Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (62 page)

Alas, the sudden deaths of his parents and the unkindness of his neighbors had been by no means the end of his woes. Chul-ho continued in school, and the indoctrination he received there made him blame his parents and grandfather for their misfortunes. “I believed in the party,” he told me. Indeed, when the time came he applied to join the military—but was rejected. “I checked the record. There was a rule against having people of bad family background in the military. I was sent to a mine instead.” Only then did he start to question the system. “I had expected to live a normal life but it was all a dream.”

Whenever I heard stories like this one I could not help noting the irony:

The regime acted as if blood “were more important than ideology—-while people like Kang Chul-ho were more than willing to forget blood ties and buy into the ideology if only the authorities would permit them to do so. This, even more than he-wing religiously to the personality cult and refusing to adjust an imperfect Marxist vision, may prove to have been the central tragedy of the Kim regime.

At the phosphorous mine in Tanchon, Tongam County Kang Chul-ho “suffered from the tough rules. At criticism meetings I had many arguments with group leaders, so I got a worse and worse reputation. When I was late for work, I was questioned while others weren’t. We were supposed to get gloves and rabbit skins to send to the military. But since I didn’t have family members I was always behind in meeting the quota.

“They pointed out my bad family background. I couldn’t stand that. They used the issue of my father and grandfather as the final card. ‘Because you had a bad father and grandfather you behave this way’ I argued that my father was my father; my grandfather, my grandfather. I’m not them. But that didn’t faze them.

“At first they didn’t use the issue in the beginning of a criticism session. They would bring it up at the end. Fellow workers didn’t know about my family background. But local officials did, so they brought it up at the end of the session. We had those sessions weekly They would assemble a group of forty or so and then choose around five people who were the worst—for family background or other reasons—and put them on the stage, then question them continuously. It takes around one hour and twenty minutes. Two or three times a month I was one of those up on the stage. The party secretaries chose us. Mainly people who had no backing or support were selected, people with no influential family members to help us. They started selecting me for criticism about a month after I arrived.

“One day I had failed to obey an order to obtain gloves and rabbit skins. Others got them from their parents or other relatives who raised rabbits or knitted gloves. My monthly quota was five pair of gloves and two rabbit skins. But I couldn’t steal them so I ignored it. Since I didn’t have any assets, or influential family background, I argued with the secretary. After that, they said, ‘Because you have a bad family background you didn’t obey’”

Following that incident, having spent only a year at the mine, Kang Chul-ho was sent to a maximum-security prison camp. I asked about the trial, and he told me there had been none. “The local party secretary and youth league leader wrote the report on me and signed it. The charge was that I didn’t follow the party’s orders and had a bad attitude against the party. The party worried about my influence on colleagues. They wanted to make an example of me.”

He arrived at prison camp No. 19, Taeheung-dong, Tanchon, in the northeastern corner of South Hamgyong Province, on December 28, 1987.

“I remember that date because after three days in prison I realized it was New Year’s Day.” The prisoners were employed mining magnesite clinker, which was used to make fire bricks and was one of North Korea’s main exports. Foreign exchange from its sales went to a national security fund.
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“Once I got to prison I had no time to complain, the rules were so tough. All I could do was follow the rules.” Electric fences surrounded the camp. “During working hours we were taken to the mine and guards watched us. It was both an open-pit and an underground mine.”

After a 5 A.M. wake-up call, the prisoners rotated into the mess hall for breakfast. There followed a one-hour period for washing up and preparing for their thirteen-and-a-half-hour workday after which they went to the mine at 6:30. Lunch break was from 12:00 to 1:00, supper break from 8:00 to 9:00 and the working day ended at 10 P.M. when the men returned to their cells.

“There was no mining machinery such as railroad cars. We mined with pick and shovel. We were truly confined at hard labor. Clothing was distributed every six months. The workplace was so dusty we had to wear dust coats. There was one bathroom in each cell for the forty inmates in that cell. At least the cell was relatively clean, because there were duty shifts among prisoners for the cleaning detail.

“But the most unbearable thing was hunger. The prisoners were always hungry,” Kang told me. “The standard was 700 grams of staple food a day, but we were given only 300 grams a day—and that only if-we mined our daily quota. If you couldn’t mine enough you got a percentage accordingly. Less than 40 percent of your quota, you only got 10 to 20 percent of the ration, 50 percent got 40 percent and 70 got 70. The food was beans and corn. Only a tenth of the prisoners could make the full quota, generally. Normally we could get only 70 percent or so. This was done intentionally to keep people working hard.” Although the guards didn’t normally steal prisoners’ food, “at the manager level there was lots of corruption.”

It wasn’t possible to work and survive on just 200 grams or so a day, so supplemental efforts were necessary. “I was so hungry I caught frogs in the mountains. I sometimes ate elm bark, which can be used to make noodles. I chewed the bark, dried it and ate it.

“To the guards, prisoners are animals, not human. They’re beaten and mistreated all the time. But we were so hungry, if we noticed anything edible—or a cigarette butt on the ground—-we tried to pick it up. Then they’d beat us. I was beaten severely many times. It’s very natural to want to eat or smoke, but the guards didn’t allow it. The guards were well educated and trained. They regarded prisoners as ‘enemy class.’

“There were around five thousand prisoners in four divisions. Once you were in, there was no way out except escape, as a practical matter. Many were shot to death trying to escape. Theoretically you can get out for good
behavior but it’s very hard. I tried that approach for three years before I decided to escape. I behaved myself very well. It was so painful for me to be there that my only hope was to get out. So I was very careful not to disobey. But it takes ten years before you’re eligible for parole.”

What happened to those who disobeyed? “They suddenly disappeared, during the night. People assumed they were killed. There were seventy prisoners in my unit. During my stay ten disappeared—not including attempted escapees.”

There were many other deaths as well. “In any one year fifteen to twenty people died of malnutrition-related causes. A total of thirty to forty people either died or went unconscious and were taken out while the authorities called family members. I guess in fact they all died. That’s the other way to get out. People died of malnutrition. Some ate poisonous plants. Others had accidents with the machinery and lost arms or legs. Most died after going to the medical section.

“It’s impossible to escape from there,” Kang Chul-ho told me. And yet he himself managed to escape. How? “Not from the prison directly. I went to a local hospital for an appendectomy and escaped from the hospital.”

After he escaped from the hospital, he told me, “I had no money until I reached China. I wasn’t sure I could make it but I had no choice. I walked eight days and nights to the Chinese border, eating corn and potatoes from farms. I got to the Yalu River around 2 A.M., chose a spot where the water was up to my waist and waded across. That was on August 30, 1990. I wanted to come to South Korea but couldn’t, because there were so many other North Koreans in China-who wanted the same thing. I got a job at a Chinese company—the manager helped me a lot. I did an interview with
Chosun Ilbo
[a South Korean daily newspaper]. The North Korean embassy people came to my company, with Chinese police, trying to catch me, but the manager of the Chinese company helped me get a Chinese passport. Finally I arranged a job in Osaka. On the way flying on Korean Air, I came to Seoul.” That was in March 1997, after he had been in China for more than six years.

When I interviewed him in 1998, Kang had combed his hair down over his forehead, according to the Seoul fashion of the time. He was by no means a handsome man—his teeth were yellow, his chin receded and he had no eyelashes that I could see. But in a gesture typical of many defectors who began new lives in the capitalist half of Korea, he sported a gold Rolex watch.

I asked about his health after the ordeal he had been through. “I’d been trained physically when I was young, so I was OK,” he said, “but spiritually …” Now, he said, he was studying theology, attending seminary as a follower of a new Protestant Christian denomination that had branched off from the Presbyterians.

Born in December 1949 in mountainous Yanggang Province, not far from the scene of Kim Il-sung’s daring 1937 guerrilla attack on the town of Pochonbo, Lee Ok-keum was just one among millions of North Koreans who would be raised to revere the Fatherly Leader. But by the time she and her family fled to South Korea in
1994,
their lives had come close to intersecting with Kim’s in a way that would have been hard to predict. When I interviewed her that year I found her a simple woman, modest and soft-spoken— yet quite helpful to my research, thanks to a homemaker’s steel-trap memory for prices and other details of living standards.

Lee’s family still owned a rice farm when she was born. Like so many other youngsters of that time, she lost her father during the Korean War. That left her mother to do the farm work along with five children (three older, one younger than Ok-keum), both before and after the farm collectivization that came in 1955.

In 1959 the family gave up farming and moved to the county seat, where Lee’s mother got a job doing road repairs. That work hardly paid enough to support the whole family, so an uncle suggested that the eldest son halt his education after the seventh grade and get a job. He did drop out, but it turned out there were no unskilled jobs available for him. Thus, after a time, the young man entered the army. Army enlisted men made very little. The brother didn’t send money home.

Although the family budget was tight, Lee positively recalled the 1950s
and 1960s as a time of optimism and of satisfaction, to a degree, with developing living standards. “After the war Kim Il-sung put all his effort into developing the economy,” she told me. The main problem then was that “the people didn’t have money to buy goods.” Lee’s mother brought home around thirty
won
a month, and much of that went to clothe the five family members who remained at home. Clothes in the stores were too expensive, so she used her wages to buy cheap, synthetic material—natural fibers were priced out of her range—and hired a tailor to make it into clothing.

A family member’s wardrobe, like those of most other North Koreans both then and later, would consist of no more than one outfit at a time— basically a uniform. “Here in South Korea people change clothes every day,” Lee marveled. In North Korea, she said, “you just wear one outfit until it’s too tattered and filthy to wear any longer. Before I came to South Korea I had three outfits to wear outside the home: one for winter, one for summer and one for autumn and spring. At home we wore pants. I had two pair and would wear one while washing the other.”

Lee’s first uniform, of course, was a school uniform. “There was no kindergarten then,” in the mid-1950s. “We started with elementary school from age seven. Schools were different then. Although we learned about Kim Il-sung, we also studied history and classical literature. We had much more freedom to study what we wanted. That changed from 1965, the year we really started to idolize Kim Il-sung.”

That was the year when, having completed the four years of elementary school and three years of junior middle school, Lee enrolled in a two-year vocational school that was divided into agricultural and mechanical programs. “I took agriculture, but after about three months I decided to switch to mechanics. If I’d stayed in agriculture I’d have had to go to a farm. So I studied tractors and such.” The mechanical training was “only theoretical,” she recalled. The students had no hands-on experience with machinery parts.

At that time there was no high school for her to attend. Lee was sent off to a job not as a mechanic but as a food-processing worker. On the mechanical side of the graduating class, “everyone had a similar experience,” she said. “After graduation there was no correlation between what you had studied and what your work assignment would be.” At the food-processing plant she helped to make soy sauce and related products as well as candy. She lived at home then and contributed her salary to household expenses. The following year she moved to a textile plant.