In the classroom every subject we learned—math, science, reading, music—was delivered with a dose of propaganda. Kim Il Sung’s son, our Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, showed incredible loyalty to his father, and this was an example for schoolchildren. In class we read a textbook about how Kim Il Sung was so busy leading our nation that he would have to read documents while riding in his car. But this was hard because the road was bumpy and the pages would shake. But when Kim Jong Il was very young, he managed to cover the road with loads of sand to make the ride smooth and comfortable for his father.
Our Dear Leader had mystical powers. His biography said he could control the weather with his thoughts, and that he wrote fifteen hundred books during his three years at Kim Il Sung University. Even when he was a child he was an amazing tactician, and when he played military games, his team always won because he came up with brilliant new strategies every time. That story inspired my classmates in Hyesan to play military games, too. But nobody ever wanted to be on the American imperialist team, because they would always have to lose the battle.
In school, we sang a song about Kim Jong Il and how he worked so hard to give our laborers on-the-spot instruction as he traveled around the country, sleeping in his car and eating only small meals of rice balls. “Please, please, Dear Leader, take a good rest for us!” we sang through our tears. “We are all crying for you.”
This worship of the Kims was reinforced in documentaries, movies, and shows broadcast by the single, state-run television station. Whenever the Leaders’ smiling pictures appeared on the screen, stirring sentimental music would build in the background. It made me so emotional every time. North Koreans are raised to venerate our fathers and our elders; it’s part of the culture we inherited from Confucianism. And so in our collective minds, Kim Il Sung was our beloved grandfather and Kim Jong Il was our father.
Once I even dreamed about Kim Jong Il. He was smiling and hugging me and giving me candy. I woke up so happy, and for a long time the memory of that dream was the biggest joy in my life.
Jang Jin Sung, a famous North Korea defector and former poet laureate who worked in North Korea’s propaganda bureau, calls this phenomenon “emotional dictatorship.” In North Korea, it’s not enough for the government to control where you go, what you learn, where you work, and what you say. They need to control you through your emotions, making you a slave to the state by destroying your individuality, and your ability to react to situations based on your own experience of the world.
This dictatorship, both emotional and physical, is reinforced in every aspect of your life. In fact, the indoctrination starts as soon as you learn to talk and are taken on your mother’s back to the inminban meetings everybody in North Korea has to attend at least once a week. You learn that your friends are your “comrades” and that is how you address one another. You are taught to think with one mind.
As soon as you are in school you are drilled in the 10 Principles of the regime, like the Ten Commandments of the Bible. (Number 1: “We must give our all in the struggle to unify the entire society with the revolutionary ideology of the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung.” Number 2: “Respect the Great Leader respected comrade Kim Il Sung with the utmost loyalty.” . . . Number 10: “We must pass down the great achievements of Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung’s revolution from generation to generation, inheriting and completing it to the end.”) You learn the principle of juche, or national self-determination. And you are taught to hate the enemies of the state with a burning passion.
Our classrooms and schoolbooks were plastered with images of grotesque American GIs with blue eyes and huge noses executing civilians or being vanquished with spears and bayonets by brave young Korean children. Sometimes during recess from school we lined up to take turns beating or stabbing dummies dressed up like American soldiers. I was so scared that the Yankee devils would attack us again and torture me to death in the most evil way.
In second grade we were taught simple math, but not the way it is taught in other countries. In North Korea, even arithmetic is a propaganda tool. A typical problem would go like this: “If you kill one American bastard and your comrade kills two, how many dead American bastards do you have?”
We could never just say “American”—that would be too respectful. It had to be “American bastard,” “Yankee devil,” or “big-nosed Yankee.” If you didn’t say it, you would be criticized for being too soft on our enemies.
Likewise, any mention of the Kims had to be preceded by a title or tender description to show our infinite love and respect for our Leaders. One time when my mother was preparing food in the kitchen and I grabbed a newspaper, I had to read it for a long time before I realized I had just finished the title of our Leader: “Our great comrade Kim Jong Il, the general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, the chairman of the DPRK National Defense Commission, and the supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army, said today . . .”
I don’t think my father was brainwashed the way the rest of us were. My mother has told me he was more aware of what the regime was doing to its people. I heard him grumble about it only once, and I didn’t understand what my father was saying at the time. We were listening to the television news broadcast with the usual footage of Kim Jong Il inspecting troops somewhere. The newsreaders were going on and on about how much the Dear Leader was suffering in the cold to give his benevolent guidance to the loyal soldiers when my father snapped, “That son of a bitch! Turn off the TV.”
My mother whispered furiously, “Be careful what you say around the children! This isn’t just about what you think. You’re putting all of us in danger.”
I had no idea my father was talking about Kim Jong Il. I could never imagine showing disrespect for the regime or our Leaders. That would be unthinkable.
• • •
My father wasn’t the only one who was beginning to think differently.
In fact, capitalism was already alive and well just a few blocks away in the bustling jangmadang. Only a few years earlier, the market had consisted of a few grandmothers selling homegrown vegetables and snacks. Now a corrugated metal roof covered rows and rows of market stalls where vendors sold everything from handmade rice cakes to Chinese athletic shoes. If you knew where to look, you could also find things like digital watches and DVD players from vendors who operated in the gray area between legal and illegal trade in the new North Korea.
The smugglers who brought the black market goods back and forth to China lived in low houses behind the market, along the river’s edge. I got to know this neighborhood well. When my father was in town with a shipment from Pyongyang, he would sometimes hide the metal in my little book bag, and then carry me piggyback from our house to one of the smugglers’ shacks. From there some men took the package to Chinese buyers on the other side of the river. Sometimes the smugglers would wade or walk across the Yalu River, sometimes they met their Chinese counterparts halfway. They did it at night, signaling one another with flashlights. There were so many of them doing business that each needed a special code—one, two, three flashes—so they didn’t get one another mixed up.
The soldiers who guarded the border were part of the operation by now, and they were always there to take their cut. Of course, even with the authorities looking the other way, there still were many things that you were forbidden to buy or sell. And breaking the rules could be fatal.
In North Korea, public executions were used to teach us lessons in loyalty to the regime and the consequences of disobedience. In Hyesan when I was little, a young man was executed right behind the market for killing and eating a cow. It was a crime to eat beef without special permission. Cows were the property of the state, and were too valuable to eat because they were used for plowing fields and dragging carts, so anybody who butchered one would be stealing government property.
The young man had committed some other petty crimes, but the cow was his main offense. H
e suffered from tuberculosis and had nothing to eat, but that didn’t make any difference to the police. They announced his execution to the whole city, and then brought him to the market and tied him at the chest, knees, and ankles to a heavy piece of wood. Three men with rifles stood in front of him and began firing. The executioners tried to cut the ropes with bullets and it took a long time. Finally, they succeeded, and the dead man flopped to the ground. My mother watched in shock as they rolled the body away, stuffed it into a sack, and drove it off in the back of a truck. Her blood went cold and she was unable to move her legs for a while. She couldn’t believe that in her own country a human’s life had less value than an animal’s. Even a dog would be treated with more respect.
There was an endless list of crimes in North Korea. The government was obsessed with preventing corrupt ideas from penetrating our borders, so all foreign media were totally forbidden. Although many families owned televisions, radios, and VCR players, they were allowed to listen to or watch only state-generated news programs and propaganda films, which were incredibly boring. There was a huge demand for foreign movies and South Korean television shows, even though you never knew when the police might raid your house searching for smuggled media. First they would shut off the electricity (if the power was on in the first place) so that the videocassette or DVD would be trapped in the machine when they came through the door. But people learned to get around this by owning two video players and quickly switching them out if they heard a police team coming. If you were caught smuggling or distributing illegal videos, the punishment could be severe. Some people have even been executed by firing squad—just to set an example for the rest of us.
Radios and televisions came sealed and permanently tuned to state-approved channels. If you tampered with them, you could be arrested and sent to a labor camp for reeducation, but a lot of people did it anyway. In the border areas those of us with receivers could sometimes pick up Chinese television broadcasts. I was mostly interested in the food commercials. There were advertisements for exotic things like milk and cookies. I never drank milk in North Korea! I didn’t even know it came from a cow until after I escaped. My friends and I would watch these incredible things and understand that the Chinese had more, but it never really occurred to us that our lives could be any different.
I’m often asked why people would risk going to prison to watch Chinese commercials or South Korean soap operas or year-old wrestling matches. I think it’s because people are so oppressed in North Korea, and daily life is so grim and colorless, that people are desperate for any kind of escape. When you watch a movie, your imagination can carry you away for two whole hours. You come back refreshed, your struggles temporarily forgotten.
My uncle Park Jin had a VCR, and when I was very young, I would go to his house to watch tapes of Hollywood movies. My aunt covered the windows and told us not to say anything about it. I loved Cinderella, Snow White, and James Bond movies. But when I was seven or eight years old, the film that changed my life was Titanic. It amazed me that it was a story that took place a hundred years ago. Those people living in 1912 had better technology than most North Koreans! But mostly I couldn’t believe how someone could make a movie out of such a shameful love story. In North Korea, the filmmakers would have been executed. No real human stories were allowed, nothing but propaganda about the Leader. But in Titanic, the characters talked about love and humanity. I was amazed that Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were willing to die for love, not just for the regime, as we were. The idea that people could choose their own destinies fascinated me. This pirated Hollywood movie gave me my first small taste of freedom.
But while the outside media offered me a glimpse of a larger world very different from the one I occupied, I never imagined I could live like the characters in those movies. I couldn’t look at the people on the screen and think they were real, or allow myself to envy their lives. The propaganda we were fed inoculated me from any lessons I might apply to my own life. It also made me numb to the suffering that was going on all around me as the famine was taking its terrible toll.
• • •
North Koreans have two stories running in their heads at all times, like trains on parallel tracks. One is what you are taught to believe; the other is what you see with your own eyes. It wasn’t until I escaped to South Korea and read a translation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four that I found a word for this peculiar condition: doublethink. This is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time—and somehow not go crazy.
This “doublethink” is how you can shout slogans denouncing capitalism in the morning, then browse through the market in the afternoon to buy smuggled South Korean cosmetics.
It is how you can believe that North Korea is a socialist paradise, the best country in the world with the happiest people who have nothing to envy, while devouring movies and TV programs that show ordinary people in enemy nations enjoying a level of prosperity that you couldn’t imagine in your dreams.
It is how you can sit in Hyesan watching propaganda videos showing productive factories, supermarkets stocked with food, and well-dressed people in amusement parks and believe you are living on the same planet as your government Leaders.
It is how you can recite the motto “Children Are King” in school, then walk home past the orphanage where children with bloated bellies stare at you with hungry eyes.
Maybe deep, deep inside me I knew something was wrong. But we North Koreans can be experts at lying, even to ourselves. The frozen babies that starving mothers abandoned in the alleys did not fit into my worldview, so I couldn’t process what I saw. It was normal to see bodies in the trash heaps, bodies floating in the river, normal to just walk by and do nothing when a stranger cried for help.
There are images I can never forget. Late one afternoon, my sister and I found the body of a young man lying beside a pond. It was a place where people went to fetch water, and he must have dragged himself there to drink. He was naked and his eyes were staring and his mouth wide open in an expression of terrible suffering. I had seen many dead bodies before, but this was the most horrible and frightening of all, because his insides were coming out where something—maybe dogs—had ripped him open. I was so embarrassed for him, lying there stripped of his clothes and his dignity. I could not bear to look at him, so I grabbed my sister’s hand and we ran home.
My mother tried to help people when she could. Homeless wanderers would sometimes knock on our door to beg for food. I remember one young woman who brought her daughter to our house. “I’m so cold, so hungry,” she said. “But if you give me food, I’ll let my baby eat.” My mother understood that feeling because she had young children, too. She invited them inside and gave them both plates of food. I watched them closely, because the daughter was nearly my age. They were very polite, and ate delicately even though they were starving. I wonder often if they survived, and if they are still in North Korea.
There were so many desperate people on the streets crying for help that you had to shut off your heart or the pain would be too much. After a while you can’t care anymore. And that is what hell is like.
Almost everybody I knew lost family in the famine. The youngest and oldest died first. Then the men, who had fewer reserves than women. Starving people wither away until they can no longer fight off diseases, or the chemicals in their blood become so unbalanced that their hearts forget to beat.
My own family suffered, too, as our fortune rose and fell like a cork in the ocean. In 1999, my father tried to use trucks instead of trains to smuggle metals out of Pyongyang, but there were too many expenses to pay drivers and buy gasoline, too many checkpoints and too many bribes to pay, so he ended up losing all of his money. My mother took me and my sister with her to live with her relatives for a few months while my father went back to his train business and made up his losses.
We arrived in Kowon to find that my mother’s famil
y was also struggling to survive. Grandfather Byeon had died a few years earlier, and my grandmother was living with her older son, Min Sik, in the family home. Her youngest son, Jong Sik, who had been imprisoned years earlier for stealing from the state, was visiting them as well. In the labor camp he had caught tuberculosis, which was very common in North Korea. Now that there was so little food to go around, he was sick all the time and wasting away.
My grandmother had taken in lots of neighborhood children, and in order to make sure everybody else was fed, she ate only a tiny bit of food each day. She worried that she was a burden, even though she consumed so little and her bones were as light as a bird’s.
I loved my little grandmother Hwang with her wooden leg. She never got upset with me, even when I cried and pestered her to carry me on her back like a horse. She always smiled at me and she was a wonderful storyteller; I would sit with her for hours as she told me about her childhood in the South. She described a beautiful island off the southern coast called Jeju, where women divers can hold their breath for a long time and swim like fish while they gather food from the bottom of the sea. I was so curious when she described the wide blue ocean to me, and the playful dolphins that lived there. I had never seen an ocean or heard of such a thing as a dolphin. Once I asked her, “Grandma, what is the biggest thing in the world?” She told me it was the whale that breathes in air from a hole in its back and makes a fountain come out. I had never even seen pictures of whales, but they sounded like something I would like.
Most of her stories were from the time of Chosun, when there was no North or South Korea, only one country, one people. She told me we had the same culture and shared the same traditions as the South. She also told me a little bit about the time she visited Seoul, although even saying the name was forbidden in North Korea. You just didn’t mention such an evil place. I knew it existed only from propaganda, newspaper articles describing anti-imperialist demonstrations by its oppressed masses. But somehow my grandmother planted deep inside me a curiosity about this place she had loved. She told me, “Come to my grave someday, and tell me that the North and South are reunited.”