by Paul Fischer
* * *
Around the time of the Arirang Festival, Choi was made to change residences. In the middle of the night Kang came into her room and told her to pack a suitcase. An army jeep was waiting outside. Kim Jong-Il preferred to move people under cover of darkness, so that they were more difficult to follow—and so that they would have a harder time keeping track of where, exactly, they were being taken.
They drove up mountain roads for two hours before arriving at a two-story building in Tongbuk-Ri. It was hidden in the woods, Choi recalls, “like a haunted house in the darkness.” Choi was introduced to her new private attendant, a middle-aged woman who looked like Kim Hak-Sun; this woman’s name, Choi was told, was Ho Hak-Sun.
The Tongbuk-Ri house was much more modest than the previous one. Choi’s room was a traditional room with tatami mats on the floor, with only a bed, a wardrobe, and a table for furniture. There was no radio. Choi felt discarded. She spent her time knitting and taking strolls in the mornings, and watching films in the afternoon. Her children’s birthdays came and went. She celebrated them in sad silence, full of pain. She hoped her son would grow up “a good, honest man” and that her daughter would “go on with [her] life … and marry a wonderful man.” She wondered where their father was and if he was taking care of them.
She remembered a day when she was a child and her mother had suddenly returned from running errands, hugged her daughter, and told her, “I just had to come home earlier because I was thinking of you.” At the time, Choi had giggled and shrugged it off. Now she understood the longing. She was desperate to see Seoul again, too. She missed the sight of “young women promenading in front of the stone wall of Toksu Palace, arm in arm; young men climbing up Paegundae and shouting ‘Yahoo!’ to hear the echo; the whole family sitting gathered around the television set after finishing supper and watching some drama and crying; people having little spats about some trivial thing and people rejoicing in sharing small pleasures with one another. Oh, how I wanted to see them once again!”
Mr. Kang introduced new elements to her ideological training. For 9/9 Day she was asked to write a “congratulatory message” to Kim Il-Sung, using an official book collection of congratulatory messages as a guide. The examples in the volume were “very lengthy and tedious,” Choi said. “The endless adjectives of praise and respect made the sentences meaningless.” She tried her best, jotting down a few sentences in the euphoric, sycophantic style expected of her. Kang read over her letter, nodded, and put it in an envelope. Then he handed her a form headed “Autobiography for Party Cadres.”
“Now you must write down the history of your life and submit it to the Party,” Kang said. “You must write only the truth. You must try hard to examine and judge yourself and your actions. Then write down your conclusions.”
“I’ve never written an autobiography,” Choi protested. She found the exercise not just absurd but upsetting. The last thing she wanted to do was revisit, in depth, the life she had been forced to give up. “How can I just sit down and write one?”
“This is the solicitude of the Dear Leader Comrade Kim Jong-Il.”
“Solicitude?”
Kang gestured at the form. “Now write it quickly.”
Choi picked up a pen. I was born on November 9, 1930, she began. I am the third daughter of my father Choi Young-Hwan.… As she wrote, Kang read her drafts and requested more detail here, or the specific inclusion of an uncle or a cousin there. Choi didn’t understand the logic of it, but she understood that it was some kind of test, an initiation. To what, she had no clue.
* * *
When she wasn’t working on her autobiography, Madame Choi filled her days the best she could. Along with reading and knitting, she took to walking through the nearby woods. She noticed that large parts of the compound’s grounds were blocked off by signs announcing they were off-limits. After a couple of weeks she was joined by a stray dog, and she started taking food from the table to feed him. She also made friends with one of the gardeners, and whenever she could she would be outside with him, on her knees, ripping up weeds and planting flowers. She liked manual work. “Working with my hands netted results—tangible results. Knitting (or gardening) seemed honest and down-to-earth in my life, where everything else was in chaos.” She kept a diary, too, and that helped keep her sane and her perspective steady.
Her new attendant, Ho Hak-Sun, was a warm and reassuring presence. She brought Choi ginseng liquor when she was anxious. “Drink a little of this,” she would urge. “You’ll feel less tense.” Often she would squeeze Choi’s hand and try to soothe her. “Please calm down, Madame. It’s bad for your health. Be strong and learn to bear it. Better days will come.”
“When I first met her,” Choi recalled, “she was in her midfifties. She was not beautiful, but she wasn’t ugly either. She seemed kind and loyal. Though she had little education, she was very intelligent. I praised her, saying, ‘If you had received a formal education, you would most definitely have been a great success in life.’ She was born to a poor family of slash-and-burn farmers in the mountains of Onsong, North Hamgyong Province. She was married when she was eighteen, in the same ordinary clothes she wore every day.” Shortly after the wedding she had had a child, and shortly after that her husband had gone to fight in the Korean War. There he died, along with every other adult male member of the family. Like all war widows, Hak-Sun was made a member of the Workers’ Party, in remembrance of her family’s sacrifice, and thanks to this she was able to improve her station. She started work in a small Party-run store, taught herself to read, write, and count, and rose to managing the store. By 1964, eleven years after the end of the war, she was transferred to Pyongyang to work for the Central Committee, where, she told Choi, she “was involved in sensitive, secret work.” She worshipped Kim Il-Sung. She kept two savings books in her home, both of them always of the same amount: 4 won, 15 chon in the first (representing Kim Il-Sung’s birthday, April 15), 2 won and 16 chon in the other (Kim Jong-Il’s birthday, February 16). Her greatest ambition in life was to distinguish herself enough to receive a Kim Il-Sung watch, engraved with the Great Leader’s name. “The name watch,” Ho Hak-Sun told Choi, “represents the glory of the Communist Party and confers privileges on the wearer.” Choi found her a remarkable woman and took to calling her auntie, or sister.
As 1978 drew to an end the weather turned bitingly cold. Hak-Sun brought Choi a People’s Army winter uniform, a drab, mustard-colored, quilted cotton jacket, pants, and padded cotton shoes, and asked her to wear it on her walks. They were the warmest clothes she could find. Choi hadn’t seen a North Korean army uniform since 1952. Looking in the mirror, she thought she looked ridiculous.
She walked twice every day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. As the weather dropped below zero, sometimes as far down as minus twenty degrees Celsius (minus four Fahrenheit), she saw people climbing trees to get over the compound walls, collecting firewood to bring home. Choi learned later that families in the local area were given small rations of coal dust, which they were supposed to turn into briquettes to use for cooking and heating, a process that no one had the time for, busy as they were with six-day workweeks, daily compulsory ideology training sessions, and “volunteering.” One man, when he saw Choi, froze and started to tremble. “He kept bowing to me,” Choi remembered. “He looked over seventy years old. He had icicles on the end of his mustache and his cheeks were sunken.” She stepped forward to help him, but the old man panicked, apologized, and scuttled into the woods in terror. When the guards caught people such as him, they shot them or sent them to prison camps for theft. Sometimes Choi heard human beings wailing in pain in the distance, in rhythm, as though they were being flogged or beaten.
Most of all her curiosity was piqued by the other houses. Tucked away in the far corners of the compound, the small houses were all spread out from one another, but every now and then she would see a jeep or a Mercedes drive to one of them. Someone else must live here, Choi t
hought.
The Arab woman was the first one she met.
* * *
It was during one of her afternoon strolls that Choi ran into her. The woman was walking the other way and Choi abruptly stopped in surprise. It was the first non-Korean face Choi had seen in the country. “She had a high, shapely nose,” Choi describes, “and a beautiful complexion.” The Arab woman looked as curious about Choi as Choi was about her. Choi used the little English she knew and asked, “Where are you from?”
“I’m from Jordan,” the woman answered. She seemed relieved to talk.
“Jordan? You’re a long way from home.”
“Yes. Where are you from?”
“I’m from Japan,” Choi lied. She wasn’t sure why, but she didn’t want to say she was from South Korea.
“Where did you buy that hat?”
Choi was wearing one of the knitted hats she made to pass the time. “I made it myself.”
“Really? It’s really nice.”
Choi smiled. Neither of them spoke much English, and the conversation reached an impasse.
“Good-bye,” Choi said. She walked past the woman, but a few steps later she heard, “Are you happy?”
Choi stopped. She turned around. “Oh…” she mumbled and shrugged.
“It’s so frustrating,” the Jordanian woman said. “I cannot even write to my family.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” There was a pause. “See you again.”
When Choi told Hak-Sun about the encounter, the attendant frowned and suggested she avoid her—and anyone else—in the future. Choi ignored her. She knitted the woman a hat, and in return the Jordanian woman gave her one of her scarves for Christmas. A couple of months later she left, and Choi never saw her again.
Throughout December Mr. Kang was in the house more frequently than ever, pushing Choi to write New Year’s greetings to Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il, “written with lofty words and … four to five pages in length. It had to be the best writing possible. Even the paper it was written on had to be the best available.” If Choi made a mistake, or if a single character wasn’t “neat and clear,” she was required to restart that page from scratch. Kang read every draft. He criticized her for being repetitious or for using the same compliment to both men. “The right titles are missing here,” he said, pointing at a specific line. “Comrade Choi! Why do you still use this spelling? That erroneous spelling is only used in the South.” On Christmas Day, Kang finally approved drafts of both letters and brought her expensive paper to write the final missives. Not a single letter could be crooked, he reminded her, and every character was to be evenly spaced, or she would have to start over. “It took me two full days to write the two letters,” Choi says. “I wrote them so many times I still remember them almost verbatim. The letter I sent to Kim Il-Sung went: As the New Year approaches, I would like to send my regards to you, our sun, our father, our leader. Undefeated in hundreds of battles, man of steel and our esteemed leader who led the defense of our country against Japan and refused to kneel before the U.S. imperialists.…” The letter to his son began: Light of our people, our teacher, our dear Comrade Kim Jong-Il, I would like to express my deepest gratitude and thanks. I would also like to wish you good health for the next year. I thank you for taking me into your confidence and helping me to see the new light.…
Kang was pleased. Not everyone was privileged enough to send letters to these great men, he told Choi, and even among those letters, only a few, such as hers, would be personally read by them. Choi shook her head. The man genuinely believed she should feel blessed to write letters of gratitude to the men who had kidnapped her.
* * *
It was another six months before Choi met the beauty from Macao. She was on her usual stroll when she glimpsed the woman coming toward her. She was tall, with stylishly short, straight hair. Choi knew immediately she wasn’t North Korean. They both stopped in the path, facing each other for a moment. They exchanged greetings. The woman’s Korean was imperfect but good enough.
“Where are you residing?” Choi asked, stiffly and politely.
“There,” the woman pointed. “In Building Number Four.” It was the same house the Jordanian woman had lived in.
“You’re not from here, are you?” Choi asked.
“No, I’m Chinese, from Macao,” the woman answered.
Choi looked around. No one seemed to be watching them. She gestured at the woman to follow her to a more remote part of the woods.
“You speak Korean well,” she said when they stopped. “Where did you learn?”
“I learned it after coming here. I’ve been here for nearly a year.”
“What is your name?”
“My name is Hong. My English name is Catherine.” She didn’t ask for Choi’s name.
“What are you doing nowadays?” Choi asked.
“I’m studying Kim Il-Sung’s writings.” She stopped for a moment, then blurted out: “I know who you are, sister. You’re the famous actress, Choi Eun-Hee.”
“How do you know me?” Choi asked, surprised.
“In Macao I saw your picture in the newspapers quite often. I recognized you right away.”
Choi took a deep breath. Her whole body charged with curiosity, her voice trembling, she asked Catherine the question she had wanted to ask since the second she had first laid eyes on her.
“How did you get here?”
* * *
Catherine Hong was one in a long list of people abducted by North Korean operatives during the 1970s. Late at night on May 29, 1970, Lee Jhe-Gun and twenty-seven fellow fishermen were sailing their ship, the Bongsan, when several ships suddenly smashed into the side. Commandos swarmed aboard the fishing vessel, pointing their assault rifles at the fishermen and shouting, “Do you want to die? Get out! Get out!” The fishermen were lined up, and the Bongsan was tethered to one of the other ships and towed into North Korean waters.
In June 1974 two ethnic Korean Japanese children, aged three and seven, were taken by North Korean spies from their home in Saitama, Japan. They were brought to Tokyo, where they were kept for six months, before being put on a North Korean ship bound for the homeland. Their father, a leader of the network of North Koreans in Japan known as the Chosen Soren, had recently fallen out of favor with Pyongyang.
The next year, South Korean Go Myung-Seob and thirty-two fellow fishermen were sailing off the coast of Korea when the boat unknowingly drifted too far north. Suddenly the thirty-three men found themselves in North Korean custody, being forcefully sailed to the North. When they arrived, they were put to work doing hard labor. It was twenty-nine years before Go managed to escape back to South Korea. By then he had been forced to marry a North Korean, had fathered two children, and the majority of his crewmates had died. When he escaped, he felt certain his wife and two children would be killed as punishment.
In November 1977, thirteen-year-old schoolgirl Yokota Megumi had just finished badminton practice in her hometown of Niigata, a harbor city on the west coast of Japan. She waved good-bye to her teammates and friends and headed on the short walk home, her racquet stuffed in her white bag over one shoulder, her black school bag in her hand. She paused at a traffic light. Suddenly, strange men grabbed her off the sidewalk, trussed her, and stuffed her into a Soviet military cargo bag. She woke up on a rusty fishing trawler headed for North Korea. For the next sixteen years she underwent isolation and reeducation in Pyongyang, was forced to teach Japanese at Kim Jong-Il Military University, and then was made to marry another abductee, this one from South Korea. She reportedly committed suicide following a nervous breakdown in 1993.
In June 1978, the family of Yaeko Tagushi, a twenty-two-year-old bar hostess in Tokyo, received a phone call from the nursery where her two young children were enrolled. Yaeko had not turned up to pick up the children; was something wrong? She had gone out to buy herself a new blouse and was never seen again. Thirteen years later, her family learned that she had been taken, against her will, to North Korea.
That same summer, five South Korean high school students disappeared from island beaches and were presumed drowned. Two decades later the teenagers, now middle-aged adults, were discovered in North Korea, working as instructors at Kim Jong-Il’s spy school, teaching North Korean would-be operatives about the culture and lifestyle of South Korea.
Yasushi Chimura and his fiancée, Fukie Hamamoto, were twenty-three years old on July 7, 1978. They were taking a walk after a date on the rocky beach of Wakasa Bay, near Obama, Japan, when they were attacked by North Korean men and forced onto a nearby boat. They were presumed missing for more than twenty-five years before the North Korean government admitted to their abduction. They were returned to Japan in October 2002, leaving behind the three children they had while in the DPRK, who are considered full North Korean citizens by the Pyongyang regime.
Later that month, twenty-year-old Kaoru Hasuike and his girlfriend Yukiko were on a secluded corner of the beach near Kashiwazaki City, trying to get away from the summer crowds. A man walked up to Kaoru with a cigarette and asked if he had a light. Before Kaoru could answer, the man struck him in the face and other strangers ran over. Within seconds, the stunned couple had been gagged, pinned down, and shoved into two large body bags. The young couple was left on the ground for a short while. They could hear the men standing around them, probably waiting for any potential witnesses to clear off. Then the men loaded the two onto an inflatable dinghy, which took them to a larger ship farther out at sea. When Kaoru and Yukiko were let out of the bags they were drugged. As the cool evening air stroked their faces, they watched the lights of their home city fade into nothingness over the horizon. Two days later they were in Chongjin, North Korea.
Thirteen days after Hasuike and his girlfriend vanished from the beach, nineteen-year-old Hitomi Soga and her mother, Miyoshi, were buying ice cream on Sado Island, forty-three miles across the water from Kashiwazaki, when three men ran up to them and beat them to the ground. They gagged them, stuffed them into black body bags, and carried them to the nearby river, where a small motor-powered skiff awaited. The boat took them to a larger ship off the coast. Hitomi was locked in the hold until the next morning, by which point land was nowhere to be seen on the horizon. She didn’t know where her mother had been taken.