Dear Leader (11 page)

Seeing the grin spread ear to ear on Young-nam’s face, I felt a little better. After the purchase was made, I forced the change and the rest of the money in my wallet into Young-nam’s pocket. But before we were able to leave, a siren started somewhere.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

The reaction of the people around us was even stranger than the sound of the siren. Everyone looked annoyed and some swore loudly.

Young-nam’s eyes were closed. He too looked exasperated. Then he hissed, ‘Fucking hell.’

When I asked again what was happening, he said it was an execution.

‘What?’ I asked.

The shoe vendor looked up from polishing a shoe with a tattered rag, and replied in Young-nam’s place, ‘You’re not from here, are you? Bad timing, that’s all. There’s going to be a People’s Trial. No one can leave the market till it’s over.’

In North Korea, a public execution is not regarded as a punishment. It is categorised as a method of moral education, and also as a tool of
public propaganda used in power struggles. But an execution in the market? As I looked confusedly at Young-nam, he reassured me that these executions took place almost on a weekly basis. They always happened in the market square so that a large audience could watch the proceedings.

Sure enough, soldiers rushed in from all directions to surround the square, herding us into the centre with the butts of their rifles. There was chaos everywhere. It made me flinch that the prisoner, led in by two soldiers, was dressed not in prison uniform but in everyday clothes. It felt like a deliberate message to the townsfolk that any of them could be in his position; that it didn’t take a special criminal mind to suffer this fate. The man’s eyes were full of terror as he scanned the scene around him from beneath his sagging eyelids and bony sockets. There was blood around his lips. For him, this truly was hell on earth, and his fellow men must have seemed as frightening as demons.

The People’s Trial was over in less than five minutes. It was not really a trial. A military officer merely read out his judgement. The prisoner’s crime was declared to be the theft of one sack of rice. As the country was ruled according to the
Songun
policy of Military-First politics, all the rice in the nation belonged to the military, and even petty crimes were dealt with according to martial law.

‘Death by firing squad!’

As soon as the judge pronounced his sentence, one of the two soldiers who was restraining the prisoner shoved something into his mouth in a swift, practised motion. It was a V-shaped spring that expanded once it was put inside the mouth, preventing the prisoner from speaking intelligibly. The prisoner made sounds but there was no human noise, only whimpering. This device had been officially sanctioned for use at public executions so that a prisoner could not utter rebellious sentiments in the final moments of his life before it was taken from him.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

I had never been so close to a gun being fired. The blood froze in my veins. Not daring to look at the prisoner at the moment of his death, I flicked my gaze upward. There was not a cloud in the sky, which was exceedingly clear and bright blue. But the faces of the townsfolk made to witness the execution were grave.

When the soldiers blew their whistles and yelled for the crowd to disperse, the people didn’t react, and began murmuring among themselves. As the whispers spread, I could catch what was being said. The prisoner’s identity had been established by those who knew him, and the shock I felt after learning the story is hard to describe. My hair stood on end, and a tingling chill reached from there to the ends of my toes.

THE PRISONER

Wherever people are gathered

there are gunshots to follow.

Today, as the crowd looks on

another man is condemned.

‘We must not feel any sympathy!

Even when he’s dead, we must kill him again!’

The slogan is interrupted:
Bang! Bang!

as the rest of the message is delivered.

Why is it that today

the crowd is silent?

The prisoner’s crime: theft of one sack of rice.

His sentence: ninety bullets to the heart.

His occupation:

Farmer.

The man riddled with bullets for stealing rice had been a starving farmer. Even someone who worked the land could not find enough to eat.

AS SOON AS
I returned home to Pyongyang, far away from the People’s Trial in Sariwon, I got into the shower. It felt like bits of the prisoner’s skin and blood had been sprayed onto my skin, and I scrubbed myself again and again. For over a week, whenever I sat at the table to eat, I was overcome with nausea and could not bear the thought of food. On any other Sunday, I would have slept in, but that day, I left when it was still dark, before dawn, to get some fresh air.

There was no one about except for a few old men sitting on the bank of the Daedong River with their fishing rods. I found an empty bench facing the water and sat down. An early summer breeze flowed with the river. I inhaled it deeply then blew out forcefully, expelling the ill feeling from my lungs. After I had done this a few times, I felt I could breathe more easily.

A stagnant stench rippled over the river’s surface, and a crumpled frying pan floated past. I wouldn’t have taken much notice of such small ugly things before. Instead, I would have let my thoughts drift with the water out towards the deep blue sea, whose depths would inspire me with poetry glittering like the sun rays on the waves. But that Sunday was different. As I watched the frying pan being carried away by the river’s current before me, its fate seemed to represent that of my friends and townsfolk. The water itself was like the passing of time, a passage no less pointless than the river water that flowed towards me only to flow onwards and away. On the other side of the riverbank, a slogan hanging from the rooftop of a building read:
‘After your thousand miles of suffering, there are ten thousand miles of joy!’ The words seemed strange and vacuous.

The Party referred to this era as the Arduous March, but wasn’t the reality much worse than merely ‘arduous’? Moreover, this wasn’t a march that all of us participated in. While ordinary North Koreans had to march in suffering for a thousand miles, cadres were strolling along the journey in privileged comfort. My townsfolk were concerned about their Leader’s eating and health, yet Kim Jong-il had the luxury of eating cold ice cream adorned with flames. I was filled with grave doubts, but I knew they were dangerous and would achieve nothing. I lived in Pyongyang. I was one of the Admitted, and I had come such a long way while only in my twenties. For my parents’ sake, I must not harbour any such deviant thoughts. If I continued on this path a little longer, I would end up in the most enviable of positions as the paragon of loyalty to Dear Leader. I had to carry on.

I resolved to work hard on the task set for me, the epic poem for which I had the full support of the United Front Department behind me. On my first day back at work, I arrived in the office earlier than others, at six-thirty in the morning. In my quiet corner, I wrote the title of my poem in big letters on a sheet of lined paper with my fountain pen: ‘An Ode to the Smiling Sun’. But I had produced nothing by the end of the day. My task was to describe how our Supreme Leader smiled, yet all I could think of was the misery of my townsfolk.

Why were we a poor nation? If our Supreme Leader was great, why were his people starving to death? Reforms had led the Chinese to prosperity, so why was our Party not considering any change in policies? I hated the way that these questions kept bubbling up in my mind like water from a mountain spring. When I thought I had dismissed one, another question arose in its place. Never before in my life had I so many questions to ask of myself, the Party and Dear Leader.

Every week, Director Im asked after my progress on ‘An Ode to the Smiling Sun’. I eventually grew sick of my excuses, and waited desperately for the end of each working day. When I took up my pen to write, it was the tears of the people – and not of our Supreme Leader – that filled my mind. I was restless with yearning to write realist poetry based on what I saw, and not loyalist poetry based on what we were all told to see.

Because I couldn’t let anyone find out about such writing, I spent my nights at home writing poetry in secret. In this way, every day, I wrote songs about rice rather than about our Dear Leader, my mind filled with the scenes I had witnessed in my hometown.

This boy was brought up on watery rice broth.

I give him a bowl of real rice on his birthday,

But he stamps his feet and refuses it.

‘This isn’t rice!’ he protests, holding his ground.

The night I wrote this poem, I cried until daybreak. It was based on a story that a work colleague had shared with me about his nephew, in a rare moment of disclosure, which I had written down.

I began to open my eyes to the poverty in Pyongyang itself, and I wanted to find out all that I could. After obtaining permission from the UFD to travel and conduct interviews freely in Pyongyang, I visited its markets and went out of my way to talk to those who had nothing. In contrast to my hometown, Sariwon, where deaths from starvation and even public executions were a common occurrence, Pyongyang’s residents would gossip guardedly about a neighbour’s death, as if it were a dangerous state secret, saying they knew it had been starvation. They lived in rigid fear, in the knowledge that there was much to lose as the result of a loose tongue: removal of the privilege of living in Pyongyang and being banished to the provinces.

But in the conversations of those living in the poorest areas of Pyongyang, in Dongdaewon and Sungyo, the truth of their situation
was clearly evident. A woman described how she cried when she heard her young son boasting to friends that he had eaten three meals that day, while she herself had eaten nothing for a week. There was a beggar whose final wish was to be able to give someone something, because all he had been able to do in life was to receive from others. As these records of truth became condensed into my secret book of poetry, I felt myself mature into a fellow human being.

But I also lived in fear. I knew about a writer who had secretly written in a realist style, and when his crime was discovered, he was sent to a gulag. I took care to keep my poems to myself, and it was all I could do to register the truth of how I felt, and confirm to myself that I was still human. The only defence I had against the paralysing terror was my faith that truth mattered. But I also began to study seriously the non-North Korean books that I had until then read as a duty and out of professional curiosity.

Until the day I was admitted to the United Front Department, I did not know what country was really meant by the name ‘Daehanminguk’ (which is how South Korea refers to itself, literally ‘Great Nation of the Han People’). I had thought it was the name of some country in South-East Asia, registering only how it had a similar name to Taiwan (
Daeman
in Korean). We had only been taught about the existence of South Korea in terms of its being ‘southern Chosun’, the lower half of the Democratic People’s Republic of Chosun, and even a passing curiosity about South Korea was treated as an act of subversion against the state. I only discovered this after my entry to the UFD, but in the summer of 1998, when the South Korean government offered to send rice to North Korea, North Korea had refused on the basis that the sacks had ‘Daehanminguk’ written on them.

As far as it was in the remit of ‘Localisation’ for South Korea, I read every outside text with gusto, and watched South Korean television obsessively. To do so was a special privilege granted to me and my
colleagues, but strictly prohibited for ordinary North Koreans, being, at the time, deemed an act that was inconceivably beyond the pale. It struck me that while North Korean television never mentioned criticism of their own system, South Korean television never praised their own administration. The lack of uniformity in their press was publicly displayed, and they would even criticise government policies and disagree with their politicians. By the time I progressed from South Korean newspapers to the more detailed analyses provided in periodicals concerned with politics, the economy, society and culture in general, my desire to seek other versions of the truth was even greater.

One of the periodicals I read regularly was the
Monthly Chosun
. Every time I opened its pages, shocking facts confronted me. I had believed that South Korea, a US colony, was being ruined by its Capitalist system. So it surprised me to discover that the South Korean economy was actually highly developed. I was also intrigued that our much-vaunted pride in the admiration of the international community rested on no more than the achievements of our Supreme Leader, while South Korea had given rise to many small and medium-sized companies of international repute. South Korea was derided as an economic slave to the US, yet the figures showed that South Korea’s trade volume competed alongside that of the Americans in world rankings. What struck me harder than anything, and was more powerfully moving than ideological fervour or propaganda, was the existence of the gap between North and South: we were one people, all of us Koreans, but why were our lives so different?

As I learned more about South Korea and the outside world, my focus turned inwards again, towards the North Korean political system. Although the slogan of the United Front Department is ‘Localisation’, outside texts that dealt with Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il on a human level had the sacrilegious sections blacked out by censors. It was this that provoked my curiosity more than anything –
if you casually wave someone away from a secret, they might just walk away, but if you struggle with all your might to hide it, their curiosity will only increase.

The happiest time of my working day was in the break after lunch, when many of my colleagues would leave the office for a little fresh air. One day, when I was sure no one was around, I held the blacked-out section of a page I was reading against the windowpane. As the black strips turned pale in the sunlight, the letters underneath became legible. What I saw on that page were the most terrible blasphemies that could not be seen or heard anywhere else in our nation. Even the smallest facts – precisely because they had been so carefully sealed away – eroded my unquestioning faith in our system. I had believed that the civil war that split our homeland was triggered by an invasion from the South on 25 June 1950. Through the revealing light of that windowpane, I read that not only in South Korea, but in the rest of the world too, historians routinely attributed responsibility for the invasion to us, and not to the South.