The Cleanest Race (12 page)

In contrast to depictions of the guerilla era, Kim appears in DPRK-themed pictures always as plump, if never quite as fat as he was in real life. Unlike Stalin and Mao, who personified the triumph of consciousness over the instincts, Kim had little need to pose as an ascetic. On the contrary, his plumpness symbolizes the race’s newfound freedom to indulge its innocent instincts. (Yankee villains, incidentally, are beanpole thin.)
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The DPRK’s propagandists are clearly uncomfortable with the “Homeland Liberation War,” even if they do depict it as a glorious victory over the US; there is no getting around the awkward fact that the republic was utterly devastated on the Parent Leader’s watch. War writers thus tend to keep him off-stage while invoking him as a galvanizing inspiration to the race. Soldiers shout “Long Live General Kim Il Sung” as they lead the charge or blow themselves up in suicide attacks.
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One of the few well-known war-themed works
in which Kim makes a physical appearance is a painting entitled “Leader, the Front Line is Up Ahead.” Kim has just disembarked from the presidential jeep (bearing, in cap and jackboots, an unfortunate resemblance to a chauffeur). While an aide surveys the smoke-dimmed middle distance, a female soldier—the usual bob-haired personification of Korean chastity—informs the leader that the front is just around the bend. Kim, somehow standing atop the thick mud and not in it, listens with a smile. Presumably one is meant to marvel at his courage in putting himself so close to harm’s way and his
modesty in traveling with only one aide.
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In depictions of the post-war years—or the Homeland Reconstruction Period, as it is called—the Great Leader is again in the forefront, often dressed in purifying white as he conducts “on-the-spot guidance” at farms, factories and construction sites. The Text gushes endlessly about these visits. Many of them were reported on days after they allegedly took place, and are remembered today with plaques and stone slabs, some engraved in blood-red script, at the relevant sites. (In 2008 I saw a South Korean tourist sternly rebuked for touching one of them.) But quite a few depictions of Kim’s “on-the-spot guidance” are presented to the public
as
literature and art, as works of the imagination. The leader’s statements in such stories are therefore not printed in boldface, as they would have to be if the account were ostensibly true.
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Their air of intimacy removes all doubt that they are fictional: no North Korean would think that a mere writer could have been privy to the great man’s private thoughts and conversations. Lest anyone still contrive to miss the point, these accounts are published as “short fiction” (tanp’yŏn sosŏl) and reviewed accordingly, with critics either praising or—much less often—faulting a writer for the story he has dreamed up.
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The reader is nonetheless expected to believe that the work is true to the
essence
of the great man. (A comparison can be made to the non-Biblical tales of Jesus taught to Christian children.) With paintings it is somewhat harder to tell imaginary scenes from purportedly historical ones, though the latter are more likely to include dates and locations in their titles.
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It may seem odd that such a repressive regime would allow
writers and artists to cast the leader in situations of their own imagining, but only the most trusted members of the cultural apparatus are commissioned to create such works. In doing so they must not only meet the party’s demands for a certain topical theme—a campaign to boost agricultural production may call for depiction of the leader at a farm—but also follow the Text’s rigid iconography. Artists, for example, must copy the face already familiar from canonical pictures; there are none of the minor stylistic variations evident in Soviet paintings of Stalin or Lenin.

Stories of Kim’s “on-the-spot guidance” are alike not only in their depiction of the hero, but in their storylines and secondary characters as well. The latter usually include a rather slow-witted aide—a different man each time, the better to play up his comic astonishment at the leader’s every word and deed. Things usually start off with Kim in an unidentified office. (In contrast to the Stalin cult, with its many paeans to the “light in the Kremlin window,” the Text does not associate the leader with any particular residence or workplace; he was and is everywhere, for he is at the heart of every Korean.) The standard plot: the aide reports on a problem in a remote farm or factory, the leader jovially suggests a road trip, and the two men head out in the presidential sedan, throwing everyone into a tizzy when they arrive. The leader must then be shown solving the problem, but without coming off as cerebral and therefore un-Korean. Both problem and solution are thus described in terms a child can grasp.

Indeed, the Leader’s published remarks are
always
trite: “Rainbow trout is a good fish, tasty and nutritious.”
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Foreigners who mock these platitudes fail to realize that the content of Kim’s guidance is not as important as the time and effort he takes
to administer it. (In many pictures of these visits, he is merely listening with a smile.
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) After all, to impart consciousness and discipline to the child race would be to make it less pure and childlike, which must never happen. Nor could Kim pose as an educator or disciplinarian without seeming an imperfect embodiment of Koreanness. In short stories, the emotional climax comes
after
Kim’s breezy solution of the problem, usually in a scene in which he fusses over someone in the adoring throng who looks cold or tired.
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It is this loving attentiveness on the part of the world’s busiest man that moves the characters to tears, and is meant to make the reader cry too. Even when Kim is referred to as Father Leader (
abŏji suryŏng
), therefore, there is nothing Confucian or patriarchal about him. In a short story called “Father,” for example, he neither exercises authority nor imparts wisdom, but rushes an injured child to hospital. The official encyclopedia praises the story in maternal terms, describing “the Great General as the loving parent who holds and nurtures all Korean children at his breast.”
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Note the pointedly androgynous or—more accurately—hermaphroditic designation of “parent.” Kim is referred to primarily as Parent Leader (ŏbŏi suryŏng), though with his maternal side praised far more often than the other.
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Kim Jong Il himself has long described his father’s motherly qualities as key to his success. These qualities manifested themselves “even in his teenage years.”

Artists and writers not only play up the feminine aspects of Kim Il Sung’s appearance—the soft, pale face, the dimpled smile, the expansive bosom—but also show him holding small children or letting them clamber over him. In photographs we see him grinning as schoolgirls pull yearningly on his arms and hands.
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Even in depictions of his guerilla years these qualities are always on display. In one illustration he is tucking children into bed. The title of another, “The Parent Leader General Kim Il Sung Holding the Children of Mt. Ma’an to his Breast,” speaks for itself.
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But even grown Koreans are children at heart, and to be treated accordingly. Here is the first verse from the song “The Leader Came to the Sentry Post”:

In one painting Kim smilingly squats down in deep snow, tying a young soldier’s bootlaces; in another he drapes an overcoat over an exhausted cadre who has fallen asleep at his desk.
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In “Worrying About A Warrior’s Health,” the smiling Kim is holding to his chest a young soldier, who like a child has pressed his pink-cheeked face up against the white tunic.
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Though all personality cults stress the people’s love for
their leader, the North Korean one differs from its Soviet and Chinese counterparts in stressing individual citizens’ personal yearning to see him or be held in his embrace. “I miss the General” is a constant refrain. The chorus of the plaintive official classic “Where Are You, General I Long For?” runs, “The harder the cold autumn wind blows/ the more I yearn for the warm bosom of the General.”
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The closest Kim Il Sung comes to appearing as a father in more than name is when he is depicted together with Kim Jong Il. The reason is obvious: If the Great Leader were shown mothering his own son, the public might be inclined to conclude that the latter had a privileged upbringing, a notion the regime—as we shall see in the following chapter—is at constant pains to dispel. Paintings often show the older man walking with dignified mien a pace ahead of the younger one, much as one sees real-life fathers and sons walking in South Korean corporations.
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The younger man must of course be shown learning from his father, because the hereditary succession derives its legitimacy in no small part from the claim that he imbibed Juche from the source. But the Text prefers to show him reflecting vaguely on past lessons; this obviates scenes of father-son instruction in which Kim Il Sung might come off as erudite and therefore un-Korean.

Whether the backdrop is the 1950s or the 1980s, the depiction of the Great Leader is basically the same, though he is shown growing fatter with age, and as an elderly if unwrinkled man is often pictured in black-framed glasses and a cap.
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(Needless to say, the goiter that afflicted the real-life man in later life is not to be seen either in photographs, which had to be taken from the same angle, or in portraits.) Relaxed and cheerful, he
is occasionally even shown with a cigarette in one hand.
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