Dear Leader (19 page)

‘You really have the money? Is it in your pocket?’ Young-min asked half expectantly, half suspiciously.

I took him to the corner of the yard and said, ‘Listen, we have nothing, we have absolutely nothing. Everything was in the rucksack. But we have to pretend we have money. That man can abandon us if he wants, but we can’t do anything without him.’

Farmer Chang-yong came out of the house with another package. He complained as if to let his mother-in-law hear, handed us a bottle of wine, and reassured us of his nephew’s promise. We would have to wait just two more days. He added that we should take care not to freeze to death in the mountains. But we must not light a fire, he warned us. He said that one of the reasons that Chinese authorities actively searched for North Korean refugees hiding in the mountains was because of the frequent mountain fires they started.

‘Go now, up near that rock over there. I’ll follow with bread and more blankets.’ As he pushed Young-min onwards, he grabbed my arm. He explained that his mother-in-law was angry with him for keeping us at her house longer than she’d expected, and putting her in danger. The only way to calm her down, he said, was to give her money.

I put on a stern face, saying, ‘We trusted your instructions in coming here, but we were almost caught. I’ll think about more money when your nephew arrives. We don’t know what else might happen, so please understand our situation.’

With that, Young-min and I headed into the mountains. An hour later, Chang-yong came to give us an old blanket and a package of food. He waved his fist at the cold and said that we would be better off on the hillside than on flat ground that couldn’t shield us from any direction; then he made his way back down the slope. A little while
later, he reappeared, saying that we must not fall asleep, because the temperature could fall to –30°C in the night. He stressed several times that we must keep ourselves awake at all costs.

We thanked him and saw him off again. We found a spot that was a little less steep, and dug away the snow until we could see earth, clearing a space just big enough to fit two people sitting down. We sat there huddled together with the blanket over us. The bottle of wine we shared was emptied far too quickly. But the alcohol spread heat through my body, which felt comforting. We also had a hot water bottle each, and I felt even warmer knowing that Chang-yong was on our side.

Young-min said, ‘Let’s each pretend the other one is a woman.’

Both of us burst out laughing at those unexpected words. Having been cooped up in a locked shack for the last few days, suspicious of even our own breathing, it felt wonderful to laugh again. The thought of having evaded the border guards in such a close call felt like a triumph too.

As the night grew darker, the mountain came alive. I remembered, back in North Korea, being captivated one quiet night by the neverending sound of waves crashing onto the coast in South Hamgyong Province. I think I was seven years old. I had not seen the ocean before, and as that vast expanse lapped restlessly, it seemed to be a living being. That night, I ran on the sand barefoot, saying that I would wake the sea from its twitchy slumber.

‘Hello, sea! It’s me! Wake up and come play with me!’

As I shouted at the waves, and as if the sea were waking with a stretch, lightning flashed in the distant dark of the sky.

Like the sea that night, the mountain whispered and pulsated in the dark, as if it were teeming with spirits. A distant sound coming from the peak of the mountain grew louder and, as it swelled into the valley, we imitated the noise, letting our voices rise with it. When the cold wind blew past us and away as if it were a visible being, I could
feel the deep energy of the mountain as it readied another wind to sweep down from its peak.

That night, Young-min and I shared our deepest secrets with each other like lovers. Our first crushes, recollections from childhood, the family we had left behind; as if painting the sky above with the colours of our memories, even the smallest recollection held significance. As the conversation turned to our loved ones, Young-min and I could do nothing but be there in silent solidarity, each for the other. Even after swallowing a fistful of snow, my throat burned with raw emotion.

The conversation turned to the North Korean regime. Ours was a system that would rather have us convicted as murderers and killed than permit us to abandon it, let alone stand in its way. The taste of bile from the pit of my stomach that made me realise, until now, I had not merely spent my life living within the borders of North Korea, but been imprisoned behind them.

IN THE AUTUMN
of 1999, I was appointed to work on the compilation of the
Annals of the Kim Dynasty
as a state historian. Following my composition of the epic poem to Kim Jong-il that had so pleased him in May, and my subsequent elevation as one of his Admitted, I had become a rising star in the UFD and received an urgent summons to the office of First Deputy Director Im Tong-ok. There I found myself in the company of seven colleagues I knew from various sections within the UFD.

I’d barely taken a seat when Director Im said, ‘Please stand up.’ He looked down at the sheets of paper in front of him on his desk. ‘I am instructed to deliver the General’s orders, as follows: “Even the ruinous five hundred years of the Lee dynasty during the Chosun period was recorded in the form of the
Annals of the Lee Dynasty
. It is a grave failing that we have no
Annals of the Kim Dynasty
to record the great rule of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. The UFD must therefore bring together the best minds in the country and urgently accomplish the completion of this work.”’

The
Annals of the Lee Dynasty
is a history of the Chosun era, spanning the half millennium between ad 1392 and 1893 on the Korean peninsula. However, it seemed paradoxical to emulate those ancient volumes when we lived in a Socialist system that was strongly critical of that feudal dynasty. And although my appointment to such a team was a great honour, I was even more surprised that the carefully selected members of the group were writers, not historians,
a signal that history came second to the cultification of the Supreme Leader.

The eight of us lived and worked in the Munsu Guesthouse, inaccessible to any outsider. Such guesthouses were independently operated by Central Party departments to provide exclusive facilities where vetted cadres could work in strict secrecy. The premises were extremely well furnished and were smaller versions of the sort of guesthouses used as accommodation for state-level visitors to North Korea.

The UFD operates several guesthouses, such as Ui-Am and Soonan. Among these, the Munsu Guesthouse had previously been used for those defecting to the North. Situated as it was in the residential area of No. 3 Chungryu-dong in the wealthy Daedong River District of East Pyongyang, not even the local residents knew that this L-shaped building was used for classified UFD operations. The interior of the high-walled compound was extravagantly appointed and, in order to ease recent defectors into collaboration, it had been decorated with luxurious foreign furnishings and materials, including expensive pieces made by South Korea’s leading furniture companies. Until then, I had engaged in ‘Localisation’ only through reading materials and consumer goods, but when I entered an entire building that that had been Localised, it blew me away. In recent years, defections to North Korea had ceased, and the villa was now designated for internal UFD use. We were the first North Korean guests to live in the premises.

The task that had been entrusted to us was the brainchild of Kim Jong-il. The first step had been taken on the third anniversary of Kim Il-sung’s death, in July 1997, when Kim Jong-il used the date of his father’s birth (15 April 1912) to mark the beginning of a new
Juche
calendar. With the birth of Kim Il-sung at year zero, the history of Korea had begun anew. Kim Jong-il had defined the ethnic identity of North Koreans as ‘Kim Il-sung’s People’ and he now needed to
legitimise this. His plan was to establish a history of Kim Il-sung that would consolidate and underpin the basis of Korean identity as an identification with the legacy of Kim Il-sung, rather than with a shared race, language or culture. In order to emphasise that North Korea was the legitimate Korea, he wanted to create a history that would include Koreans not only in the North, but also in the South and overseas. None of the relevant archival records could be released to anyone without a UFD clearance. But above all, Kim Jong-il could trust no one outside a handpicked circle with the Supreme Leader’s unvarnished secret history. We would need to master that secret history before we could reshape – or distort – it to achieve Kim Jong-il’s purpose.

North Korea asserts that Japan’s defeat in 1945 was the direct result of Kim Il-sung’s achievement as a guerrilla leader in the anti-Japanese resistance. The Korean War, which was actually suspended by an armistice, is declared to have been Kim Il-sung’s outright victory over US imperialism. Even the history of the Cold War is taught in North Korea as a Communist history that revolved around the efforts of Kim Il-sung. The international section of the Central Party became active in setting up
Juche
Research Institutes overseas, in an attempt to encourage foreigners to sympathise with North Korea’s worldview and version of history.

One reason why North Korea is unable to pursue reform and open itself more to the world is that this would risk exposing core dogmas of the state as mere fabrications. Kim Jong-il decided that under no circumstances should any potentially harmful source material relating to Kim Il-sung’s past be made available to the public. He had therefore assigned the task of creating the history to UFD cadres, who already held the highest security clearances in the nation owing to the sensitive nature of their policy and intelligence work.

Even so, there was a further level of atomisation built in, with each of us in the group responsible for a specific theme or decade in the
history of North Korea. Before our work began, we signed a contract confirming that we would pay a severe penalty if we overstepped the limits of our remit in conducting our research. We carried out our work in separate studies. I was put in charge of the history of Kim Jong-il’s activities relating to and stemming from his role in the Propaganda and Agitation Department, including his artistic achievements, from the mid 1960s up to the present day.

We were not allowed to enter anyone else’s study. But since the eight of us – segregated in turn from the rest of North Korean society – lived communally at the Munsu Guesthouse for the period of our task, the boundaries of secrecy gradually eroded and we formed deep bonds with each other.

Of the eight of us, I thought that the writer in charge of Kim Il-sung’s early years had the most challenging task. He often chain-smoked after dinner.

‘How are things going?’ I asked cautiously, not long after we had begun our stay. Instead of responding, he lit another cigarette. But he eventually turned to ask me a question.

‘You’re the youngest here. Let me ask you something. Our Supreme Leader was born on 15 April 1912. It’s such a significant day that there’s plenty to say about it. But what did he do the next day? I could refer to his mother’s milk as a revolutionary nutrient. But what did the Supreme Leader himself do? In all honesty, what else could a baby at that age do but piss and shit? And how am I going to describe the two years after that? If you were in my position, how would you approach the problem?’

Another writer, who was working on the history of North Korea in the 1980s, shared his dilemma with me. He said he had found in one of our Supreme Leader’s personal memos a mention of his attending a performance in North Pyongan Province in 1972. He asked me to help with finding source materials on similar events, with which he was going to fill three days’ worth of history in the
decade that he was supposed to be writing about. In this way, our contract of secrecy became nothing more than a piece of paper as the continuation of our mutual safety came to depend on mutual trust. We spent increasing periods of time in conversation with one another rather than in our segregated studies. And as I encountered more and more historical records, I grew ever more disturbed at the picture that began to emerge from the source materials.

Our group had been entrusted with the originals of documents relating to Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il from the archives. Compartmentalisation prevented any one person from seeing a comprehensive overview of the nation’s history, but when the pieces came together, the shape of the overall picture was clear and definite: Kim Jong-il’s authority had not, as the official narrative of hereditary succession stated, been passed on to him by Kim Il-sung, even though this was what he claimed as the basis of his legitimacy. Rather, the son had usurped the father.

The old saying that power cannot be shared between fathers and sons suggests some kind of universal and inevitable fate. The seeds of Kim Jong-il’s vicious struggle for power against his father Kim Il-sung were unintentionally sown when the boy was abandoned by his father at the age of eight, after the death of his natural mother, Kim Jong-suk. One year after her death, on 25 June 1950, Kim Il-sung invaded the South. Kim Jong-il spent three years separated from his father, as he was sent away from the fighting. After the armistice, he returned to Pyongyang, but father and son grew no closer. By 1954, he had gained a half-brother in Kim Pyong-il, whose mother was Kim Sung-ae, a secretary who had become inseparable from Kim Il-sung.

Kim Jong-il entered Kim Il-sung University for his studies, and graduated in 1964. As the eldest son of Kim Il-sung and the bearer of his father’s line, if there were to be a hereditary transfer of power at all, Kim Jong-il would have been expected to be awarded some responsibility or title, in line with Korean custom. But one year
before Kim Jong-il’s graduation, in 1963, Kim Il-sung married Kim Sung-ae, and this served to cement the exclusion of Kim Jong-il from the prospect of leadership.