Dear Leader (25 page)

‘Shut up, you arsehole!’ she shouted.

Our jaws dropped. What had Young-min done to provoke such a response? What confused us even more was that, apart from Young-min and me, the others remained silent and looked away.

As Young-min glanced around, wondering what on earth was the matter, the girl screamed at him again. ‘I am the mother! Does that make you feel better? And the baby, she isn’t my sister – she’s my daughter. So what’s the problem? Am I a freak? Is my little girl a freak?’

Young-min’s chopsticks fell from his fingers. She probably needed
a mother’s love, yet she was a mother herself with a baby to care for, and on the run at only sixteen. As if she pitied herself for this very reason, the girl suddenly grasped Mrs Shin’s hand and started to cry. ‘What am I going to do?’ she sobbed. ‘I went to the hospital yesterday. A friend took me there. Do you know what the doctor said? I don’t know what to do …’

She couldn’t finish her sentence, and beat her chest twice. Mrs Shin poured her a cup of water; she gulped it down and spoke again. ‘My little Jung-hyun, they can’t fix her eyes. She’s got to live the rest of her life blind. And do you know what else they said? They asked if something had happened when I was pregnant, if I’d ever knocked my womb or had a fall.’

I looked into the girl’s eyes, which were now clear and bright from her tears. Her trembling lips were a pale pink. This time it was I who handed her water. As if she’d lost awareness of her surroundings, she looked up and said to the ceiling, ‘I passed out. When that bastard bought me, I was fourteen. I didn’t know anything. He started to pull off my clothes. That middle-aged monster. Do you know what happened that day? I started to cry because I was scared. Then his mother and sister came into the room, those witches. They held my arms and legs down, and pulled my knickers off.’

The girl started shaking, and clutched Mrs Shin’s arm as she wailed. ‘Then, you know what, the so-called mother-in-law, sister-in-law, as they held me down, that old monster, he – you know – right in front of them.’

With her lips pursed and her eyes wet with tears, Mrs Shin held the child tight.

The girl whimpered, ‘Then I passed out. Afterwards, my poor Jung-hyun, my Jung-hyun was born blind. Because of that fucking monster.’

I tried to blink back the tears that filled my eyes. And then I could no longer hold them back. Young-min downed his cup of soju, and
could no longer restrain himself either. Mrs Shin led the teenage mother into the room we had slept in, and the only sound was of the other women sobbing. That child was only sixteen. How many more like her were there out there, forgotten by the world? How wretched their lives were. As the other women began to open up and tell their own stories, my chest tightened even more.

‘At least she was able to run away,’ said the woman from Chongjin who had introduced herself first. ‘One girl I knew from back home escaped over the river too. She was sold into a Chinese village family where she was locked up and used by all the men in the family. One day the father-in-law would be the aggressor, the next the brother-in-law, all sleeping with her. So she doesn’t even know who the father of her baby boy is, whether it’s the husband or the father-in-law or the brother-in-law. In the end, they pimped her out to other men in the village, and pocketed the money. Luckily, there was one decent man who helped her escape.

‘There are many “dark children” here in China, babies abandoned by North Korean women. Because their mothers are North Korean, they have no rights and their births aren’t recognised by China. They can’t go to school or anything like that, and they live on the streets. That’s why they’re called “dark children”.’

The woman from Hamheung, who’d seemed to be lost in pain until then, took a deep breath, as if she still couldn’t quite believe that the story she had to tell was one she herself had lived through.

‘I wasn’t going to bring up my own experience, but before I was sold, I was kept prisoner by a broker. There were sixteen other women there apart from me. He said that we could earn money by working on computers, but it turned out to be sex chatting. We were forced to be naked on camera. When I resisted, he threatened to report me to the authorities. When I still resisted, he beat me. From morning to evening we were made to do sex chatting. But six months of this work only added up to around a hundred dollars in payment
for us. He said it was expensive to feed us. Besides, as North Koreans without legitimate identities, we can’t open bank accounts here. So the broker said he was keeping our wages in the bank, and that he would return it all with interest. But, in the end, I never saw any of it, not even the one hundred. He said he’d lost it in a deal. After profiting from us for around a year, he was planning to sell us off as if we were new refugees who had just crossed over. He said he would kill us if we didn’t comply. And, really, I knew he’d have just killed me. That knowledge gave me the determination to escape, and then I met my friends here on the streets. We’re going to Tianjin to see if we can work in a restaurant. They say there are lots of Koreans there. Maybe we’ll meet someone who can help us get to South Korea.’

Young-min was red-eyed and visibly agitated by a combination of drink and anger, and suggested that returning home might be a better option than enduring such humiliation in China.

‘Are you
really
North Korean?’ one woman asked in astonishment, adding that although she could perhaps endure the hunger, she could never stomach returning to that cruel country. Others joined in, clicking their tongues in disapproval.

The woman from Hamheung, who I had thought was the most withdrawn, started cracking her knuckles nervously and said agitatedly, ‘A lot of the refugees in China have experienced repatriation. Those of us who have been sent back, knowing what the world is like over the border, usually have another go at escaping. Do you know what happens during repatriation? Even the handcuffs are different. Here in China, the handcuffs are shiny and new, but as soon as you cross the Friendship Bridge over the Yalu River and into North Korea, they change your handcuffs. North Korean handcuffs are rusty and disgusting. Besides, even though they’re foreigners, the Chinese are more humane than our own people. Before my repatriation, one of the Chinese officers even apologised, and gave me 100 yuan. But in North Korea, they’re merciless.

‘They got all of us women together, took off our clothes and groped inside our vaginas with their fingers. You know, looking for hidden money and stuff. Pregnant women are treated like animals. There was a woman who was seven months pregnant among us when I was caught. Saying that she had bastard Chinese seed in her, the North Korean officers kicked her on the stomach over and over until she passed out. She died.

‘And when you go to prison after processing, that’s when you really want to kill yourself. They keep you awake for days and beat you, and interrogate you to find out whether you might have intended to go to South Korea or the US. If they suspect you of either, you’re sent to a proper prison camp, instead of being sent to an ordinary labour camp to serve a three-year sentence. But even there, it’s hard to make it through without suffering permanent disability. I couldn’t bear the thought of going to either place. Seeing that ahead of me, I couldn’t face it. So I swallowed a hairpin to kill myself. The bastards took me to the hospital, where I overheard somebody say that someone as strong-willed as me would definitely have had South Korea as my destination and, as soon as I recovered, I should be sent for a six-month pre-trial confinement.

‘At night, when the surveillance was slack, I managed to escape and cross the river again. Even now, I can’t believe it. They had cut my stomach open to take the hairpin out and sewed it back up, and although the wound opened again, I didn’t feel any pain. Really, no pain at all.’

As I listened to their stories, I could see every scene vividly and imagined myself being taken away and repatriated. The woman who had just told us her story then asked me a question.

‘So you’re a cadre from Pyongyang. Why would you leave?’ As she spoke, all eyes in the room turned to us. It seemed that each gaze was saying,
I left because I had no choice, but what hardship could
you
have had?

I could not think of anything to say. Young-min spoke first. ‘You’re all North Korean,’ he said. ‘You’ve heard of the Scrutiny, right?’

‘Yes,’ came the replies.

‘Well, the administrative director for that was my father.’

The woman from Chongjin froze in the middle of pouring herself another cup of soju. It was as if even the liquid had turned to ice. As everyone stared at Young-min, their faces didn’t just register their shock. There was suddenly a distancing from him, as if he was an object of grotesque terror.

All over North Korea, the mere mention of the Scrutiny would be enough to silence any crying child. Every North Korean who was alive then knows about Kim Jong-il’s Scrutiny which began in August 1997, and the bloody massacre that followed.

One sweltering summer’s day in Pyongyang, an execution took place. Several hundred thousand spectators were gathered to watch it. The condemned man was a foreign spy, it was declared. But in fact, standing against the upright wooden plank – his limbs and torso bound with rope – the accused was none other than the Party’s Agricultural Secretary, Seo Gwan-hui. As the man in charge of the nation’s food supply, he had become Kim Jong-il’s scapegoat for the widespread famine that had followed the collapse of the Public Distribution System in the mid 1990s.

Seo Gwan-hui had been charged with spying for the Americans and the South Koreans. It was alleged that he had been assigned by them to systematically undermine North Korea’s principle of ‘Self-reliance’ in the sphere of agriculture. As a result, the crops had failed year after year. Accused of causing deaths among the people by starvation, he was not executed by firing squad. Instead, the crowd, whipped into hysteria, stoned him to death.

Capitalising on the widespread frenzy that followed Seo Gwan-hui’s
conviction for spying, a mass purge was instigated, and war declared against The Spies Within. The campaign was to draw on the same apparatus that had been used to condemn Seo. Back then, one of the main responsibilities of the now defunct Ministry of Social Security was to oversee recordkeeping for North Koreans. Every North Korean is assigned an identification booklet at birth. This is a life-long report card that records any change of circumstances throughout his or her years of education, contributions to the workplace and efforts in the local Party branch. Even if a person is unemployed, the officer in charge of their residential area and an officer from the Ministry will jointly assign him or her a grade for behaviour; so blank years are never an option.

In order to ‘prove’ the disgraced Agricultural Secretary’s collusion with foreign intelligence agencies, the Ministry of Social Security argued that the blank spaces in Seo’s identification booklet demonstrated that he had left the country to receive secret training in America. In fact, the three blank months in question reflected an unrecorded period in his life that occurred during the chaos of the Korean War in the early 1950s.

As the evidence for the crime had been obtained by scrutinising his identification booklet, an aptly named campaign – the Scrutiny – was launched. This process was escalated to a level whereby everyone who held an identification booklet dating to the Korean War was to be scrutinised. With its headquarters in the Ministry of Social Security, local bureaux of the ministry established dedicated Offices of Scrutiny throughout the country. Young-min’s father Hwang Jin-thaek, who headed the Ministry of Social Security, was appointed as the administrative director of the Scrutiny. Choe Mun-deok was appointed as its political director.

To consolidate the powers of the Ministry of Social Security, and to provide the distraction Kim Jong-il needed in the instability that followed from Kim Il-sung’s death and the years of mass starvation, he gave overall command of the campaign of the Scrutiny to his
brother-in-law Jang Song-thaek, who was then Deputy Director of the Party’s Administrative Department. Kim Jong-il’s intention was to lend weight to the Ministry of Social Security, which had until then ranked beneath the Ministry of State Security and the military in its surveillance powers. As Kim Jong-il’s word served as the law, and because there was no man in North Korea more powerful than himself, he effectively gave hegemony over surveillance to the Ministry of Social Security by declaring, ‘I’m first in line for your campaign of scrutiny.’ Consequently, the Ministry of Social Security rose to dominate both the military and the Ministry of State Security.

Moon Sung-sul, the General Secretary of the Workers’ Party HQ and the third most senior man in the country after Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il according to the Party’s hierarchy, became the first victim of the Scrutiny as sanctioned by Kim Jong-il. As head of the Workers’ Party HQ, Moon Sung-sul also served as the First Deputy Director of the Party’s OGD and held sway over the nation’s most powerful men, for all of them reported ultimately to that entity. Nevertheless, he found himself the first in line to be charged with espionage by Jang Song-thaek, because he had been responsible for putting Jang Song-thaek under surveillance by the OGD and restricting his influence on the grounds that he was a ‘side-branch’ of the Kim family who posed the greatest factional threat.

Jang Song-thaek took the opportunity to seek revenge by having Moon Sung-sul tortured and beaten to death. However, this move was much more than a mere act of personal vengeance on the part of Jang Song-thaek; it was a clear warning to the OGD leadership that they too were not immune from destruction if they fell out of Kim Jong-il’s favour.

The Ministry of State Security received the same warning. In 1998, the Ministry’s First Deputy Director Kim Yong-ryong shot himself when agents from the Ministry of Social Security burst into his room to arrest him during the Scrutiny.

It was at this time that Young-min’s father, Hwang Jin-thaek, was also arrested. He had raised questions about the attack against Moon Sung-sul, and Jang Song-thaek was able to obtain approval from Kim Jong-il to bring anti-revolutionary charges against Hwang.