A Kim Jong-Il Production

by Paul Fischer

  At around sunset the party subsided and Choi prepared to leave. As Kim and a guard escorted her out into the garden, she was startled by a series of loud explosions. The sky turned blindingly bright. Seeing her flinch with terror, Jong-Il laughed. “Our comrades are setting off fireworks for my birthday!”

  The scene stuck in her mind as the Mercedes drove away. Just weeks before, she had been at home, divorced with two children, worrying that her small school might go out of business. Now she had just spent the day with Kim Jong-Il, son of a Communist dictator, as he filmed his own birthday party to the bursts of fireworks.

  11

  Accused

  “I had hoped 1978 was going to be a good year for me,” Shin Sang-Ok wrote later. He hadn’t made a film in two years, but things seemed to be looking up at last. With the help of Kim Hyung-Wook, a friend and former KCIA chief who had also fallen out of President Park Chung-Hee’s graces and now lived in exile in New Jersey, Shin was applying for a visa to emigrate to the United States. Hollywood was the home of his favorite filmmaker, Charlie Chaplin, and of the studio, Columbia Pictures, that Shin Film had emulated, and filmmaking there was free of political constraints and censorship. Shin hadn’t quite broken off his relationship with Oh Su-Mi, but he wasn’t especially keen on living out his life with her either. With the stringent travel controls the South Korean government placed on its citizens, Oh Su-Mi would likely not receive permission to follow him to the United States, and that would be that. Shin would come back to Seoul often enough, he was sure, to see his children, who for now lived with him but stayed with his brother’s family while he traveled, and he and Oh could stay in touch. That his life plans might throw Oh’s in complete disarray didn’t seem to cross his mind for very long.

  It was only Choi Eun-Hee that bothered him. Two weeks after she had left for Hong Kong she had yet to return to Seoul. Shin had a flight to Los Angeles booked for the next day and was growing concerned. He decided, before leaving, to call Lee Young-Seng, his Chinese representative in Hong Kong. He was probably just being foolish, Shin thought, and Lee would quickly put his mind at ease.

  “Have you seen Eun-Hee?” Shin asked, after exchanging some pleasantries with Lee.

  There was a short silence on the line. “I can’t discuss it on the phone,” Lee finally said. “Come to Hong Kong.”

  “What do you mean? What’s happened to her?”

  “You have to come to Hong Kong. Just come. Please.”

  * * *

  The next day Shin was met at the Hong Kong airport by Lee Young-Seng, who looked anxious and uncertain, and Kim Kyu-Hwa, the Shin Film manager who worked with Lee. At the hotel Kim filled Shin in on the facts: Choi had disappeared on January 14, leaving her luggage behind in the hotel. No one had heard from her since, and no one had been in or out of her room.

  For a while, Shin sat bewildered.

  “She hasn’t used her room in more than ten days,” he said.

  “It looks that way,” Kim answered.

  “Could she have been robbed? She probably wasn’t carrying much money.” He knew his ex-wife.

  “Probably wasn’t a traffic accident, either,” Kim suggested.

  “If it had been, it would have been in the newspapers,” Shin agreed.

  “The hotel is quite upset. They’ve just left her bags in her room.”

  “There has to be some trace of her, some clue. Who did she meet with in Hong Kong?”

  “Wang Dong-Il,” Kim began, “and Lee Sang-Hee, and—”

  “Lee Sang-Hee?” Shin remembered the woman. She was a friend of Kim’s who frequently visited the Hong Kong office, that cute daughter of hers always in tow. Sang-Hee had always unsettled him a little, however. Every time she saw him she took endless pictures of him, calling them “souvenirs.” She had run a café in the movie district of Seoul for years, if Shin remembered their conversations right, then considered running for the National Assembly, and later traveled to innumerable trade fairs in Macao and Guangzhou. Her husband was a pro–North Korean businessman who had left South Korea for China and was engaged in trade with the North. Mrs. Lee said he often traveled to Pyongyang.

  All this information crossed Shin’s mind in a flash, but his thoughts snagged on one word, like a shirt sleeve caught on something sharp: Pyongyang. There had been rumors, the past couple of years, of people abducted by North Korean forces, and some presumed defectors had escaped from the North claiming they had never voluntarily gone there in the first place. The pianist Paik Kun-Woo and his wife, the actress Young Jung-Hee, alleged that North Korean agents had tried to kidnap them in Zagreb in July 1977, just six months earlier.

  “How did they meet?” he asked.

  “I introduced them and they seemed to hit it off pretty well,” answered Kim.

  “Where is that woman now?”

  “I tried to call her several times, but no one answered the phone. I went to her house, but no one was there either.”

  “Then they might have both disappeared together!”

  “It looks that way,” Kim conceded.

  “Do you think the North Koreans are behind this?” Shin let slip, off the cuff.

  Kim knew Shin was thinking of Mrs. Lee’s North Korean husband. “I wouldn’t think so. Why would they do something like this?”

  “Who actually invited Eun-Hee to Hong Kong? Who paid her expenses?” Shin asked.

  “I don’t know,” Kim said. He looked embarrassed.

  They were both quiet for a while. They had barely begun and they were at a dead end already.

  Shin reported his ex-wife’s disappearance to the police and to the South Korean embassy. He tried to track down Mrs. Lee’s daughter and learned that she had not appeared in school for some time. And then, in a display either of his characteristic self-centeredness or merely of his desperation not to jeopardize his plans, he left for Los Angeles. In his memoir, he writes of his decision, “My plane reservation had been scheduled and it was hard to change the ticketing, especially with the big Chinese lunar New Year’s celebration approaching.” With that, he left the mystery of his ex-wife’s disappearance unsolved and boarded the plane.

  * * *

  During the nearly three weeks he stayed in the United States, Shin met with his friend Kim Hyung-Wook, the former KCIA chief. He put an immigration lawyer on retainer—paying him a first fee of $2,000, a sizable chunk of the money he had left since the bankruptcy—and he filed an application for a temporary O classification visa, reserved for individuals “with extraordinary ability and internationally recognized record of extraordinary achievement in the arts.” To secure it he needed a U.S. company to sponsor him, so he also visited Robert Wise, the director and producer of West Side Story and The Sound of Music. While filming the Steve McQueen picture The Sand Pebbles in China in 1966, Wise had fallen in love with the Far East; he had a great sense of community and was passionate about helping fellow filmmakers. Wise agreed to sponsor Shin. In his free time Shin sketched out ideas for a film of Sleeping Beauty, which he was considering as his first English-language project—the universality of the tale helping him over the language barrier—and he fell in love with a 1972 novel by David Morrell titled First Blood, about a Vietnam vet named John Rambo who brings the war back home to Madison, Kentucky. The book had been purchased by Columbia Pictures, who then sold it to Warner Bros., who then sold it to someone else, and so on for the previous six years. Shin thought he might be able to get in line to buy the film rights and get Akira Kurosawa’s longtime collaborator, Ryuzo Kikushima, to write an English-language film adaptation. Shin knew very little English and Kikushima none; they planned to write in Japanese then have the screenplay translated.

  While Shin was in California, the news of Choi’s disappearance hit the Korean newspapers. The American correspondent of the Hankook Ilbo newspaper managed to track Shin down and flooded him with questions. Shin answered the best he could, but then the reporter said something that startled him.

  “You know,
many people suspect you might be somehow involved in Madame Choi’s disappearance.”

  “That’s nonsense,” Shin replied. It almost made him laugh.

  When he landed in Hong Kong on February 28, a dozen reporters were waiting for him at the arrivals gate. With them were police detectives of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Hong Kong Police Force.

  12

  Musicals, Movies, and Ideological Studies

  “I want you to show Madame Choi some movies,” Kim Jong-Il said. “The first one I want her to see is The Forty-First. You know the one I mean.”

  Kim Hak-Sun nodded. The three of them were sitting in the back of Jong-Il’s car, parked outside the Korea Film Studio. It was two in the morning. Earlier that evening Choi and Jong-Il had attended a performance of the Mansudae Art Theater. Afterward, the conversation had drifted to movies.

  “Are there film studios in North Korea?” Choi asked.

  “Yes, of course we have a film studio!” Kim answered. “Would you like to see it?” Choi was about to say that yes, she would, maybe later in the week, but Kim had already jumped to his feet. He ordered the nearest guard to get his car ready.

  They drove to the studio and, without getting out of the car, Kim gave Choi and Hak-Sun a guided tour, driving down the silent, deserted sets. There was a street made up to look like Korea in the colonial era, another dressed as Meiji-era Japan, a third that was a seedy version of a Seoul city block from the 1950s. The “European set” seemed to consist of nothing but a Tyrolean-looking chalet and an English country house facing each other on a hill. Down below them a fake vineyard and country church were reminiscent of the south of France. As the car drove around the buildings, Choi saw that each side of the houses had been made to look like a different stereotypical house from a certain European culture, as if the buildings were architectural Rubik’s cubes. She had hoped Kim’s decision to visit so late meant a night shoot might be under way, but there wasn’t a soul other than them in the whole studio. What she saw of the place looked rather small and shabby, Choi thought.

  Now they were outside the gate, idling in the car after the impromptu tour. “You know the film I mean,” Jong-Il repeated.

  Hak-Sun nodded, like a deep bow from the shoulders up. “I’ll set it up first thing in the morning.”

  The Forty-First, oddly, was not a North Korean film but a Soviet one, made in 1956 by Grigori Chukhrai. It had been a Russian box-office hit and won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, but Choi had never heard of it. The print wasn’t subtitled, so Hak-Sun explained the narrative as it went on. Set during the Russian Civil War, the film told the story of an expert Red Army sniper, Maria, with forty White Army victims to her name. She fails to kill her forty-first target but takes him prisoner, finds out he knows sensitive information about his camp’s strategy, and decides to escort him back to headquarters herself. The ship taking them across the Aral Sea is capsized and they are stranded on a small island, sole survivors. Over time the pair fall in love. Then, one day, a boat appears offshore, with the promise of rescue—but the boat belongs to the White Army. The male officer, ecstatic, rushes into the sea and starts swimming toward the ship. Maria calls out to him to stop, but he keeps swimming. She loads her rifle, places it against her shoulder, and aims. “Don’t!” she pleads. He doesn’t listen, so Maria, her eyes full of tears, shoots him. Overcome with grief, she drops the weapon and dives into the sea behind him, embracing his corpse and slowly drifting away.

  Choi wasn’t sure why Kim had chosen this film to show her first among all others. Maybe he had seen it when younger and always remembered it, or maybe it was the kind of film Jong-Il hoped to make—melodramatic, with big emotions against a dramatic historical backdrop, full of politically approved propaganda but still artful enough to win the second-highest prize at the world’s most prestigious film festival. Choi was pondering this as she stood and Hak-Sun turned the lights back on.

  “That movie was made just after Khrushchev took power in the Soviet Union,” Hak-Sun said. “You understand the bottom line of the film, don’t you? If you’re a traitor, it doesn’t matter if you’re a lover, a friend, or what…”

  She left the words hanging in the air.

  * * *

  A few weeks after her arrival in North Korea, Choi began to be allowed out of the compound. The excursions were always meticulously planned and tightly controlled. She would be informed at the last minute, and then she and Hak-Sun would climb into a Mercedes, two or three guards following in another car behind them. The convoy usually headed into Pyongyang.

  Pyongyang, reduced to rubble by American bombs, had been redesigned from scratch as the state’s most emblematic work of propaganda, full of imposing monuments, vast plazas, and wide boulevards, all of it made out of white concrete, completely free of pollution and traffic jams. This was, Kim Il-Sung had claimed, the perfect city, and the perfect capital for the perfect People’s Paradise.

  In fact, it was a show city accessible only to the elite, and the paradise, of course, was no such thing. Rather than a state of equal brotherhood and sisterhood, Kim had introduced an elaborate social order in which the eleven million ordinary North Korean citizens were classified according to their perceived political reliability. The songbun system, as it was known, ruthlessly reorganized the entire social system of North Korea into a communistic pseudofeudal system, with every individual put through eight separate background checks, their family history taken into account as far back as their grandparents and second cousins. Your final rating, or songbun, put you in one of fifty-one grades, divided into three broad categories, from top to bottom: the core class, the wavering class, and the hostile class. The hostile class included vast swathes of society, from the politically suspect (“people from families of wealthy farmers, merchants, industrialists, landowners; pro-Japan and pro-U.S. people; reactionary bureaucrats; defectors from the South; Buddhists, Catholics, expelled public officials”) to kiaesaeng (the Korean equivalent of geishas) and mudang (rural shamans).

  Although North Koreans weren’t informed of their new classification, it quickly became clear to most people what class they had been assigned. North Koreans of the hostile class were banned from living in Pyongyang or in the most fertile areas of the countryside, and they were excluded from any good jobs. There was virtually no upward mobility—once hostile, forever hostile—but plenty downward. If you were found to be doing anything that was illegal or frowned upon by the regime, you and your family’s songbun would suffer. Personal files were kept locked away in local offices, and were backed up in the offices of the Ministry for the Protection of State Security and in a blast-resistant vault in the mountains of Yanggang province. There was no way to tamper with your status, and no way to escape it. The most cunning part of it all was that Kim Il-Sung came up with a way for his subjects to enforce their own oppression by organizing the people into inminban (“people’s groups”), cooperatives of twenty or so families per neighborhood whose duty it was to keep tabs on one another and to inform on any potentially criminal or subversive behavior. These were complemented by kyuch’aldae, mobile police units on constant lookout for infringers, who had the authority to burst into your home or office at any time of day or night. Offenses included using more than your allocated quota of electricity, wearing blue jeans, wearing clothes bearing Roman writing (a “capitalist indulgence”) and allowing your hair to grow longer than the authorized length. Worse still, Kim decreed that any one person’s guilt also made that person’s family, three generations of it, guilty of the same crime. Opposing the regime meant risking your grandparents, your wife, your children—no matter how young—being imprisoned and tortured with you.

  Historically, Koreans had been subject to a caste system similar to India’s and equally as rigid. In the early years of the DPRK, the North Korean people felt this was just a modernized revitalization of that traditional social structure. By the time they realized something was awfully wrong, that a py
ramid had been built, and that at the top of it, on the very narrow peak, sat Kim Il-Sung, alone, perched on the people’s broken backs, on their murdered families and friends, on their destroyed lives—by the time they paused and dared to contemplate that their liberator, their savior, was betraying them—in fact, had always betrayed them—it was already much, much too late.

  * * *

  As a “guest” of Kim Jong-Il, Choi was often taken to the otherwise inaccessible Pyongyang, as well as to famous sites of the revolution, such as Kim Il-Sung’s birthplace in Mangyongdae, a thatched-roof peasant hut and small barn just outside of the city center. Both buildings looked as if they had just been built, like a make-believe set in a theme park. Faking a peasant hut from the 1910s was nothing for the Kim regime: in later years they would create bogus ancient tombs to give their regime legitimacy, “proving” that the legendary Korean king Dongmyeong, whose dynasty ruled for seven centuries, had lived north of the thirty-eighth parallel. The tales said Dongmyeong was born from an egg impregnated by the sun and rode a unicorn into battle. In November 2012, the regime’s Central News Agency announced the further news that the unicorn’s grave had been discovered, conveniently right in the center of Pyongyang and under a rectangular rock marked UNICORN LAIR. The director of the DPRK’s National Academy of Science declared, “This discovery proves that Pyongyang was a capital city of Ancient Korea as well as of the Koguryo Kingdom.” That it also “proved” the existence of a mythical creature, remarkably, seemed secondary.

  Disappointingly, Choi’s outings involved no unicorns but a lot of looking at statues, including the gold-plated effigy of Kim Il-Sung himself, in front of which Choi was ordered to bow and of which she was proudly told that it was “a full three yards taller than the Egyptian sphinx.” (Later in 1978, the Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping visited Pyongyang and, upon seeing the shining gold idol, expressed concern over how Beijing’s money was being spent. The gold covering was stripped and replaced by an equally shiny copper.)