Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor (5 page)

Just like we were tutored to appreciate the Great Leader for everything we received, we were equally clear about whom we should hate for all the things we were deprived of. The nannies raised the orphans to believe that all class enemies of the laboring people—landlords and capitalists—were potbellied swine, who exploited poor people and gorged on too much food themselves without thinking of others. We took this lesson to heart and began to blame the class enemies for everything—including the absence of our parents. One day, a man with a rosy complexion and a huge belly visited our orphanage. This was Choi Yeong-gon, then the Vice-Premier of North Korea, who displayed the natural signs of a privileged man—his well-fed complexion beaming in a bright rosy shimmer while his heavy gait carried along his bulging belly. The grandee, however, ended up suffering at the hands of us vicious children. As soon as he entered the orphanage, he was attacked by the indignant orphans throwing stones and shouting out at the top of their full-blown lungs: “Away with the potbellied landlord, away with the greedy capitalist, away with the exploiter of the people!” As the embarrassed nannies were running around to stop their well-trained disciples, the generous vice-premier praised the children for their feisty revolutionary spirit with an embarrassed smile on his ruddy face.

Oh, how we hated the enemies with all our might!

Among those enemies we hated, Americans were at the top of the list.

Upon entering elementary school, we orphans were treated to an excursion to the American Imperial Massacre Remembrance Museum in Shincheon. We were told that this was where American soldiers massacred some 900 villagers, many of whom were women and children. The American troops led the defenseless civilians into an air raid shelter and locked them up. They spent three days in fear, not having a clue about what would happen to them. On the third day, the soldiers set the building on fire and burned everyone to death. The museum was a solemn place commemorating the victims of the atrocities committed by the American army during the Korean War. But more importantly, it was a place where we were reminded why we should hate America. The museum displayed the American commander’s words directing the massacre. I visited this site so many times, even into my middle school days on school excursions, that I still remember every single line of the enemy commander’s order: “My command is law. Kill everyone mercilessly, old or young. Your hands should not tremble.” We were told that the American soldiers had separated children from mothers and burned them separately in ammunition storage facilities up the mountain. We were brought into a mausoleum and shown the walls where the victims’ nails were embedded as they desperately gasped their last and wrote on the wall: “Avenge our death,” and “Americans are our arch-enemies.” The excursion guide also pointed out that the white layer on the wall was grease produced by incinerated human bodies. We were told that only orphans were given the opportunity to see the walls because allowing too many people to the site would inevitably bring too much air and sunlight to destroy the layer of grease. As one of the few privileged witnesses to the heinous acts done by the American imperialists, I shuddered at the sight. Everyone felt that if it weren’t for our Great Father Kim Il-sung’s courageous leadership, all of us would still be under the yoke of foreign domination. We all felt that the intense hatred for Americans soon transformed into equally intense love for our father. Our hearts and minds welled up with admiration for he who presided over the safety and dignity of our homeland.

Overall, war orphans were treated well because they were seen as the children of martyrs who had sacrificed themselves in defending the homeland. The state made sure that only children with excellent class background, from the households of soldiers, workers, and landless farmers, were admitted to orphanages. One day, a close friend of mine was picked up by his birth mother. All the orphans were so envious of him, but much later in life, I had the misfortune of encountering him at a penal labor camp. He told me that as soon as his mother brought him home from the orphanage, his entire family was sent to a camp. The only crime they had committed was to have a bad class background: they had been landlords during Japanese colonial rule. His mother presaged the impending family misfortune and wanted to protect him by disguising her son as an orphan, but her desperate plan was unfortunately short-lived.

The orphanage was not always a safe place, even for those fully grown. I remember there was a twenty-five-year-old orphan in my class, which was made up mostly of nine-year-olds. He ended up in the orphanage as a teenager after the war and idled away without finding either adoptive parents or a vocation. He might have been slightly retarded, which is why nobody adopted him until he turned older than even some of our nannies. He used to vent his frustration by slapping the little ones around at will. Large as he was, he had many enemies and virtually no supporters. So one day, the small ones, including myself, put our heads together and waited for him to enter the classroom, then threw a blanket over the giant so as to knock him down with our little fists. The lonely monster moaned while his chubby arms and legs helplessly reached out to resist. We moved collectively to bring down the enemy and triumphed—as if to prove the revolutionary lesson we had been taught about how little people can triumph over the strong enemy if they move as one family.

Although fierce revolutionaries at heart, we orphans were never shy of troublemaking. Each one quickly learned how to fight for his or her interests, which sometimes entailed forming groups representing similar background and interests to dominate other groups. In the 1950s, North Korea sent groups of orphans abroad to the communist countries, such as China and Romania, as a gesture of friendship consolidating international socialism. Korean orphans who spent some time abroad were extremely arrogant when they returned home. Puffed with attitude and a sense of superiority, they formed exclusive circles, admitting only their own. I was particularly envious of those who had spent some time in China, because each of them had a glimmering golden-colored ballpoint pen with a shining miniature globe dangling from the end. Whenever those China-sent orphans detected envious gazes of admirers, they would brag about how the Chinese authorities presented them with those beautiful gifts and shook their hands upon their return to North Korea. The domestic orphans, including myself, painfully coveted the magically shimmering colors of their precious possessions. Nothing else, it seemed, was more prized and exotic than those pens. In order to conceal our envy, we gave the Chinese faction a tough time by constantly pestering them to fight. Despite our nannies’ tear-inducing corporeal punishments, there were constant battles between “the Romanian faction” and “the Chinese faction” as well as between “the indigenous Koreans” and “the foreign faction.”

But on rare occasions, orphans would truly unite. Children from our orphanage sometimes went for track meets where we would compete with children from other schools or day-care centers, playing soccer and running races. When the parents of those children cheered for their kids, my heart would ache with immeasurable sorrow and my entire body would feel pain. Whenever I heard parents’ voices calling out the names of our competitors, my legs would lose all power and yield to those whose faces were happily beaming. Mommies and daddies were behind those little pricks! Mommies and daddies … there simply was no way I could ever compete with the attention and love they got. Nothing was more painful than to realize that we orphans did not have anyone to cheer for us. The pain then would easily turn into anger. When the parents got out of sight, we would find handfuls of rocks and throw them at those fortunate brats. I would do anything to earn the love of parents who would stand by me! Never had I met my parents, but I knew that they would be as kind and loving as the ones I stealthily watched from the other side of the soccer field. They surely had to be kind and loving if they were mine.

Lady-Mother

At last, after so many cycles of hopes and frustrations—hopes of having kind and loving parents and frustrations of realizing their absence—it was my turn to be visited by unforeseen fortune. It was a chilly afternoon in November. A late autumn wind blew through my little fingers as I was playing a trumpet in the courtyard of the orphanage during the lunch break. A glitzy black Pobeda
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entered the courtyard and pulled up at one corner. A chauffeur in a dapper uniform stepped out of the car and opened the back door, from which emerged an attractive lady in her early thirties. She was wearing shiny black shoes and a neatly tailored black coat with fur trim around the neck. I was mesmerized by the appearance of such an unusually elegant person in our orphanage. Not until then had I seen a grown-up woman with such an air of supreme refinement. As I glanced at her with unconcealed wonderment, our eyes met and she noticed my innocent admiration. The lady stood on the playground and started to examine children closely. Her profile looked simple but cold as she cast a long, shadowy glance at the children, most of whom were oblivious of her insistent gaze.

When I returned to the classroom for the second half of the school day, faintly trembling from wonderment, I noticed that this unusual lady was conversing with my teacher. When everyone was seated, my teacher asked me and a girl named O, who was a year younger than I, to step out in front of the class. So we did, standing in silence in front of the entire class of fifty. I felt lightheaded while this lady in the fur-trimmed coat scrutinized us from the back row with the discerning eyes of a chicken sexer. What did this mean? I could not tell for sure, but something of great significance was unfolding right in front of my eyes. As I realized that I was being examined, my heart beat faster and faster. Soon the teacher told us to go back to our seats, and no more extraordinary things happened in that strange afternoon.

A few days later, the teacher told O and me that our mother had come to visit us.

Mother?

Our mother?

Sharp pain and joy pierced my heart at once.

When I followed my teacher to her office, the same elegant lady who had scrutinized us in class was there waiting for us. The teacher told O and me that we were sister and brother, and that the lady was actually our mother, who had finally found us. Then the teacher asked us to wash ourselves and put on new clothes “Mother” had brought for us. Everything was happening so suddenly; the teacher expected us to pack and be ready to leave with the lady. I was just nine years old, and still believed deep down in my heart that Kim Hye-hwa, the nanny who breast-fed me, might be my real mother. Could all this be truly happening to me? When O and I were about to leave the building with the lady, Kim Hye-hwa started to cry and told me that she was glad I had finally found my real mother and asked me to be a good child to her. She was faintly smiling through tears, holding my hands so tightly that I almost wanted to pull them back. The director of the orphanage gathered all the children in the courtyard and announced that if they kept studying diligently, someday their real parents would show up as well. Oh, how many times had I been summoned to those gatherings and witnessed with indescribable envy and pain how other children were picked up by their parents. After each occasion I would run to the stream flowing by the orphanage to cry and pour out my sorrow. But now, it was my turn to stand in front of those envious faces. And my mother was not just any mother! Mother looked like a person from a different universe who rode in a shiny black sedan … simple wonderment! I got into the backseat of the nice-smelling Russian-made car, still mesmerized by the quick succession of events that day, and only then realized that I was about to leave the place I’d called home all my life. As the car drove out of the orphanage, I saw numerous faces overlapping one another like a montage—the tear-soaked face of my sweet nanny, Kim Hye-hwa; the stern faces of disciplinarians; and the gloomy faces of my dear accomplices who had pulled their strength together to knock out the stupid Goliath.

As the magical journey to a new home continued, the lady-mother turned around from the front seat to face me and my newly discovered sister O, who also must have been lost in confusion.

“I was really sad to have lost you both during the war. I looked all over the country to find you, and now that I have you both in my arms, I want to lavish you with everything you want. Toys, clothes, sweets, whatever it is, you just have to tell me what you want.”

While I was listening to her in a dreamlike state, the black sedan pulled up to an old Russian-style two-story house. Later I learned that the house was located in the exclusive Namsan district by Mansu Hill (
Mansudae
) in Pyongyang, where only privileged people could live. When the car pulled over, a stout man with a huge belly, just like the vice-premier the orphans once persecuted, came out of the house to greet us, telling us that we were no longer orphans and didn’t need to struggle any longer under his care. This strange yet pleasant man was our “father,” according to our “mother.” O and I were simply amazed. Then he led us into the house through the heavy entrance door, carrying one of our small bags in each hand. We passed the dark foyer and followed him to the wooden staircase. Father took us to our rooms on the second floor. My room had a desk, a closet, and neatly folded blankets at the corner—all exclusively for me! I’d never really had anything that I could call “mine” at the orphanage, where everything was shared by everyone. To call these things mine seemed like a miracle, and that strong sense of wonder marked the new chapter of my childhood.

Children of Namsan

It turned out that my father was a high-ranking official in the Korean Workers’ Party, the ruling party in North Korea. He commuted to work in a new Russian-made Volga sedan, a distinctive marker of his high status. My mother was the manager of the Eastern Pyongyang Department Store, where one could find practically anything. For its size and wealth of available products, it was nicknamed the “one hundred meter
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store”: its grand façade indeed stretched for a hundred meters, from one street corner to the next. Many times I saw my mother bringing bundles of cash home and putting them in a large safe, which was already packed. I had no idea where they came from, but sometimes I would see money stacked up in backpacks in the closet, from which I would take a bundle if I needed it for any personal expenses.