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

by Chol-hwan Kang; Pierre Rigoulot

  I started in on another drink, trying to unwind. An-hyuk and our guide were deep in conversation. A feeling of great joy suddenly swept over me, a sentiment akin to hope. Here was life. . . . I felt as though I wanted to throw my arms around it, to embrace it as I should have done with that young lady. I was sure I was going to live and encounter other chances. I was light-headed and felt something heavy and dull swell inside me like a wave. It was close to 1:00 A.M. when we left the club. Our guide walked us around the village, holding forth about recent changes in local commerce. We even discussed the general economic situation. I couldn’t believe it: in the North, such freedom of speech is inconceivable. Citizens there feel they’re under constant surveillance—which for the most part, they are. The monitoring is systematic. When it’s not your identification card they ask for, it’s your traveling papers. “In China,” said our host, “as long as you don’t oppose the Party openly or act too suspiciously, you can do as you like. . . .”

  It took me a long time to fall asleep that night. Images of the North and of my family paraded through my mind, punctuated by snapshots of the young Chinese woman who had asked me to dance. I began to wonder if I would ever meet her again and whether I would ever overcome my shyness. I felt like laughing: my first night out of North Korea, and here I was worried about how best to comport myself on the dance floor! This wasn’t how I imagined my escape.

  The next night we made the journey to Yonji with our guide, trundling over mountain roads until the wee hours of the morning. Though we were already in March, the temperature was down around–5˚F—which was not unusual for the mountainous region where many of the passes rise above six thousand feet. Arriving at our destination stiff and chilled to the bone, our guide took us to the home of his sister, who lived with her husband and mother-in-law. The extended family, which was also of Korean ancestry, gave us a warm welcome and offered to lodge us for a time.

  We nevertheless began to worry for our safety. I was growing suspicious of our guide, a Communist Party member who had worked hard to cultivate a reputation for meticulous legality. We also made a decision to tell our hosts, who inspired in us great confidence, the real reason behind our voyage to China. It was during dinner that I let slip the truth.

  “We have something important to tell you,” I began. “We are neither tourists nor merchants. We’re on the run and have no intention of going back to North Korea. Life there is very hard, and we are wanted by the police for having listened to South Korean radio.”

  They asked us where we intended to go next.

  “We don’t really know,” I said. “Japan, or maybe the United States. . . .”

  “Why not to the South?” they asked. “We’ve heard that life isn’t bad there.”

  Sure, why not, but how could we get there? And how could we explain our inherent fear of the South, instilled in us by a lifetime of propaganda? It was tempting, though—another taboo to break. What resistance we still had was much weakened by our hosts’ manner of taking the South’s superiority so completely for granted. Yet, when our guide discovered our true reasons for crossing the Yalu, he wanted nothing more to do with us.

  “I don’t want to get mixed up in this,” he raged. “If you don’t go back to the North right away, I’m turning you in!”

  His relatives intervened on our behalf and got him to calm down. Having twice given him fifty dollars—hefty sums by Chinese standards—I thought he was being very ungrateful. With tempers still running high, he headed back home, and to this day I don’t know whether or not he denounced us.

  An-hyuk and I were scared. We wanted to get away that very night, but to where? We didn’t speak Chinese or even know exactly where in the country we were. Yet all was not lost. We had our hosts, as well as a friend of our guide, a wealthy Yonji merchant who invited us out to a karaoke club.

  “Come on, you’re not risking a thing,” he said. “No one ever gets their papers checked. The police are on the club’s payroll: they never bother anyone.”

  It was my first time in such a place. An-hyuk and I sat down feeling very timid and ill at ease. The young Chinese women who served the drinks gave us very suggestive glances, which made me tremble slightly. The behavior of the Chinese men, too, was both fascinating and shocking. How could they kiss and caress these girls in front of everyone without feeling embarrassed? I was jarred by a China so willing to make a spectacle of itself. Crossing the Yalu River wasn’t enough to flush out the propaganda seeped into us over so many years. I began to wonder whether the North Korean authorities weren’t justified in fearing capitalism’s nefarious influence on China! But I think what scared me was the prospect of enjoying life. The ideas to which I had sworn allegiance since youth—work, discipline, devotion to the Party and its Guide—were making their last stand.

  All around me people laughed; the bottles and glasses passed from hand to hand; the girls were nice without being vulgar. Little by little, I began to relax. Soon we were drinking and singing with a couple of girls who mistook us for South Koreans. To make us happy, they regaled us with songs from Seoul, closing their private performance with “You Can’t Imagine How Much I Love You,” a hit by the ever-popular Petty Kim. Her ex-husband, who was a composer, wrote the tune for her after her remarriage to a rich Italian.

  A few days after our karaoke night, the merchant told us that our guide had strongly advised him that, unless he wanted to compromise his social position, he would do well to put us aside. The man clearly liked us, but it was equally clear he would be relieved to see us go. Another denunciation was definitely something we could do without. We thus resolved to push our plans forward and, a few evenings later, took our leave of the home that had so hospitably taken us in. We spent our first night sleeping under the stars, but we couldn’t do that forever. Bum around long enough, and we’d be sure to arouse suspicion. So the next day we walked over to another of our guide’s relatives, a woman whose house on the outskirts of Yonji would have been a perfect hideout. At first, she was afraid our presence might bring her family trouble. Yet she was convinced of our honesty and felt sympathy for our fate, and in the end she relented to our pleading and allowed us to stay with her a night or two, just long enough to buy train tickets for Shenyang—or Moukden, as it was called during the Manchurian dynasty—where An-hyuk had a friend.

  The ride from Yonji to Shenyang lasted about ten hours, during which we felt very vulnerable and alone. When a conductor approached us, I went pale. I was afraid he was asking me for my transit papers; but that wasn’t it. Our neighbor, who spoke Korean, explained that he wanted to see our tickets. We handed them over, still trembling, forgetting to breathe until he was gone. Compared to North Korea, we were traveling in a free country. In the North, not speaking the language would have been enough to render us immediately suspect. I had heard there was freedom of movement in China, but to actually experience it was another matter altogether! Relieved and newly confident, we abandoned ourselves to sleep.

  We arrived in Shenyang in the dark, early morning hours. We felt bitterly cold and as worried and tense as ever. We were all alone in a city we could barely find on a map, ignorant of the language, and unaware of the police’s habits. In the Korean-speaking province, apart from the karaoke episode, it was possible to forget we were in a foreign country. We now had the impression of truly being in another world. Even the buildings looked different. The large, teeming city intimidated us. We felt as if we’d crossed some other, invisible border. I was getting the jitters. I felt abandoned in an immense world, an orphan for all time. I could die now and no one would know. Fortunately, there were two of us. A few schoolboy jokes were enough to revive our spirits. What we really needed to do, however, was stop wandering the streets. It was too dangerous: police were about, and they occasionally checked the IDs of passersby. We managed to avoid them, but decided it would be safer to step into a movie house until dawn. The first theater we happened on was showing a Hong Kong kung fu film. We took our seats, exhau
sted, and fell asleep almost immediately. After the show, we somehow found our way to the home of An-hyuk’s friend, a guy he had met on his first visit to China. We arrived at his place between 7:30 and 8:00 A.M. He was half asleep when he opened the door. He was hardly able to believe his eyes.

  “An-hyuk, what are you doing here?”

  They hugged each other, and the man asked us in. Then we got another surprise: he had a woman with him.

  “You’re married?” An-hyuk asked.

  “No, she’s just a good friend. We live together.”

  In North Korea, it’s not possible for an unmarried couple to live together. The young man spoke of love, but An-hyuk and I found the situation scandalous and quickly changed the subject. We told him our story, and he agreed to put us up for a while, then escort us to the South Korean consulate in Beijing. After a month of postponements, we finally set out on the seven-hour train ride.

  The Chinese capital impressed me as more Western and capitalist than specifically Chinese. Most striking were the billboards for Daewoo, Samsung, and Lucky Star, all featuring both Chinese characters and Latin script. South Korea may be a small country, I thought, but it seems to reign supreme in China. It was a shocking sight for someone who had grown up on doomsday depictions of a country rife with strikes, where legions of poor workers struggled desperately to survive from one economic crisis to the next. . . . I was also impressed by the width of the streets and the cleanliness of a city that was livelier and more modern than Shenyang.

  Behind the big buildings and commercial advertisements, certain aspects of a more traditional China still held fast. Take the public bathrooms, for example. I remember my first experience with one of them: on opening the door, I found myself face to face with people squatting next to one another, chatting and reading their newspapers as they relieved themselves; I quickly closed the door. Was I dreaming? No partitions, no flush chains. Even in the camp, we had partitions and swinging doors to give us a little privacy! The public bathrooms would turn out to be one of the most difficult aspects of our sojourn; all the toilets we encountered followed the same basic model. Since I absolutely needed to go, I waited discreetly at the exit until the bathroom was nearly empty before entering.

  Our reason for coming to Beijing was not tourism, however, and we quickly left the station and flagged down a taxi. As we climbed in, An-hyuk’s friend nonchalantly commanded the chauffeur: “To the Korean consulate.” We arrived about fifteen minutes later. Just as we were stepping out of the car, we realized there had been a serious misunderstanding. We were standing in front of the North Korean embassy! We turned tail and hailed another taxi. The South Korean consulate turned out to be the second floor of an ordinary-looking building. Upon entering the office, we were greeted by a young woman, who smiled at us from behind her reception desk.

  “Hello,” I said. “We’ve come from the North.”

  Her smile went suddenly flat, and she scurried off toward the back to tell someone about our arrival. She returned followed by a man, who politely invited us into a large office. A South Korean flag hung from one of the walls. My feelings were powerfully confused: I was face to face with both the diabolical South and the longed-for end of my journey. The world had turned inside out. We told the man our story, and he took notes, neither making comments nor asking questions. Something about him struck me as too calm. I tried not to let my feelings show, but I was choking with indignation: we had come so far, traversed so many dangers, and none of it seemed of much weight to this man. Not only did he appear untouched by our suffering, he seemed skeptical of our story’s veracity. I had hoped the consulate would be willing to hide and protect us, but that, it turned out, was out of the question. The diplomat gave us a bit of pocket money, wished us luck, and bid us to come to see him in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, he would see what he could do for us. . . . Before we could respond, we were being led out to the staircase. Returning two weeks later, we were once again counseled to have patience. I felt more and more alone and realized that my life shouldn’t depend on anyone, not even a representative of the country I wished to join.

  From a human rights perspective, my case was shocking. Yet how many people really care about the fate of a refugee lost in China? Like every government in the world, the South Korean government acts on the basis of national interests. The way it handles refugee matters is no exception. Yet, to consider the plight of refugees exclusively as a matter of national interest amounts to neglecting the rights of individuals. In Seoul, many years later, I ran into the same diplomat who had received me so coldly. “You must realize,” he began by way of apology, “that establishing our burgeoning diplomatic relations with China had taken us a very long time and required enormous efforts. We simply could not allow ourselves to act in a manner that would place China in an embarrassing situation vis-à-vis its ally in the North. . . .”

  After coming up empty at the South Korean consulate, we returned to Shenyang with An-hyuk’s friend. Something in his attitude, however, had begun to change. He was becoming colder, more aloof. Our suspicion grew when he suggested we address our case to the Chinese authorities. He said that doing so might allow us to obtain a residency authorization and prevent us from being stopped without papers. Perhaps, but it was well known at the time that the North Korean government offered substantial gifts—color television sets, for example—to anyone who offered key assistance in the repatriation of its refugees. One little tip to the higher-ups at the Shenyang Association for Chinese of Korean Ancestry—which was controlled by Pyongyang—and we would be picked up and whisked across the border. To buy ourselves a little time, we thought it wise to offer An-hyuk’s friend a wad of yens and let him understand that more might be coming. Three days later, we left for the city of Dalian—formerly known as Dairen—the Chinese port closest to South Korea.

  TWENTY

  SMALL-TIME PROSTITUTION AND BIG-TIME SMUGGLING IN DALIAN

  One Sunday we stepped out for what we said was a little walk, leaving behind a few of our things to lend our lie some credibility. The train ride to Dalian passed without incident, but we had no definite plan besides avoiding police patrols and eating. In the meantime, blending into a crowd and getting some food seemed like a fine idea, so we headed for the market. It must have been around 1:00 P.M. The streets were peopled but far from packed. Dalian doesn’t really liven up until evening, when its streets metamorphose into an immense bazaar, brimming with every manner of food and clothing merchant. We were strolling through the market like tourists, considering what our next step might be, when suddenly we heard Korean. Next to us, three women were chatting it up. It was as though a lifesaver had been thrown our way. I grabbed it without thinking. One of them seemed particularly nice. She was around thirty, well-dressed.

  “Onni,”6 I asked, “are you Korean?”

  She answered my question with another question.

  “Where are you from?”

  I decided to go for it.

  “From the North,” I told her. “We’ve hit a rough spot. Could you help us?”

  She gave us a close once-over, dismissed her friends, then led us to a nearby restaurant and ordered us bulgogi—a kind of Korean barbecue—with rice and beer.

  “Alright,” she said once we were settled, “let’s hear your story.”

  She sat listening to us for a long time, occasionally nodding her head to encourage us to continue. She was visibly moved, but afterward the only thing she would reveal about herself was that her parents were also from North Korea and that she had no sympathies for Kim Il-sung—we could be quite sure of that. By the time we ended our meal, she had invited us to stay with her. Her apartment was large and messy. And we were bewildered to find it inhabited by about fifteen young women, most of them around twenty years old and several of them Korean. It didn’t take much to figure out they were prostitutes, living there under the protection of our new friend, who also lodged her adoptive niece.

  I am indebted to all th
ose women for one of the most important times in my life. A current of sympathy ran among us, growing stronger with time. Our hostess, whom I will call Madame Yi, eventually proposed that she and I join in an oath to make us like brother and sister. I was deeply moved and accepted immediately. From that point forward, our mutual affection would be unconditional, vulnerable only to death. Once our pact was sealed, I was allowed to discover that, aside from her escort service, this energetic woman also ran another business, whose secrecy was more scrupulously maintained. Most of her earnings came from smuggling snakes into South Korea, where they are a rare and highly prized delicacy. I had eaten them myself at Yodok, but that was only because I was dying of hunger. As far as I knew, there was no shortage of food in the South! Madame Yi laughed at my naivete and explained that virility-obsessed South Koreans ate snakes for the supposed aphrodisiacal virtues they shared with eel, ginseng, deer antlers, bear bile, and, of course, seal’s penis—the be-all and end-all of sexual aids.