A Thousand Miles to Freedom (3 page)

My dad had no business sense, but there was one thing he was passionate about: writing. At the factory, it was always he who volunteered to write reports and propaganda. Above all, he had a heart of gold, and as his daughter, that was good enough for me.

I could also always count on my older sister, Keumsun, to protect me whenever I felt trouble coming my way. If boys ever came to bother me, she didn't hesitate to confront them. Although we were once mistaken for twins, I don't think Keumsun and I look very much alike. She is two years older than I am, but she is smaller, with darker skin, and large eyes that contrast with mine. On the other hand, we have the same nose, and you can definitely tell that we belong to the same family. More than anything, Keumsun has always had this dynamic personality; she is confident in herself, and can persuade just about anyone that she is right. In Eundeok, my parents' friends nicknamed her the “Little Adult” because of how grown-up she seemed.

*   *   *

As a child, I enjoyed going to school and I was a good student. Every morning it was the same routine. While it was still dark out, Mom would wake us up. Then I washed my face with cold water, which in winter was often freezing. After cleaning myself up, I carefully ironed my school uniform, which consisted of a navy blue skirt, a white blouse, and a little red scarf that signified membership in the Children's League. I was not yet allowed to wear the little pin with Kim Jong-il's likeness on it that everyone pinned over his or her breast after joining the Youth League.

While it was still not yet light outside, I would rush out to find my friends in the big esplanade at the center of town. At seven o'clock sharp, we marched to school row by row, class by class, all while singing songs in praise of our country's leaders:

“Even though we are small, our spirit is large! We are always ready to serve the great general Kim Jong-il!”

One of my favorite songs was called “A Thousand Miles of Learning.” The lyrics recounted the young Kim Il-sung's odyssey across mountains in China while he was fighting the Japanese imperialists.

After ten minutes of military-style marching, my classmates and I would stop all at once and the teachers would come to inspect our uniforms. Finally, once we passed inspection, we were allowed in the classroom. We started every day with a silent reading, generally a page about Kim Jong-il's youth, from which we had to draw lessons about how to behave ourselves. One time, we read a story about Kim Jong-suk, Kim Jong-il's mother, who was gathering grains in front of the intrigued eyes of her son.

“Why are you doing that, Mommy? We have enough to eat already,” asked the future dictator of our country.

“Because not a single one of our country's precious resources should go to waste,” responded his mother wisely.

I didn't always understand the hidden message in each of these anecdotes, but I tried to commit them to memory anyway, because the teachers asked us to do so.

In class, I often looked around furtively. There were forty of us, sitting at tables aligned neatly along the floor.

The teacher's large wooden desk sat atop the platform at the front of the classroom. On the wall behind it hung a blackboard and, above that, there was a portrait of Kim Jong-il, carefully watching us at all times. At the back of the room, there was a stove, which we used in winter to heat up our lunches.

Every morning when the teacher entered the room, she selected one of us to read the page about Kim Jong-il out loud. Studying the lives of our country's leaders was one of the most important subjects we had at school, along with mathematics, Korean language arts, and the communist ethic.

We were expected to sit in class silently. Even the tiniest bit of disturbance was met with public humiliation: in front of the whole class, the teacher would beat us with her pointer stick. At the time, I thought it was only fair that these troublemakers should be punished in this way. However, I should add that I never received this kind of treatment myself, because I was considered a good student.

Nevertheless, my status as a good student did not excuse me from the self-criticism sessions that were mandatory for everyone in the country, whether you were a factory worker or a student. In my classroom, at the end of each day, each person had to confess his or her misdeeds in front of the entire class. I remember one day I made a critical remark while toiling in the teacher's garden, a task assigned to the “good students.”

“What's the point of gathering all this corn if we won't be able to eat it?” I grumbled to myself.

“That individualistic attitude is unacceptable in the socialist society of North Korea!” my teacher sharply rebuked me, when she called me over after a classmate denounced me.

The next day, I reluctantly had to do my self-criticism. As soon as I finished, as payback I denounced the behavior of the classmate who had sold me out. To be honest, I felt a sense of sadistic pleasure in getting revenge because I was jealous of this girl. Her dad worked in the same factory as mine, but since he was ranked one level higher than my father, her family received better provisions than mine did.

At school, you needed to respect the class hierarchy. At the beginning of each year, we “elected” a class president and other people responsible for other important tasks. Even though officially these were free elections, there was only ever one candidate for each position. It's only now, as I reflect back on my childhood, that I realize the elections were just for show.

Here's an example of how the elections went: Once, the day before the election, the teacher called me over privately, probably because I was a good student. The next day, she asked the class:

“Do any of you have a candidate in mind?”

The room was silent. After a few moments had passed, I nervously lifted my finger and pointed at one of the students:

“Kim Song-ku,” I said, following the orders I had been given the night beforehand.

“Do we all agree?” the teacher asked the class.

Without hesitating, the class unanimously approved, and this is how my friend Kim Song-ku was elected. His father was a carpenter, and we suspected that his father was supplying the teacher with firewood. In North Korea, the best way to ensure the success of one's children in school was to offer gifts to the teachers. This was something that my parents never seemed to understand.

One time during the elections, however, I received quite the surprise. The teacher asked the students to elect someone to be responsible for cleaning up the classroom after class each day. It wasn't the most glamorous of jobs, but it conferred a certain status of prestige in the school. A boy stood up and announced my name. My cheeks turned bright red as soon as he said my name. At that age, I was still very shy around boys and didn't really talk to any. I'd never really noticed this boy before, but after that day, I developed a secret crush on him. His badge had two stripes and three stars, which was considered a very high honor. I had only two stars. These emblems designated the hierarchy of the class, the best of whom had three stripes and three stars. The teacher awarded these stripes and stars to reward the best students, the ones who were smartest, or those who volunteered for a class duty. She also often rewarded those children whose parents were generous toward her or toward the school. For example, once when a window broke, a boy's parents offered to pay for its repair. Just like that, their son was promoted in the class hierarchy. This was how things happened in North Korea. Unfortunately for Keumsun and me, my parents never fully understood how this system worked.

For a long time after I was nominated to clean the classroom, I wondered if the boy who had nominated me had done so because he liked me or because he had been told to do so by the teacher. To this day, I still do not know.

I don't know what's become of him, and I will probably never find out.

 

4

I will remember one fateful afternoon in July 1994 in vivid detail for the rest of my life.

I was nearly eight years old. It was pouring rain outside. At the time, we were living in a small house, and the rain was pounding down so hard that the roof was leaking. With my dad, I was running from one end of the room to the other trying to arrange buckets to collect the rain and avoid flooding in the house. Suddenly, we heard a loud knock at the front door. When we opened the door, we found a man who looked quite bewildered standing on our porch, dripping wet. It was the head of our neighborhood, known as the
inminbanjang
. Just the mention of his name struck fear throughout the neighborhood, because he was in charge of monitoring and reporting to the authorities everything that happened on our block.

The entire country was littered with these worrisome people, who even to this day ensure that the regime maintains its iron grip over the lives of twenty-five million North Koreans.

“Make sure you watch the news tonight,” the
inminbanjang
ordered us, and he seemed as confused as we were. There must have been something important planned for the broadcast that night.

Then, as quickly as the man had arrived, he disappeared again through the pouring rain. It was the first time we had ever received this kind of directive from him.

*   *   *

When the news came on that night, I sat in front of the television next to Keumsun and my father. We were a little excited because we were very curious to find out what was going on, but we were also a bit nervous. Something truly extraordinary must be happening. As usual, the anchorwoman in her traditional Korean outfit, in the middle of Pyongyang with the Taedong River in the background, appeared on screen. But this evening, she carried a sullen look on her face, like she was on the verge of crying.

“President Kim Il-sung has died,” she announced suddenly, fighting back tears.

My father was paralyzed from shock. The anchorwoman might as well have told us that the sky had just collapsed. My sister and I watched our father nervously. The images being displayed on the television had us all stupefied. I didn't really understand everything that was going on, but I knew something unimaginable must have just happened.

Shortly afterward, my mother came home from work in tears. I'd never seen her like this before. At the hospital, she had learned of the news with her coworkers, and one of them had suffered a heart attack from the shock. On that day, many people across the country died from shock. My mom was devastated, because she loved our president with all her heart. In Pyongyang, when she was a child, she had gone to school near Mangyongdae, the little farmhouse where Kim Il-sung was born. Going to Kim Il-sung's birthplace has become a national pilgrimage for North Koreans; I visited it myself when I was very little. My mom told me that once, Kim Il-sung himself visited them at school—my mom stood within one meter of him! He was very tall and had a warm smile, according to my mother. He always looked very cheerful and friendly on the pervasive portraits of him throughout the country, like the one sitting above the entrance to the train station at Eundeok.

He was a god to us, and the mere possibility that he could die seemed unthinkable. Could we still live without our god? Without our father? He was the man who had liberated us from the clutches of Japanese rule, he was the founder of our nation, he was the father of all North Koreans. When his death was announced, daily life took a hiatus across the entire country until the funeral, which was televised a few days later. All around North Korea, scenes of mass hysteria broke out: soldiers rolled around on the floor in tears, women yelled in anguish. On the TV screen, the rain falling behind her, the anchorwoman explained that “even the sky was mourning the death of the Great Leader.”

*   *   *

Today, even as I am living in the heart of Seoul, this phrase continues to resonate in my mind, because for me, it represents the indoctrination that we were subjected to and that is still in full force in North Korea. That day, on July 8, 1994, I truly did believe that the sky was crying from despair at the death of Kim Il-sung. I know now, of course, that the downpours were because we were in the middle of monsoon season, and it always rains a lot in Korea during that time of year. But at the time, I was completely brainwashed and believed everything I heard in school and at home. There was no reason for me not to believe—there was no way for me to hear any other version of the truth. Even the adults had no outside information with which to compare what we were learning in school and on TV.

My expatriation has allowed me to unlearn some of the propaganda fed to us and let me judge reality through my own eyes: my country is ruled under the hands of a bloodthirsty family dynasty. The Kims are not our loving fathers, but are ruthless tyrants. However, today, the overwhelming majority of my fellow countrymen to the north have no way of seeing the truth. My people are completely isolated in a closed-off world. They cannot be blamed if they don't revolt, because they don't know how to form their own opinions and they don't fully understand the true scope of their misfortune. It's difficult to measure the harsh reality of the dictatorship. Internet access is limited exclusively to the highest-ranking members of the Party. Watching foreign television programs, making phone calls abroad, or exchanging mail with foreigners are all strictly forbidden and punishable by imprisonment in one of the country's infamous labor camps.

Nevertheless, largely as a result of bribery, more and more information has been filtering in through the Chinese border, thanks to street vendors and smugglers. But their influence barely makes it past the surface. Along the border between North Korea and South Korea, the world's most heavily militarized border, watchtowers and mines form an impenetrable wall: no messages can reach North Korea except for a few pamphlets denouncing the Kim regime's crimes, sent over the heavily fortified border by balloon. Many families torn apart by the end of the Korean War in 1953 remain without news about their parents who live on the other side of the Demilitarized Zone, or “DMZ.” Such is the name given to the barbed barrier that still separates the two sides of the Korean peninsula.