All Monsters Must Die

by Magnus Bärtås

  THE EVENING FOG is starting to rise when we reach our destination: an observation tower in the DMZ. We look around at the rolling, verdant landscape. The tiger has significant symbolic value in Korea, and perhaps the notion that a few Siberian tigers have survived in the DMZ is an expression of the enduring dream that the Korean spirit will reunite North and South. The demilitarized zone is like a wildlife reservation — a sanctuary for a number of rare birds, an unusual breed of wild goat, Amur leopards, lynx, and a few Asian black bears. No tigers have been spotted, but tracks such as claw marks and carrion have been found.

  After a short introduction by the colonel, we are invited to look south through a telescope. We are supposed to see a long concrete wall that the South Koreans and Americans built for defence. The wall, the colonel says, was built between 1977 and 1979 and contains hangars with tanks, ready for an invasion. Like the Berlin Wall, this is the symbol of the division of the country, says the colonel. The wall embodies imperialist politics.

  But the fog makes it impossible to discern a wall, even with our telescopes. Neither the United States nor South Korea admits to its existence. It seems strange to deny the existence of a five- to eight-metre-tall construction that is said to contain a total of 800,000 tons of cement, 200,000 tons of steel, and 3.5 million cubic metres of gravel and sand. But the North Koreans claim that their enemies have piled up a layer of dirt so that the wall can’t be seen from the south side, and have built ramps for vehicles and ground troops. The two countries don’t agree on anything that has happened since the Japanese occupation. This extends to fundamentals such as the existence of giant 248-kilometre wall that stretches from west to east.

  When we later try to look for pictures of the wall on the Internet and in other reports, we don’t find anything substantial. All tourist groups that visit this observation point seem to arrive just as the evening fog is rising. The photographs that are used to prove the existence of the barrier are reminiscent of pictures of UFOs, where details have been marked with thick lines. When you enlarge these images, you step into a fog of pixels.

  THE COLONEL WANTS us to sing on the drive back to Kaesong. After working his way through a melodramatic hit song and then giving the stage to Ms. Kim and her dulcet tones, he walks around the bus with a microphone and tries to coax us all to join in. With the exception of Nils’s clear rendition of the classic ballad “Fritiof and Carmencita,” no one in the group can sing. Our voices bounce up and down, squalling and screeching.

  The Bromma boys, in line with last night’s karaoke performance at the Yanggakdo, have cast aside all of their inhibitions; they’ve crossed some sort of threshold. Everything they experience in North Korea is “totally friggin’ awesome.” Now they’re belting out Swedish left-wing anthems into the microphone: “High Standards” and “State and Capital.” One of them transitions to Tenacious D’s “Fuck Her Gently,” while the others roll around with laughter. The journey back to the hotel is not an easy one.

  DAY 7

  Back and Forth

  Across the Border

  THE BLUE BARRACK-LIKE buildings in the demilitarized zone are the only place where the military from the North and those from the South can meet face to face. We see a small, plain desk in a room that can’t be more than thirty square metres. The border runs right through the middle of this desk.

  After some explanation from the guide, we go back to the grand building that constitutes North Korea’s watchful eye on the South. From the South Korean side, it’s said that the building is actually just a metre-thick façade, but we can confirm that it does indeed contain marble stairs and a sturdy balcony from which we can see tour groups on the southern side. The tourists walk gravely and stiffly along the road to the same blue barracks that we’ve just visited, but from the other end. They’ve been told not to make any sudden movements with their arms; this could incite the North Korean military to open fire.

  Trond and Ari wave and shout at the tourists. We think they look funny, a solemn line slinking toward the barracks.

  THE BIGGEST MILITARY presence in the world is on our side of the DMZ. Last summer, when we toured on the other side of the border, we went down one of the kilometre-long tunnels which the South Korean military had found between 1974 and 1990, and which were probably built for a surprise attack from the North. The so-called “infiltration tunnels,” the first of which was discovered when steam was seen rising from the ground, housed railroad tracks and could accommodate the transport of large numbers of troops. Apparently it was there that the Swedish drilling equipment from Atlas Copco, which arrived with the shipment of Volvo cars, was put to use.

  In the cold, we stooped so as to not to hit our heads on the stones, which dripped with condensation. The walls were spray-painted black to make it look like a coal-mining tunnel.

  Our chief aim in South Korea was a meeting with Choi Eun-hee. After a long period of time, she finally agreed to meet with us in central Seoul.

  IT WAS JUNE 2007 and there was a gentle buzz in the JW Marriott Hotel’s large lobby. They’d managed to keep out the thick, humid air, and it seemed as if it were being held at bay by the guards at the front entrance, in their white cotton gloves and unusual white storm hats.

  Madame Choi had chosen the location. We found a secluded nook in the lobby, a nougat-coloured leather sofa under an oil painting by the Danish artist Ole Ring. We sat quietly, studying the picture, waiting for Madame to appear. It depicted a few country houses in a snowy landscape. In the foreground were a few windswept willows, with every groove in the bark depicted in detail.

  Choi Eun-hee arrived, dressed head to toe in black. She wore a hat with an elegant, sloping black brim, large tinted glasses, and a crucifix inlaid with onyx. Her face was considered to have been the first “Western” face in Korean cinema: large eyes, strong eyebrows, and a defined nose.

  Madame was seventy-seven years old, but the only things that gave her age away were her hands. She presented us with a gift: a DVD titled Flower in Hell (Jiokhwa). The 1958 film was the first Korean movie to show a kiss on screen, Madame said. And it wasn’t a just a peck, but deep French kissing and groping, and there were wild brawls too. The censors were very strict at that time, but officials must have been sleeping through this one.

  Twenty years later, Madame also helped introduce the first kiss in North Korean cinema. In 1984, she and Shin made Love, Love, My Love, which is based on “The Legend of Chunhyang,” a classic Korean tale about a lower-class woman who marries above her social standing. The kisses in that film were much more chaste, half-obscured by an umbrella, but they still incited strong protestations.

  OUR INTERPRETER HAD ordered an iced coffee for Madame, which was placed on the marble table with a discreet clang. Madame rarely gave interviews, and she had abstained from doing any since Shin Sang-ok died in April 2006. But she began speaking methodically, with a deep, soft voice, and she started from the beginning.

  At the start of her career, Madame worked in live theatre, getting parts in productions of Molière and Shakespeare. She was given her first film role two years after the Japanese left Korea. One year later, at the age of eighteen, she married a poor cinematographer against her parents’ will and “out of pity.” Her husband was twelve years her senior and had previously been married to a barmaid who had left him alone with their child. The man turned out to be pathologically jealous.

  In the chaos following the outbreak of the Korean War, she was separated from her husband and kidnapped by the Communists. The Communists had taken Seoul, and she was kept in a military camp, where she was forced to perform in propaganda plays for the Red Guards. When the North Korean troops retreated after the arrival of UN forces, they took the actors with them so that the soldiers would be entertained during the march back north. Bombs fell, but the show went on.

  However, during an attack by UN troops, Madame managed to escape and make her way back to Seoul. “I was
called a collaborator and I was put on trial,” she said. “But I was fine. The charges were dropped on one condition: that I entertain the South Korean military.”

  Madame smiled at the irony.

  She looked down at her hand and ran a finger tenderly over her two rings, one silver and the other gold. She began telling us how she fell for Shin Sang-ok. It was 1953, the same year that Shin was working on the film Korea, in which the Korean folk tale “The Legend of Chunhyang” was being staged as a “play within a play” in the film. Shin was a young, promising director, and for some time he had admired Madame from afar as a stage actress. He offered her the lead role in the staging of the folk tale.

  Meanwhile, Madame’s husband had been injured during a bombing in Seoul and was unable to work. She took care of his child and visited him every day at the hospital, but still his jealousy grew. After he beat her with his crutches, she had had enough and left him. It turned out that he had forgotten to register their marriage, which was supposed to have been done in his home village, but the man had been too lazy to make the arrangements when they got married.

  Madame and Shin fell in love. They exchanged rings in a love hotel and pledged their eternal devotion. Initially, their marriage caused a scandal. In Korea, a woman’s virtue was everything. The press compared Madame to Ingrid Bergman, who left her husband for Roberto Rossellini. Shin tried to convince her not to care about what people thought, but it troubled her.

  From the start, they threw themselves into a punishing work schedule. Work, love, and life became one. “We worked twenty-four hours a day,” she said. “Film was our life. There were only a few cameras available and we were terrified that they’d be damaged. The cameras were passed from filmmaker to filmmaker. Shin took home the negatives and edited at night. I made costumes and the sets. Many things were reused from film to film.”

  Choi Eun-hee wasn’t like her female colleagues. As soon as she had the chance, she got behind the camera to watch the rushes. As a stage actress, she felt torn about acting without a live audience. She wanted to understand the process and see what the eye of the camera was seeing. At that time, no woman was allowed to touch the camera. Cameras were extremely valuable and women weren’t trusted with them. This superstitious attitude was connected to a Confucian tradition, she told us. Back then women weren’t allowed to do many things, such as sitting in the front seat of a taxi or in the bow of a fishing boat. It was also inappropriate to get involved in the technical side of filmmaking, but Shin encouraged her. During the second movie they made together, she was already involved in the editing process. But she still wasn’t allowed to touch the editing equipment, so she wrote detailed instructions on paper.

  Madame had harboured dreams of a quiet life as a housewife, but Shin was totally against it. He didn’t want her to spend her time taking care of a household. When she washed clothes, he wondered why she wasn’t spending her valuable time reading screenplays.

  Shin spoke only of film; everything else was alien to him. During the most intense periods of work he barely ate, and during shoots he didn’t even notice when he hurt himself; he was consumed by his vision. He expressed his love for his wife by casting her in his movies. They made many films together, but many more were waiting in his imagination.

  “We talked more about film than about life,” said Madame.

  Shin was oblivious to the world around him unless he could see it as part of a film. The same applied to people. One time, Madame noticed him staring at their sofa. It would fit well into a film that he was working on, he said. The next day, he sent an assistant to pick it up. A little later, she found him staring at her antique bureau. It was a family heirloom, in fact the only heirloom she had. The bureau was close to her heart, and she asked him to leave it be. The next day it was gone. Shin told the crying Madame: “You are also a cinephile, so you can’t hate me too much for taking it.”

  IN THE 1950S, Shin built up a small film production and distribution company called Seoul Films. The financing had its peaks and valleys. Film production was considered a luxury and was heavily taxed. The censors were uncompromising and there were many onscreen taboos. Nothing that touched on the topic of Japan or Japanese rule could pass. She says that the 1955 costume drama The Youth (Jeolmeun geudell), in which she had the role of a Mata Hari–like character who plots against the Japanese oppressors, was banned and the 1968 film The Eunuch (Naeshi) — about a king, his concubine, and her lover — was hacked into pieces.

  THE FILM COUPLE lived hand to mouth. In 1958 they made Flower in Hell on a low budget, purely out of enthusiasm. Shin was inspired by Italian neorealism, and Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief and Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City had made a huge impact on him. Flower in Hell is about a young man who goes to Seoul to bring his wayward brother back to the countryside, only to become seduced by his sibling’s corrupt lifestyle. It was shot on the streets of Seoul and around the U.S. Army barracks, where the prostitutes were. These women wore American 1950s dresses, smoked cigarettes, chewed gum, and drank Budweiser.

  Madame plays Sonya, a prostitute who stumbles through the chaotic, sandy environment of the barracks, where jeeps filled with American soldiers stir up dust along the barbed-wire-fenced roads. The barracks are the stomping grounds of pimps and petty thieves, and Sonya is in a relationship with one of the thieves — a gang leader who wants to get their lives in order, move out of Seoul, and live a good, honourable life. For Sonya, this is a hopeless dream. Prostitutes are merely the temporary companions of American soldiers and are considered untouchable by decent Korean society; they occupy a no man’s land. As Sonya’s friend Judy says: “If we can neither live with the Americans nor the Koreans, then who are we?”

  THE COUPLE’S FINANCIAL situation improved at the end of the 1950s, if only temporarily. These were their best years. South Korea’s first president, Rhee Syng-man, had built the massive Anyang Studios, which housed tons of film equipment. His successor, General Park, was a huge fan of Shin and Choi, and he waxed most lyrical about Evergreen Tree (1961), which is set in 1930s Korea. Choi Eun-hee plays the “good teacher,” an idealistic character who starts a school in a rural village. Eventually, she overcomes the mistrust of the illiterate villagers and triumphs over Japan’s bureaucracy. Children flood into her classroom, and every day she writes her slogan on the chalkboard: “Rouse the masses from darkness!” She joins the farmers in the fields and packs clay on the walls of the school. But she overexerts herself, and her battle with a terminal illness is a drawn-out, melodramatic elegy.

  With Evergreen Tree in mind, General Park thought Shin should be the man to take over Anyang Studios. The problem was that Shin Films — as his company was now called — would also have to take over Anyang’s debts. Shin didn’t have much business sense. If one of his films became a blockbuster, he sank all of the profits into his next project, which might flop. Financially speaking, it was a roller coaster. But Shin didn’t worry about these things. “Art can’t speculate with money,” he would say.

  Shin also encouraged Madame to direct. In 1965 she made her directorial debut with A Girl Raised as a Future Daughter-in-Law (Minmyeoneuri), the story of a poor young girl who is sold to a rich family whose rotten son is her intended. At the time, she was only the third-ever female director in South Korea.

  When we told Madame that we’d seen this film the other day at Seoul’s Korean Film Archive, as well as her subsequent film Princess in Love (Gongjunim-ui jjaksarang, 1967), she looked surprised. She had no idea that a copy of Princess in Love still existed; she thought that it had completely disappeared. In all honesty, she’d never seen the finished film and she would surely be ashamed if she saw it today, she said, and then laughed.

  Like so many movies from that time, Princess in Love takes places in a historical setting, during the Joseon dynasty. The story follows an Audrey Hepburn-esque princess who falls in love with a man of the people. She tries to escape
from the palace in order to get a glimpse of her beloved, who sits by a river and daydreams while fishing. The ruler has his guards secretly follow her. When he discovers she’s in love with the young man, the guards capture her and lock her in a cage like a runaway house cat. She is taken back to the palace and “released” back into her golden prison.

  In the 1960s, impossible love was a major theme in South Korean films; specifically the power of tradition and the misery that befalls those who try to undermine custom. In both traditional family life and political life, it was disastrous for anyone to cross society’s strict boundaries.

  BY THE EARLY 1970s, Shin had a shot at becoming the king of South Korean cinema, with Choi as his queen. But Shin and his director colleagues had grown increasingly frustrated by the strict censorship laws, and they began to air their complaints openly. General Park was convinced that Shin was mobilizing the directors guild. When news spread that Shin had also initiated an affair with the young actress Oh Su-mi, the scandal was too much for the dictator. Madame recounted this without bitterness. In 1975, Shin’s working permit as a producer was revoked, which meant he was prohibited from working at all. In the same breath, their marriage broke apart.

  THE CONDENSATION FROM Madame Choi’s glass made a small pool on the marble table. She sat up straight and searched her memory. Maybe she was also searching for the words that would make the unbelievable believable. Finally, she began telling us the story of her kidnapping. How in January 1978 she had turned fifty. How she spent all of her time at the film school that she had started with Shin. How she had travelled to Hong Kong for the business meeting. How the trip was supposed to last no more than ten days, but it would be ten years before she set foot on South Korean soil again.