Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (43 page)

Since his official biographies were all produced after Kim Jong-il had taken charge of the country’s literary and propaganda output, it would be difficult to explain the lack of any reference to his little brother other than by surmising that Kim Jong-il chose, personally, to erase the younger child’s existence from history as North Koreans could read it. Why? One possible explanation is that the omission made it simpler like-wise to ignore two stepbrothers born later, Pyong-il and Yong-il—Kim Jong-il’s perceived rivals, whom by all accounts he hated. Also, it would not do to mention the fact that he once had a brother who, at the time of his drowning, was still called by a Russian nickname, Shura. That would not fit with the nationalism that was at the root of
t
h
e juche
ideology.

Another possible reason for the omission is guilt. One account by a North Korean official who defected to South Korea in 1960 says Kim Jong-il himself-was responsible for his brother’s drowning, through careless horseplay: Four-year-old Shura was trying to climb out of the pond where they had been wading but six-year-old Yura repeatedly pushed him back in, until the younger boy became exhausted and drowned. When they heard of the accident, the boys’ parents ran to the pond, out of breath.

“What’s the matter?” Kim Il-sung shouted to Kim Jong-il, who was standing there like an idiot. Shura was already dead by the time his father arrived there. “I’m asking you what this is all about?” The father again spurred the child to say something. But the boy was without a word. “What have you been doing with Shura?”

The story is at best secondhand, and it dates from the pre-1988 period when a military dictatorship ruled South Korea and was widely suspected of manipulating North Korean defectors’ testimony for political and propaganda purposes. Still the account should not be rejected out of hand—especially given that official biographies of Kim Jong-il published after that version came out did not counter it with any alternate, official version of little brother Shura’s life and death. Such sad things do happen among young children, and it would be only natural to wish to obliterate the horrible memory.

The former official who told that story described little Kim Jong-il as “a lonely and guilty child” who enjoyed killing bugs and was known to make a pest of himself-with acts of mischief. For example, he sneaked into the guard house and swiped a bayonet, which he jabbed into the calf of a guard before running away. He tormented a carpenter by vandalizing his workshop, beating
on the carefully sharpened tools with a hammer and strewing things about, then hiding to watch the man try to control his anger. Once the carpenter caught the boy scraping a saw’s teeth on the concrete floor, and could not resist slapping his face. Kim Il-sung happened to come out just at that moment. To the petrified carpenter the Great Leader said: “Comrade carpenter, you have done a good thing. No one can endure the mischief of a naughty boy even if he is the son of the premier.” But then, according to the story, Kim told his bodyguard chief: “Get rid of that bastard carpenter right away. How can he use violence here?”
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Regarding Kim Jong-il’s mother’s death on September 22, 1949, the official biographies are vague about the cause—and, of course, say nothing about her rivalry-with Kim Song-ae. But far from ignoring her death as they do the death of her son Shura, they dwell upon it at length to garner every possible ounce of public sympathy for Kim Jong-il.

Kim Jong-suk told her son she was going to the hospital, which was just opposite the house, and would be back very soon. The thirty-two-year-old woman then “left the house with a smiling face.” Jong-il and his younger sister were waiting impatiently for her return, the little girl crying, when a car pulled in through the gate of the house. Kim Jong-il ran out on the porch, but it was a female relative who had arrived; she was there to get one of his mother’s dresses to prepare the body for the funeral. “She could hardly tell the boy of the terrible fact, so she told him that Mother would come back when the day dawned. With this she left, concealing her tears.”

The next morning, when he learned the truth, the boy was distraught, hardly able to comprehend. He grabbed his little sister’s hand and tried to run with her to the hospital, but the women at the house—relatives, and some comrades of Kim Jong-suk’s from the days of the anti-Japanese struggle— stopped him. “He called again and again his dear mother in a trembling voice. But Mother did not come.” At the funeral in the assembly hall of the party Central Committee, Kim Jong-il “put his face to his mother’s breast and wept. The women fighters picked up the boy to take him away from the side of his mother, whereupon the father leader said in a hoarse voice, ‘Leave him alone. Tomorrow he will have no mother anymore in whose embrace to cry’ Taking his handkerchief from his pocket he wiped the tears calmly. At this moment the solemn strains of the dirge were intoned”:

Bones and flesh of the martyrs lie buried in earth,
But their revolutionary spirit and single-hearted fidelity remain alive.
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After his mother’s death, one or more women took over the job of raising him and his sister, to whom by all accounts the boy was devoted. The official
biographies that were published following his selection as successor fail to name a caregiver, much less record any special bond of affection with her. Some other accounts say that Kim Ok-sun, the surviving member of the tap-dancing duo from Manchurian guerrilla days and the wife of future army chief and defense minister Choe Gwang, took on the role lovingly. This does appear to have been the case, although there are other versions that say a first cousin of their father’s raised the children. In a chapter of Kim Il-sung’s memoirs—a posthumous installment whose real author we can guess to be Kim Jong-il, busily polishing his own myth—the late Great Leader is made to credit Gen. Ri Ul-sol “and other comrades in arms” for having taken care of Jong-il and his sister after their mother died. (Kim Jong-il relied heavily on Ri to smooth the succession after Kim Il-sung died.)
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Just nine months after Kim Jong-suk’s death, with the coming of the Korean War, Kim Il-sung moved out of the house and into his command bunker. His son stayed in the house only a little longer, until the war moved too close to home. He worked up an eight-year-old’s strong hatred of “the U.S. imperialists, the sworn enemy of the Korean people for more than a hundred years, who had pounced on them again to enslave them.” He vowed to grow up and make the Americans “pay a thousand times more for the blood shed by our people.”
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In September, after the tide of war had shifted against the North, the boy and his sister were bundled off to join the retreat from Pyongyang. Traveling by car, the premier’s family took a road that was “packed with people streaming north-ward. … The going was possible only at night, otherwise in the daytime enemy planes would raid.” During the retreat Jong-il supposedly admonished a party official, who accompanied them, for cutting a live tree for firewood to prepare their meal instead of gathering dead twigs. “Don’t touch even a single living tree,” he ordered the man. The propaganda intent of relating the anecdote is to show that the eight-year-old knew the retreat would be short-lived and wished to conserve Korean resources. To non–North Koreans, he is more likely to come across as a snot-nosed tyrant.
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Yura and his sister stayed for a while in the mountains near the Yalu River
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before retreating farther to “the rear”—to a place that is not named in the official histories but was actually in China. (According to some accounts the place was Jilin, where his father had attended middle school.
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) Kim Il-sung had ordered the Mangyongdae School for Bereaved Children of Revolutionaries relocated there for the duration of the war. Kim Jong-il enrolled, living for a time in a house with his great-grandfather Kim and other refugee relatives before moving into the school dormitory. The teacher who had “the honor” of teaching him there announced to his fellow students that, since he was “a brilliant student,” he was skipping a grade. Supposedly “the
pupils who were going to take the first lesson with him were all filled with joy.”

Another teacher “paid special attention to his education.” When she was transferred to another post, she left a twelve-point memo advising her successor how to deal with Kim Jong-il. One of her points was that the boy “does not want and even detests special favors”—but the rest of the list was a formula for running the classroom precisely according to his needs, wishes and whims. For example, “the teacher should study without delay and in detail” the works of Kim Il-sung, since “these are what Kim Jong-il is most concerned about, and he inquires about them [at] any moment.” The daily classroom schedule “should be laid out meticulously so that there may be no time spent idly and he should be guided to observe it strictly. His temperament is like the current of a swift river, so he does not know standstill and stagnation but always makes progress.” There is more—as humorist Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up. “The teacher should always watch the eyes of Kim Jong-il. … When he looks away or shows aloofness from the teacher, the latter should know that his own speech or act is at fault and should correct it promptly. In other words, it will be proper to regard the eyes of Kim Jong-il as an indicator of right and wrong.”
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The story of the list—like the anecdote about his tirade against tree cutting—-was first disseminated at a time in the 1980s when the regime was trying to build a personality cult for the junior Kim, making him out to have been clever and wise (just as his father purportedly had been at the same age) and, at all times, totally devoted to perpetuating his father’s ideas—in short, the ideal successor. Thus, the teacher’s memo may be apocryphal in whole or in part. But the general picture that emerges, of teachers and other adults deferring to the communist prince and letting him have his way is by all accounts accurate.

When the children were finally reunited with their father following the signing of the armistice, an official biography relates, Kim Il-sung stroked their heads and said: “Now that the war is over, let us all live together as before, papa rebuilding the country wrecked by the Yanks and you going to school. … What do you say? Good?”
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The biography does not mention that the Father-Leader during the war had found time to start a new family. The happy home life he promised fell short of materializing, as Kim Jong-il and his stepmother, Kim Song-ae, were often at odds. “I heard that Kim Jong-il himself obtained permission from his father to call his stepmother ‘auntie’ instead of ‘mother,’” Hwang Jang-yop, who was the party secretary for ideology from 1958, wrote after his 1997 defection to the South.
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“Kim Jong-il always hated Kim Song-ae due to the tragic death of his
mother,” according to defector Kang Myong-do. And the boy felt slighted by his father’s attention to stepbrother Kim Pyong-il, “who was born around 1953. Pyong-il looked like his father, and in the less frenzied atmosphere of the late 1950s the father was able to spend more time with him and develop a closer, more affectionate relationship than he had managed with Jong-il a decade earlier, Kang reported. “Kim Il-sung always favored Pyong-il over Jong-il,” he added.
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Kim Jong-il’s official biographies reveal nothing of such problems, making no mention of Kim Song-ae or any of her children. Indeed, to read those accounts, it would seem the household included only Kim Jong-il, his little sister and their father—-who was often away from Pyongyang for “on-the-spot guidance” trips. When Kim Il-sung was in town, he returned home late from the office, burned the lights in his study practically the whole night and only then might go for an early morning walk with Kim Jong-il, the son who had been waiting for a chance to talk with him. They strolled along the roads inside the premier’s estate, which doubled as an experiment station for agriculture, fisheries and forestry. Father and son talked about “study, art, the comradeship of the anti-Japanese fighters or … the renowned people and famous generals in Korea.”

The boy “made every effort to help his father in his work,” and the regime retailed various anecdotes to show the premier’s youthful aide in action. Once, for example, Kim Jong-il supposedly went to the market to price school supplies. Finding that the merchants were buying state-produced goods and marking up the prices as much as 300 percent before reselling them, he delivered to an accompanying pal a stinging critique of such vestiges of the market economy. “No matter how cheaply the state sells good for the people, merchants buy them up before they reach the people,” he complained. “If we leave intact private merchants, we can neither develop the country’s economy nor make the people well off. That’s why the fatherly Marshal has mapped out a line of transforming all the private merchants.” Walking with the fatherly Marshal the next morning, the boy turned over pen nibs he had bought as evidence. “Inspecting the nibs over and over again, the Great Leader said that those nibs proved that … it was necessary to remold the traders to be socialist working people.” Soon the regime adopted new restrictions on the merchants and began shifting them into cooperatives. (We must forgo any disrespectful puns here about His Nibs’ having been responsible.)

Another time, while walking in the garden with his father, the boy displayed the fashion sense that later would affect clothing styles in the country. Kim Il-sung, glancing at some People’s Army soldiers passing by, remarked that their uniform looked out of date. Kim Jong-il instantly agreed, and suggested a new design based on the uniforms that the anti-Japanese guerrillas had worn, but with modifications “to fit in with the contemporary esthetic
sense.” Kim Il-sung, captivated by the idea, “stopped and looked at his son with affectionate eyes.”
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