Dear Leader (7 page)

Despite these efforts, the preference of many North Koreans for the ‘Mount Fuji people’, as opposed to the ‘Mount Paektu people’ and the anti-Japanese feats of Kim Il-sung, did not disappear. My friend
Young-nam was therefore a member of a group of people who were generally admired, in contradiction to the official stance. Moreover, his family was once the wealthiest in Sariwon.

Nevertheless, life became very difficult for his family after the death of his grandparents in Japan, when their supply of Japanese money and goods came to an end. As they were immigrants from Japan, Young-nam and his parents had no prospect of entering respectable careers, because the assignment of jobs was controlled by the Workers’ Party. They had to start selling off their possessions one by one and, eventually, they became impoverished and lived in a much worse state than the local North Koreans.

The one thing I remember clearly from my childhood is that we had a Yamaha piano at home, given to our family by Young-nam’s father when he was still a wealthy man. I remember my mother telling me that when Young-nam’s family first settled in Sariwon, my father helped them secure a new apartment through the allocations made by the Workers’ Party. As the piano had arrived in the house before I was born, I grew up assuming that everyone had Japanese pianos, just as everyone had a portrait of Kim Il-sung on their wall at home.

One day, however, when I went to a friend’s house to play, I realised that they did not have a piano. I was astonished. When I came home, I ran into the house and shouted at my mother, as if I had just witnessed something incredible: ‘Mum, did you know? They don’t have a piano at home!’

She replied coolly, ‘They probably didn’t want a piano in the house. They prefer reading books.’

It was only when I began my first year at Dongri People’s Primary School that I came to understand that the possession of a Japanese Yamaha piano was a very big deal indeed. The kids – and the grown-ups too – referred to me as ‘the boy with the Japanese piano’ or ‘the doctor’s boy’. Most kids at school lived in ‘harmonica apartments’ built in the 1950s, so-called because each floor had flats that were packed closely together like the square holes in a
harmonica. We lived in a large flat on the third floor of an apartment block set aside for officials. My mother, who was the head doctor at a medical centre for the exclusive use of Party cadres, hoped that my two older sisters would become teachers and that I would one day become a famous pianist. She finally cajoled my father into finding me a famous piano tutor.

One day, my father brought a tutor home with him. The man had a long face and spoke with the heavy accent characteristic of Hamgyong Province in the north. But what amazed me more than his accent was that he was an ethnic Korean from China. And he stank of cigarette smoke, which I didn’t like. Worse, he was a chain-smoker, and my sisters didn’t like him much at first, either. But he didn’t seem to care. Bending down, he pulled my ear to his mouth and said emphatically in his phlegmatic voice, ‘My name is Choi Liang. Did you hear that? Two syllables. Choi Liang!’

His loud voice frightened me as much as the stench of smoke did. When my father announced that the man and his family were going to move in with us, I was devastated. I pretended to need the toilet, ran outside, and sobbed.

Choi Liang became my first proper mentor. He had been a violinist in China’s Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. During the Cultural Revolution, he’d fled the Red Guards’ assaults on the educated by coming to North Korea, along with many other ethnic Koreans. His first job in North Korea was as a violin tutor at Pyongyang Arts School. At the time, he and Paek Go-san were considered to be among North Korea’s leading violinists. Paek Go-san had taken both the top prize for his category and the honorary prize in the Tchaikovsky International Music Competition of 1982. In 1978, he had also been the first Asian to be appointed a lifetime member of the panel of judges for the violin section of the competition.

Paek Go-san had a younger brother called Paek Do-san, who had insulted Choi Liang by referring to him as a ‘dirty bastard’, a common derogatory term used by Koreans to refer to the Chinese.
Choi Liang, infamous for his short temper, punched him in the face. For this Choi Liang was banished to the countryside until my father rescued him from rustic exile by hiring him to teach me music. Choi Liang’s wife, son and daughter moved into our house with him and our quiet home burst into unaccustomed life as it became home to our two families.

In my early years, teacher Choi Liang seemed to me the cruellest of men. He started me off with ear training and he went about this task without mercy. Several hundred times a day, I would have to strain to discern the note or interval he sounded on the piano. Gradually, I learned to pick out the notes and intervals without hesitation. Eventually, he moved on to chords and by the end he had taught me how to arrange music for a string quartet.

My father tried very hard to get Choi Liang hired as a professor at Sariwon Arts School. However, his foreign birth proved too great an obstacle for the post and he was taken on as a lecturer instead. Even so, because he was one of North Korea’s leading violinists, students flocked from all over the country to study with him. Choi Liang frequently invited them to our house and even showed them my string quartet arrangements.

I still remember very clearly what Choi Liang had to say about string quartet arrangements, as he often repeated this piece of wisdom: ‘Above all, the score should be covered with black notes everywhere. Semitone intervals should be used with care, but as frequently as needed. Understood?’

More than just an education in music, Choi Liang instilled in me great artistic ambition. Every day I listened to his anecdotes about Beethoven, Mozart and the fame that surrounded them even after their deaths. While other children aspired to become Party cadres or to drive cars for Party cadres, I dreamed of becoming Dvořák, and of achieving world renown for the composition of my own
New World
Symphony. I once mentioned this dream to my mother and she gave me a fierce telling-off, saying that if I shared these thoughts
with anyone else, our entire family would be accused of Revisionism or Moral Corruption. She made sure to give me a terrific fright by saying that if I didn’t keep these thoughts to myself, I might be arrested.

My mother was troubled by the realisation that her thirteen-year-old son had grown enamoured of the music of Dvořák. I had come to love his works because of the tape recordings that Choi Liang had smuggled in with him from China, and because the only other kind of music I had access to was the stuff I heard at school. It wasn’t just that the music was limited to revolutionary anthems. Rather, after having been exposed to the thrilling world of harmonic possibility, I found it frustrating to listen to North Korean songs of perfect victory that did not allow for any suggestion of imperfection through musical dissonance or tension.

Once, in singing class at school, I couldn’t contain my thoughts any longer. I volunteered to do the accompaniment for the session, and played as I wished instead of following the prescribed pattern. My pedalling on the organ (there was no piano at school) wasn’t perfect but I knew that I had played well and without mistakes. In spite of this, our music teacher punished me for my deviation by humiliating me in front of the class, making an example of me as someone who knew nothing whatsoever about music. In my heart, though, I believed it was the school – not me – that lacked an understanding of music. As a result, I could not stop myself from beginning to doubt everything else the school taught us to regard as the most accurate and objective form of knowledge, whether this took the form of the revolutionary history of Kim Il-sung, linguistics or any other subject.

As time went on, I was confirmed in my conviction that Western music was artistically superior to the North Korean music I was being taught. It wasn’t that I preferred one set of stylistic rules to the other. Western music had its rules too; but what it had that North Korean music didn’t was the infinite possibilities of breaking an established rule, to make a new one of your own. With Choi Liang by my side
to explain the intricacies of musical rule-breaking, I grew more confident that the transgression of expectation and rules was not unmusical, but, rather, that this was part of the essence of musicality.

From dawn to dusk, I listened to Dvořák. My father worried about my hearing and took my headphones away from me several times; but I was so desperate that I once took a stethoscope from my mother’s bag and held it against the speaker of the tape player so that I could listen under the blankets at night. My father was proudly supportive of my ambitions and was convinced that I was destined for great things, but Choi Liang was stubborn in his honesty.

‘This boy will never become a good pianist,’ he said. ‘His fingers are too short. He does have creative talent, though, and I recommend that he should train to be a composer.’

I entered Pyongyang Arts School at fifteen. I was determined to become a world-famous composer, fulfilling the dream that Choi Liang had sown in me. But my sudden encounter with a book from the ‘100-Copy Collection’ resulted in my musical ambitions being replaced overnight by literary ones.

The book was the
Collected Works of Lord Byron
. As part of North Korea’s ‘Hundred-Copy Collection’, the print run of this book was restricted to one hundred copies. In North Korea, the circulation of foreign books is restricted in this way so that only the ruling Kim and his family, his closest associates and select members of North Korea’s elite have access to them. Each of the books in a hundred-copy set has a stamped number on the first page to show which of the hundred copies it is. Books bearing the ‘No. 1’ stamp are, of course, offered only to the ruling Kim. It is thus considered a mark of high status among cadres and other members of the elite to possess a book stamped with a single-digit numeral, or the closest number they can get to it.

The secret translation and printing of these limited editions of foreign works continues to be done by a team of translators working under the auspices of the Propaganda and Agitation Department
and the Chosun Social Sciences Institute, in the Joong-gu Area of Pyongyang. It is the responsibility of cultural or science attachés stationed in DPRK embassies abroad to acquire foreign books for limited distribution through this system.

I don’t know how our copy of the
Collected Works of Lord Byron
had ended up in my father’s personal bookcase. One day, I picked it up from the shelf out of mere curiosity, noticing that the spine of the book was different from the others stacked there. North Korean books usually reflect North Korean state aesthetics in their bright and gaudy designs. This book, however, was subdued in colour. The dark and faded cover was suggestive of an ancient foreign culture. The pattern of a frame, similar in design to that of an oil painting, surrounded the printed title. Ordinary books were mass-produced, but this book seemed to be handmade, as its thick and bulky cover housed pages that were held together by delicate threadwork.

I opened the book with vague curiosity, but I was pulled in from the first page and the poetry seized me at once. The vocabulary was bold and the words pushed their definitions and associations to the limits, unlike anything I had ever read. In North Korea, the institutional control of thought begins with the consolidation of language, a policy designed to unify the private and public spheres of thought. In order for the realms of individual expression to adhere to a shared ideology, the Party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department sets strict boundaries for the written and spoken word. No North Korean literary work may deviate from the legal framework of Kim Jong-il’s
Juche
Art Theory, printed in several volumes, which sets the conditions under which Socialist art can exist. The authority of thought which monitors and enforces this theory, through the penalty of prison camp for all those who are responsible for letting a deviant work slip through the net, is the National Literary Deliberation Committee. As one who had been brought up in such a fixed framework of linguistic expression, Byron’s poetry was like
a dictionary of New Korean to me. As I worked out the meanings and inferences in words I had never seen before, I experienced the strange sensation of learning how to speak Korean from a foreign-language speaker.

What really intrigued me too was the politeness of the language. In the North Korean language, there are two distinct registers of speech: one relating to the Leader, and one to everyone else. Before encountering Byron’s poetry, I had thought that adjectives such as ‘Dear’ and ‘Respected’ were a special form of pronoun in the Korean language reserved for Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Along with ‘Great’, which is always seen in one of the terms referring to Kim Il-sung as ‘Great Leader’, I had assumed that these adjectives were names just like Kim and therefore etymologically and purely Korean. But I learned, through Byron’s poetry, that these words were terms of respect that were part of a universal language and not uniquely Korean. I felt strangely elated by the discovery that these terms might be applied to an individual.

Most of all, the patterns of words and poetic devices – all balanced against the underlying rhythm of the poem – awakened in me a sense of literary sublimity that surpassed what music alone could convey. Just as I had done with Dvořák’s
New World
Symphony, I read Byron’s epic poems
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
and
The Corsair
over and over again in their North Korean translations.
The Corsair’
s ending – the protagonist, a vagabond pirate, disappearing from the island upon learning of his beloved’s death – left me restless, and this agitation lingered with me long after each reading. I had known only loyalty to the Supreme Leader, believing that this was the most sublime emotion a human being could feel. But these poems were proof that emotions could be experienced in a personal sphere that did not include the Leader. This understanding may be taken for granted in the rest of the world, but it was an astounding epiphany for me, and after this realisation, I wanted suddenly to confess my love to a
woman. I wanted to fall in love, and I wanted to be weak for love. Out of this longing, I began to write poetry of my own.