A Kim Jong-Il Production

by Paul Fischer

  “[Choi]’s face was white as a sheet of paper. My heart was racing like a motor,” Shin wrote a year later, “fearing we might run into the white taxi on our way to the embassy.… The U.S. Embassy was five minutes away. It felt like five hours.”

  Boltzmanngasse, the embassy’s quiet side street, is one-way and often congested with cars trying to drive by or get clearance through the main gate. Parking restrictions on both sides meant traffic often ground to a standstill entering the street. Shin and Choi’s taxi found itself stuck at the bottom of the hill, unable to go any farther, about fifty yards from American soil. Breathlessly Shin asked Enoki to stay and watch them until they were safe. Without saying good-bye, he pushed his door open. From the front seat Choi did the same. They ran as fast as they could, reached the embassy door at the same time, and tried to shove each other out of the way in their rush to reach safety. They burst through the doors, sprinted to the receptionist, and told him their names. Shin handed him a Shin Film card—address, Pyongyang—and tried to explain their situation in broken English. The receptionist took them to another embassy worker. Shin asked to see the consul. The young man recognized their names and escorted the two South Koreans through a metal detector where a security guard gave them a pat-down, then walked them into a small room and asked them to wait. They were served a cup of tea, the young official stepped outside, and the door closed behind him. Choi was trembling. Shin still expected to see the North Koreans come blazing into the embassy. It was 1:15 p.m.

  As the clock ticked steadily from one minute to the next they sank into their seats, relief washing over them. A smile floated on Choi’s face as she turned to her husband. “You tried to get through the embassy doors before me, didn’t you?” she asked. Shin laughed. “I don’t remember,” he said, blushing. For years thereafter, she would tease him about it, saying that Shin had chivalrously pushed his way ahead of her to save his own skin.

  After about fifteen minutes another American, a man in his thirties, entered the room. He had been expecting them, he joked, but not this soon. It turned out that the Japanese hotel employee had dutifully passed Shin’s message along, and that the American put in charge of the case had spent the morning looking up Shin and Choi. The reason it had taken fifteen minutes for him to get here was that, as they were bursting through the embassy doors, he was at the nearby police station, trying to establish whether the Austrian police had already busted the South Koreans with falsified papers. The American quickly debriefed Shin and Choi, then asked them to follow him outside. With two other U.S. officials sticking close by, they climbed into two unmarked cars, which drove them to a house on a quiet residential street. They rushed inside. The American in charge of their case left the room for a minute and returned with a pink rose. With a big smile he handed it to Choi.

  “Welcome,” he said, “to the West.” Choi Eun-Hee took the rose and burst into tears.

  31

  From Kim to Kim

  “People of the world, if you are looking for miracles, come to Korea! Christians, do not go to Jerusalem. Come rather to Korea. Do not believe in God. Believe in the great man.”

  —OFFICIAL RODONG SINMUN EDITORIAL ABOUT KIM IL-SUNG, DECEMBER 1980

  Foreigners who look at pictures of Pyongyang often inquire about the unusual white dots, crosses, and numbers painted on the asphalt of Kim Il-Sung Square and all the main streets running to and through it. The marks form a complex grid used to orchestrate mass political events and gatherings, indicating to citizens where to stand and where to move, like tape on a theater stage indicating where furniture and scenery is to be placed or an actor’s “mark” on a film set, a taped cross on the ground indicating where the performer must stand to be in frame and in focus. Pyongyang’s grid is the clearest sign that the DPRK’s capital is not a city but a stage on a monumental scale.

  * * *

  Losing Shin Sang-Ok and Madame Choi was the beginning of the end for Kim Jong-Il’s career as a movie mogul. It would take another twenty years for the North Korean film industry to collapse, but that day in March 1986 was its start.

  No one really knows how Kim Jong-Il reacted to the news of his beloved filmmakers’ defection. He was undoubtedly surprised, and would have felt betrayed; the North Koreans in charge of making sure that something like this didn’t happen would have been severely punished. Choe Ik-Gyu was suspended from the Propaganda and Agitation Department and sent down to production, his exact whereabouts unknown for several years. Ho Hak-Sun was almost certainly removed from the Tongbuk-Ri guesthouse and expelled from the Party, but her punishment is unclear.

  Shin and Choi’s escape created a minor diplomatic stir. Kyodo News, Enoki’s employers, were the first to break the news, based on the testimony of “a trusted source,” Enoki himself. Over the days that followed, the U.S. and North Korean embassies exchanged recriminations in the newspapers and over the newswires. The North Korean government first accused the United States government of “tricking and kidnapping [Shin and Choi] in agreement with the South Korean puppets.” It repeated its claim that Shin had been persecuted by the South Korean government and voluntarily sought domicile in the North, and that “we helped him, because he asked for our help.” The North Korean ambassador in Vienna put out a mournful appeal, like a parent seeking a missing child. He told the news that Shin and Choi had been taken from the Intercontinental against their will, “and they have not returned. Since then we have been looking for them.”

  This all changed when Shin and Choi gave their first press conference, announcing to the world that they had been kidnapped but now were free. Kim Jong-Il’s diplomat became indignant. Yes, Shin and Choi had escaped, he now told the media, not because they had been prisoners but because—corrupt, untrustworthy South Koreans that they had been from the start—they had stolen the $2 million with which Kim had generously and kindheartedly entrusted them to restart their failed careers. (Shin later disclosed, “When I thought about the eight years of personal and public loss we had suffered, I thought it only fair for us to keep the money,” but it was a decision he would regret.) The American wolves, predictably, had helped them in their deception and betrayal.

  Shin’s name was immediately removed from the credits of Pulgasari, with credit passing to his assistant. When the film was released on North Korean screens just weeks after Shin and Choi escaped, it was an unprecedented success. Kim personally ordered a nationwide campaign of lectures and ideology sessions to discredit Shin, demanding that “every single North Korean” accept Shin no longer as a cultural hero, but as a traitor. Shin’s name became unmentionable without punishment, and the films he had directed were removed from circulation.

  North Korea would soon have bigger problems than the loss of its only good filmmaker. Five decades of political isolation, technological stagnation, and economic mismanagement were taking their toll, impacting every single part of the economy starting with the country’s very soil. Kim Il-Sung had so abused his country’s resources and infrastructure that growing and harvesting food now became well-nigh impossible. Whole swathes of the countryside had been ruined by reckless deforestation, and the DPRK’s dam and irrigation systems had fallen into disrepair, devastating the surrounding farms and plots. North Korea’s problems were compounded by the changing face of the world at the end of the Cold War. In the late 1980s the DPRK’s two biggest (and arguably only) allies, China and the USSR, opened diplomatic and trade relations with South Korea, a slap in the face for the Kims. Around the same time, the Chinese and Soviets, themselves facing economic difficulty, started asking for cash up-front from North Korea for any new deliveries of food and fuel. The North owed its allies roughly $10 billion in loans by this point, none of which it could pay back. Two-thirds of North Korea’s food imports, and three-quarters of its fuel, came from its Chinese neighbors. The rest was imported from the Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991, ceasing trade with the DPRK entirely.

  The North Korean economy ground to a halt, and “soon
the country was sucked into a vicious death spiral,” the journalist Barbara Demick wrote a few years later. “Without cheap fuel oil and raw material, it couldn’t keep the factories running, which meant it had nothing to export. With no exports, there was no hard currency, and without hard currency, fuel imports fell even further and electricity stopped. The coal mines couldn’t operate without electricity [and] the shortage of coal worsened the electricity shortage. The electricity shortage further lowered agricultural output.” Soon North Korea ran out of food. And as people began to starve and die, the ambulances ran out of petrol, the hospitals went dark, and all communication broke down.

  By 1998, depending on whose numbers you go by, between sixty thousand and two million North Koreans—as much as 10 percent of the entire population—had died from famine. Those who survived resembled what Westerners were more used to seeing in Somalia or Ethiopia: people with sunken eyes, distended bellies, and dry skin stretched over bone. People laid traps to catch birds, rats, even mice. The country’s entire frog population was eaten to extinction within a year. People scraped and chewed the bark off trees, and dug through cowpats for undigested corn and wheat. There were reports of parents arrested for eating their children and of black-market stalls selling human flesh. Corpses lay unclaimed and unattended in the streets and on the steps of train stations. The only thing that kept North Korea going was aid, over $2 billion of it, most coming from the “murderous Yankee wolves” of the United States.

  Kim Il-Sung, whose health had long been declining, finally died in 1994, at the age of eighty-two. He had spent his final two decades sleeping with the teenage girls of the Joy Brigade and surrounded by doctors and nurses at the Kim Il-Sung Longevity Institute, created by his son to try and keep the Supreme Leader alive. The old guerrilla’s mind and body had weakened considerably. His eyesight and hearing were failing. The doctors recommended laughter and health foods, as well as transfusions from the blood of younger men, to rejuvenate the Sun of Korea. But there was nothing to be done. One scorchingly hot July day Kim Il-Sung’s heart gave out. He had been the leader of his country for forty-six years. He had outlived Mao by nearly twenty years and Stalin by forty; his reign had seen off nine U.S. presidents, twenty-one Japanese prime ministers, and six South Korean presidents. And he had succeeded in passing the reins of power to his son.

  * * *

  When the Korean Central News Agency anchor, in a black suit and black tie, announced the news of Kim Il-Sung’s death, a howl rose from the streets. Entire families ran out of their homes and banged their heads against walls and pavements. Many started to scream and wail. People killed themselves by jumping off rooftops or, in the longer term, slowly starving themselves. (Even suicide is difficult in North Korea, where nobody has sleeping pills to overdose on and only soldiers have bullets with which to blow their brains out.)

  Over the next few days, mass hysteria swept over the country. People gathered around statues of Kim Il-Sung to pour out their grief. Things became warped and absurd. First people turned out because they were genuinely distraught, then they returned because they were hungry and the authorities had started handing out rice cakes to everyone who paid their respects. And then they returned again and again because it was expected, and later demanded, of them. What had begun spontaneously became a duty. An order was put out that each group of mourners must bring flowers to leave at the Leader’s foot, and the inminban were watching to spot people whose grieving wasn’t clear or convincing enough, in case they were traitors, or wavering. Jong-Il released a propaganda film claiming that the Great Leader might come back to life if people grieved hard enough for him. Conspiracy theories spread that the Great Leader had been assassinated by the Americans or South Koreans: How else could he have died?

  According to Communist tradition begun following the death of Lenin in 1924, Kim Il-Sung’s body was embalmed and put on display for his people to see. The process involved removing all of the Supreme Leader’s organs before bathing his hollow corpse in a formaldehyde bath and injecting liters of chemical balsam, a cocktail of glycerine and potassium acetate, in his veins to keep his flesh lifelike and elastic. Finally makeup and lipstick were applied to Kim’s face to restore the illusion of youth. A team of Soviet biochemists, who called themselves the Mausoleum Laboratory and had carried out the mummifications of Lenin, Stalin, and Ho Chi Minh, were flown in to Pyongyang to do the job.

  An elaborate funeral was arranged over two days, July 19 and 20. Two million people lined the capital’s streets as the coffin, on the roof of a Cadillac, cruised down to its final destination: Kumsusan Palace, which Kim Jong-Il turned into a memorial and mausoleum. Mourners and visitors were sanitized as they walked in: expensive X-ray equipment peeked into their pockets, revolving brushes cleaned the soles of their shoes, and air cannons blasted the dust and dirt off their clothes as they were moved along a half-mile-long conveyor belt. The belt led to the end of a marble corridor and into a chamber featuring a white marble statue of the deceased Leader, illuminated from behind by pink lights. Through that anteroom was a vast, dark hall filled with somber music. There on a black bier lay Kim Il-Sung, expensively preserved, in a black suit under clear glass. The whole thing cost, by most estimates, over $100 million. North Korea’s entire annual trade was estimated at only $2 billion. The day of the funeral, Jong-Il announced that Kim Il-Sung would remain “Eternal President,” still walking side by side with his people, ruling and guiding the republic from the beyond.

  * * *

  Though Kim Jong-Il assumed power in the early 1980s, his father remaining the country’s head in name only, the younger Kim officially took over just in time to be seen as the one responsible for his country’s devastation. Ever the propagandist, the Dear Leader put his publicity machine into overdrive in a desperate bid to save face and explain away the famine. The government first claimed it was stockpiling food to feed the starving people of South Korea on the impending day of reunification. When that story failed to connect, the government alleged that the United States had unilaterally imposed a blockade against North Korea and was keeping food out of the DPRK in a bid to starve the people and destroy the regime. This worked a little better, but was undercut when citizens reported sightings of the North Korean army building fences along the seashores to stop people fishing, because fish were “state property” needed by the Party to feed themselves and the elite. The North Korean news followed up with a documentary about a greedy man whose stomach burst from eating too much food, suggesting that starving was actually good for you. There is no record of how that tactic was received.

  In the midst of this human tragedy, Kim Jong-Il decided that the country needed cinema more than ever. North Korean film during the famine dutifully returned to propaganda about the DPRK being the happiest and luckiest country on Earth, a message which had little resonance given the people’s daily struggle to survive. At almost the exact same time, international films began to be smuggled into North Korea and reveal to its citizens all they had been missing. Black markets were becoming endemic, run by Chinese smugglers who snuck VHS players and tapes (along with food and other foreign goods) across the Yalu and Tumen Rivers. For the very first time in the country’s history movies weren’t the exclusive domain of the state. Films and television shows from China, Hong Kong, South Korea, and even the United States appeared on market stalls. Soon Chinese dealers upgraded to DVDs, the thin discs being easier to pack in huge quantities than VHS tapes. Smuggling was easy: all they had to do was fill a duffel bag with hundreds of discs, a carton of Marlboros on top to bribe any inquisitive soldier.

  North Korean propaganda could not compete with this. It wasn’t just that the films were so much better made, or more entertaining, or that they made North Korean audiences more discriminating and more sharply receptive to the subtexts and rhythms of a motion picture, though all of that was true. The real game changer was that millions of ordinary North Koreans now saw extensive images of the outside world for the first tim
e. They saw cities packed with cars and skyscrapers, homes with dishwashers and laundry machines and televisions—not just wealthy people’s homes, but everyone’s homes. Romantic comedies ended with people freely chasing each other in airports, surrounded by hundreds of people who could afford (and were allowed) to travel the world for leisure. The South Koreans, once believed to be living under a more severe and brutal government, also appeared to benefit at will from the free world’s perks. And the evil Americans they saw in these films seemed too happy and healthy, too busy buying things and falling in love, to be believably related to the hook-nosed, crooked-fingered child killers of North Korean legend.

  In 1989, Charles Jenkins and the other U.S. defectors got their own smuggled VHS player, acquired through an Ethiopian student living in Pyongyang. Over the next decade they watched a stack of black-market tapes—Titanic, Cliffhanger, Coming to America, Die Hard, the James Bond films—“with all the curtains drawn and the volume turned down as low as possible.” Jenkins now had two daughters, born and raised in North Korea, and they found these glimpses of the never-before-seen outside world overwhelming and hard to relate to. “They could hardly make sense of them. In Coming to America, for example, Eddie Murphy stars as an African prince who finds a wife in New York City, but [Jenkins’s daughters] Brinda and Mika had always been taught that black people in America were still basically slaves, so to see shots of all the races walking around freely and basically getting along with each other on the streets of New York was too much for them.”