Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (74 page)

On the petals dewdrops glisten.
Is it there that my tears flow?
The moon is bright but in this dim,
Dark world I know not where to go.

One moon shines up in the sky.
But different people gaze upon it.
Some are happy to see the moon,
While others grow most melancholy.

(Kim Jong-il, chain-smoking until he got his thoughts in order, is reported to have taken a personal hand in sharpening the lyrics’ focus on the different moods in which people would react to the moon, depending on their social station in a pre-revolutionary society full of contradictions.)
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The heroine’s troubles only get worse. After the landlords sell her to a textile mill, they beat her mother to death and blind her sister. In the second act, a
show-stopping pangchang
sung by an offstage ensemble of-women—the lyrics again reportedly showing Kim Jong-il’s personal revision
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—expresses Ggot-bun’s feelings and those of other women of her class:

Moon, bright moon, you shine sadly.
Do you know how hard our fate is?
We ’re assaulted by woe and woe,
Ill-treated and humiliated.

At the climax, guerrillas swoop down from the hills to execute the wicked landords and reunite Ggot-bun with her siblings.

At that point in the evening when I saw
The Flower Girl,
if there was a dry eye in the house it certainly did not belong to me. But then came the finale, apparently an even more exciting moment for other theatergoers. The image of a red sun appeared on a backdrop, symbolizing Kim Il-sung (-who claimed to have come up with the story line as a teenaged revolutionary)
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and the good life that liberation and his communist regime would bring. Koreans in the audience, all wearing their miniature enameled portraits of Kim on their breasts, stood and cheered for the leader. Finally the curtain fell and the evening’s performance ended. As we turned to leave, my guide explained that the revolution symbolized by that red sun was far from over. “We are continuing until we establish in this land communism, an ideal society,” he asserted earnestly.

Pyongyang continued to rely on propaganda campaigns to whip its people into a revolutionary frenzy of overproduction. Even given the potency of its propaganda, it was remarkable after so many decades how much the regime had to show (and “show” is the operative word here) for its seemingly anachronistic, circuses-before-bread approach. Carried on at breakneck speed
and referred to in borrowed military terminology as “speed battles,” its orgies of construction were the sort of exercise of which even the most dedicated ideologues must soon have tired. Yet North Koreans had battled on, out of whatever combination of fear and fervor, so that those visiting for the youth festival found new wonders to behold. In downtown Pyongyang we could see that the basic concrete work had been done on the 105-story hotel structure that was intended to be Asia’s highest building.
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Soldiers had helped build the West Sea Barrage, consisting of a five-mile-wide dam, with ship locks, across the Taedong River where it meets the Yellow Sea. Guides boasted that the construction project had produced 103 “labor heroes.” At Sunchon, an hour and a half’s drive north of Pyongyang, a largely military workforce was putting up an enormous complex to produce the indigenous synthetic fiber vinalon.

A major construction goal in 1989 clearly was to try to outdo Seoul’s Olympics, and no effort or expense was spared. Besides stadiums and other venues for the festival’s sports events, North Koreans had built streets lined with high-rise apartment buildings. Those housed festival participants. After their departure the apartments were to be turned over to citizens. Pyongyang’s skyline soared, and the opening and closing ceremonies for the youth festival proved more elaborate even than the extraordinary shows Seoul had put on for the Olympics.

“We’re in a hurry,” Kim Jong-su explained to me. “Everyone’s in a hurry here. Our leader said we are a back-ward country. If the others take one step forward, we must take ten. If they walk, we must run.”

Glorification of the leaders was the focus of much of the frenzy of construction. It was impossible to miss Pyongyang’s version of the Arc de Triomph, larger than the Paris original. It had been built in 1982, the year of Kim Il-sung’s seventieth birthday, to commemorate his triumphal return from exile in 1945 to take command of a country he supposedly had liberated from the Japanese. Kim Jong-il had overseen the recent monument building, which foreign economists were calling a major drain on the economy.

If in retrospect the gargantuan effort of the 1980s is seen to have been a last hurrah before Pyongyang’s world fell apart in the 1990s, in the process it may have provided history the definitive last word on just how very far a people can be led with propaganda.

Whatever cosmetic touches the regime had employed to inflate its claims of having created a “paradise,” and however far behind South Korea—and even China—the country had fallen in reality, North Korea in 1989 still managed an appearance of dynamism that appealed to some people outside its borders.

Third World leaders were impressed with Kim Il-sung’s credentials as an anti-imperialist freedom fighter. Some of them also admired the North’s
economic development—or at least appreciated Pyongyang’s foreign aid programs and arms supplies. (Some had adopted personality cults similar to Kim’s. At the youth festival, Iraqi, Afghan, Syrian and Cote d’Ivoire delegates all carried—or, in the last case, wore stamped on their clothing—portraits of their own national leaders.) Naturally, any hint of foreign approval the regime could muster was translated instantly into domestic propaganda. “I recommend to you
The Pyongyang Times,
” my straight-faced guide said to me when I asked him about reading matter. He referred to a weekly tabloid devoted mainly to chronicling Kim Il-sung’s meetings with and tributes from foreign dignitaries.

The ideology was even proving exportable to South Korea. A virulent Pyongyang fever on campuses had become a severe complicating factor in the South’s quest for stability. Radically inclined South Korean students were attracted to Kim’s teachings of revolutionary egalitarianism, economic self-sufficiency unification zeal and anti-Americanism. His pre-liberation guerrilla opposition to the Japanese made him a patriot hero in their eyes. Based on that interest, the Kims appeared still to hope that a resurgence of unrest in the South would lead to a leftist insurrection, reversing the otherwise clear course of history, and pave the way to reunification on Pyongyang’s terms.

Until not long before, after all, the major influences on Koreans in the South as well as the North had been authoritarian. They had lived under the dynastic system of royalty and hereditary nobles backed up with Chinese Confucian thought, and then under the emperor-worshipping Japanese colonial regime. The only major difference was that from 1945 South Korea received American influence while North Korea received Soviet and then Chinese communist influence. American-style democracy-was far from transforming South Korean politics completely. The authoritarian tradition held sway among political leaders of all stripes even after a relatively free election in 1987. Thus, it was not unreasonable to imagine, as did many in the North and some in the South, that American influence was just a thin veneer that could be replaced with socialist and communist ideas.

By 1989, the campus atmosphere in the South had become reminiscent of Americans’ 1960s slogan, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” The substantial number of South Korean scholars who had learned enough overseas about communist thinking to reject it were, by the time of their return to teaching posts back home, too old and established to be considered trust-worthy advisers by the student radicals. Outright pro-communist propaganda had some enthusiastic fans. So did some left-leaning foreign scholars’ theories that condemned the roles of the American and South Korean governments while going easy on criticism of the Northern regime.

Earlier, the South had banned books on such topics; South Koreans attracted to Marxist ideas while studying abroad were in no position to
propagate them publicly after their return home. But a belated grant of democratic freedoms after 1987 had suddenly allowed Southerners to flirt with Marxism and North Korean ideology. After decades without contact with such ideas, perhaps it should not have been surprising that substantial numbers in the South were not inoculated with the skepticism needed to counter the simple if often deceptive appeal of Northern propaganda. The inherent attraction of the new and previously forbidden enhanced the attraction.

With North Koreans themselves practicing pretty much the Stalinism that briefly appealed to leftist Americans in the Depression years of the 1930s, it was almost as if Koreans on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone had traveled back five decades in an intellectual time machine. South Korean officials were at wit’s end trying to cope. American military and diplomatic policymakers, too, were concerned. Some U.S. officials saw the most prolific and influential of the American scholars as a pied piper and went so far as to implore him to go to Seoul and help disabuse student radicals of their distorted notions. He declined.
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A big part of the problem was that South Korean students did
not
know the North—still were not permitted to go there without special permission. When their government insisted that the North was a bleak place, they considered what the government had told them previously and, perhaps understandably, decided not to believe it.

The evening I went to see
The Flower Girl
the guest of honor swept into the theater just before the curtain rose for the first act, receiving a standing ovation. Im Su-gyong, a beautiful South Korean university student, had defied her government by visiting Pyongyang via a third country to attend the youth festival. She was promoting a pro-unification scheme for a student march from the northern end of the peninsula, across the normally unpassable Demilitarized Zone and down to the southern tip. Her arrival in Pyongyang created pandemonium. Northerners, evidently genuinely delighted and moved by her visit, mobbed her. In the televised arrival scene, the jostled cameraman was unable to keep his camera still, resulting in a rare bit of spontaneous television.

Im Su-gyong soon returned to the South, where she was jailed until Christmas Eve of 1992 for violating the National Security Act. That only made her a martyr to the Southern radicals’ cause—to the delight of the propaganda authorities in the North. During another visit to Pyongyang three years later, I was taken to an art studio where the main non-Kim subject of the artists turned out to be Im. There were sculptures of her and paintings galore, in a variety of poses, the most dramatic a courtroom scene from her trial in Seoul.

Hwang Jang-yop, following his 1997 defection, told of another way the
North sought to appeal to the South. Recall Baek Nam-woon, “the father of left-wing scholars,” whom Kim Jong-il purged at the end of the 1960s. Although he died in a concentration camp, Hwang reported, Baek’s remains were later moved to the Shinmiri Patriotic Martyrs’ Cemetery. Hwang said the same procedure was followed with others who were popular among South Korean nationalists. “Anyone with some value in maintaining the sympathy of outsiders is buried here, even if he had died at the hands of the North Korean rulers.”
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The image of ideological purity that Pyongyang projected appealed to the South Korean radicals’ tendency to see issues in black and white. The propaganda mills of Pyongyang never failed to point out that the South still suffered the ignominy of having foreign troops on its soil, “controlling” its armed forces, buying its women, golfing on its prime real estate and disseminating crass American culture over one of the most desirable of the scarce television channels. (The fact that those troops were there to deter another invasion by the North like the one in 1950 was never mentioned—Northern propaganda still claimed it was the South that had invaded.)
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Pyongyang’s call for immediate reunification—its means for completing the revolution—had a simple appeal compared with the more complex and cautious South Korean policy. Pyongyang presented early reunification as a spiritual as well as a practical imperative for achieving Korea’s destiny as a major nation, free of contaminating foreign influence and able to stand alone, whole, atop the North’s considerable mineral resources—including coal, iron ore, gold and uranium—combined with the South’s arable land and its technological and business prowess. “If our country is reunified it will be rich in food,” Haksan Cooperative Farm’s director told me.

In one sequence in the mammoth opening ceremony of the youth festival scores of doves or pigeons representing peace were released inside the stadium. Immediately, there was a multiple-gun salute—twenty-one guns, I suppose, but I did not count—during which the booming noise and the smoke of the explosions drove the already frightened birds into panic so that they veered all over the stadium in apparent efforts to escape. (Shu Chung-shin, the dancer once rejected as a candidate for the
okwa
on account of her family background, told me when I met her in South Korea several years later that she had been on the field performing during the dove scene.) That incident could have symbolized the ambiguity of North Korea’s reunification policy: On the one hand, Pyongyang continued to insist publicly that it had no interest in unifying the peninsula by force. On the other hand, its enormous military was poised to attack south-ward on short notice.