even the barking of dogs made me realize that the whole peninsula was one large village. My memories of life in the South flowed into the dark of the night like a memory of some faraway place. Scops owls do not divide themselves into communists and capitalists, but we Koreans had lived as separate countries for the past four decades. I could not believe I had crossed such a wide expanse of time to be here. Sleep fled at the fearful thought of our children inheriting the same fate.

  Drawn by birdsong, I opened the window and put my head out, staring toward the dark forest. The sky was turning blue. A thin ribbon of light appeared on the horizon, and the rich scent of loam filled the air. A new day was dawning over Pyongyang.

  I felt very much at home in Pyongyang, as it was my mother’s hometown. When we were growing up in the South she told us many stories, again and again, of her childhood, our family’s customs, the food, our relatives. While watching the Taedong River flow past, I could imagine my mother as a high school student skating over it when it froze in the winter. In any difficult moment of her life as a widow raising four children on her own, my mother would say determinedly, “I am a Pyongyang woman. Put me anywhere in this world and I could still raise all of you.” Through these repeated assertions, Mother was teaching us about the strength of Northern women and making sure we knew that as no one was going to help us, we had better help ourselves. My mother also taught me the taste of noti rice cakes, extra-large dumplings, and buckwheat noodles in dongchimi, a pickled radish broth, during the long winter nights. She would often lament that nothing in the South tasted as good as food in the North.

  From the time we fled to the South until the day she died, Mother kept all of her old land deeds and Japanese-era bonds in a battered briefcase. Sometimes she would secretly take them out to look at before bed—not so much to confirm her assets as to reminisce about the house and lands that she had grown up in. My memories of Pyongyang, where I lived until I was four, are as vague as a dream, but my mother remembered the place clearly. Its traces remained with her for a long time.

  Pyongyang was utterly different from Seoul and even more different from Tokyo or New York. If I had to compare it to a foreign city, it reminded me of Berlin. Both Pyongyang and Berlin had to be rebuilt over the rubble of intense bombing. When I visited East Berlin after the Wall came down, I thought of how the apartments there, built in the 1950s after the aerial bombardments, were shaped and structured exactly like those of Pyongyang’s Botonggang district. According to one theory, this came of imitating Moscow’s speedy rebuilding of its showcase capital. Foreigners criticized Pyongyang for its hodgepodge of architectural styles, but the eclectic nature of the buildings probably stems from the changes that followed the North’s ideological and social advances from the postwar era up to the 1980s. There were buildings and gardens that were Korean in style, but also plazas, bridges, and memorials that gave a Western impression. The more recent constructions were super modern, with the suspended construction of the Ryugyong Hotel, due to lack of funds, looking positively avant-garde. Pyongyang was not the Pyongyang of thousands of years of history, but a new city rebuilt from the ashes according to socialist urban planning. About a million South Koreans visited the Northern tourist and industrial attractions of Kaesong, Mount Kumgang, and Pyongyang from the end of 1990 to the early 2000s, when North–South exchange was at its height, and street views of Pyongyang are now broadcast regularly on South Korean television. But back then, during my first visit, the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc still existed, and North Korea managed to maintain its economic system of self-sufficiency and redistribution despite the difficulties. The country would fall into real peril a few years later, and from prison I would watch on TV what later became known as the Arduous March.

  Pyongyang was organized around its centers of employment. People who worked at the same company lived in the same apartment zones. Later on, black markets would appear first in the regions and then, when things got worse, in the back streets of Pyongyang, but all I saw then was foreign-currency shops (the equivalent to our duty-free shops), department stores, and the various amenities that one would expect to find alongside those places.

  In the accounts of Western journalists at the time and still today, Pyongyang tends to be described in the same terms: few people, cars, or shops on the street, many placards with slogans or statues and buildings dedicated to Kim Il-sung, pedestrians wearing drab clothes, a limited choice of products in department stores, shoddy goods, and a citizenry with no idea what is going on in the rest of the world. It’s true that everyone went to school or work at the designated time, traffic cut off at the designated time, and there were no bars or nightlife, which made the city seem dead after rush hour. The North did seem poorer than the South on that first visit, but it still seemed to be more or less maintaining its self-reliance. You could see many young people and families out and about on weekends, relaxing on the banks of the Taedong River or near Moranbong, changed from their old work clothes into weekend wear. But their lives did seem dull and over organized. They could be free only within limits, and any individual deviation was strictly forbidden. Even at the visitors’ center, the workers seemed to have weekend classes and gathered in a meeting at the end of every day. I once found Hye-sook sitting at the kitchen table, absorbed in writing something in a notebook. She was copying some “Words of instruction from the Dear Leader and Comrade Kim Jong-il” into it. It must have been homework assigned by the Party. I wondered if the high-ranking officials of the Party and its leader Kim Il-sung ultimately led boring, monotonous, and lonely lives themselves. In truth, my own life in Pyongyang was an example of such monotony. While awaiting Moon Ik-hwan’s arrival, I unofficially visited downtown Pyongyang, following the guide to the Mansudae Art Studio, the Pibada Theater, the Grand People’s Study House library, Pyongyang Maternity Hospital, Mangyongdae Children’s Palace, Pyongyang Department Store, the subway, the Chongsanri cooperative farm, the Juche Tower, Moranbong, and Mangyongdae where Kim Il-sung was born. Around March 25, I was informed that Pastor Moon had finally arrived in Pyongyang via Beijing. His visit was made possible by the help of the National Christian Council in Japan, Chung Kyung-mo, and the Korean businessman Yoo Won Ho. Before this, the head of the Hyundai Group, Chung Ju-yung, had visited North Korea with the permission of the South Korean government and had announced plans for his Mount Kumgang development. The North called for a joint committee toward holding a North–South summit and invited the leaders of the South’s ruling and opposition parties, Cardinal Kim Sou-hwan, Pastor Moon Ik-hwan, and Paek Ki-wan. But the South Korean government decided that Chung Ju-yung’s visit was legal and everyone else’s illegal; they alleged we were being used as pawns in North Korea’s reunification tactics. The government’s attitude was fundamentally a self-contradictory stance that went against the July 7 Declaration of 1988. South Korea’s broadcast news reported frantically on Moon Ik-hwan and me visiting North Korea, while some other media outlets were content to calmly record the facts.

  On the morning of March 27, one of the handlers came in looking nervous and said, “There’s an important event today.” He told me to put on a suit and tie, which made me anxious about the day ahead. The visitors’ residence people usually let me sleep in after a night of drinking and did their best to delay any other event I might have, so I could rest. I didn’t ask, but guessed it had something to do with Moon Ik-hwan and his group. I was driven to a house surrounded by forest; it took me a while to get my bearings. When a young man in a black suit and tie opened the car door for me, the handler
whispered that we were at the residence of Chairman Kim Il-sung. In the foyer, I saw the familiar face of Chung Kyung-mo. We gladly greeted each other, and when I looked around for Moon Ik-hwan, Chong told me that he was currently meeting the chairman. Moon had been invited as a guest of the Committee for the Peace ful Reunification of the Fatherland to discuss with Chairman Kim, in a political negotiation of sorts, the North’s proposal for federation-style reunification and the South’s proposal for a pan-Korean community. In other words, Chairman Kim Il-sung was discussing the different forms reunification could take with civilian reunification activists from South Korea. Roh Tae-woo’s pan-Korean community was an answer to Kim Il-sung’s proposed Koryo Federation, the contents of which would be reconfirmed in 2007, through the October 4 Joint Declaration between Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Jong-il. Reunification activists such as Moon Ik-hwan did not oppose Roh Tae-woo’s reunification plan at the time. They tried to convince Kim Il-sung that certain aspects of the North’s proposed Koryo Federation would be difficult to implement in practice, meaning that smaller steps were needed at first.

  The Southern activists’ plan for a federation was based on the idea that if either the South or the North made their own ideology or political system an absolute condition for reunification, it would only result in conflict and deepen the divide. The most reasonable solution seemed to be that each side accept the other as it was and create a national reunification government in which they would share the same rights and obligations, while maintaining political autonomy in their respective territories. This proposal for a reunified republic was suppressed all throughout the 1990s. Thousands of people were arrested at National Liberation Day events in 1994 and 1996, with over 400 being sent to prison. And yet all either side wanted was to pursue reunification through peaceful coexistence, with the North proposing reunification with both systems left intact and the South likewise respecting each other’s existence via their concept of a pan-Korean community. This was the proposal’s most important point of commonality with the North’s proposal: that the peaceful reunification of North and South was held to be the sacred duty of the nation.

  On June 15, 2000—two years after I was released from prison—President Kim Dae-jung of the Republic of Korea and Chairman of the National Defense Commission Kim Jong-il of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea met in Pyongyang to proclaim what would be called the June 15 North–South Joint Declaration, expressing their desire to come together to take ownership of and resolve the reunification issue, including humanitarian matters, social and cultural exchanges, and the question of political prisoners.

  The second point of the declaration indicated that the South’s community proposal and the North’s low-level federation proposal had something in common, and that reunification could be pursued along these lines. Of the three stages of South Korea’s plan, the first stage of a united Korea would require North and South to remain independent nations with their own defense structures and diplomatic corps, while cooperating through United Korea summits and cabinet meetings, maintaining a “one nation, two countries, two systems, two governments” approach. On the other hand, the North Korean “low-level” federation was similar to the South’s proposal in that it would maintain one nation, two countries, and two systems by allowing each region to handle their own defense and diplomacy, but differed in suggesting a single, unified government. In recent years, South Korea’s conservative governments have insisted on the total breakdown and absorption of North Korea into the South, but this is wishful thinking that deliberately ignores the influence of the US and China, which both claim ownership over the Korean peninsula.

  There were tall, intimidating men wearing black suits standing around the lobby and reception area, who I later learned were part of the North Korean secret service. Before I went in, they instructed me to answer every question the chairman asked me, to speak in short phrases and in a loud, clear voice, to never interrupt him or bring up anything I wasn’t asked, and to speak only of light matters, along with a bunch of other nonsense that, true to form, I promptly forgot the moment I stepped into the room. My “liberal” way of speaking left the men visibly disconcerted, while Kim Il-sung, who must have found my odd behavior amusing, laughed often during our talk.

  Chairman Kim stood waiting by the door as we stepped into the meeting area. He was tall and had a hoarse voice. He shook the hands of my companions, but at my turn he embraced me instead. He was bigger and broader than I was, and I felt as if I was being buried in his chest. I heard later that when he receives guests from far away, such as Koreans from overseas, he hugs them and pats them lightly on the back. He always used courteous language; in a more intimate moment he would ask in a low voice a question in informal Korean. He called me Comrade Hwang or Writer Hwang in private, but in public he always used the proper honorific of Mr. Hwang. He was, as in photographs from his youth, a handsome man with gray hair swept back and long, thick eyebrows that made a formidable impression. We sat at a round table with Pastor Moon to his left and me to his right. Also present were Chung Kyung-mo, Yoo Won Ho, and Yun Gi-bok and Chong Jun-gi from the North’s National Committee for the Peace ful Reunification of the Fatherland and the Party’s United Front Department. The chairman asked after Pastor Moon’s mother, who was nearing one hundred, and talked of his memories of Longjing and Bukgando.

  Many independence fighters had stayed at Pastor Moon’s house while he lived in Longjing; he said his mother had even taken care of the martyr An Jung-geun there. Chairman Kim also talked about Manchuria and his alliance with the Chinese resistance against the Japanese, how they used to give him goods or lodging, and how he signed off on IOUs with “Korean People’s Revolutionary Army Commander Kim.” He smiled as he recollected how Zhou Enlai, his closest friend in the Chinese government, had told him that any landowner who happened to have one of these IOUs was pardoned. He emphasized that old records and the family names of Manchurian people, such as the Gaoli, indicated that Manchuria was an ancient Korean land. In parts of China that used to be Korean territory, he added, they still drink what we in Korea call sikhye, which Deng Xiaoping especially enjoys; he lamented the failure of our ancestors to hold on to that huge territory. He also said that the Jurchen peoples used to live in North Hamgyong Province and that the Aoji Coal Mine and Jueul hot springs all got their names from Jurchen, as aoji means “fiery stone” and jueul means “hot water” in that language. There were still people in that province with old Jurchen surnames that had had to be changed to Korean ones. Whenever he spoke of some region, he would say something like “There was that woman from Myongchon who lost all three of her children during the war. Her oldest grandson should get married this year. Then she’ll feel more at peace.” He accurately remembered who lived in what neighborhood, and always turned the conversation toward his concern for the people.

  Out of the blue, Chung Kyung-mo asked the chairman whether his mother had been an evangelist. The chairman did not understand at first, but one of his men explained that Chung was asking whether his mother had been a Christian.

  He smiled and said, “My mother had a hard life, so she used to go to church to catch up on sleep.” Later I asked Chung why he had asked the chairman about his mother. He replied that Kim’s maternal grandfather had been a Presbyterian pastor and had an uncle on his mother’s side who was also a church elder, and that Kim’s father had attended Soongsil School, which was part of the Presbyterian church. Kim’s mother’s given name was Pan-sok, the old Korean translation of the name of the apostle Peter, so he had wondered if it were a Christian name. Come to think of it, my own mother’s family was Christian, as were most enlightened intellectuals in the North at that time. Chairman Kim’s father, Kim Hyong-jik, ran church-style night classes while organizing young people and participating in the nationalist independence movement. Later, as he learned about the Russian Revolution and imbibed modern ideas, his eyes were opened to the proletarian struggle. This was probably when he left his family in
Pyongyang to fight the Japanese as a communist guerrilla in Manchuria.

  Kim Il-sung spoke of the church for a bit before shifting to a new topic. “We were active around Paektu Mountain at the time. There was almost no one living around there. Aside from us, there were some locals who believed in Cheonbulgyo or something. They were slash-and-burn farmers who lived in tiny hamlets made up of a handful of log cabins. You know, religion is an amazing thing. Those people believed in Dangun and the Buddha and the mountain spirits, all mixed up, but they were a fine people. There’s nothing to eat in that primordial wilderness. The Paektu tundra has harsh winters, it’s nothing but snow and wind. We would come across these people during our marches from time to time. But even they had to abandon the place in the 1940s, when foreigners kept invading. We were the only ones left in the end.”

  I remember him as a natural storyteller who spoke through metaphors and his own experiences, rather than in abstractions.

  After the audience with Chairman Kim, Moon Ik-hwan’s team was scheduled to leave Pyongyang on April 3. I was going to stay behind for twenty more days researching the countryside. I called on Moon’s team the morning they were due to leave. Their lodgings were a visitors’ center on the banks of the Taedong River. The car entered a wide garden before stopping by a gazebo. Moon was sitting there alone, gazing down at the Taedong River. He said he had just written a poem, which he read to me in a ringing voice. We were all hopeless optimists in those days, but even so, I was particularly moved by the purity of his passion that enabled him to face so peacefully the imprisonment that surely awaited him upon returning to South Korea. We reminded each other that our trips to North Korea had been planned separately. We also worried over the businessman Yoo Won Ho, who had accompanied us without either party having had time to prepare. He was the weakest link and so would endure the worst of the interrogation. If he returned later than we did, he would be even more isolated and his position uncertain. In any case, he had chosen this path for himself, and despite our misgivings he handled his situation with aplomb. Pastor Moon advised, “We don’t have to arrive together and be arrested all at once. Mr. Hwang must write his travelogue of North Korea. Finish that, and then return. But you’re going to have a hard time of it. The longer you delay, the worse it’s going to be.”