Dear Leader (12 page)

The Workers’ Party’s rewriting of our history looked shabby in comparison. Even the greatness of our Supreme Leader was not the greatness of morality and righteousness. He had acquired his autocratic powers not through his benevolence but by selfish means, such as purging and executing his comrades. When I discovered this history, I knew I could no longer write in loyal obedience to a regime built on lies. I tried to convince Director Im that, just as Supervisor Park had said, referring to the Supreme Leader’s tears in a poem might go against the principles of
Juche
Art Theory. Perhaps fearing the responsibility, he eventually acquiesced.

It happened that in 2001, under the orders of Supreme Commander Kim Jong-il, the North Korean people were mobilised. In order to establish the
Songun
way of thinking in society, all civilians under forty, including high-school students, had to enter into a compulsory
three-year period of military service. Kim Jong-il stressed that Central Party cadres must set an example of the Military-First mindset, and that they too must leave their current posts and serve in the military. This led to the astonishing sight of Party Secretaries and Directors parading in the streets in uniforms too small to hide their flabby bodies.

In North Korea, a university degree is equivalent to the rank of lieutenant. Director Im made sure that I could do my ‘military service’ as a lieutenant in a unit based in Pyongyang, faking it like many other enlisted soldiers who did their ‘military service’ at home. Even while I was technically a soldier, I continued my literary work with extended periods of stay at UFD guesthouses. At the time, Office 101 was preparing for literary exchanges with South Korean writers, with the objective of arousing sympathy for our positions and views in the South Korean populace. Part of the mission included compiling a literary anthology of ‘Unified Korean Literature’.

By the second year of Kim Jong-il’s nationwide mobilisation order, its enforcement was no longer taken seriously by anybody of note. When I returned to Office 101 in the summer of 2002, I eagerly caught up with the South Korean literature and media that I had missed out on; and troubling thoughts, rising from the apparent contradiction of facts, returned to haunt me. The longer I bore these truths alone, the heavier my heart became, and the deeper my loneliness. I needed a trusted friend with whom to share my discoveries.

‘This is a southern Chosun periodical. Don’t lose it.’

Although I knew that removing a volume from the United Front Department was an act of treason, I passed a book from there on to my friend, Hwang Young-min. He had been a classmate of mine at Pyongyang Arts School. But my decision to trust him was based on more than just our friendship. He had, on several occasions, very
cautiously tried to share the notion that the infallibility of our system might be questioned.

Young-min’s father, Hwang Jin-thaek, had been a two-star general and chief of staff at the Ministry of Social Security (today, the Ministry of People’s Security). Paek Hak-rim, the nominal director of the Ministry, was an honorary appointee in his eighties, and Hwang Jin-thaek was the de facto head of this powerful state surveillance organ. In North Korea, however, no one could wield more power than was to Kim Jong-il’s liking. One day, after Young-min’s father spoke out a little too boldly on a Party issue, he was accused of being an anti-revolutionary. If the prosecution had reached its natural conclusion, Young-min would have been sent with his family to a gulag for his father’s crimes. The North Korean system of guilt-by-association made this a common feature of sentencing practice. Although Hwang Jin-thaek was able to clear his name before the investigation could finish, he died of the injuries he’d suffered under interrogation. Fortunately for Young-min, he was able to retain Pyongyang residency and was reinstated as composer for the Wangjaesan Orchestra.

The Wangjaesan Orchestra, kept separate from other North Korean cultural institutions, was operated directly by the Party’s Organisation and Guidance Department as Kim Jong-il’s court musicians. There was one other such group, the Bocheonbo Band, which worked in modern genres and with electric instruments, while members of the Wangjaesan Orchestra used classical Western instrumentation and also worked in the medium of dance. As the group of performers who played for Kim Jong-il consisted of young and beautiful women, people referred to them unofficially as the ‘Joy Division’.

Young-min knew things about Kim Jong-il’s personal life that no outsider knew, and it had taken a visible toll on him. He never talked much about himself, and I might have thought he had been like that
all his life if not for our friendship at school, before his appointment. He was taller than me and had curly hair. People always assumed that he was the older of the two of us, although we were the same age. His serious eyebrows, as black as soot, reflected his unwavering faithfulness. Sometimes, when he smiled, his cheeks blushed a slight red, revealing the innocence of a passion that he kept hidden from the world. Even after the death of his father, and in spite of his introverted personality, he could nonetheless manifest instances of fearless defiance, and the Party’s OGD took notice. Although Young-min was formally reinstated, he found himself excluded from Kim Jong-il’s presence on more than one occasion, based on some feeble pretext.

When the two of us got drunk together, and his cover slipped, he would even say dangerous things: ‘Indeed, our General is the Sun! If you get too close to him, you burn to death, but if you go too far from him, you freeze to death. And that’s not my line. I hear it directly from the most powerful cadres. You think you know Kim Jong-il? It’s not the North Korean people our Leader loves, it’s the North Korean girls. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, and too much of it.’

In North Korea, it is forbidden to mention any information about the ruling Kim that isn’t included in the body of official propaganda released by the Workers’ Party. Dear Leader was the Father of the People; and as soon as you knew him as a man called Kim Jong-il, unless you were authorised to have this knowledge, your life would come to an end as the system of guilt-by-association was put into action. Many cadres ended up in prison camps because to remain close to the centre of power was a dangerous game of balance, requiring a constant and attentive awareness.

When I shared my reading materials from the outside world with Young-min, and when Young-min told me about Kim Jong-il’s secret personal life, we were able to share our burdens. Our friendship provided me with the strength to carry on. The truth is more powerful the less it is tampered with; and as we learned about our place in the
world together – a world very different from that portrayed by Dear Leader – our friendship deepened.

On 10 January 2004, I heard loud and insistent knocking at the front door. When I opened it, Young-min was standing there, deathly pale and out of breath. He was wearing a dark jacket with fake fur around the neck for warmth. As he stood there and stared at me, unable to speak, I knew that something awful had happened.

‘That book you lent me, that southern Chosun book – I lost it.’

I gripped the doorknob to keep myself from sinking to the floor. He had fallen asleep in the underground, he told me, and left his bag on the train. He’d rushed back to retrieve it straight away, but as he reached the platform the door had slid shut. His words were barely audible to my ringing ears. Without thinking, I went to pick up my pen from the table, but put it back down. I could derive no comfort even from holding my most cherished possession.

‘Were your identification papers in the bag?’ I asked.

‘No, just the book,’ he replied.

‘Was there anything in the bag that could be traced to you?’ I asked again.

‘No, it was a new bag. Actually, there was my notebook too. But I’m fine, at least until they check for fingerprints,’ he said.

It looked as if it was I who was in the greater danger. Books belonging to the UFD were marked ‘Top Secret: Restricted to Internal Agents’ with a bright red stamp, as well as a bright blue one that read ‘Chosun Workers’ Party Central Committee, United Front Department’. Whenever a book was loaned to an agent, we had to show our official identification and sign for it. In my contract of admission, there was a clause that made the danger very clear: ‘If you expose southern Chosun literature outside the Department, you will be executed for treason.’

The contents of this particular book could only make the situation worse. It included a biography of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il written by a South Korean academic who had pieced together their family history, although we were only allowed to know their revolutionary history. It even made mention of the fact that Kim Jong-il had mistresses. The Party requires its people to live by a code of honour derived from Confucian tradition, which emphasises conservative family values such as obedience to one’s parents, marital fidelity and hereditary rights of the eldest son, in order to reinforce the legitimacy of a dynastic succession. But the personal history of the Kim family, in which those values were flagrantly ignored and bloody purges and violent politics formed the basis of their power, was in stark and contradictory contrast to the official version of events.

Whether or not these things were true, and regardless of whether we believed that an unauthorised version of North Korean history could exist, it was considered treason of the most serious degree to have shared this information. Although the sacrilegious sections were censored with black marker pen, the Ministry of State Security was not going to believe we could not read the writing behind it.

I felt sure that the secret police would appear at any moment. The closer a cadre is to the top, the more violent his end when it comes. Young-min too, as one of Kim Jong-il’s personal composers, was a senior cadre of the Central Party. The affair could not end with our deaths alone, because in the following weeks, after we had confessed to our treason and accepted the penalty, our families would have their lives summarily destroyed.

Looming always in the back of all North Korean minds is the principle of guilt-by-association, by which the family and associates of the traitor are destroyed along with the criminal, so that his or her corruption might be rooted out for good. I knew that the principle wasn’t just an empty threat, as the state made sure to display to its people whenever the opportunity arose for its enforcement. Yet this
tragic possibility had felt unrelated to me until now, when I found myself in the position of potentially experiencing its devastating effects. Young-min and I communicated through our eyes, not saying much. We were not so much concerned with concocting an alibi for the crime, as with survival itself. With the coming of daylight, our lives would turn dark, and I was too afraid even to look at the time ticking by on the clock.

I suddenly needed a drink. Seeing me reach for a bottle, Young-min took the two biggest glasses out of the cabinet. We downed our first shots together. We had put our families at terrible risk, and knowing this, we could not waste a single moment. We needed a plan, and then to carry it out.

As we downed a second desperate shot together, we made our decision. No words passed between us, but we both knew it well. The drink didn’t blur our senses – it gave us strength.

Young-min spoke first: ‘You know that saying: “When a small man drinks he vomits, but when a great man drinks he designs a revolution”? Well, what I’m saying is, that southern Chosun book … it made me feel …’

I interrupted him. ‘Let’s go to South Korea.’

Young-min’s fingers froze on the rim of his glass.

I continued, ‘There’s no other way. For the sake of those we love, we can’t risk confession. You know what this country is like. You more than anyone else know what this country is like.’

He didn’t need any persuasion. He seized my hand and, as if that were not enough of a gesture, pulled me close in a tight embrace. ‘You’re right, we’re leaving,’ he said. ‘We’ll die either way, so it doesn’t matter for us. I can’t even breathe any longer here, knowing what I know. Be killed at home or on the road, what’s the difference?’

There was no point in wasting time once we had confirmed our decision, and we began to plan our next steps. We agreed to turn up for work as usual in the morning. Luckily, as we had established,
the bag that Young-min had mislaid contained no direct personal identification linking it to him, so as long as I kept my wits about me, I could buy some time. When the Ministry of State Security tracked me down from the book, I would argue that I had simply misplaced my bag. In any case, it would take a day for them to put a surveillance team in place, and my status as one of the Admitted would prevent them from acting too hastily. We would make our way north during this time. The only way out of the country was to cross the border into China, as it was impossible to cross the DMZ into South Korea. A travel pass could be obtained from a former classmate at Kim Il-sung University, who worked in Pyongyang at a cross-border trading company. He was always in need of money, and a decent bribe would sort him out. By a stroke of good fortune, we found that there was a 9 p.m. train scheduled to leave Pyongyang the next day towards the border region. If we were to get on this train, we must pretend everything was normal until the time came for us to leave.

After planning these things, I hurried to pack my bag. As I would have to go to the train station straight from work, we decided that Young-min would take my rucksack. He could leave work in the afternoon. I stuffed into my rucksack everything I could think of. I did not forget my secret manuscript of poetry. It was my voice, and I would take it out of the country with me.

‘See you at 7.30 p.m. at Pyongyang Station,’ I said.

Young-min nodded, turned to go, but then swung back and seized my arm. He dropped his gaze as if he were lost for words, but then spoke in a low but firm voice.

‘If we get caught, we will commit suicide.’ The word ‘suicide’ felt like a tangible object being passed from his tender heart to mine. I felt strangely thrilled by the thought that death could be a conscious choice: I had the means to decide my own fate.