Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (47 page)

Another former East European diplomat has described the junior Kim in Joe College terms—soccer player, amateur pianist, at least normally intelligent student. Expanding on the latter point, a North Korean who knew him told me, “Although his mind is okay, it does not appear he studied much. There must be a strict teacher-student relationship for good education. Could there possibly be someone able to teach properly the son of Kim Il-sung?”

Kim Jong-il, at the top of the pecking order, was by no means unique in the extent to which the experiences of childhood and youth depended on who his father was. All the way down the complicated North Korean class hierarchy youngsters typically found their treatment, from even their earliest years, to be governed by the family’s socioeconomic position, or
songbun
— essentially the status of their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.
¹

Take Dong Young-jun, who grew up in privilege—although not even remotely near Kim Jong-il’s level—in Bukchong, the big country town in North Hamgyong Province where he was born in 1965. “My family-was very well off,” he told me. “Whenever I met people who were undergoing hardship or hunger, I felt especially thankful for my parents.”

Dong’s father worked as an investigator in “internal affairs,” meaning he was checking up on his fellow North Koreans. Following the turmoil of the Korean War, “many people lied about their backgrounds,” Dong explained. Employed by a secret police organization that in 1973 was renamed Department of State Security, his father “was digging up their true backgrounds.” On the other side of the family Dong’s mother, herself a doctor, had some good connections in Pyongyang. One of her cousins was a senior colonel working at a military academy. Another was a member of the Supreme People’s Assembly.

Dong grew up, he told me, as a “fanatic,” idolizing Kim Il-sung and urging his schoolmates to do the same. “All through elementary school, junior
middle and higher middle school, I was student body president. Even at the university I was on the student council.”

At one point in our interview Dong asked if I minded if he smoked. I told him it was all right with me. He interjected then that he had grown up hating the United States. Now that he had defected to South Korea, though, “I think I actually like the United States,” he told me. “Look, I have a U.S.-made lighter and I smoke Marlboros.”

I asked when he had started smoking. His answer, totally unexpected, introduced me to a facet of North Korea that I had neither heard nor read about. He had started “at age eleven,” Dong said. He explained: “In North Korean schools there are gangs that fight a lot. They consider the first boy to suffer a nosebleed the loser. They believe if you smoke a lot you won’t get a nosebleed.” So Dong the model student had led a double life, moonlighting as a member of a violent teenage gang? Naturally I wanted to know more, and Dong obliged me.

“Gangs are rated according to the social rank of the members’ fathers,” he told me. “These aren’t formal groups, but this has been going on for years—for generations. In most cases, if your father is very high ranking you get the power. You hang out with kids from similar family backgrounds.

“You can’t fight on the school grounds,” Dong said. Rather, the gangs usually fought at sites where the students were doing the manual labor frequently required of them. “Or we would meet on Sunday by pre-arrangement, say near the Namdaechon River bank at such and such a time with such and such number of people. We might catch a dog around there and eat it, or hide and steal people’s watches.”

Dong told me he stayed in his gang until junior year in higher middle school. “But in senior year I studied very hard, so I could get into Pyongyang Engineering College.”

My own very first article as a cub newspaper reporter in North Carolina, in 1969, was about a fatal fight between gangs supporting the basketball teams of two high schools. Of course, it made the front page of
The Charlotte Observer.
To hear Dong describe the fights with rocks and tools that went on in his community—an arm cut off, a skull broken in half—it was clear to me that some of them would be considered newsworthy in any country with a free press. In North Korea, however, although the official media on occasion referred vaguely to problems of young people’s misbehavior, the regime did not like to shine too bright a light on such rampant juvenile delinquency as Dong was describing. “It’s never in the newspapers there,” Dong said.

Most interesting in Dong’s account, I thought, was his description of the makeup of the gangs. “There were basically about four groupings throughout the grades,” he said, and all of those were from the elite. “Ordinary people’s children could hardly be part of the gangs. Say you had a fight and hurt someone. You’d go to prison. If your parents were influential, they could get
you out. But the ordinary people would have no chance of getting out, so they didn’t join.

“The leader of each gang was whoever had the most important father. The first group consisted of children of party or State Security men. The second group’s members were children of people working in administration and technology; the third, military; the fourth, trade and commerce. I was part of the first group. Because our group was highest ranking and most powerful, the other groups would give us gifts like cigarettes. Normally the first group would fight the second and third groups. Often the second group fought the third.”

And what were those fights about? Dong gave me an example. “In my district,” he said, “there were a lot of special forces military men. The student who got his arm cut off was the son of a military man. The one who cut it off was the son of a technocrat. What happened was that the military man’s son had just been transferred into the school and wasn’t part of a gang yet. Kids can be very cruel to newcomers in school. People in the second group kicked him around and beat him up badly. The military kids took offense, even though he wasn’t yet part of their gang. The whole gang got into the fight. That was in 1977, at the Namdaechon River bank. We were assigned there to collect pebbles. One guy hit a military kid with a sharp-edged spade and cut his arm off. It was completely severed. I saw it. We always sharpened the spades so they would slip easily into the ground. I was twelve years old then, and so was the kid who got hurt.

“The incident of the split skull I didn’t see. It happened a year later at the same site, during the night. In that case it was a fight with kids from another school. A guy on the other side had his skull split—again, with a sharpened spade—and died.”

So what happened to the young authors of mayhem and murder? “If the victim’s father was of higher rank, the perpetrator would be in serious trouble,” Dong said. “And if the perpetrator’s father was of higher rank, things would be hushed up. The guy who cut off his opponent’s arm got only three weeks of forced labor. In the case of the killing I described, the perpetrator had his head shaved and was sent to prison. He stayed only ten days, though. His father was so prominent, he was just sent to another school.”

When I asked, Dong told me that from what he had heard his experience was not peculiar to his locale. “All over North Korea there are gangs like this. I don’t know about the degree of brutality. Even in Pyongyang there are gangs, but they’re closely watched. If there’s a fight between two groups there and the authorities find out, the leader and his family are sent to a prison camp. Chongjin, Rajin and Hamhung are the worst places. Gang fighting originated with Koreans from Japan, who tended to settle in those areas. Lots of Koreans who moved from Japan are people who got in trouble in Japan and then were sent to North Korea. They were accepted because they had money.”

I have no confirmation of Dong’s observation that banishing troublemakers was a significant factor when ethnic Korean families in Japan decided who among them would repatriate to North Korea. However, it is true that for decades many of the gangsters in Japan were people of Korean ancestry. (That was, at least in part, a reflection of the Korean minority’s mistreatment by the Japanese majority.) So I was curious to know whether the North Korean gangs followed the rituals of the Japanese underworld
yakuza.
“No, they don’t cut their fingers off or tattoo themselves,” Dong told me. “But they do prick their fingers and hold them together to become blood brothers.”

Dong told me that the name of his gang was a Korean word that means downpour or deluge. “Every member of my gang wore formal shoes—leather shoes with laces. Of course, the other kids had only cloth shoes. Leather shoes were rare. Just by wearing those, we showed we had prominence.”

The shoe discussion led Dong to digress away from the topic of gang life into courtship customs. For a
son,
the arranged and rather formal first date between a man and woman of marriageable age, he told me, “a guy might borrow leather shoes to impress the woman.”

It took me a moment to realize that Dong was relating a standard North Korean joke, whose humor derived from its essential if not literal truth about the material advantages of the elite. “The three things you need for that first date are leather shoes, a Seiko watch and a gold tooth,” Dong went on, getting wound up. “Sometimes you would even borrow the gold tooth. At night the guy would take the girl to a bright spot and show those things off as he made arrangements for the next meeting. He would say, ‘We have to meet tomorrow at eight,’ and he would tap his Seiko watch. ‘We have to meet
here.’
He would tap his leather shoe on the ground so she would look at it when he said ‘here,’ and then he would grin widely at her so the light would glint off his gold tooth.”

As Kim Dae-ho grew up he had a life quite different from Dong’s—except for the fact that he also became a juvenile gang fighter. Born across the border in China in 1959, Kim was a member of an ethnic Korean family. He formed few memories of China before his parents, motivated by patriotism, moved the family to South Hamgyong Province in North Korea when he was three. His father went to work in a food factory. His mother stayed home to keep house and care for Dae-ho and his younger brothers, of whom eventually there were three.

The parents quickly realized that the lifestyle they had left behind in China was more prosperous, and they “couldn’t forget” about the differences, Kim told me. “In China we had candy stored in the kitchen for snacks”—but not in North Korea. “My mother used to cry when, as an elementary student,
I ripped my pants and she had to mend them. We were so poor. That’s why she cried.”

Starting his education with nursery school and kindergarten, where he began to learn about Kim Il-sung’s greatness, little Dae-ho soon came to wish he had an elder brother. “When I got in a fight, a kid with his elder brother could beat me up.”

Worse, Kim Dae-ho recalled being subject to “invisible discrimination from fellow pupils with more stable backgrounds. Having no relatives in North Korea I was at a disadvantage. You have to write a paper on your family. Other people could write about a father in the party, an uncle on the Central Committee. I had no relatives and my parents weren’t party members, so the discrimination continued.”

Not only other children but also teachers and officials meted out different treatment depending on a pupil’s family background, Kim Dae-ho told me. “Even when looking over our home-work the officials would praise children of high officials.” (Recall the slavish praise of Kim Jong-il by his teachers.) The highlight of a youngster’s life was supposed to be donning the bright kerchief of a member of the children’s corps. Even there, though, “the children of the elite got in earlier. There were two inflows of eight-year-olds. The first group got in on April 15, Kim Il-sung’s birthday. I was part of the second intake, on June 6. The reason given for letting the first group in early was that they were better students, brought up more uprightly.”

Kim Dae-ho blamed such discrimination for having affected his personality. “I became rough and aggressive. I beat up children of high officials and disobeyed the teacher often.” He grinned and added: “Since I was very rough, kids were afraid of me and the teachers didn’t know what to do with me.” Mean-while some older youngsters were bullying him in turn. Junior high students, some of them repatriated from Japan, had formed gangs. “I did some dirty work for them, got on trains to steal from people, did some shoplifting. You couldn’t say I was a gang member, because I was only about ten years old. They would bully me and demand that I bring money from home.”

Eventually each group gave him something serious to think about. “In third grade I bullied so many kids that my classmates decided to gang up on me. I realized then that kids no longer feared me. They would throw stones at me, or spit at me.” The older gang members, around the same time, “took me to the railroad, stripped me to my underwear and made me lie on the track.”