Nothing to Envy

by Barbara Demick

  On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender over the radio. It took several days for the news to reach the village. When the boys heard the news, they ran to the barracks where the Japanese were garrisoned and found that they had pulled out, abruptly leaving their personal belongings behind. The occupation was over. The villagers didn’t have the money for a celebration, but they ran jubilant in the streets, congratulating one another and cheering.

  “Mansei Chosun,” they cried. Long live Korea!

  The Koreans believed they were once again in control of their own destiny. They would reclaim their country.

  As the Japanese emperor read his statement over the radio, across the globe in Washington, D.C., two young army officers huddled over a National Geographic Society map, wondering what to do about Korea. Nobody in Washington knew much about this obscure Japanese colony. While elaborate plans had been drawn up for the postwar occupation of Germany and Japan, Korea was an afterthought. The Japanese had ruled for thirty-five years, and with their abrupt withdrawal there would be a dangerous power vacuum. The United States was concerned that the Soviet Union might seize Korea as a staging ground on the way to the bigger prize of Japan. Despite the World War II alliance, distrust of the Soviet Union was growing in Washington. Soviet troops had already entered Korea from the north the week before Japan’s surrender and were poised to keep going. The Americans sought to appease the Soviets by giving them the northern half of Korea to administer in what was supposed to be a temporary trusteeship. The officers, one of whom was Dean Rusk, later to become secretary of state, wanted to keep the capital, Seoul, in the U.S. sector. So the two army officers looked for a convenient way to divide the peninsula. They slapped a line across the map at the 38th parallel.

  The line bore little relationship to anything in Korean history or geography. The little thumb jutting out of China that is the Korean peninsula is a well-delineated landmass with the Sea of Japan to the east, the Yellow Sea to the west, and the Yalu and Tumen Rivers forming the boundary with China. Nothing about it suggests that there is a natural place to carve it in two. For the 1,300 years prior to the Japanese occupation, Korea had been a unified country governed by the Chosun dynasty, one of the longest-lived monarchies in world history. Before the Chosun dynasty, there were three kingdoms vying for power on the peninsula. Political schisms tended to run north to south, the east gravitating naturally toward Japan and the west to China. The bifurcation between north and south was an entirely foreign creation, cooked up in Washington and stamped on the Koreans without any input from them. One story has it that the secretary of state at the time, Edward Stettinius, had to ask a subordinate where Korea was.

  Koreans were infuriated to be partitioned in the same way as the Germans. After all, they had not been aggressors in World War II, but victims. Koreans at the time described themselves with a self-deprecating expression, saying they were “shrimp among whales,” crushed between the rivalries of the superpowers.

  Neither superpower was willing to cede ground to allow for an independent Korea. The Koreans themselves were splintered into more than a dozen rival factions, many with Communist sympathies. The temporary demarcations on the map soon hardened into facts on the ground. In 1948, the Republic of Korea was created under the leadership of the seventy-year-old Syngman Rhee, a crusty conservative with a PhD from Princeton. Kim Il-sung, an anti-Japanese resistance fighter backed by Moscow, quickly followed suit by declaring his state the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—North Korea. The line along the 38th parallel would solidify into a 155-mile-long, 2.5-mile-wide thicket of concertina wire, tank traps, trenches, embankments, moats, artillery pieces, and land mines.

  With both sides claiming to be the legitimate government of Korea, war was inevitable. Before dawn on Sunday morning, June 25, 1950, Kim Il-sung’s troops stormed across the border with Soviet-supplied tanks. They quickly captured Seoul and swept southward until all that was left of South Korea was a pocket around the southeastern coastal city of Pusan. The daring amphibious landing at Incheon of forty thousand U.S. troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur in September reversed the Communist gains. Besides the United States and South Korea, troops of fifteen nations joined a U.N. coalition—among them Britain, Australia, Canada, France, and the Netherlands. They recaptured Seoul and headed north to Pyongyang and beyond. As they approached the Yalu River, however, Chinese Communist forces entered the war and pushed them back. Two more years of fighting produced only frustration and stalemate. By the time an armistice was signed on July 27, 1953, nearly three million people were dead and the peninsula lay in ruins. The border remained more or less along the 38th parallel. Even by the dubious standards of twentieth-century warcraft, it was a futile and unsatisfying war.

  Tae-woo was eighteen years old when the Communists invaded. He was the main source of support for his mother and sisters, his father having died before the war began. The South Koreans were ill-prepared for the invasion, with only sixty-five thousand under arms—roughly one quarter the troop strength of the North Koreans. They would need all the able-bodied men they could get. Some of the rice farmers were sympathetic to the North because they’d heard a rumor that the Communists would give them free land. Their economic situation hadn’t improved since the defeat of the Japanese. But most of the young men were apolitical. “We didn’t know left from right in those days,” Lee Jong-hun recalled. Whatever their political persuasions, they had no choice but to enlist in the South Korean army.

  Tae-woo eventually rose to the rank of sergeant. His unit’s last battle took place near the village of Kimhwa, twenty-five miles north of the 38th parallel. Kimhwa (later renamed Kumhwa) made up one point in what the U.S. military had nicknamed the “Iron Triangle,” a strategic valley surrounded by granite mountains. (Pyongyang and Chorwon made up the other two points.) It had witnessed some of the heaviest fighting in this late stage of the war as the Chinese tried to nudge the front line southward in anticipation of an armistice. On the night of July 13, 1953, three divisions of Chinese troops—about sixty thousand soldiers—launched a surprise attack against U.N. and South Korean troops. At about 7.30 P.M. the Communist forces started bombing the U.N. positions; at around 10:00 P.M. they fired flares so the soldiers would see the “hills and valleys come alive with thousands of enemy soldiers,” a U.S. soldier later wrote about the attack. Bugles sounded from all sides and they could see the Chinese troops running toward them. “We were incredulous. It was like a scene unfolding in a motion picture,” a former South Korean soldier later said. It had been raining steadily for a week and the hills “streamed with blood and water.”

  Tae-woo, by this time assigned to a medical unit, was carrying a South Korean soldier on a stretcher when the unit was surrounded by the Chinese. It was only two weeks before the signing of the armistice, but he, along with approximately five hundred other soldiers from the South Korean army’s Capital Division, were taken as prisoners of war.

  His life as a South Korean was effectively over. Mi-ran’s father never discussed what happened to him in captivity. One would expect that conditions for him were no better than for other POWs held by the Communists. Huh Jae-suk, a fellow POW who later escaped, wrote in his memoir that the men were housed in squalid camps where they were not permitted to bathe or brush their teeth. Their hair became infested with lice; untreated wounds swarmed with maggots. They were fed one meal of rice and saltwater a day.

  After the armistice, there was a prisoner exchange in which the Communist forces released 12,773 prisoners, among them 7,862 South Koreans. Thousands more, maybe tens of thousands, were never sent home, among them Tae-woo. They were loaded onto trains at Pyongyang station that they thought were heading south toward home, but instead went north toward the coal-rich mountains that hugged the Chinese border, according to Huh’s memoir. Under the name Construction Unit of the Interior Department, new POW camps had been built near the mines. Coal mining in North Korea was not only dirty
but exceedingly dangerous, since the mines frequently collapsed or caught fire. “The life of a POW was worth less than a fly,” Huh wrote. “Every day that we walked into the mines, I shuddered with fear. Like a cow walking to the slaughterhouse, I never knew if I would emerge alive.”

  In 1956, the North Korean cabinet issued an order that allowed the South Korean prisoners of war to be issued certificates of North Korean citizenship. It meant that the worst was over, but also that they were never going home. The worst were in the coal mines, which were hastily dug and subject to frequent collapses and fires. Tae-woo was sent to an iron-ore mine in Musan, a gritty town on the North Korean side of the Chinese border in North Hamgyong province. The men were all former South Koreans and lived together in a dormitory.

  One of the workers at the dormitory was a woman, nineteen years old and single—a virtual old maid. She was too angular to be considered pretty, but there was something in her purposeful manner that was appealing; she radiated strength in mind and body. She was eager to get married, if only to get away from her mother and sisters, with whom she was living. Marriageable men were scarce after the war. The manager of the dormitory introduced her to Tae-woo. Though he was no taller than she, he was soft-spoken, a gentlemanly quality coming through from under the black grit of the coal mine. She felt a rush of pity for this young man who was so alone in the world. They married that same year.

  Tae-woo quickly assimilated into North Korean life. It was easy enough for him to blend in. The Koreans were one people—han nara, one nation, as they liked to say. They looked the same. The Pyongyang accent was often ridiculed for its similarity to the guttural dialect of Pusan. The chaos of the war years had thoroughly mixed the Korean population. Fearing persecution by the Communists, tens of thousands of Koreans from north of the 38th parallel had fled south—among them landlords, businessmen, Christian clergymen, and Japanese collaborators. A smaller number of Communist sympathizers fled north. Countless others with no political agenda were simply pushed up or down as they fled the fighting.

  Who could tell who was a North Korean and who was a South Korean? Soon after his marriage, Tae-woo and his new bride were transferred to another mine near Chongjin where he knew nobody. There was no reason for anyone to suspect anything unusual in his background, but it was in the peculiar nature of North Korea that somebody always did know.

  After the war, Kim Il-sung made it his first order of business to weed out foe from friend. He started at the top with potential rivals for the leadership. He disposed of many of his comrades in arms who had led the struggle from Manchuria to unseat the Japanese occupiers. He ordered the arrest of the founding members of the Communist Party in South Korea. They had been invaluable during the war; now that they’d served their purpose they could be discarded. Throughout the 1950s, many more were purged in what was increasingly coming to resemble an ancient Chinese empire with Kim Il-sung the unchallenged master of the realm.

  Kim Il-sung then turned his attention to ordinary people. In 1958, he ordered up an elaborate project to classify all North Koreans by their political reliability, ambitiously seeking to reorganize an entire human population. While the Chinese Red Guard also rooted out “capitalist roaders” during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, it resulted in a chaotic reign of terror in which neighbor denounced neighbor. The North Koreans were methodical to a fault. Each person was put through eight background checks. Your song-bun, as the rating was called, took into account the backgrounds of your parents, grandparents, and even second cousins. The loyalty surveys were carried out in various phases with inspiring names. “Intensive Guidance by the Central Party” was the first announced phase. The classifications became more refined in subsequent phases, such as the “Understanding People Project,” between 1972 and 1974.

  Despite the twentieth-century lingo of social engineering, this process was akin to an updating of the feudal system that had stifled Koreans in prior centuries. In the past, Koreans were bound by a caste system nearly as rigid as that of India. Noblemen wore white shirts and high black horsehair hats, while slaves wore wooden tags around their necks. The old class structure drew heavily on the teachings of the Chinese philosopher Confucius, who believed that humans fit strictly into a social pyramid. Kim Il-sung took the least humane elements of Confucianism and combined them with Stalinism. At the top of the pyramid, instead of an emperor, resided Kim Il-sung and his family. From there began a downward progression of fifty-one categories that were lumped into three broad classes—the core class, the wavering class, and the hostile class.

  The hostile class included the kisaeng (female entertainers who, like the Japanese geisha, might provide a bit more for high-paying clients), fortune-tellers, and mudang (shamans, who were also in the lower classes during the dynastic period). Also included were the politically suspect, as defined by a white paper on human rights in North Korea based on testimony of defectors living in South Korea.

  People from families of wealthy farmers, merchants, industrialists, landowners, or those whose private assets have been completely confiscated; pro-Japan and pro-U.S. people; reactionary bureaucrats; defectors from the South … Buddhists, Catholics, expelled public officials, those who helped South Korea during the Korean War.

  As a former South Korean soldier, Tae-woo’s ranking was toward the bottom of the heap—not the very bottom, because those people (about 200,000, or 1 percent of the population) were permanently banished to labor camps modeled after the Soviet gulag. North Koreans of the lower ranks were banned from living in the showcase capital of Pyongyang or the nicer patches of countryside toward the south where the soil was more fertile and the weather warmer. Tae-woo couldn’t dream of joining the Workers’ Party, which, like the Communist Party in China and the Soviet Union, controlled the plum jobs.

  People of his rank would be closely watched by their neighbors. North Koreans are organized into what are called the inminban— literally, “people’s group”—cooperatives of twenty or so families whose job it is to keep tabs on one another and run the neighborhood. The inminban have an elected leader, usually a middle-aged woman, who reports anything suspicious to higher-ranking authorities. It was almost impossible for a North Korean of low rank to improve his status. Personal files were locked away in local offices of the Ministry for the Protection of State Security and, for extra safekeeping, just in case someone dared to think of tampering with the records, in the mountainous Yanggang province. The only mobility within the class system was downward. Even if you were in the core class—reserved for relatives of the ruling family and party cadres—you could get demoted for bad behavior. But once in the hostile class, you remained there for life. Whatever your original stain, it was permanent and immutable. And just like the caste system of old Korea, family status was hereditary. The sins of the father were the sins of the children and the grandchildren.

  The North Koreans called these people beidsun—“tainted blood,” or impure.

  Mi-ran and her four siblings would carry that taint in their blood. They had to expect that their horizons would be as limited as those of their father.

  AS A CHILD, Mi-ran was unaware of the catastrophe that had befallen her even before she was born. Her parents thought it best if they said nothing at all to the children about their father’s roots in South Korea. What was the point in burdening them with the knowledge that they would be barred from the best schools and the best jobs, that their lives would soon reach a dead end? Why would they bother to study hard, to practice their musical instruments or compete in sports?

  North Koreans aren’t informed of their classification, so it wasn’t immediately obvious that there was something wrong with the family, but the children themselves suspected something peculiar about their father. He was an odd, solitary figure who seemed to carry a ponderous burden. He had no known relatives. It was not only that he wouldn’t speak of the past, he hardly spoke at all. He gave monosyllabic answers to questions; he kept his voice to a whisper.
Tae-woo looked happiest when he was working with his hands, fixing something around the house, intent on a project that gave him an excuse not to speak.

  There was no trace of the bossy little boy who strutted around playing general. His wife, from whom the daughters inherited their height and athleticism, did all the talking for him. If the children needed to be disciplined, if there was a complaint to be made to a neighbor, it was his wife who did it. If he had any opinions, he kept them to himself. On the occasions that they could get a newspaper, a luxury in North Korea, he would read in silence by the light of their single lamp with its 40-watt bulb. What he thought of the latest great achievement of Kim Il-sung, as touted in Rodong Sinmun, the official Workers’ Party newspaper, or in Hambuk Daily, the local paper, he would not say. Had he come to believe in North Korea? Was he convinced?

  Mi-ran often found her father’s passivity maddening. Only later did she understand this was a survival mechanism. It was as though he had hammered down his own personality to avoid drawing undue attention to himself. Among the thousands of former South Korean soldiers who tried to assimilate into North Korean society, many slipped up. Mi-ran’s mother later told her that four of her father’s buddies in the mines, fellow South Koreans, had been executed for minor infractions, their bodies dumped in mass graves. Being a member of the hostile class meant you would never get the benefit of the doubt. A sarcastic inflection when referring to Kim Il-sung or a nostalgic remark about South Korea could get you in serious trouble. It was especially taboo to talk about the Korean War and who started it. In the official histories (and there was nothing but official history in North Korea), it was the South Korean Army that invaded, acting on orders from the Americans, not the North Korean Army storming across the 38th parallel. “The U.S. imperialists gave the Syngman Rhee puppet clique an order to unleash a Korean War,” goes the account in Rodong Sinmun. Anybody who remembered what really happened on June 25, 1950 (and which Korean could forget?), knew it was wise to keep one’s mouth shut.