by Paul Fischer
When asked how she would describe the man she loved to someone who never met him, she smiles and her voice grows even softer. She thinks carefully before answering. “A bachelor,” she says. “Rebellious. In one word,” she adds, before proceeding to use many more, “crazy about movies, a great artist. He had a really good memory. He always talked about film and work.” She loved how clumsy he was, that he would throw himself into his films so wholeheartedly that he lost all awareness of the world around him. Asked if she thinks they would have remarried had they not been kidnapped, she replies, firmly, “No. We had no plans. We were moving in different directions.”
As for her time in North Korea, there were no happy moments, Choi says, not one in the eight years that she spent there. Even when she experienced joy or relief—at seeing Shin again, for instance—she had simultaneously felt sadness, loss, and despair. Every day of the eight years, “every time I closed my eyes, I had my children in my eyes,” she says, using a Korean expression for having something lodged constantly in your mind, absorbing your consciousness.
In older interviews she expresses anger and resentment toward Kim Jong-Il. Now, however, she says she feels compassion for a man whom she sees as “a poor soul in need.… I feel sorry for him as a human being. I [sometimes] feel very mad. Because of him we lost money, status, and the school,” which she valued so much that she regrets losing it as much as she regrets missing out on her children’s teenage years. But she no longer carries ill will toward him or anyone involved in her kidnapping. “God sends people to Earth with his own plans for them,” she says, “and mine was one of them. It may sound like Kim Jong-Il took everything from me, but in the end it’s God who gives, and God who takes away.” She talks of God a lot. Her faith helps her to come to terms with things so far out of her control, things done that can never be undone.
* * *
Shin, a man who lived and breathed cinema, would have wanted to be remembered for his films. And, although Kim Jong-Il and North Korea will perhaps always take precedence, he is. In 1994 he was a member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. Alongside his fellow jurors, Clint Eastwood and Catherine Deneuve, he bestowed the Palme d’Or on Pulp Fiction, by a rising indie director named Quentin Tarantino. In 2002, Shin was the subject of an eleven-film retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His films are now studied in film schools, both in Korea and abroad. His work may be little known and hard to find, but when found much of it is unforgettable.
Choi says she has no desire to be remembered or immortalized. More than anything, she wants “the world to accept our story as true and not question it as invented. I can’t understand why people want to twist our story to fit their own purposes.” After saying this she is quiet for a few more seconds. “I lived a very truthful and honest life. People often invent the story they want to be true. But I want to say: I lived honestly.”
* * *
So much of this story is about human will, about what we can do when we come up against forces bigger than ourselves. Whatever your beliefs or your lack thereof, we will only live one version of this life, and where and when that life starts determines so much. We all, we are told, have the power and free will to do whatever we like with the hands we are dealt. Thinking of Choi Eun-Hee, a woman born in a country torn in two by greater powers, and whose life has in so many ways been defined by Director Shin and Dear Leader Kim—two men with large egos and the ambition to determine, control, and direct—calls to mind the twenty-four million other shrimp among whales, north of the DMZ, unwilling players in that large-scale production of a nation.
The force of Choi Eun-Hee’s will is undeniable. None of the crowd in the coffee shop around her would recognize her or can imagine what she has lived through. But today her name still invokes recognition, tinged with awe, in many more Koreans than Shin’s. She is an icon of the Korean film industry. She refuses to let Kim Jong-Il, North Korea, or her eight years of captivity define who she is or was. She is a star—in 2014, aged eighty-eight, at a time when movie stars barely exist anymore.
There is a picture of Madame Choi and Marilyn Monroe, taken in Seoul in 1954 during a post–Korean War goodwill tour by various Hollywood stars. Choi and Monroe were the exact same age, both born in 1926. They started their careers at roughly the same time; Choi’s first on-screen credit is dated 1947, Monroe’s 1948. When that photograph was taken, Marilyn was in her prime, fresh off Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire, with The Seven Year Itch and that famous billowing white dress just a few months away. Choi was years from her most iconic roles, newly married to Shin Sang-Ok, and just emerging from the trauma—rape, abuse, abduction—that she had endured during the war.
And yet looking at that photograph, even with Monroe’s iconic face, her hair, her lips, already burned into your consciousness, you would be hard pressed to tell who is the bigger star, who more draws the eye. Monroe is in a bomber jacket, laughing, eyes half closed; but even she is looking at Choi, who is smiling but whose eyes have a sharp steeliness. Nothing about her accepts that she is the token Korean picked for a photo opportunity alongside the Hollywood goddess. She is the star.
Eight years after that picture was taken, Marilyn Monroe was dead. Today, sixty years later, Choi—having suffered scandal, divorce, kidnapping, exile, and widowhood—is still alive, and in her culture no less iconic.
Shrimp among whales we may be, but some of us refuse to accept the whales as the masters of our own fate. Looking at Choi Eun-Hee, there is a lot to be said for that.
Afterword
The story of Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee, like most eyewitness accounts of North Korea, relies heavily on the participants’ telling of their own tale. The Hermit Kingdom is so tightly sealed, and its rulers so adept at blurring and confusing the picture, that it is a constant challenge for all those who write about it to confirm the facts upon which we are building our accounts. When it comes to North Korea, most facts need to be double- and triple-checked in case they turn out to be repetitions of a rumor that has been around so long that it has been accepted as truth. Accordingly, I have done my best to make sure nothing appears in the book that has not been as rigorously corroborated and fact-checked as possible.
While forced to use Shin and Choi’s accounts of their time in Pyongyang as my main source, I approached them, from the start, with all the skepticism I could muster. All timelines and dates in this book have been checked and compared with accepted histories. Geographical descriptions were confirmed through photographs and third-party eyewitness accounts. In the case especially of Repulse Bay, Prison Number 6, and the villas Shin and Choi resided in, I analyzed Google Earth images of each location. I traveled to Pyongyang and stood outside the Fish House and inside the film studios. I stayed in their hotel room at the Vienna Intercontinental and looked at floor plans and photographs of the hotel prior to its post-1986 restoration. I spoke to every non–North Korean mentioned by name in Shin and Choi’s memoirs, or if that wasn’t possible tried to track down family, colleagues, even biographers. (A fuller list of the people who have generously contributed time and knowledge to this book can be found in the acknowledgments.)
Shin and Choi were kidnapped in 1978, right in the middle of not just one of the North’s periods of intensive kidnapping, but also the only time period (1977–1983) during which Pyongyang has admitted kidnapping people. The kidnapping methods Shin and Choi described—men disguised in long wigs, secluded beaches, being subdued and put into some sort of bag, the small skiff, then the larger ship—fit exactly with the methods used by North Koreans in other, proven kidnapping cases, methods that were not yet public in 1987, when Shin and Choi wrote and published their first memoir. I submitted their memoir and my own questions both to Robert S. Boynton of New York University, an expert on Southeast Asian kidnapping as a political tool, and to the National Association for the Rescue of Japanese Kidnapped by North Korea, who found no gaps in it and confirmed that the events as described were lo
gical and within the range of known North Korean methods and activities. The Tongbuk-Ri and Chestnut Valley guesthouses were found on satellite images by expert Chris Marker, who analyzed the images for a UN report. (Prison Number 6 is clearly visible on other satellite images, and in the exact area Shin claimed it to be.) Shin’s time in Prison Number 6 holds up credibly against other eyewitness accounts, including that of South American poet Ali Lameda, down to the smallest details, such as the soup spoon without a handle, which is mentioned in Hyok Kang’s This is Paradise!
* * *
There are many, especially in South Korea, who do not believe Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee were kidnapped by North Korea, but that they defected to Pyongyang willingly. The case for a defection rather than a kidnapping is built on hypotheses: “It could be imagined that Shin, his career over in the South, was convinced to start over in the North” or “It’s possible that Shin defected willingly and then changed his mind later, and made up the kidnapping story so he wouldn’t get in trouble in South Korea.” The suspicion has been fed by the repetition of inaccuracies: one “historical dictionary” of the DPRK claims that he could have defected to the North because he was originally from the northern city of Chongjin and his parents still lived there, when they in fact were long dead by 1978; another book describes Shin as a “displaced person,” who lived in North Korea post-division and as such fit a certain type of profile once he moved to the South (Shin was in Seoul in 1945 and didn’t set foot north of the thirty-eighth parallel between then and 1978). These “facts” have been picked up and reprinted, and over the years have muddied the waters and become part of the public perception of Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee’s story. Most of the skeptics I have spoken to refer back to one volume, The Fictional Image, by Nishida Retsuoh, to explain their doubt of Shin and Choi’s trustworthiness. Retsuoh (a pseudonym) was a Japanese journalist who claimed to know Shin, Shin’s brother, and the journalist Kyushiro Kusakabe, whom Shin and Choi had entrusted with their letters and audiotape recording of Kim Jong-Il when they met him in Eastern Europe. This book, I was repeatedly told, ruthlessly and methodically debunked Shin and Choi’s story.
I read the book and found that it did no such thing. It is full of errors. Retsuoh claimed to have met Shin in Hong Kong and in Japan in the spring of 1978 and that Shin jokingly told him he was planning to defect—conveniently, with no one else around to hear him. He further claims to know Shin started work on Emissary of No Return in 1979 with “carte blanche” from Kim Jong-Il to make any film he wanted, but offers no reason for why it then took three and a half years for Shin to complete that film. He repeats North Korean claims that Shin and Choi were free to travel anywhere they chose (France being one of the examples mentioned), when they were only ever permitted west of Berlin once, to attend the London Film Festival. He also ignored that the North Koreans sent abductees abroad all the time: in August 1979 the DPRK sent four Lebanese abductees to Yugoslavia, so that they could speak to their families and claim they were all right. They were closely watched, but two escaped, ran to the Kuwaiti embassy, and were repatriated to Lebanon. Abductee Kim Yong-Kyu was sent to South Korea to do spy work for the government, whom he had convinced of his allegiance; he surrendered to South Korean authorities and regained his freedom. And most famously, in 2002, North Korea returned five abductees to Japan, under condition that they return to North Korea after a short visit. The North Korean leaders were apparently shocked when they didn’t.
The most glaring hole in Retsuoh’s “debunking” of Shin and Choi’s story is his version of their escape in Vienna in 1986. Retsuoh, who calls the escape “their U-turn to the West,” claims Shin and Choi were in touch with U.S. authorities a full six months before arriving in Vienna, and that Shin and Choi enlisted Enoki as an unwitting witness to a fake escape. Retsuoh says Enoki told him this himself, although to my knowledge Akira Enoki, until his death, gave no interviews and made no public statements about Shin and Choi’s escape; it seems, again, extremely convenient that the only one he gave would have been to Retsuoh to confirm Retsuoh’s suspicions. Retsuoh claimed that Shin and Choi were working with the CIA on a plan of escape, and that they had to stage a car chase to the embassy to do so. Yet the Intercontinental Hotel was owned by Pan Am, the U.S. commercial airline, and enjoyed a particularly close relationship with the U.S. embassy in Austria. U.S. diplomatic couriers, government employees in charge of carrying classified mail from embassy to embassy, stayed at the hotel, and Pan Am crews on eastern and western routes stopped in Vienna and stayed at the Intercontinental on their crew changes. John Edmaier, who was general manager in the 1980s, had the U.S. embassy’s duty officer on speed dial. His instructions, in case of any trouble, were to call the Americans directly rather than the Austrian chief of police. If Shin and Choi had been in touch with the United States about escaping North Korea, no dramatic car chase would have been necessary. They would have simply checked into the hotel, and within a few hours American intelligence agents would have knocked on their door and safely walked them out, as they did countless other defectors before them and after.
* * *
While there is no evidence supporting Shin and Choi’s having defected to the North willingly, there is significant circumstantial evidence against the theory, such as:
If Shin defected willingly, why did he immediately and very publicly announce that he thought Choi Eun-Hee had been kidnapped? Why wouldn’t they defect together, rather than have Shin raise a media circus over her disappearance and then himself defect, in what would be the most convoluted defection in Cold War history? Also, Shin’s defection would have been a propaganda coup for Pyongyang, so why would the Kims not have instantly put him on display in a pro-North press conference?
And if he had gone of his own volition to make films for Kim Jong-Il, why did it take him until 1983 to start making his first North Korean film? Surely if he had defected willingly, and then later run into trouble, the dates of his filmography in the North would have been reversed; he would have been very active immediately, then his output would have diminished.
Even if Shin had defected of his own will, what were Choi Eun-Hee’s motives? Why leave behind her children, whom she valued above all else?
Perhaps the most definitive evidence that Shin and Choi were kidnapped is the corroboration by North Koreans who had nothing to gain by lying, chief among them Hwang Jang-Yop, one of Kim Il-Sung’s most trusted advisers and, some say, the architect of juche theory. Hwang told author John Cha that “Division 35 [one of Kim Jong-Il’s departments] planned and executed the kidnapping of South Korean actress Choi Eun-Hee and her husband, Shin Sang-Ok.” Later, after both men had escaped North Korea, Hwang also participated in roundtable talks with Shin about the Hermit Kingdom.
Former North Korean operatives Kim Gwang-Hyeon, Sin Kwang-Su, and Liu Yong-Hua have admitted to the kidnapping of foreigners; several others have told how the kidnapping of Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee was openly discussed at Kim Jong-Il Military Academy, where they were trained.
The U.S. State Department and CIA thought Shin and Choi credible enough to keep them away from the KCIA and pay for three years of round-the-clock protection. (One of Shin’s sons now works for the State Department.) Committees of the United Nations have used Shin and Choi’s testimony as a source for human rights documentation. Eric Heginbotham, a former senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, says Shin and Choi’s story is believable and consistent with what is known about the Kim regime. Don Oberdorfer, formerly of The Washington Post, says he is usually skeptical about the many “questionable” defectors he has interviewed over the years, but that Shin and Choi didn’t fall into that category. “I made it a practice not to repeat the various yarns about Kim unless I felt confident from reliable sources they were true,” Oberdorfer told fellow journalist John Gorenfeld in 2003. “This one I believed.” In his book The Two Koreas, Oberdorfer writes, “Some in South Korea and elsewhere have raised doubts about the credibility o
f Choi and Shin, but they returned with photographs and tape recordings of themselves with Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il that have been accepted by US and ROK intelligence as authentic. I had three meetings with them, the first shortly after their escape through Vienna, and I believe they are credible.”
In 2005, U.S. defector Charles Jenkins and his wife Ms. Soga, a Japanese abductee, brought to light the kidnapping of Anocha Panjoy, a Thai national who was abducted to North Korea from Macao in May 1978. By October 2005 the Thai media confirmed the details and method of Ms. Panjoy’s abduction, all of which matched the way Choi Eun-Hee, seventeen years earlier, had described her own kidnapping. It was brought to light that Ms. Panjoy had disappeared the same day as Catherine Hong, who had also vanished from Macao. The National Association for the Rescue of Japanese Kidnapped by North Korea interviewed Choi about Ms. Hong. Choi told them that the Ms. Hong she had met had a mother and a brother in Macao, that her father had been a teacher, that she had played volleyball in high school and then given up on university and gotten a job so that her brother could afford to go to university, that she had worked as a clerk in a jewelry shop and also part-time as a tour guide, that she was Catholic and was twenty years old when she was abducted, in the summer of 1978. All the details “completely matched” the profile of a Ms. Hong Leng-Ieng, who had disappeared from Macao on July 2, 1978. Ms. Hong’s family did not know her baptismal name, which she had kept private. Choi told her interviewers it was Maria, and this fact, too, was confirmed by the church where Hong had been baptized in Macao. When shown a picture of Ms. Hong, Choi confirmed she was the woman she met in Pyongyang. In March 2006 she met Ms. Hong’s family, who further vouched for the accuracy of her statements.