A Kim Jong-Il Production

by Paul Fischer

  A short while after Shin submitted his second self-criticism, the warden informed him that he had permission to write Kim Jong-Il another letter, this one addressing the problems of the North Korean film industry and possible solutions. “I suggested methods for movie production and means for reducing the cost and improving the quality of North Korean films. I [also] suggested breaking away from old-fashioned production methods and instead producing films based on historical events” and on the exploits of real North Korean “champions.” Whenever they allowed him to go to that room he wrote letter after letter, handing them to the guards despite never hearing back. “Though Kim Jong-Il had kidnapped me,” he reasoned, putting himself in his kidnapper’s shoes, “he had treated me with hospitality and concern. In spite of it, I had tried to flee twice. He may have considered it a betrayal.” He didn’t know if Kim ever read his letters but later assumed that since Kim liked to know everything, he probably did. In any case, Shin, like Choi, diligently pursued his ideological studies and endless letter writing to pass the time.

  The days turned into weeks, the weeks into months, 1979 into 1980. Sometime in January Shin was moved to a different cell, at the other end of the prison, with heated floors and a functioning toilet. The room was still too small for him to lie down in, but he was allowed bedding, soap, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and a washbasin. He was ordered to make them all last—the bar of soap for six months, the toothpaste for seven—and warned he would be given no replacements if he went through them too fast. At mealtimes he could expect rice and soup, sometimes even a thick chunk of glistening pork fat. The torture position remained his daily routine. On the wall someone had written, in flawless calligraphy, seven lines of text, under the heading “Warnings.”

  1. Obey the orders of the guards without question.

  2. Don’t try to find out about the other prisoners.

  3. Don’t eavesdrop on conversations between guards and other prisoners.

  4. Never talk with other prisoners.

  5. If you catch another prisoner violating regulations, you must report him immediately.

  6. Patients must absolutely obey the doctor’s orders.

  7. Never damage any of the daily necessities including the bedding, for they are the property of the State.

  The next day Shin was taken to the bathroom for his biweekly ablutions by a trusty—a prisoner given preferential treatment by the guards in exchange for being trusted with specific tasks, such as cleaning or running messages. “Although [this trusty] treated the other prisoners roughly, he was kind to me,” Shin wrote. He allowed Shin longer than the five minutes allotted by the rules and showed him how to adjust the water temperature. As Shin splashed water on himself, the trusty eyed him carefully. “I know who you are,” he said. “You’re Choi Eun-Hee’s husband, aren’t you?”

  Shin was stunned. After the years of solitude and removal from the world, to be speaking to someone who knew who he was, in Shin’s words, was “like meeting Buddha in hell.”

  The trusty handed Shin a mirror and a razor, luxuries by the standard of Prison Number 6. As he wiped his pale, emaciated face—it was the first time he had seen his own features in a long time—Shin asked, “How do you know of me?”

  “Fellow, how could I not know you? I was a South Korean spy. I was captured and sentenced to twenty years. I still have five to go before I get out.”

  “I was kidnapped in Hong Kong,” Shin replied, overjoyed to have someone to openly talk to. “I tried to escape, but they caught me. If I have six hours by myself I can escape. The six hours are the problem.”

  “Choi Eun-Hee was here for three months,” the trusty said abruptly. “After she got here she refused to eat. Even when they gave her cookies she wouldn’t eat. She barely ate anything. Three months later they released her. It was the first time anyone ever got out of here in only three months.”

  “Choi Eun-Hee was here?” Shin said. Why was she imprisoned? he wondered.

  The trusty nodded. Their conversation was cut short by the next prisoners in line for the bathroom, and Shin went back to his room plagued by fearful thoughts. As the evening wore on, sitting in his cell staring at the door, he found the trusty’s story sat with him awkwardly. Surely a captured South Korean spy would be executed, not just condemned to twenty years, when ordinary North Korean citizens were shot or hanged for much less? How did the trusty know so many details about Choi’s stay at Prison Number 6, such as its exact duration?

  The next day Shin asked the trusty to describe the woman he claimed to have seen. It quickly became clear the man had mistaken someone else for Choi Eun-Hee, even though he knew Shin well enough to recognize him on sight, when he was the one of the pair who worked behind the camera. Was the trusty mistaken, or lying? Was it a test?

  “I wanted to speak with the trusty, but it was difficult,” Shin recalled. “I could exchange only a few words a day with him. On bathing day I could manage to talk with him for one or two minutes. That was only once every two weeks.” Over time, Shin managed to piece together the prisoner’s full history: he had been in show business himself since 1945, and claimed he had been the first director of the Korean Army Show, the South Korean troop-entertainment organization Choi Eun-Hee had forcefully been made a part of during the Korean War. After the retreat of UN forces from Pyongyang in 1951, the trusty said he had been convinced to stay in the North as an undercover intelligence agent, that when the war had ended he had found himself stuck in North Korea, and that he had reluctantly settled down outside Pyongyang, married, and fathered three children. Fifteen years later state security had come to arrest him, charge him with espionage, and throw him in prison for life.

  The more he spoke, the less Shin believed the man’s narrative. Originally the trusty’s sentence had been twenty years, now it was life; he said he recognized Shin from his time in the South, but Shin wasn’t famous yet during the war. When pressed on how he had recognized him in spite of living in the North, the trusty answered that he knew him from listening to South Korean radio broadcasts (how he could recognize a man on sight from hearing about him on the radio, Shin didn’t bother to ask). The man also had the habit of complaining about the North Korean system to see if Shin agreed. “This is the epitome of the socialist state,” he told Shin once while patching up cracks in the hallway, one of his duties. “They use only five sacks of cement where ten are needed. Then when the work is done, they shout hurray for us because we exceeded our norms and saved materials. And they get the title of Labor Hero. What a goddamn sight this is. They’re all asses.” Shin always made sure to reply with fulsome praise for the Great Leader and the juche way. By now he felt sure the trusty must be working for the warden, maybe even for state security. “He lied to me,” Shin realized, “to sound me out.”

  The man’s last name was Choi—he never told Shin his given name—and Shin wondered if the name had also been chosen deliberately, to keep the thought of Eun-Hee fresh in his mind. The trusty kept talking about her, too. He claimed she hadn’t been kidnapped at all but had come to North Korea voluntarily after eloping with a famous North Korean actor named Chun. “You were at the height of playing around with your love affairs and she was very depressed, wasn’t she? Well, she fell in love with Chun and promised to run away with him to North Korea. And later she did it. She fell in love with him and eloped with him.” Another time he poked Shin in the ribs, grinning, and said, “If you get out of here and make movies, you can have your pick of any People’s Actress or Meritorious Actress that you like, you know. Even the best actress will be yours. The Party will arrange it.” He was obviously gauging how Shin felt about his ex-wife, but it was unsettling nonetheless. Doubt kept niggling at Shin’s mind. Sitting in the torture position, he had a lot of time to obsessively run through every aspect of the trusty’s tales for possible truth.

  As time passed, Shin realized he must have been passing all the tests, for his treatment steadily improved. He started receiving some cookies or candie
s once every month, sometimes even a boiled pollack or a chunk of some other kind of fish with his rice ball and soup. He gained weight. On some days they gave him so much food he actually left some on his plate.

  One day in the fall of 1980, a guard took Shin out of his sunning cage and took his photograph, Shin assumed so that it could be sent to Kim Jong-Il as proof that he was looking healthier. The next spring the trusty Choi came by Shin’s cell and whispered, “Got some good news for you. They say you’ll be getting out soon. You’d better straighten out your clothes and things—someone might even come to get you late tonight.” Shin was jubilant. He was so excited he skipped his dinner and couldn’t go to sleep.

  But the call never came.

  “You’re driving me nuts,” Shin seethed at the trusty when he came around with the breakfast cart the next morning.

  “You are to be released soon,” the trusty said. “Just wait a little longer.”

  Time passed. By August Shin had fallen into despair. Tomorrow would be the same, and so would the next day. So he decided to take matters in his own hands: he went on a hunger strike, determined to attract Kim Jong-Il’s attention or die in the process.

  Once again he planned it badly. For the first few days he didn’t touch his meals, but snacked away on candies hidden inside the toilet cistern. “Why don’t you eat?” asked a confused guard after Shin hadn’t touched his lunch or dinner on the first day. “Are you sick?”

  “No, sir. I’m on a hunger strike and I’m prepared to die if necessary. I’d rather die than go on like this.”

  “A hunger strike, you say?” The guard guffawed. “Just wait. Soon you’ll be begging for food.”

  The next morning Shin ate none of his breakfast. “I want to see the investigator, sir,” Shin told the guard who came to take the plate away.

  “Sure. If you don’t eat for a month, we’ll let you meet him. A hell of a lot of good that’ll do, anyway.”

  Shin thought that after three days the guards would respond to his strike and be forced to take action. He was wrong. The candies were making him hungrier and lethargic, and the sugar, the only thing in his stomach, gave him diarrhea. Sitting in the torture position with no fuel exhausted him. Refusing water as well as food, Shin quickly grew dehydrated. He was so thirsty he considered drinking the dirty water from the toilet.

  Seventy-two hours after his first skipped meal, as usually happens, the pain really kicked in. Starved of nutrients, Shin’s body started using up his own muscle protein to make the glucose it needed to keep functioning. He quickly lost weight. Even sitting down he felt nauseatingly dizzy. His blood pressure fell so low he could barely feel his pulse.

  On the fifth day Shin collapsed and lost consciousness. Had the strike been another failure? Didn’t Kim Jong-Il care?

  When he woke up in the infirmary wing, with an investigator and a military officer standing by his bed, Shin was relieved to find that, unlike with his escape attempts, this time he had been successful.

  He had finally drawn Kim Jong-Il’s attention.

  20

  Director Shin Is Coming

  After two and a half years at the guesthouse in Mount Paekdu, Choi Eun-Hee was moved back to Tongbuk-Ri, where she spent another year, resuming her endless rounds of sightseeing and ideological lessons. She went walking around the woods every day, along the same path she had followed nearly three years earlier, hoping to run into Catherine Hong, the beauty from Macao, wondering if she was still in the compound and what had happened to her. Three days after she moved back in they bumped into each other. They were both elated.

  “How have you been getting along?” Choi asked.

  “I cried so much after you left,” Ms. Hong said, hugging her. “I used to see you in my dreams. Let’s never be separated again.”

  They walked together, talking for a long time. Catherine’s Korean had drastically improved and their conversations became more layered and far ranging. For the next several weeks they met every other day at prearranged locations and times, sometimes sharing a bottle of ginseng liquor as they talked.

  “Sister, do you have a religion?” Catherine asked Choi one afternoon.

  “Well, sometimes I pray, but you can’t really say I have a religion,” Choi said.

  “I’m Roman Catholic,” Catherine said. “My baptismal name is Maria. What do you think about Catholicism?”

  “I’ve always found something attractive in it,” Choi answered, vaguely.

  “Well then, why don’t we pray together to God?”

  “All right,” Choi said.

  She followed Catherine deeper into the forest and, as there was no body of water deep enough within the compound walls, Catherine baptized Choi by dunking her in the fallen leaves, red, golden, and soft. She wasn’t really qualified to baptize, Maria told her, but under such circumstances she felt she could. “Now you are Catholic too, and we can pray together. I’ll give you a baptismal name. I think it would be nice if it started with an M, like Maria. I think Madeline would be good?” Choi nodded. “Good. From now on, you are Madeline.”

  Choi and Catherine prayed together and gave each other courage; it reassured Choi to have something private, even if it was just a name—Maria, Madeline, like a secret code—with the only person she knew who understood how she felt. In her memoir Choi puts it simply: her only friend was a Catholic, “so I became one too.”

  In early March they relocated Choi again. The day before she was to be moved, Choi had one last meeting with Catherine, who gave Choi a necklace as a gift. Choi, who didn’t have anything she felt suitable to give, tried to give her friend two $100 bills she’d had since her last day in Hong Kong. But Maria gently shook her head. “That’s all right,” she said. “I receive a salary, you know. I think you’ll need it more than I.” Choi couldn’t bear leaving the only person with whom she could share her true feelings and thoughts. She pressed the money into her hand, turned around and started to walk away. She had only taken a few steps when she heard: “Madeline!” She spun to face her friend.

  “Sister,” Catherine said, “we’ll meet again someday.” She hurried to Choi and hugged her, resting her head against her chest. Choi and Catherine both cried until they were exhausted, then said good-bye. In later years Choi learned that Catherine had been relocated here and there within the country and finally had been assigned to teach Cantonese to North Korean espionage agents. They never saw each other again.

  One person Choi continued to see plenty of was Kim Jong-Il. They met regularly through 1981 and 1982, usually at his Fish House parties. He looked “very thin” to her. “It’s because I’m exercising every day to lose weight,” Jong-Il told her. He was still smoking but drinking less, and now spent most of his parties sipping bottled water—although he still egged on the guests to drink more. Their relationship had settled into an almost mother-son routine; she was, after all, sixteen years older than him. She teased him about improving his diet and did her best “to win [his] trust.” The only way she could preserve some kind of freedom and sanity was to appear content, even charmed, and she resigned herself to performing as pleasantly, but never sycophantically, as possible.

  It’s likely Jong-Il was also getting himself into shape in preparation for the higher public profile he was taking. In October 1980 Kim Il-Sung had officially announced to the Sixth Congress of the Workers’ Party that Kim Jong-Il would be his successor, a move met with international condemnation for its nepotism and authoritarianism, not just in the West but in many socialist states of Eastern Europe and Asia. At the same congress, Jong-Il announced that North Korea would move away from traditional communism toward self-reliance and the renewed promotion of the juche idea. The Party members who had attended the congress returned home with a gift of the most exciting new cutting-edge technology: a family-size modern refrigerator, made in Japan. The front of the fridge was emblazoned with the word PAEKTUSAN (“Mount Paekdu”) in large letters. The fridge, each party member was told, was a personal gift f
rom the Dear Leader. In February 1982 Jong-Il was “elected” to the Supreme People’s Assembly and the title of Dear Leader was made official to the wider public. The young man was also busy overseeing the preparations for his father’s seventieth birthday on April 15, 1982; along with the many lavish celebrations, Jong-Il was completely redesigning the layout of Pyongyang to accommodate a 170-meter high juche tower, an arch of triumph, and a Kim Il-Sung Square plaza, all of which he insisted be built in a perfect line crossing the city. He was, finally, in production on a multipart epic movie biography of Kim Il-Sung, The Star of Korea, in which the Great Leader finally appeared as an on-screen character.

  Following the official announcement that Jong-Il would be the successor to the Party leadership—the general public would not be informed until Kim Il-Sung’s death fourteen years later—the regime began to deify Jong-Il as it had his father. In practice this meant Jong-Il was turning himself into the son of God. Until then, Choi’s sightseeing excursions had mostly been to sites dedicated to Kim Il-Sung, but now she was taken to a “Kim Jong-Il Revolutionary Site,” glorifying the son rather than the father. The site consisted of a “history” museum, a mountain park they told her had been Jong-Il’s military training ground, and a lecture hall dedicated to filmmaking and Kim Jong-Il’s exceptional creative talents. The buildings were all brand-new, the tour guides all female members of the military. On the walls of the lecture hall were articles from foreign newspapers—The New York Times, for instance—praising the Kims. When Choi looked closer she saw they were paid ads, mocked up to look like features.