“I would give my life for Korea,” I agreed. “But I’d rather give the lives of one thousand Yankees.”
The General laughed. Then he reached into a drawer and handed me a pistol. “Today I give you this,” he said, “Take it as the ‘relay baton’ with which to continue on the revolution after me.”
I began to choke up as I felt the gun’s weight in my hands. It felt warm and cold at the same time, the most beautiful present any father could give his son. “General, I’ll always remember your words, and will fight all my life for the revolution with this gun.”
“You must bear in mind that a gun is the revolutionary’s eternal companion,” General Kim Il Sung explained, putting his hand on my shoulder. “A gun never betrays its master, though everything else in the world should change. It will help you guarantee victory like nothing else will. That’s why a revolutionary must never lay down his gun his entire life.”
Nothing more needed to be said. I understood completely, for I was truly my father’s son.
From that day on, I lived at the Supreme Headquarters with the General. I observed his incessant planning as carefully but unobtrusively as I could. The workflow was constant. He received reports about the situation at the front and issued orders accordingly. He took measures to strengthen the Party and to stabilize the people’s living conditions. When he met technicians, he had them draw up plans for reconstruction.
When he met artists, he defined how artistic activities could contribute to winning the war. All the problems arising in Korea were solved by the General on the spot.
The war entered its final, most horrific act soon after I moved into Supreme Headquarters. Having unleashed insects and disease, the Americans next plagued Korea in the form of napalm fire bombing. Then, on June 23 and 24, 1952, the enemy carried out a large-scale attack on Suphung Power Station in the west. The US air pirates also bombed over ten other power stations. They wanted to deprive the Korean people of everything possible—even light itself.
After destroying Korea’s electrical capabilities, the Yankees turned to destroying our agriculture. They bombed dams that accounted for over 75% of our agricultural production, completely flooding many villages in the process. Worse, the villains attacked immediately after the rice transplantation season. It was no coincidence but rather a carefully orchestrated plan to maximize the Korean people’s suffering and hunger.
Once the targeted bombing was completed, the Yanks attacked anything else that was left. For close to a year, they showered bombs on the northern half of the Republic until all its towns and villages were decimated. Finally, they had to stop. The Far East Bomber Command reported that there were no more targets in north Korea. The US imperialists had simply annihilated everything. There was no precedent in the history of war for such severity, for such thoroughness of destruction on such a scale.
That Korea could be bombed into debris without surrendering seemed utterly unfathomable to the cowardly Americans. Yet that was the turn of affairs, and the Yankees were baffled. In fact, rather than surrendering, the KPA led three powerful counterattacks from mid-May 1953 through the end of July. Clearly, the Korean people still had plenty of fight left in them. The Korean invasion had already cost the US imperialists more than double the casualties that they’d suffered during the Second World War. The Yankees had only one choice left.
On July 19, 1953, I was walking outside when I heard someone shouting from a park nearby: “The Yanks have lifted up their hands!” I ran over and saw a huge crowd gathered around a radio. The announcer could barely hide his excitement as he reported the proud victory scored by the heroic Korean People’s Army after three years of war.
Everyone was so filled with joy that we danced in each other’s arms. Then I heard another shout: “Long live General Kim Il Sung!” Everyone replied with deafening cheers of Manse! Then we all began to sing The Song of General Kim Il Sung, shedding tears of joy all the while. Overcoming every possible hardship, carrying the heavy burdens of war on his shoulders, the General had finally and conclusively defeated the Americans.
Eight days later, the newspapers carried the news we’d all been waiting for. At 10 a.m. that day, under the DPRK and United Nations flags, the American delegates signed the Korean Armistice Agreement at Panmunjom, a town right by the 38th parallel. The Americans were so humiliated that they left the flags and their dossiers behind in their rush to flee home—and their abandoned property remains on display in Panmunjom to this very day. General Clark, commander-in-chief of the US Far East Command, couldn’t help but admit his shame. “I gained the inevitable distinction,” he soon admitted, “of being the first United States Army Commander in history to sign an armistice agreement without victory.”
Per the agreement, a military demarcation line was drawn on the map at the war front, roughly along the 38th parallel. On either side of the line was a “demilitarized zone” (DMZ) 2.5 miles wide. After all the fighting, not one inch of the north of Korea had been ceded to the US imperialists. But Korea, a unified nation for millennia, occupied by a single people with one blood, had been rent in two.
The house was divided against itself.
Chapter 4
Fighting Flunkeyism
Pyongyang was in ruins.
Soon after the armistice was signed, I took a walk around my city to assess the damage. I couldn’t find one single undamaged house. Everywhere I looked, as far as I could see, there was debris and destruction. The kindergarten where I’d asked so many questions had been obliterated. The Taedong Bridge was down to its girders. Only the walls of Department Store No. 1 still stood undamaged. It wouldn’t even be a matter of rebuilding the capital; there was nothing to rebuild.
Pyongyang was not alone. The only way to figure out where Korean cities had once been—for there were no cities left—was by looking for chimneys, the only things that managed to survive the assaults. Every major industry was ruined, all agriculture decimated. Over a million civilians had died, a tenth of the population.
Nationwide, there was no question as to what needed to be done. Prime Minister Kim Il Sung put forward a three-year plan that would lay the foundation for an independent national economy. All the people put forth their effort to create a new and modern Korea, with the same fighting spirit that had won them the war.
I was only eleven years old, so of course there was little I could do to help with any construction. Instead I remembered the words of the Prime Minister: “If a revolutionary fails to study properly, he will fail to successfully create the revolution.” I packed my bookshelves so full that they looked like fortified walls. The texts themselves quickly became filled with my notes, marks of the fierce struggle I waged to conquer the ideas within them. I fought my way up the highest peaks of the knowledge that mankind had achieved. The width and depth of my studies soon became unmeasurable. The librarian practically became my closest comrade. “We have leading economic officials, renowned doctors, professors and specialists come here,” she told me one day. “None of them can match you in reading books!”
“If cooked rice is the staff of physical life,” I said, “then learning is the staff of mental life. If a man doesn’t become accustomed to reading books in his youth, then he won’t like to read them when he grows up—and he would become empty-headed man.”
Like all the other people in the north, I constantly read the General’s latest speeches and writings, analyzing and studying them. But of course General Kim Il Sung was also a man of action. I knew that knowledge apart from life, excellence in scholarship apart from life, was useless. I wanted to acquire information so that I could apply it, not just to know it for its own sake. So one evening, after finishing a book about automotive technology, I decided to put what I’d learned into practice. I went to a nearby garage and began taking a discarded automobile apart, seeing how each of its parts worked. A worker watched what I was doing and shook his head with disapproval. “Focus on driving well,” he told me. “If a car breaks down, one of our repairmen wil
l fix it.” “Everybody should have a knowledge of technology,” I said. “Without technology our country can’t advance even one step. Our people who beat the US should arm themselves with advanced technology, scale the peak of Juche and recognize that taking loving care of machines is a manifestation of patriotism.”
I was coming home from school a few weeks later when I saw a crowd of people standing around a bus. I walked across the street to see if I could help. “What’s going on?” I asked one of the spectators.
“The bus is out of order,” he told me. “The driver did all he could to make the engine start working, but to no avail. The passengers are trying to help him but they can’t seem to figure it out either! Everyone is becoming quite irritated.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. I left the man behind, baffled as to how a middle school boy would be able to repair a bus. I walked up to the bus driver and offered my help.
“Why not?” he said with a laugh. “Everyone else has had a go.”
I sat in the driver’s seat and checked all the gauges. Then, one after another, I set the accelerator and other working parts. Nothing. Finally I went around, popped open the hood and took a look inside. “Do you have a spanner and a hammer?” I asked the driver.
“Of course.” The driver handed me the tools from his box, still not quite believing his eyes.
By knowing how the parts were supposed to work, it wasn’t all that difficult to determine when they weren’t. I managed to check what was actually in good order. One by one, I eliminated potential issues as possibilities. Soon my hands became stained with oil, and sweat began to drip down my brow. Finally I spotted the problem and cranked it fixed. I was so enveloped in my tough work that I hadn’t noticed that the passengers had all been watching me. Caught in the act, all I could do was stretch and throw them a wink. “I think we’re ready,” I announced. I returned to the driver’s seat and switched on the bus. The passengers all started cheering when they heard the engine start to chug along.
The delighted bus driver came over to shake my hand. “I have something to confess,” he told me. “I recently finished the drivers’ short course but it didn’t help. We’ve been having this kind of mishap fairly frequently.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, motioning for him to take his seat. “The latest model of bus might still be unfamiliar to you. You’ll learn soon enough.” I got off the bus, waving the passengers off as the driver honked his horn with delight.
I wish I could claim that incidents like this were isolated occurrences. But in fact such stories were hardly uncommon for me. My boyhood abounds in anecdotes that are beautiful like jewels and brilliant like the stars. Each of them is so deeply stirring that even now they fill people with boundless admiration. Yes, I became an expert at fixing machinery. But what I was most proud of is how skilled I grew at fixing my fellow children.
At every school, there was something called the Children’s Union for the students to join. It was meant to be a source of extracurricular activity, comradeship and guidance. Unfortunately, the organizational life at my school’s sub-branch wasn’t very well developed. The Union didn’t do as much as it should have, especially for young minds so eager for activities. As a result, students usually found themselves without anything to do when the school day ended. This so-called “free” time turned out to be the costliest time possible.
Back then, private trade and industry hadn’t yet gone through a socialist reorganization in the DPRK. Young people often spent their days roaming the streets, looking around at the marketplaces. On my way home from school one afternoon, I heard a storekeeper shouting at some children at the Somunbak market. “Prize lot drawing!” he barked. “A carp candy for first prize, a hare candy for second prize and a duck candy for third prize. If you’re lucky, you’ll win a carp candy!” The storekeeper caught the attention of several schoolboys, who ran over to try their hand at the candy lottery.
I recognized one of the boys as being in my class, so I silently followed him to the store. “How does it work?” asked the boy.
“It’s simple,” the storekeeper told him. “For five won you get to draw a lot. If you draw one with a picture of an animal, that’s the type of candy you win.”
“I want a carp candy,” the boy mused aloud. “Those are my favorite. Here’s five won.”
The storekeeper held out a bucket filled with crumbled slips of paper. “Here you go!” he said. “Take whichever one you like.”
My classmate reached in and felt around, trying to figure out which slip felt luckiest to him. Finally he made his choice and pulled out the lot, opening it with great anticipation.
It was blank.
“That’s all right,” the boy said. “I’ll make up for it with the next one.” The next one was blank as well—as was the one after that, and the one after that. Fifty won later, the boy hadn’t won anything. Worse, he’d spent all the money that he had. He bowed down his head, feeling humiliated and embarrassed.
I went up to him and tapped him on the shoulder. “Did you really think the evil storekeeper would put in a first-prize lot in the bunch?” I said. “All merchants are liars. They make no bones of telling any kind of lie so as to make money. You should never do such a thing in the future. Should you ever rely on the luck of the marketplace, you’ll be no better than a merchant yourself!”
“You’re right,” he said. “I can see that now. Thank you.”
I explained to the boy how these marketplaces were exerting a bad influence. I reiterated that there were many swindlers luring children in with unhealthy amusements in order to squeeze money out of them. As I went on and on, telling him how at great length foolish he had been, I realized that the boy’s actions weren’t entirely his fault. They were my fault as well. Life in my CU sub-branch was dull. The students had little interest in their lessons, failed to do their homework and generally acted in a liberal manner. How ironic that the students who ran the CU were referred to as “activists”!
The following day, I took one of these CU activists back with me to the market after school. “Take a look around,” I said to him. “What do you see?”
Not sure what I was referring to, he turned in every direction. “I see a market bustling with people. I see all kinds of different sellers.”
“And do you see all the pupils hanging around this noisy place?”
“I do...”
I frowned. “They’re spending their precious afterschool hours in this way!” I said. “If we leave them alone, they could slide into a swamp of selfishness. What are we going to do about this?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “It can’t be helped,” he said. “This is happening after school, not during the school day.”
I glared at him. “Are you telling me that they should be left to themselves, to hover around as they please, only to become badly contaminated? What’s the point of the Children’s Union organization? This is only happening because the Children’s Union organization isn’t properly ‘organizing’ the students’ extramural life!”
“What do you think we should do?” he asked me.
“I’ll tell you.”
All my usual reading fell by the wayside the following week as I researched my fellow students as much as I could. I learned about the individual characteristics, merits, shortcomings and home environments of every student in my sub-branch. I compiled files on each of them to the best of my ability. Finally, I gathered together the CU activists and told them what I’d learned. “But the biggest problem,” I concluded, “is going on after school. We need more activities then.”
“What sorts of activities?” asked one activist.
“What if the members of the sub-branch collectively conducted an art circle?” I said. “We can also make educational visits to different places or even go to the movies. We can meet with the Heroes of the Republic. We can conduct proper physical training for when we grow up and join the KPA. Wouldn’t that be a lot better than drawing prize lots in hopes
of winning candy? Instead of looking at hawkers selling goods, we should be visiting factories to watch the workers operate the machines. Wouldn’t those sorts of activities be of interest to everyone?”
I handed out a proposed schedule for extramural activities that I’d prepared. Seeing my ideas in writing made the activists realize how idle they’d been. “There is one thing here that I’m unclear about,” one said. “You’ve set aside an hour once per week for criticism and self-criticism. What’s that?”
I explained to the activists how I’d criticized my friend who had wanted to win a carp candy—and how my criticism had had an immediate positive effect on him. “True comradeship lies in criticism,” I continued. “We should engage in criticism of both ourselves and one another to make sure that everyone stays on a righteous course.”
The activists looked at one another, not understanding what I meant.
“I just don’t feel comfortable criticizing my friends,” one of them confessed.
“Do you love your friends?” I asked.
“Of course!”
“If you love your friends from your heart, then you should criticize and correct the shortcomings in their study and organizational lives.”
“That seems...hurtful.”
“It is at first,” I agreed. “But as the proverb goes, ‘Whips make a good child.’ Parents love their children, so they scold them. They would spoil them if they ignored their children’s shortcomings and only praised them. Criticism between friends is similar to that. Those who criticize their intimate friends will feel as great a pain as those who they are criticizing. Think of the poplar trees growing around the playground. It seems like only the day before yesterday that the students planted them. But now those trees have grown three or four times as tall as a man. We worked very hard to bring them up. We sprinkled chemicals to fight infestation from noxious insects. We went out and set up props when the wind blew strongly. Without our tender care, those trees wouldn’t have grown as straight and big as they did. Noxious insects could have nested, propagated and then eaten the trees hollow. The wind could have knocked the young trees over, or at least warped them.”
Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il Page 7
