Escape from North Korea (10 page)

The North Korean students happened to be in the right place at the right time. They were among thirty-eight North Koreans studying in Bulgaria at a moment of deteriorating relations between Pyongyang and Moscow. As ties between North Korea and the Soviet Union worsened due to, among other things, Nikita Khrushchev's rejection of Stalinism, Pyongyang recalled its students from every Communist country in Europe except Stalinist Albania.

On August 9, 1962, four students in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia decided to seize the moment and exploit the rift between their country and Bulgaria. Declaring themselves as loyal Leninists, they requested asylum. In a handwritten petition delivered to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, they stated that no “threats or hardships” could “turn us aside from the right Leninist path.” The letter ended, “We cherish our lives, but we cherish more our just cause.”

Two and a half weeks later, North Korean agents kidnapped the four students in the center of Sofia and took them by force to the North Korean Embassy. This was an outlaw action, and the Bulgarian government declared it a “rude intervention in the affairs of the country.” The incident soon devolved into farce. Two of the students managed to escape from the North Korean Embassy by tying sheets together and climbing out an upper-story window. The other two
were rescued by Bulgarian police at the Sofia airport as North Korean officials tried to manhandle them onto a flight to Pyongyang.
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In 2010, during a visit to Seoul, two of the former students, now both in their seventies, told reporters that their protestations of support for Leninism had been false. They were not true Leninists, they said; they were only trying to win the assistance of Bulgaria's Communist government, which at the time was closely aligned with Moscow. The real reason the North Korean government had kidnapped them in an effort to force their return, they said, was that they had issued a statement calling the Korean War a “North Korean war of aggression” in contravention of the official North Korean line that the United States started the war. Their statement also included the conviction that “it is better to read the Bible than the Collected Works of Kim Il Sung.”
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Half a century after the fact, it is impossible to know whether the defectors were telling the truth or rewriting history for the benefit of their hosts in Seoul.

Once the famine arrived in the mid-1990s and escape routes opened across the Tumen and Yalu Rivers and then across China, a high percentage of the fugitives came from the northeast region of North Korea, near the Chinese border. But word of the exodus reached some people in the privileged enclave of Pyongyang. Members of the powerful elite class made the decision to flee, too.

One such man was Kim Cheol-woong, first pianist of the Pyongyang Philharmonic Orchestra until 2001, when he escaped to China. Kim Cheol-woong reached South Korea in 2003 after two years on the run in China and two repatriations to the North. “My motivation to escape was not hunger,” he said later, “but to be able to play freely the music of my choice.”
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Kim Cheol-woong was born in Pyongyang in 1974 to a politically connected family. His father worked for the Workers' Party,
and his mother was a professor. At the age of eight, he was selected for a special program for young artists at the Pyongyang Music and Dance University, where he underwent fourteen years of intensive training. “For music students,” Kim Cheol-woong explained, “the core requirements are of course subjects related to music, but the main stress is always laid on the theory and philosophy of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.”

Among the required subjects Kim Cheol-woong studied were the Revolutionary History of Great Leader Kim Il Sung and the Revolutionary History of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. In music, as in every art form, the purpose is to serve the state and extol the country's dictators—or so Kim Cheol-woong and his fellow students learned. The performing arts are a means to political ends.

Kim Cheol-woong recalled an episode that influenced him profoundly during his student years and taught him a lesson about the role of the artist in North Korea. The incident concerned a celebrated young pianist who had just won a minor international competition. Kim Jong Il ordered the pianist to enter the International Tchaikovsky Competition, held every four years in Moscow. It is the world's most competitive piano competition, and Kim Cheol-woong said the young pianist knew he needed more years of practice before he would be ready for it. So he decided not to enter. It was a “rationally considered choice as a pianist,” Kim Cheol-woong said, but as a political matter, it had disastrous consequences for the unlucky young man. For his disobedience, the pianist was sent to the gulag on the orders of Kim Jong Il.

Many North Korean musicians studied in Russia at the time, and in 1995, Kim Cheol-woong, then twenty-one years old, was dispatched to the Tchaikovsky Conservatory of Music in Moscow. In Russia, his life was tightly restricted. He lived at the North Korean Embassy, and he was under surveillance by North Korean security guards. Even so, a new world opened before him. For the first time, he could study twentieth-century music, and he fell in love with the
free harmonics of jazz. There was only one problem: Jazz was banned in North Korea.

In North Korea, jazz is “seen as ‘vicious' music that confuses people's minds,” Kim Cheol-woong explained. American jazz pianist Dave Brubeck made a similar observation in 1958 on a visit to Warsaw. “No dictatorship can tolerate jazz,” he said at the time of that Cold War visit. “It is the first sign of a return to freedom.”
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The North Korean regime also bans individual composers whose biographies it deems dangerous. Among them is Sergei Rachmaninoff, who wrote some of the twentieth century's greatest piano music. Rachmaninoff is verboten because he fled his native Russia after the 1917 Revolution and settled in the United States. In the eyes of the North Korean regime, a musician who betrayed his country—especially one who betrayed it in favor of the United States—is not a model anyone should emulate.

In Russia, Kim Cheol-woong discovered the lush, romantic music of the French composer and pianist Richard Clayderman. He remembers the first time he heard a recording by Clayderman. He was sitting in a café in Moscow across the street from the conservatory when the song “Autumn Leaves” came over the stereo system. He was entranced: “I had never heard music like that before, and it gave me goose bumps all over my body.”

“What is it?” he asked the owner of the cafe.

The Russian scoffed at him. “You're studying at the music conservatory and you don't know? What kind of student are you?”

Kim Cheol-woong bought Clayderman's recordings in Moscow and continued to listen to them in secret when he returned home to Pyongyang in 1999. Then, one day in mid-2001, he was practicing Clayderman's “Autumn Leaves,” which he wanted to play as a surprise for his girlfriend. A colleague heard him playing the illegal music and reported him to the Ministry of State Security, which oversees the country's secret police and reports directly to the supreme leader, then Kim Jong Il. Kim Cheol-woong was forced
to apologize and write ten pages of self-criticism. The experience was a personal epiphany: “The fact that a pianist, just because of playing his music, was forced to apologize, caused a great sense of aversion in me, and I decided to seek the freedom of being able to play freely.”

Kim Cheol-woong had heard rumors about North Koreans who had managed to get to South Korea by crossing the river to China, where they sought the help of Christian missionaries running an underground railroad. He decided to flee. In October 2001, he took a train to a town in the northeast part of the country, where he found a guide who, for $2,000, led him across the Tumen River in the middle of the night.

The guide directed him to a small village where other North Koreans were hiding. Kim Cheol-woong knocked on a random door. He told the farmer who answered that he was a classical pianist who had trained in Moscow at one of the world's preeminent conservatories. He might as well have announced that he was an astronaut who had flown to the moon. The farmer's response? “He said, ‘What's a piano? I have no idea what you're talking about,' ” Kim said. The farmer gave him a job helping with the harvest in exchange for room and board.

For seven months, Kim Cheol-woong never touched a piano. After three weeks helping the farmer bring in his harvest, he found a job as a logger. It was backbreaking work that left him exhausted at night. Even so, he never gave up looking for a piano. “Every day I would tell whomever I met that I played the piano,” he said. Eventually another refugee directed him to a church that had a broken-down instrument. Thirty of the eighty keys did not function, but that did not matter to Kim Cheol-woong. “I could hear the missing notes in my head,” he said. After seven months of not playing, “I finally felt like I was alive.”

After about a year in China, he bought a fake South Korean passport on the black market and tried to use it to fly to Seoul. He
was caught by the Chinese immigration authorities at the airport in Beijing. After three months in detention in China, he was put on a train to North Korea. Desperate to escape, he managed to jump from the moving train shortly after it reached North Korean soil. He immediately crossed the river again to China.

Two months later, Kim Cheol-woong was arrested a second time. This time he was nabbed as he was trying to cross the border into Mongolia posing as a Chinese tourist. He spent six months in jail in China before being deported. He was taken to the border and handed over to North Korean officials. He was about to be sent to a prison camp when he caught the eye of one of the officials, who happened to have worked with Kim's father in Pyongyang. That man helped him escape and get back to China.

His third attempt to leave China worked. On December 7, 2002, using a fake South Korean passport he had purchased on the black market, Kim Cheol-woong flew from Beijing to Seoul. At the airport, he walked to the immigration desk and announced to the officer on duty, “I'm from Pyongyang.”

In recent years, Kim Cheol-woong has traveled the world with his music and his story. On a warm spring evening in 2008, he gave a private recital in Manhattan. The venue was the venerable Metropolitan Club, a white-marble palazzo designed by the renowned architect Stanford White and opened in 1894. The club overlooks Central Park from its prime location on Fifth Avenue at East Sixtieth Street. On the evening that Kim Cheol-woong took his seat at the grand piano in the ground-floor salon, the red-velvet curtains were closed to the evening light and the room was softly lit by triple-armed sconces lining the gold-and-white walls.

After the recital, which included a ballad by Richard Clayderman, Kim Cheol-woong took questions from the audience. Someone inquired about his life in South Korea. Freedom isn't easy, he replied. “One of the hardest things I have experienced since leaving North Korea is having to choose what to play.”

The highest-ranking North Korean official to defect was Hwang Jang-yop, who made world headlines in 1997 when he requested political asylum at the South Korean Embassy in Beijing. Hwang's defection is one of the few times that Beijing has stood up publicly to its North Korean ally. It is the only time that the Chinese have publicly defied Pyongyang in support of a defector who wanted to flee to South Korea, although China has allowed other defectors to leave China quietly. It is unclear why Chinese authorities decided to disregard Kim Jong Il's wish that they return the defector. Hwang Jang-yop had friends in high places in Beijing, and perhaps they interceded on his behalf. Or perhaps China viewed Hwang's release to South Korea as a way of solidifying its newly established diplomatic ties with that country. It's also possible that international public opinion played a role.