by Paul Fischer
They were wary of returning. The South’s National Security Law was still in full force, and it wasn’t uncommon for Koreans who had been taken by force to the North to be thrown into prison as traitors when they returned. And they had been away so long that they feared they wouldn’t feel at home any more. But they couldn’t stay away. So, in 1999, twenty-one years after their abductions, Director Shin and Madame Choi finally returned permanently to Seoul.
The South Korea from which they had been taken in 1978 was a military dictatorship, the streets of Seoul frequently thick with tear gas and riot police, the arts and media tightly censored. The country they found in the final years of the twentieth century was wealthy, democratic, peaceful, and urbanized. It had successfully hosted the 1988 Summer Olympics, and in 1990 the people had chosen their first truly democratically elected president, Roh Tae-Woo. South Korea seemed to have become what Shin, Choi, and millions of South Koreans had been hoping it would become for decades.
As soon as they stepped off the plane, Shin and Choi were met by the Korean CIA and taken to interrogation rooms, where they were hooked up to lie detectors and questioned for hours. Stupidly, they were still wearing the watches given to them by Kim Jong-Il: Shin his gold Rolex, Choi her first Kim Il-Sung name watch. Both were confiscated. At the end of a long day of questioning—during which, Shin claimed, his interrogators accused him of being a North Korean spy—they were released, on condition that they give several press conferences and public interviews denying any allegiance to the North. They did so in their usual attire: Choi perfectly coiffed and made-up, in large sunglasses and tailored clothes, Shin in his French-cut black suit and silk patterned necktie. Witnessing the elegant couple, the South Korean people refused to believe that Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee had been kidnapped. This, they said, did not look like two people who had gone through such a terrible ordeal. They looked wealthy and old. Hadn’t Shin just made that terrible Mayumi film, the one that took advantage of the grief of the families of hijack victims? And the book they wrote, wasn’t that just another way to make money?
The whole thing, Choi said, was “brutal” and “emotionally harrowing.” Everywhere else in the world they were treated with respect, but their own countrymen refused to believe and accept them. “Everyone was against us,” she said. “When we actually asked some of these people if they had read the book, we found most people hadn’t. They just heard things from someone and then went on talking about it, about how unrealistic the whole story was.” Worst of all, they were immediately turned into pawns in a political game. Anyone with right-wing sympathies took them up as examples of the ruthlessness of the criminal North Korean government. Those on the left saw them instead as tools of the South Korean conservative establishment and refused to believe in their story, claiming their abduction and escape were invented, their book ghostwritten by government staff, and the tapes of Kim Jong-Il fakes manufactured by the KCIA using voice actors. Shin couldn’t work in the South, so he had gone north, they said, and then he either had a change of heart or was stolen back by the KCIA. They shrugged off evidence to the contrary, and these doubts, over time, stuck. While to the world at large there was no doubt that Shin and Choi were victims, kidnapped by the North, in South Korea rumors still abound attacking the credibility of their story.
After everything they had endured, they asked themselves, this was their welcome home?
* * *
They rented a small house in Seoul and tried to get back to work. But times were hard. They were both exhausted and in debt. It was always unlikely that Shin, a relic from a filmmaking era over thirty years prior, would easily find a place in South Korea’s new edgy, youth-oriented film industry. A Japanese film buff and sometime distributor of wacky and cultish movies, who wrote for Japanese Playboy under the pen name Edoki Jun (a Japanese version of “Ed Wood Jr.”), had just bought Japanese rights to Pulgasari and released it in his home country to stupendous success. Shin sued to have his name put back on the film, but lost, since the film was governed by North Korean law, and North Korean law was Kim Jong-Il’s will. A couple of years later Pulgasari was released on VHS and DVD in the United States, where it was widely derided but became an instant cult classic. Shin never saw a penny.
At least he still had his sense of humor. Reporters visiting his office on the outskirts of Seoul never failed to notice that, alongside the pictures of him and his wife in the 1960s, or him, Catherine Deneuve, and Clint Eastwood in Cannes in 1994, he also proudly displayed the surreal pictures of him and Choi alongside Kim Jong-Il and Kim Il-Sung. Speaking to a journalist in 2003, Shin admitted, “When I think of having money, I think of North Korea.” Later in the interview, when asked about Kim Jong-Il’s impact on his life, he playfully nudged his wife. “He played a positive role for us,” he smiled. “Perhaps she told Kim to kidnap us, she was so keen to get back together.”
He made light of it, but for such an ambitious man, who had always craved to be at the center of things, the world’s casual indifference to him was even worse than its disbelief and suspicion. He directed one more film in South Korea, A Story of Winter, a small, serious-minded drama about senile dementia and the fragilities of old age.
It went unreleased. It would be his last time behind a film camera.
Epilogue: 2013
Sitting in front of the old lady is a lemon tea and hot water. It’s over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit outside, suffocatingly humid and sticky, but she can no longer drink cold drinks, she explains, because of problems with her throat and esophagus. Her eyes are bright and focused. When she moves, which she rarely does, she is slow and deliberate.
Madame Choi is eighty-eight years old and can only get around in a wheelchair. She looks as good as anyone could expect to at eighty-eight. She wears very big prescription glasses under a gray cap, from which short white hair slips out in wisps, and subtle but full makeup on a pale face. She has on trousers and a blue jacket blouse over a burgundy top, expensive-looking silver shoes with a small heel, and a big, square silver medallion hung low around her neck. There are rings on three of her fingers, one of them her (second) wedding band. You hear people talk of a movie star or a rock god entering a room and the air pressure changing with their presence. Choi Eun-Hee, in her eighties, in a wheelchair, has that quality.
In an eatery called Pop Street, one of those South Korean establishments that is part restaurant (serving everything from traditional Korean fare to spaghetti Bolognese, hamburgers, and chicken Caesar salads) and part Starbucks-style coffeehouse, Madame Choi recounts her story over a period of four hours, fielding the questions with quiet charm and grace. When asked, in summary, if there is only one thing that she hopes readers will take from her and Shin’s story, she doesn’t even think before replying.
“The most important thing to me,” she says, “is for people to finally accept that the truth is the truth.”
* * *
Shin Sang-Ok died on April 11, 2006. Even today, years later, when she is unable to sleep in the small hours, Madame Choi imagines walking into his study, expecting him to be there, working, the way he used to do right up until his final days.
He had stopped talking a couple of years before his death. When spoken to he would just smile, sad and dog tired, instead of answering. If he did answer, he would whisper, “I don’t have much to say.” A liver transplant in 2005 took poorly, and a second operation followed a few months later; he was old, weak, and struggled to recover. Choi couldn’t afford a car, so she made long bus journeys, alone, to visit Shin in the hospital every day. She now blames one of Shin’s nurses for exercising him too much, for rushing his recovery. She also blames Kim Jong-Il, more fairly, for the years that Shin spent weakening in a gulag. While still in hospital Shin contracted hepatitis, and his health deteriorated so rapidly he seemed to be getting worse every hour. The night of April 11, at the end of her visit, Choi kissed him and prepared to leave.
As always, she asked him if he needed anything. Shin, s
miling, replied, “Hold my hand. So I can see how strong you are.” She gave her husband her hand and he held it for a while. His hands, she remembers, were warm and comforting. After a long time he let go and, in a low, quiet, loving voice, said, “You can go now, Madame Choi.” Choi smiled and told him she would return early the next morning. Later that night, Shin’s body gave out. His last words were spoken to his nurse, as he watched his blood drip from an open sore, off the bed and onto the floor. “Please,” he said, “clean this mess I made.”
Madame Choi’s mobile phone rang as she was just getting off the bus that took her back home. She couldn’t process the news. When she and Shin were divorced, she says, “I could still hate him, and miss him,” because she knew he was out there, living in the world somewhere. Now he was gone, and there was nothing left. “Death,” she says, “is a cold thing.”
The funeral took place at the Seoul National University Hospital. Movie stars from the 1960s and 1970s, most of whom hadn’t seen each other since the golden days, filed into the old building to pay their respects. The actor Shin Young-Kyun, one of Shin’s favorites, who had starred in Eunuch and Red Muffler, among countless others, spoke at the altar, crediting Shin with making the Korean industry what it became. The South Korean culture and tourism minister, Kim Myung-Gon, himself a former actor and screenwriter, paid his respects and placed the Gold Crown Cultural Medal, the highest honor in South Korea for an artist, onto the casket. Newspapers around the world, from The New York Times to The Guardian, carried his obituary. Every tribute defined Shin’s life first and foremost by his kidnapping, not his films; or, as the Times headline summed up: SHIN SANG OK, 80, KOREAN FILM DIRECTOR ABDUCTED BY DICTATOR, IS DEAD.
* * *
Kim Jong-Il drew his last breath five years later, on December 17, 2011, at the age of seventy. He died on his private train, which then halted on a siding while the Workers’ Party figured out how to announce the Dear Leader’s passing and handle his succession. After two long days the official North Korean media finally announced that he had died of a massive heart attack brought on by “overwork.” Some reports later insisted the heart attack had struck while Kim was ranting at underlings “in a fit of rage” over the shoddy work at a power plant construction site. His son, Kim Jong-Un, was announced as his successor in the newscast that reported his death. Kim Jong-Nam, the eldest son, had fallen out of favor a decade earlier following his humiliating arrest at the Tokyo airport for attempting to enter the country on a fake Dominican Republic passport in the name of Pang Xiong (“Fat Bear” in Mandarin Chinese). The incident was made even more ridiculous by Jong-Nam’s being accompanied by two women, neither of whom was his wife; by his traveling with a suitcase full of cash; and by his claims that he only wanted to visit Tokyo Disneyland (he was actually most likely traveling to Japan on Division 39 business). In the weeks that followed, the Japanese newspapers were full of the unflattering testimony of hostesses at the seedy massage parlors Jong-Nam liked to frequent when in Tokyo. After that Kim Jong-Il had quickly turned his favors to his younger, and much better behaved, son Jong-Un.
The same newscaster who had announced Kim Il-Sung’s passing on state television told the people of Kim Jong-Il’s death, while wearing the same traditional black mourning outfit. The Central News Agency reported that throughout the country the people were “convulsing with pain and despair” at the loss of their leader. “Our people and army are beating their breasts.”
Kim’s body lay embalmed in Kumsusan Palace for a week for the people to visit. After his state funeral there was a further twenty-four hour mourning period, the end of which was marked by heavy artillery fire, followed by three minutes of silence, followed by “all official vehicles, locomotives, and vessels [sounding] their horns.”
No government officials from South Korea paid their condolences, but restrained sympathies were communicated by the UN Secretary General and a European Union high representative; the most heartfelt condolences came from Azerbaijan (“I was deeply saddened to hear [of] this heavy loss,” said President Ilham Aliyev), Bangladesh (“The people of the DPRK have lost a great leader and we have lost a dear friend.… We pray that they will be able to bear this irreparable loss with courage and fortitude,” said President Zillur Rahman), and Syria (Jong-Il’s death was “a great loss not only to the Korean people but to the people of all countries struggling for freedom, justice, and peace,” said President Bashar al-Assad). In Cuba, Fidel Castro’s Council of State announced a period of official mourning and flew the country’s flags at half-mast for two days.
The day of the Dear Leader’s funeral saw Pyongyang clothed in crisp, pure white snow, a favorite symbol of the Kim regime, which liked to present North Korea as a victimized child in a world of wolves and predators. In a highly choreographed event, a procession of black cars rolled slowly down streets lined by an estimated two hundred thousand hysterical North Koreans. There were army jeeps and Mercedes limousines, military trucks filled with wreaths and flag-carrying generals, a fleet of gleaming white Mercedes sedans. Goose-stepping infantry marched among the cars, the entire convoy escorted by a military band.
At the center of everything was a black hearse. On its roof, inside a black coffin draped with the red DPRK flag, was Kim Jong-Il’s body. The hearse was escorted, on foot, on the left side by uniformed generals and on the right by leading members of the Workers’ Party, black clad and grim faced. First among them was the favored son and successor, twenty-eight-year-old Kim Jong-Un.
The Central News Agency broadcast “spontaneous” interviews with spectators along the route. One beautiful female soldier, her breathless tones and choked voice straight out of one of the Dear Leader’s movies, said, “As I see the snow fall, I shed more tears, thinking about our General’s hard work.” Another male soldier laid it on even more thickly: “How can the sky not cry? The people are all crying—crying tears of blood.” Each interview was as melodramatic as the scripts that Kim Jong-Il had loved so much. One person in the crowd shouted: “How could you leave us? What are we supposed to do without you?”
The North Korean people were told this broadcast was live, but it wasn’t; it was aired several hours later, the government having given itself time to edit and manipulate the event even further, digitally erasing the state film crews littering the whole route and scripting the perfect commentary.
A funeral is a ritual; in North Korea it becomes, like everything else, a show. Kim Jong-Il’s funeral had to be the biggest show in memory. Loudspeakers blared carefully selected revolutionary hymns; the “spontaneous” crowd had been arranged with the more attractive female soldiers grouped together in the front. In one clip of the broadcast, a group of generals is looking on as the coffin drives nearer. When one general raises his hand to wipe away his tears, the other three copy him immediately. Farther down the road people repetitively pretend to be collapsing under the weight of their pain. They hold on to one another by the elbows and sway up and down. There are people doubling over suddenly, as if struck by a burst appendix. All of them are freezing, hatless, breathing clouds of vapor in the icy temperatures. In close-ups you can see apparently tearful eyes open and look around, completely dry, before the person resumes “crying” again. The footage is theatrical, dehumanizing, and humiliating to watch.
The funeral convoy drove for forty kilometers (roughly twenty-five miles) through Pyongyang’s west side, the city’s attractive showpiece district, bypassing the east side of the Taedong River, which still looks like it did in 1955. There isn’t enough of Pyongyang’s west side for a forty-kilometer route, so the procession had to loop around some of the same streets, and did two circles of Kim Il-Sung Square. After three hours Kim’s body ended up back at Kumsusan Palace, where the funeral took place behind closed doors. His body was then put on display next to his father’s, where it still lies today, visited by busloads of worshipful pilgrims. And four months later—four months after his death—Kim Jong-Il was promoted to Supreme Leader of North Kore
a, ascending like his father before him to an eternal position of leadership in the Communist afterlife.
In Seoul, about a hundred right-wing protesters gathered to burn North Korean flags and portraits and effigies of the Dear Leader. When night fell, they let off celebratory fireworks.
* * *
Choi is very serious, at times almost mournful. She doesn’t do much these days. After Shin’s death she moved into a much smaller house, in a run-down neighborhood on the south side of Seoul, just three subway stops from trendy Gangnam but a world away from its hip nightclubs and flagship luxury stores.
Her poor health leaves her tired much of the time. She prays a lot. She used to do calligraphy, but because she can’t sit or stand straight for any period of time, she had to stop. When people seek her out, it’s always about her time in North Korea. The last time she acted was in 2001, at the age of seventy-five, when she “pushed herself” onto the stage for a musical version of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. “I did okay,” she says. But she won’t ever act again.
In spite of everything, she lights up when she talks about Shin. She cracks huge smiles and her voice turns admiring. Her devotion to the man is incredible. The pictures taken of them in their seventies seem as happy and romantic as those taken when they were in their thirties. Shin loved her, and after their North Korean experience he was more committed to her. He felt more settled, and didn’t have the same need to chase after other women. But he never hid the fact that she was not his greatest love and passion. Movies were. His autobiography is titled I Am Film. That book, which Choi edited and completed after Shin’s death, talks almost exclusively about films and the experience of making them, not about personal events. In one passage Shin writes that he would happily sell his wife to another man if doing so helped him make a film. Choi relates this comment affectionately. Still she never felt that she came second. “His passion for the movies and his passion for me were the same,” she says.