Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader
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When Chang was growing up, “most of the people in my town worked in factories or on collective farms,” he said. “Besides such regular jobs, there was a law passed in 1985 permitting ‘household cooperation communities.’ Those without work could stay home or stay in the neighborhood, engage in cottage industries and go to the markets to sell things they had made, such as cigarettes. Before 1985, there was a market every ten days where people could sell their own produce or industrial products. After 1985, small consumer goods like cigarettes could be sold there also, and you could go to the seashore to get clams to sell. If you wanted to be part of the household cooperative community you needed to get government permission.”
I asked Chang about the regular distribution system for food grains. “The distribution systems were different for workers and farmers,” he said. “Farmers got their year’s supply of rice after the harvest. Workers got their supplies every fifteen days, between 700 grams and one kilogram per person depending on their work. Unemployed people got about 300 grams; children, 400 to 600 depending on age. Even if you ate very sparingly you could only live on the ration for twelve days. So for three days you would starve or hunt for roots to eat.”
Like all the other North Koreans I interviewed, Chang could remember with some precision the fluctuations of food supply for people where he lived. “It was always hard and seemed to be getting worse,” he said. “Until the 1970s maybe it was all right. In the early ’70s, when I was in elementary school, we could still find jams in the stores and eat them. Later, from around 1975, they-were unavailable. From the mid-eighties things started getting really much worse. In 1988, I was still getting all my regular grain distribution. I left North Korea in 1989, for Russia and started getting letters from relatives saying the distribution center didn’t have rice, or other grain. The center gave people tickets instead of grain. Later on, if the food arrived, they could exchange the tickets for food.”
Although residents of Pyongyang got special privileges, Chang told me, people like his family who lived outside Pyongyang were “not as envious as you would think. The general run of people don’t even think of living in the capital. If you reach a certain rank you may get a call from Pyongyang City Hall. The population is always controlled at two million. Once in a while if they get too populous they send people elsewhere.”
I asked Chang what he had done for fun and excitement as a child. “Of course childhood activities are different for children in Pyongyang and the provinces,” he said. “I didn’t have much time to play. I had to do my social labor—-work in the fields after class—even in elementary school. In winter, the schools usually didn’t get coal supplies so we had to go get corn husks and dry them to use for fuel. In the summers, I do remember playing. We went to an apple orchard, ate some apples and ran around.”
Chang managed to get accepted into a university right out of school, which was unusual, and thus he was not required to put in the usual decade-long stint in the military. “You’re exempt if you enter university, as long as you spend six months in a military training course,” he told me. “I went to Sinuiju University and studied to become a teacher. In North Korea teaching is not considered a very good profession. It’s hard to sustain a normal life as a teacher. And the basic image of a teacher is not very positive. It may seem a bit sissy. Lots of women are teachers. So after I graduated I went to work for the railroad, where I was in charge of controlling the tracks, coupling and uncoupling the trains. It was very dangerous work. I worked on the railroad until 1987. From then until 1988 I was applying and preparing for my Russia assignment.”
The competition to get to Russia was severe, Chang explained. “For North Koreans, to be able to go to Russia is the chance of a lifetime. You can earn lots of money. The average income in North Korea is about 60 won a month. In Russia I got 900 won a month. Actually I would have gotten 3,000 won a month, but the North Korean government kept 2,100 won. A special committee selected me. You have to have a good family background. My elder brothers were high officials in the party and my third brother was an actor in Pyongyang. Eighty percent of those selected are party members. I wasn’t a party member, but they checked to make sure I was ideologically stable—not susceptible to subversive influences. In each workplace there’s a party secretary. My party secretary at the railroad recommended me.”
When he arrived in 1988 Chang found that “the lifestyle of the camp was basically the same, a miniature North Korea with 15,000 to 20,000 North Koreans working there. My work was analyzing statistics of the operation. I had an eight-hour day, but had to study ideology during my off hours. I was in Russia but I was controlled by North Koreans. To get out of the restricted area I needed a pass.”
I asked Chang how his outlook had changed while he was working at the camp. “Until I got to the Soviet Union I believed in the regime,” he said. “But when I got to the Soviet Union and started meeting people there, I realized there must be something wrong back home. It was after I had been there about six months that my mentality started to change. We are taught that the whole world worships Kim Il-sung. I met Russians who made fun of this Kim worship, and then I realized that he was not in fact worshipped by the whole world. Cultural differences played a big role in the changes I went through. In North Korea there are no entertainment facilities. All you can do is drink a lot. In Russia I saw cinemas, discos. I didn’t go to discos often, because there would be big trouble if I got caught; I would be sent back to North Korea. The North Korean authorities wouldn’t allow us to go because they thought it would make us lazy.” But Chang did manage to get out on the town occasionally. “I was affected. I realized this was the kind of life people should lead—not suppressed and controlled.”
Although he liked the lifestyle in Russia, Chang didn’t think of defecting on that account. Rather, it was radio that set him off. “I’m the curious type, and my friend and I started listening to South Korean and other foreign broadcasts. He was caught and sent back. I was put under surveillance because we were such close friends. It was one month before I was due to go back to North Korea myself, but I was afraid if I went back I would be executed or sent to a prison camp.” Chang had listened to South Korea’s state-owned KBS, which broadcast special programming to Korean-speaking people in communist countries. He had also heard Korean-language programming from the Soviet Union and from China’s ethnically Korean Yan-bian region. As for KBS, “I could listen in the afternoon but the reception was bad. At night from eleven o’clock I could listen. At first I had a hard time understanding the South Korean dialect. They had people criticizing the government on various issues. And at that time they were running a series on the rise of the Kim Il-sung regime in North Korea. It was very interesting to get a different perspective. So I experienced some ideological change. My friend and I kidded each other, ‘Let’s go to South Korea.’ Ultimately it was that ideological change coupled with fear of execution that prodded me to defect.”
I told Chang that the U.S. Congress was preparing to fund Radio Free Asia, which would likely have a Korean-language service directed to North Koreans. “Of course it would be good! What bad could come of it?” he said. “But there’s a saying in Korea: ‘Listening 100 times is not as good as seeing it once.’ Actual interchange is needed, too.”
When he decided to defect, Chang realized it would not be easy. “The problem was that the North Korean and Russian police worked together. If anyone tried to escape, the Russian authorities would capture him and turn him over to the North Koreans. Many tried, but most were caught and sent back, to death in most cases. One day I read an ad from a Moscow department store saying that South Korean–made goods would be sold there to people with dollars to buy them. I decided to go to Moscow in the hope of meeting some of the South Koreans there. A Russian friend got me a ticket to Moscow. Most escapees don’t have good plans for getting away. They just run for the mountains—it seems to be a Korean instinct. The authorities know that, so they just go to the mountains and
recapture the escapees. But the Russian cops didn’t think of looking for me en route to Moscow. Unfortunately, by the time I got to Moscow the August Revolution had broken out there and the South Koreans had all gone back home. So I figured I had to cross the Russian border. My job experience on the railroad helped. I realized that all Eastern European countries except Hungary required a visa. I bribed a railroad worker to let me climb a ladder in the restroom to the roof of the car, where I stayed until the train crossed the border into Hungary. I went to the South Korean embassy.”
Kim Kil-song, when I interviewed him in 1994, appeared to be something of a dandy. He was fussily gotten up in long-oval, gold-framed spectacles, a rectangular gold watch with gold band, starched white shirt, a floral print tie with tie bar, double-breasted brown-checked sports jacket and dark trousers. But on his left hand, in the web between thumb and forefinger, was a tattoo, and after I had heard his story I knew he had not always been a fashion plate.
Kim was born in 1962 in Pyongyang. His father, injured in 1952 while fighting in the Korean War as an officer, had been mustered out in Pyongyang. After recovering from his wounds, the father held management jobs in a porcelain factory which made household crockery. There he met Kim’s mother. The couple married, first living at the factory and later being assigned an apartment. Eventually his mother stopped working at the factory and took a job as a salesperson at a textiles store near their home. His father at that time commuted to work by trolley bus.
In 1964, there was a reassignment in which less “loyal” North Koreans were moved out of the good jobs and out of Pyongyang to menial positions in the provinces. Kim’s father had been a landowner—he had owned an orchard in Northern Hamgyong Province. That was enough to bar the family from the loyal class. They-were sent to Sinuiju, on the Yalu River across from China, where the father worked loading shipments on trucks at a synthetic textile factory. The mother worked in a sporting goods factory, making balls. From then on the family remained in Sinuiju.
Such treatment for a wounded Korean War veteran shocked me a little, and I asked Kim whether it had made his parents bitter. “They blamed their ancestors,” he replied. “Possibly they felt the regime was at fault for their treatment, but they would have had very little chance to express it. Once or twice when times got very hard Mother would express some dissatisfaction with the regime: ‘How could they question our past background?’” By hard times, Kim meant that “housing was terrible,” at least for his family. “We lived in a house that had been damaged in a Korean War bombing raid. Up through 1968, there was no food problem, but then food conditions worsened. We didn’t have enough food. There were few goods in the store. Before that, I remember taking pocket money and going to stores to buy candy. I could see the products on the shelves. But shortages began in 1969. Just in one or two years they ran out of supplies. It happened all over the country. We heard from neighbors who had visited relatives in other provinces. There, too, there were no goods in the stores.”
In his youth, Kim told me, he had been “very faithful to Kim Il-sung. Even though life was hard, I was thankful. Without Kim Il-sung we would be in an even worse situation, I thought. I learned that way of thinking from kindergarten and elementary school. Once in a while, my parents, too, would say, ‘You have to be faithful to Kim Il-sung.’” I asked how he expressed his faithfulness. “In each household there was a portrait of Kim Il-sung,” he said. “If my father brought home some clothes or snacks or a toy for me, instead of thanking Father I would go to the portrait of Kim Il-sung, bow before it and say, ‘Thank you for the wonderful gift. ”
I wanted to know more about the family’s housing. “We lived in the same house until I was in high school,” Kim told me. “Because of the bombing it was leaning, about to fall down, but we couldn’t get any help from the authorities to fix it because my father was an ordinary worker. He worked at a big factory. Finally though, the factory built a housing complex and we moved to an apartment. That apartment was about eighteen square meters, with two small rooms to house my parents, two brothers, two sisters and myself—altogether seven people. Lots of families of seven people lived in one-room apartments. We considered ourselves very fortunate to have two.” The apartment was unfinished when the family moved in. “There was a little room meant to be a bathroom, but it didn’t have plumbing except for a water faucet. The equipment had been unavailable when the apartments were built. We made a cement tank to store water for bathing. We had to go downstairs to use a communal toilet. Anyhow, in North Korea, except in Pyongyang, when they say, ‘We have housing for you,’ you can’t expect to find it ready to move in. The interior is just the rough concrete structure. You have to finish it yourself, with floor covering, doors, and so on. Usually in Pyongyang you do get a finished apartment, but in the provinces, no.”
Kim told me he had remained loyal to Kim Il-sung throughout a ten-year army enlistment that started in 1979 when he was seventeen. He was stationed in Kaesong, near the border with South Korea, as an artilleryman. “I worked on launchers with thirty separate warheads. I became a sergeant, commanding one launcher and a squad of twelve men attached to it.” I asked what he had been taught about his mission. “While I was in the army, conditions in North Korea worsened,” he replied. “We had about three hours of ideological studies each day, and they taught us to believe that all our difficulties were due to the U.S. Army and the South Korean government. I believed I had to fight. I even wanted to sacrifice my life for the country. They constantly taught us about the superiority of socialism and the greatness of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. I believed socialism was the best. They continually told us stories about South Korea that highlighted the negative aspects of capitalism—the gap between rich and poor, beggars and homeless people living in the streets and under bridges, people getting no education because the South Korean government could not provide equal opportunities to the people. I believed it totally.”
Kim explained that North Koreans believed because they had no alternative sources of information. I asked him about broadcasts from abroad, but he said he had never heard one while he was in North Korea. Well, then, wasn’t there a grapevine, as other defectors had told me? “I’m skeptical about the powers of the grapevine,” Kim replied. “All right, an ethnic Korean living in Yanbian [in China] might have visited South Korea. He might pass the word that South Koreans are wealthy But even if I had heard it, I was so brain-washed I wouldn’t have believed it. And even if I had believed it, I wouldn’t have dared to spread it. But there may be some difference between civilians and soldiers in this regard. I would be pretty sure such rumors don’t spread in the army even now. But among civilians, rumors of South Korean wealth are spreading and there are some people who are envious of South Koreans’ lives.”
His remark about the military’s resistance to outside information intrigued me and I asked Kim to explain. “During your ten-year hitch in the army you get no leave,” he explained. “There’s no contact with the outside world. No outside information can penetrate. There’s much more ideological study than civilians undergo.” I pressed him on whether there was some way that the United States and South Korea could get through to soldiers despite those circumstances. “It’s very difficult to penetrate the army” he said. But he added that the situation was not entirely hopeless. “Just continue the drops of propaganda leaflets and the propaganda broadcasts through DMZ loudspeakers. Even though they try not to listen, how can they not hear some of those?”
I went back to Kim’s remark that he had been ready to fight and asked him to talk about that. “The North Korean government tells the civilian population that unification will come through peaceful means,” he said. “In the military though, they taught us that reunification would be possible only through forcible measures, so we had to be prepared for war. Then, after reunification, we would restructure South Korea with socialism. They taught us that food shortages are the result of isolation caused by the capitalist societies’ sanctions. Th
rough a-war, we believed, we could come out of that isolation. We believed that through reunification on North Korean terms, if we had South Korea, we would then have enough farmland to cultivate enough food to sustain life.”
That sounded to me a little like Hitler’s concept of lebensraum. I asked Kim to try to recreate for me the lectures he had heard in ideological training, in the words of the instructors to the extent he could remember. Here are some of the spiels he remembered: “We have to reunify the peninsula by 1995, even if-we must use force to achieve it. Everyone serving in the army now must be prepared for this war. You must be prepared to sacrifice your life for the country. Capitalism is an evil, a vice. Socialism is the system that works for the people. We military must fight together to enforce a socialist regime. South Korea is a very anti-humanitarian regime. For the sake of Koreans north and south, for the betterment of the whole race, we must ensure the triumph of socialism. Even though South Korea has the U.S. Army to help it, North Korea is prepared. We’re better than the U.S. Army. We’ve been preparing since the Korean War. We have enough men and matériel to fight the war and win. There’s a basic difference between us and the other side. The South Korean and American armies are structured according to the capitalist ideal. Their soldiers fight for money. They aren’t prepared to sacrifice their lives to win the war. North Korean soldiers are prepared to sacrifice our lives. We are not fighting for money but to create an ideal society for the people. During the Korean War, eighteen countries helped South Korea but we still won. We didn’t have enough matériel then, but now we have what we need. We definitely can win this war.”