Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  ***

  Another North Korean who experienced a moment of truth while abroad was Kim Ji-il, “who studied physics in Kharkov, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union), from 1984. (In chapter 15, we met Kim as an elementary school class president who in criticism sessions stumbled on the pronunciation of that mouthful of a Korean word for “advance-guard stormtrooper,” keunuidaekyeolsade.) He defected to Seoul in 1990.11 A handsome fellow with heavy eyebrows, Kim—like only one other male defector to South Korea among the dozens I spoke with—did not wear a gold watch. His timepiece was a black, plastic, digital sports model. “My wife tells me I should wear a formal watch, like other businessmen, but I like casual,” he explained when I commented on that nonconformist fashion touch. As for being a businessman, he was working at Sunkyong Corporation in the foreign trade department, developing exchange projects with other countries. He told me he hoped to get involved in trade with North Korea eventually, but wasn’t yet pursuing any deals with Pyongyang.

  Born in 1964, Kim Ji-il grew up in Pyongyang, where his father was a construction engineer building factories and energy projects. His mother was a professor of Russian at the Foreign Languages University. Maternity leave was seventy-seven days, so Kim was sent to a nursery at around two months of age. Later, “in kindergarten, when they gave us our snacks, they would say, ‘Our Great Leader gave us these.’ The kids would have to say ‘Thank you, Great Fatherly Leader.’” I had been wondering how family relationships had fared in a country-where the Great Leader was everyone’s father. I asked Kim Ji-il whether, despite exposure to the constant propaganda focus on Kim Il-sung, he had been close to his parents. “Very close,” he replied. “When my father returned from a business trip, he would bring me snacks. He helped me with my home-work. I remember walking around with my parents, being with them quite a lot.”

  Kim Ji-il seemed to have had an unusually happy childhood. Even an involuntary family move away from Pyongyang when the boy was twelve was a positive experience for him. “Because of the 1976 axe-murder incident there was a fear of war, so everyone at my father’s workplace moved to Ku-jan County in North Pyongan Province. That was my first real encounter with nature. I could see down into the river, could jump from a cliff into the river. I took hiking trips into the mountains, hunting for rabbits and game.”

  I asked if he had loved the Great Leader. “I wouldn’t say I loved Kim Il-sung,” he replied. “I didn’t know him personally. But we were brought up to idolize Kim Il-sung. There was an element of habit in it. Everybody idolized Kim Il-sung. It was the thing to do.” I told him that reminded me of the situation in a small Southern town in the United States where pretty much everyone is an evangelical Christian and one either believes in that faith or at least gives it lip service. He had been away from North Korea long enough to grasp the comparison. “The mechanics of Kim Il-sung’s ideology and religion are the same,” he said. “In Christian society if you say ‘I’m an atheist,’ they’ll point their fingers at you. It’s the same in North Korea. If you say ‘I don’t believe in Kim Il-sung,’ you’ll get in trouble. In religion, though, God is invisible. In North Korea, Kim Il-sung is alive and you can see him.”

  Kim Ji-il had been a rather cool customer, though, in the ideology department. And his impression was that his approach had been pretty much universal among his countrymen. “The extent of idolization of Kim Il-sung is about the same for everyone,” he asserted. “In religion there may be fanatics, but no one in North Korea is a fanatic.” I pressed the point: How about hysterical young people crying because they are so touched by the benevolence of the Great Leader? “At official gatherings I’ve seen it, but normally you would never see it,” he said. “I think it’s acting.” (Tell that to Dong Young-jun, who assured me his tears had been very real.)

  I told Kim Ji-il the story of how, on my first trip to North Korea, in 1979, my interpreter grabbed my camera to keep me from photographing children running around on a schoolyard. The photographer’s argument was that such photos would not convey the unity, the single-mindedness, of the North Korean people. “That’s what the people at the top want foreigners to see: unity,” Kim commented. “But as I say, all that idolatry you saw in the schools is habitual behavior. When no one was watching, we would just go wild like any kids around the world.”

  Kim did his undergraduate studies at Kim Il-sung University, from 1980 to 1984. It was then that he began to harbor real doubts about the regime. “When I was little and they said our uniforms had been given by Kim Il-sung, I though, ‘Wow, for free? What a kind and generous man!’ But after I went to university, my mentality began developing. When they gave us presents, I said, ‘Where does Kim Il-sung get the money to supply all these presents?’ I knew there was a Kim Il-sung fund, but where did he get the money? That was the start of my doubts. Twice a year they would give ‘gifts’ to all the students around the nation, so I began to wonder how fat that fund was.” Expressing such doubts could be dangerous. “Two or three spies were assigned per thirty people at the university—one from the party, one from State Security, one from Public Security. Most people can speculate who the spies are. You just have to watch your back.”

  I wondered whether it was because he came from an elite background that Kim Ji-il thought the fanaticism of other North Koreans that he had encountered was feigned. Were the common people more likely to be genuinely fanatical? “I didn’t think of myself as elite,” he told me. “At the university there were so many people of higher rank than I.” He did recognize that he was different, in terms of privilege, from the great mass of North Koreans, but he said he did not believe there was a great difference in ideological fervor. “The common people are overworked and hungry,” Kim said. “Maybe outwardly they would profess faith in the regime, but behind the officials’ backs they would complain more than the elite, I think.”

  He himself, while living in North Korea, was “never full, but I didn’t have such a problem that I was reduced to eating weeds. Harking back to the 1970s, I don’t remember thinking, ‘We don’t have enough food.’ You never had a feeling there was plenty, but it wasn’t as bad as in the ’80s.” After he began his studies abroad, he had a two-month home leave in 1987 and noticed that things had started getting worse.

  I asked how he had managed to go abroad to study. “From the early 1950s to the late ’60s, many students were sent to Eastern Europe to study,” he said. “My dad went to East Germany. From the late ’60s until the early ’80s no more students were sent. But then, in 1984 or so, Kim Il-sung went to Eastern Europe. He realized North Korea was far behind, so he said we’d better send some students. That’s how the opportunity came to me. Those sent overseas were all science and engineering students. They selected students still in the university who they believed had intact ideology that wouldn’t be swayed by encounters with capitalism. The ones who made the judgment were officials sent by the party to work in a special university department where they inspected students’ lives. The procedure was first to select the ‘ideologically intact’ students and then test those in their fields to find the ones to send abroad.”

  With the doubts about the regime that he had told me he harbored even as an undergraduate, I wondered how Kim Ji-il had passed the scrutiny of the screening committee for overseas study. Was it acting? “I did have some doubts at the time but I didn’t oppose the regime so I didn’t really have to pretend or act,” he replied. “In North Korea even if you had doubts, you couldn’t satisfy your curiosity because you had no way of hearing the truth.”

  However, Kim continued, “the moment I set foot in the Soviet Union I changed. I saw a wave of individualism. People all dressed differently. Party members weren’t forced to attend every single meeting but could skip some. I liked the way the stores worked: If you had money, you could buy, unlike the ration system in North Korea. This was a totally different world. I got to know the real details by making friends with Russians and talking with them. In essence, I think the mentali
ty of Russians and Americans was essentially the same. I got there during the time when Konstantin Chernenko held the top job, but he was quickly followed by Gorbachev. I watched the unfolding of perestroika and glasnost. I became anti-regime after about a year in the Soviet Union. I went back to North Korea in the summer of 1987 for two months of home leave. My intent was not to say anything but to wait until I came back for a longer time before trying to change people’s minds.”

  In 1988, Kim Ji-il began thinking he really did not want to return to North Korea. “But I didn’t think of defecting to South Korea until the moment of my defection,” he told me. “If it were only a matter of ideological changes, everyone in North Korea should defect.” For anyone who might actually go so far as to defect, “there’s always a plus alpha. My plus alpha was my wife and my daughter. I had met my wife, a Soviet citizen, on campus. She was willing to go with me anywhere in the world. North Korea would have been no problem for her. But North Korean society would not have accepted her. An international marriage would be unthinkable there. It was a secret marriage. My daughter was born in 1989 and I didn’t tell my government.” I wondered: How could he have kept his marriage secret? “That shows how much freer we were in the USSR than in North Korea,” Kim replied.

  At first Kim’s wife advised him, “Go back to North Korea. Defecting would affect your parents.” Kim was “in a dilemma,” he told me. “It was time to return to North Korea and I had to choose between my family in North Korea and my wife and daughter, whom I couldn’t take back with me. I chose the wife and child. I didn’t want my daughter to be brought up without a father.” Having made his decision, he defected by traveling to Eastern Europe and presenting himself at a South Korean embassy.

  At the time of Kim’s defection, his father was in Germany making a deal with a German company. His mother back in Pyongyang worked in broadcasting as an editorial writer. A younger sister worked at Yongseong Nutrition Institute, which had a factory that packaged high-quality food for consumption by the elite. A younger brother was studying at Kim Chaek University of Technology. He told me, hopefully: “Coming to South Korea doesn’t mean I’m losing my parents. I believe they’re alive. They may have suffered, but I believe they’re alive. The trend is such that for North Korea to survive it must adapt to the free-market system as the Chinese have done. I believe North Korea will do it. That will bring openness and a lot of foreign cultural influences.”

  I mentioned the plans that were brewing at the time in Washington to broadcast North Korean news to North Koreans in their own language via Radio Free Asia. “It’s a good idea,” Kim said. “I listened to Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America in Russian. They-were a success in the Soviet Union. They reported stories that weren’t in the Soviet press. My wife’s family also listened.” Among the radios owned by North Koreans, “some of the Japanese imports are short-wave. At customs they are stuck on one channel. But civilian and military high officials have short-wave radios that are not fixed to one channel.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Logging In and Logging Out

  North Korean defectors to the South up until the 1990s were so rare that the Pyongyang regime and its sympathizers in the West could dismiss those few citizens who did make the break as malcontents—often criminals—-whose testimony about conditions back home amounted to little more than artful propaganda, manipulated on behalf of the military-backed South Korean dictators by the sinister spooks of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. But as conditions in the North worsened, the numbers of defectors increased dramatically. Mean-while Kim Young-sam, a longtime democratic opposition figure, won the South Korean presidency in the election of December 1992 and set out to reform the intelligence agency. Soon there were in the South enough defectors, evidently free to speak their minds, that an interviewer willing to spend time unburdening them of their life stories could start to discern a combination of large patterns—recall, for example, the custom of gang-fighting among youths, covered in chapter 12—and small variations. Considered together, these suggested an essential truthfulness in what they had to say.

  Take, for example, the men who had worked in the Russian Far East at logging camps and in a few cases at mining camps. I found that this group was largely misunderstood by Western reporters and commentators. Quite a few of my colleagues in the media suggested that armies of North Korean men had been forced to travel to Siberia to work in slave labor camps.1 In fact, as interviews with a number of them demonstrated to me, the men had gone of their own volition. Indeed, they had competed fiercely, using bribes and any other means available, to exert enough influence on North Korean officials to get themselves on the list. They saw going to Russia as their tickets to wealth other-wise almost unimaginable by North Korean standards. The work was approximately as arduous as what they would have experienced back home. The big difference besides huge salary increases was that it was possible to leave the camps occasionally and interact with Russians and ethnic Koreans and Chinese in nearby communities. Many loggers were transformed by experiencing Russia’s relatively liberalized atmosphere. Here are some of their stories.

  Chang Ki-hong defected in November 1991, while working at a North Korean timber camp in eastern Russia not far from Khabarovsk. When I met him Chang was enrolled as a Russian language student at Seoul’s Yonsei University, one of South Korea’s top-rated institutions, and had married a fellow student. With his round face, strong jaw, reddish complexion and wiry hair, he had something of the appearance of a soldier—classic Korean looks.

  Chang was born in Yomju, North Pyongan Province, in 1963. Not only had his father fought in the Korean war, Chang told me, but “before the Kim regime came to power, our family were neither landlords nor capitalists. So we were considered to have a good family background. Mother worked in a salt factory. Father couldn’t work because he was disabled and couldn’t walk well. He stayed at home and did some wood-cutting.” The household’s living standard was in the middle-to-high range.

  Chang told me he had begun his education with nursery school and kindergarten. “They didn’t give us much training in nursery school. It really started in kindergarten. When we played soldier with toy soldiers, we would always say, ‘The general is Kim Il-sung.’ We would learn about his family, his upbringing, where he was born, how brave he was in fighting Japanese imperial rule. They had a room where they put up pictures of Kim Il-sung’s life. We would have to memorize the pictures and the stories that went with them. The pupils who did best at that got red stars for exemplary-work. And if you excelled in studies of Kim Il-sung, you got more snacks than other pupils. I got a lot of red stars.”

  After kindergarten, “basic education is eleven years,” Chang said. “But when I was in school it was nine years—four years of elementary school followed by five years of junior and senior middle school. You would finish around eighteen. I remember I was always hungry. Another thing: Even in elementary school I was so accustomed to being part of a highly organized system. When I went into second grade I had to become part of the children’s corps. In junior high I switched to the socialist youth league. You stay in that until you’re about thirty years old. Then you either get into the party which is good, or become part of some other organization for adults. You’re always part of some organization. You’re never on your own. All these are basically subsystems within the system called the party. They make people more manageable.” (Since North Koreans while remaining in the country were trained to avoid asking why things were the way they were, as Chang himself said a little later in our talk, I suspected that last observation about making people more “manageable” to have been something of an afterthought, the product of fairly recent reflection.)

  “The basic thing you learn in youth organizations is that you can’t be an individual,” Chang continued. “You’re part of a system. You learn more about the Kim regime, about Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il—that they are gods on their own terms. They told us that the family is another organization.
Parents can feed you, they brought you into the world. But as for the party and government, even after your death they can allow your political life to continue eternally. Because of the existence of the party and government, the family can exist. Kim Il-sung comes first. He is the father of all.”

  I asked him whether parents would ever have objected to putting Kim Il-sung, party and state ahead of the family. “They figure everyone in the world must be living like this, so there is nothing to object to,” Chang replied. “Of course, they have small complaints about the Kim regime, food shortages and so on, but nothing they would speak out about. To make sure we wouldn’t complain, in each New Year’s speech Kim Il-sung reminded us that ‘we all have to suffer and sacrifice as long as imperialism exists in this world and the United States and South Korea are preparing to make war on us.’ He made that speech every New Year’s until 1991.

  “Basically the mental processes of North Koreans aren’t so complex,” Chang continued. “They do acknowledge they are poor. Even those who don’t have exchanges of information with relatives in Japan and China recognize they lead poor lives. Maybe 80 percent imagine that South Koreans live better. But their mentality is separated between lifestyle and politics. They don’t connect the two and blame the government for their poverty.” Again, I figured this was something Chang had sorted out for himself fairly late in life, after his arrival and debriefing by government officials in the South—although that did not keep his words from ringing true.