Nothing to Envy

by Barbara Demick

  As the children approached adolescence, the obstacles presented by their father’s background began to loom larger. By age fifteen mandatory schooling is completed and students begin applying to high schools. Those not admitted are assigned to a work unit, a factory, a coal mine, or the like. But Mi-ran’s siblings were confident they would be among those chosen to further their education. They were smart, good-looking, athletic, well liked by teachers and peers. Had they been less talented, rejection might have gone down more easily.

  Her eldest sister, Mi-hee, had a lovely soprano voice. Whether she was belting out one of the syrupy folk songs so beloved by Koreans or a paean to Kim Il-sung, the neighbors would come to listen. She was often asked to perform at public events. Singing is a highly valued talent in North Korea since few people have stereos. Mi-hee was so pretty that an artist came to sketch her portrait. She had every expectation that she would be selected to attend a performing arts high school. She wailed for days when she was rejected. Their mother must have known the reason, but she nevertheless marched to the school to demand an explanation. The headmaster was sympathetic, but unhelpful. She explained that only students with better songbun could secure placement in performing arts schools.

  Mi-ran didn’t have any particular artistic or athletic talent like her older sisters, but she was a good student and she was beautiful. When she was fifteen years old, her school was visited by a team of serious-looking men and women in somber suits. These were the okwa, members of the fifth division of the Central Workers’ Party, recruiters who scoured the country looking for young women to serve on the personal staff of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. If selected, the girls would be sent off to a military-style training camp, before being assigned to one of the leadership’s many residences around the country. Once accepted, they would not be permitted to visit their homes, but their families would be compensated with expensive gifts. It wasn’t exactly clear what jobs these girls did. Some were said to be secretaries, maids, and entertainers; others were rumored to be concubines. Mi-ran had heard all about this from a friend whose cousin had been one of those chosen.

  “You know, Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung, they’re just men, like any others,” Mi-ran’s friend whispered to her. Mi-ran nodded knowingly, embarrassed to admit she was utterly mystified. North Korean girls her age didn’t know what a concubine was, only that whatever you might do to serve the leadership would be a tremendous honor. Only the smartest and prettiest girls would be selected.

  When the recruiters walked into the classroom, the students sat upright at their desks and waited quietly. The girls sat two to a desk, in long rows. Mi-ran wore her middle school uniform. On her feet were canvas exercise shoes. The recruiters wove in between the rows of desks, pausing from time to time to take a closer look. They slowed down when they came to Mi-ran’s desk.

  “You, stand up,” one of the recruiters commanded. They beckoned her to follow them to the teachers’ lounge. When she got there, four other girls were waiting. They looked over her files, measured her. At five foot three, Mi-ran was one of the tallest girls in the class. They peppered her with questions: How were her grades? What was her favorite subject? Was she healthy? Did anything hurt? She answered their questions calmly and, she thought, correctly.

  That was the last she heard of them. Not that she really wanted to be taken away from her family, but rejection always stung.

  By then, the children had come to realize that their family background was the problem. They began to suspect that their father had come from the other side of the border, because he had no relatives in the North, but under what circumstances? They assumed he must have been a committed Communist who had heroically run away to enlist with Kim Il-sung’s troops. Mi-ran’s brother finally forced the truth to the surface. An intense young man with permanently furrowed brows, Sok-ju had spent months cramming for an exam to win admission to the teachers’ college. He knew every answer perfectly. When he was told he had failed, he angrily confronted the judges to demand an explanation.

  The truth was devastating. The children had been thoroughly inculcated in the North Korean version of history. The Americans were the incarnation of evil and the South Koreans their pathetic lackeys. They’d studied photographs of their country after it had been pulverized by U.S. bombs. They’d read about how sneering American and South Korean soldiers drove their bayonets into the bodies of innocent civilians. Their textbooks at school were full of stories of people burned, crushed, stabbed, shot, and poisoned by the enemy. To learn that their own father was a South Korean who had fought with the Yankees was too much to bear. Sok-ju got drunk for the first time in his life. He ran away from home. He stayed at a friend’s house for two weeks until the friend convinced him he had to return.

  “He’s still your father, you know,” the friend urged him. Sok-ju took the words to heart. He knew, like any other Korean boy, especially an only son, that he had to revere his father. He went home and fell to his knees, begging for forgiveness. It was the first time he saw his father cry.

  WHILE THE CHILDREN were slow to discover the truth about their father, they may have been the last to know. The gossips in the neighborhood had long spread the rumor that he was a South Korean soldier, and the inminban, the people’s group, had been told to keep a watchful eye on the family. Almost as quickly as Jun-sang discovered the name of the girl he spotted at the movie theater, he heard the gossip. Jun-sang was well aware that a liaison with a girl of Mi-ran’s status could hurt his prospects. He was not cowardly, but he was a dutiful son, as much a creature of the Confucian system as any other North Korean. He believed he was put on this earth to serve his father, and it was his father’s ambition that he attend university in Pyongyang. He would need not only top grades, but impeccable conduct. The smallest indiscretion could derail him because his own family background was problematic, too.

  Jun-sang’s parents were both born in Japan, part of a population of ethnic Koreans that numbered about two million at the end of World War II. They were a cross section of Korean society—elites who had gone there to study, people who had been forcibly conscripted to help the Japanese war effort, and migrant workers. Some had gotten rich, but they were always a minority, often despised. They ached to return to the homeland, but which homeland? After the partition of Korea, the Koreans in Japan divided into two factions—those who supported South Korea and those who sympathized with North Koreans. The pro–North Koreans affiliated with a group called Chosen Soren, the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan.

  For these nationalists, North Korea looked to be the true motherland because it had severed itself from the Japanese colonial past, whereas Syngman Rhee’s pro-U.S. government had elevated many Japanese collaborators. And until the late 1960s, the North Korean economy looked to be much stronger. North Korean propaganda conjured up images of rosy-cheeked children playing in the fields and brand-new farm equipment hauling in abundant harvests in the miraculous new country that flourished under the wise leadership of Kim Il-sung. Today, the bright-colored posters of this genre are easy to dismiss as socialist kitsch, but back then, they proved, for many, convincing.

  More than eighty thousand people were sucked in by the pitch, Jun-sang’s grandparents among them. His paternal grandfather was a member of the Japanese Communist Party and had even served time in a Japanese prison for his left-wing beliefs. Too old and infirm himself to be of use to the new country, he instead sent his oldest son. Jun-sang’s father landed on the shores of this brave new world in 1962 after a twenty-one-hour ferry ride across the Sea of Japan. Because he was an engineer, his skills were in great demand and he was assigned to a work unit at a factory near Chongjin. A few years later, he met an elegant young woman who had come with her parents from Japan around the same time. Jun-sang’s father was homely, with sloping shoulders and pitted skin, but he was intelligent and literate. His family would say he looked like a pirate, but spoke like a poet. With kindness and persistence, he managed to woo this
delicate beauty until she accepted his proposal of marriage.

  Jun-sang’s parents had managed to keep enough of their money to enjoy a better quality of life than most North Koreans. They had wangled for themselves a freestanding house—a luxury that afforded them a garden in which to grow vegetables. Until the 1990s, North Koreans weren’t allowed to cultivate their own plots of land. Inside the house were five substantial wooden wardrobes stuffed with quality Japanese-made quilts and clothing. (North Koreans sleep on mats on the floor in the traditional Asian style, rolling up their bedding during the day and stuffing it into cabinets.) North Koreans tended to rank themselves by the number of wardrobes in their home, and five meant that you were prosperous indeed. They had more appliances than any of their neighbors—an electric fan, a television, a sewing machine, an eight-track tape player, a camera, and even a refrigerator—a rarity in a country where hardly anybody had enough fresh food to keep cold.

  Most unusual, though, was that Jun-sang had a pet—a Korean breed called the poongsan, a shaggy white-haired dog that resembles a spitz. Although some Koreans in the countryside kept dogs as farm animals, raising them in large part to eat in a spicy dog-meat stew called boshintang, it was unheard of to have a dog as a household pet. Who could afford an extra mouth to feed?

  In fact, Japanese Koreans, who were known as kitachosenjin, after the Japanese term for North Korea, Kita Chosen, lived in a world apart. They had distinctive accents and tended to marry one another. Although they were far from rich by Japanese standards, they were wealthy compared with ordinary North Koreans. They had arrived in the new country with leather shoes and nice woolen sweaters, while North Koreans wore canvas on their feet and shiny polyester. Their relatives regularly sent them Japanese yen, which could be used in special hard-currency shops to buy appliances. Some had even brought over automobiles, although soon enough they would break down for lack of spare parts and have to be donated to the North Korean government. Years after they arrived, Japanese Koreans received regular visits from their relatives who would travel over on the Mangyongbong-92 ferry with money and gifts. The ferry was operated by the pro-regime Chosen Soren and its visits to North Korea were encouraged as a way of bringing currency into the country. The regime skimmed off a portion of the money sent by relatives. Yet for all their wealth, the Japanese Koreans occupied a lowly position in the North Korean hierarchy. No matter that they were avowed Communists who gave up comfortable lives in Japan, they were lumped in with the hostile class. The regime couldn’t trust anyone with money who wasn’t a member of the Workers’ Party. They were among the few North Koreans permitted to have contact with the outside, and that in itself made them unreliable; the strength of the regime came from its ability to isolate its own citizens completely.

  The new immigrants from Japan quickly shed their idealism. Some of the early immigrants who arrived in North Korea wrote letters home warning others not to come, but those letters were intercepted and destroyed. Many of the Japanese Koreans, including some prominent in Chosen Soren, ended up being purged in the early 1970s, the leaders executed, their families sent to the gulag.

  Jun-sang had overheard his parents whispering these stories. When they came to take you away, there was no warning. A truck would pull up outside your house late at night. You’d get maybe an hour or two to pack up your belongings. Jun-sang lived with a fear that was so internalized that he wasn’t able to articulate it, but it was ever-present. He knew by instinct to watch what he said.

  He was also careful not to provoke envy. He wore thick woolen socks from Japan whereas most children had no socks at all, but he kept his feet tucked under long pants, hoping nobody would notice. He would later describe himself as a sensitive animal with big twitching ears, always on the alert for predators.

  For all their warm sweaters, appliances, and blankets, Jun-sang’s family was no more at ease than Mi-ran’s. His mother, who had been a pretty and popular teenager when she’d left Japan, grew increasingly wistful about her lost girlhood as she aged. After the birth of her four children, she never recovered her health. In the evening, Jun-sang’s father would sit and smoke, sighing glumly. It was not that they thought anyone was listening—one of the advantages of a freestanding house was a certain degree of privacy—but they wouldn’t dare give voice to what they really felt. They couldn’t come out and say that they wanted to leave this socialist paradise to go back to capitalist Japan.

  So the unspoken hung over the household: the realization sank in deeper with each passing day that a terrible mistake had been made in going to North Korea. Returning to Japan was impossible, they knew, so they had to make the best of a bad situation. The only way to redeem the family would be to play the system and try to climb the social ladder. The family’s hopes rested on Jun-sang. If only he could get himself to university in Pyongyang, perhaps he would eventually be permitted to join the Workers’ Party and then the family might be forgiven their bourgeois Japanese past. The constant pressure left Jun-sang nervous and indecisive. He fantasized about the girl he’d seen at the movie theater and debated whether to approach her, but ended up doing nothing.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE TRUE BELIEVER

  The USS Missouri firing on Chongjin, October 1950.

  CHONGJIN IS A CITY WITH A BAD REPUTATION, AN UNDESIRABLE place to live even by North Korean standards. The city of 500,000 is wedged between a granite spine of mountains zigzagging up and down the coast and the Sea of Japan, which Koreans call the East Sea. The coastline has the rugged beauty of Maine, and its glistening waters run deep and cold, but fishing is treacherous without a sturdy boat. The wind-whipped mountains support few crops, and temperatures in the winter can plunge to 40 degrees below (Fahrenheit). Only the land around the low-lying coast can grow rice, the staple food around which Korean culture revolves. Historically, Koreans have measured their success in life by their proximity to power—part of a long Asian tradition of striving to get off the farm and close to the imperial palace. Chongjin is practically off the map of Korea, so far north that it is nearer to the Russian city of Vladivostok than to Pyongyang. Even today, the drive between Chongjin and Pyongyang, just 250 miles apart, can take three days over the unpaved mountain roads, with dangerous hairpin turns.

  During the Chosun dynasty, when the Korean capital was even farther away—on the site of present-day Seoul—officials who incurred the wrath of the emperor were exiled to this outlying fringe of the realm. Perhaps as a result of all these malcontents in the gene pool, what is now North Hamgyong province is thought to breed the toughest, hardest-to-subdue Koreans anywhere.

  Until the twentieth century, this northernmost province of Korea, extending all the way to the Tumen River, its border with China and Russia, was sparsely populated and of little economic significance. The province’s human population was most likely outnumbered by tigers in centuries past, the beasts that still terrify small children in Korean folktales. Today, though, the animals themselves are long gone. All that changed when the Japanese set their sights on empire building. North Hamgyong province lay right in the pathway of Japan’s eventual push toward Manchuria, which it would occupy in the run-up to World War II. The Japanese also coveted the largely unexploited coal and iron-ore deposits around Musan and they would need to ship their booty from the occupied peninsula back home. Chongjin, just a small fishing village (the name comes from the Chinese characters for “clear river crossing”), was transformed into a port that could handle three million tons of freight each year. During the occupation (1910-45), the Japanese built massive steelworks at Chongjin’s port, and farther south they developed Nanam, a planned city with a rectangular street grid and large modern buildings. The Imperial Japanese Army’s 19th infantry division, which assisted in the invasion of eastern China, was headquartered there. Farther down the coast, they built virtually from scratch the city of Hamhung as the headquarters of massive chemical factories producing everything from gunpowder to fertilizer.

  After the Comm
unists came to power in the 1950s, they rebuilt the factories that had been bombed in the successive wars and reclaimed them as their own. Chongjin’s Nippon Steel became Kimchaek Iron and Steel, the largest factory in North Korea. Kim Il-sung pointed to the industrial might of the northeast as a shining example of his economic achievements. To this day, Chongjin residents know little of their city’s history—indeed, it seems to be a place without any past at all—because the North Korean regime does not credit the Japanese for anything. Within the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Chongjin’s prestige and population continued to grow, making it by the 1970s the second-largest city in the country, with a population of 900,000. (The population is believed to have since slipped to about 500,000, making Chongjin the third-largest city, behind Hamhung.)