Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (64 page)

In their vulnerable position, her parents had wanted their daughter to marry someone of good family background. They were dismayed when Shu picked a man with many strikes against him politically. “I had a lot of trouble from my parents,” she told me. “But we were in love, and I insisted on going through with the marriage. I had met my husband when I was seventeen and in college. He was twenty-three then. We married when I was twenty-four, in 1995. He was a student. After our marriage, he worked as a physics teacher at a middle school. In South Korea now he studies theology. No one had followed his grandfather’s example and become a minister, and his father wanted one of the children to do that.”

Her husband’s family, like her own, enjoyed relatively good economic circumstances, thanks to remittances from the relatives in America. “But by 1995, the whole economy had slowed down. So it was getting harder to get
rice,” Shu said. “Until I married, I had regarded my family as middle-class. We kept a one-year reserve of rice—100 or 200 kilograms. After I married, in 1994 and 1995, it was different. Subsidized rice rations stopped in the Sinuiju area in 1995, for a whole year. In other areas they had stopped in 1994.” Still the family did not go hungry. “I didn’t have any difficulties, thanks to the dollars sent from America. Also, my father-in-law worked in foreign exchange. He moved around in North Korea and made money. He was a trader. He raised silk-worms and grew seed plants, sold them to the Chinese and in exchange got wheat, as well as money that we could use to buy food.” There were some things money could not readily buy. The medical system was “very poor. There is no intravenous equipment and virtually no medicine. Anesthesia is scarce, and the doctors use it only at the precise time of surgery. There are not even sleeping pills. With no medicine, the doctors have nothing to do. They collect scrap metal to sell to Chinese traders.”

Here I must mention that Shu, although a bit on the gaunt side as befitted a recent arrival from North Korea, was very pretty, especially when animated by memories of love or indignation. Even the no-nonsense blue blouse and gray slacks that she wore to meet me looked good on her lithe dancer’s body. Although already a mother—her three-year-old son, in Mickey Mouse shirt and sneakers, slept in her lap as we spoke—she still wore her hair attractively long. (Once East Asian women became matrons they used to exhibit a lamentable tendency to chop off their flowing tresses in favor of more practical hairdos, wishing to look the new role and no longer feeling much need to attract men. But I am told younger women have taken a different view.) Her only ornaments were a silver-colored watch and a diamond pendant on a gold neck chain. I noticed in particular her full, pouty red lips, which reminded me of those of a former girlfriend. Shu was soft-spoken, charming—face it: she was a babe. Now, if I am beginning to sound like one of Kim Jong-il’s operatives salivating over a particularly choice candidate for the mansion service corps, that is precisely the point. As soon as I caught a glimpse of Shu I felt pretty sure she would not have escaped the recruiters’ notice. So after a decent interval spent talking about other matters I posed a general question, asking whether she had heard anything about girls being taken to Pyongyang for Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.

Indeed she had. “There is a group called fifth division—in Korean,
okwa.
They are all women—dancers and so on. Since I lived in Sinuiju, I don’t know exactly what happens in Pyongyang. But I heard that Kim Jong-il would call in some dancers from the
kippeunjo
when he was depressed at night and they would dance naked in front of him. I also heard a story that once, when some communist secretaries came from overseas, they were out driving and saw a pretty woman. North Korean officials who were with them stopped the car and had her spend the night with them. Later they sent her to a mental hospital and locked her up. One of my family members went to
Pyongyang University of Foreign Languages. He heard the story there.” So far, all that she had told me about the leaders’ treatment of women was hearsay but I pressed on with my questioning: Were the girls recruited from all over the country? “Recruiting officials go to every province looking for beautiful girls,” Shu replied.

And then she came out with it. “Actually I myself was initially chosen when I was a student at the college of fine arts, when I was seventeen,” Shu said. “But then I was turned down because my family was from Japan. This was for
okwa.
They didn’t tell me what unit, but they did tell me I’d be with the Wangjaesan Band.”

The recruiters, Shu explained further, “go to arts-related institutions. They prefer actresses and other fine arts majors, because they assume the beauties are studying in those fields.” In Sinuiju, “they distributed numbers from one to ten, looked at the girls’ faces and chose us by number. Then there was a second local round.” Shu laughed fetchingly “People like big eyes—that’s their idea of beauty—so I did “well locally and got chosen to go to Pyongyang for the third round. In the first and second rounds they just looked at our faces, judged us by our appearance. In Pyongyang they interviewed us, consulting official documents. They asked me whether my father was a party member, the ages and the dates and places of birth of my parents, their jobs and so on. Finally they said, ‘You can go. We’ll let you know by mail if you are chosen.’ I didn’t get an acceptance. They realized that my family was from Japan, so they rejected me. I know this because my mother-in-law’s friend’s son worked in that band, but he had to leave because his family were returnees from Japan. The government was afraid that news about
okwa
would spread to the world.”

I asked Shu if she had been disappointed not to make the final cut. “I wasn’t sorry at all,” she said at first. “My parents had heard in the neighborhood that if I got in I wouldn’t be allowed out, I would be spoiled. Most North Koreans know the purpose of
okwa.”
Her rejection mainly made her think about what sort of career she could have in the performing arts. “I was worried about whether my family background would affect my chances to perform in Pyongyang.” A bit later in our conversation, though, she gestured beautifully, touching the long, gracefully tapered fingers of one hand to her face and then to her heart. “Actually,” she then confessed, “I wanted to go. I would have nice clothes, French makeup, imported lingerie, good food— fruit, butter, milk—that was hard to find in our local area. At the time I was young, so I didn’t know the bottom line. I didn’t realize sex might be part of the deal. I just thought I’d dance and live well. My parents had heard about the
kippeunjo
and didn’t want me to go to Pyongyang. But I wasn’t afraid because being a band dancer in
kippeunjo
was different from being in another
okwa
unit that was explicitly for sexual services.
Kippeunjo
members are supposed to give pleasure but not sexual services. Sex is not their basic job.”

Shu told me she had once “met a woman from
okwa.
Her father-in-law had been sent to Sinuiju from Pyongyang because he had done something wrong. The woman was married; she had already retired from the mansions corps. But one day her husband was drinking with his friends. He had no money so he left a watch with Kim Il-sung’s signature engraved on the back, as a guarantee until he could get money. The watch was a gift for high-ranking officials. The husband was so drunk, he handed the watch to the clerk, who reported the incident directly to the police. The husband was punished and had to follow his father to Sinuiju, and she came too. When I first met her I thought she might have come from overseas, because she looked totally different from ordinary people. That woman had no idea how ordinary people lived. The husband had been a foreign exchange trader and had been making big money, so his wife could spend $ 500 at a time. In Pyongyang, there was plenty for her to buy; it was just a matter of money. But in Sinuiju there was simply nothing to buy. It shocked her a lot.” I asked if the husband had known about his wife’s past. “Yes,” Shu said. “It’s not out of the ordinary for sons of high officials to live with former
okwa
members. Kim Jong-il orders it.”

Shu told me how the women recruited for explicitly sexual duties were rounded up. “The recruiters came in a Mercedes-Benz, went to middle schools, chose seventeen-to-eighteen-year-olds and took them away. The parents didn’t know what had happened, and searched for their daughters. When they gave up, officials came with gifts from Pyongyang and said, ‘Your daughter is well. Don’t worry’ After that the parents gave up, thinking, ‘Now our daughter belongs to the state.’ Some families think it’s a kind of sacrifice to the country. Some families who had been hungry think it’s a benefit.”

I received confirmation regarding the duties of the mansions corps from several men who said they had been in contact with members. Oh Young-nam, a former captain of State Security, told me in 1996 that his “first love” had been one of the mansions corps women available for sexual services to the leaders. “I first thought they were all naive virgins. I had a sexual relationship with this woman and I realized that she wasn’t a virgin. She worked at Munsu Mansion. That mansion is for the Ministry of People’s Armed Forces. You can see her in North Korean films. She became a movie star with Kim Jong-il’s help. She spent a couple of nights with Kim Jong-il and then had a relationship with Kim Kang-jin, vice-minister of armed forces. You enter that service at twelve and retire at twenty-two. Usually the women promise not to tell anyone, but we were thinking of marriage. My mother opposed it. The woman told me all about the training: mental training, skin treatment, light exercise to keep her figure. She had to learn massage, dance, striptease, mambo, samba and so on. She said she was noticed when she was twelve when returning home from school. Somebody took her by car; they do not ask the parents’ permission.

Those who are selected for the mansions service and for anti–South Korea espionage—their parents are just told they have been given to the country. They do not try to find where their children have gone.”

Kang Myong-do was a son-in-law of Kang Song-san, who was prime minister around the time of the son-in-law’s defection. The defector said he also was distantly related to Kim Il-sung as a grandnephew of the late Vice-President Kang Ryang-uk, born in Chilgol, Kim Il-sung’s native village, of the same clan as Kim’s mother.
³
While Kang said he did meet Kim Jong-il on occasion, some of the information he was able to provide falls into the category of hearsay rather than eye-witness reports. “Kim Jong-il and I are relatives, but not too close,” Kang told me in an interview. “Basically-what I tell you comes from the buzz, the talkamong the elite of the elite—about sixty people who run the country, and their families. I was a member of that group.≵
⁴
Having offered the reader that caveat regarding hearsay, let me say that Kang’s reports generally ring true when they can be compared with the accounts of other North Koreans, including those who boasted greater seniority and more direct contact with the leadership.

Kang told me that the party Central Committee’s fifth division, or
okwa,
was in charge of the palace women’s corps, with staff members in each province and county to handle recruiting. The officials would check on the family backgrounds of the likeliest prospects, to make sure of their loyalty to the regime, then watch them to make sure they did not get involved with boys. The young women who made the cut at the time of graduation from senior middle school, at age fifteen or sixteen, would be given physical examinations to confirm their virginity.
⁵

About two thousand girls were selected each year and given a year of training. Some five to six hundred who were expected to be available for sex would be assigned to the lodges and villas
(chodeso)
and to other mansions
(titka)
where the rulers held receptions; some also went to the bodyguard service. Others were given secretarial and other jobs where, officially, they were not expected to provide sexual services.

Kang told me that many of his friends working for the Central Committee had married mansions corps retirees, in a sort of lottery procedure.
⁶
Slips of paper with the women’s names written on them were placed in a pile. Most of the dragooned bridegrooms he knew were aware that the women might have been available to the rulers for sexual services and thus might not have been the virgin brides much sought after by Korean males—but the men had no choice. Still, “on balance, they like it. You get rich by marrying them.” Besides the women’s pensions, there would be elaborate gifts. Kang said he visited two former Happy Corps dancers he knew and found “a house full of presents from Kim Jong-il.” Another factor appealing to the prospective bridegrooms was: “How else would they get such good-looking women?” After all, in case nature had been in any way deficient, these were women who
had access to the high-level 915 Hospital, staffed with plastic surgeons. (Doctors at 915 also operated on spies who were in need of disguise, according to an ex-spy, Ahn Myung-jin, who told me about the hospital.)
⁷

Even if a prospective bridegroom wanted a virgin it would be hard to find one, according to Kang. The men figured that “it’s better to marry a top leader’s former woman than get a bride who’s been broken in by some farm boy.” To hear Kang tell it—other sources disagreed vehemently on this—hardly any virgins of marriageable age remained in North Korea. Kang was an official of an organization that supplied special foodstuffs to the elite, and sometimes he went to middle schools to recruit office workers. “One place I went, out of fifty middle-school graduates only three were virgins. This came out in the course of complete medical checkups we arranged for them at a hospital. Afterward there was a special order not to do those physicals because it upset the women.”