Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor (27 page)

These women looked at me, startled, as they noticed my obvious North Korean accent and manner of speech, but they soon gained composure and continued with their complaint.

“Don’t worry, we will be as resolute as possible if there’s war. War is war, but for now, we need compensation money for our neck injury.”

I was feeling that enough was enough when an invitation to visit the United States came through a Korean-American church organization. I was only too glad to let myself be taken to a new destination.

I’d begun to wonder, as soon as I learned about my father’s true background, about America. It was a place that caused our family unfathomable tragedy. It was the country for which my father worked during the Korean War and yet it tore everyone apart, sent children far away from parents and husbands from their wives. Its army still occupied the southern half of the Korean peninsula. Nevertheless, I was growing more curious than angry. I wanted to see with my own eyes what America was like and what my father had worked for at the cost of unspeakable grief. In March 2003, I was on a plane for New York and thinking about my father. I remembered nothing of him, but I was heading to a country that might be able to tell me more about who he really was.
¹

As a rare witness to one of the most atrocious gulags ever in human history, I gave lectures everywhere I went: churches, universities, community events. The most memorable of them all was to testify before the Human Rights Committee of the U.S. Congress in April 2003. In Washington, D.C., I also helped intelligence officers identify the locations of the North Korean camps and the facilities manufacturing counterfeit foreign currency. I was not sure to what degree they were interested in my knowledge about these facilities, but it turned out that they were not really paying attention; three years later, they seemed to have realized the importance of this story and came back to me with follow-up questions.

The tour was supposed to end on the West Coast with lectures and meetings. Los Angeles was the final destination, where many Korean Americans greeted me. Three days after my arrival, a letter was delivered to me from a Jewish lawyer who took a special interest in my story. She had read about it in the English-language edition of
Monthly Chosun
(Wolgan joseon), which featured the gruesome details of my internment in Camp No. 14. She was willing to help me apply for political asylum in the United States. My original plan had been to go to Japan after my visit to the United States, because I was feeling increasingly unsafe in South Korea with those mysterious phone calls urging me not to talk about the North Korean camps. So I agreed to this offer, hoping that the U.S. government could provide me with a safe refuge.

Soon after settling down in Los Angeles, I enrolled in a seminary and began to lecture for various churches. As I tried to embrace the teachings of love and forgiveness, my life became meaningful. My South Korean friends who’d urged me to explore Christian ways of life would have been happy for me. I became active in the community of North Koreans and did my best to advocate for their safety and rights while waiting for my case to be resolved. Although a labor certificate was issued in December 2004, I am still waiting for word about the asylum case, which will guarantee my permanent legal status in the States. I was introduced to the director of Immigration and Naturalization Services while in Washington, D.C. and many friends are advocating for me, but I am still waiting to hear from the INS and make the United States my adoptive home.

After getting settled in Los Angeles, I was able to ask my former business partner—a Chinese expatriate who travels frequently between China and North Korea—to salvage some family photos and bring them out of North Korea. He picked up pictures from my wife’s brother, who did not know where the rest of my family had ended up. The only thing my brother-in-law could say was that after my arrest, my family was rounded up and sent to a remote mountain area. When I think of their surprise, terror, and anguish when that took place, I sink into unfathomable despair. Where have all those years when we were living under the same roof as a family gone? I would be only too glad to give my life to relieve their pain. My children must have grown up to be unrecognizable strangers. They were only five and three when I saw them last. If I were to pass by them on the street, would I be able to tell who they were? Against all hope, against the cruelly indifferent stream of time, my memory reverts to that morning of 1993. It was an ordinary day—peaceful and quiet. For some reason, my wife hand-washed the Nissan bright and shiny, early that morning. I remember thanking her for it. My son had already gone to school, but my wife and daughter were still at home and saw me off in front of the house. Our white dog was wagging his tail as I drove the car past the alley. In my mind, they are forever living that day.

For some time now I have thought about how to end my story. I thought it could end with my improbable escape from the camp. That moment I crossed the border between the living and the dead, when mental anguish alone could have cut the thin thread of my life; that moment when I saw the reflection of my face under the moonlight in Go-on. That chilly rivulet under the bright moon captured the fearful face of the hunted, but at least it was the face of a man freed from bestial captivity. Although my life was in jeopardy from unspeakable hunger, the harrowing possibility of betrayal and capture, I was at least free at that moment.

Or my story could end with my arrival in South Korea or the United States, where I did not have to worry about imminent capture or imprisonment, but life continued to take me through unexpected routes and challenges. Should I find solace in the way I managed to survive so many deaths to tell my story? In my mind, both versions are missing something significant. Though my story illustrates a journey through the dark and bright sides of fate, it has not reached its conclusion yet.

Ideally, this story should end with a reunion with my children and wife whom I left behind in North Korea. Whenever and wherever that might take place, it would be a perfect event to end this book. Just as the waves of the Californian shores indifferently repeat their swaying motion, my journey keeps moving forward and backward, without ultimate direction. There is no end to my story, and I know well it has to do with home.

Home for me is a place where the memories of people so dear to me are enshrined.

I long to go back and rejoice at my birthplace, where I grew up and began my travels along the bumpy roads of life—a life marked by both happiness and tragedies. It is still home to me. And yet, that place reminiscent of great joy and terror is still far from sight. Until I set foot there again, the journey continues, forward and backward.

Notes

Introduction by Kim Suk-Young

1
. Carter J. Eckert et al.,
Korea Old and New: A History
(Seoul, Korea: Ilchongak Publishers and Korea Institute at Harvard University, 1990), 328–29.

2
. Quoted in Don Oberdorfer,
Two Koreas
(Indianapolis: Basic Books, 1997), 7.

3
. The past decade (1998–2008) might have been a digression from the hostile inter-Korean relationship, since South Korean policy toward North Korea changed significantly under the presidency of Kim Dae-jung (1998–2003), who introduced the so-called “Sunshine policy” (
haetpit jeongchaek
). Taking its concept from Aesop’s fable about a contest between wind and sunshine to make a traveler voluntarily remove his coat, the new policy advocated open dialogue instead of military conflict, mutual understanding instead of mutual accusation between the two Koreas. Under this policy, South Korea actively took the lead in engaging North Korea. The following president, Roh Mu-hyeon (2003–2008), continued this engagement effort, and inter-Korean exchange grew in all sectors. However, the “Sunshine policy” also invited severe criticism of the South Korean government that it is unwilling to confront North Korea about human rights abuses and refugee issues for fear that it might cause the inter-Korean relationship to deteriorate.

4
. Charles Armstrong explains in detail that the cultural conflict between the two Koreas was in large part the outcome of the ideological competition and rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States, the occupiers of the north and south, to win the hearts and minds of the Korean people on both sides. See “The Cultural Cold War in Korea, 1945–1950,”
Journal of Asian Studies
62, no.1 (Feb. 2003): 71–99.

5
. Bruce Cumings,
Korea’s Place in the Sun
(New York: Norton, 1997), 225.

6
. Helen-Louise Hunter, “Society and Its Environment,” in
North Korea: A Country Study
, ed. Robert Worden, 270 (Washington, D.C.: The Library of Congress Research Division, forthcoming).

7
. Hwang Pong Hyok and Kim Jong Ryol,
DPR Korea Tour
(Pyongyang: National Tourism Administration, 2002), 99.

8
. A chapter on the North Korean economy in Marcus Noland’s book
Avoiding the Apocalypse: The Future of the Two Koreas
(Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 2000), 59–142, features some aspects of the North Korean government’s foreign currency–earning activities.

9
. For a detailed account with recent examples of North Korea’s illegal activities on the global stage, see Balbina Y. Hwang, “Curtailing North Korea’s Illicit Activities,”
http://www.heritage.org/Research/AsiaandthePacific/bg1679.cfm#pgfId-1049475
(accessed September 23, 2008).

10
. Hunter, “Society and Its Environment,” 223.

11
. Charles Armstrong,
The North Korean Revolution 1945–1950
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 72–73.

12
. Hunter, “Society and Its Environment,” 223.

13
. Richard K. Carton, ed.,
Forced Labor in the “People’s Democracies”
(New York: Mid-European Studies Center, 1955), 8. Quoted in Philip F. Williams and Yenna Wu,
The Great Wall of Confinement: The Chinese Prison Camp Through Contemporary Fiction and Reportage
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 37.

14
. Williams and Yu,
The Great Wall of Confinement
, 37.

15
. Williams and Yu,
The Great Wall of Confinement
, 41.

16
. David Hawk, the author of
The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps,
translates the term as “political penal-labor colony” as opposed to “political-detention camp,” “prison camp,” or “concentration camp.”
The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea), 18.

17
. Ibid., 24.

18
. Hawk,
The Hidden Gulag
, 24.

19
. Hawk,
The Hidden Gulag
, 24.

20
. David Hawk argues that there are six
kwanliso
s currently in operation, four of which have been confirmed in Kim Yong’s testimony. Hawk,
The Hidden Gulag
, 26.

21
. Kang Cheol-hwan, who spent ten years of his childhood in the infamous prison camp No. 15 in Yodeok, South Hamgyeong province, also provides a detailed account of food deprivation that caused madness and near starvation, driving inmates to eat anything to survive, including snakes and roaches. Kang Chol-Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot,
The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag
(New York: Basic Books, 2001).

22
. Oleg V. Khlevniuk,
The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 105.

23
. Williams and Yu,
The Great Wall of Confinement,
87.