Dear Leader (8 page)

I even considered dropping out of Pyongyang Arts School, but I did not dare let my parents down after the faith they had placed in me. The least I could do, though, was to attempt to find a literary mentor.

There are three poems that all North Koreans must learn by heart. These are ‘For my One and Only Homeland’ by Ri Su-bok, ‘Mother’ by Kim Chul and ‘My Homeland’ by Kim Sang-o. In ‘For my One and Only Homeland’, the poet states that although he has only one lifetime to live, he will sacrifice it to his homeland, of which there is also only one. In this poem, the self is sublimated to the country. ‘Mother’ describes how the motherly love of the Workers’ Party is deeper than that of any human mother, who cannot rear her child as an individual separate from the state. Here, motherly love is inadequate on its own, and profoundly inferior to the love provided by the Party. ‘My Homeland’ describes the Great Leader as the poet’s true homeland, and the country is subsumed into the identity of its leader.

If I were to have a teacher at all, I wanted it to be one of North Korea’s foremost poets. Fortunately, as wide as my world seemed, it was also small. Ri Su-ryon, the granddaughter of Kim Sang-o, happened to be my classmate. When she told me that her grandfather had agreed to meet me, and she asked me to go home with her after lectures, I was so overjoyed that I took her hand and shook it wildly. It was the winter of 1990, when I should have been wholly devoted to my musical studies at Pyongyang Arts School.

Kim Sang-o’s apartment was in Otan-dong, in the Joong-gu Area, with unobstructed views over the Daedong River. After Korea’s liberation from Japanese occupation in 1948, Kim Sang-o had returned from Japan and served as the deputy editor of a newspaper in Hwanghae Province. When Kim Il-sung came to Hwanghae Province, Kim Sang-o was assigned to be his speechwriter. This
collaboration eventually led to his promotion to the post of Vice President of the Central Committee of the Korean Writers’ Union.

However, the influence of China’s Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, led to many intellectuals being purged in North Korea too. The North Korean state had designated Khrushchev as a ‘revisionist’, following his criticism of Stalin’s cultification, and at the time the DPRK preferred the Chinese style of Communism to that of the Soviet Union. The record of Kim Sang-o’s years in Japan as a student let him down as it associated him with pro-Japanese collaborators, and was seen as undermining Kim Il-sung’s authority as an anti-Japanese resistance fighter. After losing his licence as a writer, Kim Sang-o was banished to the countryside, where for fifteen years he worked as a farm labourer.

Kim Il-sung, however, had a good memory. When he conducted an on-site guidance session in South Hwanghae Province, he asked for the young speechwriter who had composed Kim’s first speech in Hwanghae Province, shortly after the liberation of Korea. Kim Sang-o was subsequently recalled to Pyongyang and he composed the lyric poem ‘My Homeland’ at this emotional time, praising the person of Kim Il-sung (instead of the state or territory) as his true homeland. My classmate Ri Su-ryon was born in Seoheung-gun in Hwanghae Province where Kim Sang-o had been in exile, but following his rehabilitation she had moved with him to the capital city of Pyongyang.

Kim Il-sung appointed his former speechwriter as the head of UFD Office 101, Section 5. From then on, he had to channel his literary talents to serve the goals of the Workers’ Party, working under a pseudonym and deprived of an identity or history of his own. By the time of my visit to his home, he had retired from the UFD, though he was still an honorary director of Office 101 due to his official status as a Kim Il-sung Associate. As his UFD title came with no actual responsibility, he was living as quiet and ordinary a life
as possible for someone with such a background. More importantly from my perspective, he also had the time to meet me.

When Kim Sang-o himself opened the door, I was startled and bowed deeply from the waist. His tall stature and imposing countenance made a strong first impression on me, suggesting that men of Kim Il-sung’s inner circle were, even in appearance, extraordinary beings. Yet it was his humility that made him a truly great man in my eyes.

In spite of his status, Kim Sang-o’s house was cold because of the erratic heating system in Pyongyang. As I entered, his wife offered me one of his coats to keep me warm, and I was surprised to notice three cigarette burns on the fabric.

Until fairly recently, the electricity supply had not been too bad. But as it was a centrally organised system, even a minor disruption in one area would affect the hot water heating supply for the rest of Pyongyang. The age of the pipes and their tendency to burst frequently was a problem, and many households resorted to siphoning hot water from the traditional Korean under-floor heating system to use for washing. So there was always a lack of heat, and with the inefficiency of the infrastructure, even in the harsh middle of winter, the best heat to be had was a lukewarm floor.

This was the case even though Kim Sang-o lived in a senior Party cadres’ retirement flat, built in the 1980s in a residential area set apart from those of ordinary Pyongyang residents. Although this was the first time we had met, he lamented that what he found more unbearable than the cold was the fact that he could not set foot properly on the bare earth. He had been assigned a twelfth-floor apartment and, as the lift was always out of order, he was stuck between the earth and the sky.

When he started to talk about his home province, I could see that the burn marks on his coat were nothing compared to the scars in his heart. In the early 1980s, the North Korean state had decided that
the presence of disabled citizens in Pyongyang was an affront to the beauty of the city, and banished them en masse to the countryside. Kim Sang-o’s only daughter, who had a physical disability, was left behind in Hwanghae Province when the rest of the family was instructed to relocate to Pyongyang. That woman was my friend Su-ryon’s mother.

On the day of my first visit, Kim Sang-o took great pains to read every line of the poems I’d taken from my jacket pocket. When he had finished reading my attempt at an epic poem, he laughed heartily, saying that he knew I had written in imitation of Byron. To my astonishment, he did not scold me, but was accepting of it: ‘If you had come to me with something like “Oh, my homeland! Oh, my Party!” I would have refused to talk to you. I enjoyed your personal narrative of love. I can see that you’re faithful to your own voice.’

Kim Sang-o’s words of moral encouragement became the cornerstone of my life as a writer. He taught me that ‘A piece of writing will stubbornly pursue its author and hold him accountable to the end. Look to your conscience; speak your own truth. That is the only way that you can go beyond what you have been taught and accomplish a literature that truly belongs to you.’

In Kim Sang-o’s last years, the UFD pleaded with him continually in the hope that he would produce more state literature for them, but he refused to the end, saying that his health didn’t allow it. I wonder, though, if his choice to keep silence was the decisive act of Kim Sang-o’s conscience and his truth, after a life spent in loyal obedience to the Workers’ Party.

With Kim Sang-o’s recommendation, I was able to submit my own poems to the selection process for literary works organised by the Party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department. The best would be offered for the judgement of Kim Jong-il himself, and my compositions made the selection.

On 19 February 1992, the state newspaper
Rodong Sinmun
published an announcement to the effect that a collection of fifty poems entitled
The Songs of a Blessed Generation
had been presented to General Kim Jong-il on his fiftieth birthday. He had read the book and written the two poets a letter of commendation.

Even today, I remember with vivid clarity the look on the face of the Party Secretary for Pyongyang Arts School as he presented Kim Jong-il’s letter of appreciation to me, a student of music who had wronged the school by straying from his assigned course of study. He had to do this in front of all the staff and students, and while he had no alternative but to say, ‘I am so delighted that we had such a jewel in our school,’ he twisted my ear with such force that I almost cried out loud on stage.

It didn’t end there. In his letter, Kim Jong-il said that anything I asked of him would be granted, and I took him at his word. The Party required a graduate of music to serve the state in a musical capacity for the remainder of his or her working life. But the Party made an exception for me and granted me my first choice of career: I was assigned to be the Arts Writer of the Chosun Central Broadcasting Committee in the Propaganda and Agitation Department.

In North Korea, there is only one television channel. Central TV is broadcast from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. on weekdays and from 10 a.m. on Sundays. In my new role as Arts Writer, I was responsible for curating North Korean poetry, and I helped with presenting poetry in a format suitable for television. My parents and teachers were shocked at Kim Jong-il’s granting of my wish, as was, of course, the Party Secretary for Pyongyang Arts School.

It was 1994 when I began my working life. Before my first day at work, I went to see Kim Sang-o’s widow, and in the traditional Korean show of reverence, I offered her a deep bow.

Kim Sang-o had died in 1992 of tuberculosis in a special ward on the eleventh floor of Kim Man Yu Hospital, a state-of-the-art facility. Even his final breath, he gave to me. All cadres had to sign an oath
of loyalty to Kim Jong-il when they were close to death, swearing that their single-hearted devotion would continue after they died. Poet Kim Sang-o had added the following words to his handwritten will: ‘I leave behind unfinished works, to be completed by my children and my student.’ His funeral was handled by the United Front Department, as befitted a dignitary of the state. Kim Il-sung also decided that the Homeland Unification Medal – one of North Korea’s highest state honours – was to be awarded to Kim Sang-o on the day of his funeral. The
Rodong Sinmun
duly announced this as an ordinance of the state.

It was Kim Sang-o’s will that prompted the UFD to recruit me into its ranks, although I had originally applied to be an Arts Writer. Following a stern complaint from Kim Jong-il that the UFD had ceased to produce works of Kim Sang-o’s quality, UFD First Deputy Director Im Tong-ok had personally sought me out for recruitment. The vetting process for a Central Party cadre required at least six months of rigorous background checks, but the process was rushed through on orders from above and my transfer to the UFD happened quickly.

There was another problem, though: the Party required UFD staff to be graduates of literature or the social sciences, and music just didn’t cut it. So I was admitted to the graduate faculty of literature and languages at the University of Kim Il-sung in September 1996, under the pretext of doing my trial period at the UFD. But this wasn’t about due process; it was only a means of achieving an end. The one-year UFD trial period was also replaced by my graduate degree, and I was admitted to the UFD upon graduation.

Because of this history, my request to return to my place of birth was about much more than merely revisiting friends and seeing my hometown again. It was really to make a pilgrimage to the place that had brought me to Choi Liang and Kim Sang-o, who had taken my hand in theirs to guide me towards my calling.

PYONGYANG STATION WAS
so crowded that it was difficult to see along the platform. There seemed to be more passengers who had spent days waiting for a delayed train than people who were there to buy tickets or embark on their journey; and it wasn’t just because this was the central railway terminus in the capital city of North Korea.

In North Korea, apart from sections of track linking newly constructed stations or in the development zones, the rest of the country relied on a single-track railway laid during the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula during the first half of the twentieth century. North Koreans were used to the fact that trains never operated according to a regular timetable. Both Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il stressed that the railway was the nervous system of the nation. But in reality, North Korea was like a person with nerve damage paralysing one half of the body. Natural disasters were not even a major problem, given the constant physical breakdowns, problems with the engine or tracks and frequent blackouts. Even when the electricity was actually working, the power was low, and passengers bounced up and down as the carriage hiccupped its way along the track. Sometimes villagers along the line would race the train on their ox carts, laughing as they overtook the passengers in their carriages.

Besides, there were higher priorities, as passenger trains must always give way to the ruling Kim’s special train, for which myriad
routes were kept clear for security reasons, only for them to be changed at the last minute. Many freight trains operated several months behind schedule, and the Party and military used all kinds of justifications to get Kim Jong-il’s ratification to be granted priority track use. While trains that operated under Kim Jong-il’s orders, often carrying military goods, travelled across the country’s tracks on maximum priority, passenger trains were at the very bottom of the pecking order.

Luckily, my hometown was south of Pyongyang, where there was less rail traffic compared to other regions. This was thanks to the nature of Japanese colonial planning, which focused its infrastructure in the northern parts of the country, to aid in its mission of using Korea as a foothold for controlling Manchuria to the north. North Korean trade networks were concentrated on these connections, and the southern regions had been left relatively undeveloped.

The distance from Pyongyang to my hometown of Sariwon is sixty-three kilometres, which would take less than an hour by car. But when I arrived at the station, I was told that the start of the journey would be delayed by three hours. I didn’t mind the wait. I hadn’t been back for ten years and was determined to make the journey by train, so I was full of excited anticipation. To be honest, I was returning home in clouds of glory as one of the Admitted. I had even planned to take with me my special wine glass into which the General himself had poured wine, and use it to toast friends back home. But my mother sternly refused me permission, saying that such an heirloom should not be removed from the house. So instead, I had filled my rucksack with alcohol and tinned meats. Carrying this bag and waiting in line for my ticket, I stood tall and proud.