The Reluctant Communist

by Charles Robert Jenkins

  Abshier and Anocha did not have any children, so Anocha, over the next several years, played the role of aunt to the rest of our growing families. Parrish and Siham had three sons. Nahi was the first of all the kids (and the baby that brought on Siham’s return to North Korea after she was freed by her mother’s efforts). He was born in April 1980. After that, Siham had Michael in August 1981 and Ricky in the spring of 1986. Dresnok and Dona had two sons. Ricardo was born in late 1980, and Gabi was born in the spring of 1984.

  As for Hitomi and me, Mika was born June 1, 1983, and Brinda came along July 23, 1985. The births of my daughters were two of the happiest days of my life. Because we lost our son, it was still my wife’s turn to name our first child. She chose Mika, which means “beautiful,” and the middle name of “Roberta,” after me. The second child’s name was my turn. I chose Brenda Carol, which was the name of my half-sister back home. I chose that name because I wanted my daughter’s name to be a continuation of my family back in the States, but I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of any of my other five sisters. Since Brenda was the last child and the only half-sister, she was special in a couple of ways, so it was easy to choose her individually yet also have the name be a way to pay tribute to the whole family. About the discrepancy between the spellings of my sister’s and my daughter’s names—how my daughter became “Brinda,” spelled with an “I” instead of with an “E,” the way my sister spells it—I can’t really say, except that until two or three years ago, nobody ever wrote my daughter’s name in English. Somewhere along the way, whether it was a transcription variation between English and Korean or just a mistake that someone made once that then kept getting passed along, the spelling got changed. Now my daughter is “Brinda,” and “Brinda” she will remain.

  Even as our apartment building seemed like one giant nursery and all of the children were great playmates, it would be a stretch to say all the adults got along well. It wasn’t long after they met, for example, that Dona started in on my wife. Dona’s favorite way to torment Hitomi: to try to convince everyone that Hitomi was actually a Korean and a spy sent to nail us all. She would tell anyone who would listen that she suspected Hitomi’s story about being Japanese and being kidnapped was all a big lie. One of Dona’s favorite points of proof? Our wedding pictures, in which Hitomi was wearing a traditional Korean dress.

  I came home from teaching at the university one week to find my wife crying hysterically on the bed. I asked her what the matter was, and she said, “I have done something horrible.” I asked what she did, and she said, “Something awful.” So I asked her again, and she responded, “Do you promise you’ll forgive me?” At this point, I began to fear the worst, that she had cheated on me or murdered someone or something like that, so I got panicked and became impatient. “Dammit, woman, what did you do?” I yelled. At which point she sobbed, “I burned the wedding pictures!” Jesus, what a relief! I was sorry to see the wedding pictures go, but after that buildup, I can honestly say I was happy to hear that that was all it was.

  It was around this time that Parrish supplanted Dresnok as the biggest stooge for the North Koreans. Since his wife was allowed to go back and forth to Italy to see her mother for a few weeks every few years, and since they received money from abroad, he thought he and his family were better than the rest of us. Siham, too. She cultivated such a superiority complex that the rest of us started sarcastically calling her the “Imim-bong jang,” which is a party designation for someone under a leader who is the boss in charge of watching a floor or a set of floors of an apartment building.

  Even with the frequent personality clashes that occurred among such a small group in these strange and often stressful circumstances, we all realized that we had no choice: Our four families had to try to get along the best we could. We had to, since we were forced to do everything together. Take our children’s education. After we moved into the apartment, the house that Abshier and Anocha had been living in was turned into a kindergarten, just for our kids. (That house was also the leaders’ quarters.) There were three little desks in the house’s main room, and each of our kids would spend two years there, from about the time they were six until they were eight. Nahi, Ricardo, and Michael were the first “class.” Mika and Gabi were in the second “class.” And Brinda and Ricky were in the third “class.” There, they would learn to count, recite their alphabet, and, of course, learn their first revolutionary songs singing the praises of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.

  Once each “class” got out of kindergarten, the children enrolled in the school that was part of the large collective farm that bordered our house. The schoolhouse itself was about a thirty- or forty-minute walk away, and the school had about thirty or forty students per class. The farm school had a grade school, a middle school, and a high school. I was not much of a student myself, so I am not one to judge, but it didn’t seem like the schools taught much more than propaganda. They watched movies and got lectures almost constantly about how evil Americans were. Surprisingly, however, none of our kids experienced discrimination at school because they were half-American. They were treated more like exotic and rare specimens rather than half-breeds or mongrels, as you might have guessed. Even so, I tried to tell my girls not to believe all of the America-hating stuff they were taught. For some reason, Mika seemed to buy into the propaganda a bit more than Brinda did, but one of the many reasons I am glad Mika and Brinda are out of North Korea is that they can finally get a proper education. You spend that much time on indoctrination, I figure, and a lot of the reading, writing, and arithmetic just had to be neglected.

  Aside from the propaganda, there were other ways in which North Korean schools were unique. How many other countries do you know of where the students have to pull guard duty to defend their school from thieves—and the primary class of thieves they are guarding against is the army? Girls and younger boys only pulled daytime duty, but older boys would be required to guard at night throughout the week and over the weekends. As they would anywhere else in North Korea, soldiers would steal anything they could get their hands on, but what they wanted most of all from the school was the preserving alcohol used during science experiments. They didn’t want to drink it, and they certainly weren’t dissecting frogs. The army wanted the alcohol to put into the radiators of the their tractors, since they didn’t have any proper antifreeze.

  The 1980s were probably the high point for sighting abductees and other noteworthy foreigners. There were always foreign diplomats, exchange students, and a few businessmen and NGO workers in Pyongyang whenever you went. But I am talking about Japanese and people of other nationalities who you could just sense were there for mysterious purposes. I don’t know why our contact with them dropped off dramatically in the 1990s, but my theory is that it had something to do with the aftermath of Korean Airlines Flight 858 getting blown out of the sky in late 1987 and the female North Korean agent who confessed a lot about the Japanese abductees’ involvement in spy training. The Organization must have clamped down on them after that. Our conduct didn’t change in the 1990s, after all. We still kept going to the same hotels, shops, and hospitals in Pyongyang, but we simply bumped into fewer people like that, the ones you would see and say to yourself, “They have a story North Korea would prefer we didn’t know.”

  For example, one day in 1986, Parrish, Siham, Hitomi, and I were shopping at the Rakwon Dollar Store. It’s a two-story building, and we were at the top of the main staircase when Siham nudged Parrish and Parrish nudged me. Two non-Korean Asians were coming up the stairs. Parrish said, “That’s the Japanese we were telling you about.” It was a Japanese man and his Japanese wife. “Good afternoon,” said the Japanese man. “How are you?” he asked, in some of the best English I had heard from a nonnative English speaker in all my time in North Korea. The man was very handsome. The woman was also good looking, though her very thick glasses made that harder to see at first glance. The woman and Siham obviously knew each other from before and exchanged greeti
ngs. The man and the woman did not seem to be with a leader, though neither were we at the moment, and we chatted in English for about five or ten minutes. At the top of the stairs was a counter filled with pens, stationery, and small office equipment. The couple was looking for a tape recorder, and as the man did most of the talking, the woman examined the tape recorders under the glass very intently. They took a good, long look at my wife as we talked, but Hitomi hung back and did not reveal herself to be Japanese.

  Not less than a month before, Siham had returned from the hospital after giving birth to her son, Ricky. She said that her roommate in the hospital was a Japanese woman who had had a son about a week before. During their time together, Siham told us, the woman said that she and her husband had been kidnapped from Europe where they were studying English. She also said that the woman told her that the people who took them were members of the same Japanese terrorist organization that had hijacked a plane in 1970.

  After returning from North Korea, my wife and I realized that Siham’s story and our memories of the Japanese couple’s appearances matched Toru Ishioka and Keiko Arimoto exactly. Ishioka and Arimoto were both kidnapped from Europe—in 1980 and 1983, respectively—by Japanese people who were affiliated with the Red Army Faction members that in 1970 hijacked to Pyongyang Japan Airlines Flight 351, a plane known as the Yodogo. During the 1970s and early 1980s, the Japanese Red Army faction was one of the most notorious radical, paramilitary groups in the world. Ishioka and Arimoto are the couple that the North Korean government says died on November 4, 1988, of carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty home heating system. The North Korean government also claims that the couple’s child, who they say died on November 4 as well, was a daughter. But I am absolutely certain that Siham said that the woman had had a son.

  There was another Japanese woman whom we saw seemingly everywhere between the years 1980 and 1985. She was short, very pretty, and in her early twenties. She was always alone, except for being accompanied by a leader and a driver. We saw her oodles of times at the Rakwon Dollar Store. We saw her several times a year, but we could never time it just right to speak to her. The last I heard of her was in June of 1985. I was in the hospital at the time since I had broken my collarbone. Parrish, Siham, Anocha, Hitomi (who was about eight months pregnant with Brinda), Mika, Nahi, and Michael were all on their way to an amusement park at Manyongdae and stopped by to see if the doctor would let me come with them. But the doctor said no way. Parrish told me later that they had all spotted the Japanese woman at the amusement park. When you walk into the park, on the left there is an arcade, with things like an electronic shooting range and a game where you hit the heads of the plastic gophers that pop out of holes. She was in there, Parrish said, completely alone, and there were a couple of Koreans guarding the door. They told him he couldn’t go in there, but he told them to go to hell. He pushed his way through and was about to say something to her, but she took the commotion as a sign to skedaddle before he could. As the rest of his group came in the door to the arcade, she and her Korean minders were on their way out.

  In 1982, Hitomi, Anocha, and I went to a musical at the Mansudae Art Theater. The Song of Paradise was the name of the show. We were in a box seat along the side on an upper balcony. In the box seat next to ours were two young Japanese women. We could not see them because there were dividers between the boxes, but we could hear them speaking Japanese. I tried to mess with them by saying the only Japanese words I knew as loudly as I could. I would go, cough, cough, “Arigato!” over the divider. My wife, who was sitting next to me, would secretly pinch me hard to get me to shut up. When the show was over, we dallied as long as we could on the street to catch a glimpse of them. Eventually, they did come out. We saw them get into their car with their leader and drive off. Japanese were not the only abductees, of course. Dona, Anocha, and, to a lesser extent, Siham were all abductees, after all. We never met any other people who confessed to being stolen from their homelands, but over the years we would learn to spot people we suspected were not there by choice. The way they looked, the types of leaders they were with, the cars they were chauffeured in—you just learned to develop a hunch for these things. I have looked at all the pictures of suspected female Japanese abductees, and none of them looked like the two women in the theater or the woman we used to see frequently in Pyongyang. I cannot guarantee I would be able to recognize them again like I could Ishioka and Arimoto, but so far I haven’t seen any other photos of people who look familiar.

  Americans were a real rarity in North Korea. Some of them would come in for diplomatic meetings or NGO work, I suppose, but I never met any of them. The only people I was 100 percent certain were American were our foursome. And there was Suhr Anna. I am sure about her, too. I am not sure the whole history I heard about her is true, but I am sure she was American. She was a legendary (or maybe “notorious” is the right word) person in North Korea. The supposed backstory on her was that her husband was a radio broadcaster in Seoul when the war broke out. His radio show made a broadcast railing against the war, and the South Korean Army came and shot him, but she escaped to the North. Once set up in the North, they say, she became Seoul City Sue, the Tokyo Rose figure who made Englishlanguage radio broadcasts during the war trying to break the morale of American soldiers in the South by telling them how their girlfriends back home were probably cheating on them or just by reading the names of American soldiers who had been killed that day. I don’t know if anybody has been able to answer the question of whether she was a true believer or a kind of abductee or prisoner herself who was forced to help North Korea against her will.

  Later, she became in charge of all English publications for the Korean Central News Agency. Abshier had dinner with her once, in 1962, just after he had crossed over. That dinner was part of a photo spread for a propaganda pamphlet called “Lucky Boy.” There was a picture of them in that pamphlet just laughing their heads off like they were having the best time in the world. Abshier said Suhr Anna told him that it was hard at first to live in North Korea but that he would eventually come to like it.

  I met her in 1965 when I went to the “foreigners only” section of the No. 2 Department Store. I was by myself. (Our leader at the time had just said, “Yeah, go on; go ahead,” when I asked to go to the store and let me go alone.) I recognized her from the “Lucky Boy” pamphlet, so I walked up to her and said, “Hello, Suhr Anna-senseng” (senseng is the Korean word for “teacher”). It was winter, and she was wearing a black leather overcoat, very put-together. She looked surprised and turned, looked at me, and said, “Oh, you must be the American who just came over.” I said, “Uh-huh,” but she was spooked. The second we met, she wanted to get the hell out of there. She excused herself, saying she really needed to be going, and was gone.

  That was the last I heard of her until 1973. We were teaching at the military school, and one of the instructors said he was going to the Korean Central News Agency to pick up some texts or booklets or something. Dresnok said, “Say hello to Suhr Anna for us!” The teacher dropped his things and said, “You want me to say hello to that dead, goddamn spy!?” We had no idea what he was talking about. He told us that they caught her in 1969 as a double agent. She had been secretly feeding information to the South for years, he said, and they executed her. I have no idea if any of this is true, but that is what they told me, and we certainly never saw her again or heard from anyone who had.

  People always ask me about Joseph White, the U.S. Army private who walked across the DMZ in 1982, the first GI to do so since I did. But I never met White and never saw him, except for watching the press conference he did in Pyongyang shortly after he crossed on TV. He was wearing his uniform and gave some predictable words of praise to Kim Il-sung and the paradise he had created in North Korea. Watching White, I considered myself lucky that I never had to do one of those press conferences. I never heard from him or saw him again. On April 15, 1984, though, we were having a holiday party, as always, for the cadre
s (April 15 is Kim Il-sung’s birthday), and I said to one of them, “Why don’t you bring White here? We could use another face, and if they got along, he could be Anocha’s new husband.” (As early as 1972, the Tall Cadre had told us that we were such a bunch of fuck-ups that they would never, ever put any more Americans with us, so I knew this was a long shot.) But this cadre—a guy we called the One-Hour Cadre since he never overstayed his welcome, unlike all the others—just said, “Uh-uh. We can’t use White.” He said that White had had some sort of accident or stroke and was now paralyzed. And that was the end of that. I have found out since getting to Japan that the most often told story about White was that he drowned around 1985. I don’t know which story about him is true. Maybe both. Maybe neither.

  Anocha left in April 1989. A few months before her departure, some cadres came to say that they had found her another husband. She wanted to stay and have the husband come here. And we wanted that, too. The Organization said that would not happen. Her new husband was a German and did some sort of business that required frequent trips abroad, so maybe it wound up being a big step up for Anocha. Regardless, we were sad to see her go because she was the person in the apartment building we were closest to by far. Hitomi was particularly sad because they had become very good friends over the years. The night before Anocha left, she came over to our apartment for a farewell party. It was just the three of us. She brought a bottle of wine and a cassette tape of American rock and roll songs from the 1950s and1960s. We got drunk and did the twist all night long, playing “Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard over and over and over again.