Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  “Since I had a pass for business travel, no one would have been too surprised that I didn’t show up for several days. Taking advantage of that, I went to the Tumen River. I first tried to cross to China at Sosong, but couldn’t make it so went to Hoeryong and failed there, too. I thought of returning home. I went back to Musan and tried to bribe a guard but couldn’t. I stayed close to the border then, and for two days watched the way the guards walked their rounds until I knew their pattern. When I saw my chance, I ran for it across the river, which was frozen then, about 50 meters across. I could run 100 meters in thirteen seconds, so probably it took me only six and a half seconds to get across. It was 7:30 P.M.” Ko grinned as he recounted his adventure.

  “I didn’t have money. I starved for about five days in China. In Beijing, at a diner in front of the train station, I met a South Korean who gave me some money. Then I went to Dairen and stowed away on a ship. When we got far out of port I revealed and identified myself. In South Korea I want to become a businessman, but as yet I lack the capital. Now I’m just sightseeing and making speeches.” I asked if he had thought of going to business school. “In North Korea I couldn’t apply for university because of the forced labor on my record,” he replied. “Now I’m too old.” I told him Americans would not consider thirty-two too old for business school.

  Some who took up this new occupation did so because other avenues of advancement were blocked. Kim Dae-ho, whom we first met as a China-born member of a youth gang, ended up as a trader after having become a model soldier and a worker in the atomic energy industry. “Basically I had no prospects due to my family background,” Kim told me. “I decided to participate in the raising of foreign currency for North Korea. I was working on the western coast. Officially I was supposed to be selling clams, sea cucumbers and oysters to buy equipment for the atomic energy industry. But I was also trading on my own account, selling Korean antiques to Japanese businessmen.”

  Kim ended up a failure at that unfamiliar game, he said, when some people he dealt with tricked him out of $25,000—money belonging to the state. “First, I was conned by the brother of someone who was working for me. He said he knew of a gold antique that he wanted to buy so he could resell it to a Japanese trader, but he didn’t have enough money. He asked to borrow it. I went to the trading company and borrrowed $25,000, saying I would use it to make foreign currency profits for the state. The guy took the $ 15,000 I advanced him and never came back.”

  The second time, Kim said, “I was swindled by the head of the Tae-kwondo Department along with Chang Song-taek, Kim Jong-il’s sister’s husband. I wanted to pay back the $25,000 I had borrowed from my employers, but I needed to have my own import department to make enough money for that. Those two said, ‘Give us money to bribe officials. We can help you set up a trading company’ I gave them the remaining $10,000. Chang’s elder brother was in State Security then, the head of the political department. So I had no way of getting my money back from them. Then I decided I was really in trouble and had to defect.” Kim defected via China, in 1994.

  Kim Kwang-wook as a university junior became a black market dealer in antiques. He did not look the part. With his crudely cut hair, big black-framed glasses and acne he looked more like, say, a computer nerd.

  “I applied for a fellowship to study in China,” Kim told me. “Although I believed I was qualified, I was rejected. I checked it out and found the reason was my relatives in China. My parents had lived in China and had come to North Korea before I was born. I realized this family background would keep me from becoming a high official like a policeman or journalist. I could only go so far as an administrator. So I figured the only way to succeed in the society was to earn money so I could bribe officials, and then I could be somebody.

  “I sold North Korean antiques to Chinese and Japanese merchants in Pyongyang. These were the antiques rich people had owned before the Korean War. After the war they had hard lives. They sold them for money—or one could excavate rich people’s tombs to find antiques. I didn’t excavate them myself, but I bought, cheap, from those who did. Then I resold them to Japanese porcelain merchants.

  “I continued to work in antique trading even while I was a Three Revolutions team member. [His experiences as a team member are related in chapter 15.] Then a lot of the people who worked with me in the antique business got caught in the act and sent to prison camps. During interrogation they told about me. Since I was an antique dealer I had a lot of money. Money buys friends. I had friends all over, including police. One policeman warned me I had been reported. My friends got caught in July, and in September I learned that I had been fingered. I defected the next month, October.

  “I crossed the Yalu River secretly at night. Just before crossing I was apprehensive, but looking back on it now I think it was pretty easy. Even if I’d been caught, I wouldn’t have gotten in trouble. I had a certificate saying I was from a Three Revolutions team, signed by Kim Jong-il’s secretary’s office, and I also had a counterfeit travel permit. To get by in China I had plenty of foreign exchange left over from my antique business. In fact I never had a hard life after I started dealing in antiques. I never intended to come to South Korea. I just wanted to live in China. When I first defected I really believed the North Korean propaganda that said South Korea was full of economic strife, and I didn’t want to come here. While I was in China I realized South Korea is a democratic, wealthy country.

  “I’m certain North Korea can’t last long. Kim Il-sung and O Jin-u are dead. Kim Jong-il’s reputation is bad. Hunger is so prevalent. I give it three to five years. When you look at South Korea there were lots of demonstrations during the 1980s. That was possible because South Korean students could compare their situation with those of other countries. North Koreans couldn’t, but by the time I left in October 1993 people had more perception of the outside world. So I think these complaints will swell and explode. They learn about reality mainly from Siberian loggers and from Chinese and Japanese merchants visiting North Korea. At the moment the economic situation won’t permit the regime to kick those merchants out. It can’t do without the foreign exchange they bring.”

  Bae In-Soo’s father studied tractor design at a Chinese university and became the chairman of the metal and steel industry inspection department in the government division of the Workers’ Party Central Committee. His mother ran the accounting department at the Kumsong tractor factory—the factory that had produced the famous tractor prototype that only moved in reverse. In 1968, the father was one of many members of the Yenan (Chinese) faction who were purged. He was sent to political prison camp—Bae did not know which camp—and was never heard from again, Bae said, even though many political prisoners were released between 1984 and 1986. Eventually Bae, his mother and his elder brother were exiled from the port city of Nampo, where they had lived, to a rural area in South Pyongan province.

  “Most of our belongings were confiscated,” Bae, a handsome, thoughtful-seeming man, told me. “We still had our color TV We were the only family in the area who had one. After four months someone set fire to our house. Everything was lost except the underwear we had on. Probably it was a villager, one of those people who were calling us anti-communists. After our property was set on fire, Mother kept demanding an investigation. The Central Party said she was crazy and put her in a mental hospital when I was seven, in 1976. For three years she stayed there while my brother and I dined only on small rations. I had eyesight problems. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t attend the elementary school because schoolmates would call me anti-communist and teachers would hit me. My brother taught me a little. But if anyone had offered us help, that person would have gotten in trouble. No one helped.

  “My uncle on my mother’s side was vice-commander of the Second Army Corps. He met the governor of the province and asked him for clemency. The governor arranged for us to be resettled. In 1980, we moved to Maengsan County, 120 kilometers east of Pyongyang, where Mother worked as farmhand. People who
were deemed anti-communists, capitalists or landlords, or who had helped South Korea during the war, were resettled in Maengsan County. Seventy percent of the people there are like us. It was a difficult place to survive. The soil was poor. Transportation was poor. It was in remote mountain terrain. The nearest train station was 30 kilometers and the way to get there was on foot.

  “Every time I start talking about the past I just start crying,” Bae said. “I don’t recall any good experiences. When I was in senior middle school, my only hope was that some day I could enter the army. I had no hope of going to a university. But by the time of graduation, I realized that I could not even enter the army because of my father’s status. So I had lost all hope in life. North Korea should be called the Feudal State of Korea. It’s like during the Yi Dynasty, when it was the yangban [nobles] against the ordinary people. We started bribing authorities and I was allowed to go to Maengsan County automotive school, where I learned to drive. I went to work driving a truck for a truck-and-driver-hire organization. I did that from 1988 to May 1993.

  “On the side I was making money by trading. Normally, on Kim Il-sung’s birthday, each family got a fish. They sold them instead of eating them. I bought those fish for 10 won each on the black market and dried them at home. My workplace sent me to get fish for employees. I would barter 50 liters of liquor, 140 kilograms of oil and 100 of coal for a truckload of fish. The barter was unofficial. We would steal some of the load on the way back.

  Eventually, I would drive to the border with a full truckload of dried fish and trade. The company head and the rest often participated. I was not fooling anyone in the company.

  “For three years I made strenuous efforts to show my loyalty and enter the party. But when I tried to sign up, the official in charge said: ‘Look at your background. How dare you apply to join the party?’ After that I lost all faith in the regime. In 1993, the announcement came that war was about to erupt, so anyone under thirty should volunteer and prepare to fight. I didn’t want to go to war. At graduation time, the army had represented my hope to erase my bad background and have a decent career. But I had come to realize that no matter how hard I worked, my background never would be erased. I “would always be mistreated and discriminated against.

  “I had problems with State Security people, but bribed them to send me to Sunchon City to work as driver hauling export goods, a better job than the one I had. Bribery started in big way in the early 1980s and became very prevalent in 1988, especially in 1989 with the youth festival. In 1988, because of the coming festival many foreign countries donated goods. People started realizing the value of foreign goods and realized that you have to have money to buy them in the black market. So officials and others developed a greed for foreign exchange.

  “In the past, ifgirls prostituted themselves and used the proceeds to buy fancy clothes, the authorities might inquire into where the money had come from. These days no one even asks any more. So many girls sell themselves to foreigners. Even in the Sunchon area, in the train stations, women approach and ask ‘Do you want to buy a squid?’ People in the know understand this to be the code. In the past the code would be ‘flower basket.’ Even in Pyongyang, if they find a foreigner with a North Korean woman, State Security will follow them, then approach her and demand the money. The women usually turn over the money. The customers are not only foreigners. A North Korean man with five won can get that service. Some ofthe women have approached me. In the past people scorned them, but now people are understanding, as long as they earn money. Usually in North Korea, all villagers know where the prostitutes are.

  “I worked in Sunchon from May to October, 1993, then crossed the Tu-men River to China on October 1, 1993. On January 28, 1996, I came to South Korea. All I want to do is get a South Korean driver’s license and drive a big container truck. At first, I thought of becoming a tractor designer, but they’ve got enough of those.”

  North Korea with its one-man rule and brain-washed society always had appeared to scholars as a country in which the real story was that of the leader. But the basis of that assumption started to shift during the 1990s. A nanny state that had provided everything was unable now to provide much of anything. North Koreans found they had nothing left but ideology, which they could neither eat nor wear. Required for their survival to become traders and individual strivers, many had found a certain freedom. Although under the circumstances it would have been surprising if many of Kim Jong-il’s subjects welcomed that development, it seemed to me likely to have some profound— perhaps ultimately positive—consequences for North Koreans’ future.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Though Alive, Worse Than Gutter Dogs

  In March 1999, North Korean diplomats and other agents kidnapped twenty-year-old Hong Won-myong, along with his diplomat father and his mother, who were attempting to defect, from a Bangkok apartment. The parents escaped in the confusion of an automobile wreck, but young Hong was in another car that was not involved in the wreck. His captors held him as a hostage while, with a degree of chutzpah that none but North Koreans could muster, they used him as a bargaining chip as they demanded that the Thai government turn the parents over to them and absolve Pyongyang and its gang of thugs of blame for the kidnap. Not buying that audacious pitch, the Thais threatened to break off diplomatic relations if the North Koreans refused to give up hostage Hong. Pyongyang considered Bangkok its most useful Southeast Asian diplomatic and trading outpost, so young Hong was released.

  Amazingly, after his release, Hong held a press conference at which he announced he wanted to go home to North Korea, with or without his parents. “I love and respect my father very much,” he said—adding, with emotion in his voice: “But if my father refuses to return I will ask to cut parental ties and return home alone.”

  No doubt re-wards awaited him. His countrymen would make a big fuss over him upon his arrival back in Pyongyang. They would parade him around as an example of the type of selfless patriot that the country’s educational system for decades had sought—-with remarkable success up to a point—to produce. I could visualize thousands of chanting, flower-waving schoolchildren lining the route of young Hong’s motorcade from Pyongyang’s airport into the capital, “where he would be hustled onto state television (the only television there was in North Korea) to repeat in Korean his performance in Thai at the press conference.

  There were various versions of why the parents were unwilling to go home to Pyongyang. North Korea alleged that the father, as number three in the embassy had embezzled $83 million that the country was preparing to pay for Thai rice imports. There was no way the regime would have entrusted him with that much money I thought. But financial irregularities of some degree had become a way of life for North Korean officials, in the environment of extreme uncertainty and rapid moral decline in which their country found itself. It would not have surprised me to learn that a defecting diplomat had dipped his hand into the cookie jar.

  What the father told the son, the latter said, was that he wanted to live in a country that would offer the younger Hong more comfort than North Korea. “But for what should I go to live in a foreign country?” the son asked at the press conference. “Should I live comfortably like a selfish person, or should I return to join more than 20 million people in my homeland to bring prosperity and development to it?” And there was more: “I don’t think my country is poor, but it is very rich, because everybody works for the single aim of bringing progress to the country.”

  Here is another switch: The young man claimed that it was he who, for a time, had not wanted his embassy captors to turn him over to the Thai authorities. He finally agreed when he saw that it would be an opportunity to be with his parents for long enough to persuade them to go home, reunite with his elder brother and other relatives and friends, admit their mistakes and be accepted back into the bosom ofthe country. He did not think his father had been the traitor he was accused ofbeing, young Hong said—but the elder Hong might have made some mistakes
. “I believe that ifanyone admits a mistake and asks for forgiveness, my country will give him another chance,” he said. And he himself-would “work wholeheartedly” to make up for any mistakes his father might have made.

  It was obvious that, during his two weeks in an undisclosed place of captivity, the youngster had received some great coaching from the A-team Pyongyang sent in to help him see the light. Even though he had been living outside North Korea for years, he managed to get the party line down pat in his press conference performance. No doubt he would do just as well in public appearances back in Pyongyang.

  He probably would not be arrested immediately. Kim Jong-il had issued in 1993 a new policy—“Do not make internal enemies”—encouraging leniency toward defectors’ family members who were willing as Hong put it to “cut family ties.” But after he had served the regime’s propaganda machine sufficiently, he would be of no further use. The people in charge would not make him a diplomat, like his dad, and take advantage of his qualifications as a foreign-educated linguist, because they could never banish the suspicion he might some day try to defect and join his parents. That cosmopolitan background of his would count against him, not for him. After all, the North Koreans most inclined to complain about the regime were the cosmopolitan elements. Think in particular of the ethnic Koreans born in Japan or China who immigrated with high patriotic spirit to help “build the homeland” but, having in their minds those inevitable points of comparison, found they did not much like what they found.

  Judging from what I had learned about the North Korean system by talking with many of his former countrymen who had managed to escape abroad, I thought young Hong after the inevitable waning of his propaganda value most likely would be found wanting in the loyalty department. He might be exiled to one of the poorest, most barren and mountainous parts of his country. If he were lucky, his lot there might be to try to eke out a living, as a farmer or miner, in one of the communities of people cast out of normal communities because their loyalty to the ruler was suspect—not on account of any crimes they had committed but due to problems of “family background.” Some were people whose families had been abroad and who had been overheard comparing North Korea unfavorably with other countries.