The Reluctant Communist (16 page)

You may have noticed above that I said Anocha moved into the other upstairs apartment and did not mention Abshier. That’s because before we were able to move in, Abshier died of a heart attack. My wife and I were still living in the house I had had since 1972, and Abshier and Anocha were living together in the other house in Li Suk, the one that had originally been Dresnok’s. (Dresnok and Parrish were in the other pair of houses in the nearby town at this time.) Abshier’s house and my house were not much more than fifty yards apart.

The day before he died, Abshier was building some shelves. I had to come and help him. He was hard working but not handy, and it was rare that he ever actually finished anything. If I hadn’t come over, he would have abandoned the job. He was funny in a lot of ways like that. He was just not very practical. For example, his conversational Korean was not very good, but he would spend hours studying the newspaper, looking for the hardest words to master, economic and political words. He loved doing that, but he would have been better off learning to speak to the leaders and farmers better. But no, he was happiest when he could slide a word into the conversation that Dresnok didn’t know.

That night, Abshier had dinner with Anocha as usual. It was Sunday night, so there was “international time” and a Chinese movie on TV. He was nodding off throughout the whole movie, which was odd for him, Anocha said. Around midnight, he said his chest felt very tight, and he got up to go to the bathroom. As soon as he reached it, he collapsed. Years ago, I had installed an alarm system, which was really just two bells, like small school bells, that connected the two houses. If you pressed the button in one house, the bell would ring in the other house, to alert the other family that something was wrong. Anocha went running for the alarm and pushed it and pushed it, but nothing happened. I had told Abshier and Anocha a couple of days before that since we had just had Mika, we were going to disable ours, but Anocha forgot. After a few moments of nothing happening, Anocha came running and pounded on our door. I went running back over to Abshier’s house. There I found him sprawled on his back on the bathroom floor. I will never forget the look on his face as he looked up at me, his eyes rolled back, as I stood behind him. He was trying to say something, but all he could do was groan and then exhale heavily. I knew that was his last breath.

I ran out to the security agency station to get a doctor. By the time the doctor got there, it was about an hour later, and we had dragged Abshier to his bed. The doctor’s pronouncing him dead was just a formality. He died just after midnight on the morning of Monday, July 11, 1983. The funeral was the next day, Tuesday, in his house. Since he was a teacher at the university, he had a somewhat fancy funeral, though for nonparty members, that is still not saying a whole lot. His body was placed in a simple wood box, but it was draped with a red cloth. Next to his coffin was a photo of him and the medal he received for appearing in films. (You had to appear in two installments of Nameless Heroes to get a medal. At that time, I had appeared only in chapter 20, so no medal for me. Actually, I never got a medal.) A general and a colonel from the school came, and they gave Anocha five hundred won. There was lots to eat and drink. Abshier was buried about two miles away from his home. His headstone said he died on July 10. It also said he was born in Pyongyang. I told the cadres that the date was a mistake and that the birthplace was simply ridiculous. They couldn’t have cared less about either one of those things. I knew they wouldn’t, but I thought I owed it to Abshier’s memory to at least point it out to someone. His grave is about half a mile from the hospital where Megumi Yokota supposedly committed suicide. If we were in North Korea now, I could take you straight to both places.

Abshier and Anocha did not have any children, so Anocha, over the next several years, played the role of aunt to the rest of our growing families. Parrish and Siham had three sons. Nahi was the first of all the kids (and the baby that brought on Siham’s return to North Korea after she was freed by her mother’s efforts). He was born in April 1980. After that, Siham had Michael in August 1981 and Ricky in the spring of 1986. Dresnok and Dona had two sons. Ricardo was born in late 1980, and Gabi was born in the spring of 1984.

As for Hitomi and me, Mika was born June 1, 1983, and Brinda came along July 23, 1985. The births of my daughters were two of the happiest days of my life. Because we lost our son, it was still my wife’s turn to name our first child. She chose Mika, which means “beautiful,” and the middle name of “Roberta,” after me. The second child’s name was my turn. I chose Brenda Carol, which was the name of my half-sister back home. I chose that name because I wanted my daughter’s name to be a continuation of my family back in the States, but I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of any of my other five sisters. Since Brenda was the last child and the only half-sister, she was special in a couple of ways, so it was easy to choose her individually yet also have the name be a way to pay tribute to the whole family. About the discrepancy between the spellings of my sister’s and my daughter’s names—how my daughter became “Brinda,” spelled with an “I” instead of with an “E,” the way my sister spells it—I can’t really say, except that until two or three years ago, nobody ever wrote my daughter’s name in English. Somewhere along the way, whether it was a transcription variation between English and Korean or just a mistake that someone made once that then kept getting passed along, the spelling got changed. Now my daughter is “Brinda,” and “Brinda” she will remain.

Even as our apartment building seemed like one giant nursery and all of the children were great playmates, it would be a stretch to say all the adults got along well. It wasn’t long after they met, for example, that Dona started in on my wife. Dona’s favorite way to torment Hitomi: to try to convince everyone that Hitomi was actually a Korean and a spy sent to nail us all. She would tell anyone who would listen that she suspected Hitomi’s story about being Japanese and being kidnapped was all a big lie. One of Dona’s favorite points of proof? Our wedding pictures, in which Hitomi was wearing a traditional Korean dress.

I came home from teaching at the university one week to find my wife crying hysterically on the bed. I asked her what the matter was, and she said, “I have done something horrible.” I asked what she did, and she said, “Something awful.” So I asked her again, and she responded, “Do you promise you’ll forgive me?” At this point, I began to fear the worst, that she had cheated on me or murdered someone or something like that, so I got panicked and became impatient. “Dammit, woman, what did you do?” I yelled. At which point she sobbed, “I burned the wedding pictures!” Jesus, what a relief! I was sorry to see the wedding pictures go, but after that buildup, I can honestly say I was happy to hear that that was all it was.

It was around this time that Parrish supplanted Dresnok as the biggest stooge for the North Koreans. Since his wife was allowed to go back and forth to Italy to see her mother for a few weeks every few years, and since they received money from abroad, he thought he and his family were better than the rest of us. Siham, too. She cultivated such a superiority complex that the rest of us started sarcastically calling her the “Imim-bong jang,” which is a party designation for someone under a leader who is the boss in charge of watching a floor or a set of floors of an apartment building.

Even with the frequent personality clashes that occurred among such a small group in these strange and often stressful circumstances, we all realized that we had no choice: Our four families had to try to get along the best we could. We had to, since we were forced to do everything together. Take our children’s education. After we moved into the apartment, the house that Abshier and Anocha had been living in was turned into a kindergarten, just for our kids. (That house was also the leaders’ quarters.) There were three little desks in the house’s main room, and each of our kids would spend two years there, from about the time they were six until they were eight. Nahi, Ricardo, and Michael were the first “class.” Mika and Gabi were in the second “class.” And Brinda and Ricky were in the third “class.” There, they would learn to count, recite their alphabet, and, of course, learn their first revolutionary songs singing the praises of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.

Once each “class” got out of kindergarten, the children enrolled in the school that was part of the large collective farm that bordered our house. The schoolhouse itself was about a thirty- or forty-minute walk away, and the school had about thirty or forty students per class. The farm school had a grade school, a middle school, and a high school. I was not much of a student myself, so I am not one to judge, but it didn’t seem like the schools taught much more than propaganda. They watched movies and got lectures almost constantly about how evil Americans were. Surprisingly, however, none of our kids experienced discrimination at school because they were half-American. They were treated more like exotic and rare specimens rather than half-breeds or mongrels, as you might have guessed. Even so, I tried to tell my girls not to believe all of the America-hating stuff they were taught. For some reason, Mika seemed to buy into the propaganda a bit more than Brinda did, but one of the many reasons I am glad Mika and Brinda are out of North Korea is that they can finally get a proper education. You spend that much time on indoctrination, I figure, and a lot of the reading, writing, and arithmetic just had to be neglected.

Aside from the propaganda, there were other ways in which North Korean schools were unique. How many other countries do you know of where the students have to pull guard duty to defend their school from thieves—and the primary class of thieves they are guarding against is the army? Girls and younger boys only pulled daytime duty, but older boys would be required to guard at night throughout the week and over the weekends. As they would anywhere else in North Korea, soldiers would steal anything they could get their hands on, but what they wanted most of all from the school was the preserving alcohol used during science experiments. They didn’t want to drink it, and they certainly weren’t dissecting frogs. The army wanted the alcohol to put into the radiators of the their tractors, since they didn’t have any proper antifreeze.

The 1980s were probably the high point for sighting abductees and other noteworthy foreigners. There were always foreign diplomats, exchange students, and a few businessmen and NGO workers in Pyongyang whenever you went. But I am talking about Japanese and people of other nationalities who you could just sense were there for mysterious purposes. I don’t know why our contact with them dropped off dramatically in the 1990s, but my theory is that it had something to do with the aftermath of Korean Airlines Flight 858 getting blown out of the sky in late 1987 and the female North Korean agent who confessed a lot about the Japanese abductees’ involvement in spy training. The Organization must have clamped down on them after that. Our conduct didn’t change in the 1990s, after all. We still kept going to the same hotels, shops, and hospitals in Pyongyang, but we simply bumped into fewer people like that, the ones you would see and say to yourself, “They have a story North Korea would prefer we didn’t know.”

For example, one day in 1986, Parrish, Siham, Hitomi, and I were shopping at the Rakwon Dollar Store. It’s a two-story building, and we were at the top of the main staircase when Siham nudged Parrish and Parrish nudged me. Two non-Korean Asians were coming up the stairs. Parrish said, “That’s the Japanese we were telling you about.” It was a Japanese man and his Japanese wife. “Good afternoon,” said the Japanese man. “How are you?” he asked, in some of the best English I had heard from a nonnative English speaker in all my time in North Korea. The man was very handsome. The woman was also good looking, though her very thick glasses made that harder to see at first glance. The woman and Siham obviously knew each other from before and exchanged greetings. The man and the woman did not seem to be with a leader, though neither were we at the moment, and we chatted in English for about five or ten minutes. At the top of the stairs was a counter filled with pens, stationery, and small office equipment. The couple was looking for a tape recorder, and as the man did most of the talking, the woman examined the tape recorders under the glass very intently. They took a good, long look at my wife as we talked, but Hitomi hung back and did not reveal herself to be Japanese.

Not less than a month before, Siham had returned from the hospital after giving birth to her son, Ricky. She said that her roommate in the hospital was a Japanese woman who had had a son about a week before. During their time together, Siham told us, the woman said that she and her husband had been kidnapped from Europe where they were studying English. She also said that the woman told her that the people who took them were members of the same Japanese terrorist organization that had hijacked a plane in 1970.

After returning from North Korea, my wife and I realized that Siham’s story and our memories of the Japanese couple’s appearances matched Toru Ishioka and Keiko Arimoto exactly. Ishioka and Arimoto were both kidnapped from Europe—in 1980 and 1983, respectively—by Japanese people who were affiliated with the Red Army Faction members that in 1970 hijacked to Pyongyang Japan Airlines Flight 351, a plane known as the Yodogo. During the 1970s and early 1980s, the Japanese Red Army faction was one of the most notorious radical, paramilitary groups in the world. Ishioka and Arimoto are the couple that the North Korean government says died on November 4, 1988, of carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty home heating system. The North Korean government also claims that the couple’s child, who they say died on November 4 as well, was a daughter. But I am absolutely certain that Siham said that the woman had had a son.

There was another Japanese woman whom we saw seemingly everywhere between the years 1980 and 1985. She was short, very pretty, and in her early twenties. She was always alone, except for being accompanied by a leader and a driver. We saw her oodles of times at the Rakwon Dollar Store. We saw her several times a year, but we could never time it just right to speak to her. The last I heard of her was in June of 1985. I was in the hospital at the time since I had broken my collarbone. Parrish, Siham, Anocha, Hitomi (who was about eight months pregnant with Brinda), Mika, Nahi, and Michael were all on their way to an amusement park at Manyongdae and stopped by to see if the doctor would let me come with them. But the doctor said no way. Parrish told me later that they had all spotted the Japanese woman at the amusement park. When you walk into the park, on the left there is an arcade, with things like an electronic shooting range and a game where you hit the heads of the plastic gophers that pop out of holes. She was in there, Parrish said, completely alone, and there were a couple of Koreans guarding the door. They told him he couldn’t go in there, but he told them to go to hell. He pushed his way through and was about to say something to her, but she took the commotion as a sign to skedaddle before he could. As the rest of his group came in the door to the arcade, she and her Korean minders were on their way out.