Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (65 page)

House-wife Lee Ok-keum was one of those who disputed Kang’s characterization of the younger generation. “Basically in North Korea boys and girls in junior or senior middle school wouldn’t have close connections,” she told me. Indeed, officially, ordinary North Korean citizens were expected to keep to very strict sexual morality. Even among university students, “there aren’t supposed to be male-female relationships,” a former member of Kim Il-sung’s bodyguard unit, Pak Su-hyon, told me. “If women wear makeup, they will be scrutinized.” Couples must keep their liaisons secret or face expulsion.

However, Kang was not alone in pointing to an increase in sexual license. “In a way North Korea may be sexually wilder than South Korea,” Pak Su-hyon told me. “In South Korea when guys and girls meet, you have tea and exchange pleasantries. There’s no opportunity for that sort of thing in the North. If you talk about a relationship between a man and a woman, it means they’re having sex. But those relationships tend to be long running, consistent. They make love outside mostly—in parks at night, near the lake.”

Kim Ji-il, who was a physics student in the Ukraine when he defected in 1990, agreed with Pak. “From outside it may seem there’s a lot of rigidity in male-female relations,” Kim told me, “but when you get down to it things can get quite wild. In North Korea women are very naive. If a man says, ‘I’ll marry you,’ the woman gives everything. Many men take advantage of girls. Many North Koreans want to be party members, but that depends on party officials, who may trade a promise of party membership for sex with a woman candidate.” Kim added: “Since North Korea is an organization-based society, often you’re away from home with your group, even overnight. Many relationships form during the night shift. There’s no sex education, so often when couples act out their curiosity it leads to pregnancy. They don’t know how to deal with it, so lots of-women take rat poison to kill themselves. Since so many women died from eating rat poison, in 1984 Kim Jong-il told the doctors to give abortions on demand.”

With the 1980 announcement of the succession, Kim Jong-il immediately established a pattern of sparking concern—at home and abroad—about his health.
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At the party congress where he was elevated, he looked uncharacteristically thin and pale. It was later claimed that people all over the country had written to chastise other officials for failing to look after the princeling’s health. Whether people really wrote such letters of their own volition, the junior Kim seems to have learned something about what in Western democracies is called a “sympathy vote.”

Another pattern he established was that of
not
appearing in public. He had been reclusive before his 1980 debut as heir-designate, and he was to remain so. Pyongyang after 1980 reported that the junior Kim had been eschewing appearances at meetings, other than the party congress at which he was anointed and a series of celebratory parades. Instead he was spending his time traveling around to give “guidance” to the people.

In fact he lived much of his life in the private world of a movie fan, locked up in a room with his celluloid and videotape images of the outside. After a trip to China in 1983, it appears that he seldom went abroad. Besides absorbing movie versions of foreign places, he had his women dress up once a week in the national costume of some country, serve him the cuisine of that country and make believe.

Kim Jong-il’s responsibilities increased, so much so that the contrast of his behavior with the persona he needed to project became untenable. Eventually
he himself would realize the need for a conscious effort to clean up his act. But that time did not come until the mid-1980s, when—already in his forties—he was placed in day-to-day charge of the party government and military. His youth and some signs that he harbored liberal views led to hopes that he would prove to be a reformer prince, but early evidence for that proposition was less than overwhelming.

Especially through the first half of the 1980s, although he had started a family as early as 1977, Kim Jong-il continued an active schedule of relationships with women from the world of let’s pretend: actresses, dancers, members of his mansions corps. At the same time, according to Hwang Jang-yop, who was working for him in a high-ranking position in the party’s central committee, Kim would go to any length to portray himself in the public eye as “above reproach when it comes to women.” Hwang said Kim “forbade women to ride behind men on bicycles when out searching for food because it offended public morals. He even forbade women from riding bicycles on their own because he said it was unsightly.”

If such decrees seem more ridiculous than sinister, consider the story told by Hwang, architect-engineer Kim Young-song and others about Woo In-hee, a promiscuous movie star who had received the title “people’s actress.” In 1980 she was making love in a garaged car—the engine and heater running—-with a Korean returnee from Japan. Both were overcome by carbon monoxide and the man died. When Woo recovered, authorities interrogated her to obtain a list of men with whom she had been intimate. The story goes that Kim Jong-il then ordered her execution by shooting. Hwang wrote, “It is rumored that the main reason for deciding to kill Woo was that she had crumbled under interrogation and confessed to having slept with Kim Jong-il.
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While many elite North Koreans had heard about Woo, the rumors about Kim Jong-il’s involvement with her awaited confirmation. The evidence was a little better in the case of another woman who talked out of school. A Happy Corps member was irate because it was time for her retirement and she had not been assigned a husband like the other retirees. She let off steam by complaining to acquaintances that Kim Jong-il “is propagandized as a holy, pure, godlike type, but he’s nothing like that.” Former political prisoner Ahn Hyuk told me he had met the woman in his prison camp and heard directly from her about this.

(It was Ahn, drawing on what he said that woman prisoner had told him, who said that “Kim Jong-il didn’t go overseas any more, so they would have national nights. On India night, the Happy Corps would wear Indian sari and he would eat Indian food. The next time they might be gotten up as geishas.” But former official Kang Myong-do told the Seoul newspaper
JoongAng Ilbo
that Kim did make some unannounced pleasure trips up until the mid-1980s. “He would take his private jet to Hong Kong, Macao, stay in the top hotels, eat Chinese delicacies including sparrow specialties.”)

My point in dwelling on the Kims’ sex lives at some length is to show that a great many North Koreans were affected by the rulers’ systematic, even official, exploitation of girls and young women. I mentioned President Bill Clinton and Prince Charles earlier. Many people would argue that the news media and, in Clinton’s case, political opponents were too keen to expose what were essentially private acts between consenting adults, the sort of affairs that many countrymen who were far less exalted like-wise engaged in. I doubt that many who have read this far would offer such an argument on behalf of the Kims.

Sometimes it was men who suffered from Kim’s womanizing, if that term can be used for such intricately organized hunting and gathering. One former official told me the story of Kang Yon-ok, a beautiful woman who “was able to make her acting debut because she was Kim Jong-il’s mistress. Kim Jong-il kept her from age seventeen to twenty-nine. He set her up to marry an actor, Yi Sung-nam. Yi didn’t know she wasn’t a virgin. He was upset when he discovered she wasn’t, and taunted her. She had promised not to talk about her background, but she felt she had to tell him. He was furious. He spoke to his friends, asking: ‘How could Kim Jong-il do this?’ Now he’s in a prison camp. Lots of people in North Korea know this story.”

The former official added that Pyongyang elite circles believed actress Kang as well as others among Kim’s mistresses had become pregnant by Kim before he married them off to other men, and subsequently had given birth to his children. The official mentioned in this regard famous actresses Hong Yung-hui (“who played the title role in the movie
The Flower Girl),
O Mi-ran and Ji Yung-bok. Although specific confirmation of such rumors is elusive, it is indisputable that Kim did take time out of the busy schedule of the country’s co-ruler to involve himself in matchmaking—traditionally the job of parents. Consider the following story—this one from an official biography— of a hastily arranged marriage:

One evening in January 1980, a woman anti-Japanese veteran was telephoned in her office by Kim Jong-il and was told to come to him at once. … Some days previously, Kim Jong-il, who had heard that she had a son who was old enough to get married, chose a fiancée for … her son, who was serving in the army after graduating from a military academy, and asked her opinion. She immediately agreed with Kim Jong-il’s choice and was grateful for his kindness, which was as great as the warmth shown by parents to their son. Remembering his care, the veteran fighter wondered, while she was in the car, how she would thank him when she met the man who had been
worried about her family. Before she realized it, the car pulled into the grounds of a building.

But she found something else to surprise her when she entered the room. Her son and married daughter were already there. “Oh, my what are you doing here?” Her daughter told her what had happened. Kim Jong-il had sent for her because of her son’s marriage. After he had heard the opinions of both the lad and the girl as well as the parents of both sides, Kim Jong-il had thought that, because they all agreed about the marriage, it would be a good idea to have an engagement party. This was why they had been sent for. …

Kim Jong-il was highly delighted to see her, and shook her hand ?warmly He told her that he had sent for her because he wanted to decide on her son’s betrothed and hold the engagement party and then set the date of their marriage. Then he asked her for her opinion. She thanked him heartily, saying that they had no greater honor that that of having the engagement party in the presence of Kim Jong-il. They would not mind if they did not have a wedding party, she added. She said they would take the memorable engagement party as being a wedding party. Kim Jong-il thanked her and told an official to prepare the wedding party.
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Mean-while, the regime’s ideologists were working hard to develop a theoretical basis for the succession. As ultimately spelled out, it involved these propositions: First, it was necessary to have a successor to Kim Il-sung, because “the struggle of the working class and the masses of people is too prolonged and too complicated to be completed in one generation.” Second, the heir must be someone endowed with “boundless loyalty to the Great Leader, which takes the form of a complete knowledge and understanding of the revolutionary thought of the Leader; dedication to the working-class and people’s interests; and complete inheritance of the Great Leader’s illustrious leadership and a full embodiment of his lofty moral virtues.
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Of course, only one person combined all these virtues.

Kim Il-sung played Confucian ethics for all they were worth to justify the hereditary elite he established and his plans for dynastic rule of the country. It was at least partially for that purpose that the regime’s propagandists—now headed by his son—glorified the elder Kim’s parents, uncles, grandparents and even his great-grandfather as patriot leaders. “All of the world’s people ought to learn from the record of struggle established by the Kim family,” Radio Pyongyang told listeners in 1977. “The people of the world envy the Korean people who have such a family as their leaders. Therefore we must be loyal and devoted to the Kim family and their shining tradition.”
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In fact, of course, not all the people of the world—and not even all the people of the communist world—-were swept away with envy. An American
Korea specialist went to China in the early 1980s and discussed North Korea with Chinese Pyongyang-watchers. He kept trying to get their opinion on the dynasty in Pyongyang, but the Chinese were hesitant to talk about it. Finally the host said, “Let’s go to lunch and stop talking about this. But before we go I will say one thing. We communist theoreticians have a difficult time categorizing this system. Is it feudal socialism or socialist feudalism?”

Lies quickly engulfed the young Kim, as they had his father. Indeed, his own official personality cult is even more ludicrous in its excess than Kim Il-sung’s, because propagandists had far less to work with. In the case of the elder Kim, the regime’s sycophantic biographers needed only a few steps from recounting his actual guerrilla war record during the 1930s to casting him as a magical general who could cross rivers by walking on fallen leaves. When it came to the son, though, a lack of tangible achievements made constructing a towering image more difficult. After all, Kim Jong-il fought in neither the anti-Japanese resistance nor the Korean War. Casting about for alternative legends to glorify the man who would be Great Leader but who had little apparent Great Leadership to his credit, the Pyongyang regime settled on the title of “genius.”
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