Dear Leader (22 page)

The Jeep was as powerful and agile as Mr Shin. Listening to Korean pop music on the radio as we bounced along the road, I felt we could ride this Jeep all the way to Seoul. Instead, we arrived back in Yanji, this time in a central and modernised area. There, right in the middle of the city, Mr Shin brought the Jeep to a halt, opened the door and asked us to get out. Having been so far from the bustle of ordinary life, we found the busy crowd overwhelming. Mr Shin didn’t seem to notice. He just shouted, ‘Hurry up!’ and we followed him.

We went into a shopping mall, where I was startled to see a group of armed police on patrol. Yet Mr Shin dared to call my name out loud. His apparent carelessness put me on edge, but Young-min and I did as we were told as he beckoned impatiently to us from outside a clothing store.

After putting on the new clothes he’d chosen, I looked in the mirror, pleased at first, but then shocked to see my easily recognisable face staring back. What was I doing, standing in such a public place with my face displayed for all to see? I quickly asked for a pair of sunglasses instead of new clothes. Mr Shin said that would arouse suspicion, but Young-min pleaded likewise. He even explained at length how we had lost our sunglasses in the rucksack we had been forced to abandon. Mr Shin was reluctant to make the purchase, saying it might make us stand out, but in the end he gave in to Young-min.

From then on, we wore our new clothes and sunglasses. I felt I could stand tall, safely disguised by the dark glasses. Young-min
grinned at me from behind his shades, although I could not see his eyes. I felt a pang of sadness, thinking that this is how I must have looked to my parents when they saw me for the last time.

When we went back to the car, Mr Shin was waiting with a camera. He said he had to provide evidence to his superiors of how he had used their money. If we had not bought the sunglasses, I don’t think I could have let myself be photographed in public. After we’d finished with the photographs, I noticed some more police officers standing behind us, completely oblivious.

That was the first day I felt we were really able to appreciate the impact of reforms in China. Just like the North Korean saying that ‘Even viewing Mount Keumgang should be done after eating’ (meaning that even gazing at the best views on earth ought to be done on a full stomach), we headed first to have lunch. Mr Shin took us to an expensive restaurant that specialised in smoked duck served whole on a large plate. Mr Shin boasted that this was a favourite dish of such illustrious figures as Emperor Qianlong, Empress Cixi, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, but our delight in the dish was pleasure enough without these sorts of associations. After stuffing ourselves with duck, we went – for the first time in our lives – to a Korean-style sauna open to both men and women. I asked why it was referred to as Korean-style, and Mr Shin explained that, in South Korea, you could take a bath, have a sauna and stay the night all in one establishment.

When I plunged up to my neck into a large hot tub, washing off the dirt I’d accumulated since we’d left Pyongyang, it seemed as though all my suffering was being washed away too. Even the hot water overflowing from the tub was miraculous. By 1994, when the central heating system of Pyongyang had all but collapsed, hot water had become a rare privilege. In November 1998, just before the start of winter, the Party finally acknowledged this through a public order, stating that each household must sort out its own heating problems.
At the time, Pyongyang residents openly stated that they were happy to forgo hot water, if only they could be provided with a decent supply of drinking water.

The only residential area in Pyongyang that provided a hot water supply to its residents was Changgwang-dong of Joongu Area, where Central Party cadres lived. Even there, the supply was only provided twice a day for two hours at a time, between six and eight in the morning and seven and nine in the evening, when people were preparing to go to work and arriving home. With the situation so dire even for the most privileged people in the nation, the places foreigners frequented, such as Koryo Hotel, and facilities set up for foreigners, such as saunas, became established as the social gathering places of the North Korean elite.

Until I left Pyongyang in 2004, the price of one kilo of rice in the markets was 1000 won. At the exchange rate of the time, this was the equivalent of 50 US cents. At a time when many couldn’t afford to pay even such a small sum for essentials and sometimes went without food for days, a fee of US$5 or US$8 for one entry to a foreigners’ bath or sauna represented an inconceivable extravagance. Instead, the middle class of Pyongyang, who didn’t have enough foreign currency purchasing power to afford this luxury, frequented the boiler rooms at foreign embassies, restaurants or central state institutions. If you paid a bribe, the staff would allow you to have some of the hot water from the overflow pipe. You could sometimes see foreigners at these locations, but there would always be surveillance around and no one dared to get too friendly with the visitors.

Even today, the vast majority of the North Korean population, which struggles with many of the basics of day-to-day living, relies on vinyl bathing ‘greenhouses’ imported from China. These come in single and double sizes. If you hang this vinyl encasement from the ceiling, it reaches to the floor. In effect, it is a large plastic bag. If you enter it carrying a bucket full of boiling water, the steam
rises and the plastic bag swells like a balloon. You wash yourself by mixing cold and boiling water, and you’re kept warm by the sauna effect.

In contrast to all this, China seemed to me paradise on earth. The hot water that filled my tub was much more than that to me. It was yet another example of how reform had transformed Chinese society to the extent that the enjoyment of the most luxurious privilege, by North Korean standards, was available even to ordinary people. On hearing our description of the ‘greenhouse’ baths, Mr Shin said that there were rural places in China where they still washed themselves using a similar method. Ironically, it was due to Chinese reforms that these ‘Korean-style’ saunas had appeared. Seemingly proud of this, he leapt out of the bath, declaring that he would give us North Korean hillbillies a real taste of Chinese-style reform.

He took us to a room furnished with beds, where a man stood in a white bathrobe. Mr Shin said he was the back-scrubber, who would scrub our backs for a few coins. I couldn’t understand why on earth anyone would stoop to scrub another man’s back, even for money. We were made to lie down to see for ourselves what it was like. The man went to work energetically, but I felt so embarrassed that I couldn’t enjoy the experience. Coming from a country where ideology dictated that no ordinary individual was permitted to benefit from the personal service of any other individual, this back-scrubbing experience made me feel that I was overdosing on the worst excesses of Capitalist exploitation.

Changing into bathrobes, we followed Mr Shin into the main hall, where we were profoundly shocked once again. This time, it was at the sight of men and women in the same room wearing only bathrobes, despite being complete strangers. When a woman wearing shorts that revealed her knees approached and plonked herself down next to us, Young-min and I jumped up from our seats. In North Korea, only a madwoman would behave in such an unguarded
manner in the presence of men. While we stared in amazement as she nonchalantly peeled a tangerine, Mr Shin laughed.

After the sauna, we went to a karaoke bar. Mr Shin probably thought that we would find the karaoke more astonishing than the back-scrubbing services, but he was wrong. In fact, we had sung more karaoke than Mr Shin.

Pyongyang has karaoke bars too. The main difference between them and this one in China was that back home you had to pay an entrance fee of US$10 per person and you didn’t have time in one session to sing as many songs as you could here. Instead, you would receive a special token in exchange for a US dollar, which allowed you to sing one song. But for a country where millions were on the starvation line, karaoke, like hot water, was an extravagant luxury.

In Pyongyang’s karaoke bars, the play lists are filled with songs of praise for Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, but no one in his right mind would have paid precious foreign currency to sing such common fare. Nevertheless, even being drunk in a karaoke bar with friends might not exempt a person from being accused of subversion if he messed up the lyrics while singing a song of praise for Dear Leader. So the most popular songs in these establishments were songs such as ‘Whistling’ or ‘Nice to Meet You’: popular melodies considered relatively free from political implications, yet whose lyrics had been adapted to comply with the Party.

In a country where the arts were explicitly political, there were not too many songs to choose from. Whenever Young-min and I went to a karaoke bar in Pyongyang, we sang ‘Morning Dew’ over and over again. The song was actually South Korean, one of the anthems of the South Korean democratic movement that rose against that country’s military dictatorship in the 1970s. But the Party had edited the lyrics to suggest that South Korean citizens looked towards Kim Il-sung as the force that would unify the Korean peninsula, and so the song was sanctioned for karaoke use.

When Young-min and I now took turns to sing ‘Morning Dew’ in perfect tune, Mr Shin was astonished at how we hit all the right notes. He gave us a thumbs up and said that we were clearly different from ordinary refugees who had never seen a microphone before. Whenever we heard his compliments ringing through the sound system, we felt embarrassed and waved our hands to quiet him, but Mr Shin went on to shout drunkenly, ‘Here in this land, there is no Kim Jong-il!’

The evening passed quickly, and it was past ten by the time we stumbled outside. When we got into a cab, Mr Shin told us that we would be staying at his place for a few days. The cab dropped us off in front of a decrepit building, where there were no lights in the stairwell. Mr Shin led the way up to his third-floor apartment with a cigarette lighter, warning us that the stairs were slippery.

We stopped at a door with a small plaque that read 302. When Mr Shin rang the doorbell, a woman in her mid-twenties opened the front door. She was wearing a hooded purple sweatshirt and matching bottoms. Whether it was because of her rolled-up sleeves or her pursed lips, I felt I could sense in her a certain inner strength. But her face remained impassive and all she said was ‘Yes,’ or ‘No,’ in a Spartan way.

‘This is my wife.’ Mr Shin gave his curt introduction, but the impact of those words was deep for me. The muscles in my body, which had been tense and rigid with chill and fear of death since crossing the Tumen River, relaxed a little. I felt there was no more comforting word in the world than ‘wife’, with its domestic connotations.

The inside of Mr Shin’s flat looked not much different from an average flat in North Korea’s capital city. The kitchen doubled as a bathroom, with a tap and toilet next to each other in the confined space. This was also where we took our shoes off to enter the rest of Mr Shin’s home. There were two rooms in addition to the kitchen-bathroom, where Mr Shin ate and slept on the heated floor in true
North Korean style. In the bigger room of the two, there were three wardrobes. Apart from those items and a loud whirring fan heater on the floor, there were no furnishings.

In the smaller room, there were some blankets folded up in a corner. Gesturing towards them, Mr Shin said, ‘You can use this room. It’s warmer than the other one because it’s smaller. Goodnight then.’ With those words, he left us alone. Young-min and I both stretched our limbs. Hearing the cracking noises in my joints gave me pleasure, because I feared they had withered in the terror and cold of the last few days. There was more that gave me new reason to hope. Tonight we were no longer hiding out in a shed or on a frozen mountainside, I thought, but in a real home. After switching off the light, I snuggled under the blankets in our warm room.

As I lay in the dark, images of the dangers and close calls we’d experienced over the last few days began to play over and over in my head like scenes in a film on repeat. They were mere memories, but nevertheless my heart thumped; my mind fell prey to doubts about whether we would make it through the night, and I wondered how much longer we could remain on the run. The faintest sound of a motor vehicle outside sent shivers through me and, when it was quiet, I held my breath in anticipation of the next potential threat. Although this pattern continued without any real danger materialising, my restless mind didn’t tire of the routine. My finer feelings and emotions had evaporated after these days spent so close to death, and now I was relying solely on my animal instincts, desiring and imagining nothing but survival. Although I recognised and wanted to reject this response, I couldn’t. And I felt dismayed and hollow at how weak I had become.

Young-min slept with his back to me, but whenever he breathed really loudly, I could sense his inner torment. There might not be any soldiers knocking at our door, but they were already in our heads, and we had to do battle with them throughout the night.

In the morning, someone knocked on the door of our room.

‘Are you up yet?’ Mr Shin asked. He had in his hand some paper and a pen. We had been up and awake for an hour, had folded our blankets, and were peering through the window at Yanji. ‘I’ll show you around Yanji as much as you want, but now isn’t the time. I need both of you to write me a statement before we can eat breakfast.’

He passed us the paper and pen and asked us to write ‘carefully’ a statement detailing our family relations, what intelligence we had to pass on to the South Korean government, and the reason for our defection. He emphasised the importance of intelligence, but said that since he himself must not know about the details, we should just summarise it in bullet points. The way he spoke suggested that he was practised in this routine. But what did we have to offer that would count as intelligence? All the same, the request felt professional, as if he were directly representing South Korea.