I was so upset that I began to stamp my feet in agony, loud enough that several mourners lost their composure. Seconds later, the entire household was in tears. The soldiers looked around at one another. Finally one of them came over and put her hand on my shoulder. “She’s not coming, comrade.”
“Why?” I snapped. “Why isn’t she coming? She left Kyong Hui crying all night. Ask her to come back. She’ll come back if you ask her, you’ll see. My mother can do anything.”
But the woman just shook her head. “That is one thing that she can’t do, not anymore.”
“How could she be so cruel?” I said.
“This is what it means to be a revolutionary,” the woman explained. “Some give their all so that others may go on. That’s how Comrade Jong Suk lived—and it’s how she died, as well.”
I hugged the woman and buried my head in her side, crying my eyes out. The following days were a blur. General Kim Il Sung rushed home, and the next thing I knew I was going with him to the assembly hall of the Party Central Committee. People came from all parts of the country to offer their condolences. But all I noticed was Mother lying in her coffin, dressed in her best military uniform and surrounded by flowers.
I watched the General stare at the display for quite a while. “Can someone bring me her watch?” he finally demanded. I could tell from his hoarse voice that he’s been crying as much as I had. A woman guerrilla quickly brought over the watch to General Kim Il Sung. He took it into his hands and very carefully wound it up. “Comrade Kim Jong Suk had dedicated her whole life to the revolution,” he told the woman. “I gave her this watch as a gift because she’d been so loyal to me during the anti-Japanese struggle. Let us send her off with it.”
The guerrilla took back the watch and placed it on Mother’s wrist. For a second it was as if she were asleep, raising her hand to be helped out of bed. I couldn’t contain myself for another moment. I ran forward and wrapped my arms around the coffin. The woman gently tried to pull me away. “Come now,” she said. “Be strong for your mother.”
“Leave him alone,” the General hissed. “Tomorrow he won’t have any mother to wrap his arms around. And I won’t have a wife.” Very calmly, he took his handkerchief from his pocket. Only then could I actually see that he was wiping away tears.
After a dirge was played, the General took to the podium and spoke a few words. “Comrade Kim Jong Suk was most faithful to me,” he said. “Everything she did was for the sake of her comrades, and she did nothing for her own self. I would say nothing if she’d lived in comfort, eating and dressing well even for a single day. What grieves me most is the fact that she passed away after suffering hardships all of her life.”
After a few other speeches, everyone began to file out of the assembly hall. For a moment I turned to look back, but the General pushed me forward. Past the doorway I saw murky clouds covering the sky outside. Even the heavens were dark with sorrow, even the earth was soaked in tears, for Mother’s untimely departure. She had only been thirty-one years old.
Hundreds of thousands of people filled the square in Pyongyang, gathering to bid farewell to the greatest revolutionary fighter, revolutionary soldier and revolutionary mother that Korea had ever known. The masses lined the entire route of the funeral procession, but I couldn’t look at their faces as we rode home.
Eventually we came around the foot of Mt. Haebang and paused before our house. Then the soldiers who were lined up around the residence fired a 20-gun salute, after which the General gently ushered me out of the hearse. “Go look after your sister,” he told me. “She’s still very young and doesn’t understand what’s going on. I’ll be back from the cemetery soon enough.”
With a nod, I turned on my heels and walked into the house. Kyong Hui was crying when I walked inside. In truth, it felt as if she hadn’t stopped even for an instant. “Brother, where’s Mother?” she asked me. “Where has she gone?”
I hugged my sister and tightened my arms around her. “If you cry for Mother,” I told Kyong Hui, “you will hurt the General and make him unable to work. If you miss her, don’t go in tears to the General. Come to me from now on. I’ll show you her photo and we can remember her together.” Kyong Hui snuggled into my chest. My sense of loyalty to the General became maternal love, flowing into my sister’s heart. To Kyong Hui, my embrace now felt just like Mother’s had.
After I calmed my sister down, I went up to Mother’s room for one final look. On her nightstand was a small pistol, perhaps the very same one she used to save the General from death. I picked it up and held it close to my chest. Mother had been faithful to General Kim Il Sung at all times, doing everything for the man with the heavy burden of building a new country. Now, it had fallen unto me to complete whatever she’d left unfinished.
A few mornings after the funeral, I was the one pacing with a stick outside the General’s window. After about an hour of chasing away the sparrows, I turned my head and saw that he’d been watching me with great interest. “What’s going on here?” he asked. “Did the sparrows bother you?” I said.
“No. It was the fact that I couldn’t hear them that woke me up. It sounded very strange. What are you doing with that stick?”
“Mother used it to chase them away in the morning so that you could rest.”
“Then why do you have it?”
“Because Mother isn’t here to chase them away anymore, General.” “Come over here,” he said. I did as he asked. The General crouched down so that we were eye to eye. “You might still be small in stature, but you act like a full-grown person. I’ll need your help in these coming days. Will you help me?”
“Of course.” Then and there, I made a vow to hold the General in high esteem and devote everything for his sake, just as anti-Japanese heroine Kim Jong Suk would have wanted. Mother had died, but she wasn’t really gone.
I was Mother now.
Chapter 3
Korea is One
On June 25, 1950, I woke up to a smell that I was very familiar with: the burnt bitter scent of war. I looked out the window and saw black clouds covering the clear, blue sky of the motherland. It had finally happened: the US imperialists had launched war upon Korea. My first thought was with the General. I hopped out of bed, only to discover that he was long gone. It made sense, of course. He would need to lead the war effort to victory. As agonizing as it was, all I could do was try to keep safe.
I kept listening to the radio in hopes of understanding what had happened. The news reports were contradictory and incomplete. That entire first day I was an anxious mess. I wanted to call the General and offer my help, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to reach him. So I paced and kept looking out the window, waiting for the Yanks to rain death upon Pyongyang.
The following day, General Kim Il Sung addressed the entire nation. “Last night,” he informed us, “the Yankees and their stooges launched a cowardly surprise attack while the people were still asleep. 100,000 soldiers penetrated two kilometers into the northern part of the nation.”
It was a nightmare of nightmares. The Yankees hadn’t lost a single battle in over one hundred aggressive wars. Many regarded the US as a dreadful and invincible being, a horned monster which made small children tremble. Yet there was one small child who refused to tremble at their name: Kim Jong Il. I knew how strong and heroic the Korean people were. Though it had only been five years since Korea’s liberation from Japan, I was sure that we’d rise as one in the struggle against the US imperialists. We had a weapon far greater than anything America had to offer: the leadership of General Kim Il Sung.
“I lost no time in convening a meeting of the DPRK Cabinet,” the General assured us. “I immediately issued an order to mount a counteroffensive to wipe out the invaders. The Military Commission of the DPRK has been organized as the supreme national leadership, with myself elected as its chairman.”
To my great delight, all the news that I heard over the following days was entirely positive. The KPA had successfully frust
rated the enemy’s surprise attack, and began advancing rapidly on a counteroffensive. Within three days, Seoul had been liberated. Large numbers of students and other young people heeded the call to arms and volunteered to fight. Workers’ regiments were organized in the major industrial districts and sent to the front. In a matter of weeks, the Yankees were driven to the very southeast corner of Korea to make their final stand.
I was so convinced of the General’s brilliance that I thought that the war would be concluded there at Pusan. Finally, once and for all, Korea would be completely free of imperialism. But I was wrong. It wasn’t that I overestimated General Kim Il Sung’s skills. It was that I underestimated just how tenaciously the US imperialists were prepared to defend their war bounty of south Korea.
President Harry Truman then called upon the United Nations for assistance, blaming the conflict on General Kim Il Sung himself. To my horror, fifteen nations answered Truman’s call. Now the KPA would have to fight against the land, sea and air forces of the United States—said to be the mightiest in the world—as well as the armies of its fifteen satellite countries and the puppet army of south Korea. Try as I might, I could not even imagine an easy, peaceful outcome.
On September 15, 1950 the Americans and their puppets succeeded in making a landing behind the KPA and thereby cutting off its supply route. An army can be the bravest in the world, but it’s still helpless without access to weaponry and munitions. Despite having liberated 90% of south Korea, the heroic People’s Army was forced to beat a temporary strategic retreat to delay the enemy as much as possible. Soon the Yankees penetrated into the northern part of the Republic.
As they occupied areas of northern Korea, the Yankees perpetrated the most brutal, largest-scale slaughter of people ever known in human history. As General Kim Il Sung put it, “Engels once called the British army the most brutal army. During World War II, the German fascist army outdid the British army in its savagery. The human brain could not imagine more diabolical and horrible barbarities than those committed by the Hitlerite villains. But in Korea, the Yankees surpassed the Hitlerites by far.”
THE SINCHON MASSACRE
The US imperialists seized the city of Sinchon on October 17, 1950. On the very first day, Lieutenant Harrison, commander of the occupying troops, assembled all the overthrown landlords, wicked religious men, usurers, scamps and other human scum that were there. He issued them a declaration: “My orders are the law, and whoever violates them shall be shot unconditionally. Kill everyone mercilessly, old or young. Your hands should not tremble!”
Sinchon was turned into a hell on earth.
The methods of murder were so cruel as to make even beasts turn away from the sight. The villains pushed hundreds of civilians into an air-raid shelter and then set fire to it. They loaded Koreans into military trucks and drowned them in the reservoirs. In addition to the mass murder, the American aggressors also reveled in killing people individually. They nailed a model peasant’s letter of commendation to his forehead and pierced his hands through with bayonets. Then they ran wire through his nose and ears and dragged him around the village for everyone to see. The American murderers did not hesitate to skin the heads of patriots and, following the examples of their Yankee ancestors, took the scalps away as “souvenirs.”
Later that month, hearing of the American advance, the Chinese people organized volunteers and sent them to the Korean front. The KPA teamed with the Chinese units and began to launch counteroffensives. These units dealt a terrible blow to the enemy, making raids by relying on tunnels and applying many adroit Juche military tactics.
As the US imperialists were forced to abandon Sinchon, they committed one final atrocity. The troops gathered all the mothers of the village with their children. “It is too happy for the families to be together,” Lt. Harrison proclaimed. “Tear the kids off at once and lock them separately. Let the mothers die in their anxiety about their children, and let the children die while crying for their mothers! Ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha!”
The American mercenary troops tore the babies away without any hesitation. The hills of Sinchon reverberated with their cries, and with the screams of mothers calling out for their darlings. The children and their mothers were locked in separate storehouses. The Americans threw rice straw on their heads, poured gasoline over them and set them alight. Then, to ensure that everyone was dead, the troops threw grenades inside. All that remained of the victims were their fingernails—embedded in the walls as they tried to scratch their way out—and the messages that they scribbled:
Avenge our death! The Americans are our enemies!
With the assistance of the Chinese forces, the tide once again began to turn against the US imperialists. This filled me with enormous joy. Now, I thought, it was only a matter of time before they’d surrender. I was filled a certain sense of glee—but it was premature. One evening I was walking down the street when I heard some old men discussing the situation. They were terrified that President Truman, architect of Korea’s destruction, was going to use nuclear weapons against our nation. I wanted to dismiss their fears as the prattling of elderly fools. Then Truman himself publicly threatened as much. “The use of any kind of weapons—including atomic bombs—on Korea is under consideration,” he said.
It was a terrible prospect, to say the least. I knew this wasn’t a bluff, since Truman was the only person in history to use nuclear weapons—and against a civilian population to boot. But what could I possibly do? I never had any contact with General Kim Il Sung, who was practically living at Supreme Headquarters. One day, finally, I managed to get the General on the phone. I knew I only had seconds of his precious time, so I asked the most important question at hand: “How can I help the war effort?”
“That’s the easiest question that I’ve been asked all day,” said General Kim Il Sung. “The first and foremost task of a revolutionary is to study. You should wreak vengeance on the enemy by getting A’s in school. Let your grades be your weaponry.”
If that’s what he thought, then I knew it was the truth. I studied harder than ever, not only for myself but for my country and for the General. Yet there was only so much I could do. At the time the educational system—like everything else in Korea—was being strained to the limit by the ongoing war. As the number of teachers available were stretched thin, common people often volunteered their talents in their stead.
One day, my class had a lesson on art from a local painter. The man pulled out a poster and put it on the wall in front of the room. “This is the Mona Lisa,” he explained. “It was painted by Leonardo da Vinci, a renowned Italian artist active in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Da Vinci made up his mind to paint the portrait of an ideal woman who had been haunting him. For a long time he travelled all over his country, crossing mountains and rivers, searching for a real woman who resembled his visionary idol. Finally, he found her.”
The artist was so well-versed in the Mona Lisa that he discussed it at length without notes, passionately groping at the air as he spoke. I watched the students nodding their heads in delight, as if nothing he was saying was wrong. The entire horrible scene made me sick to my stomach.
“Da Vinci told the woman of his motive,” the man continued, “and asked her to go with him. Moved by his passion, she complied with his request. She sat in his studio as he painted her portrait with zeal. He even invited a famous band to play music while he was painting. At last, after four years, the picture was completed. When the picture was opened to public view it caused a worldwide sensation. Depending on how you viewed it, the woman in the painting either looked melancholy or joyous. This is what made the Mona Lisa such a deathless masterpiece. It became a cultural relic of humanity which will be handed down to posterity.” The lesson finished, the artist left. The students remained behind in the classroom, waiting for our next speaker. All the children besides myself were so excited about the painting that the room became one loud discussion. “She must have been lonely because she was away from
home for four years,” one boy guessed.
“Being painted while listening to music?” a girl replied. “She must have been in rapture!”
“What we can agree on,” the boy said, “is that a painting can’t be comprehended by ordinary people if it is to be called a masterpiece.”
I remained silent tor a while, waiting for someone to correct him. But no one seemed to have a problem with his claim. I couldn’t believe it. “An enigmatic picture which changes appearance might have been a masterpiece at that time,” I barked, “but in this era it can’t be praised as such! If people who see a painting can’t grasp its meaning, they can’t say it’s a good picture—no matter how talented the artist who may have painted it. A picture must be painted in such a way that the viewer can understand its meaning.”
Hushed silence fell over the classroom. The pupils’ eyes were all wide open. Here I was, condemning what was handed down in history as a first-rate artistic masterpiece. How could such a thing be possible? I was still a child!
“Just think,” I continued. “If a student said that a mountain can be either high or low, the teacher will regard him as an idiot instead of giving him good marks. The same principle applies to pictures. How can a picture which seems to be either this or that be called a ‘masterpiece’? A masterpiece greatly moves and instructs the viewer. It makes sense to everyone.”
Though they’d been hesitant to accept what I said, no one could argue with my points. By the end of the day, the fact that I’d criticized the Mona Lisa spread throughout the school. Even the faculty pondered the matter. Finally, everyone came to realize that my evaluation was correct beyond dispute.
I was shocked that no one in the school—not even a painter himself!—had any inkling about the truth of the Mona Lisa. Worse, they’d subordinated their Korean natures to the values of a far-off country and its centuries-old tradition. That was when I realized how serious the war effort really was. We had to liberate, not simply the Korean peninsula, but the hearts and minds of the Korean people themselves. Liberating the peninsula would be the easy part—though that of course was hardly “easy.” We weren’t simply engaged in a war for Korean land or Korean territory. We were engaged in a Fatherland Liberation War.
Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il Page 5
