Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (4 page)

My guide, Kim Yon-shik, was an official whose regular job was arranging North Korean participation in international sporting events. One of the few North Koreans permitted to travel abroad, he had been in Guyana in the fall of 1978 around the time of the notorious Jonestown massacre, in which members of an American religious cult died in a gruesome murder-suicide spectacle. Kim Yon-shik asked me what Americans thought of the incident. I could not resist framing my reply in terms that might strike very close to the bone for him. “Most Americans see Jonestown as a case of fanaticism,” I told him blandly, “people blindly following one leader.”

Kim Yon-shik was in his forties, old enough that he would not have been brought up completely in the current system, and he usually demonstrated a good sense of humor. Yet he showed no sign of appreciating the irony in my reply.

“Does the People’s Temple sect still survive?” he asked me.

“It’s hard,” I replied, “for a cult like that to continue for long after its charismatic leader has died.”

Kim Yon-shik still showed no sign of recognizing the barb. “Don’t you think the CIA was involved in that incident?” he asked me.

Concocting a mythology around the nation’s founding father is by no means a North Korean monopoly. Think of George Washington’s fictional confession to having chopped down his father’s cherry tree: “I cannot tell a lie.” But while Americans and Europeans in the second half of the twentieth century moved in the opposite direction, gleefully felling the mighty North Korea’s official hagiographers carried to previously unknown heights the art of building up the leader.

Western and South Korean historians have despaired of being able to separate historical truth from the Pyongyang regime’s innumerable distortions and fabrications about Kim Il-sung’s life, especially his childhood and youth. Lacking verifiable facts beyond the most basic, they have tended to dispose of Kim’s first two decades with a few sparse paragraphs before moving along quickly to the events of his adult life—for which, at least, there are sources such as contemporary newspaper accounts and the records of foreign governments.

However, in the years immediately preceding his death in 1994, Kim produced several volumes of memoirs that offer a somewhat franker, more down-to-earth account than his sycophantic writers had provided in earlier official biographies.

To be sure, many exaggerations and distortions remain even in the newer volumes. For example, whatever quantity of disbelief the reader has managed to suspend may come crashing down at an account of bandits
capturing Kim’s father and two companions. While the bandits smoked opium in their camp, Kim wrote, one captive put out the lamp and helped the other two escape before “attacking the rascals, some ten in all, with skillful boxing. Then he made off from the den of the bandits.” It was, enthused Kim, “a truly dramatic sight, resembling a fight scene in a movie.”

Indeed. No doubt it
is
a fight scene in at least one of the countless North Korean movies glorifying Kim and his family. Hwang Jang-yop, a leading North Korean intellectual who defected to South Korea in 1997, reported that Kim’s autobiography had been “created by artists who had been writing scenarios for revolutionary novels and films. Thus, it made for very interesting reading. When Part I was published it was a huge hit. This was only natural, since its contents were literally scenes straight out of the movies that had been made for the same purpose, and its plot was as interesting as any novel or film.” Hwang termed the series a “masterpiece of historical fabrication.”
¹

But there is gold among the dross in the memoirs. Some passages can be checked against the recollections of contemporaries—and those passages are found to offer more truthful portrayals than we had been accustomed to getting from Pyongyang
²
. Of course that does not provide the elusive verification for other passages dealing with different phases of Kim’s youth. But at least it suggests that Kim, as he worked with his writing staff to produce those memoirs in his seventies, had some notion of straightening out his story in the time remaining to him.

Combining what was previously known of Kim’s formative years with a careful reading of the memoirs, tossing out the preposterous, tentatively accepting the plausible while intuitively making allowance for exaggerations, adding in the testimony of contemporaries where available, it is possible now to see a picture that is reasonably complex and believable.

Parts of this picture show Kim as the regime had sketched him—but on a more human scale. Toning down some of the official claims has enhanced their credibility. Thus, we can see in Kim Il-sung a youngster genuinely consumed by patriotic anti-colonialism who, while still in his teens, embraced communism as the key to independence and justice for Koreans.

Other parts of the picture were only recently uncovered. Who, for example, would have imagined that the man whose rule wiped out nearly every trace of religion in North Korea—except worship of himself—had been until his late teens not only a churchgoer but, moreover, a church organist? The young Kim was both. Experience in church-related activities played a considerable role in training one of the most successful mass leaders and propagandists in the history of the world, not to mention providing a model for his own eventual elevation to divine status.
³

***

The Great Leader–to-be was born Kim Song-ju on April 15, 1912, at the home of his maternal grandfather in the village of Chilgol. The nearby house of his paternal grandparents at Mangyongdae, where he spent several years of his childhood, is his recognized family home. Mangyongdae has since been incorporated into nearby Pyongyang, the provincial capital that became the capital of Kim’s Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Kim’s regime enshrined the mud-walled, thatched-roofed Mangyongdae farmhouse as Korea’s answer to the manger in Bethlehem or Abe Lincoln’s log cabin. I visited there in 1979 and found the parking lot and the pedestrian paths packed with thousands of visitors, mostly Korean. A guide said that Kim’s paternal forebears had lived at Mangyongdae since the time of his great-grandfather, a poor tenant farmer who worked as a graves-keeper for the landlord. The name Mangyongdae means a place blessed with countless scenic views. As Kim said in his memoirs, “Rich people and government officials vied with one another in buying hills in the Mangyongdae area as burial plots because they were attracted by the beautiful scenery.
⁴

The river Taedong runs past Mangyongdae. Nearly half a century before Kim’s birth, that river had been the scene of an ugly incident that represents the unhappy beginning of Korean-American relations. In the context of a push by confident and condescending Americans of the period to open far-flung “heathen” nations to Christian proselytizing and trade, an armed merchant ship in 1866 intruded into the forbidden waters of the Taedong. The
General Sherman,
aptly named for the American Civil War commander who had laid waste to much of Georgia, headed upriver for Pyongyang, firing its guns, capturing one local Korean official and stopping to permit a missionary— who was aboard as the expedition’s interpreter—to preach and distribute leaflets.

Then the American captain of the
General Sherman
made the mistake of running aground. An incensed mob of local people descended on the ship, tore it apart and hacked the intruding foreigners to pieces. Kim Il-sung was to claim after taking power that his great-grandfather had been a leader of the people who attacked the ship.
⁵
True or not, there is no denying that the
Sherman
incident lived on in the memories of Korean nationalists. Although Korean scholarship suggests the
Sherman
expedition was an act of piracy by known tomb robbers, the incident stimulated a more heavily armed intrusion in 1871 in which Americans massacred some 250 Koreans. By 1882, Korean rulers saw that the better part of valor was to accede to a treaty with the United States, arranged by China, which removed the centuries-old isolation of the “hermit kingdom.”
⁶

Kim Il-sung’s father, Kim Hyong-jik, managed enough upward mobility to rise out of the peasant class into which he had been born. He attended—but
did not finish—middle school, and he married the daughter of a schoolmaster. He worked first as an elementary school teacher and later as a traditional herbal doctor. While those accomplishments translated into some social cachet, they did not put extra food on the table. Clearly the family was never affluent.

Kim Hyong-jik married at fifteen to a bride, Kang Pan-sok, who was two years older. The Chilgol Kangs were educated people who included Christian clerics and church elders in addition to teachers and schoolmasters. According to Kang Myong-do, who defected to the South in 1994 and described himself as a member of the Chilgol Kang clan, the Kangs felt the marriage was an unequal one in view of the groom’s father’s work as a graves-keeper and the fact he owned only a little over two acres of reclaimed farmland. But one thing the families had in common was that they were Christian churchgoers.
⁷

Kim Hyong-jik entered middle school at sixteen and fathered the future Great Leader at seventeen, still living in his parents’ home. The whole family worked at extra jobs to pay the teenager’s school fees.
⁸
Hyong-jik’s mother— Kim Il-sung’s paternal grandmother—arose before dawn to make breakfast so she could be sure her son would not be late for classes. The North Korean president wrote in his memoirs that his grandmother on occasion awoke far too early. Preparing the meal in the middle of the night, she then stared for hours out the eastern window of the house, waiting for signs of sunrise so she would know when to rouse the student and send him off. A clock was a luxury then; Kim’s family did not have one but the neighbor family behind their house did. The grandmother sometimes sent her young daughter-in-law, Kim’s mother, to check the time at the neighbors’ house. Kang Pan-sok “would squat outside the fence waiting for the clock to strike the hours. Then she would return and tell grandmother the time.”
⁹

Despite the family’s incessant hard work, “such things as fruit and meat were beyond our means,” Kim recalled. “Once I had a sore throat and grandmother obtained some pork for me. I ate it and my throat got better. After that, whenever I felt like eating pork I wished I had a sore throat again.”
¹⁰
He remembered his father’s younger brother, Hyong-gwon, then eleven or twelve years old, throwing a tantrum over food. Hyong-gwon could not control his disgust with the coarse gruel, made of millet and uncleaned sorghum, that was the Kim family’s regular fare. He banged his head against the bowl, bloodying his head and sending the bowl flying across the room. The future president sympathized. The gruel always tasted bad and, to add injury to insult, the cereal’s coarse husks pricked the throat as they-went down.
¹¹

More significant in shaping Kim Il-sung’s thinking than the family’s poverty was the timing of his birth, less than two years after Korea’s annexation by Japan. Heirs to a proud civilization, Koreans for centuries had condescended to Japan as a cultural Johnny-come-lately. The many Japanese
borrowings from Korea had ranged from ceramics and architecture to religion. Patriotic Koreans after 1910 observed as National Humiliation Day the August 29 anniversary of the ignominious Japanese takeover.

Independence from Japan was the ardent desire of most Koreans in those days.
¹²
Kim recalled that it was a consuming passion for members of his family. His father and two uncles were all jailed at different times for pro-independence activities. Kim himself was a patriot long before he became a communist. “No feeling in the world is greater, more ennobling and more sacred than patriotism,” he explained.
¹³

For his family as well as other Koreans, patriotism meant implacable hatred of Japan. Kim recalled that his own patriotic consciousness had caught fire before his seventh birthday during the momentous March 1, 1919, uprising against Japanese rule. Joining his family among tens of thousands of demonstrators who thronged Pyongyang in the mistaken belief that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson would champion their cause, “I shouted for independence standing on tiptoe squeezed in between the adults.”
¹⁴
From then on, the determination someday to take on the foreign aggressors guided even his play, by Kim’s account. The assertion has been enshrined in the official mythology. When I visited Mangyongdae the guide identified a sand pile surrounded by a manicured hedge as the site where the Great Leader–to-be had wrestled older children to practice for his life’s work.