by Paul Fischer
Shin looked at the woman he had adored most of his life. He had loved her from the moment he met her, had lived, slept, and worked with her almost his entire adult life. But as he admitted later, he was too proud “to just say Yes, I love you.” So he just smiled. Choi understood. He stepped forward and embraced her. For some time they stood that way, in silence.
Finally, Choi stepped back and looked at him. “Wherever you’ve been, your face is not the same…” she said.
“I’ll tell you about it, little by little,” Shin said. “How have you been getting along?”
“I’ll tell you about it, little by little,” she echoed. “But I don’t know where to begin.”
“Dear, you seem a little strange…” Shin ventured, looking in her eyes. “Have you been … brainwashed?”
The word, out loud, sounded idiotic. Choi burst out laughing. She gave Shin a gratified, coquettish little look. “Why, the movie director can’t even recognize acting when he sees it,” she teased.
“I underestimated her,” Shin later said. “She was a great actress in the South, on-screen, and in the North offscreen.”
It felt marvelous to be in the same room with one another. “We had so much to tell each other,” Shin recalled. Scared that the room was bugged and that their conversations would be recorded, they went to the bathroom, turned the faucets in the tub on full blast, and whispered. They told each other about the last few years and exchanged their stories of suffering. They discovered they had been abducted on the same freighter, from almost the same beach. Choi learned that Shin had stayed in one of the villas she had stayed in just weeks before she had. She recounted the execution of the People’s Actress Woo In-Hee. Both were carefully deciphering what had changed in the other, whether they had been subtly indoctrinated, and the extent of their trauma.
One thing Choi said, as they sat by the bathtub talking, made an impression on Shin that stayed with him until the moment he drifted to sleep. “Darling,” she said, “we have acted and directed the lives of others in films. From now on, let’s act and direct our lives ingeniously.”
They had to make the most of their plight. And every day, carefully, they would plan for the one thing that truly mattered: their escape.
22
The Tape Recorder
Imagine, for a moment, that by the grace of God, or the luck of the draw—whatever you choose to call it—you were born and raised in North Korea. Most likely you would be born to a family of the neutral or hostile songbun class, not one of the elite, and live outside Pyongyang, in the harsh, mountainous countryside. At the age of two you were taken to revolutionary day care and preschool, where you spent most of your time, rather than at home, and whose teachers became your primary influences and authority. Toy pistols and rifles lined the shelves of the playroom, alongside a framed poster depicting bright-eyed children attacking a bloody U.S. soldier.
Day care and preschool consisted of fourteen-hour days, usually six days a week. At a young age you were taught endless slogans—“What the Party decides, we will put in practice” or “Let us become human bullets to defend the Great Leader!”—and to always call the elder Kim “Great Leader Grandfather Kim Il-Sung” or later “Comrade Great Leader Kim Il-Sung.” His son was “Comrade Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il.” After preschool came nursery school, then four years of primary school and six of secondary school. The uniform at every establishment was cut in a military style. During those years you learned Kim Il-Sung’s biography, by rote, down to the smallest detail. (After the late 1980s, you would also learn about the life of Kim Jong-Il, your teachers telling you he grew up such an idealist he climbed trees to catch rainbows—and was such a virtuous genius he succeeded in grabbing them.) You learned that the food you received was a gift from the Great Leader, and that you must be grateful to him for receiving it. You learned math by adding, subtracting, and multiplying numbers of dead American soldiers or the number of apples stolen from the local farm by a dastardly Japanese; you learned conjugation by repeating, “We fight against Yankees. We fought against Yankees. We will fight against Yankees”; you learned history by reciting the state-sponsored biographies of Kim Il-Sung. Reading was taught through stories about revolutionary heroes fighting the Japanese or dark tales of Yankees—you were told to never call them Americans, always “Yankees,” “Yankee dogs,” “Yankee imperialists,” or simply “the long-noses”—and you would sing popular kids’ tunes like “Shoot the Yankee Bastards” (“Our enemies are the American bastards / Who are trying to take over our beautiful fatherland / With guns that I make with my own hands / I will shoot them BANG! BANG! BANG!”).
At recess you and the other children were allowed to play with the teacher’s blond, beak-nosed dummy of a Yankee imperialist. You all took turns hitting it with sticks and pelting it with stones as the teacher looked on approvingly. Occasionally for fun you might have been taken to a shooting range. You were never told, in so many words, that the Leaders were gods, but, in the words of researcher Lee Su-Won, “the process in which people start to see God and Jesus as absolute entities is very similar to the way Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il are revered [in North Korea].” All children learn that it is heresy to doodle or draw the Leaders, and that no picture of them may be folded or thrown in the trash (which is also why the Rodong Sinmun newspaper is posted under glass in public places rather than distributed). It is blasphemy to insult the Leaders or make jokes at their expense. At the age of ten you joined the Young Pioneers—the DPRK’s version of the Boy Scouts or, more fittingly, the Hitler Youth—and at twelve you received your own Kim Il-Sung badge, to wear on your chest whenever—absolutely whenever—you left home. At the same age you began performing your patriotic duties on Sundays, working in rice paddies or elsewhere in the countryside to assist the republic’s progress.
Outside of school the world was even odder. From the beginning of your life you’d noticed everyone was suspicious of everyone else, all the time. There was no way of telling who, no matter how close a friend or family member, might be an informant or an undercover security agent. Everyone knew the stories of the families sent to the camps because a careless child or grandparent let something delicate slip to the wrong person. So life even at home was guarded, performed. Everyone, in the words of Hyok Kang, “always looked as though they were wearing a mask.” You never celebrated your own birthday, only those of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il. On those days you received a gigantic two pounds of chocolates, gummies, chewing gum, and cookies, and when you did you lined up in front of the home’s portraits of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il, bowing deeply and saying, “Thank you, dear father Kim Il-Sung,” several times.
When you turned seventeen you received your “citizen’s certificate,” modeled on the old Soviet ID document, a twelve-page booklet about the bearer containing your name, photograph, place of residence, date of birth, marital status, police and behavior record, and permission (or absence thereof) to live in Pyongyang. The citizen’s certificate was to be carried with you at all times and renewed every ten years. Being arrested meant the confiscation of your citizen’s certificate: during time spent in prison, you would no longer be a citizen, and you would no longer have any (notional) rights.
After school there was military duty to be served, ten full years of it, most of it spent not in maneuvers but as a cheap workforce for the state, putting up buildings and laying down roads. After that you were assigned a job in a factory, office, or agricultural collective, most likely; the good jobs were reserved for party members, and your songbun would never permit you the clearance necessary for one of those plum positions. From now on you received your rations every two weeks, measured by weight and doled out in a volume relative to your type of work. The usual daily ration was a bowl of rice with kimchi and a smaller bowl of soup, no meat—meat was added only to mark special occasions, like the Leader’s birthday or Liberation Day. By the early 1980s your rations were often delayed, or tampered with; your family would receive a frozen pig ra
ther than one preserved in salt, so that when the animal was cooked it turned out that half its weight was water, evaporating into the air; more commonly, rice bags were simply loaded with stones to deceive the scales of the rationing office. By the 1990s, for months at a time, the rations stopped coming altogether. You couldn’t complain, of course: no one complained.
You worked long hours every day, six days a week. After work you went to compulsory self-criticism sessions. If a new movie was released by the state studio overseen by the creative genius Comrade Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il, you were required to immediately go to the cinema (or to the projection room in the factory or Party office if your village was so small as to have no cinema) and watch it. The movies all had titles like Fate of a Self-Defense Corps Member, The Song of Camaraderie, Five Guerrilla Brothers, and Again to the Front, and the screening was followed by an education session in which you and the others were asked about the film’s seed and which characters in it should be emulated. The seventh day of the week was reserved for “volunteer” work—cleaning the streets, helping out on state farms or construction sites, preparing for big events such as the Mass Games. There was no such thing as free time. Body and mind were made to serve the regime.
One day you found a person to marry, so you asked the state’s obligatory permission; when it was received you were married by a local Party worker under your town’s statue of Kim Il-Sung. Your husband or wife likely had the same songbun as you, and that songbun would be passed on to your children. You probably didn’t know much about the opposite sex. Since 1971 a “special instruction” by Kim Il-Sung had decreed men should be thirty when they married and women twenty-eight, and any contact between unmarried adults, even hand-holding, was severely frowned upon. The exact knowledge of what happened in a bed between a man and a woman might still have been vague and confusing as you walked back to your state-assigned home after your wedding.
You and your spouse stayed in the same area you were both born in. Relocating was rare, and traveling from one village to another, even for a day, required an official permit. Every overnight guest in your own home required advance permission from the village police. You lived in the same block of flats or houses as the work colleagues from your unit, and a local auntie kept an eye on all of you for the inminban, the people’s group, which reported back to the Public Safety Department. And that was your lot, really, for the rest of your life. The loudspeakers went on telling you war and reunification were imminent, the Yankee threat ever present. Every year the Mass Games rolled around. North Korea was a cashless, taxless, salaryless society, so nothing could be privately sold; all the necessities, including housing, food, education, and health care, were free and provided by the state. Private enterprise was banned, promotion unlikely, changing career paths unheard of. You might receive a commendation for consistently fulfilling work quotas, but probably nothing more exciting than that. Maybe one day Kim Il-Sung would visit the town for an on-the-spot guidance visit, and you and the other villagers would be mobilized to scrub the streets and houses from top to bottom; after the Great Leader left, whatever room he had stayed in, whatever furniture he had sat on, anything he had touched, was roped off, given a plaque, and turned into a historical site or a local relic. (In this way thousands of rooms throughout North Korea were used by Kim Il-Sung or Kim Jong-Il for one night and then never used again, pockets of sacred emptiness in every town and village.)
As you grew old you were reminded, endlessly, how lucky you were to live in the Workers’ Paradise: that you were one of the single luckiest people on Earth, a chosen people with “nothing to envy” anyone anywhere. South Korea, you were told on the evening news, was “a living hell, with its traffic accidents and collapsing buildings.… Do you know how many cars are stolen every year? The place is full of thieves. One hundred twenty people disappear every day; everywhere there are assaults, violent gangs; the subway is a hell-way.… It’s five, ten times the level of [crime] of other countries … the whole country consists of snitches and police detectives.” South Korean children were said to rummage for food in trash heaps while American soldiers shot at them for target practice or ran them over for fun. American soldiers, in fact, were said to be everywhere in South Korea, in their riot helmets and dark sunglasses, raping women in alleyways and publicly beating men, subjugating boys as sexual slaves. Even after the economic miracle of the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, the media told you the South’s growing prosperity was just another sign of its moral depravity and dependence on the Yankee teat. South Korea, the propaganda said, was “the flashiest of American colonies … a foul whore of America … covered in bruises from where it has been kicked black and blue by the American soldiers’ boots, decaying from where the American sewage has seeped in.… It turns the stomach just to think of it.”
The television news was full of footage of student riots in South Korea, bloody miners’ strikes in the United Kingdom, endless murders and crimes in the United States, half-naked savages in Africa who behaved, you were told, essentially like animals. There were environmental disasters everywhere, great tragedies all of them, except for the earthquakes that befell Japan, which you were told were divine payback for their decades of oppression of the Korean people. The Chinese people were starving after giving up strict socialism and opening up to world markets. In the 1980s a new disease, AIDS, was ravaging the Western world, the abominable consequence of the Yankees’ same-sex, interracial, and promiscuous premarital fornication; and covert operatives were reporting that the U.S. military was building a base in South Korea to which were assigned only servicemen suffering from the disease. “The bloodsuckers and butchers are trying to force the AIDS disaster, as well as a nuclear holocaust, upon mankind!” shouted the histrionic news anchor. Every day, luckily, there were also cheering “human interest stories” in the paper or on the television: of heroic citizens who had lost their lives trying to rescue their Kim portraits from a fire or flood, or of children dutifully snitching on their own parents and having them sent to jail, bravely combating unpatriotic behavior in their own homes. On the best days miracles were part of the program: fog had descended to protect Kim Il-Sung from snipers, or snow had melted and flowers grown under Kim Jong-Il’s foot as he walked in Hwanghae Province.
There was a statue of Kim Il-Sung in every single town in the country. Every citizen, like you, wore a badge bearing his likeness, always, every second they were outside the home. On every floor in every workplace and office building, in the main hallway, was a little book of the Great Leader or Dear Leader’s thoughts, handwritten and updated each month. The museums glorified the Kims. The bookstores were exclusively full of books by them or about them. A radio station known as the Third Broadcast played in every household and office building during daylight hours, sharing news about the Kims, maxims attributed to them, and songs of devotion and celebration about them. It could be turned down but not off. Every night the news closed with a maxim attributed to Kim Il-Sung or Kim Jong-Il. The same portraits kept in your living room were in every factory, every courtyard, every schoolroom, every coal mine, and every prison.
When you died—in 1980 your life expectancy was sixty-eight years, six years less than the average Yankee imperialist and eight years less than a neighboring Japanese—your body stayed in your home for three days, watched and mourned over by your children and grandchildren, who would then go to the local Party automobile factory and beg for a truck or cart to carry your body to the cemetery. A bribe, big enough to take a year or two to pay off, usually did the trick. At the end of the third day the family sat down to eat a plain, freshly cooked bowl of rice, then took you to the plot assigned by the local authority outside of town and buried you, themselves, with no help, in the same clothes you had worn your whole life—with the exception of your Kim Il-Sung pin. It would not do, of course, to cover the Great Leader’s likeness in soil and leave it in the cold ground. In life the Leaders were everywhere. In death, however, you were on your own.
&n
bsp; It was folly for anyone to question any aspect of this way of life, however small. Speaking or acting against the system would see you and your entire family condemned to labor camps or death—and why question it? For your whole life, every newspaper article, television broadcast, book, film, song, conversation, and billboard had drilled the Truth into you and everyone around you. The country was hermetically sealed to any communication from the outside world that might break the illusion: you likely never felt the urge to question any of it. For the most part, you might have lived a happy, contented life within its carefully drawn limits, as long as you never tried to go beyond those limits, never tried to think for yourself, never tried to question reality.
* * *
The songbuns, the prison camps, and the myths that Kim Il-Sung had single-handedly liberated Korea had foundations as far back as the 1940s, but the ritualization of daily life, the eradication of every discordant note and opinion, the raising of thousands of statues and monuments, the imposition of Kim Il-Sung pins on every chest and Kim Il-Sung portraits in every household—all this was orchestrated by Kim Jong-Il. The elder Kim had been raised in a Presbyterian family, with a Protestant minister grandfather and a father who had gone to missionary school, and had fought a Japanese enemy who believed their emperor was a god. Once in power he banned the Bible and tore down the churches, appropriating religious imagery and worship for his own purposes. He knew religion. His son, on the other hand, had grown up in a world devoid of it, but he understood how to harness the power of culture and entertainment.
As the DPRK defaulted on its foreign loans and its economy slowly foundered, as the world outside moved toward the future while North Korea dug deeper into the past, Jong-Il understood that he would not be able to improve his country’s fortunes without jeopardizing his own hold on power—and the nation’s very existence as a state separate from South Korea. Since he couldn’t change his people’s reality, Jong-Il elected to change their perception of it. Between the late 1960s and the end of his life he created one vast stage production. He was the writer, director, and producer of the nation. He conceived his people’s roles, their devotion, their values; he wrote their dialogue and forced it upon them; he mapped out their entire character arcs, from birth to death, splicing them out of the picture if they broke type. And with the informers, patrols, and inminbans he had inherited from his father constantly watching everyone, it was like always being on film. The camera was always rolling. The director never shouted “cut.” And the extras, day and night, kept playing their parts.