Throughout my life, all my decisions were characterized by attack: attacking the foes of the Great Leader; attacking the arts and remaking them; attacking the problems of construction; attacking the enemy when confronted. I always responded to an enemy’s knife with a sword, and to his rifle with a cannon. It usually didn’t need to come to violence; an enemy will inevitably back down if you simply yell louder than him. And never in history did anyone yell as loudly as I did on October 9, 2006, when the world heard the sound of north Korea’s successful underground nuclear test.
Early in the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt had said that the Korean people were incapable of lifting a finger to defend their country. One hundred years later, no one could deny our military power as a nuclear state. As soon as the DPRK acquired atomic weapons, the discussion in America switched subjects. Talk went from “Should we invade Korea?” to “What should we do about Korea?”
Lest there be any confusion, I confirmed that America’s worst fears had been realized. “If the US imperialists infringe even one inch upon the DPRK’s territory,” I announced, “if they threaten our right to exist in the slightest, we will wipe them out with a single blow.” It might seem hyperbolic to believe that such a mighty force could be felled by one attack. Even as I said it, I myself was a bit skeptical that such a thing could be possible.
But then it happened to me.
In Korea we say that “your life flashes before your eyes” when you are about to die. I didn’t have such an experience. All that happened to me one day was a great deal of pain, and then waking up to be told that I’d suffered a stroke. Of the event itself I remembered nothing. Fortunately, my superb memory spared me those details. All I remembered was lying in bed, feeling the weakest that I’d ever felt in my entire life.
No, my life never flashed before my eyes during my long recovery— but I took time to think back upon it with great care instead. I desperately wanted to be sure that I still remembered every event that mattered: My birth on Mt. Paektu. General Kim Il Sung’s victory over imperialism, and his triumphant homecoming. The loss of my mother. My school years. Recreating and reviving the Korean arts. Bringing worldwide glory to the name of the Great Leader—and grieving when he passed. Leading the people through the Arduous March and coming out all the stronger for it.
As I looked back upon my life, I allowed myself to feel a most unsocialist emotion, one utterly at odds with the basis of my character: pride. My claims of military accomplishment are dismissed as propaganda by foreigners, since they tend to measure military success by the amount of blood that had been spilled. But I believe differently. True, it’s difficult to win a victory with bullets flying by. Yet it is far more difficult to win a victory without any shots being fired and without any casualties—precisely what I’d done.
I realized that there were times when my choices had results that were less than ideal. If the outcomes seemed undesirable, I was confident that the alternatives would have been far worse. Despite decades of attack from every angle, despite hundreds of claims of collapse, Korea was still essentially what it has been for decades. It was still essentially the same nation that President Kim Il Sung had led, populated exclusively by the same people that had lived on the same land since the beginning of mankind.
Of course, I regretted many things that had occurred throughout my life. But when it came to my actions, my only regret was that I had but one life to give for my country.
For Korea.
Chapter 21
My Three Sons
I always lived my life on behalf of Korea, never believing that my personal affairs mattered to anyone in the slightest. I was never like the Western celebrities, obsessed with attention of any kind and willing to pay for it at the cost of my dignity. For me, the only important thing on any given day was whatever I happened to be doing for the masses, and the DPRK’s newspapers and television programs accordingly reported on such issues alone. My personal life was never the subject of journalism. Because I was so hard-working, so skilled and so dedicated, it was difficult for many to perceive me as a real man. Yet a real man I certainly am. I catch cold, I get hungry, I go to the bathroom—and I fall in love. I’d first crossed paths with her in 1956, when I was just a schoolboy.
At the time, Hye Rim was engaged to my close friend’s older brother. I was five years her junior, but at that age I might as well have been five generations younger. I had to indulge in my crush from afar because she was on her way to getting married. I wasn’t the only one who thought about Hye Rim in that way, either. Everyone had eyes for her, but she only had eyes for her betrothed.
She was just nineteen then, a theatre student, but Hye Rim was well on her way to becoming a prominent actress. Though I’d already developed a sense for that sort of thing, it was still pretty obvious. I never met anyone who exuded grace like she did, from her sly smile and the demure way she walked to how her eyelashes fluttered when she spoke.
One of Hye Rim’s first roles was in the enormously successful film A Village by the Demarcation Line. The Great Leader himself saw it and praised it, especially the character she played and her interpretation of the part. After that her career was unstoppable. In the subsequent years, Hye Rim blossomed into one of Korea’s best known and most beloved actresses. It was no surprise, then, that I ran into her again in 1968 when I was working in the cinema.
I saw her on a film set, and from afar I noticed how everyone was in awe of her. I only rarely observed such behavior in the DPRK. In fact, I really only witnessed it with regard to General Kim Il Sung himself. I wanted to go speak with Hye Rim, very much so, but in fact I was nervous. At first I worried that she’d remember me as the awkward youngster I’d been and not register me as the fine sophisticated man that I’d become. Then I worried that she wouldn’t remember me at all.
Get it together, I told myself. You’re a director. Direct this conversation to a successful conclusion! I walked up to Hye Rim and was about to tap her on the shoulder when I had another embarrassing realization. I didn’t know whether to call her by her professional name (which would imply that I’d never met her) or by her married name (which would tell her that I knew about her personal life). Not knowing what to do, I caught her attention by waving. “Hello! I’m Kim Jong Il.”
She smiled that dazzling movie-star smile at me. “Are you Kim Jong Il the producer, or the Kim Jong Il who I knew years ago? Or do you not remember me?”
“Of course I remember you!” I blurted out, a bit too defensively. “The last time I saw you, you were about to get married.”
She rolled her eyes. “I was young and foolish. I can’t say that it was a mistake, for without him I would never have become a mother. But I can say that it’s over, and I’m the better for it.”
“You don’t say...”
After that we were inseparable. It was easy for us to play out our relationship in plain sight, for she was an actress and I was shaping the film industry. She’d read over scripts with me, giving me useful advice based on her years of experience. I’d ask her opinion when I was casting different films. The two of us often went to scout potential shooting locations: a remote beach, a secluded resort, a charming forest. Once we even took a helicopter to Mt. Paektu, and when I looked at Hye Rim I understood what the Great Leader felt when he looked at my mother.
At the same time, we very much did have to hide what was going on. To begin with, Hye Rim’s father was from the south, and her entire family had once lived there. Worse, he had been a landlord. In other words, her songbun wasn’t up to the expected standards for a girlfriend of mine. If General Kim Il Sung found out—or worse, one of my personal enemies—then the consequences would be dire. The fact that she’d already been married and bore a child didn’t help matters either. Nor that she was five years older than me.
Hye Rim had as much to lose from our relationship as I did. Her power in film meant that there were many jealous people seeking any opportunity they could to undermine her. Her car
eer as an actress was heavily based on her image as the idealized young Korean wife. Any evidence to the contrary might destroy her, and actresses rarely received second chances to revive their careers.
It’s easy for outsiders to claim that I was playing favorites with her when I cast her in my films, or that she was using me to help her career along. But neither was the case. We truly loved one another, and when you love someone who’s a performer you see them at their most vulnerable—and therefore know just how powerful they can be on the screen. I put her in many roles and negotiated her membership into the Party. It wasn’t very difficult to get such a prominent celebrity admitted, even considering her poor songbun.
Hye Rim and I moved in together about a year after getting reacquainted. I considered her to be my wife but of course we could never get married legally. The paper trail would be too damning, and the possibility of us keeping something like that a secret in Korea was nil. All that mattered was that I regarded her as the woman with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life.
One thing led to another and nature inevitably took its course. One day I came home from another exhausting day at work and Hye Rim ran into me. She almost knocked me over, squeezing me as tightly as she could. I hugged her back, not knowing what was the matter. “Have you been crying?” I asked her.
“I have, I have,” she said.
“Then why are you smiling like that? What happened?”
Without another word, she took my hand, kissed it and then placed it against her stomach. “Life happened,” Hye Rim said.
It was the best news that I ever could have received, so I wanted to be absolutely certain that I wasn’t misunderstanding her. “Are you pregnant?”
She nodded. “And it’s going to be a boy.”
I snickered. “You can’t possibly know that.”
“I can. I do. Mothers know these things. Just as your mother must have known.”
She was right. Nine months later, on May 10, 1971, Kim Jong Nam was born at Pyongyang’s Ponghwa Clinic. The entire hospital staff was sworn to the utmost secrecy. Given that the clinic was reserved for the Party leadership, I knew that I could count on their discretion. I was so elated that night that I honked my horn all the way home. My cheers of joy were so loud that I’m sure they could hear me all the way down at the DMZ. If I made some US imperialists anxious that night, so much the better!
I doted over Jong Nam almost as much as Hye Rim did. She had a large staff to assist her when I left for work every day. Though it was a far quieter life than she’d been used to, there was no doubt that motherhood suited her. She also had her family to keep her company if she got lonely, for we had to keep Jong Nam a secret too. Life was good.
In fact, life was too good. One day in early 1972 I was on an inspection tour with the Great Leader, attending to a radish farm. The sun was warm on my face and I thought everything was perfect. I was living the Korean dream that General Kim Il Sung had worked so hard to construct. “You look like you’re glowing,” he told me.
“Of course. I’m in the company of the sun!” I joked.
“It makes me happy to see you doing so well,” he said. “But there’s something you can do to make me even happier.”
Instantly my grin faded. “What is it? I’ll attend to it at once.”
“You’re thirty-one years old. It is far past time for you to get married.” “We’ve discussed this. My priority is to the Juche idea and to my work.”
The Great Leader shook his head. “The most important thing you can do for the revolution is to give me a grandson so that our bloodline can continue.”
It killed me to lie to him, but it could have actually killed me if I told him the truth. “I haven’t met the right person. Soon.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
I kept putting him off as much as I could. Then, after about a year, the Great Leader brought me to his home. “Sit down,” he told me. “I’ve been quite cross with you, but I’ve struck upon a solution.”
I sat down, anxious. “What have I done?”
“Nothing,” he told me. “That’s the problem. You’ve not found a wife. You haven’t even come close. So I found one for you.”
“What? Where?”
“Her name is Kim Young Suk. She works in the Party office, and comes from a very good background. You’ve met her, I believe, and you’ve met her father.”
“Yes,” I said, “I know who she is. And I know her father.” “Splendid,” he said. “Then it’s settled.”
“Of course.”
Reader, I married her. Young Suk was perfectly sweet and nice, even pretty. I liked her as a person and she certainly did everything she could to win my heart—but that heart belonged to someone else. Unfortunately, now I had to tell that someone else what I’d done before she found out for herself. There was no easy way for me to do it.
One day I took Hye Rim to a beach we’d frequented when we first started seeing each another. We sat on a blanket and watched the water on the lake. After a while, I realized there was no good segue. No matter how many times I’d practiced telling her, it was going to be an excruciating conversation. “You know I love you,” I said, “and you know that our family means everything to me. But you also know that I’m in a unique position in a country unlike any other.”
She scowled. “Of course I know that.”
“There’s even talk of me officially being named successor, but I don’t know if the Great Leader is completely comfortable with the idea. Since I’m his son, it would appear highly irregular even to our allies. That isn’t the only issue between he and I, either. It’s also been bothering him that I’d never married.”
“Oh! This is wonderful! We can finally tell him about us and about Jong Nam. We won’t have to hide anymore!”
“No, I can’t. He’d realize that I’ve been less than truthful with him. Then there’s absolutely no way that he’d name me to be his successor.”
“Is it that important to you?” Hye Rim said. She had an edge to her voice that I rarely heard from anyone anymore.
“I can’t afford to get in trouble.”
“Nonsense. No one is going to harm the President’s son!”
“But they might harm his wife. Or her family.”
Hye Rim wiped a tear away from her cheek. She knew how things worked in the DPRK. “So what does this mean?”
I told her about what had transpired with the Great Leader and I told her about Kim Young Suk. I expected her to be angry, and I expected her to cry, and I expected her to—eventually—understand. But I didn’t expect her to have virtually no reaction at all. Her face was as still as the lake’s surface. “So the man that I think of as my husband—the man who refers to me as his wife—is married to another woman?”
“I’m sorry it had to be this way,” I said, preparing to console her. But Hye Rim didn’t need any consoling at all.
“I knew something was wrong and spent nights wondering what it could have been,” she said. “Maybe something was going on with the Americans, I thought. Maybe there was a problem with the harvest this year, or with steel production. I even worried that you were sick and scared to tell me about it. I’m—no, I was an actress. Every conceivable drama ran through my head as a possibility. But this? This I never imagined.”
“I’ll still be home very frequently,” I said, weakly.
“Did you hear what I said? I was an actress. Then I was your wife. And now I’m nothing. It’s like I’m not even a person anymore. Can we go home now?”
“But we just got here.”
“I want to go home. I’m tired. I’ve been tired for a while now. And now I finally know why. So thank you for that, my husband. At least I know what’s the matter.”
So I took her home. I knew things would change after I told her, but I didn’t expect how they would change. It wasn’t just that Hye Rim grew cold toward me. She grew cold toward everyone and everything. Actually, it wasn’t that she was cold. It’s as
if she wasn’t even there. The woman who had made a name for herself by portraying strength and intensity seemed as if she had no emotion left within her.
Raising Jong Nam increasingly fell on the staff and myself, and half the time I wasn’t even there. The older my son grew, the trickier hiding him became. I was a bit obsessive about his health and always worried over every little scratch he acquired. If he had a fever, I’d be so unable to concentrate on anything else that my work suffered. Of course this meant that I made sure that he was regularly taken to see his doctoress.
One day when Jong Nam was about three years old, I cleared my schedule so that I could go with him to the doctoress. I was sitting in the room holding his hand as she listened to his heartbeat with the stethoscope. I paused for a moment, hearing some people walking down the hall. Listening closer, I was certain that I recognized one of the voices. “Who’s coming down the hallway?” I asked the doctoress.
“I think there’s an inspection tour,” she said off-handedly. Then the doctoress realized that there was no reason for me to be in the hospital, especially with a young boy who looked a great deal like me. She must have thought I was going to kill her, because all the color trained out of her face.
As scared as the doctoress was, I was even more terrified. The inspection tour was being led by a prominent Party member, one with whom I’d had strong disagreements. Though we’d smoothed over the matter, I still didn’t trust him. Nor could I liquidate him, because of his influence with the Great Leader. “Stall them!” I snapped at the doctoress, wondering what to do.
She nodded. “Right away.” The doctoress got up and walked into the hall, shutting the door tightly behind her.
I kneeled down and smiled at my son. “Jong Nam, do you remember last week when you were hiding from Mother?”
He giggled. “Uh huh.”
“It took her over an hour to find you, because you were being so quiet and you were such a good hider. Well, I need you to be even quieter and an even better hider now. Will you do that for me?”
Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il Page 35
