All Monsters Must Die

by Magnus Bärtås

  We had been speaking with Madame Choi for close to three hours. She wasn’t showing signs of fatigue, only vague charges of suppressed emotion every now and then. She seemed to have forgotten that the interview was supposed to have lasted only an hour. Now she wanted to take us to lunch.

  A taxi was hailed for us, and we sailed into Seoul’s viscous traffic. The weather forecasters had predicted that the stormy weather would soon culminate in rain, and their predictions were accurate down to the hour. We had one day left until the rainy season began.

  WE WERE LET off on a boulevard lined with sycamores and led into a bulgogi restaurant. Steel platters with glowing coals were placed before us. Madame instructed the personnel and soon the table was covered with dishes: two kinds of octopus, two types of kimchi, pepper, garlic in oil, bean paste, and lettuce and perilla leaves to wrap the meat in. Madame ordered several bottles of soju and filled our glasses.

  She continued telling her story about her time in captivity in the golden palace in North Korea. She talked about her idleness and how she passed the time; how she had longed for her children, worried about her students at the film school, and thought about Shin.

  Suddenly, Madame whimpered. She took out a handkerchief and dabbed her eyes behind her large, tinted glasses. She was remembering Shin’s appearance at Kim Jong-il’s surprise party. She turned to our interpreter and put her fingers between his eyebrows.

  “Here were large, white flecks,” she said, her voice thick with emotion. “His hair was grey and stood on end. His ankles were completely swollen.”

  For a moment, Madame sat in silence with her memories. Then she served us our meat, which had finished grilling, and we wrapped it in the leaves. We toasted with our soju, but Madame looked sombre. The memories of Shin’s hardships had taken hold of her; she said she had a guilty conscience. She had been a luxury-prisoner living in a mansion, and he had suffered the worst.

  But once Shin was released and the two were reunited, they were given everything they needed for film production. The resources were unbelievable, and they got to choose their locations in the Soviet Union and China.

  “Kim Jong-il was extremely knowledgeable about art and film,” said Madame. “He was on the same level as Shin.”

  We were stunned by her words of praise for her kidnapper, the figure who is always depicted as a mad playboy, ridiculous in his brown creepers, his lifted soles, that chubby body — “North Korea’s only fat man” — the applauding baby hands, and above all his hair, that blow-dried swell meant to make him look taller but which actually made him look like an obscure rockabilly artist.

  Then we realized that we’d misunderstood an important part of this story. We’d been thinking of it as a Faustian bargain, where the artist-couple chose to sell their souls to those in power. We’d spoken about the princely theme: to be forced to produce, to become an extension of that power. Now Madame was talking about the enormous opportunities they’d been given. For the first time, they didn’t have to worry about money. While there was indeed a political agenda, dictated by Kim Jong-il, it had all been very informal when it came to the kidnapped guests. Kim Jong-il loved their films and encouraged them to create.

  They hadn’t moved from freedom to imprisonment. After all, at the time Korea was made up of two dictatorships. They’d just moved from one prison to the next. And both dictators loved their films.

  MADAME WAS FILLING our glasses. Her back was to the large television in the restaurant, so she couldn’t see the commercial, which we guessed was for a hair trimmer. A Kim Jong-il lookalike was being filmed from the back, sitting in a barber’s chair. The hairdresser had just put the finishing touches to the hair at his neck. “Kim” turned and smiled.

  The real Kim Jong-il rearranged the calendar as he saw fit. Shin Sang-ok was born in October, but Kim decided to host a birthday banquet for him in September. In February the next year, they were invited to celebrate Kim Jong-il’s birthday. Like Madame’s previous invitation to the firstborn son’s birthday, this was a sign of being favoured absolutely by the dictator, a favouritism that didn’t even extend to members of his innermost political circle. Many were green with envy.

  ONE OF THE films Shin and Madame made in North Korea was Salt (Sogeum, 1985). We’d seen it listed in an anthology about female filmmakers in South Korea as Choi Eun-hee’s fourth and final film as a director. But now she denied directing it. She said her name was often added as co-director, but she didn’t know why. Shin was the director and Madame had played the lead. At the 1985 Moscow International Film Festival, she was awarded the Best Actress prize for her performance in Salt.

  The grand international productions were what mattered to the couple because these allowed them to stretch the boundaries of their imprisonment. They were issued passports and could move around the Eastern bloc, even if North Korean “bodyguards” constantly shadowed them. Shin was clever about satisfying the system. He used the KAPF texts, which always had a revolutionary foundation, as a starting point. And then he put his own spin on them.

  IN 1986, THE couple was invited to be on the jury at a film festival in Vienna. They were chaperoned by their bodyguards. On the way to the festival’s cinema they were given the unusual opportunity of taking their own taxi. Their overcoats were in the taxi behind them. At one point, a couple of cars cut between the two vehicles. Shin and Madame noted this and convinced their driver to turn right at a crossing, in the direction of the American embassy. Soon, the bodyguards realized that they’d been shaken off. They radioed the chauffeur in the couple’s car and asked him where they were. At that moment, Shin and Madame handed the driver a bundle of cash and convinced him to lie about where they were going.

  The car neared the American embassy, and at last found a place to stop. They threw themselves out of the taxi and rushed onto the grounds of the embassy. Madame and Shin asked for political asylum in the United States. But Madame has never forgotten that Shin pushed past her in order to get through the door of the American embassy first.

  OUR LUNCH ENDED with cold glass noodles in large stainless-steel bowls. It was a meal in itself. Glass noodles should be easy to swallow, but they clumped together and slid around our mouths like a second tongue. Madame, on the other hand, hungrily slurped hers up. It had been Shin’s favourite dish, she said. He used to empty his bowl with only two lifts of his chopsticks.

  Madame continued her story, looking worried as she spoke about Kim Jong-il. The dictator had refused to believe that they had left him out of their own free will. He sent a letter in which he offered to help them get back to Pyongyang. Madame spoke as if she were in his debt. She and Shin made seven films during those eight years and another ten were in development. They had paid back everything that had been put in an Austrian bank account for their services in North Korea. Every dollar. That’s probably why she was still alive, she speculated. Otherwise she might have been murdered by North Korean agents.

  The staff started to clear the table. Madame stood up and grabbed her handbag. We followed her to the cash register, where she elegantly placed the bill on the counter. It had been taken care of without either of us noticing.

  Outside the restaurant we met Madame’s son, who was going to take her to the hospital for a regular check-up. The man was in his forties, and he was one of the two children that Madame and Shin had adopted. Shin and his lover, Oh Su-mi, also had two children but Oh died in a car accident in Hawaii and, since then, Madame had looked upon Oh’s children as her own.

  We said goodbye and slowly started walking back down the sycamore-lined boulevard to the hum of the traffic.

  THE NEXT DAY, we took a trip to the old city wall in Seoul and saw traces of shamanistic rituals in the forest. Food had been offered to the forefathers, even though small signs had been posted stating that shamanistic rituals were forbidden.

  Shamanism still has sweeping importance in South Korea. Regular citizens
and politicians, members of the military, and leaders of business turn to shamans, mediums (mudang), and clairvoyants (jumsung-ga) for help with important questions, even if they often don’t acknowledge it publicly. Many still think it would be irresponsible to not pay a specialist (chonmunga) for advice when naming a baby. Destiny is written into a name.

  Shamanism has deep roots, deeper than the Confucianism imported from China, and often this more impassioned and unbridled belief system has a stronger impact on daily life. The flashes of hot temper and open superstition you encounter in South Korea are far from the restraint and unflagging integrity of the people in neighbouring Japan. In North Korea, the supernatural powers that the ruling dynasty possesses, according to propaganda, are presumably tied to the shamanistic tradition ingrained in Korea.

  AFTER WE WANDERED along the city wall, we sat in a screening room in the film archive and watched Salt, the film Madame had told us about the previous day. It’s a story about one woman’s unrelenting hardships, in the vein of Maxim Gorky’s socially engaged melodramas. Salt introduced a number of new concepts in North Korean film, Madame had explained. Before, cinema was considered the fruit of the nameless collective’s efforts, but with this film the director’s and actors’ names were listed in the credits. Dialect was used for the first time instead of standardized North Korean, which was a dramatic development. The public was shocked by certain scenes. One rape scene was so explicit that Kim Il-sung himself was forced to publicly defend it, explaining that it was motivated by art.

  Salt takes place in the 1930s, when the Japanese colonial rulers and the Chinese landowners made a pact that essentially enslaved all Koreans. Salt was a valuable commodity and is a metaphor for living under oppression. The Koreans live an impoverished life in all respects, “like food without salt.” After numerous humiliations and a life of poverty, Madame’s character becomes a salt smuggler who gets caught at the Chinese–Korean border. Only in the last scene, when the Communist rebels have killed the Chinese militia group that attacks the smugglers, she understands who the righteous ones are in the political struggle. She realizes that “Communism is the salt of the world.” In this way, Shin resolved an ideological problem.

  IT WAS REMARKABLE watching Madame play a mother to small children — at the time of filming, she was fifty-seven years old. Even more remarkable was imagining the circumstances of the film’s production. Shin had just recovered from his four years of imprisonment on a grass diet, some of it spent in an isolation cell where he couldn’t even lie down. Now he was shooting scenes where Madame was thrown in prison, starved, abused, and raped. She plays a victim of social injustice. They themselves were prisoners with a certain amount of artistic freedom and great economic freedom. It was the art itself — their empathy, skills, and vision — that Kim Jong-il coveted. He understood that certain things couldn’t be bought with money or created in a laboratory. People with specialized skills and unique talent were simply useful bodies that had to be obtained, and one had to hope that they wouldn’t fall to pieces. Maybe those years of imprisonment were meant to give them experiences that they could then channel into art. Perhaps this had been his plan.

  * * *

  IN A PARKING lot on our way out of Panmunjom in the DMZ, we bump into Alejandro Cao de Benós de Les y Pérez. This complicated name belongs to a thirty-four-year-old Spanish man of noble birth, known for his participation in the documentary Friends of Kim. There he was simply called Alejandro, short and sweet. He was, and is, president of the Korean Friendship Association (KFA).

  In the documentary, the camera followed his officious progress, travelling around the country and participating in a peaceful march calling for reunification, as well as various “acts of solidarity” with the North Korean people. After the march, members of the KFA join a group of North Korean workers for an hour. As part of this performance, Alejandro carries a pile of stones in solidarity with a labourer and makes a lofty proclamation about North Korea: “We are constructing a paradise, a worker’s paradise. And that’s the most important thing.”

  “And how far along are we?” asks the documentarian. “Halfway?”

  “Oh, I think more than halfway,” Alejandro responds. “If we compare with the rest of the world, we are already at 80 percent. And if we are talking about human feelings and heart, we are at least 95 percent there.”

  The documentary shows seeds of doubt growing among the KFA members, who become ever more wary of the “wonder” that is North Korea, while Alejandro, unfazed, charges forth, leading group songs and shaking hands with everyone he meets.

  In Panmunjom he tries to lead the group in protest against the United States, bellowing: “Yankees go home.” Toward the end of the trip he breaks into a room belonging to a journalist in the group, the American Andrew Morse, who was then with ABC News. He pries open a locked box, confiscates video footage and notes, and then hands them over to the authorities. Alejandro forces Morse to sign a confession of guilt, stating that he apologizes for all the criticisms he has voiced during a visit to a farming collective. Only then is he allowed to leave the country.

  Since 2000, Alejandro has been responsible for North Korea’s official website. The country has been so pleased with his contributions it has awarded him a series of honours, as well a position in the Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.

  Alejandro looks very happy as he climbs aboard our bus. He wears a well-tailored outfit that he is said to have designed himself, based on the uniform of the Korean People’s Army. Elias pushes to the front to get his photo taken with Alejandro, who straightens up and smiles. His military attire has virtually no wrinkles or creases.

  When Alejandro has taken his leave and the bus rolls away from Panmunjom, Ari and Trond take out their North Korean flag and start singing “The Internationale,” a popular socialist anthem that has been sung since the late nineteenth century.

  The videographer is ready with his camera again.

  THE DMZ IS a no man’s land that stretches along the two countries’ border. It is a wide area that contains green fields and a small village called Kijong-dong, which the South Koreans say is a façade — that the houses are merely cement shells patrolled by functionaries and the lights are turned on and off at regular intervals. Here in the village, the North Koreans have erected one of the world’s tallest flagpoles — 160 metres — in order to break the record held by the South Koreans, who built a 98-metre flagpole in the DMZ village Daeseong-dong in the 1980s. They also started an audio war. Since the 1950s, the North Koreans have bombarded the South with revolutionary operas and propaganda speeches using enormous loudspeakers. In 2004, the South retaliated with a sonic wall of Korean pop. This time the two sides managed to end this unbearable situation at the negotiation table, where they agreed to a sonic ceasefire.

  Soon after we leave the DMZ, we get a flat tire. Mr. Song, the bus driver, and the videographer are down to their undershirts, struggling to change the tire in the heat. The Bromma boys think it’s incredibly funny; Bruno, who towers over everyone like a giant, calmly observes it all. He’s about twice as tall as Mr. Song and could easily lift the tire without having to bend his knees. His enormous back and muscles are ready to spring into action. We look expectantly at him. But Mr. Song and the bus driver don’t want his help; they are going to take care of this with true Juche spirit, or “uri minjok-kkiri” — “only our people together [can take care of this]” — as they say in both North and South Korea.

  One of the Bromma boys spreads out a beach towel on the asphalt, strips to his underwear, and lies down. One of his friends takes a picture of him posing. He makes sure to get the tire-changing in the background. Tiny North Koreans struggling with giant tires.

  “This is fun,” he says.

  * * *

  SHIN SANG-OK AND Madame Choi weren’t alone in their plight as prisoners in North Korea. But what differentiates their destiny from other
abductees is that we have a public record of their activities: their movies. The films they made in the North can be seen as documents filled with messages and metaphors. One feature that wasn’t made during their time in North Korea, but which has still been endowed with symbolic value, is the 1964 drama Red Muffler (Ppalgan mahura). This film commemorates the South Korean air raids on the North during the Korean War. Shin had half of the film’s 35mm negatives with him when he was kidnapped, as well as The Red Gate (Yeolnyeomun, 1962) and Pyongyang Bombing Squad (Pyongyang pokgyokdae, 1971). The reels were seized, but Shin managed to record what he had of Red Muffler with a video camera. After the couple’s escape from North Korea, this was merged with the other half of the film in South Korea. The result is a remarkable document that explores both the division of the country and Shin’s own story. We watched the spliced version at the Korean Film Archive in Seoul. The quality of Shin’s video footage creates a filter, like a new layer of history in the story of the war.

  The film’s title plays on the red muffler scarfs the South Korean fighter pilots wore with pride, but which at the same time carried with them the values of the Red Guard and the associations of North Korean schoolchildren. The mufflers synthesize values and worlds, not least establishing a link between North and South, as David Scott Diffrient shows in the essay “Han’guk Heroism: Cinematic Spectacle and the Postwar Cultural Politics of Red Muffler.” The muffler is a symbol of the enemy’s scalp, and an object that saves lives, and something that is passed on from hand to hand in the same way that the character Chi-son, played by Madame Choi, goes from owner to owner, from wife to prostitute to wife again.

  General Park gave Shin generous resources for this project: Red Muffler was to become a military recruitment film as well as a celebration of the South Korean dictator himself. In the scenes in which North Korean villages are bombed, no maimed people or crying children are shown; instead we are given the pilot’s perspective as he looks over the controls and levers, like in a video game.