Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il

by Michael Malice

  He flashed me a sneaky little smile. “Can I get candy?” It was an unfortunate way to discover that my son had inherited the family’s strategic thinking.

  Now I could clearly hear the doctoress speaking with the tour; the enemy had reached the doorway. “You can have all the candy you want,” I told Jong Nam. “You can eat candy until you get such a stomachache that I’ll have to bring you back here to the hospital, all right?”

  “All right!”

  I picked him up and handed him to my secretary. “Quick, out the window!”

  The man grabbed my son and was gone instantly. I stood there by myself for a second until I heard the door very very slowly creak open. “Of course you can take a look in here!” the doctoress said from the hallway, making sure that I could hear her.

  The members of the tour poured into the room, one by one registering the fact that I was there and then staring at me with confusion. Acting nonchalant, I took the stethoscope in my hands and put it up against my heart, listening very carefully. Finally the Party member entered the room. “Comrade Jong Il!” he said, startled. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “There’s no reason we can’t both conduct an inspection!” I snapped, trying to sound offended.

  “No,” he agreed, “of course not.”

  “Well, everything seems to be in order in this room,” I told the group. The staff ushered everyone out as I exhaled a sigh of relief. When we returned home that afternoon, I got Jong Nam all the candy he could possibly eat and then I got him some more. To be honest, I didn’t just give him the candy because he’d listened to me. I was happy to do it because I desperately wanted his upbringing to be different than mine had been, huddled hungry in the snows of Mt. Paektu. Yes, the kinship I’d felt with the guerrillas had been irreplaceable, but it had still been a extraordinarily difficult experience. As an adult, I worked as hard as possible to ensure that the Korean people could live a comfortable life, eating rice and meat soup every day and dwelling in tile-roofed houses. If I wanted this for the sons and daughters of Korea, of course I wanted the same for my own son.

  I made it a point to have dinner with Jong Nam and Hye Rim as much as possible. The food really did taste better that way, I felt. I also tried to spent as much time with my son as I could because I sympathized with him. Due to our family’s secret circumstances, he had to grow up alone. Yes, he had the staff, but he never interacted with any other children lest they run their mouths as children are prone to do. Not only was Hye Rim a target for my opponents, but so too was my heir. The thought of something happening to him sometimes kept me up at night.

  One day in April of 1974, I sat Jong Nam on my lap. “Son, do you know what May 10 is?” I asked him.

  “My birthday?”

  “That’s right!” I said. “Do you know what you want for your birthday? You can have anything you want, just ask for it.”

  He put his finger to his lips and thought. I couldn’t blame him for not knowing what to say. Jong Nam had more toys than he could count, literally. I even let him watch as much television as he desired on any of his three sets. “I know!” he said. “I want to see the man on the TV!” I thought he must have seen a film and wanted to meet the star. Of course that would be very easy to accomplish. “Which man? Will you show me, son?”

  He took me by the hand and walked me over to a television. He turned it on and went through all the channels before giving up. “He’s not there,” Jong Nam said.

  I sat down knee to knee with him on the floor. “You keep watching. The next time he’s on the TV, you tell one of the staff. They’ll tell me the man’s name, and you’ll get to meet him for your birthday.”

  “OK!” Jong Nam said, giving me a big hug.

  Three days later, I came home and was called over by one of the cooks. “Comrade,” he said, “I feel embarrassed to bother you with this, but Jong Nam was most insistent that I speak with you.”

  “Oh! Has he found the actor that he wants to meet?”

  The poor cook didn’t look at me, and spoke quietly. “Um, yes. Yes, he did.”

  “So? Who is it?” “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re not sure?” I rattled off some of the more prominent actors of the era, but the cook merely shook his head. “Well, what film was he in?”

  “He wasn’t in a film.”

  “So what program was he on? Was he a reporter of some kind?”

  “No, comrade. I don’t know his name because it wasn’t given. He was playing a character.”

  I rolled my eyes. “So what was the character’s name?”

  “I can’t tell. With all due respect, I turned away from the set as soon as I heard them speak. The program seemed to come from the village below.”

  “You mean south Korea.”

  The chef nodded. “I will discuss this in my criticism session this week.”

  “Very well,” I said, dismissing the man. Against my better judgment, I permitted Jong Nam to watch foreign cartoons and children’s shows. Now he was taken with some south Korean celebrity and wanted to meet him for his birthday. I’d promised my son anything he wanted—but this even I couldn’t deliver. I was at a loss as to what to do, so I did what most fathers would in my situation: I ignored it and hoped that the kid would forget.

  It was an unfortunate way to also discover that my son had inherited my prodigious memory. From that point on, it was the same thing every time I came home: “Have you spoken to him yet?” “Is he coming to my birthday?” “Should I get him a present too?”

  I was Kim Jong Il, the incarnation of love and morality. Surely I could think of some way to solve this dilemma! I rejected the first option I thought of: kidnapping the performer and bringing him to the north. It would be too public and lead to too many questions, defeating the whole purpose of secrecy.

  There were no good solutions, only poor ones. I was being defeated by a child—one who hadn’t even tried to pit himself against me. Finally, I came up with a plan. It wasn’t up to my usual standards, but it was pretty much the only plausible choice that I had. I acquired a stack of south Korean children’s publications and had the chef pick out the performer for me. Then I called a meeting with my most trusted agent in our intelligence division. The man had done great work for me in the past, and intuitively knew to keep his mouth shut under any circumstances.

  Late one night, he met me in my office. I sat down across from him at my desk and slid him the picture from the magazine. “This is a very popular children’s entertainer in the south. We need to find someone who looks just like him in the north. Someone who looks so much like him that his own mother wouldn’t be able to spot the difference.”

  The agent held up the picture and chuckled. “A brilliant plan, comrade. You’ve outdone yourself.”

  “But I haven’t told you the plan yet.”

  He scowled. “Pardon?”

  “What do you think the plan is?”

  “I’m assuming that we abduct this performer and replace him with one of our own, making sure he encourages the children to see the north in a more positive light. A long-term project, perhaps, but the youngsters will be adults soon enough.”

  I paused. That actually was a brilliant plan, but I was focusing on my son at the moment. “I of course had been thinking along those lines, but we need something more immediate for now. Sort of a test run.”

  “Very well. What timeframe am I operating under?”

  “He’ll be putting on a show on May 10th.”

  “I’m assuming this will be televised?” asked the agent.

  “No. It’s for a party.”

  “A party?”

  “Why does it matter what it’s for?” I barked.

  “My apologies, comrade. I ask because I need to understand what sort of scrutiny this performer will be under. That will affect how, say, we alter his appearance and how much we need to work on his dialect. Things like that.”

  “Very well. The audience will be one boy.”

/>   The agent blinked. “A boy?”

  “Yes, there’s a boy who is a member of my family and meeting this performer is his birthday wish.”

  “I...see. I’ll make sure this task is accomplished right away.”

  The agent scoured the Korean countryside until he found a farmer who looked reasonably similar to the TV performer. Then he took him to a private studio to watch the show and practice mimicking it. The man was happy to do it, because I made sure that his family was very well taken care of.

  As promised, Jong Nam had his birthday party on May 10. He unwrapped toy after toy, but I could tell that he was getting antsy for the big surprise that I’d promised him. Finally, a staff member gathered everyone’s attention and introduced the “performer.” I applauded heartily, watching Jong Nam’s reaction out of the corner of my eye. Minutes after the man began his act, my son stood up and went to leave.

  Calling for a pause in the show, I went after Jong Nam and caught up to him in the hall. “Where are you going? He came all the way from Seoul to be here with you on your birthday.”

  “That’s not him.”

  “Of course it is. Just look!” I glanced back at the performer. Now he, I’m sure, really did see his whole life flash before his eyes in that moment. He didn’t knew what the consequences would be if his fraud were exposed, but they surely wouldn’t be pleasant.

  Jong Nam stared me down. It was the same stare I’d seen his grandfather deliver to men who’d failed him. “You’re a liar,” my son said. “You make up stories and everyone in the house acts like they’re true. Even Mother. Well, they’re not true.” Then he shrugged my hand off and walked to his room.

  I turned around; everyone was waiting for me to tell them what to do. “Let’s clean up,” I muttered. “I’m going to go do some work in my office.” It was apparent that the secrecy regarding Jong Nam was untenable and would only get worse as he got older. It would be harder and harder to explain to him why he couldn’t play with other children or go to school. Yet I didn’t know what to do or even who I could speak to. In circumstances like this I always looked to the Great Leader for advice, but he was the main individual that I was keeping Jong Nam from.

  There was only one person in all of the DPRK who’d appreciate the situation that I’d gotten myself in, only one person who I could trust and who knew the Great Leader almost as well as I did: my sister. Kim Kyong Hui was no longer the little girl I’d comforted when Mother had died. As befitting the daughter of two Mt. Paektu revolutionaries, she’d grown into a strong, opinionated woman in her own right. She held an important position in the Korean Democratic Women’s Union where she had a reputation for being downright gruff. I arranged to have dinner with her in a restaurant in Pyongyang shortly after Jong Nam’s birthday debacle.

  Kyong Hui sat there chain-smoking cigarettes as I told her everything, not omitting a single important detail. Letting me get the story out, her reactions alternated between rolling her eyes and grunting with amusement. “So how do you think I should handle this?” I finally asked her.

  “Look,” she said, “Hye Rim is older than you. She’s been married before, and has an older daughter. Do you understand that there is absolutely no possibility she would be acceptable as your wife, regardless of your position or whatever the circumstances might be?”

  It sounded so much harsher when she said it, but of course it was all true. “Yes, I do understand that. That’s why I’ve kept all this a secret.”

  “So get rid of her.”

  “Get rid of her? What do you mean?”

  Kyong Hui shrugged, stamping out her cigarette. “Send her abroad. Moscow, Beijing. You can send her to New York, it doesn’t matter. Just get rid of her.”

  “I can’t ask her to leave!”

  “From everything that you’ve told me, it sounds like she wants to leave. You said that she complains about being trapped in that house. Fine. If she doesn’t want to be trapped, she can go wherever she wants on the entire planet. Just make sure that she’s provided for and then she won’t be so miserable.”

  “But what about Jong Nam?”

  “I’ll raise him,” Kyong Hui said.

  “Really?”

  “Of course. We’ll have to get tutors and the like, but it’ll be fine. I grew up without a mother. So did you, and we both turned out very well. It was difficult, but there wasn’t anything that we could do about it.”

  I thought about what Kyong Hui was suggesting. It did seem like the best plan for all concerned. The more I mulled it over in my head, the more it seemed like a new life for Hye Rim was exactly what she needed to regain her vigor. But still, it was a lot to demand from her. “I can’t do it,” I finally said. “I can’t bring myself to ask her to leave a household that we’ve both built together.”

  “Fine,” Kyong Hui said.

  “I’ll talk to her.” “You will?”

  “Of course. This woman is nothing to me. And if you really want to know my opinion, she was never that good of an actress anyway.”

  My sister and I fixed a date for her to approach Hye Rim. I made it a point to work very late that night so that I could avoid any awkwardness. As the minutes passed by, I kept glancing at the phone in anticipation of Kyong Hui calling to tell me how the talk went. I truthfully had no way of predicting how Hye Rim would react. By this point, I couldn’t predict anything Hye Rim did anymore. Finally, the call came through. “How did it go?” I asked my sister.

  “Not all that well.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” Kyong Hui said. “She absolutely refused. She said that she was Jong Nam’s mother and that she was going to raise her own son. She insisted that she would never abandon him.”

  I winced. “I see.”

  “She also said something very curious.”

  “What? What else did she say?”

  “She said that if you try something like this again, then she will personally bring Jong Nam to see President Kim Il Sung.”

  “Well, that’s that,” I told my sister. “Thank you very much.”

  “Wait, there’s one more thing I need to tell you. It’s just a feeling I have, but I know that there’s truth behind it. Listen to me carefully: there’s something not right with her.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not right’?”

  “I don’t know. Like I said, it’s just have an impression that she gave me. It was more how she spoke than anything that she said. It made me...uneasy.”

  On some level I knew what Kyong Hui meant, but I confess that I quickly put the thought out of my mind. That night I went to my other home to sleep, not wanting to deal with Hye Rim. It took a few days before I returned to my primary household. There I found Hye Rim in bed, even though it was late afternoon. “Are you sleeping?” I asked her.

  “I’ve been tired lately,” she said casually, as if her conversation with Kyong Hui had never happened. “I don’t feel well.”

  I sat down on the bed beside her. She looked awful, like she was in the midst of some sickness. “How long has this been going on?”

  “I don’t know. Please, let me rest.”

  “All right,” I said, leaving her be.

  As the weeks went on, Hye Rim didn’t seem to get any better. At the time I didn’t register how ill she seemed or how long she’d been sick. I was too busy focusing on officially being named as successor. Once that happened, I breathed a little easier. In 1975, I knew it was finally time to let the Great Leader know about Hye Rim and Jong Nam. Though this was a deception of several years’ standing, I actually wasn’t worried in the slightest. On my side of the conversation I had the very thing that President Kim Il Sung wanted most: a grandson.

  I went over to his villa one evening when I knew that his plans had been cancelled. I didn’t even bother explaining why I was paying him a visit. “There’s someone here I want you to meet,” I told him. “Jong Nam, come in here!”

  In walked little Jong Nam, wearing his best military-style uniform.
The boy went up to the Great Leader and gave him the solemnest of salutes—just as we’d practiced at home. “It’s a honor to meet you, General.” The General laughed at the scene. “It’s an honor to meet you as well. What’s your name?”

  “I’m Kim Jong Nam.”

  The General looked up at me, wondering what this was about. “He’s very cute. Do you remember when you were a little boy, and you kept General Shtykov waiting because I was sleeping?”

  “I do,” I said. “I must have looked quite like this.”

  He turned back to Jong Nam. “You did look like this when you were his age...”

  “That’s because this is my son,” I told him. “Your grandson.”

  It was as I’d told him that I’d been born in Russia or that he’d been the one to start the Korean War. The statement was so absurd that President Kim Il Sung didn’t know how to respond. Finally he came up with a plausible explanation. “You’ve adopted a boy?” he whispered under his breath.

  “No. Jong Nam, why don’t you have a seat on your grandfather’s lap while I have a little talk with him.”

  “OK!” He quickly clambered right up, much to the Great Leader’s amusement.

  I then proceeded to tell President Kim Il Sung everything that had happened. He was livid at various points, and with good reason. But he was also a human being. Here was his very own flesh and blood, just as he’d been asking for for years. I’m not sure whether Jong Nam was doing it intentionally, but he was masterful at mollifying the Great Leader’s anger. Anytime President Kim Il Sung seemed to start getting upset, Jong Nam would interrupt with a question: “What’s your favorite candy?” “Why are some of your hairs gray?” “Can I see your glasses?” It was absolutely impossible for the Great Leader to remain annoyed under such circumstances.

  From that day on, President Kim Il Sung doted over Jong Nam even more than I did. His anger with me was over within days—and with that, the biggest source of stress in my life was gone. It was a wonderful time for everyone in the family, but for one glaring exception: Hye Rim. She was always sick or tired or some combination of the two. She never truly complained about it, either. It was more the fact that she always seemed to be in bed whenever I came home. Unprompted, the staff confided to me that she spent virtually all her time in her room. She was clearly losing weight, and they were all quite worried about her.