by Paul Fischer
There was one other thing to keep in mind about North Korea, especially for a People’s Actress: society did not allow for anything resembling a private life. Everything was public, from your haircut and the age you got married to your innermost thoughts and loyalties. Spying, informing, and gossiping were virtues that kept the people on their toes and the system working. The Workers’ Party made blank cogs of workers. Your heart and sex life were no different, whether you were ripping wheat from chaff on a collective farm or crying hot, melodramatic tears in front of a film camera on the back lot of the Korea Film Studio. There were lines not to cross, and as invisible or murky as those lines were, once you crossed them there was no coming back.
Especially when Kim Jong-Il was involved.
* * *
By the late 1970s, the stories about Woo In-Hee had become so commonplace that one day she was confronted with them directly. In a self-criticism session—compulsory meetings in which each worker was expected, in front of colleagues, both to list the ways she had failed the Party that week, and also to denounce someone else—a man in the group denounced Woo for her affairs and loose morals. Instead of hanging her head in shame, verbally flagellating herself, and expressing her fervent wish that Kim Il-Sung would give her one more chance to redeem herself (the expected response to any charge, big or small), Woo In-Hee fought back. The accuser was one to talk, she barked. Hadn’t he been one of the men who seduced her? In fact, she went on, pointing at one man here, another there, “You’ve all seduced me, haven’t you?”
Woo’s career went into free fall. The men would not let her get away with that. She was downgraded from her rank as People’s Actress, first to a simple stock player, then demoted off the screen entirely and assigned to work in the boiler room of the film studio. For a year she worked as a stoker, manually feeding coal into the blazing furnace of the boiler, hard, exhausting, and dangerous work. In 1979 she was allowed to return to filming, straight back into leading roles, such a quick and positive reversal of fortune that it shocked those who had taken pleasure in her punishment. Woo In-Hee was an extremely popular actress, and it was certainly a waste to keep her off the screen for very long, but there was something else to it: another man. A man who understood passionate souls trapped by public expectations, who was used to flaunting his power and taking advantage of beautiful women in precarious positions, a man with a famous soft spot for actresses, who was, arguably, the only person capable of overturning the severe punishment that might befall a People’s Actress.
We’ll never know exactly when Woo In-Hee’s affair with Kim Jong-Il began, whether there had been dalliances years before or whether the younger Kim saw an opportunity when the gorgeous woman had lost everything—that she would worship a man with the power to restore it all to her. By this point Kim already had not one but two consorts, and his personal life was a highly classified secret; once you stepped inside that circle, your life was all but his. Revealing any of it, privately or publicly, meant a prison camp. Even if Kim merely suspected that you might reveal any of it, your life was in danger. Woo In-Hee never should have gotten involved with Kim Jong-Il. But she was shoveling coal twelve hours a day, and besides, saying no to the Dear Leader, heir to the Sun of Korea, is easier said than done.
If getting involved with Kim Jong-Il was dangerous, starting an affair with someone else at the same time was suicidal. But Woo In-Hee could not resist. She fell in love, again, this time with a young Korean from Japan, whose wealthy businessman father had generously supported the Kim regime over the years. He had now sent his only son, who had grown soft in the comfort of Japan, to North Korea to work and become a man. This young man was assigned to work at a radio station. While there, he met Woo In-Hee and immediately, desperately pursued her. She liked the romantic, different boy, but Woo In-Hee stayed away. He didn’t give up. He showered her with gifts and attention and finally she gave in.
Neither of them could go home—Woo had a family, and the young man’s circle surely would gossip if the People’s Actress turned up in their midst—nor could they spend time at the studio, where Woo’s reputation still clung to her like a sweat-soaked shirt. Kim Jong-Il had assigned another actress to shadow Woo during work hours and report back her every move. Hotels were out, as owners were obliged by law to check overnight permits, refuse any couples, and report all guests to the police. By virtue of his father’s standing, the boy had a car, a luxury Mercedes, and since he had driven his whole life in Japan he had no need for a chauffeur. So the Mercedes became their meeting place. They would drive around for hours or park in dark, out-of-the-way spots.
One freezing winter night in the winter of 1980, they parked the car out of sight and made love. Maybe it was the first time, maybe the hundredth. With the engine still running and the windows shut tight to keep them warm, they fell asleep in each other’s arms. When the car was found in the morning the boy was dead of carbon monoxide poisoning. Woo In-Hee was unconscious and barely breathing.
It took two weeks of hospital treatment for Woo In-Hee to grow strong enough to blink her eyes open. Once her health had returned, the soldiers came. The son of a high-profile donor to the Party was dead because of an affair with a married woman whose history of scandalous behavior was well known. People up high had questions, and they wanted them answered. There is no record of the interrogations, but at some point Woo In-Hee brought up the name of Kim Jong-Il. Maybe he could save her one last time. The soldiers left the room. When they returned they told Woo In-Hee to stand up. She was being released and taken home.
* * *
Dozens and dozens of buses were parked in a line outside the film studio, their engines idling, the drivers smoking and gossiping. There was still a chill in the air from the dying winter.
That morning, every single worker in the movie industry, from the directors down to the typists, had received orders to assemble and board the buses for an emergency collective activity ordered by the Party. They were not told where they were being taken, even after the bus doors closed and the vehicles pulled onto the road. Among the passengers was the director Yoo Hosun, Woo In-Hee’s husband and the father of her children. He had not seen her in weeks, since she had been taken to the hospital after being found with the young Korean-Japanese. She had not returned home or to work. Woo imagined she was serving some kind of temporary punishment, as when she had been assigned to boiler duty, or in prison.
Today must have taken his mind off his worries. Nothing like today’s mysterious trip had happened during his career at the film studio, and everyone was intrigued. Were they being ferried to a pleasant day of historical sightseeing, perhaps to the Great Leader’s birthplace in Mansudae or to some revolutionary monument? Was there a big policy announcement coming regarding film’s future in the country? Perhaps they were just being taken to a drab, mass self-criticism session—though it seemed like a lot of trouble for a meeting, especially when the film studio had plenty of auditoriums big enough to gather everyone in.
The several dozen buses drove in a convoy out of the city and into the suburbs, a ride of at least forty-five minutes. Finally they stopped outside a rifle range. There were dozens of these facilities near Pyongyang and hundreds around the country, many adorned with illustrations of wolves in U.S. Army uniforms to serve as targets. Older children would regularly be taken there to practice their marksmanship, especially as July 8, Anti-American Day, approached. Today the range itself was deserted, but bleachers had been set up opposite the targets, and ordinary civilians, about five thousand of them, were already occupying the back rows or standing along the sides. The movie people—two thousand strong, by industry estimates—were told to disembark and fill the available remaining bleacher seats.
A white curtain had been stretched up in front of the targets, and a tall wooden stake had been set in the ground in front of the curtain. For a few minutes the spectators waited in hushed, anxious expectation. Then an army jeep pulled up and parked between the white sheet and the t
argets. Presently a woman’s desperate scream ripped the air from behind the curtain. A tingle of electricity rippled through the crowd. Whatever they had been brought here to see, this was it.
Just that morning Woo In-Hee had been told she was free to go home. Only when they loaded her into the jeep and blindfolded her did she know that she had been lied to.
The soldiers dragged her out in the front of the curtain, blindfolded, her hands tied. In the audience it now was her husband’s turn to scream.
Executions, like so much else in North Korea, are designed as a theatrical show, with the condemned as the unwitting lead performer. Woo In-Hee would have been dressed in a prisoner’s outfit, which it was rumored had been specially designed by North Korean army scientists for public executions: a thick, grayish suit of fleece and cotton designed to soak up blood, turning a dramatic deep, dark red as it does. Woo In-Hee was tied to the wooden post by two ropes, one at her chest and the other around her legs. Throughout it all she never stopped screaming. She screamed for Kim Jong-Il and others in the Party leadership—some witnesses remember that she was cursing their names; some that she was still pleading to speak to Kim, to explain, to beg his forgiveness. One of the soldiers then stepped up to a microphone, and his voice boomed and echoed from the loudspeakers, barely drowning out her cries. “For committing immoral and licentious acts, the People’s Actress Woo In-Hee has been condemned to death. She will be executed by firing squad, in the name of the People.” Within a second of his speaking the last words, “in the name of the People,” the sound of gunfire tore through the air.
The firing squad, three soldiers strong, did it the usual way. The first burst of bullets broke the chest-height rope, causing Woo’s body to tip forward as if in a final bow to the audience. The next volley aimed for the head, exploding it in a soggy, spectacular mess of flesh and bone and brain. (“In the winter,” wrote the North Korean defector Hyok Kang of executions he had witnessed as a child, “at temperatures of minus twenty or minus thirty [Celsius], there’s a lot of steam when that happens, because of the difference in temperature between the body and the atmosphere.”) Finally, one last salvo shredded the rope holding Woo In-Hee up at the legs, her body dropping with a thud into the bag laid out at her feet.
In the audience Yoo Hosun went limp and collapsed. He was not conscious to witness the soldiers kicking and shoving his wife’s body into the bag, and throwing it back into the jeep. After an execution, Hyok Kang writes, the norm was for the body to be “abandoned somewhere in the mountains without being buried, for the [wild] dogs to eat.” The car doors closed on the People’s Actress Woo In-Hee, and the jeep drove away. Behind them there was a brief silence, broken by the children in the front row dashing forward with excited screams to fight over the spent rifle cartridges littering the bloodstained earth.
* * *
After that, Woo In-Hee’s films were banned, her magazine photographs were cut or blacked out, and the pages mentioning her in film history books and pamphlets were glued together. If her classic films were rerun on television, every scene featuring her was edited out, turning narratives into incomprehensible messes, but also sending a clear message to the audience, who lived in a world ritualized enough to understand such messages. Her husband, Yoo Hosun, was exiled to the countryside and sent down to production. A suppression decree was issued to the thousands who had witnessed the execution, threatening them with death if they ever spoke about it. But why build bleachers around an execution ground and bus in six thousand witnesses unless you want them to talk?
And talk about it they did, in whispers and with furtive looks over their shoulders. Three years later, in the luxury villa in which she was held, Choi Eun-Hee overheard her North Korean staff telling each other the story loudly enough, by accident or by design, for her to hear. The message was not lost on her.
The one man who had the power to order the summary execution of a famous, honored actress who had disappointed him—and to do so with such a ruthless sense of drama and showmanship—was Kim Jong-Il.
REEL THREE
PRODUCED BY KIM JONG-IL
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances …
—Jaques, As You Like It (Act II, Scene vii), by William Shakespeare
Truman (Jim Carrey): Was nothing real?
Christof (Ed Harris): You were real. That’s what made you so good to watch.
—The Truman Show, screenplay by Andrew Niccol, directed by Peter Weir
21
Together
The tragic story of the People’s Actress returned to Choi as she observed the drunken guests around her at the reunion banquet. This was the film world she and Shin were now entering.
Nearby, on Kim Jong-Il’s right-hand side, sat Shin. Jong-Il was pleasant and courteous, almost contrite, toward the older man. The Dear Leader had been spoiled his whole life and given everything he wanted, so that by now only a select few experiences must have felt thrilling and new. Surely this was one of them. Shin Sang-Ok was the first filmmaker of international renown he had ever met, a director whose every film he had seen—and whose work he had liked and admired enough to think him worthy of bringing to North Korea to be his star director.
“Mr. Shin, please forgive the dramatics,” Jong-Il said, turning his big, bright eyes on his guest. “I’m sorry to have caused you so much suffering.” He took Shin’s right hand, put it on his own knee, and squeezed it. Before Shin could answer, Jong-Il went on, “No one ever laid a hand on Madame Choi,” then, raising his voice, to the rest of the table: “I send her back to you exactly as she was! Mr. Shin, we Communists are pure. Aren’t we, comrades?”
“Yes, sir!” came the reply in unison, punctuated with a burst of applause.
“Let us all be devoted to the Dear Leader!” shouted a man who Shin later learned was the head of the Party newspaper Rodong Sinmun. Everyone at the table echoed the toast and knocked back their drink.
“Let’s all work together to accomplish the task!” cheered someone else once the glasses had been refilled.
Toast followed toast, and soon Jong-Il had declared a “liquor offensive,” one of his favorite party games, in which the assembled guests had to chug round after round, shouting loyalist slogans after every drink. Shin usually didn’t drink, but he thought it unwise not to join in. It was a shrewd decision, for Kim valued men who could drink, seeing it as a sign of strength and self-control. Being unable to hold your cognac was a mark against your manhood. Everyone seemed to want to pour Shin a drink and pat him on the shoulder. At one point Kim Jong-Il’s younger sister, Kyong-Hui, whom Jong-Il had been fiercely protective of since his younger brother Shura’s death in the garden pond all those years ago, refilled Shin’s glass and said quietly to him, “From now on, please help my brother.” Her own glass needed frequent replenishing as well: she was in the early stages of severe alcohol dependency, an addiction that would later risk her position in the Party and find her seeking rehab treatment in China.
Endless toasts led to hours of drinking. The band played a series of (officially banned) South Korean pop songs, surprising Shin, who in his years in North Korea had only heard war songs and hymns to the Great Leader. The guests sang along to some of the songs, a triumphalism in their voice, Shin observing that “they sang South Korean popular songs not because they liked these songs, but because they thought the South belonged to them,” and its music with it.
The cognac was making Shin’s head swim. He looked over at Choi, who was smiling and chatting to the people on either side of her. She seemed at ease with everyone, almost as if she were one of them. She is playing up to Kim Jong-Il and his cronies, Shin thought. Or has she been completely brainwashed? Was this why they had kept them separate for all these years only to reunite them now? Has she been indoctrinated and is under instruction to find out what I’m really thinking? Shin felt woozy and paranoid. He wished he could lie d
own.
Luckily the evening seemed to be drawing to a close. Then suddenly the Dear Leader turned to Shin and asked, “What do you say to watching a movie?”
Kim, Shin, Choi, and a few others left the ballroom and filed into a small screening room to watch a couple of short propaganda films. It took about twenty minutes, and then they all returned to the party, which had found a second wind. The “eating, drinking, singing, and dancing went on until 3 a.m.,” Shin remembered, at which point Jong-Il suddenly noticed Shin’s exhaustion. He called a man over, who Shin would later learn was Choe Ik-Gyu, Jong-Il’s filmmaking mentor and the man Shin would be working with from now on. “We’ll send the couple home first,” Jong-Il said. “Take them in my car.”
Jong-Il walked them to the Mercedes. Shin and Choi were quiet. What was expected of them next? Choe Ik-Gyu got in the driver’s seat. Shin opened the car’s back door. Laughing out loud, and with obvious innuendo, Kim shouted, “Since it’s a special day, you two go to your bridal chamber, and rest!”
So it was that Shin and Choi were driven back to the very first villa Choi had been kept in, the tacky house with all the chandeliers. They said good night to Choe Ik-Gyu and went upstairs to the luxurious bedroom, which had been made ready for them, cognac and a fruit basket freshly placed on the coffee table. As soon as they had closed the door, Choi said, “Dear, if you don’t love me, let’s sleep in separate rooms from this moment on. Tell me right now.”