All Monsters Must Die

by Magnus Bärtås

  * * *

  BEFORE WE ENTER the studio’s sound stage, the guide says that Kim Jong-il often comes here and gives solid advice. To us, the advice sounds a bit general: “Preserve these buildings and use them more effectively.” The guide says that North Korean filmmakers sometimes experience doubt and insecurity. In moments like these it’s good to have a stable, firm authority to lean on. They phone Kim Jong-il and get answers to their questions. This is how one makes a “perfect film.”

  The sound stage has seen better days. If you don’t take the worn wooden scenery flats and the abraded bucket seats into account, the studio takes you right back to the 1980s. As far as we can tell, the latest sound technology at that time was installed in the screening room. But they haven’t upgraded since it was built.

  A film that is in the process of being mastered starts to play on the screen. It begins with the logo of the North Korean film industry, which we recognize from Pulgasari’s opening credits and the large mosaic on the studio square. The symbol depicts a sculpture in Pyongyang: the winged horse Chollima, a Korean pegasus leaping into the future. According to the folk tales, the Chollima can run 400 kilometres in a day and no knight could ever tame it. In the terminology of the revolution, “Chollima-speed” is the speed with which North Korean society surges forth. The Chollima Movement in the 1950s was the North Korean answer to Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

  A montage of documentary and feature-film scenes about the war against Japan follows the Chollima logo. There are arrogant Japanese businessmen with round glasses and Hitler moustaches, slaves working in a quarry, and gangsters wearing pinstriped jazz suits. We recognize the actors’ gestures from North Korean dramas: someone falls on the ground and reaches up his arm in anguish; someone wipes the sweaty, bloody foreheads of the dying; families and lovers are torn apart, crying and screaming.

  We are gripped by the feeling that we are nearing the heart of the story. This could be the command centre of our story. We are rapt, but our fellow travellers are silent and bored. Even Elias seems distracted. In the darkness, we hear someone snoring.

  WITH AWE AND wonder, Shin and Madame watched the studio grow. They couldn’t help but feel flattered; Kim Jong-il offered them resources that they’d never have dreamed of before. But every day they discussed their escape. They mapped out their flight like the plot twists in a screenplay, but they also knew that their plan could never be realized.

  * * *

  WE LEAVE THE film studio with the feeling that something that has slipped through our fingers. Maybe we’d convinced ourselves that we could find solid evidence of Madame and Shin’s time there? Perhaps a dusty monster head in a prop closet? Pulgasari’s grimacing, horned mask?

  Our bus travels south, passing Pyongyang’s enormous triumphal arch, which is of course several metres taller than the original Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and we soon find ourselves on the Reunification Highway that leads straight as an arrow to Kaesong, right on the border with South Korea. There are four lanes with a green belt in the middle. After a while, we realize that we’ve never been on a highway like this before; hardly any cars are on the road. We pass a few military vehicles, and amid much irritated honking we overtake a crowded bus, but otherwise it’s empty.

  We see a few people doing maintenance along the road — micro-maintenance. One woman is sweeping up a pile of dry leaves and dust on the road. She squats and lifts the debris with her cupped hands, then tosses it over the barrier guard into the ditch.

  ON THE BUS ride, we look at the pictures of the production of Pulgasari in Kenpachiro Satsuma’s memoir. There are interior shots of the hotel in Pyongyang where they stayed, as well as of restaurants, grocery stores, and department stores. The department store was a copy of one in Japan and offered both Japanese and black market goods. The staff even smiled and offered perfect greetings of “sumimasen” (“excuse me”), exactly as they did in Tokyo. In the hotel there was a camera store where the shopkeepers spoke accent-free Japanese. It was assumed that a number of the employees were Japanese citizens who had been kidnapped.

  Until recently, North Korea has officially denied the kidnapping of Japanese people. For twenty years, their protesting relatives were considered dogmatists, even in Japan. No one believed them. But in 2002 Kim Jong-il admitted to the abduction of thirteen Japanese citizens, five of whom were allowed to go home. The Japanese government’s official list contains the names of seventeen citizens (including the five who have returned), but organized groups of relatives claim that as many as eighty people are being held captive in North Korea. The question has become especially sensitive since Japan’s right-wing nationalists appropriated the matter in order to make a case for remilitarization.

  It is known that people from a number of countries, including Romania and Thailand, have been abducted and taken to North Korea. During her time in the country, Madame met people who had been kidnapped from Jordan, Japan, and France. South Korea insists that 480 of its citizens are being held in North Korea against their will.

  IN 2002, HITOMI SOGA was allowed to return to Japan. She was nineteen years old when she and her mother were kidnapped in 1978. They were taken on board a boat and ferried to Nampo and then on to Pyongyang. She married Charles Robert Jenkins, an American commander who willingly crossed the border at the demilitarized zone (DMZ).

  During the first half of the 1960s, a total of four American soldiers sought happiness in the North, where they all became players in a large-scale theatre of propaganda. At least one of them had the threat of martial law hanging over his head at the time of his defection. Joe Dresnok, the only one who still lives in North Korea, appeared in the British documentary Crossing the Line in 2007.

  North Korea heralded the arrival of the four military defectors: Dresnok, Charles Jenkins, Larry Abshier, and Jerry Parrish. Brochures about these “Fortune’s Favourites” were printed along with photographs of the men picnicking by the river with local beauties, bottles of wine, and teeming picnic baskets. Their clothing was suspiciously similar. North Korean tailors must have projected their own idea of what American men would wear on a Sunday outing: uniform-like turquoise suits, straw hats, shirts with wide collars and giant buttons, all presumably made of Vinalon.

  The soldiers were presented like trophies: they appeared at mass meetings, and relayed messages via the loudspeakers that were broadcast across the border. These siren songs from paradise were aimed at the understimulated American troops on the south side who were waiting for action; in the Communist country, everyone was given free food and shelter and unlimited access to women.

  But the four Americans were idle, even if they were supplied with steady food rations and alcohol, despite what was happening in the rest of the country. Dresnok describes a largely carefree existence: studying Kim Il-sung’s writings, playing cards, drinking soju, and taking fishing trips by the river.

  According to Charles Jenkins, it wasn’t as idyllic as all that. Until 1972, the men lived in a one-room apartment without running water. They got on each other’s nerves, and Dresnok was a brutal fellow who often gave Jenkins a good hiding. When they were separated in 1972, the situation improved. Dresnok and Jenkins started teaching English, but Jenkins, who was from North Carolina, spoke with a deep Southern accent. When it was apparent that future spies had parroted Jenkins’s thick regional dialect, he was fired.

  ONLY WHEN KIM JONG-IL became the minister of propaganda did the state find a use for these men, who would have been called “hillbillies” back home. Around the time of Madame’s kidnapping, the propaganda minister started production on the TV series Unsung Heroes. The destinies of the four soldiers were only revealed to the United States in 1996, when the CIA acquired a copy of Unsung Heroes and analyzed the voices of the actors.

  THE TV SERIES takes place during the Korean War. At its centre is a North Korean agent who stymies the South Korean and American imperialists. Donning aviators and a mous
tache, Joe Dresnok faithfully embodies the role of the cruel camp commander and lead interrogator Arthur Cockstud. The others were typecast in their roles but had a chance to refine them over the course of the series: Jerry Parrish played a freedom-loving Irishman who hated the Brits; Larry Abshier was the American stooge; and the poisonous spider — Jenkins’s character, with his pronounced forehead, wingnuts for ears, and large hat — was the sly American architect of evil behind the war.

  Playing the roles of evil American imperialists, they all became film stars in North Korea. Today, people who meet Joe Dresnok on the streets of Pyongyang still call him Arthur. When a copy of Unsung Heroes was screened in South Korea, the theme song “Welcome Happiness” became a minor hit. In 2005 when South Korea’s minister of culture visited North Korea, he started to sing the theme song during a dinner. A popular move in North Korea. Less so in the South.

  WE’RE HALFWAY TO Kaesong and are about to make a pit stop. The bus driver doesn’t go to the trouble of pulling into a parking lot; he just pulls up at the side of the road. We automatically look left and right before we cross the highway to get to the rest stop, but it’s completely unnecessary.

  The café barely has anything to purchase, and the stench of urine in the washroom is stupefying. When we get back on the bus we sit right at the front to film the rest of the journey south. In the beginning we had discreetly used our camera; now we’ve changed tactics. Mr. Song is surprisingly lax about this. When we pass military posts, he asks us to turn it off; otherwise, he doesn’t seem to care much. He says that he’s never seen a tourist with such a big camera.

  Soon we get back to the topic of hairstyles. Now what did that article say? What punishment did you get for having an incorrect hairstyle?

  * * *

  WE LEAVE OUR baggage at the hotel in Kaesong, which is encircled by a sturdy wall. But the wall doesn’t keep out the sound of the many loudspeakers projecting revolutionary music and disciplinary speeches. These speakers are everywhere. Trucks carrying large speakers travel the countryside so that the field workers can get their dose of instruction and warnings. And as if this wasn’t enough, in every home a mounted, wired speaker turns on automatically at fixed times. You can turn the volume down, but you can’t shut it off. If strangers are on their way to the neighbourhood, local citizens are given instructions on how to behave. Inspectors make rounds to ensure that the home speakers are installed properly and that no one has cut any of the wires. All of the radios in North Korea, except the illegal ones, are manufactured domestically and can receive only the din of transmissions from the state channel.

  Kaesong is an unusual city both because we tourists are allowed to visit and because of the economic exchange with South Korea that has been in development for the past few years. Hyundai and a number of other corporations have been allowed to establish factories to produce shoes, watches, clothes, ginseng, and precious stones. Even the electricity in this city comes from the South. But for the moment, our simple hotel doesn’t have electricity, nor is there any hot water. And the beds are like those found in traditional Korean hostels: thin mattresses that you roll out on the floor.

  This industrial zone was established after North Korea received a huge donation of money from South Korean businesses, mainly Hyundai. These companies are, of course, interested in the cheap labour the country has to offer. Only citizens approved by the regime are allowed to work in the zone. After a while they are replaced. Their salary is paid to the North Korean state, which in turn pays a share to the workers.

  When we found ourselves on the south side of the border a year ago, in June 2007, we saw South Korean trucks transporting sand, waiting to go through the strict border control. They were all issued with small red tattered flags as a mark of courtesy — or perhaps to assimilate them into the North Korean landscape.

  IN THEIR BOOK The Hidden People of North Korea, Ralph Hassig and Oh Kongdan emphasize the changes that were made to the economy after the country’s catastrophic famine. The authors mean that people broke the rules in order to survive; or rather, those who broke the rules were the ones who survived. Previously, North Koreans were paid in coupons — based on their status in society — that could be redeemed for food. But the system stopped working in the mid-1990s and people were forced to scavenge.

  Different systems, official and unofficial, exist side by side and overlap in North Korea. To simplify, there are four general frameworks:

  The official planned economy.

  A number of enclosed free-trade zones to which international investors have been invited.

  Small-scale local markets that were previously illegal but have become authorized. These markets — even if they are controlled by the state — have meant a great change.

  The Kim clan’s personal economy, which includes gold mines, heroin and amphetamine production, and the production of counterfeit currency, cigarettes, and pharmaceuticals like Viagra.

  The smuggling carried out by North Korean diplomats — which seems to be part of the unofficial job description — is also part of this economy. In 1977, diplomats at the North Korean embassy in Stockholm were deported for engaging in large-scale alcohol and hash smuggling operations. A picture in Dagens Nyheter showed a police officer with a confiscated magnum of Dewar’s White Label on a serving stand. The diplomats were apparently not smuggling for reasons of personal gain. The proceeds were used to buy full-page ads in the daily newspapers. This was the only way Kim Il-sung’s propaganda speeches could find their way into print in the major Western newspapers.

  All of these lucrative operations furnish the top echelon with further riches. Bureau 39 in the North Korean Workers’ Party organizes the extraction of everything valuable and desirable in the country, like ginseng, precious metals, matsutake, and sea urchins, for the benefit of the elite. Bureau 39 also organizes the manufacturing of narcotics, pharmaceuticals, and counterfeit money. Beyond funding the clan’s luxurious lifestyle, it is likely that the bureau’s income supports the North Korean nuclear weapons program.

  What’s remarkable is that the products that come from the country’s underground factories outshine the originals. The drugs and pharmaceuticals are considered very potent. And the counterfeit hundred-dollar bills are so well made that the FBI has been forced to admit that they are virtually impossible to distinguish from the originals. In 1996, the U.S. government decided to modify the dollar to counteract the North Korean counterfeit industry. It was the first time since 1928 that the United States Department of the Treasury had been forced to change the banknote. They began using an ink that changed colour in the light, and introduced a new safety thread and a new watermark. It took just two years for the North Koreans to figure out how to copy these new banknotes. Shortly thereafter, new forged hundred-dollar bills were in circulation in casinos in Macao and Las Vegas. Again, changes were made. The Americans invested in a wildly expensive printing press, which they thought would make it unprofitable for the North Koreans to continue counterfeiting, given the investment it would demand. But again they were wrong. New North Korean U.S. dollars were soon out in the market.

  In an interview with the New York Times, one civil servant at the U.S. Treasury Department dejectedly stated that there is perhaps one way the North Korean hundred-dollar bills can be distinguished from the originals: they are better made.

  THE SITUATION IN the industrial zone outside of Kaesong has become more difficult since Lee “The Bulldozer” Myung-bak became president of South Korea in February 2008. To show its displeasure, North Korea tore up signed contracts in protest of the new South Korean government’s animosity toward them.

  South Koreans are normally denied entry to North Korea except in purpose-built, fenced-off holiday facilities. In Kumgangsan — the Diamond Mountains — in North Korea’s Kangwon Province, South Koreans spent a few seasons vacationing at “Hyundai’s holiday gulag,” with its fresh air and newly built gol
f course, the largest in Asia. They handed over their cell phones, and cameras were stripped of their powerful zoom lenses. Guests played golf during the day and sang karaoke at night. But exactly two months prior to our visit, a fifty-three-year-old South Korean woman happened to find her way out of the designated area and was shot dead by the North Korean military. Since then, the tourist facilities have been empty.

  * * *

  THE BUS TAKES us through Kaesong’s wide streets. We pass a number of military posts and then we are out in the countryside. The sun is low over the landscape. We drive on a narrow road built for tanks. It is made of concrete slabs and cuts through fields where rice, corn, lettuce, and potatoes are being cultivated. Women squat to wash their clothes in a clear stream. It’s the weekend, but the worker brigades don’t have the day off. Young men holding reaping hooks march in line next to the cornfields, on an elevated path.

  Goats gambol in the lush grass, and water buffalo with rings in their noses shut their eyes against the setting sun, dreamily chewing cud. We could be anywhere in East Asia if not for the young girl on a bicycle wearing a red scarf and carrying a backpack with a red flag. She appears to be illuminated by the warm evening light, and she triggers the memory of another image: a Chinese propaganda picture from the Cultural Revolution.

  This is most likely one of the most fertile areas in North Korea. Many parts of the country have wretched terrain — mountainous regions where not much can be farmed and which were hardest hit by the famine in the mid-1990s.

  A RETIRED COLONEL has joined us on the bus for this excursion. He’s wearing a brownish-green decorated uniform and bulky cap bearing a red stripe. The driver stops for some geese on the road. The colonel steps forward, opens the door, and gives their owner a telling off. She looks back at him fearfully, while trying to drive her animals with a cane. The colonel is furious and goes on ranting at the woman, though he seems to be directing his ire just as much at the waddling, unfazed geese.