Be that as it may, he clearly had considerable help with the memoirs, as Hwang suggested. An Omaha, Nebraska, pathologist, Won Tai Sohn, Kim’s friend from Jilin days, told a U.S. newspaper interviewer that during one of his 1990s visits to Pyongyang a professor from North Korea’s History Research Institute had tagged along for every meeting, taking notes on the Great Leader’s recollections as the conversations progressed. See Geraldine Brooks, “Two Old Friends: One Became a Doctor, the Other a Dictator,” Asian Wall Street Journal, September 19, 1994.
Whether his helpers merely researched and edited the work or, as seems more likely, actually ghostwrote it, their contributions are evident in the provision of considerably detailed historical background for periods and episodes touched upon by Kim—background that even the all-powerful North Korean leader would not likely have had at his fingertips, even if he had enjoyed the leisure to pore over his records. For example, when Kim describes his transfer to Yuwen Middle School in Jilin in January 1927 (vol. 1, p. 208), he refers to the files of a Chinese newspaper, Jizhang Ribao, for accounts of the school that had appeared in its pages years before his enrollment.
One helper allegedly was South Korean dissident novelist Hwang Suk-young, who visited North Korea numerous times without his government’s permission while living abroad in the 1980s and ’90s. When he returned to South Korea in 1993, professing satisfaction that President Kim Young-sam had inaugurated a “civilian” regime after the years of military-backed government, Hwang was arrested, tried and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for violating the national security law. One of the charges was that during his final stay of six months in the North he had “participated in the writing” of With the Century, which the prosecution deemed “a pro-enemy publication praising Kim Il-sung and North Korea” ([South] Korean Overseas Information Service, Backgrounder, October 12, 1994).
Perhaps thanks to the involvement of such professionals as novelist Hwang, much of With the Century is a cracking good read, laced with adventure sequences, humorous anecdotes and vignettes of people Kim encountered.
For more on the significance of the early volumes of the memoirs see Bradley Martin, “Remaking Kim’s Image,” Far Eastern Economic Review, April 15, 1993, or the author’s similar Korean-language article, “Revisionism in Pyongyang,” Newsweek Hankuk-pan, April 1, 1993.
As for later volumes of the memoir, which were published in Korean posthumously, there is additional reason for skepticism about accuracy. Those go to great lengths to present claims designed to build up the personality cult of Kim Jong-il, who after his father’s death was in complete charge and thus in position to shape the account as he wished.
3. There is precedent among his communist forebears. Stalin had been a Russian Orthodox seminarian. I am grateful to George L. Olson, a retired Lutheran missionary who spent his career working in East Asia, for pointing this out to me. “Some people say communism is a heresy of Christianity,” Olson noted, because the two share “a lot of the social emphasis.”
4. Kim, With the Century (see chap. 2, n. 2), vol. 1, p. 6.
5. Kim offered a different version of what had happened. “When the U.S. imperialist aggressors’ ship General Sherman sailed up the River Taedong and anchored at Turu Islet,” he wrote, “my great-grandfather, together with some other villagers, collected ropes from all the houses and stretched them across the river between Konyu Islet and Mangyong Hill; then they rolled some stones into the water to block the way of the pirate ship. When he heard that the General Sherman had sailed up to Yanggak Islet and was killing the people there with its cannons and guns, and that its crew were stealing the people’s possessions and raping the women, he rushed to the walled city of Pyongyang at the head of the villagers. The people of the city, with the government army, loaded a lot of small boats with firewood, tied them together, set them on fire and floated them down towards the aggressor ship, so that the American ship was set on fire and sank with all hands. I was told that my grandfather played a major role in this attack” (With the Century, vol. 1, p. 10).
6. See Fred Harvey Harrington, “An American View of Korean-American Relations,” in Yur-Bok Lee and Wayne Patterson, eds., One Hundred Years of Korean-American Relations, 1882–1982 (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1986), pp. 46–54. “Martyred on the bank of the Taedong River” is the description of the missionary, Rev. Robert J. Thomas, in the dedication to Thomas J. Belke, Juche: A Christian Study of North Korea’s State Religion (Bartlesville, Okla.: Living Sacrifice Book Company, 1999). For a Korean scholar’s version, marshaling evidence that the expedition’s main goal was to rob tombs of their valuables, see Yongkoo Kim, The Five Years’ Crisis, 1866–1871: Korea in the Maelstrom of Western Imperialism (Inchon, Korea: Circle, 2001).
7. From Kang Myong-do’s testimony, compiled by Tae Won-ki in a twelve-part series in the Seoul daily JoongAng Ilbo, starting April 12, 1995.
8. “The monthly tuition fee at Sungsil Middle School at the time was two won. To earn two won my mother went to the River Sunhwa and collected shellfish to sell. My grandfather grew melons, my grandmother young radishes, and even my uncle who was only 15 years old made straw sandals to earn money to help his elder brother with his school fees. My father worked after school until dusk in a workshop run by the school to earn money. Then he would read books for hours in the school library before returning home late at night” (Kim, With the Century, vol. 1, p. 9).
9. Ibid., pp. 7–8. (Korean women keep their birth names after marriage.)
10. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 7.
11. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 83–84.
12. Only later, in the 1920s and ’30s, did the Japanese manage to co-opt large numbers of Koreans.
13. Kim, With the Century, vol. 2, p. 401.
14. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 47. Imagining that the Versailles conference of great powers settling the peace after World War I would be Korea’s salvation, in view of Wilson’s ringing promises of self-determination for the nations, the demonstrators “were not aware that the American President Wilson was not the good guy he claimed to be,” writes Young S. Kim in “Anti-Japan Movement: 1911–1920” (Korea Web Weekly), http://kimsoft.com/korea/eyewit02.htm.
15. “After 1898 the Pyongyang station became the center of all Christian activities in northern Korea. … The common people in northern Korea are comparatively free from stubborn conservatism. They have been hard workers, fighting against the mountainous environment in which they till the ground. Not many of the Northerners held high offices in the government, but were rather subject to the oppression and extortion of the officials sent from Seoul. Their social customs were also somewhat different from those of the capital. There were no strict class distinctions, as in Seoul and the southern provinces, neither was there rigid separation of the sexes—a custom resulting from literal interpretation of one of the five relations of the Confucian teachings. Religiously, the people largely professed Confucianism, but it had no such hold on them as it had in southern Korea. Shamanism was the prevailing belief. When the country was opened to the West, the energetic people of the North soon caught the spirit of the times. Thus the character of the people, the political vicissitudes, the social background, and the religious conditions made possible the success of Christianity in the North” (Lak-Geoon George Paik, The History of Protestant Missions in Korea 1832–1910 [Pyongyang: Union Christian College Press, 1929; reprint, Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1987], pp. 272–273).
16. See Yur-Bok Lee, “Korean-American Diplomatic Relations, 1882–1905,” in Patterson and Lee, One Hundred Years, pp. 12–45. It was in the Taft-Katsura Memorandum of 1905 that the Theodore Roosevelt administration traded recognition of Japanese interests in Korea for Japanese recognition of U.S. interests in the Philippines.
17. See Wi Jo Kang, “Relations Between the Japanese Colonial Government and the American Missionary Community in Korea, 1905–1945,” in Patterson and Lee, One Hundred Years, pp. 68–85.
18. Chay Pyung-gil, “Follow
ing the Conclusion of the Serialization Yu Song-ch’ol’s Testimony,’” Hankuk Ilbo (Seoul), December 1, 1990 (translated in the appendix to Sydney A. Seiler, Kim Il-song 1941–1948: The Creation of a Legend, the Building of a Regime [Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1994], p. 196).
19. Kim, With the Century, vol. 1, p. 107.
20. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 20. A missionary report said that the curriculum at Sungsil “presupposed considerable knowledge of the Chinese characters, so as to enable the pupils to begin the use of all available text-books in that language. It contemplates the study of the whole bible, and special histories of the nineteenth century. In mathematics, it contemplates arithmetic, algebra, and geometry. In science, it covers the elements of physiology and hygiene, botany, zoology, physics, astronomy and chemistry, geography, physical geography, Korean grammar, map-drawing, composition and calisthenics.” Students in the school’s “self-help” program worked half of each day to earn their board (W. M. Baird, “History of the Educational Work,” Quarto Centennial Papers read before the Korea Mission of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., 1909, pp. 67–68, 259, cited in Paik, History of Protestant Missions, p. 320).
21. Kim, With the Century, vol. 1, p. 21. Is it too easy to note that his son seems to have taken this notion to heart? As far as Kim Il-sung’s subjects are concerned, he might as well have engraved in stone the commandment “Thou shalt have no other god before me.”
22. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 69.
23. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 106.
24. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 106–107.
25. By 1944, 11.6 percent of Koreans resided outside Korea (Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. I: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes 1945–1947 [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981, cited hereinafter as Origins I], p. 54).
26. Kim, With the Century, vol. 1, p. 62.
27. Author’s 1982 interview with Ju Yuanjung, official of the Committee on Minority Nationality Affairs of China’s Jilin Province. See Jilin-datelined article: Bradley K. Martin, “China’s Koreans ignore Pyongyang’s praise of Kim,” The Baltimore Sun, April 6, 1982. For reminiscences of a third-generation Soviet-Korean whose grandfather moved to the Soviet .Maritime Province in 1870 seeking a decent living, see Yu Song-chol’s testimony in Hankuk Ilbo, November 2, 1990 (translated in Seiler, Kim Il-song 1941–1948, pp. 101–104).
28. Robert A. Scalapino and Chong-sik Lee, Communism in Korea. Part I: The Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 138–140.
29. Kim, With the Century, vol. 1, p. 62.
30. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 64.
31. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 70.
32. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 78–79.
33. The fact that most of his education was in non-Korean schools is something Kim had been loath to dwell upon until publication of his memoirs, presumably for fear it might detract from his Korean nationalist credentials.
34. Kim, With the Century, vol. 1, p. 84.
35. “None of the assertions about revolutionary activities can be verified in any Korean or other records,” writes Kim’s biographer, Dae-Sook Suh, of the University of Hawaii. Kim’s father “may have joined an anti-Japanese nationalist group, but his activities ’were of little importance.” Efforts to depict the parents as major revolutionary figures “seem to be directed more toward upgrading the attributes of Kim as a pious son who reveres his parents. … [H]is parents ’were ordinary people who suffered the poverty and oppression of the time and died early without giving much education or assistance to their children” (Suh, Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader [New York: Columbia University Press, 1988], p. 5). Kim himself at one point in his memoirs describes his father as attending a meeting of “veterans or the leaders of medium standing of the independence movement” (With the Century, vol. 1, p. 120). And elsewhere he notes that his father’s deeds had not been known as “widely to the people as they are now”—i.e., now that Kim’s publicists have emphasized them (vol. 1, p. 114). Such references may represent modest attempts to tone down previous accounts of his father in response to attacks on their veracity by Suh and other scholars, including Scalapino and Lee (Communism in Korea, pt. I, p. 204 n.).
Dr. Won Tai Sohn of Omaha, Nebraska, son of Rev. Sohn Dong-jo, a well-known figure in the Korean independence movement and a friend of Kim Hyong-jik, -wrote to the author in January 1995, “As far as I remember, my father regarded Mr. Kim Hyong-jik as a fighter for independence playing a key role.”
36. Kim, With the Century, vol. 1, p. 31.
37. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 80–85.
38. Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, pt. I, p. 205.
39. Kim, With the Century, vol. 3, p. 44.
40. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 92–93.
41. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 89.
42. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 86.
43. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 94.
44. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 95.
45. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 148.
46. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 143.
47. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 163.
48. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 156–157.
49. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 159.
50. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 158.
51. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 159.
52. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 174–178.
53. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 211.
54. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 207–208.
55. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 248.
56. See Suh, The Korean Communist Movement 1918-1948 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 263. Kim in his memoirs seems to suggest that his Chinese-language abilities contributed to his career in the anti-Japanese movement in .Manchuria. That does indeed seem to have been the case, as we shall see in the next chapter.
57. Kim, With the Century, vol. 1, pp. 208–210.
58. Letter from Dr. Won Tai Sohn comprising written answers to the author’s questions, January 1995. Kim himself in With the Century wrote simply that he lived with friends in Jilin, not mentioning the .Methodist dormitory.
59. Kim, With the Century, vol. 1, pp. 213–226. Previous North Korean biographical works claimed Kim read Das Kapital in 1927. Outside biographers, however, had noted that this was highly unlikely, since neither the Korean nor the Chinese translation was published until after World War II. See Lim Un, The Founding of a Dynasty in North Korea —An Authentic Biography of Kim Il-song (Tokyo: Jiyu-sha, 1982). Like many points in Kim’s memoirs (and whether true or not), the explanation that a friend read Marx’s magnum opus in Japanese and told him about it seems to be an adjustment that responds directly to the outside biographers’ challenge.
60. Kim, With the Century, vol. 1, pp. 240–245.
61. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 227–239. “Literary works play a great role in the formation of the world view of people, so every time I meet writers, I tell them to produce many revolutionary stories and novels,” Kim wrote (vol. 1, p. 215).
62. Mark O’Neill, “N. Korea’s Dead Dictator Remembered as Star Pupil According to Chinese Teacher’s Daughter” (Reuters dispatch from Beijing), Korea Times, September 10, 1994.
63. Kim, With the Century, vol. 1, p. 236.
64. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 222–224.
65. See Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, pt. I, p. 19.
66. Kim, With the Century, vol. 2, p. 12.
67. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 267.
68. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 281–292.
69. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 293–306. Dr. Won Tai Sohn told me in a letter (January 1995) that he had been present, seated in the front row, at An Chang-ho’s lecture. He vouched for Kim’s account: “Still vivid in my memory is the scene of Kim Song-ju [Kim Il-sung’s name at the time] asking the speaker questions as well as the scene of Ri Kwan-Rin, a heroine of the Independence Army, rushing toward the policemen on the stage to stop them when they were arresting An Chang-Ho,” Sohn told me. “Actually I was arrested too because I was trying to climb on the stage to release An Chang-ho.”
70. Kim, With the Century, vol. 1, pp. 309–315.
71. Ibid., vol. 1
, pp. 315–317.
72. Letter to the author from Dr. Won Tai Sohn, January 1995. Also see Kim, With the Century, vol. 1, p. 21.
73. Kim, With the Century, vol. 2, p. 8.
74. Letter to the author from Dr. Won Tai Sohn, January 1995. Also see Geraldine Brooks, “Two Old Friends: One Became A Doctor, the Other a Dictator,” Asian Wall Street Journal, September 19, 1994.
Dr. Sohn, who knew Kim in his middle-school days in the Chinese city of Jilin, told me, “Had I written about my days in Jilin, I would have written just the same as he did.” But Dr. Sohn also told me he had not replied to my letter of inquiry immediately but first had taken it along on a trip to Pyongyang. Although I do not doubt his basic story, I can’t help wondering whether he perhaps received help in the preparation of his literary-sounding accounts from some of the people involved with researching, ghostwriting or polishing Kim’s memoirs. The physician eventually published a book of his own. It is glowing, indeed almost worshipful, in its account of Kim, as the University of Pennsylvania’s G. Cameron Hurst III and Bradley University’s In Kwan Hwang noted in forewords they contributed. See Won Tai Sohn, Kim Il Sung and Korea’s Struggle: An Unconventional Firsthand History (Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Company, 2003).
75. Kim, With the Century, vol. 2, p. 8.
76. Letter from Dr. Sohn to author, January 1995.
Kim also played the guitar, according to a reference in his memoirs: “Once I went to Ryang Song Ryang’s house and played the guitar there. I did not do it because I was merry or free from anxiety. Frankly speaking, I felt gloomy at that time” (With the Century, vol. 3, p. 314).
77. Kim, With the Century, vol. 2, p. 10.
78. Letter to the author, January 1995.
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