Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (67 page)

If that documentary had shown nothing else, at least it would have demonstrated that Kim Jong-il still had ample reason to be dissatisfied with his filmmakers. Of course there were bright spots where they had “grasped the seed” and produced work in which he could take pride. The film version of
The Flower Girl
at one foreign film festival had been awarded a Special Prize and Special Medal.
¹⁴
But obviously there remained much room for improvement. And indeed, as it turned out, Kim had long since made plans—bizarre beyond anything the world had yet heard about him—to deal with his film industry’s shortcomings.

Lacking a film director of the caliber of South Korea’s finest, the prize-winning Shin Sang-ok, the Dear Leader in 1978 had arranged for the kidnapping of Shin himself. Kim’s agents first lured Shin’s ex-wife, South Korean superstar Choi Eun-hi, to Hong Kong to discuss an acting role, then
bundled her off to North Korea by sea. Kim Jong-il, waiting at dockside for her arrival, said, “Welcome to the DPRK.” He didn’t explain why she had been kidnapped, and Choi was “afraid to ask.” Kim established her in luxurious surroundings, as she related in a book Choi and Shin published after their 1986 escape.
¹⁵

It would be five years before Choi learned that she had been taken as bait to catch Shin. The two had remained friendly—and Kim Jong-il knew this—although they had divorced due to childlessness and Shin had married another actress, with whom he had children. Six months after Choi’s mysterious disappearance Shin—-who had been searching for her—-was in Hong Kong when Kim’s agents nabbed him, too, and spirited him off to North Korea. In Pyongyang, at first, Shin like-wise got VIP treatment, with no explanation of-what was going on—he was not told what had become of Choi. But Shin twice attempted escape. He was sent to prison, where he learned the hard way how the regime dealt with disobedience.

Choi was assigned a tutor and put to work studying Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and the North Korean revolution. On Fridays Kim Jong-il invited her to see movies, operas and musicals. Others attending those soirees were high officials Kim had invited. Kim clearly wanted Choi to get to know him and to have a favorable impression of him. If there was no party, he took her videotapes of South Korean movies and asked for her critical opinion. Eventually she realized he was intelligent and possessed artistic sensibility. He arranged for her to have reading material, including a three-volume life of Kim Il-sung’s father, Kim Hong jik. Volume three alone took about three months to read, but she found it interesting. With all that watching and reading, reviewing and commenting, she wasn’t permitted much free time. But on Kim Jong-il’s birthday, February 16, 1978, Choi’s handler-guide took her on an outing. The destination proved to be a museum, at Kim Il-sung University that was devoted to Kim Jong-il. Never having seen such a big museum devoted to just one person, she was surprised.

Choi saw and was impressed by Kim’s trademark movies,
Sea of Blood
and
The Flower Girl.
But although she knew he had overseen those productions, taking more or less the role of producer, she couldn’t tell who had actually directed the films. She noticed that in North Korea the director was not identified on movie posters. Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il wouldn’t allow it, she learned. Only industry insiders would know who had made a movie. The two Kims didn’t want other people to become famous. There were exceptions, though. A few movie people Kim Jong-il liked were recognized publicly as stars. For example, Hong Yong-hui of
Flower Girl
fame was pictured on the country’s
one-won
currency note.

Choi noticed another curious practice in the North Korean media
world: The country televised sports matches between North and South Korea only if the North had won. The people weren’t told the outcome of the losing matches. She found also that the Korean language had forked off into different directions in the North and the South. When she went shopping with her guide, he requested
bulal.
Hearing that word embarrassed her, as
bulal
in South Korea meant testicle. But she found that in North Korea it meant lightbulb.

When April 15 came, Choi noticed that Kim Il-sung’s birthday parade was “more like a funeral” because the North Koreans cried at the sight of the Great Leader. They also cried as they received the gifts—clothing, mostly— that Kim Il-sung provided for the people. Of course they applauded even as they were crying. “Once I neglected to clap my hands. Someone asked me, ‘Why don’t you praise Kim Il-sung?’ ‘Uh oh. I’m sorry’ And I clapped.” Then there were the formal messages of congratulation that she was expected to prepare on Kim Jong-il’s and Kim Il-sung’s birthdays and on the September 9 anniversary of liberation. “Someone brought very nice paper so I could write the message, and then I had to make a cover of colorful material. There were specific dimensions to be followed. I had to find a different message each year—one is not allowed to repeat oneself. It was really torture.”

Choi found also that, just before one of the leaders’ birthdays, all North Koreans had to gather in family or other groupings to commemmorate the occasion by listening to a 140-minute radio broadcast or recording recounting the Kim family saga. It was forbidden to talk or sleep before this Pyongyang answer to a Christmas Eve service ended. On Kim Il-sung’s birthday everyone was expected to collect or otherwise acquire azaleas to present to him. Presents came from the Great Leader in return. Most prized was an Omega watch, the back inscribed with Kim Il-sung’s name. Choi got one of those.

Choi, staying in a guest house, had a dog, which made her very happy. But she heard that the North Koreans exported dog fur to Russia, besides eating dog meat. The dog disappeared. The housemaid said she didn’t know for sure, but it was “probably far away.” As the housemaid told her, frankly, “A dog’s life is only six months. A dog is an export item in North Korea.” (Some South Koreans eat the meat of dogs, but in the South those normally are especially bred food animals, not pets.)

Choi met a Chinese woman who had been kidnapped to work as a language teacher and learned from her that the spies employed in such operations must be good-looking. A handsome spy, pretending to be rich, could easily pick up a targeted female victim. If a spy’s natural endowments were insufficient, the plastic surgeons stood ready to perfect what nature had wrought. Choi learned that “there was a special hospital for Kim Il-sung, his family and high officials. There were always soldiers there.”

***

Shin was kept at first in a guest house, also in Pyongyang but separate from Choi’s, with a guide and a secretary. After a couple of months, however, as punishment for his two nocturnal escape attempts, he was jailed. In his cell he was required to sit cross-legged, in the lotus position, his back straight, for hours at a time, Zen-style. He was not allowed to move. No reading, no radio, nothing else was permitted. He had to look into the eyes of his instructor, not shifting his gaze. A guard remained with him all day long. Meals were corn or rice, with salty soup.

“I awoke around five each day, then as soon as I got up I had to raise my arms straight up until the 7 A.M. breakfast, as punishment,” Shin recalled. “After breakfast I could wash my face with the remains of my drinking water. Then I had to sit in the lotus position for three hours. After that punishment, I had three minutes to relax. Following lunch, it was the lotus position again from 12:30 to 6:30. Electrical brownouts occurred on average three times a day. Someone would bring a candle to each cell then, because the guards needed to see that we were in the lotus position. Once a week I had to strip and face the wall for a ‘physical exam.’ It was not a real physical, and I hated to show them my nudity.”

In jail, after a couple of years of that routine, Shin felt his sanity starting to unravel. On Christmas morning in 1980, he was struck by an urge to send a greeting to his family back in South Korea. It was a white Christmas. Sent out with a shovel to clear the grounds, Shin used his urine to write “Merry Xmas” on the snow. “Anyone who saw me would have thought I was out of my mind, but I had to do it,” he wrote. (That passage reminded me of my own nutty 1979 fantasy of escape across the Demilitarized Zone, described in chapter 1.)

Eventually Shin requested a consultation with someone in authority. The request was refused. He was told he must write a letter of apology to Kim Jong-il for his escape attempts and his other disobedience. “I decided to write a letter of apology. It took three days to get it right. I wrote: ‘I will obey your rules. I want to become a DPRK citizen and follow and praise Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Please free me.’”

After he wrote his apology letter, Shin found that his status changed. Under the tutelage of a State Security agent, he began studying the lives and thoughts of the Kims. Wake-up time was still 5 A.M. And he had to obey rules that were posted on his wall: “Obedience is essential. Do not try to learn of the private lives of other prisoners. Don’t listen to other prisoners’ conversations. Don’t converse with other prisoners. Accuse any prisoner who is at fault. Patients, obey the doctor. Don’t waste the blanket, which is the property of the nation.” Each prisoner had only one blanket, one set of clothing, one pair of socks. Before Kim Il-sung’s birthday the
prisoners had to clean the premises furiously. Some called that “the torture of April.”

Shin found the rules ridiculous, especially one that limited each prisoner’s shower to five minutes. He obeyed for a while but eventually got so fed up with prison that he resumed attempting to escape and even tried to fast to death. At first, his guards simply told him to go ahead and die of starvation if he wished. But then some “guidance” officials came to his cell and force-fed him with a funnel, pushing the food down his throat. After that horrible experience a guard told him, “I’ve never seen that before. They never cared about a fasting prisoner. You’re the first.” The guard said his treatment indicated Shin must be very important for North Korea.

Shin continued his studies and eventually was awarded his own outing to the Kim Jong-il Museum. There he was shown a mineral well whose water was highly praised. He should drink from it, he was told. He declined but his hosts insisted he “drink in remembrance of Kim Jong-il.” It isn’t clear whether this touch had been borrowed from Christian observance or from the ritual purification rite performed at the shrines of Japanese Shinto, the religion that had been used to support emperor worship.

In 1982, when Kim Il-sung’s seventieth birthday drew near, Shin worked on composing a congratulatory letter as his political tutors had urged. They told him ordinary paper would not do, and gave him the proper stationery, magnificent and colorful. Opening the cover, he could see the faint outlines of the magnolia flower, Kim’s favorite. He wrote his note on that paper. When Kim’s birthday came, Shin received as a present from the Great Leader his own inscribed Omega wrist-watch. He was also awarded a national medal.

The following year, on February 23, Shin’s letters of apology and flattery finally paid off when Kim Jong-il sent a letter releasing him from jail. A guard ordered him to stand at attention while the guard read it and watched Shin’s eyes. “I forgive you even though you are a sinner and your guilt was very large,” Kim Jong-il had written. “I just want you to devote yourself to achieving revolution in my country.” Shin’s handler took him to a restaurant. There, Shin bo-wed automatically, at the requisite forty-five-degree angle, before a portrait of Kim Il-sung. Then, still standing before the portrait, he vowed aloud to “do as you order, Great Leader.” The guide was pleased. “You are doing very well,” he told Shin. “Let’s have a seat.”

Earlier that month, Kim Jong-il had told Choi for the first time that her ex-husband was in Pyongyang, promising her that she would meet Shin soon. On March 6, Shin’s handler told him: “You will have good news today. You should get dressed.” He was taken to meet Kim Jong-il and Choi. Kim suggested to Choi: “Why don’t you hug him?” Then Kim announced, to the
security people and others present, “Mr. Shin will be my film advisor from now on.” Kim had a suggestion for the divorced couple: “Why don’t you get married on my father’s birthday?” He assured Shin that he was returning the still-glamorous Choi to him “without having touched her. I am a real, purified communist.”

Kim held a party for the couple and there he astonished them by apologizing for having kept each of them in the dark about the reasons for the kidnapping and the whereabouts of the other. The date was March 7, 1983, and presumably Kim knew that it was the twenty-ninth anniversary of their original marriage. “Please forgive me,” Kim said to them. “I was just playing a role.” Kim got drunk during the party and sang South Korean songs (-which were forbidden to his subjects). He showed some documentary films in which citizens displayed adulation toward him. When Shin complimented him on the people’s evident devotion, Kim replied: “It’s all a lie. They’re just pretending to praise me.”

Before meeting him, Shin had thought Kim must be crazy. Now, however, upon hearing Kim’s apologetic and humble remarks, Shin concluded that the young leader had real humanity and was very generous. “I was amazed that he was a communist.”

Shin and Choi were happy to be reunited. After the party, they were taken to see the Dear Leader’s personal film library, which they found to be a three-story building where some 250 employees cared for an astonishingly full collection of more than 15,000 films from around the world. Around 300 of those were from South Korea, and one of them came as a major shock to Shin and Choi. Years earlier, without taking the precaution of making copies of his new film
Tale of Shimcheong,
Shin had sent it to a representative in Hong Kong who had asked to have it shipped there so that subtitles could be made. The film thereafter had gone missing. Now Shin saw that Kim Jong-il had it in his library, which meant that the Dear Leader was the only person in the world who could screen it. The couple figured Shin’s Hong Kong employee had been Kim Jong-il’s secret agent, involved first in stealing the film and then in kidnapping them.