Dear Leader (35 page)

‘To tell you the truth, that son of mine has no musical aptitude whatsoever. In fact, he doesn’t care for music. I only bought a piano to see if it might civilise him. Besides, you’ve got to earn your keep. Until you see your friend again, you can teach my boy some piano. It won’t be easy, though. He’s like an untamed horse.’ He sighed and continued, ‘You can stay in our spare room; I’ll make sure you have enough bedding. I’ll pay you separately for the piano tuition, so when
you see your friend again, you’ll have enough to make the journey to Beijing together. As for me, I’ll ask around for South Korean contacts. How about that? Does that sound good?’

‘Thank you, thank you!’ I got out of my seat and bowed with gratitude. As he asked me to sit back down, he smiled brightly. Then his expression darkened as he asked me for my opinion on how music lessons might help improve his son’s attitude.

‘First, it will be good for him to acquaint himself with the sound of the piano,’ I replied. ‘By the time he can distinguish harmony from dissonance, I hope he’ll have become more perceptive of the world around him.’

The man slapped his hand on the coffee table and spoke in Chinese to Cho-rin, who looked delighted. Suddenly, we were startled by a loud bang as a young boy burst into the room, practically hurling the door off its hinges. Although Cho-rin’s uncle shouted at him in Chinese, the child ignored him and ran about in search of something, throwing everything out of place. Finally, he grabbed a toy sword from under the table. He then stormed out of the room, slamming the door as if to break its frame, just as he had when he came into the room. It all happened so quickly, as if a tornado had whirled through rather than a ten-year-old.

‘What’s his name?’ I asked, still grinning with the shock and surprise of the boy’s energy.

‘Wang Hou.’ The boy’s father looked despairingly at me. ‘You can only have one child in China, and my wife and I were well into our middle age by the time he was born. We named him “Hou”, meaning tiger, so he’d grow to be strong and independent. Perhaps children are destined to resemble not their parents, but the name they’re given …’

Indeed, the boy seemed wilder than I could have imagined. None of the family knew where his energy came from, his father explained.
From the moment he woke to the moment he fell asleep, he was either running about or throwing a tantrum. He wasn’t interested in things like junk food, but he had an obsession with historical dramas on television, and the only toys he would play with were plastic swords. Propped against one wall of his bedroom was a tightly packed row of toy swords, each one different from its neighbour. I could see that I would have a battle on my hands.

It was January, and the boy was on winter vacation. We blocked out ten to eleven for piano tuition each morning, and three to five in the afternoon. Cho-rin would act as an interpreter for us. She usually worked as an accountant at her uncle’s company, but she would take some time off and stay in the house with us.

I had to admit defeat in our very first session. That morning, I called Mr Shin’s wife and left her the number of the house I was staying in. The thought of being reunited with Young-min had given me a positive start to the day, but the boy did not listen to a word I said.

When Cho-rin relayed my instructions to him, Wang Hou ignored them. He continued with his strange jumping and odd movements, as if he were a martial arts character on television. He even insisted on climbing onto Cho-rin’s back as if he were riding a horse. When I lost my temper and banged on the keys to get the boy’s attention, he showed no fear. Instead, he sat on the stool and made even more noise by stomping on the keys with his heels. When I moved to close the cover of the keyboard, he screamed at the top of his voice.

His desperate mother, holding a stick in one hand and a kitchen knife in the other, tried to intimidate the boy into compliance. Seeing my surprised look, Cho-rin explained that if his mother held up only the stick, the boy would run into the kitchen and pick up a kitchen knife in response. Once, he had even cut her on the leg; and from then on, she kept the kitchen knife in her own hand. No one in the family knew what to do with him.

I realised that I had to find a way of my own to get through to him. Determined, I waited until three in the afternoon. When the clock struck three times, I collected the knife from the kitchen and knocked on the boy’s bedroom door. There was no response, so I knocked again. I heard a thump on the other side of the door. I knocked with my knuckles, but he responded with his toy sword.

I said, ‘Cho-rin, tell him that his piano tutor is looking for him.’

When Cho-rin translated for me, the boy shouted something in response. Judging from Cho-rin’s sharp intake of breath, it was clear that the boy had used bad language. Holding the kitchen knife behind my back, I opened the door and walked into his room.

‘Cho-rin, tell him that I am the most terrifying piano teacher in the world, and that I shall show him no mercy.’

As Cho-rin blustered, the boy put his hands on his hips and chuckled. I picked up a toy sword from his collection and went into the living room with a deliberate and slow stride. Making sure the boy was watching, I held up the kitchen knife above the plastic toy sword. I struck down hard and the toy sword broke into two pieces with a smack, and then fell silently onto the plush carpet. The boy screamed. As if witnessing his fear of a grown-up for the first time, his mother and cousin stood in silent astonishment.

I gestured towards the piano room with the kitchen knife. ‘Go and sit in there.’

The boy clenched his fists in fury but he remained where he was, making it clear that he would not back down. I went into his bedroom again, and this time I returned with an armful of toy swords. I scattered them onto the carpet and pointed again towards the music room.

‘Go sit in there.’

Before I could finish my short sentence, the boy spat on the carpet. I sliced a second toy sword into two pieces, and his lips began to tremble.

I told Cho-rin, ‘Tell him that I wouldn’t mind chopping up another toy sword. Ask him to sit at the piano. Tell him I’m not his mother or father. Cho-rin, are you listening?’

I felt like a strange caricature of a grown-up as I said those words, and remembered how much I had feared Choi Liang when he was my music teacher in Sariwon. Now I knew what it felt like to be a teacher disciplining a student, and I could see in my mind’s eye the deep wrinkles on Choi Liang’s forehead.

Cho-rin translated my message, but without much conviction. Then something miraculous happened. The boy shuffled reluctantly into the piano room. He looked anxiously at me and at the kitchen knife I was holding, as if to entreat me to save the rest of his toy swords from harm. As I returned the knife to his mother, I gave her a wink. She looked into my eyes in wonder. Until now, I had felt like an unwelcome guest in her house, and she had made an effort to avoid making eye contact with me.

When I returned to the room, the boy was standing quietly next to the piano. I pointed to the stool.

‘Come, Wang Hou. Sit here.’

Although I spoke in Korean, he understood and complied without hesitation. I could hear the mother speaking excitedly on the phone to her husband from the kitchen. Cho-rin took the phone from her and laughed as she spoke. While the grown-ups were now in good spirits, the boy looked utterly defeated and I felt sorry for him. That evening, perhaps exhausted by the first surrender of his life, he went to sleep well before his bedtime. When his astonished father returned home, he sat beside his sleeping son for a long time.

‘
LET’S HAVE A
drink.’

After dinner, Cho-rin’s uncle placed a bottle of Shaoxing wine on the table. I had thought all Chinese wines were white, but this one was a pale red. It was one of the top ten best-known wines of China, he explained, and was considered to have been a favourite of Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Chinese Nationalists who retreated to Taiwan after losing to the Communists. The northerners living in a colder climate preferred white wine, whereas the southerners were said to prefer red; he declared that one of the best of these was Shaoxing wine. I confessed that I didn’t hold my drink very well. He replied that this was a wine enjoyed by women for its lightness, and went on to pour me a very large glass of it.

I had believed that Chinese wines were all as strong as liquor, but the Shaoxing wine defied my expectations. Wang Hou’s mother retired to bed after dinner, but Cho-rin and her uncle stayed at the table to drink with me. While she and I drank the Shaoxing, her uncle chose Kaoliang wine. As we started getting tipsy, he lit another cigarette and asked me a question.

‘You know, seeing you here, it strikes me that there must be a certain spirit of defiance in you North Koreans. Look, even a powerful country such as the US remains at the mercy of Kim Jong-il. Even though the country is dirt poor! I’ve always wanted to know, what’s the secret behind it all? How do you North Koreans get away with it?’

‘It’s simple,’ I replied. ‘The US negotiates as a matter of diplomacy,
to seek common ground on an issue; but when North Korea comes to the table, it’s a counter-intelligence operation. In other words, North Korea uses dialogue as a tool of deception rather than of negotiation, with the objective being the maintenance of misplaced trust in the other party. And why not? North Korea’s opacity is its greatest strength. It allows things to be done on its own terms while other countries continue to take what North Korea says at face value. In fact, Kim Jong-il formally set these three principles as a basis for diplomatic engagement: “The US will buy any lie, as long as it is logically presented”; “Japan is susceptible to emotional manipulation”; and “South Korea can be ignored or blackmailed”.’

Cho-rin’s uncle laughed. ‘So South Korea is the most pitiful one, eh! But how does the North go about ignoring South Korea’s demands? Doesn’t North Korea need their cooperation?’

‘Yes, but we know how to make it happen on our own terms.’

At the time of my escape, North Korea’s secret diplomatic weapon against the South was the Northern Limit Line (NLL) Strategy. This issue remains extremely sensitive to this day.

The NLL is a demarcation of territorial waters established in the Yellow Sea by the UN, and contested by North Korea, after the armistice signed on 27 July 1953 by the UN Command, North Korea and China at the end of the Korean War. It became the focal point of North Korea’s military provocations against the South during the era of the Sunshine Policy.

In February 1998, when the left-wing administration of then president Kim Dae-joong came into power, South Korea embarked on a foreign policy focused on warming relations with the North and softening North Korea’s perception of the South as adversarial. This was the Sunshine Policy, whose name was inspired by an Aesop fable in which a strong wind (a hard-line policy) was unable to force the coat off a man, but the sunshine (a conciliatory policy) managed to do so with its embracing warmth. Ironically, the policy only served
to entrench Kim Jong-il’s slipping control, and enabled the Party to consolidate and adapt its political and economic powers for a new era.

By 1999, there was a dire need to secure the North Korean system domestically, as it was the fifth consecutive year that state rations had not been distributed. With mass starvation and resulting economic hardship, loyalty to the Party among the populace was waning at an alarming rate. Leaving aside the core central institutions in Pyongyang, many organisations had become paralysed in terms of their departmental or regional functions, and there were increasing incidents of their putting their own and their staff’s needs for survival before their duty to the Party. This was a dangerous situation: Kim Jong-il had painted himself into a corner he could not get out of, and was slowly losing his iron grip over the people. It was then – to the Party’s profound relief – that South Korea’s Sunshine Policy came unwittingly to the rescue.

At first, North Korea criticised the policy, saying its real purpose was to collapse the system through soft-power tactics. But by mid-1998, Kim Jong-il had ordered the United Front Department to formulate a Sunshine Exploitation strategy that would allow the Party to extract much-needed economic benefits from South Korea while making as few concessions as possible.

All available UFD resources were deployed on this mission. In order to lure South Korean companies into investing by means of collaborative ventures, the UFD prepared strategies for reconciliation and negotiation. The visit in June and October of Jung Joo-young, CEO of South Korea’s Hyundai conglomerate, was a great coup that helped to legitimise the new status quo of ‘cooperation’ between the two Koreas. As international and South Korean food aid entered the system, the Party was able to resume to a certain extent its provision of rations, allowing it to return to the use of stronger levels of enforcement to secure the obedience it needed from the people.

At the time, the highest priority for the Party was to acquire the
minimum resources it needed to reverse its diminishing control over the nation. But just as its priority today remains the satisfaction of the nation’s economic demands at the lowest possible level required for stability of power, and to ensure that access to all opportunities remain routed through Party-vetted channels, Kim Jong-il had then to focus on the next most pressing priority after a degree of control had been regained: unconditional aid and joint economic ventures were to be managed so as to prevent the North from having to reciprocate or accept demands made by the outside world.

In the first move of the Sunshine Policy, South Korea’s Kim Dae-joong administration suggested that inter-Korean family reunions be allowed to take place, in exchange for fertiliser aid from the South. South Korea’s opposition party at the time, the conservatives, criticised the Sunshine Policy as pouring resources into a bottomless pit. They argued that there should instead be a principle whereby the North would have to make tangible compromises in return, such as a reduction in military spending or the implementation of reforms.