The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  As we ate noodles for lunch, he said, “We call these frozen potato noodles. I asked Luise Rinser if Germany had something like this when she visited from there some time ago, but she said North Korea was the only country to cook with frozen potatoes.”

  The noodles were black, thick, and delicious. The starch came from frozen potatoes that had been kneaded, sliced, and boiled, perfect for dunking in cold soybean soup. There was a sprinkling of black sesame seeds on top, and it came with a side dish of Hamgyong Province–style charlock kimchi.

  “Many people around the Tumen River helped us when we fought. The subsistence farmers were hungry themselves, but they would bury potatoes near the roads where we would pass and leave marks for us to find them. The earth was frozen underneath the thick snow, and the potatoes were like black rocks. You couldn’t roast them or boil them. The Japanese bastards had successfully cut off our supply lines at the time. They expected us to freeze or starve to death, and were going to kill off any guerrillas that were left. We did not want to throw away anything the people had given us, so a comrade who had once been a slash-and-burn farmer thought of making noodles from the starch. Poor people know how to survive. How delicious those noodles were with only salted water for flavor.”

  Another day, once I had seen something of the country, Kim Il-sung asked whether I could suggest any improvements. I remember speaking freely then as well, unlike the other visitors.

  “I was very surprised at the resilience of the people. But I couldn’t help thinking that North Korean society has no joints.”

  “What do you mean by joints?”

  “I’ve read that the chairman goes all the way to the backwaters of Chagang Province to deliver his on-site teachings. But how could it be possible to see everything? There are problems of all sizes, from the tips of the country’s toes to the head, all converging at the center, the heart. Wouldn’t it be better to allow certain regions to solve their own problems? Those are the joints. They’re like fuses that break at a power surge. When the joints are inflexible, you’re in danger of paralysis.”

  What I meant was that if the Party’s center held all the decision-making powers, the system would become fraught with the dangers of bureaucracy, such as mindless processes, corruption, and results that looked good only on paper. Perhaps the League of Socialist Working Youth or the General Federation of Trade Unions of Korea or Socialist Women’s Union of Korea could be given a bit more autonomy. I had been in a village that was preparing for a visit from Kim Il-sung and saw them hastily transplanting fruit trees and being given more rations to make them seem better off than they were. There were places in Hamgyong Province where I saw signs that read “Topsoil Battle.” I cautiously asked what this meant. Apparently, despite localities reporting successful achievement of their productivity targets, upon actual inspection, productivity was found to have fallen. In the absence of fertilizer the quality of the soil was declining, the topsoil becoming unsuitable for farming. Research revealed that vast areas of land would no longer be arable in a few years. Soil from the mountains had to be hauled in for topsoil. While the isolation of North Korea played a significant role in the nationwide famine during the 1990s, this kind of bureaucracy and red tape had surely compromised the “self-reliant agriculture” that depended on the farmers’ motivation to work. The wife of a famous foreign visitor once told me of how the chairman had entered a farmer’s house on a whim and opened the rice pot, only to find a layer of white dust. The chairman had crouched down on the dirt floor and burst into tears.

  “That is a very good observation. The people must fight against bureaucracy. The Party should not always try to do everything directly. Being so poor, we have tried to do so much, perhaps too much. In the end, we can only rely on the strength of our people.”

  The South Korean activist sphere had not taken kindly to Chung Ju-yung’s visit. Some Hyundai laborers had been beaten up by hired thugs on the very day he entered North Korea. Koreans living overseas became highly critical whenever Chairman Kim met a far-right figure such as Moon Sun Myung.

  But Chairman Kim had an unexpected take on the issue. “What do young people in the South call Hyundai’s Chung Ju-yung or Daewoo’s Kim Woo-choong?”

  One of his aides replied, “Ah yes, monopoly capitalists.” “Monopoly capitalists. I don’t see them as that. Moneymaking is a talent. Not everyone can do it. We must take a broader perspective. Mitsubishi or Mitsui belong to other people, but Korean companies belong to us. It is a good thing if they use their riches to benefit nation and country. In my speeches after Liberation, I told the people that those who can give money should give money; those who possess knowledge, their knowledge; and those with strength, their strength for us to build our nation. I still think so. We’re a divided nation with foreign powers right under our noses, so we should not have division among us. Of course, our relationship with production will change as well once we achieve a peaceful union.”

  As Kim Il-sung said himself, his life had been a long process of fighting against sectarianism while expanding the membership of the pro-reunification club. He mentioned Choe Chang-gul many times when talking about these struggles, from the years in Manchuria where he allied with anti-Japanese Chinese forces to when he shook hands with right-wing nationalists who were often more intent on crushing communism than on fighting the Japanese. Choe Chang-gul was the principled squadron leader of the nationalist right-wing group, Gukminbu, who had brought reinforcements to Kim Il-sung at the latter’s desperate request, before being assassinated by one of his own men. As Choe succumbed to his injury, he bade his army not to punish the assassin. This was his way of making them realize that, despite their ideological differences, the resistance must stand together to fight the Japanese.

  The chairman used many interesting turns of phrase, saying that “turning left leads to a narrow road”; that public activism needed to be “like a peach, mouthwatering from the outside, soft flesh on the inside, a hard pit in the middle, and a soft kernel in the pit” (the skin was mainstream politics, the flesh was the masses, the pit was the central organization, and the soft kernel was the love and trust among the people of the organization); or that theories of revolution that were “as cold and hard as ice” needed to be “melted down in the flame of experienced wisdom.” I called this his “people’s rhetoric.”

  The spokesperson for the German Greens, Rainer Benning, told me an amusing story about what Kim Il-sung said when asked about liberalization and opening up the country. “Well, it is a bit stuffy, so we should open the window. We’ll get a fresh breeze if we open it just a crack, but we’ll have flies and mosquitoes and other insects flying in if we open it too much. We’d need a screen.”

  His words on the North–South division left an impression on me. “South Korea is like the horsehair gat hat the nobles of old used to wear. The gat is the reunification problem. It stays on the head because of the two ribbons tied under the chin. One string is the American empire, the other, the Japanese. Just one loose string can take the whole gat off.”

  He was quite a conversationalist and said many such interesting things to me whenever we met. I was always impressed by how much he read and by his unexpected intellectual depth.

  If someone were to ask what I thought of Kim Il-sung (and this question was inevitable at the end of my talks, usually posed in an accusatory tone by someone who knew I’d been to North Korea), my first answer would be another question: can we really talk of modern Korean history without Kim Il-sung? We need to look at his life objectively. He was born in 1912, just as Russia and Europe were gearing up for their imperial wars and revolutions, and he had started his own revolutionary work in 1926 with the Down-with-Imperialism union. He could be seen as part of the first generation of socialist revolutionaries that includes Lenin, Stalin, Tito, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh, leaders from other countries who are fairly famous in South Korea. Our own modern history frequently mentions the patriotic Enlightenment movement or the Reformist m
ovement, but almost never talks about the socialist movements of the 1930s or the armed resistance against the Japanese. Kim Il-sung was alternately relegated to being thought of as dead or fake—and at best a puppet of superpowers like China or Russia. Until the beginning of the revolution in Asia, the Comintern’s central ruling powers directed revolutionaries in Vietnam, which had lost its country, and Korea was forced to be part of the Chinese Communist Party under the “one party per country” rule, to be deployed in China’s revolution first. Kim San’s Song of Arirang shows us that countless young revolutionaries who sacrificed themselves in the Guangdong and Shanghai communes were Korean. André Malraux’s Man’s Fate depicts the “Canton Commune” around the same time that Ho Chi Minh worked as a member of the Chinese communists. This was why Kim Il-sung was affiliated to the CCP and had to move his base of activity to the Tumen River to overcome the conflict between the Comintern and the issue of the Korean communist revolution. The unfortunate circumstances besetting the Korean revolutionaries are reflected in Kim San’s own frustration at being a hanger-on in Yan’an. Having given his whole life to the revolution, in the end he was accused of espionage and executed. Hong Bum-do, who had also been a legend in the Russian Manchurian armed resistance, was forcibly moved to Central Asia where he spent the rest of his life as a janitor in an obscure theater.

  There is a theory that Kim Il-sung’s resistance group against the Japanese was nothing but a puppet army of the Soviets, and that our own armed resistance was negligible in the 1940s. Japan’s war of conquest was heating up around that time, and anti-Japanese guerrillas did work mostly in small groups. It was only just before Liberation that the US and Soviet Union struck alliances with the resistance and coalition forces of various Asian and European countries. The American Office of Strategic Services trained guerrillas and the resistance in France, Italy, Greece, and Yugoslavia, as well as Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh and the illustrious commander of Dien Bien Phu, Võ Nguyên Giáp, who were subsequently drafted into Allied forces and used in the war against the Japanese. We know from the memoirs of Kim Jun-Yop and Chang Chun-ha that it was the same with the Korean resistance, who were also given military training by the OSS for deployment on the Korean peninsula—only to be dismissed when Japan surrendered after the nuclear bombs fell. It is not unknown that Kim Il-sung’s army, which enjoyed intimate knowledge of the Tumen River region and the trust of its people, were part of the Soviet section of the Allies. We can see from US State Department files that Japan’s Guangdong forces and Koreans in the North were aware of Kim Il-sung and his soldiers. As the only armed Korean forces to be acknowledged and accepted by the Allies, they are proof that there was armed Korean resistance in eastern Manchuria. It is not good history to deny even the most objective facts about Kim Il-sung, just because he stood on the other side of division. We need to be able to talk about Kim Il-sung’s achievements and faults, just like we need to have a balanced perspective on Park Chung-hee. I have always maintained that speaking of peace and communication while twisting the facts and attacking the other side would never lead to a better relationship, which is why I’ve tried to be as generous as I can with North Korea. I have written about the things Kim and I discussed because there was a compassionate dimension to his words, very different from his policies, which I could never agree with. It is undeniable that his many errors of judgment have brought misery to the North Korean people, especially his role in dividing Korea. The American policy of containment shares some of the blame, but it was indisputably Kim Il-sung who imposed isolation on North Korea and the basis for a hereditary rule that has extended to his grandson. This is why history will continue to remember him as an internationally notorious dictator.

  ~

  I know that everyone has childhood memories, and there’s nothing inherently remarkable about reminiscing over them. But being able to look back, albeit dimly, on the old days in a land that I thought I would never see again was an absolutely unforgettable feeling. And maybe it was that feeling that nudged me in a certain direction. I am confessing this now to explain the reasons for my generous interpretation of the state of affairs in North Korea. First and foremost, it was because of my childhood family memories. But maybe my reasons went beyond that, into the political. Pastor Moon told me in Pyongyang that Chung Kyung-mo said to him: “If the North Koreans insist they are making soybean paste out of black beans, just play along. Isn’t that the way to get them talking to us? Hasn’t every other outside visitor gone against them, saying ‘no,’ ‘we object,’ ‘that is not the case’?”

  I thought it only right to praise the resilience of the North Korean people. General Douglas MacArthur, from his headquarters in Japan, had written in his report of the war against North Korea that there were no targets left in the territory after they had bombed every harbor, railway, and minor reservoir. The North Koreans had restored what, to borrow an American expression, had been bombed into the Stone Age, and had become self-sufficient—an achievement no Western nation has the right to look down on. To criticize the official Juche ideology or the dictatorship centered around the Great Leader is something else, and my thinking was that we needed to give them the leeway to develop trust and communication, for the sake of reunification, before we could “lead” North Korea to change. I know that to say anything in the slightest way positive about North Korea is to violate the National Security Act, but I was glad to see that the fields and forests along the Taedong River remained undeveloped and looked just as they had in the past.

  Moranbong is really a small hill, and like Nam Mountain in Seoul, it serves as a park in the middle of the city, dividing Pyongyang into east and west. From there you can see the Taedong River and the plains east of the city. The famous pine trees of Moranbong were almost wiped out by bombing during the Korean War, but trees and bushes had been replanted since and were filled with blooms when I visited in the spring. The Japanese-style two-story house where my family lived when we moved down from Manchuria had stood between the stadium and the arch memorial that was built after the war. My old neighborhood had vanished, and now there were tall apartment buildings built at intervals over areas of green. I stood on the western side of Moranbong, which we would have seen from our house, in order to guess where it had been. I was about three at the time, so my memories were fragmented like dreams at dawn. They were memories my mother and sisters and I had rehearsed many times over the decades, so parts of them were very clear. A Soviet officer and his wife lived on the first floor of that two-story house; we lived on the second. His wife adored me and gave me things to eat and hung colorful epaulets and medals on my clothes. The rooms all had tatami mats and large oshiire (built-in closets) that were so cozy I would climb into them and fall asleep. My family would become frantic, thinking I had disappeared.

  We could see Moranbong from the second-floor window. A row of traditional hanok houses had lined a hill that was now all memorials and murals. We could see my younger aunt’s house (she died in South Korea in the 1970s). In the mornings I would see her busily moving about in her courtyard. I can clearly remember my older sisters leaning out the window and calling, “Auntie!” whereupon our aunt would look up and wave to us.

  The path up the western slope of Moranbong led to Chilseong Gate. Every morning I would hold my father’s hand and pass through the gate to walk to the Ulmil Pavilion. Occasionally the caramel candy seller would be there, and if I were lucky, I’d get to enjoy a treat that morning. Looking out from Chilseong Gate and a little off from our neighborhood was a main road where the tramline ended. My sisters and I would play all day and then go to the tram station to wait for our mother to return from work. I can still see my mother smiling and running toward me with a bag of Japanese cookies or rice crackers in her hands, and then lifting me up in her arms.

  I went through Chilseong Gate and up Moranbong, like I used to as a child. The gatehouse, old walls, and stone steps were still the same. It had seemed like such a tall mountain when I was little, but
now I saw that it was only a small hill. The winding stone steps led up to the base of the pavilion, and on the corner of the steps of Ulmildae itself was a small crag. My father and I would rest our legs there for a bit when we reached it. Ah! That crag was still there. There was a photograph of my father and me at this very spot, which was how I remembered it so well. I sat in that spot that had been a faint memory these past forty-odd years and had a photo taken of myself, a boy who had returned as a middle-aged man now older than his father. I turned away and cried. Not from happiness or sorrow, but maybe for the harshness of this life.