Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (77 page)

Dong explained that “when you’re small, all you thinkof is gratitude to Kim Il-sung. When you’re older, you think, ‘He has done so much for me, I should not do anything against him.’ And I also feared punishment if I should do anything against him. There was no way for me to get access to information that went against Kim Il-sung or showed discrepancies.”

I mentioned to Dong how, on an afternoon in 1979, I had gone to Kim Il-sung University but had found the parts of the campus I was shown utterly deserted and had not believed my guides’ explanation that everyone was in a meeting, all 12,000 students. Dong surprised me by saying there really were such meetings.
“Everyone
goes. Otherwise, at the next meeting you’ll be the one expelled. We would meet on the grounds of the campus. The university president attends plus one agent from State Security, one from Public Security, the regular dean and the party-affiliated dean. Professors attend only the very serious annual session. They also go to separate faculty meetings every three months.”

Dong told me a bit about how the universities taught. “There’s one
advantage to a North Korean university,” he said. “Even the professors study along with the students. There’s no difference between a professor and a student. If the student excels to the point he’s better than the professor, the student will be acknowledged.” But that student would have to excel within the context of what Kim Il-sung had said and written. “In North Korea there’s only discussion, no debate. Most ideology courses require memorization of principles, but to excel in class you need to come up with an improvement. Of course you can’t change Kim Il-sung’s principles, but you can think of the best way to put them into effect.”

I asked Dong’s view of the regime succession. “I thought very highly of Kim Il-sung,” he replied. “I was proud and honored to work for such a high being. As for Kim Jong-il, I thought of him as a human. I liked Kim Jong-il because he was young and understood the younger generation. I thought he could bring a lot of change to North Korea. Understanding the younger generation, Kim Jong-il allowed men to grow their hair longer and let women have permanent waves. He even permitted access to famous foreign literary works. When you see festivities in North Korea, sometimes you can find Koreans dancing. This was allowed thanks to a decision by Kim Jong-il. I participated in that dancing, too, and was very grateful to Kim Jong-il. In 1983 on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the North Korean People’s Army I joined in the dancing, too.”

Dong’s remarks reminded me that I had danced around a maypole on May Day, 1979, in Pyongyang’s Kim Il-sung Square, wearing a Lenin cap newly purchased in a department store. I had not realized at the time that even that sort of dancing, based on folk dancing and to my eye totally devoid of sexual suggestiveness, was a newly granted privilege for which I should thank the Dear Leader.

Dong told me that he had kept his ideological purity until he left North Korea to study abroad. “Our political and economic system was based on dictatorship by Kim Il-sung—one-man rule,” he said. “When I was in North Korea, I thought Kim Il-sung was God. I did everything by his command. I had no doubts about the regime until I went to Poland in 1985. Then, for five years, I heard a lot of news of the West—the United States, Germany, England. I thought, ‘Which system or country is better politically or economically?’ And I saw the life of the Polish people. In my mind, I saw that life in the West and in East European socialist countries, as well, was better than life in North Korea.

“I watched the Seoul Olympics on television—all the games. On the television monitor I saw Seoul and other cities. Before seeing the 1988 Olympics, I had been taught that South Korea was very poor. Many, many people were dying there, fighting against dictatorship, I was told. But I saw something
different during the ’88 Olympics. Of course I was interested in the games, but I was mostly interested in the street scenes that were televised, how the people were dressed. I realized I had been thinking wrong. I’d always been taught that South Korea was a poverty-stricken colony of the United States with no freedom, but when I watched boxing and saw that the South Korean beat the American, I thought, ‘Maybe it’s not the way I’ve been told.’ Up until then I had thought that the colony could not go against the imperialists. Seeing that the South Koreans upheld their flag and competed in the games as South Korea, I was astonished that they could beat the United States.”

After the Seoul Olympics, “people in many Eastern European countries including Poland were eager to find out about South Korea,” Dong said. “There were a lot of special reports in the news—magazines, television, and so on—about how South Korea could develop into such an industrialized nation, and about how much power South Korea had to have to be able to host the Olympics. This was the channel I used to get knowledge of South Korea. I think it’s a tragedy we had to get information that way When I was in Pyongyang we could not learn such things.”

Dong noted that radio, for example, “is a product of capitalism.” In North Korea, “people can’t have access to normal radios, because that would allow them to hear broadcasts from all over the world. It’s hard to buy radios except the one-channel radios. The central government sends people to inspect radios every three or four months, so just having a radio can put people under fear and apprehension.”

I asked Dong-what he thought of the plans then being discussed for U.S. radio broadcasts to North Korea of news about North Korea in the Korean language, via Radio Free Asia. “It’s a very good idea but not very practical,” was his opinion. “Not enough North Koreans have access to radios to receive the transmissions—maybe just one percent, the high officials, a few people with power like those in State Security. The broadcasts won’t be known nationwide. But the people with power to change things could listen and think. I myself got a lot of help from Radio Free Europe and BBC broadcasts.”

It was not only what he heard on the radio and the televised revelations about South Korea that rocked Dong’s worldview. “The changes in Poland— especially Solidarity—influenced me a lot,” he said. “I had lots of Polish friends in Solidarity. They kept telling me, ‘If your brain is properly oiled, you won’t go back to North Korea.’ I was shocked when a South Korean embassy was set up in Hungary, but I felt encouraged, because with a North Korean passport I couldn’t go to a Western or neutral country but I could go to Hungary.”

Soon, another factor arose that made Dong feel he had only a narrow window of opportunity if he wished to escape. When the embassy was established in Hungary, all the North Korean students there were sent to Poland
to keep them from having contact with the Southerners. “When I heard of a plan for a South Korean embassy in Poland, I figured the North Korean students in Poland “would be removed, too.” With nowhere else to go in Europe, “I would be sent back to North Korea. That’s what triggered my defection. I went by plane to Hungary and found the South Korean embassy in Budapest. They sent me to the South Korean embassy in Vienna.” That was in May of 1989, six months before the South Korean embassy in Poland opened. “When I defected,” Dong told me, “the main thing that troubled me was that my family would be punished. But I feel I’m a very egocentric man, to be able to defect. I guesss I was egotistical enough to overcome that concern.”

I asked Dong how North Korean youngsters managed to learn anything substantive in school, what with all the gang fighting, labor, ideology instruction and so on. Had he felt he was far behind his Polish fellow students? “I thought I was way up there, because I entered in Poland as a university freshman,” he replied. “All my classmates had only graduated from high school, but I already had three years of university education. So I was ahead of them. In general, though, I think North Korea lags in all fields with the possible exceptions of math, basic science—physics and chemistry—and English and Russian.”

Before entering the prestigious Korea University in Seoul, Dong told me, he had taken an entrance examination and failed Korean. (That is not as surprising as it may sound. After all the decades of separation, the versions of Korean used in the North and South had many differences in vocabulary. As for the writing systems, although North Korea had long before halted the use of Chinese characters, South Koreans continued to use them in tandem with what had become the sole Northern writing system, the indigenous Korean
hangul
alphabet.) Nevertheless, Dong said, “I had very high scores in physics, chemistry and math. I’m a senior now. When I graduate, I’ll enter Daewoo Corporation and specialize in East European trade. I speak Polish.”

I asked Dong if he still worshipped Kim Il-sung, years after his defection. He hesitated. “It’s hard to answer,” he said. “When I think of Kim Il-sung, he did very cruel and wrong things. Still, when you contemplate it, the degree of his wrongdoing lessens. Since coming to South Korea I’ve come to realize that much of his history is fabricated, but still I’m moved by Kim Ilsung’s leadership.” Kim Il-sung, Dong noted, formerly had worn “people’s clothes”—
inmin-pok.
(-what Americans call Mao suits although the Chinese actually call them Sun Yat-sen suits, for the 1911 founder of the Chinese republic, who wore the garb before either Mao or the North Koreans did)— with a Lenin cap. “Now he wears Western-style suits. That symbolizes that his health is good and he has the intent of cooperating with the West. The former, the health symbolism, is for his people; the latter is for the outside world.”

By the time I spoke with Dong, the United States and North Korea were embroiled in the first dispute over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program. Dong read into that an interesting observation about the regime’s staying power. “I don’t believe North Korea is going to collapse suddenly” he said. “To be able to have this conflict with the United States means Kim Il-sung has something to rely on: the support of the people.” I asked if this was real rather than feigned or imaginary support. “I believe he
has
the people’s support,” Dong said. “Here’s proof. Now they’re having two meals a day they’re overworked, but still there’s no uprising. That proves he has the people’s support. People now understand that North Korea is not the most powerful nation. But they still believe it is among the most developed nations in the world. For me, when I left for Poland, I thought, ‘North Korea is the best nation.’ When I visited North Korea before the 1988 Olympics I met people who realized North Korea was not the best nation, but they thought it was certainly among the higher-ranking ones.”

Dong noted that “Kim Il-sung is old” and said that “people realize he’ll die soon. Until Kim Il-sung’s death the regime will stay put. After his death, Kim Jong-il will succeed him. People don’t trust Kim Jong-il as much as Kim Il-sung, so they will be a bit troubled. But there’s still backing, and the regime won’t collapse all that suddenly. From then on there will be a lot of change in North Korea—change like in China, maintaining the socialist system but adapting the free-market system. But the problem is, there will be turmoil caused by people who want revenge for all the hardship they’ve gone through. I believe Kim Jong-il doesn’t have the kind of leadership ability Kim Il-sung has. So the people who have been oppressed will rise up and take revenge.”

I asked Dong what he thought South Korea and the United States should be doing. “I would like to see the U.S. put more pressure on North Korea,” he said. “Sanctions, demanding to inspect the human rights situation. Mean-while South Korea should play the good cop and say to the U.S., ‘Don’t press them so hard.’ Thus there could be a good channel for North-South talks. But the U.S. still would have to maintain the pressure. Even if there are North-South talks, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations and the United States should be able to step up the pressure if the talks don’t go well. But I do believe that to achieve normal ties between North and South will be very difficult. It would be easier to normalize relations between the U.S. and North Korea or between Japan and North Korea.”

Chung Seong-san, a soldier until his January 1995 defection, gave me a “yes, but …” answer to the question of whether the communist new man (or woman) really existed in North Korea. Chung told me he had contracted
polio as a child and suffered from “stiff” legs. A man of very casual demeanor and dress, wearing a white-on-white windbreaker, light plaid slacks and loafers, Chung exhibited no obvious physical symptoms other than swollen knuckles. (Those were not uncommon among North Korean army veterans, trained in knuckle-smashing martial arts.) Evidently Chung’s had been a mild case of polio or the diagnosis was faulty.

At one point in our conversation Chung said to me: “I’ve met a lot of North Korea specialists. Theoretically they know more about North Korea than I do, but they don’t know the North Korean heart.” Chung’s heart story was a complicated one, sometimes self-contradictory it turned out. “I was bald until I was eleven or twelve,” he told me. “I got special treatment because of my illness, due to the benevolence of the party.”

Hearing Chung say that, I remembered that neither I nor other visitors had seen handicapped people in Pyongyang. Lee Woong-pyong, the MIG19 pilot who escaped with his plane to the South, had told me that, in Pyongyang, “before the 1970s you could find many beggars and people disabled by the war. After that they were exiled to rural areas in the provinces. The reason the authorities gave was that Pyongyang is a cultured city, with lots of foreign visitors and there should be no distractions from the scenery.” Ahn Choong-hak, a former soldier and logging camp worker who became a Kia automobile salesman when he reached the South, told me, “In the early 1980s they rounded up all the midgets in North Korea and placed them in M.aemu-ri. Relatives started complaining, so around 1989 or 1990 they released them.”