Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (46 page)

Young Kim is described in one officially disseminated biography as having gone “deeply into the people” during his college days.
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The phrase is an accidental but telling double entendre: Those “people” seem to have been mainly young women. Nonofficial sources describe Kim the collegian as a ladies’ man leading a rambunctious life. He started out living in the premier’s
mansion instead of the school dormitory, but serious family problems— especially conflicts with his stepmother, who would report to his father on his behavior—eventually kept him away from home for long stretches. Not eating properly he was expending his energies on love affairs to the extent that one professor, Kim Shin-sook, decided the budding Don Juan needed better nutrition to keep up his health and stamina. Whether out of sincere concern or to earn brownie points, the professor acquired delicacies and fed them to Kim Jong-il. The young man, on that rich diet, began to grow chubby—eventually presenting a roly-poly contrast to the slim builds of most of his fellow North Koreans on and off campus.

Rumors of wild partying, fast driving and sexual escapades got around in Pyongyang. Perhaps it was partly for that reason that the regime eventually went to so much trouble to paint a contrasting picture. Jesus Christ as Eagle Scout, doing many a good turn daily—that pretty much sums up the official portrayals of the young Kim. China’s communist propagandists once plucked from the masses a previously anonymous do-gooder named Lei Feng, composed songs about him and taught children to emulate Lei Feng’s selflessness. In North Korea the songs and tales of Kim Jong-il would serve the same function.

As in stories about his father, it seems people were constantly shedding tears at the astonishing love, benevolence and selflessness Kim Jong-il unfailingly displayed. One of countless officially peddled anecdotes relates that a sickly youth whom he tended in the hospital and helped with studies “could not hide hot tears welling up in his eyes.” Holding in his hands the class notes that young Kim had copied out for him during his absence, the student “threw himself into the broad arms of Kim Jong-il and burst into sobs with his face buried in his breast. That was something too noble to be called mere friendship.
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Helping sick friends seems to have been a specialty. There is another story telling how young Kim prescribed and delivered medicine—“a cure-all”— for a female student suffering the aftereffects of a malnourished childhood in South Korea. “She burst into sobs,” and her mother’s eyes were “wet with tears.” Needless to say, the young woman recovered.
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Exaggerated and over-dramatized they may be, but probably there is at least a grain of truth in some of the stories about kind gestures to individuals. Regarding his “prescription,” for example, Kim Jong-il had access to the best medicines, many of which were unavailable to ordinary North Koreans. Considering that virtually everyone else let him have his way the pharmacists at the hospital for the top elite might well have let the youngster do the prescribing—perhaps of a tonic such as Korean ginseng. In the pattern of noblesse oblige it would become his habit to present gifts—usually elaborate and sometimes wildly extravagant—to somewhat less fortunate people who happened to be his friends, supporters or underlings, or who otherwise were known to him.

But against whatever signs of a warm heart the young Kim displayed must be balanced some tasteless hijinks in which he humiliated others for his own amusement. An example is a story that a former member of the Pyongyang elite told me about Kim and his pal “Jerkoff” Choe.

Choe Hyon, a former anti-Japanese guerrilla, rose to become vice-president of North Korea and lived in the exclusive neighborhood of Changkwangdong, near the premier’s mansion. His son, Choe Yong-hae, grew up hanging out after school with Kim Jong-il and Kim’s other buddies.
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After Kim Jong-il enrolled in the university and began his career of amour, he noticed that Choe Yong-hae was very shy and would not date girls. He suggested that Choe might not be a “real male.” One day Kim Jong-il and his other buddies, with their girlfriends, were at Choe’s house after classes. Continuing to torment Choe, Kim demanded that he take his pants off. The boy complied, but Kim Jong-il pointed out his lack of an erection despite the girls’ presence and suggested that Choe must be impotent. So he had other pals tie up Choe and told one of the group to massage him. Disobedience to Kim Jong-il was unthinkable because of whose son he was, as well as fear that the disobedient one would become his next target for bullying. Those who had tied him up held the struggling victim down while the designated youngster duly complied with the instruction. When Choe became aroused, Kim Jong-il said: “Oh. You’re capable. I’m satisfied.
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Instead of Yong-hae, from that day forward Choe was known as Yong-du, “the head is moving toward the sky,” a slang term for masturbation. He eventually became chairman of the Central Committee of the League of Socialist Working Youth, the body responsible for training and guiding prospective party members following their graduation from school. He held that post until 1997, when, according to a South Korean intelligence report, he was ousted for corruption. He was known to be a trusted crony of Kim Jong-il’s— and very fond of women. His childhood pals had continued to call him Yong-du.
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Kim Jong-il may have grown a bit more serious as he became a university upperclassman and could see looming ahead his graduation into the North Korean top elite’s version of the real world. Maybe his father had a heart-to-heart talk with him about his future and the need to settle down somewhat— perhaps even mentioning Jong-il’s possible eventual succession to the top post. The younger Kim did not stop partying then, it is clear, but the official accounts have him accompanying his father on frequent trips for “on-the-spot guidance.” In the course of such trips the junior Kim enthusiastically picked up his father’s style of micromanagement. It is a style that unfortunately had reached, if it had not already long since passed, the point of diminishing returns for the economy.

One such story unintentionally shows that Kim Il-sung’s originally admirable practice of going out to the boondocks to see the real problems of the people was becoming an empty ritual. Both officials and ordinary people wanted only to please the overburdened Great Leader without “troubling” such an exalted being with their problems.

Father and son, visiting a military outpost near the Demilitarized Zone in February 1963, split up for separate inspections. The junior Kim noticed that the only water supply was a dribble from an ice-covered spring. Mess hall, bathhouse and laundry were all out of commission on account of the lack of water. Kim Il-sung had already asked the soldiers if they had any problems. Oh, no, they said. They were living “literally in plenty.” Then Jong-il approached the Great One to tell him quietly about the water shortage that the men had not mentioned, a problem that could be overcome with just a little pipe and pumping equipment. “These comrades say that they dared not request the material out of consideration of the nation’s economic problems,” he told his father, who immediately gave orders to solve the problem. “The next day found the arrival on that hill of many technicians and a large amount of pumping equipment, all sent by the Fatherly Leader. A fortnight later clear water began to gush forth.” The soldiers felt “boundless respect” for Kim Jong-il.
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During a scorching lowland heat wave the following August, the Kims prudently chose to focus their guidance on remote Pungsan County, in the high, cool mountains of Yanggang Province. (The accounts do not say whether the premier’s entire family, including Pyong-il and the other children, went along on that working summer vacation.) Kim Jong-il discovered that local children’s lunchboxes were packed with potato cakes instead of the rice Koreans generally prefer. Imagining “the sorry faces of the mothers preparing the lunches for their children every day,” he “perceived the still poor livelihood of the mountain folk, and judged the irresponsible work attitude of the officials who were not so enthusiastic for the improvement of the people’s standard of living.” He passed along his findings to his father, who called a meeting of county agricultural officials and set them right with instructions on soil building, planting suitable crops for the cold highland, damming the river to set up an irrigation system and exchanging the potatoes grown there for lowland rice. Hearing the Fatherly Leader point out “the bright road they should follow,” the listeners cheered “at the top of their voices.”
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In those instances Kim Jong-il kept his role to investigating quietly, advising his father of his findings and recommendations. One wonders, then, about the real feelings of an obsequious school official in Pungsan County when the college boy stepped out of the staff role and decided to guide the official directly in the work of running the Pungsan Middle School. Visiting the school’s science laboratories, young Kim noticed that they were set up
only for general teaching of the subjects, with nothing to help tailor instruction to the particular needs of the county. He advised collecting local soil samples and bringing in preserved specimens of local flora and fauna— asters, sheep, bull trout. That seems to have been sensible enough advice.

But then, “seeing that trunks of poplars around the playground had been mauled by axes and knives,” Kim Jong-il said sports equipment should be provided to prevent mischievous boys from misbehaving. Additionally, he instructed that apple trees be planted on a bare hillside behind the school. Apples don’t normally do well on such a cold highland, but Kim Jong-il “explained in detail” how to adapt them. That, he said, would be “very important in convincing the children that nothing will be impossible if they get down to implementing the leader’s instruction to develop the highland to be as good a place as the lowland.”

In a classroom he found a gap in the floor. Frowning, “he exhorted the official to fill in the chink lest a cold “wind through it in winter should make the children catch a cold.” The school official, astonished that the young visitor had noticed something he himself had neglected, “bo-wed his head, ashamed of his failure to fulfill the duty as an educationist.” A little later, “reluctant to part” with Kim Jong-il, the same official “begged him to give more instructions.” Kim Jong-il then produced bark he had stripped off a birch tree in the schoolyard. (Evidently that was okay, although carving on poplar trees was not.) Using the birch bark as writing paper just as his father’s anti-Japanese guerrillas supposedly had done, he dashed off seven pages of “precious instruction.”
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Back at the university that fall, Kim Jong-il is reported to have set out to use what he had learned as the starting point for a graduation thesis on the role of the county. His father was then promoting the county as the key local government level at which to “resolve all problems arising in the building of socialism and communism in the countryside.” A professor suggested that the topic was too ambitious for a mere bachelor’s-degree thesis, requiring so much original research and argument that it would be more like a doctoral dissertation. The professor advised young Kim to be satisfied with a typical graduation paper proving socialist economic laws. However, “Kim Jong-il said smilingly that the validity of socialist economic laws had already been confirmed and that there was no use of proving it again. He continued: ‘What we need is a correct way to carry on the revolution and construction. Many lectures at the university deal with something abstract and general, and lack in clarifying such a thing.’”

Sticking with his plan, the junior Kim worked hard studying his father’s pronouncements on rural economy and local industry, says an official biography. “At the same time, he himself toured different parts of the country to
collect various data on politics, the economy and culture.” That was, of course, a research opportunity not available to the usual North Korean undergraduate. He also had plenty of help from state agencies, normally stingy with statistics, as he “analyzed the facts consolidated by the State Planning Commission and economic guidance agencies.”

After all that work, finally “he could give perfect answers to the questions raised in the revolution.” In March of 1964, a few days before his graduation, he rose in a college lecture hall to deliver “an immortal work, ‘The Place and Role of the County in the Building of Socialism.’” Needless to say “the audience loudly applauded him for his firm conviction, clear-cut analysis and cogent theory and his ideo-theoretical brilliance and convincing argument by which he solved the complex rural problem in an original way from the standpoint of
juche.”
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As in the case of his other some 1,199 college writings, though, skeptics harbor doubt that Kim himself-wrote the thesis— or wrote it the way it was finally published, twenty-one years later, at a time when efforts to promote his personality cult were peaking.
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But even if Kim Jong-il was not quite the Big Man on Campus that such official accounts make him out to have been, it does seem he was very much a presence at his university—and not only on account of-whose son he was. Partially overcoming his peculiar upbringing, he was developing some engaging qualities of his own. Perhaps he was learning something about human relations by-watching his father, a past master. Relationships with classmates seem to have been relatively good.

According to a Bulgarian diplomat who was an exchange student at Kim Il-sung University, Kim Jong-il “loved to talk with friends,” especially foreigners. Evidently, by that time he had acquired a proper aristocrat’s set of manners. He seemed “not as arrogant as many sons of high-ranking officials in Bulgaria,” Georgi Mitov recalled in a South Korean newspaper interview some three decades later. Young Kim’s humility quotient was high enough, at least, to permit his becoming star-struck: Mitov was a famous volleyball player, and he thought that was part of the reason Kim Jong-il visited him in his dormitory often—so often that the Bulgarian sometimes had to pretend he was out.
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