Most of our contact with foreigners was with people whose presence there could easily be explained—students, diplomats, businessmen. I know the Organization preferred we didn’t associate with them, but as long as we did it in limited doses, there wasn’t much they could do to stop it. A lot of Syrians were studying medicine at the No. 11 Hospital, which was right near the Pyongyang Shop, for example, so we would see them often and got to know some of them pretty well. Siham would speak Arabic with them, and she would frequently trade foreign currency with them. She would trade money with them on our behalf, too, saying she got a better rate because they were more comfortable dealing with her, but she always took a monstrous cut. Through acting in the movies, I also became friends with people like the son of the Cuban ambassador. And through a chance meeting in the Pyongyang Shop, I became buddies with the Nigerian ambassador, too.
One big character in our lives was an Ethiopian named Sammy who was a composition student at the Pyongyang music college. Sammy would hang around the Pyongyang Shop’s restaurant every afternoon. He was there so often, it was like his home. I doubt he ever studied. He was the person who slipped us most of the movies we would watch. In 1989, Parrish bought a VCR for about 620 won. Having a VCR was legal, but the biggest problem was that there was nothing to watch. We told Sammy we were sick of watching North Korean propaganda movies on tape, and he said he would start bringing us real movies.
We soon developed a handoff system. Whenever we went to the Pyongyang Shop’s restaurant, we would take a bag with us. Sammy, as I said, was almost always guaranteed to be there. As you walked in the restaurant, there was a window to the left that had long, floor-length curtains. Behind these curtains was the drop-off point. After we walked in, Sammy would get up, disappear for a few minutes, come back, and sit down at our table. While we were chatting, he would mention that “things were in position.” That was our signal that the tapes were there and the coast was clear. One of us would get up and grab the tapes he had just left there.
Thanks to Sammy, we got to see a pretty steady supply of Western movies. We would watch them at Parrish’s house, with all the curtains drawn and the volume turned down as low as possible. That was how we became familiar with Michael Jackson’s music. Sammy brought us “Thriller” on video. I have to say, Michael Jackson seemed like a pretty strange guy even then. Some of the many movies he lent us included a lot of the James Bond movies, Titanic, Cliffhanger, Coming to America, and many of the Die Hards. Sometimes it seemed like there were as many Die Hard movies as James Bond movies. For a few years in the early 1990s, Parrish got into the black market tape-selling business. He got a second VCR and would duplicate the tapes he borrowed from Sammy, cramming about four movies onto one cassette at LP speed, and then he would give them to his son, Michael, to sell to some Chinese he knew in a nearby town.
My daughters didn’t watch the movies much. I think it was hard for them to relate to them. They seemed so strange and otherworldly; they could hardly make sense of them. In Coming to America, for example, Eddie Murphy stars as an African prince who finds a wife in New York City, but Brinda and Mika had always been taught that black people in America were still basically slaves, so to see these shots of all the races walking around freely and basically getting along with each other on the streets of New York City was too much for them. Even though Coming to America was a fairy tale involving princes and princesses, I tried to tell them that it was still a better view of what the world was really like than the life we were living. I would always tell them, “We are not in the real world. This is not the real world.” But they didn’t believe me. It was the only world they knew.
7 | Domestic Life
I am well aware that we Americans and our families were a special, even privileged group in North Korea and that our tales of hardship do not compare to the truly unimaginable suffering that so many North Koreans endure every day. Perhaps millions of North Koreans have already starved to death since famines began hitting the country in the mid-1990s, and a huge percentage of the country’s citizens still live with the constant torture of not having enough food to eat or clean water to drink. In addition, many hundreds of thousands, if not more, have been worked to death and are still being worked to death in the nation’s prisons and gulags. Our situation, it is true, was never remotely that dire. We always had a shelter and never went without food for more than a day or two. But even so, the life we lived was never easy, and our “privileged” existence here would have been considered unspeakable in much of the rest of the world. Our battles with cold, hunger, thirst, poverty, and inadequate sanitation were constant, day in and day out, year in and year out.
I can begin with the cold, since that is the thing that I can still feel deep down in my bones. Our apartment building had a heating system, but it was a good day when we actually had adequate heat. Our house used a hot-water system fired by a coal-burning boiler that sat in the basement. We were responsible for tending to our own boiler. At first, we split the job up. Every year we would start the fire in October or November. Parrish, Dresnok, and I would then each take ten days per month until we shut it down, usually in March. Parrish developed some health problems, mostly involving his kidneys, in 1986, and he bowed out. Then Dresnok came down with heart trouble in the early 1990s, so that left it to me to keep the apartment warm.
Every year we got about twenty tons of coal for the winter. Some trucks would usually bring it in several big shipments over a couple of days in September. We had a storage room in the basement to keep the coal dry, but the leaders would sneak in and help themselves, chipping away at our supply. The first step when you get a coal delivery is to sift the rocks out of it and put it in storage. Then, you can’t just shovel the coal straight into the furnace. You need to make it more stable and slower burning by mixing it with clay. We had a huge mound of clay outside, which we used to make this mixture: We blended three shovels full of coal with one shovel of clay, stirred it with water, and formed it into a mound or brick. But the clay-and-coal bricks need to be dry, so it is best to build them well in advance. It is important to always have enough on hand, because if the fire goes out, it takes at least half a day to build a good, hot boiler fire from scratch. And you can’t let an extinguished fire set for more than a couple of hours because not only will you get cold, but the water will freeze and the pipes will burst, and then, brother, you really have problems.
The pipes were crooked, so half of the building was never properly heated. And sometimes, because of bad construction, air pockets would form in a pipe somewhere and water would get stuck, so you’d have to boil the hell out of the tank to just force the water through the system. Or you’d have to plunge an outlet valve to get things moving again. If you take care of the boiler like you should, you really should be there all day, stoking the fire and tending to it. But in practice, I would load and stoke it three times a day: once at dawn, once around lunch, and once before I went to bed. Three times a day, I would go right up into that fire. I’d come out covered in soot, blacker than night. That’s why I kept a separate set of clothes outside. I would change into and out of them just to stoke the fire, so I didn’t track soot into the house too badly. But washing up three times a day, scrubbing coal off of your face without hot water? Now that’s a chore. Finally, around 1997, I got one of the leaders to agree that I needed some help, so after that, I usually had an Organization flunky on rotation with me.
Even with all of my best efforts, the apartment was still colder than hell. The bathrooms, hallways, and kitchens were not piped for heat at all, so the warmest parts of the house could get up to sixty degrees on good days, while other parts would plunge well below freezing. Cooking oil and soy sauce freezing in the closet was a regular winter occurrence. We would routinely walk around and sleep in four or five layers of clothes. I remember one time I had a cold, so I went to bed with a couple of aspirin and a glass of water. I put the water on my nightstand, and it froze right there in the glass overnight.
Because it was the furthest away from the boiler and on the windiest corner, Mika and Brinda’s room was also one of the coldest rooms in the apartment building. To help them in the cold winters, I improvised an electrical floor heating system. I took four hundred yards of 0.7 millimeter copper-insulated wire and laid it down on the cement floor of their room in a back-andforth, back-and-forth pattern. Then I covered over that with another layer of thin cement. I hid a flip switch behind their wardrobe. It threw some pretty good heat, even though the current rarely ran at the 220 volts it was supposed to. And this heating system only worked when we had electricity, which was pretty rare.
I would say that before 1997 we had electricity about half the time through the summer and very rarely during the winter. After 1997, we had electricity during the summer only sporadically and almost never during the winter. In the final few years, we had almost no electricity at all, except on major holidays. For example, we could usually count on a couple of days of steady electricity around Kim Jong-il’s birthday on February 16. During long stretches, when we had no continuous power, perhaps twice a week we would get an hour or two of electricity. When that happened, we would focus our energies on pumping water into the house. Back in 1978 and 1979, I had dug the well myself—30 feet deep, 7.5 feet long, and 7.5 feet wide. It was about a hundred yards away from the apartment building, and we had to pump the water up to a holding tank on a hill about a hundred yards past the apartment building.
We had an electric motor to pump the well. It was a fourteenkilowatt motor, but we really needed a twenty-one-kilowatt one to do the job, so even when the electricity was working, it was so weak that the water would rarely get to the tank even on the best days. So usually, we pumped water straight to the apartment building. But even then, it would usually only get as far as Parrish’s and Dresnok’s places on the first floor. So my family and Anocha would have to carry our water up from their houses in buckets. We had a twenty-gallon tank and a fifteen-gallon tank in the kitchen and another fifteen-gallon tank in the bathroom. Brinda and Mika have probably carried more buckets of water up a flight of stairs than they could count.
After that, we would have to boil every ounce of water we had for drinking. In North Korea, lots of people suffer from intestinal problems from drinking untreated water. Between boiling water for drinking and cooking food, that left very little gas for heating water for our baths. We had a bathtub that I bought from a supply man for 335 packs of cigarettes, but the fuel was simply too valuable to waste on bathing water. We did our cooking with gas, which came in four-gallon cans that we would refill at the hardware store. The cans themselves were hard to get, and gas was scarce. More than a few times we took our can in to get refilled and some bigwig cadre or someone from an embassy showed up and raised a fuss. The people at the hardware store simply gave them our gas and our can. And that was that. There was nothing you could do about it, except to give them a good cussing until you felt better and start trying to work angles to get yourself a new can. When we didn’t have gas, we would go outside and build a wood fire to boil our water. Everyone in my family can probably count on one hand the number of hot baths they took at home in North Korea. It is the reason that going to the public bathhouse in Pyongyang once a week was such a treat.
Then there were the toilets. In the winter, since we never had the electricity to fill the main water tank on the hill and thus never had running water, we would have to dump a bucket of water into the bowl to flush the toilet. And the take-away pipes of the toilets were so small, they would frequently clog up. It would be a stretch to say we had a septic tank. Our sewage ran raw onto the open ground about forty yards away from our house and down a hill. Rats would frequently come up the pipes. A live rat once came up through Siham’s toilet. She chased that thing around the bathroom with the nearest pipe or club she could find—maybe it was a plunger—but the rat ran right back down the toilet. Once every few years a rat would die in the plumbing, so I would have to go up into the plumbing system and fish out the rat that was plugging up the whole works.
Since electricity was scarce everywhere, candles were one of the hardest things to get in the whole country, even in the foreigners’ shops. But that didn’t matter, since North Korean candles were total crap anyway. It was better to make your own. At the hardware store, you could usually get paraffin, so I would buy it in one- or two-kilo blocks. Then I would break it up into chunks and put it in a teapot to melt it. I would also throw in the stubs of crayons I would tell the girls to save from school. That gave it a little color. Once the paraffin was melted, I would pour it into a plastic pipe about eight or ten inches tall that was stopped up on one end with a soda bottle top (which fit its circumference exactly). I had already made a hole in the soda top and knotted some cotton string (other fibers won’t work) on the outside and run the string up through the inside of the pipe and out the other end. At the top end, I would hold the string taut with a hairpin while also lining it up to make sure the string didn’t touch the edges. Then I would dip the pipe into a coffee can of cold water to speed its hardening. With five or six pipes working at once, I could make about one hundred candles a day. Try as I did, I could never find exactly the right cotton string, the kind that disintegrated as it burned. All the string I could ever find would char but not evaporate as it burned, so unless you kept your eye on the wick, it would grow long, droop, hit the outside edge of the candle, melt it, and cause it to fall over. That’s why every night I had to patrol the house a few times, tugging the tops off of the burnt wicks with tweezers.
Since we rarely had any electricity, we had a hand-cranked generator for our television, a black-and-white Chinese portable I bought for $31. Later, we could run it off of a twelve-volt battery I bought. The battery was rechargeable off of house current (which rarely mattered since the whole reason we had the battery in the first place was because the house current never worked) or by using a gasoline-powered generator I had outside. Gasoline, however, was even harder to come by than cooking gas, so we usually made do with the hand crank.
Starting in the early 1990s, we were no longer paid in won. Each of the families received a flat $120 a month. (In 2003, they switched us to 120 euros per month.) If we tried to buy all our food in dollar stores, however, the money wouldn’t have lasted a week, so we needed a way to get some won. By that time, money was tight all over the country, so it was no problem to get our leaders to trade money for us on the black market, as long as they got a cut. This is an indication of how bad things had gotten by the 1990s. In decades past, a leader never would have participated in this type of corruption. It would have been our heads if they had found out, but now the leaders themselves were doing the exchanging. But their price was steep. It varied over the years, but often you could get twelve to fifteen hundred won per dollar on the black market, and the leaders would frequently take half of that.
Every month, I would change about $30 or $40 so I could buy staples like rice and flour from the government ration supply people who came once a month. Rice in North Korea is so dirty, you can wash it all you want and even after the fourth washing the water still looks like milk. It has bugs and stones in it. Sometimes the stones are so big and there are so many of them that I think they put them there on purpose to boost the weight. But at least it was usually edible. Those were the only foods that came reliably from the supply people. And toward the end, even those were less reliable. The flour stopped coming first, and then from the mid-1990s onward, sometimes the rice wouldn’t come, either. But if the supply people brought eggs, it was guaranteed that half the eggs would be rotten. If they brought a frozen pig, measured by weight, you would discover later that they had stuffed the pig with water before freezing so more than half of your pig’s weight was going to melt away into nothing.
All the rest of our food we had to get however we could, whether it was to buy, barter, or grow it. On my plot (which was about fifty by twenty-five feet), I could grow tomatoes, cucumbers, egg
plant, red pepper, spinach, cabbage, garlic, and corn. We usually grew enough vegetables to make it through the year. We had an old Italian freezer, but it was a tricky juggling act to keep the vegetables from spoiling. If we got a full few days of electricity, the freezer would keep the food cool for four to five days. Then, if the electricity was out for a long time, you found yourself oddly wishing it was as cold as possible so you could move the frozen food outside to keep. So we would be cold as hell, but we would be glad that at least the food was not spoiling. There are always silver linings, I suppose.
Our biggest field was of corn. We would dry the corn on the roof of the house, and in a good year, I could grow 500 pounds of dried corn. That was a popular thing to trade. I could trade dried corn for moonshine or corn noodles. I grew so much corn so we could save all of our rice for Mika and Brinda. We had to send 60 kilograms (or 132 pounds) of rice to school every month. That’s 2.2 pounds per daughter every day, even though a student’s ration is only a pound per day, so you can see that someone, somewhere, was skimming more than half of what we sent. But that’s just the way North Korea works. Growing all that corn allowed my wife and I to have corn noodles for lunch every day of our lives for more years than I care to remember. There is no food in the world that I am more sick of than corn noodles. I will never eat another corn noodle as long as I live.
The Reluctant Communist Page 14
