by Paul Fischer
As electricity to residential areas now became rationed to specific time slots, people—especially younger people—would take advantage of the few hours of power they had every day or every few days to gather at the house of a friend with a VCR or a DVD player, lock the door, draw the curtains, and, in groups of up to thirty, as many as the house could fit, watch as many films as time allowed: South Korean soaps, old American films, Chinese classics, Hong Kong action flicks. Sometimes the police would shut down the electricity early, knowing that tapes and DVDs couldn’t be ejected without power, then raid every home in the neighborhood, arresting anyone found with a foreign movie still in their player. DVD smugglers and salespeople were arrested and executed. Jong-Il announced that the influx of foreign culture was a CIA plot to destabilize the People’s Republic. “Through all manner of falsehoods and trickery,” he declared in a lecture to Party members, “the imperialists and reactionaries are paralyzing the healthy thinking of the masses while spreading among them bourgeois-reactionary ideas and rotten bourgeois customs.… What will happen if we succumb and fail to block these customs of living that the bastards are disseminating?… We become unable to defend to our death the leadership of the revolution and adhere to socialism.” Any North Korean found selling, buying, or watching foreign films or television, Jong-Il decreed, was collaborating with “the puppets under the control of the CIA, who are wickedly conniving to use these specially made materials to beautify the world of imperialism.”
But the illegal and dangerous private screenings continued. The North Korean people had a new perspective not just on what cinema had to offer, but on what their lives could and should have been. North Korean cinema, by way of comparison, stayed stuck in the mid-1980s, bereft of an audience. Kim Jong-Il’s most vital propaganda tool was rendered, within the space of just a couple of years, completely obsolete.
* * *
Meanwhile the North Korean film studios continued to churn out films, or claimed to. In 1988 Deputy Director Choe Ik-Gyu was returned from his exile in the countryside and reinstated as vice director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department. Throughout the 1990s his office claimed the Korea Film Studio made thirty films a year, but by 2000 it was clear the studio had not been used in years. When asked, North Korean citizens were hard-pressed to name any homegrown film they had enjoyed more recently than a film called A Broad Bellflower, which was made back in 1987. There was an attempt at a Titanic rip-off in the early twenty-first century, but it was, fittingly, a disaster. Instead, today’s North Korean filmmakers are encouraged to “Make More Cartoons!” Animation is cheaper, more controllable, and a good way to make use of all the highly trained graduates of the Pyongyang Institute of Art.
And besides, now the performance has moved off the screen and into real life. Diplomats and tourists who visit North Korea today watch as subways are run solely for display for foreign visitors. Fruit, snack, and flower stands are erected to give the illusion of free trade. For visitors concerned by Pyongyang’s alleged religious intolerance, showcase churches have been built in which fake Christian services are performed. And every year, the Arirang Mass Games, overseen by newly appointed minister of culture Choe Ik-Gyu, make headlines on television broadcasts around the world as a demonstration of the North Korean people’s devotion, single-mindedness, endurance, and military precision. The people are still required, under pain of imprisonment, to thank Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il every morning for their food, even though Kim Il-Sung is dead and they have no food.
It is all absurd. It is all fake. But it doesn’t matter. North Korea itself, as a Kim Jong-Il production, had become a theater state: a ritualized experience, a system of symbols, spectacles, and theatrics designed to maintain the authority and legitimacy of a regime that, in reality, has neither.
There is a revolution going on. The performance cannot be allowed to stop. The screens cannot be allowed to go blank.
32
The Stars and Stripes
Choi slept for four days after their daring escape in Vienna. While she rested, her husband looked after her. It was the first time in their three decades together that he was the one cooking for her. Over the next week the CIA agents moved them from safe house to safe house, to make sure they had ditched any North Korean surveillance. Suspicious-looking Asian men had been spotted lurking around the American embassy; when Austrian police had stopped them they had found them armed with handguns. The Americans told Shin and Choi of rumors that Jong-Il had put a price of half a million dollars on their heads. Finally, one morning the agents handed the couple traditional Middle Eastern attire, covering their heads and, in Choi’s case, part of her face. The agents drove them in these disguises to the airport and, with an armed marshal as their escort, put them on a plane to Washington, D.C.
* * *
Like many filmmakers, Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee had dreamed of Hollywood. They had not dreamed of Reston, Virginia.
Asylum had come in exchange for a promise to provide the CIA with all the information they could on Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-Il, and North Korea. They were the first reliable witnesses of the Kims’ habits and behavior to make their way into the hands of the American national security agencies. So when they flew to America it was to a three-story rented house in Reston, just outside D.C., paid for with taxpayers’ money, and with live-in CIA bodyguards.
It was not quite the freedom they had imagined, but it did feel safe. Reston had been built as a planned community in the 1960s by a real estate mogul, Robert E. Simon, funded entirely with the proceeds of the sale of Carnegie Hall, a family heirloom. It had attractive homes, bike paths, tennis courts, golf courses, swimming pools, a zoo, two art galleries, a history museum, and boat rentals on Lake Fairfax. It was here, too, that Shin and Choi were finally reunited with their children. Their daughter was happily married in Seoul, but Jung-Kyun, now twenty-three, came to live with them. The last time Choi had seen him he had been a teenager with braces on his teeth. His face was long and thin, and he was cooler, more aloof. While Shin and Choi were in North Korea he had learned, through the press, that he was adopted; his parents had never had the chance to tell him themselves when he reached a certain age, as they had planned.
They learned that Oh Su-Mi had divorced her photographer husband, dropped out of the film industry, and was struggling with drug addiction. So her two children with Shin—Shin Sang-Kyun, now thirteen, and Shin Seung-Lee, just ten—came to live with them in America, as well. Choi had eight years of pent-up motherly energy to relieve, and somehow she pulled them all together into a coherent family. It was a strange and at times absurd domestic atmosphere, with the CIA agents barbecuing steaks for everyone or taking the family on the ferry around Jamestown and Colonial Williamsburg to celebrate Shin’s sixtieth birthday.
Shin and Choi kept busy giving a series of interviews to The Washington Post and writing their Korean-language memoir, which filled nine hundred pages and was published in Korea in 1988. At first it sold astonishingly well, but after the initial media interest faded, the memoir fell out of attention and out of print, and was never translated into English. They were disappointed when the $2.2 million in the Austrian bank account, which Shin hoped to use as seed funding for a new film career in Hollywood—the least, he figured, Kim Jong-Il could do to repay them—was seized by the Austrian government, to whom the Kims owed money.
They became U.S. citizens and, at Choi’s request, finally got married properly, in the Italian embassy, which the CIA considered the safest location. Shin wore a tuxedo, Choi a white lace dress and head scarf. He was sixty, she was fifty-six. They had been famous together and poor together, adopted children and made films, rubbed shoulders with presidents and dictators, married, divorced, remarried, survived kidnapping and imprisonment.
“Thank you for being stubborn about me when we first started dating,” Madame Choi told her husband. “You were brave to choose me, considering the situation.”
“No, I wasn’t brave,” Shin answe
red. “You were just so beautiful that I had no choice.”
* * *
Choi would have been happy living out her life as a mother and wife again, safe in the knowledge that her children slept under her roof, and that she was free to come, go, and do as she pleased. But her husband wanted to be in California. He wanted to work. “We didn’t escape to live like the dead,” he would grumble restlessly.
“What about your age?” Choi would ask him.
“What age?” he would answer.
Deep dissatisfaction defined the last chapter of Shin’s life. “I wish I was ten years younger than I am now,” he would growl to his wife. “I wish I spoke better English.” More than one person who interviewed him in his later years noted that life in Virginia was the only topic he could not comfortably discuss. Prison he could talk about; Kim Jong-Il he could talk about; but sitting in a big house in Virginia at someone else’s expense, not making films … about that Shin was speechless.
So after three years of living under the protection of the CIA, Shin and Choi left Reston and headed west, for California, to start their careers fresh. Shin had dreams of making it big in Hollywood. Through mutual connections they found a Korean-Japanese businessman who had made a fortune in real estate in Hawaii, remembered their films, and was willing to fund their efforts. He had a house in Beverly Hills and offered to let them stay there. Shin and Choi ended up living there for nearly four years, as Shin went to work on a third start to his career. He now went by the name of Simon Sheen, the Christian name he took when Choi convinced him to convert to Catholicism prior to their wedding ceremony in Washington.
Choi quickly realized that, at sixty-three, she was too old and too little known in the West to print out head shots, get an agent, and fight for bit parts in a town swimming with young, fresh starlets. Besides, she struggled to pick up English, and even after years in the United States couldn’t string more than a few words together. Shin fared little better. Genghis Khan, which he now reimagined as an epic musical, fell through, and door after door was closed in his face when he proposed a film about his and Choi’s North Korean experience, the rejections casually stressing the grim commercial prospects, in America at least, of a project with three Korean lead roles.
In 1990 Shin briefly returned to Asia to direct Mayumi: Virgin Terrorist, based on the real story of a female North Korean agent who had bombed a Korean Air flight in 1987; he made the film, he later said, to “confirm his identity” and prove he wasn’t a Communist. The effort backfired dramatically. Despite having the largest budget of any Korean film to date, being shot in seventeen countries, and having been preselected as an entry to the Venice Film Festival (as well as South Korea’s official Best Foreign Language Picture submission for the Academy Awards), the film was met with largely mocking reviews upon its release. To make things worse, he was slapped with a defamation suit by the families of the victims of the bombing, who claimed Shin had won the right to tell their loved ones’ stories by promising he would make a film that would honor the victims but instead had made a “blood-soaked” and tactless spectacle. They especially criticized Mayumi’s largest set piece, the bombing sequence, which was shot in a grotesquely violent manner, intercut with documentary footage of the real families mourning their lost ones. The two-and-a-half-minute sequence had cost nearly half of the film’s total $2 million budget, and Shin, after settling the suit out of court for an undisclosed sum, later sheepishly admitted that shooting it had been the main draw of the film for him. Some viewed Mayumi as little more than thinly veiled South Korean propaganda, an anti-North film the government required of Shin to publicly establish his antagonism for the North. Most just thought it was a bad film: rushed, cheap, and poorly acted.
Shin scuttled back to Los Angeles and directed a film portraying the 1980s South Korean military dictatorship in an unfavorable light, maybe to redress the balance. That also tanked. After those experiences Shin decided to stay away from politics for a while. The success of Home Alone and America’s intense Asian martial arts fetishism—born with Bruce Lee, but feeding off the Karate Kid franchise of 1984–1994 and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles craze—inspired Shin to create 3 Ninjas, a Disney movie franchise about three all-American kids who use martial arts to fight crime. Shin had a script written and entered talks with Disney to finance and distribute the film. He might have been the biggest filmmaker in both Koreas, but he found himself awed by actual direct talks with a Hollywood studio. Disney lawyers were famous for their heartless intransigence, and it didn’t matter that Shin was in his sixties or had survived kidnapping and the gulag. In May 1992, while the Rodney King riots tore Los Angeles apart outside their hotel window, Shin, his lawyers, and Disney’s lawyers locked themselves in a suite for a whole night, arguing an arcanely detailed licensing agreement. Shin, who was used to doing everything on a handshake, a wink, and a prayer, with some forged papers to back it all up if necessary, was completely lost. “Everything was different,” he said. “I did my best to accept everything they suggested.”
The series had three films in all, Shin directing one and producing and writing all three. He had hoped they would rival Home Alone in popularity. In fact, they were all box-office and critical failures, box-office receipts for each installment diminishing dramatically following the first film’s respectable return on investment; but they later found something of a kids’ following on television and home video, riding the zeitgeist (and, incidentally, launching the career of director Jon Turteltaub, who later directed Cool Runnings and the National Treasure blockbusters). Shin also sold the Disney Channel television network a kids’ movie remake of Pulgasari entitled The Legend of Galgameth, a film so bad that it makes Pulgasari look good; and a year later produced The Gardener, a forgettable thriller starring Malcolm McDowell.
Turteltaub remained a friend for the rest of Shin’s life, and Angie Everhart, who costarred in The Gardener and suffered a miscarriage during the film’s shoot, remembered that Shin made sure the production halted for as long as she needed and that she received the best care. “Sheen was very kind to me,” she said. He was on set every day, “serious and quiet,” embarrassed by his poor English. Everyone on the crew remembered his assistant, a young Korean woman whose face was covered in scars: a former gang member in L.A., she had been disfigured when a rival had spat razor blades in her face and pushed them into her skin. It’s unknown how Shin had found her, but he gave her her break in the film industry. Even in America, it seemed, tragedy could strike anyone at any time—women especially; it was always worse for women, Shin despaired.
Something had clearly changed in Shin Sang-Ok the artist. Here was a filmmaker who had spent the 1960s and 1970s pushing boundaries, who was most famous for his films’ eroticism and sensuality. Now, he could only manage Disney Channel drivel. What had been shrewd populism earlier in his career had become trite and manipulatively labored. Perhaps he was desperate for a hit and thought that copying mainstream trends was a way to translate his talents. He certainly found it hard fitting into the Hollywood way of doing things, and it is telling that in six years in California he produced five films but only directed one (he would later shrug off even that, and say that he had never directed in Hollywood, in spite of the credit). He said later, “I suddenly, and I must say brutally, realized the cultural differences between our two civilizations. I felt very far away.”
Beverly Hills was hard on Madame Choi, too. While her husband struggled to make his way professionally she spent her days with the children or taking walks around the neighborhood. She was the only Asian woman in the community, as far as she could tell, and she was keenly aware of the gazes of the other wives, who mostly seemed to fall into two categories: power wives, the skin on their foreheads and cheekbones tight, their whole bodies seemingly on the verge of snapping, always rushing to some meeting or lunch; and trophy wives, youthful and firm and perky, either in jeans or bright leggings, eating health food and always returning from the beach or an exerc
ise class. Each had her own brand of power and independence. Madame Choi, who had no meetings or classes to go to and who always wore black, with black sunglasses and a large black hat shading her pale skin from the sun, felt old and witchy and out of place.
Now that she was divorced, Oh Su-Mi had started flying to California to “see her children,” she claimed; but Choi felt sure it was the Hollywood glamour that was drawing the former starlet like a moth to a flame. She had, after all, never sought to visit Reston. Oh would take both children on outings, leaving Choi behind feeling lonely and dejected. She never could forget that Oh was the children’s biological mother, and that she had never been able to bear her own children. Oh seemed not to care if her flying visits made life difficult for the kids. She had a drug and alcohol problem, and when she and Choi would argue, sometimes in public, it wasn’t uncommon for Oh to throw wine in Choi’s face or pull her hair in the middle of a restaurant. She would bring up wanting to take her kids back to South Korea with her, and then relent and agree they were better off with Shin and Choi. One day Oh called Choi to tell her she was getting married, to a Frenchman she had met. Shortly after that she was in a horrific car accident in Hawaii and died. She was only forty-two years old. Shin was on a film set working, so Choi flew to her cremation in Hawaii with Sang-Kyun, Oh’s son. There was no one else there, and after the service Choi was left in the crematorium on the very foreign island, holding a box full of ashes. Her feelings were, she said, “complicated.” She thought of how there was no one else there for Oh, and wondered how she would have felt if she had known Shin’s wife would be the only person at her funeral. Sitting alone with the ashes, Choi cried, as desperately as she had when Su-Mi had first come into her life. She didn’t know what to make of any of it.
* * *
After eight years out of the world, Shin and Choi were strangers everywhere, at home nowhere. The United States had welcomed them with open arms, and they were grateful. But home—the home they had been taken away from in 1978—remained South Korea.