The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag

by Chol-hwan Kang; Pierre Rigoulot

  My grandparents were embarrassed, flustered. I think Grandfather was the first to realize he’d been had. The head of our family, whose stature alone was once enough to quell any thought of rebellion, looked everyday more defeated, was everyday less like the man his children had once dubbed “tiger face.” Gone was that sense of haughty self-assurance and, along with it, his sons’ fear of speaking their minds. Grandmother, on the other hand, pretending to still hope for an improvement in the situation, stalwartly countered the criticisms indirectly aimed at Kim Il-sung. Communist ideology had supplied her with an inexhaustible supply of readymade retorts, which she never hesitated to unleash upon her children: “What impatience! How can you expect a country to be rich a mere ten years after the terrible destruction wrought by the imperialist Americans? Everything needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Have you forgotten that enemies still walk in the corridors of power? How can the dictatorship of the proletariat possibly loosen its grip? Have you no confidence in the awesome leader we are so privileged to follow?” Her kids shrugged their shoulders. They felt North Korea had received them not as compatriots but as foreigners—worse, as foreigners who were responsible for being so. The North Korean state was eager to collect the Japanese residents’ money, but it made no effort to dispel the mistrust many natives felt toward the newly arrived.

  While the atmosphere never prevented my aunts and uncles from advancing brilliantly in their studies, there was no longer any mention of the prospect, once dangled before them, of going to Moscow. My first uncle became a journalist after studying philosophy at Kim Il-sung University; my second uncle earned his degree in gastroenterology from the department of medicine in Pyongyang; and my third uncle became a biologist after majoring in natural sciences at the University of Pyongsan. As for my aunts, one studied pharmacology, then did research for a pharmaceutical factory in Pyongyang. My second aunt studied medicine, then married a young man whose family—also emigrated from Japan—had recently been sent to the camps. When my grandmother learned of the deportation, she acted quickly to try to extricate her daughter from this reactionary milieu. Since her daughter was pregnant, she urged her to get an abortion and generally did everything in her power to cause a rift in the marriage. Her efforts were unsuccessful, however, and the couple stayed together. Later, when it came our turn to be arrested, Grandmother underwent the added humiliation of finding herself face to face with these reactionaries. As for my father, who had studied photography in Japan, he climbed his way to the head of Pyongyang’s biggest studio, the Ongnyu—or “Clear Water”—Photo Shop. As a semiofficial state photographer, he spent much of his time shooting public ceremonies and printing portraits of Party leaders.

  All this might be thought an indication of the family’s integration and success, but that’s not the way it felt. The family’s bitterness ran deep. My father and his siblings knew that, even if they wanted to, their parents couldn’t officially request to return to Japan. Doing so could even be dangerous. Their unhappy decision to move to North Korea was irreversible, and they all thought of themselves as prisoners. At a certain point, my first uncle stopped raising the issue with his parents. That big man, who was once so outgoing and full of life, became more taciturn and morose by the day. My second uncle, who was more interested in comic books than official literature, began to drink heavily—another manner of expressing oneself without saying a word. Only my third uncle managed to keep his spirits high. His passion for botany and biology was strong enough to make him overlook political reality. He collected plants and insects, and his display boards were even catalogued in the museum. It’s ironic that he was the only one of my uncles to be sent to the camps. Unlike his two brothers, who had married and moved out of the house, he continued to live with his parents, and so suffered the family’s fate.

  Growing up, I was never aware of my uncles’ disaffection with Kim Il-sung: I was too young to imagine such a thing was possible. Looking back now, their transformation seems telling: the silence of one, the alcoholism of the other, my father’s sudden obsession with music. They were each running away from reality, avoiding the words that might indict the political system or, worse yet, the parents who had brought them to live in it. My father was learning all the popular international songs by heart. He knew “Nathalie” and “La Paloma.” To our great joy, he also sang us the famous “O Sole Mio.” I now realize this was his way of escaping the military marching music and the glory hymns to Kim Il-sung.

  I mentioned that he had been married to a woman whose family also had returned from Japan. Many marriages took place within this immigrant community, which proves just how difficult integrating into Korean society really was. The former Japanese residents, especially the young ones, had grown up in a different culture. This made communication with North Koreans difficult. Neighbors and security agents never let slip an opportunity to remind them that they were no longer in Japan, that they should express less originality, that they should show more respect for the laws.

  Having been exposed to the wider world, my parents, like most former Japanese residents, felt superior to the people who never left North Korea. Their payback was being viewed as strangers. The old enmity between Korea and Japan also played against us. To many people, my family’s former immigration to Japan seemed more important than its decision to come back. The family’s material advantages were also the cause of barely veiled jealousy. As part of the next generation, I always felt profoundly and unequivocally Korean—indeed, North Korean. Yet, even as a young child, I sensed the chasm that separated my parents from their neighbors. My mother’s accent, which bore traces of her years in Japan, was the cause of constant laughter among my friends. Every time she got home from work and called me back inside, they would mimic her voice, making me blush with embarrassment. Finally I asked her not to do it anymore. I think I hurt her feelings, but she didn’t say anything, and from then on, whenever she wanted me to come home, she walked over to where I was playing and gave me a little tap on the shoulder.

  To put it simply, the repatriated Koreans didn’t get on with the others, just as the Armenians from France and America didn’t fit in with their Soviet kinsmen. Though growing sulkier by the day, Grandfather did rattle the chains occasionally. Supplied with the necessary paperwork, he sometimes got out the Volvo and took us on trips around the countryside. That’s how we wound up visiting the famous tourist destination of Mount Kumgang, lately in the news because of tour groups brought there by a South Korean travel company, Hyndai, which pays the Pyongyang government millions of dollars in royalties. At the time, driving to Mount Kumgang in a car so emblematic of capitalist ostentation might have been seen as a provocation. We were verging on counterrevolutionary action! Yet the police seemed not to notice and gave us what authorizations we needed without much hassle, a solicitude due at least in part to the generous sums my grandfather dispersed among the Security Force and the state.

  Later the authorizations became more difficult to come by. Then the police began suggesting my grandfather should voluntarily bequeath his cherished Volvo to the government. The suggestions became recommendations, the recommendations an order. At last my grandfather had to cede his Volvo, most likely to some wellplaced police or government official who wanted a nice car in which to strut about town. As the family’s situation worsened, Japan became an ever-expanding reservoir of idealized memories, nostalgic images, favorable dispositions. My family was once again a family of uprooted emigrants. That feeling of nostalgia is still in the family, but with every generation its object continues to shift. My grandfather lived in Japan full of longing for his native Cheju Island. My father lived in North Korea and was nostalgic for Japan. And me, I sit recalling my life’s story in Seoul, gnawed at by the Pyongyang of my youth.

  FOUR

  IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP AT THE AGE OF NINE

  Though even more anxious and withdrawn, Grandfather remained the central character of the family. His pronounced eyebrows, round, sparkling
eyes, and stentorian voice always enthralled me. So, too, did the respect shown him by Pyongyang’s Party cadres. And yet this never got in the way of our intimacy. Our Sunday walks, in tones of high secrecy, he would tell me stories about his former days in Kyoto: about the jewelry shop where he stayed up all night filling his first orders, the rice warehouses he guarded against envious competitors, the stunning success of his gaming rooms; and the fortunes that grew and fell there in a matter of minutes. These stories were a source of constant enchantment for me. I listened, mesmerized, to their architect and hero, my grandfather. I loved him, and never could I have imagined that our conversations and Sunday walks might one day come to an end.

  Yet he disappeared. It was in July of 1977. One night he didn’t come home from work. The police said they knew nothing. The heads of my grandfather’s department, whom my grandmother anxiously queried, finally told us he had left on a business trip, an urgent matter, they said. The order had come from the Party, and he had to decide right away. “But come back next week and you’ll have some news,” they assured her. “There’s no need to worry.”

  My grandmother had her doubts about this business trip. Her husband was not the type to leave without warning. A week later, the authorities told her to keep waiting, but she was unable to restrain herself and went back to my grandfather’s office. The reception she met with only deepened her fears. Everyone seemed embarrassed by the mere mention of her husband’s name and avoided talking about him. The same wall of nervous silence soon cropped up everywhere Grandmother went.

  My parents suspected that the Security Force was behind the mysterious disappearance, but they dared not admit this even to themselves. In the preceding months a number of their acquaintances had vanished in similar ways. Yet the family preferred to believe—my grandmother more than anyone—that there was no comparison between my grandfather and those others, who must have plotted against the state or committed some other grave offense. None of us was willing to face the possibility that the police had taken him away from us. We knew that Grandfather was never at a loss for words and that he often criticized Party bureaucrats and their management methods rather too sharply. We also knew that he rarely showed up at Party meetings and rallies, but then again, Grandmother attended enough for two! And had he not always been an honest citizen, entrusting his all to the Party? Had he not handed over his immense fortune upon arriving from Japan? Had he not given the Party everything, down to his Volvo?

  A few weeks after Grandfather’s disappearance, I was playing on the riverbank when several of my friends came to tell me that a group of people were at my house. Puzzled, I got up and ran to our apartment.

  Traditionally, people take their shoes off on entering a Korean home. Not doing so is a sign of disrespect to your host. To my astonishment, I noticed that though the living room was full of people, the entrance hall had only the usual number of shoes. What did this mean? I wanted to move forward, but there were so many people in the room it was hard to maneuver. Apart from my father, mother, grandmother, and sister, there were a number of other people whom I had never seen before. The only one missing was my uncle, who lived with us but was away for a few days at a professional conference in south Hamkyung Province. Who were these other people? I greeted my parents with a big wave, but they, who were ordinarily so happy to see me, responded strangely, remaining distant, like condescending adults who hadn’t time for such trifles. My mother sighed and kept on repeating (as though someone would answer!), “But what is happening to us? But what is happening to us?” I pushed forward, determined to see what was going on: three uniformed men were rifling through our things as a fourth took notes. What extraordinary event was this? And how could they keep their shoes on? That was what shocked me the most, but when I tried to tell my mother, she didn’t even answer me.

  Our apartment consisted of four bedrooms and a living room. The smallest bedroom stored wrapped gifts my grandparents had requested from friends and family who had visited from Japan over the years. The cache of jewelry, clothes, and watches was to be presented at the wedding of my third uncle—whenever that was going to be. (It is customary for Korean families to begin preparing for their children’s wedding far—often years—in advance.) The room also contained several cameras and various darkroom materials that my father used in his work. These treasures greatly excited the security agents—for these were who our four visitors were. In the past, my parents had been “encouraged” to offer one of the cameras as a gift to the state but had always found a pretext for refusing. This time the agents were simply going to help themselves. My father later told me about the agents’ secret councils in the corner of the room, about their mock indignation at finding the wedding gifts—as though we were smugglers or harborers of stolen goods—and about the spark of covetousness and joy in their eyes as they divvied up the loot in plain view of my distraught parents.

  The agents then pressed on through the rest of the apartment, three searching, while the fourth continued to take notes. The inventory progressed slowly, and I soon grew bored of a situation that didn’t really involve me, since the gentlemen seemed not the least interested in my aquariums. I went and got my sister, Mi-ho, and we started to play, indifferent to what might come next. We were soon running around, romping in the shambles left by the search. I started to jump up and down on my parents’ big Japanese bed and encouraged my sister to do the same. My father noticed but made no attempt to stop this ordinarily forbidden game. Heartened, I jumped ever higher, until what was bound to happen, happened: I broke a mattress spring, or a lattice, I no longer remember which. My sister and I froze. A boundary had been crossed, we knew that. And yet Father still said nothing. I don’t know what my sister thought of that paternal abdication, but it left me feeling very strange. The order of things had changed. I was not yet worried, but I began to feel a certain malaise, the shape and cause of which I could not altogether comprehend. Perhaps this is why a hole persists there in my memory.

  Yet I remember perfectly the moment I first heard pronounced the name of “Yodok.” One of the agents had begun rifling through my mother’s lingerie, and seeing her private things tossed across the room, my mother allowed her voice to rise. Outraged, the man with the notebook jumped to his feet, ordering her to shut up, then pulled out a paper from which he read out loud. According to the document, my grandfather had committed “a crime of high treason,” the consequence of which was that his family—all of us there gathered, that is—was “immediately” to present itself at the secure zone in Yodok, a canton of which I had never heard. Everyone around me seemed to go dead. There was a long silence, then tears, and hands taking hold of one another. Clearly reaping pleasure from the effect of his words, the leader ordered his men to resume their work. The agents turned the place inside out, going through the bedding, the clothes, the mattresses, the kitchen utensils. I looked on bewildered, unable to understand what they could be looking for among the bowls and the plates and the pots and even my chest of toys. The inventory wound to a close around three in the morning. The agents performed their work according to well-defined rules—of their own invention—with a small cut going to the government, and a bigger cut going to them. My father’s photo equipment and Omega wristwatch, my mother’s and grandmother’s jewelry, my uncle’s wedding presents, and the family’s Japanese color television set were all shared among the agents. No more than one item out of ten was left to the government.

  There is one moment that particularly stands out in my memory of that night. My grandmother was having a face-off with the agents. They were trying to force her to sign a document, but she objected, pointing insistently at certain passages. The agents offered some perfunctory explanations, their tone alternating between calm restraint and outbursts of angry shouting. Suddenly I saw her reach for the pen holder and sign the paper. The next thing that happened surprised me even more: she had hardly finished signing when the men grabbed her and locked her up in one of the rooms!

/>   When sunrise came and I learned we’d soon be leaving for that unknown place whose mention had so jolted my parents, I was not overly upset. I thought of it as a move to the country, an adventure, something to bring a little excitement to our lives. Truth be told, the idea actually pleased me. My one real concern was finding a way to bring my fish collection along. In some respects, our departure for Yodok resembled a move. We weren’t being sent to the camps as criminals but as relatives of a criminal, which meant we were treated with a little more clemency. My grandfather had been picked up from work and taken away to a hard-labor camp without even the chance to pack a bag. His fate was like that of many people arrested in the USSR and Nazi Germany, whose history I was later able to read. We, at least, were allowed to bring a minimum of furniture, clothes, and even food.

  From a certain perspective, our case could be seen as one of simple banishment, but as we would soon discover, the barbed wire, the huts, the malnutrition, and the mind-quashing work left little doubt that it really was a concentration camp. The camp’s policy of maintaining the cohesion of the family unit merely testifies to the resilience—even in a supposedly Communist country—of the Confucian tradition. This policy does not, however, alter the basic nature of the camp. The stated purpose of sending us away as a family was to reeducate us through work and study. As noncriminals who were contaminated by the reactionary ideology of the criminal in our midst, we were ordered to a place built specifically for the “redeemable” cases. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  The search completed, my parents began packing with the help of several employees from my grandfather’s office. They had arrived early in the morning, conscripted, perhaps, by the security agents looking to hasten our departure. My grandfather’s former colleagues might have been pleased to lend my family a helping hand, but it is unlikely that the gesture was a spontaneous one. Showing solidarity with a criminal family was dangerous. Indeed, since the arrival of security only one person had dared drop in for a visit. That one exception was an old lady who lived on our floor. She knocked on our door, then slipped her slight little figure in among the packing boxes. She smiled at everyone, greeted the agents politely, and generally did her best to blend into the wallpaper. She then glided over to my grandmother and whispered in her ear. “Be strong, dear. Have courage.... Don’t ever give up. You have no reason to blame yourself, and you know your husband did nothing wrong. And a final bit of advice: when you’re in a difficult spot, think about your children and your grandchildren and you’ll make it.”