Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (82 page)

North Korean defectors to the South up until the 1990s were so rare that the Pyongyang regime and its sympathizers in the West could dismiss those few citizens who did make the break as malcontents—often criminals—-whose testimony about conditions back home amounted to little more than artful propaganda, manipulated on behalf of the military-backed South Korean dictators by the sinister spooks of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. But as conditions in the North worsened, the numbers of defectors increased dramatically. Mean-while Kim Young-sam, a longtime democratic opposition figure, won the South Korean presidency in the election of December 1992 and set out to reform the intelligence agency. Soon there were in the South enough defectors, evidently free to speak their minds, that an interviewer willing to spend time unburdening them of their life stories could start to discern a combination of large patterns—recall, for example, the custom of gang-fighting among youths, covered in chapter 12—and small variations. Considered together, these suggested an essential truthfulness in what they had to say.

Take, for example, the men who had worked in the Russian Far East at logging camps and in a few cases at mining camps. I found that this group was largely misunderstood by Western reporters and commentators. Quite a few of my colleagues in the media suggested that armies of North Korean men had been forced to travel to Siberia to work in slave labor camps.
¹
In fact, as interviews with a number of them demonstrated to me, the men had
gone of their own volition. Indeed, they had competed fiercely, using bribes and any other means available, to exert enough influence on North Korean officials to get themselves on the list. They saw going to Russia as their tickets to wealth other-wise almost unimaginable by North Korean standards. The work was approximately as arduous as what they would have experienced back home. The big difference besides huge salary increases was that it was possible to leave the camps occasionally and interact with Russians and ethnic Koreans and Chinese in nearby communities. Many loggers were transformed by experiencing Russia’s relatively liberalized atmosphere. Here are some of their stories.

Chang Ki-hong defected in November 1991, while working at a North Korean timber camp in eastern Russia not far from Khabarovsk. When I met him Chang was enrolled as a Russian language student at Seoul’s Yonsei University, one of South Korea’s top-rated institutions, and had married a fellow student. With his round face, strong jaw, reddish complexion and wiry hair, he had something of the appearance of a soldier—classic Korean looks.

Chang was born in Yomju, North Pyongan Province, in 1963. Not only had his father fought in the Korean war, Chang told me, but “before the Kim regime came to power, our family were neither landlords nor capitalists. So we were considered to have a good family background. Mother worked in a salt factory. Father couldn’t work because he was disabled and couldn’t walk well. He stayed at home and did some wood-cutting.” The household’s living standard was in the middle-to-high range.

Chang told me he had begun his education with nursery school and kindergarten. “They didn’t give us much training in nursery school. It really started in kindergarten. When we played soldier with toy soldiers, we would always say, ‘The general is Kim Il-sung.’ We would learn about his family, his upbringing, where he was born, how brave he was in fighting Japanese imperial rule. They had a room where they put up pictures of Kim Il-sung’s life. We would have to memorize the pictures and the stories that went with them. The pupils who did best at that got red stars for exemplary-work. And if you excelled in studies of Kim Il-sung, you got more snacks than other pupils. I got a lot of red stars.”

After kindergarten, “basic education is eleven years,” Chang said. “But when I was in school it was nine years—four years of elementary school followed by five years of junior and senior middle school. You would finish around eighteen. I remember I was always hungry. Another thing: Even in elementary school I was so accustomed to being part of a highly organized system. When I went into second grade I had to become part of the children’s corps. In junior high I switched to the socialist youth league. You stay
in that until you’re about thirty years old. Then you either get into the party which is good, or become part of some other organization for adults. You’re always part of some organization. You’re never on your own. All these are basically subsystems within the system called the party. They make people more manageable.” (Since North Koreans while remaining in the country were trained to avoid asking why things were the way they were, as Chang himself said a little later in our talk, I suspected that last observation about making people more “manageable” to have been something of an afterthought, the product of fairly recent reflection.)

“The basic thing you learn in youth organizations is that you can’t be an individual,” Chang continued. “You’re part of a system. You learn more about the Kim regime, about Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il—that they are gods on their own terms. They told us that the family is another organization. Parents can feed you, they brought you into the world. But as for the party and government, even after your death they can allow your political life to continue eternally. Because of the existence of the party and government, the family can exist. Kim Il-sung comes first. He is the father of all.”

I asked him whether parents would ever have objected to putting Kim Il-sung, party and state ahead of the family. “They figure everyone in the world must be living like this, so there is nothing to object to,” Chang replied. “Of course, they have small complaints about the Kim regime, food shortages and so on, but nothing they would speak out about. To make sure we wouldn’t complain, in each New Year’s speech Kim Il-sung reminded us that ‘we all have to suffer and sacrifice as long as imperialism exists in this world and the United States and South Korea are preparing to make war on us.’ He made that speech every New Year’s until 1991.

“Basically the mental processes of North Koreans aren’t so complex,” Chang continued. “They do acknowledge they are poor. Even those who don’t have exchanges of information with relatives in Japan and China recognize they lead poor lives. Maybe 80 percent imagine that South Koreans live better. But their mentality is separated between lifestyle and politics. They don’t connect the two and blame the government for their poverty.” Again, I figured this was something Chang had sorted out for himself fairly late in life, after his arrival and debriefing by government officials in the South—although that did not keep his words from ringing true.

When Chang was growing up, “most of the people in my town worked in factories or on collective farms,” he said. “Besides such regular jobs, there was a law passed in 1985 permitting ‘household cooperation communities.’ Those without work could stay home or stay in the neighborhood, engage in cottage industries and go to the markets to sell things they had made, such as cigarettes. Before 1985, there was a market every ten days where people could sell their own produce or industrial products. After 1985, small consumer goods like cigarettes could be sold there also, and you could go to the
seashore to get clams to sell. If you wanted to be part of the household cooperative community you needed to get government permission.”

I asked Chang about the regular distribution system for food grains. “The distribution systems were different for workers and farmers,” he said. “Farmers got their year’s supply of rice after the harvest. Workers got their supplies every fifteen days, between 700 grams and one kilogram per person depending on their work. Unemployed people got about 300 grams; children, 400 to 600 depending on age. Even if you ate very sparingly you could only live on the ration for twelve days. So for three days you would starve or hunt for roots to eat.”

Like all the other North Koreans I interviewed, Chang could remember with some precision the fluctuations of food supply for people where he lived. “It was always hard and seemed to be getting worse,” he said. “Until the 1970s maybe it was all right. In the early ’70s, when I was in elementary school, we could still find jams in the stores and eat them. Later, from around 1975, they-were unavailable. From the mid-eighties things started getting really much worse. In 1988, I was still getting all my regular grain distribution. I left North Korea in 1989, for Russia and started getting letters from relatives saying the distribution center didn’t have rice, or other grain. The center gave people tickets instead of grain. Later on, if the food arrived, they could exchange the tickets for food.”

Although residents of Pyongyang got special privileges, Chang told me, people like his family who lived outside Pyongyang were “not as envious as you would think. The general run of people don’t even think of living in the capital. If you reach a certain rank you may get a call from Pyongyang City Hall. The population is always controlled at two million. Once in a while if they get too populous they send people elsewhere.”

I asked Chang what he had done for fun and excitement as a child. “Of course childhood activities are different for children in Pyongyang and the provinces,” he said. “I didn’t have much time to play. I had to do my social labor—-work in the fields after class—even in elementary school. In winter, the schools usually didn’t get coal supplies so we had to go get corn husks and dry them to use for fuel. In the summers, I do remember playing. We went to an apple orchard, ate some apples and ran around.”

Chang managed to get accepted into a university right out of school, which was unusual, and thus he was not required to put in the usual decade-long stint in the military. “You’re exempt if you enter university, as long as you spend six months in a military training course,” he told me. “I went to Sinuiju University and studied to become a teacher. In North Korea teaching is not considered a very good profession. It’s hard to sustain a normal life as a teacher. And the basic image of a teacher is not very positive. It may seem a bit sissy. Lots of women are teachers. So after I graduated I went to work for the railroad, where I was in charge of controlling the tracks, coupling and
uncoupling the trains. It was very dangerous work. I worked on the railroad until 1987. From then until 1988 I was applying and preparing for my Russia assignment.”

The competition to get to Russia was severe, Chang explained. “For North Koreans, to be able to go to Russia is the chance of a lifetime. You can earn lots of money. The average income in North Korea is about 60
won
a month. In Russia I got 900
won
a month. Actually I would have gotten 3,000
won
a month, but the North Korean government kept 2,100
won.
A special committee selected me. You have to have a good family background. My elder brothers were high officials in the party and my third brother was an actor in Pyongyang. Eighty percent of those selected are party members. I wasn’t a party member, but they checked to make sure I was ideologically stable—not susceptible to subversive influences. In each workplace there’s a party secretary. My party secretary at the railroad recommended me.”

When he arrived in 1988 Chang found that “the lifestyle of the camp was basically the same, a miniature North Korea with 15,000 to 20,000 North Koreans working there. My work was analyzing statistics of the operation. I had an eight-hour day, but had to study ideology during my off hours. I was in Russia but I was controlled by North Koreans. To get out of the restricted area I needed a pass.”

I asked Chang how his outlook had changed while he was working at the camp. “Until I got to the Soviet Union I believed in the regime,” he said. “But when I got to the Soviet Union and started meeting people there, I realized there must be something wrong back home. It was after I had been there about six months that my mentality started to change. We are taught that the whole world worships Kim Il-sung. I met Russians who made fun of this Kim worship, and then I realized that he was not in fact worshipped by the whole world. Cultural differences played a big role in the changes I went through. In North Korea there are no entertainment facilities. All you can do is drink a lot. In Russia I saw cinemas, discos. I didn’t go to discos often, because there would be big trouble if I got caught; I would be sent back to North Korea. The North Korean authorities wouldn’t allow us to go because they thought it would make us lazy.” But Chang did manage to get out on the town occasionally. “I was affected. I realized this was the kind of life people should lead—not suppressed and controlled.”

Although he liked the lifestyle in Russia, Chang didn’t think of defecting on that account. Rather, it was radio that set him off. “I’m the curious type, and my friend and I started listening to South Korean and other foreign broadcasts. He was caught and sent back. I was put under surveillance because we were such close friends. It was one month before I was due to go back to North Korea myself, but I was afraid if I went back I would be executed or sent to a prison camp.” Chang had listened to South Korea’s state-owned KBS, which broadcast special programming to Korean-speaking
people in communist countries. He had also heard Korean-language programming from the Soviet Union and from China’s ethnically Korean Yan-bian region. As for KBS, “I could listen in the afternoon but the reception was bad. At night from eleven o’clock I could listen. At first I had a hard time understanding the South Korean dialect. They had people criticizing the government on various issues. And at that time they were running a series on the rise of the Kim Il-sung regime in North Korea. It was very interesting to get a different perspective. So I experienced some ideological change. My friend and I kidded each other, ‘Let’s go to South Korea.’ Ultimately it was that ideological change coupled with fear of execution that prodded me to defect.”