by J. M. Lee
Father and I were to live in a squat mud hut with a ceiling of unsecured planks. There was no electricity, and the wood-burning stove was clean, as though it had never been used. Father placed his bag on the dirt floor. The agent who accompanied us to our hut gave us our final instructions, and told us to assemble in the field when the bell rang in the morning.
The following morning, the bell sounded at five a.m. Father and I peeled our eyes open and headed to the empty field next to the huts. Pale faces bobbed about in the dark. Our area was composed of fifty or so families, creating a work crew of 170 people, who were then divided into three work units. Each cluster of households was surrounded by a four-meter-high wall crowned with an electric fence. Half a dozen work crews created one zone, and several zones made up this enormous prison camp, which encompassed a huge brick factory, a farm with an endless cornfield, an orchard, chickens and pigs, and copper and gold mines. Father was assigned to the undertaker crew. He smiled in relief.
“Hey!” a guard shouted, gesturing at Father with his baton. “What are you grinning at, asshole?”
Father froze.
Luckily for me, I was young enough to enroll in the primary school, in sixth grade; I would have been forced into hard labor had I been assigned to the middle school based on my aptitude. Classes began at eight a.m. A guard in a gray cap taught all the subjects, a baton in hand. We didn’t have any Korean, math, or science books; all that was drilled into us was the history of the revolution, the Dear Leader, and ideology. The third period was devoted to preparations for work, which began in earnest in the afternoon. With our smaller hands, we were assigned to do intricate work and tasks that required us to fit in small spaces. Our lower tolerance for beatings meant that we readily followed instructions. So instead of mastering Korean, we learned how to quarry, and instead of learning English, we gathered wood for fuel. Math, physics, and chemistry were pushed aside as we reclaimed the wasteland, logged, weeded, and bred rabbits. We were divided into units of half a dozen students, based on grade and physical ability, and assigned quotas for gathering food for rabbits, fertilizing vegetable gardens with human waste, and repairing walls. The taller, stronger children were assigned the most difficult work in the quarry; they developed blisters and calluses from the large stone-filled yoked buckets they had to carry on their shoulders.
The Seven-Year Plan dictated that we sell everything that could possibly be sold overseas. We dug out anything that could be unearthed and picked anything that grew. In the spring we picked bracken and wild greens, and in the fall we picked pine mushrooms and acorns. My slowness and lack of coordination assigned me to the rabbit breeding unit. My rabbits’ pelts were exported to China, and their meat went to the SPSD agents and guards. We wandered the mountains and the fields, scrounging food for the animals. We dug up the earth at the foot of mountains to haul it back to build rabbit cages. A few kids were buried under mounds of dirt in landslides and others tripped and tumbled off cliffs, but everyone was focused on how many rabbits were born and how many survived. Winter work began after the fall harvest—we repaired cages and stockpiled feed. The temperature dipped to negative 20 degrees. We began waking in the middle of the night from the cold, hunger, and pain. We were becoming translucent. At morning roll call, Father wrapped my face and hands with his uniform. A young guard had taken the gloves Jae-ha had given me. “It’ll be all right,” he murmured consolingly. “At least he didn’t yank off your fingers.”
One day, not far from the rabbit cages, a crow, its black feathers glimmering in blue and green, settled on a branch. It reminded me of a damselfly’s wings. My work crew grew excited. Crows, hawfinch, and titmice that flew into the camp were snared to fill hungry bellies, prisoners plucking feathers to stuff their clothes and sharing uncooked flesh. This crow flicked its tail, taunting us. Some boys threw stones at the crow. Our determined leader, Chon Myong-sik, threw a stone that hit the branch. I jumped up, startling the crow, which looked my way before flying off, its wings gleaming. Any hope for food flew away, too. I wanted to be the bird. I wanted to fly anywhere I wished. I wanted to decide for myself whether to fly or not.
Myong-sik came up and shoved me. “It flew away because you surprised it, stupid.”
I wasn’t stupid, and the bird didn’t fly away because of me. But my breath caught in my throat as I fell down. The other kids circled me, looking angry. The wall of faces closed in. I screamed. Someone kicked me in the gut, unleashing an avalanche of blistered hands, cracked heels, and long sticks. The world turned dark. A deep voice boomed. Everyone scattered. A rough hand wiped the blood off my mouth, but I pushed it away.
“Hey, I’m just trying to clean you up,” the man said, rubbing his hand on his pants.
It was Mr. Kang, who lived with his daughter Yong-ae in the hut across from ours. I looked up. His long sideburns were flecked with white. He smiled, deep lines carving a groove in each cheek. I looked up at the sky. Where did the crow go?
Mr. Kang studied me. “I met a boy like you once. When I was living abroad.”
The breeze kicked up dust, and Mr. Kang waved it away from his face. He caught me staring at his hands. Two joints were missing from his right forefinger, and his entire left pinky was gone. “Oh, this?” He grinned. “Winters took these away. Frostbite.” He opened his hands to show me.
I started to think of a functional formula that calculated the length of someone’s stay at a prison camp from the number of the remaining joints on his hands. “How long did it take for you to lose five joints?”
“Well, I’ve been digging copper for four years, now.”
“Copper?”
“To get one gram of copper, you have to dig through hundred times more rock.”
“Copper is a transition metal,” I informed him. “It’s in group eleven of the periodic table. Its atomic weight is 63.546 g/mol, its element symbol is Cu, and its atomic number is twenty-nine.”
Mr. Kang nodded and looked up at the darkening sky. My eyes went to his hands again, to his asymmetrical fingers. Mr. Kang noticed my gaze and curled his fingers into fists.
“I like symmetry,” I explained. “And also prime numbers and especially calculations. And formulas, geometry, equations, and sequences.”
“I can tell you’re a special boy,” Mr. Kang remarked. “I worked for a long time at a bank, where I did the accounting. I know a bit about numbers, too.”
People died in the middle of the night, at dawn, and in the afternoon. They were killed by trees, smothered by a mound of dirt in the brick factory, beaten, starved, and executed. The fell off tall structures, accidentally ate poisonous plants, and succumbed to illness. Father was in charge of first aid in a hospital without any medical equipment, let alone a decent doctor. More corpses than patients came his way. A truck would pull up and someone would toss down a body wrapped in straw mats. Guards rushed forward to peel the clothes, shoes, and hat off the dead person before delivering death certificates to the next of kin, who wept quietly, the sound trickling down the paths.
“Why do they cry so quietly?” I asked Father once.
“You need energy to be sad,” he whispered. “If you haven’t eaten a thing, it’s hard to even cry.”
“Why are they crying?”
“They’re crying for the dead.”
I didn’t think so. I was sure they were crying because they didn’t want to be left behind.
Father no longer cleaned dead bodies or folded their hands neatly over their hearts. Once a fortnight, the bodies were taken to the burial site. Father and the burial team accompanied them on the back of the truck, which was covered in blood and bodily fluids. Father vomited from the motion, spitting out bitter yellow bile. Rats, plumper than people, scuttled underfoot. The corpses were light; they had been feasted on by rats and maggots. Everyone wanted to be on the burial team. They could take any rags the guards hadn’t already taken and they were eligible for an extra bowl of corn noodles. One person’s death became another’s meal ticket.
At the burial grounds, Father tossed corpse after corpse into a hole. Upon his return, he would moan all night, prostrated on the ground.
“Why don’t you wipe their faces anymore?” I asked one night.
“There’s no antiseptic here.” Father’s voice was muffled. “And there are too many deaths.”
“Can they go to heaven, even with dirty faces?”
Father reached over to stroke my head, but stopped, remembering that I detested being touched. “They probably went somewhere nice, even if it isn’t heaven.”
“How do you know?”
“Because even hell would be better than here.” Father muttered that part to himself but I heard him.
When I woke, hunger stared me down. We didn’t have any food. The furnace was cold. The corn gruel Father made with half of our daily ration disappeared quickly. Father gave me two extra spoonfuls from his bowl, but that wasn’t enough. Hunger dogged me. I sipped water and chewed on my tongue, which reminded me of eating meat. Pain moved in, wandering from my muscles to my bones to my joints, then to my stomach or head or ankles. The sharp, sometimes burning sensation was different from being bruised, cut, or broken.
“Hang in there,” Father said. “You’ll get used to it.”
But I knew I wouldn’t. It remained painful. I wished I were the hard winter bark of a tree. Or resolute prime numbers, firm beaks of small birds, the frozen winter ground, or the thick, yellow calluses embedded in adults’ palms. They didn’t feel pain, did they?
“The world you live in will be better than mine,” Father said, as we walked to morning roll call. “Life will be harder, and death will multiply, but at least, as an undertaker, you won’t be out of a job, no matter where you go.”
Prisoners limped toward us. Father glanced at them warily and stopped speaking until they were out of earshot. “This place is hell,” he muttered. “We’d be better off dead.”
“What’s in heaven?” I whispered.
“Everything. If anything was lacking, it wouldn’t be heaven, would it?”
“So food and warmth? And Mother?”
Father nodded.
SECRETS CONCEALED IN NUMBERS
Mr. Kang was a quiet man. He never opened his mouth wide, not even when he laughed. That was because the inside of his mouth was a gold mine. He had hidden eight pieces of gold in place of his molars. I knew this because he got drunk on the strong liquor specially rationed for the Dear Leader’s birthday and showed me. His mouth smelled fusty. Gold sparkled in the dark cavern of his mouth.
“You won’t tell anyone, right?” He looked around. “This is all I have left. I can always pull them out and sell them. I’ll be able to buy my way into something better.”
“Why haven’t you done it yet?”
Mr. Kang smiled faintly. “Gil-mo, never show your last hand. Only when you are at your limit do you reveal what you have.”
Before coming to the prison camp, Mr. Kang had been the manager of Korea Taesong Bank’s international division. Controlled by the Central Committee Bureau 39 of the Workers Party, the bank oversaw the republic’s foreign currency slush fund under direction of the Dear Leader himself. Mr. Kang graduated from Pyongyang Foreign Language School and had an English degree from Kim Il-sung University. He exported coal, minerals, textiles, pottery, and medicinal herbs on behalf of the bank and imported sugar, seasoning, and household items. He also headed Korea Taesong Trading Company. Having established an account at Sberbank of Russia, Mr. Kang was hailed as a hero for bringing in foreign funds and was appointed the head of the DPRK-UK collaboration corporation in London, where he oversaw gold and foreign currency transactions. With London as his home base, he played a pivotal role in the foreign currency business all around Europe, traveling to Geneva, Berlin, and Paris. Three years into his stint, he was abruptly ordered to return. He realized that something had gone awry. He could survive if he disregarded the order, but that would put his wife and daughter back home in danger. When he landed at Sunan Airport, men grabbed him and dragged him to the SPSD. It was all because he had slashed the security budget of the North Korean representatives in London. His company provided funds for the official residences throughout Europe, and he had been concerned about the ballooning budget. After the fall of the USSR and the beginning of the Arduous March, the foreign currency situation had become dire. Though Mr. Kang had been able to turn a profit through skilled foreign trading, there was only so much one man could do. The only thing he could do was to reduce the representatives’ budgets. Angered, the representatives reported to their superiors in Pyongyang that Mr. Kang’s loyalty to the Party was suspect and that he was being swayed by capitalism. After ten days of interrogation, he was ordered to pack his bags. His family joined him on the back of a military truck.
“I knew what was waiting for me back home,” Mr. Kang confided. “I’d saved some money while I was abroad, but I knew I’d be searched as soon as I landed in Pyongyang. So I went to a dentist, had him pull all my molars, and replace them with gold. I figured they wouldn’t find out.”
In this prison camp, he labored silently in the mines, sixteen hours a day. Dark tunnels closed in on him as he dug along the vein of ore, looking for copper. He believed that luck came to those who laughed, but he never could laugh to his heart’s content, afraid that the gold in his mouth would betray him. So he only laughed in the darkness underground. He laughed and laughed, thinking about what was inside his mouth. Eventually, luck heard him and came to him.
The warden of the prison camp, Yun Yong-dae, had once been the associate director of the Sinuiju SPSD, a political military officer who dreamed of making it to the Central Committee. He was discovered to be corrupt—he had been smuggling valuables from abroad—and as punishment, he was now stationed at the camp. He was determined to turn this setback into something good and demonstrate his loyalty to the Party. He figured he would return to the good graces of the Party if he could earn more foreign currency for the republic. When the warden visited the copper mine to encourage laborers to work harder, Mr. Kang went up to him and brazenly suggested that they enter into business together. He explained that he was uniquely qualified to bring in foreign currency and that he desired to head the prison camp’s foreign currency work. The warden had heard all about the republic’s foremost foreign currency earner; his interest was piqued.
Having escaped the death sentence of the mine, Mr. Kang was handed the books in the office. A month later, the warden ordered me to help Mr. Kang; it turned out that Mr. Kang had requested my help. We handled an ever flowing stream of numbers. The number of pine mushrooms picked by each team and their unit price; sales figures per team; output per copper mine team; the number of rabbits; the output of the brick factory and the pig farm . . . We processed primary statistics and generated precise, secondary data, such as the work team’s production factor per hour; the efficiency of each work unit; the change in output of superior work units; the productivity of each individual member in each work unit; the progression of pricing of the Chinese trading company; the functional relation between the increase of production and unit price. The warden was now able to understand everything about the prison camp’s money-making business in one glance. It was clear that the current productivity could increase more than 30 percent if certain measures were taken. “Could this be true?” the warden glared at Mr. Kang with suspicion.
“All we did was to extract the data, using the output and sales figures that are reported every day,” protested Mr. Kang.
“I don’t believe you. There’s no way you can figure out the inner workings of the prison like this.” The warden’s Adam’s apple thrummed.
“Numbers reveal our secrets,” I blurted out. “If you listen carefully to what the numbers are saying, you can figure anything out.”
The warden cocked his head and squinted at me.
Mr. Kang assigned me all kinds of problems. I calculated the output of each work unit per day, the unit price and amount available to be sold, an
d the efficiency of production. I made graphs of specific items, comparing last year’s output to this year’s, then predicting the output for one week, one month, and one year into the future. Based on the prediction model we came up with, Mr. Kang reported the optimal number of work units, work hours, and work methods to the warden. We analyzed the numerical value of the work for the previous three years. We discovered that working after eight p.m. decreased the total weekly output, convincing the warden to minimize late-night work. Putting more people in each work unit increased the per-person output, leading to larger teams. The warden approved all of our suggested changes.
“Gil-mo, it’s a success,” Mr. Kang said happily. “Math is changing the way this place is operated.”
It didn’t surprise me one bit. I already knew that numbers could transform anything in the world.
The sunset was redder in the prison camp than the one over the Taedong River. Cornfields swelled and birds flew up; I wished Jae-ha could see this, along with the senior colonel and my math teacher. Mr. Kang was telling me about his life abroad. “People wore tight black pants, thin shirts, and ties, carefree. Their streets are lined with banks, insurance and investment companies, and people come from all around the world. They make bets and quick decisions using computers, numbers, and graphs. In those days, I would make more money in thirty minutes than this entire camp earns in one month. But sometimes I would lose that much in ten minutes.”
“You should have stayed,” I told him.
“I had to come back. My family. I had to return, no matter what. Pyongyang is my Ithaca, you see.” Mr. Kang told me the story of Odysseus and Penelope, Agamemnon and Achilles and Hector, as well as Prince Paris, the Trojan War, and the wooden horse. I remembered some of the names from The Possibilities of the Impossible but didn’t say anything. I had to keep my promise to the senior colonel.
