Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (21 page)

During our half-day tour, I got a chance to quiz Julie—Rebekah would say “interrogate”—about issues of the day, including political freedom, Internet openness, and Chinese hacking. As a tour guide for Westerners, I knew she’d be ready with answers; I just wanted to hear what those answers were.

I asked her about the Chinese government blocking Facebook. “We do not need it,” she said. “We have our own Facebook,” referring to Renren, which began life in 2005 as Xiaonei.com, or “On Campus,” a Facebook clone that assiduously copied Facebook’s layout and shades of blue.

When the conversation turned to politics, Julie opined that there eventually will be more than one party in China, but that change “will only come from the top.” Like most Chinese, she had never heard of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989; it is censored from textbooks. Asked about democracy, Julie said that poorer, less-educated rural Chinese “are not ready for it,” which is the party line. She said the best form of political system is “freedom with controls,” but the thing she said that still sticks in my mind years later, because it’s a piece of social engineering
genius by Beijing, is this quote: “We have enough freedom.” If a government can get enough of its people to believe that, it’s won.

I tried, vainly, to explain that to a Westerner, certainly an American, there is no such thing as “enough” freedom. Political freedom is a binary thing for us: either you’re free or you’re not. Naturally, certain revelations about the activities of the National Security Agency and other U.S. government agencies have tempered this binary view a bit. Nevertheless, when Americans step into a voting booth, they have a real, legally protected choice, and that’s not naïveté.

The Chinese government has walked the delicate line of supplying its people with economic freedom while withholding political freedom. This was Deng Xiaoping’s masterpiece. He believed that an open economy leads to efficient markets, but an open political system leads only to chaos. Deng’s—and now Beijing’s—wager is that its people will trade stability and economic prosperity for political freedom. Given China’s long history of eras of great advancement followed by epochs of savagery and destitution, one after the other, the utmost goal of the ruling People’s Party in Beijing is stability. That governs every decision it makes, and those who interact with China must understand that.

China is not unique in trying to run a country this way. One of the most eye-opening things this West Virginia bumpkin realized in his travels outside of the U.S. is just how many people are willing to shave off a little, or more than a little, personal freedom in exchange for prosperity and stability. If your country was recently poor and unstable, that makes more sense than it might to an American. You’ll see that bargain in Singapore, which is a modern, prosperous, quality-of-life paradise—as long as you don’t break a law. Then you’ll be subject to the country’s laws, which Westerners see as disproportionate and draconian but which Singaporeans see as a just price for living in what they believe is a
civilized fashion. You’ll even see that bargain in Korea, where voters are not allowed to Tweet pictures of themselves in front of campaign posters of political candidates, because the government feels it could unduly influence the outcome of an election. Korean voters are not even allowed to give the ubiquitous-in-Asia peace sign in photographs posted to social media on election days, because Korean candidates are identified by numbers, and the two-finger peace sign could be seen as an endorsement of candidate number two.

I certainly saw the allure of China and the attractiveness for Hyundai and all automakers. I had felt the seemingly limitless optimism, openness, and enthusiasm of its next generation, who are certain they’re riding the wave of the next big thing. I had treated a group of auto journalists to a spectacular meal at a restaurant off Tiananmen Square with a striking view of Mao’s mausoleum, the Monument to the People’s Heroes, and the Forbidden City in the distance, all spectacularly illuminated at night. Six hundred years of history lay before us, both glorious and tragic, right at the heart of China, the great, throbbing story of the twenty-first century. I had also experienced the pollution; Chinese automakers’ blatant and unapologetic rip-offs of Western car designs on display at Chinese auto shows; the state’s control over its citizens’ information and opinions; and even the unvarnished hunger for money and advantage that leads someone to violate a foreign tourist’s personal electronics.

I kept coming back to what was, for me, the most telling—and seductive—paradox that is China: although the communist party is officially atheist, nowhere in the world is Christianity—evangelical, Bible-based Christianity—growing faster. There is a surging hunger for it. The state authorizes an antiseptic form of Christian worship, but once Chinese Christians compare that to what they’re reading in the new Bibles passed out by missionar
ies, they find the state’s offering wanting. So they are organizing underground churches by the hundreds. The state crackdown on these unauthorized churches ranges from annoyance level—shutting off the electricity to the building hosting the church—to imprisonment. And yet the churches are still growing. As one Chinese pastor put it, “We sing sitting down to keep our voices low, so the neighbors won’t complain to the authorities.” In other words, as long as the churches do not threaten China’s stability, they can continue, albeit sitting down. Perhaps one day they will be able to stand up.

11

THE DANGEROUS COUSINS KIM

A few months after we had settled in Korea, Rebekah and I got a chance to visit the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, which separates North and South Korea. It is the most heavily defended border in the world. In theory it’s still a live battlefield; only a cease-fire preserves the peace between the two Koreas. At the same time it’s a tourist attraction. The USO runs one-day bus tours that leave from Seoul every day, only adding to the bizarreness of the whole thing. I couldn’t help but think of the Civil War tourists who rode out from Washington with picnic lunches to watch the battles in Northern Virginia.

Rebekah and I took a Saturday tour to Panmunjom, the abandoned village on the border where the armistice was signed in 1953. The DMZ itself is not the border. The DMZ is a strip of land running the width of the country roughly along the 38th parallel and is four kilometers wide, two kilometers on each side of the border. It largely is a no-man’s-land, but it is not barren. It is a remarkable
and verdant wildlife preserve, home to several rare species. And it’s not entirely absent of people. A South Korean propaganda effort has placed about 250 farmers inside the DMZ. In return for tilling the first land that would fall to invading North Korean forces, the government pays each farmer nearly $90,000 per year.

A row of humble one-story huts straddles the actual border at Panmunjom. Each hut has two doors, one opening into North Korea, the other into South Korea. Looming over the huts on each side of the border are large, modern government structures. Inside the big building on the South side, our tour is told by U.S. military officials that, once outdoors, we will take several steps to get to the huts. We are warned to keep our arms at our sides and not to point or gesture at anything. We are being photographed by the North and are told that pictures of pointing tourists can easily be turned into North Korean propaganda.

The scene is a mixture of tension and absurdity. We walk inside one hut and see a conference table astride the border that bisects the building. A line is painted on the floor. Once we walk past the table, we are in North Korea. Our guide tells us not to wander too closely to the door opening into North Korea, as it has been flung open by soldiers who have snatched tourists. We are told stories about past negotiations where North Korean agents have surreptitiously sawed down the chair legs on the South’s side of the conference table the night before talks so the South’s representatives would have a literally lower position in negotiations with the North.

Outside, on the ground, a short concrete curb defines the border between the two warring nations. Snow had fallen in the days before our tour. It was shoveled from the ground on the South side of the curb and on the North side, but the snow remained piled on top of the curb itself. I suppose if one party were to shovel the curb, it could be construed as an incursion.

It’s easy to think of North Korea as a joke, because it has done so many childish things. Over the years the South has discovered several tunnels dug under the DMZ by the North for spy infiltration. Caught red-handed digging one tunnel, the North told the South, no, the tunnel was not for spying on the South. They were just mining for coal, the North said. And, in perhaps history’s lamest attempt to hide evidence, the North painted the tunnel walls black and hoped the South would buy it. In a more recent example, instead of simply ignoring the 2014 Hollywood farce
The Interview
—whose admittedly tasteless plot involved assassinating the North Korean leader—North Korea petulantly hacked Sony Pictures, the film’s studio, causing embarrassing internal e-mails to be leaked and costing millions in security and brand damage, not to mention the studio head’s job.

North Korea is no joke to the South. In 1968, North Korean commandos ordered to kill President Park Chung-hee got within 100 meters of the presidential residence, called the Blue House for its roof color, before being stopped by security forces. Six years later came the second attempt on Park’s life, by the North Korean sympathizer who killed Park’s wife. In 1983, North Koreans tried to kill South Korean president Chun Doo-hwan during a state visit to Rangoon by planting a bomb in a ceiling of a building he was scheduled to visit. He was delayed in traffic but the bomb went off anyway, killing several senior advisers already there. In 1987, ostensibly upset that it had been denied the honor of hosting any of the 1988 Olympic games that went to Seoul, North Korean agents exploded a bomb on a Korean Air flight, killing 115. In 2006, North Korea detonated a nuclear bomb, repeating the exercise in 2009, 2013, and 2016. The spring before we arrived in Korea, in 2010, a North Korean torpedo sank the South Korean corvette
Cheonan
, killing forty-six sailors.

When we visited the DMZ, Kim Jong-il had been supreme leader for seventeen years, having inherited the dictatorship from his father, Kim Il-sung, who was installed by the Soviets after they took the northern part of the Korean Peninsula from the Japanese in 1945. Kim Il-sung advocated the political and economic policy of
juche
, or self-reliance, cutting off his people from the outside world and virtually severing trade. He also built the gulags that continue to this day and engineered a cult of personality around him. Kim Jong-il took over the country at his father’s death in 1994. On his watch, as many as 600,000 North Koreans starved during a famine caused by incompetence. Health experts visiting the country determined that chronic malnourishment caused North Koreans to be, on average, three inches shorter than their genetic cousins in the South. The country adopted a military-first policy. Kim Jong-il repeatedly outfoxed and embarrassed Seoul with bogus olive branches.

So, the longer one lives in Korea, the less funny North Korea gets.

As bellicose as North Korea can be, threatening to turn South Korea into a “lake of fire” every few months, a full-scale attack from the North was a theoretical if remote possibility. More worrisome to me was a rogue North Korean commander or an accident loosing a missile at one or both of the prime targets in the South: downtown Seoul, where my wife worked at the U.S. embassy, and the U.S. military base where we lived. The rest of the world thinks North Korea is crazy and unpredictable. South Korea does not. It believes the North is calculating. The South’s thinking seems to come down to this: the South will respond gravely to the North’s verbal threats and even endure the occasional fatal military action, such as the Yeonpyeong shelling, because the South believes the North is not reckless enough to launch a full-scale attack on the South, since the North would be obliterated in a
counterattack by combined U.S.–South Korean forces. So South Koreans learn to live with the North and continue to absorb its occasional deadly attacks. It’s like living next door to a bully.

Less physically threatening to those of us who lived in Seoul but more horrifying were the North’s gulags. As recounted by numerous North Korean defectors, these camps are for political enemies of the North Korean regime, although most of the prisoners don’t even know that. Kim Il-Sung believed that political prisoners must be punished to their third generation. They are the longest continuously operating gulags on the planet. People are born, live, and die in these squalid camps, where mothers turn on their own children for scraps of food and never know why they are there or what exists outside the camps. So lowly are they regarded, they are not even given the privilege of learning about their Dear Leader. As far as they know, life is simply a brutal cage with no escape and no explanation.

Ever since the cessation of the Korean War, South Korean presidents have tried to figure out how to handle North Korea, often in league with the U.S. Some, such as conservative president Lee Myung-bak have hewed to the U.S. hard line that insists no quarter be given to the North until it abandons its nuclear desires. Under these administrations, there is no talk of rapprochement with the North. Other South Korean presidents, such as liberal Kim Dae-jung, have tried to pacify the North. Kim launched what he called the “Sunshine Policy” of engagement that led to the building of a vacation resort of sorts in the North open to tourists from the South and an industrial complex just over the border in the North where businesses from the South set up shop using cheap North Korean labor. The glimmering apex of the Sunshine Policy was the 2000 summit between President Kim Dae-jung and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, something few would have believed possible. For all this, Kim Dae-jung was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 and South Korea swelled with pride.