Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (5 page)

The patriotism of Kim’s family members, like that of many other Koreans, was linked with Christianity. Protestant and, to a lesser extent, Catholic churches flourished in Korean communities following the 1882 treaty with the United States. Pyongyang, in particular, was such fertile ground for American mission work that the city became known as Korea’s Jerusalem.
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Following Korea’s annexation, the Japanese authorities distrusted Christians. There was some irony in this, since missionaries often were prepared to render unto Caesar and ignore politics if only they could continue with their religious activities. The American missionaries’ own government had connived in the Japanese advance into Korea in exchange for Japanese recognition of U.S. interests in the Philippines.
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But Japanese authorities repressed Korean believers, squandering what might otherwise have been an advantage.
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A number of Christians became identified with the independence movement. Christians were involved in planning the March 1 uprising.

Kim’s Il-sung’s own religious training and background represent a side of his early life that he had been reluctant to recall—and finally acknowledged in his memoirs only with considerable hedging about. For example, although both his parents were churchgoers, Kim was intent on assigning them the role of atheistic holy family of the Korean revolution. He insisted
that both had been nonbelievers. While some sources have described his mother as a devout woman who served as a deaconess,
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her son claimed she had gone to church only to relax from her exhausting workaday toil, dozing during the service.
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Kim’s father attended Sungsil Middle School, founded in 1900 by American Presbyterian missionaries in Pyongyang. But Kim said his father had enrolled there only out of the desire to have a “modern education” in a school where he would not be required to memorize the very difficult Nine Chinese Classics, which were taught at old-fashioned Confucian schools.
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Kim described his father as a young man consumed by patriotism who exhorted schoolmates: “Believe in a Korean God, if you believe in one!”
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After the family moved to Manchuria, his father went to every service at a local chapel and sometimes led the singing and played the organ, teaching his son to play also. But this, insisted Kim, was just a chance to conduct anti-Japanese propaganda.
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Acknowledging his exposure to Christianity, Kim said he rejected its doctrines while still young. “Some miserable people thought they would go to ‘Heaven’ after death if they believed in Jesus Christ,” he wrote. At first “I, too, was interested in church.” Later, though, “I became tired of the tedious religious ceremony and the monotonous preaching of the minister, so I seldom went.”
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Kim maintained he was “not affected by religion” despite his youthful connections with the church. Nevertheless, “I received a great deal of humanitarian assistance from Christians, and in return I had an ideological influence on them.
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At age seven Kim moved with his family across the Chinese border to Manchuria. A wrenching move for the youngster, in the larger picture that was part of an exodus that eventually planted Korean communities around the globe, from Tashkent to Osaka to Los Angeles. The Korean diaspora came almost to rival those of the Jews and the overseas Chinese.
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Since the latter half of the nineteenth century, waves of Koreans had emigrated in search of better lives. Many had gone to Hawaii and North America. There, Kim said, “they were treated as barbarians and hired as servants in restaurants and rich men’s houses or were worked hard on plantations under the scorching sun.”
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Others had gone to the relatively wide-open frontier spaces of the Russian Maritime Province and Chinese-ruled Manchuria. Oppression by the Korean rulers of the time propelled the first wave of Korean migrants to those places, around 1860. A famine in northern Korea a decade later accelerated the trend. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Japan’s move to absorb Korea as part of the expansion of its Northeast Asia empire triggered another wave of emigration.
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Manchuria once had been reserved as the sparsely populated homeland
of the last Chinese imperial dynasty and its nomadic Manchu clansmen. As the dynasty weakened and migratory pressures built, however, China had opened vast stretches of the region to settlers. Koreans could become no more than tenant farmers in most of Manchuria. The Japanese, though, in 1909—the year before they completed their conquest of Korea—extracted from a Chinese government in its death throes a very favorable treaty. Among other things it enabled Koreans to own land in Manchuria’s Jiandao Province, immediately adjoining the Korean border. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans made the move to Manchuria before Kim’s family did so. The majority went to Jiandao, where the Korean settlers far outnumbered the Chinese.

Economic betterment was an important incentive for those early-twentieth-century emigrants. Considering conditions back at Mangyongdae, it could well have been a factor luring Kim’s father to Manchuria. As in the 1860s, though, there were settlers whose motives for fleeing across the border were political. Hoping to continue their struggle against oppressive Japanese rule, some determined Korean patriots found sanctuary in Manchuria.
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The region’s mountainous areas, in particular, were relatively lawless and free-wheeling places. Chinese warlords, Korean independence fighters, agents of the new Soviet regime in Moscow and assorted bandits all competed for spoils and influence against the encroaching Japanese. Kim described his family as among the political exiles who were driven from their homeland and left to drift “like fallen leaves to the desolate wilderness of Manchuria.
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Kim’s father had become a medical practitioner by reading “a few books on medicine” and obtaining a diploma from a friend in Pyongyang.
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While working for the independence movement in Manchuria, the elder Kim supported his family by treating patients with traditional herbal medicine. Kim said he often went on errands for his father—but in connection not so much with the medical work as with pro-independence activities. He took food and clothing to some jailed Korean patriots on one occasion, he wrote; and often went to the post office to pick up his father’s newspapers and magazines from Korea.
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He told of having been the leader of a group of mischievous children in the Manchurian town of Badaogou. One playmate belonged to a family of “patriotic merchants.” The family’s storage shed was full of weapons and clothing awaiting shipment to Korean independence fighters. One day that boy injured himself when a detonation cap exploded while he was playing with it. The victim’s brother wrapped him in a blanket and carried him to Kim’s father’s home dispensary for treatment, Kim recalled.
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An ordeal that Kim looked back on as a rite of passage to manhood came shortly before his eleventh birthday. His father sent him from Manchuria
back to Korea, alone, he said. He had been attending local Chinese schools and learning the Chinese language as spoken in Manchuria.
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Now, though, the elder Kim instructed him that “a man born in Korea must have a good knowledge of Korea.” Kim rode trains for parts of the journey but walked much of the 250-mile distance, carrying a map his father had drawn with a list of places to stop overnight, he recalled.

His father had taken some precautions, telegraphing innkeeper acquaintances to alert them that the boy would be arriving. Kim described those innkeepers as “under the guidance and influence of my father
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—a claim in keeping with what outside biographers describe as a massive effort to depict Kim Hyong-jik as a leading light of the independence movement rather than the minor figure they believe he actually was.
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Whatever the father’s importance in the movement, it does seem that he had many friends. Kim Il-sung said he learned from his father “the ethics of comradeship.”
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It appears that as his career progressed he made assiduous use of both his family connections and his father’s example of cultivating friendships.

Kim’s anecdotal recollections of his “one-thousand-
ri
[250-mile] journey for learning” dwell, understandably, on sore feet and hospitable innkeepers. At the foot of Mount Oga, “I fortunately met an old man who cured my blisters by burning them with matches.” An inn in Kaechon offered a mattress and two blankets for 50
chon.
The night was cold, but to save money Kim asked for only one blanket; the kindly innkeeper gave him two blankets anyhow. At Kanggye, Kim’s instructions from his father said to wire home. The telegraph fee increased after the first six characters, so he kept his message to just six:
“kang gye mu sa do chak”
—“Arrived safely in Kanggye.”
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Back in his home district in Korea after his two-week journey, Kim stayed with his maternal grandparents, the Kangs. One of their sons, Kang Jin-sok, was in prison for anti-Japanese activities. (He eventually died there after thirteen years’ imprisonment.
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) Police surveillance of the family was strict and burdensome, Kim recalled. The boy attended Changdok School, where his grandfather was schoolmaster. A memory of those days is that Grandfather Kang taught him a poem by a Korean warrior who had so distinguished himself against invaders as to be named minister of the army at age twenty:

Grinding my sword wears down Mount Paektu’s rock;
My horse gulps and dries the Tumen River.
Should a man at twenty fail to subdue the land,
Who will in later years call him a man of caliber?
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Kim’s teacher was another relative, Kang Ryang-uk, a Methodist minister. In later years Kang Ryang-uk was to head North Korea’s token “opposition” Korean Democratic Party and serve as figurehead vice-president of the
country under Kim. The teacher was a strong nationalist who taught his pupils patriotic songs. Kim said he remembered the songs and sang them later while fighting the Japanese.
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Like other Korean schools of the time, Changdok School taught the Japanese language but not Korean. The authorities were trying to integrate the Korean colony into Greater Japan. To that end they sought to relegate Korean to the status of a regional dialect and replace it with Japanese, which they referred to as the “national language” or “mother tongue.” Later, they would even demand that Koreans adopt Japanese names. As Kim was to tell it later, he was shocked when his grandfather gave him his fifth-grade textbooks. “I asked my grandfather why the Japanese language book was titled
Mother-tongue Reader.
He merely heaved a sigh.” Kim claimed he then took a pocketknife, resolutely scratched the word “Mother-tongue” from the book’s title and wrote “Japanese” to replace it, making the title
Japanese Reader.
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The anecdote may sound a bit too good to be true, but—as with many of Kim’s claims—no witness is alive to refute his account.

The Kangs had little to share with the grandson who had come to live with them. They were so poor that one of his uncles had to hire out as a carter to make ends meet. But like many Korean families the Kangs combined pride with endless respect for formal education. The family “did not reveal any signs of poverty in my presence and supported me wholeheartedly while I attended school,” Kim recalled. “They provided me with a separate room furnished with a kerosene lamp and fine floor mats.”
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Their poverty was only typical of-what most Koreans experienced during that period. Even among the one hundred thousand residents of Pyongyang, Kim said, “only a small number of Japanese and Americans were living well.” Koreans had to settle for “slum dwellings with straw-mat doors and board roofing.”
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Hearing the news of the Tokyo area’s great earthquake of 1923, Kim was outraged by reports that Japanese had killed hundreds of Korean émigré residents. Inflammatory rumors had spread in Japan, accusing Korean residents of plotting to rise up and take advantage of their masters’ misfortune, even of poisoning the wells. Kim realized that Japanese “despised Korean people, treating them worse than beasts.” He said he responded by planting a board with a nail sticking from it in the road, hoping it would puncture the bicycle tires of any passing policeman.

His growing awareness of his people’s “miseries” made him aspire to a new sort of society. It would blend productive pride and joy with the characteristic Korean feeling called
han
—a prickly combination of pessimism, vengefulness and xenophobia that had evolved over centuries, in response to the frustration aroused by the country’s status as a small nation bullied by bigger and more powerful neighbors. In the new society, Kim dreamed,“the toiling masses could live happily and harbor a bitter hatred for the Japanese imperialist aggressors, landlords and capitalists.”
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After two years in Korea, Kim returned to Manchuria. The family moved to the town of Fusong. There Kim’s father, long in poor health, died at age thirty-two. Now fourteen years old, the boy-was sent off to Huadian, another Manchurian town, where he enrolled in a military school founded by nationalists in the Korean independence movement.

Arriving in Huadian he went for supper at the home of one of his father’s friends, who offered him his first drink of liquor. “There was a bottle of alcohol made from cereal at one edge of the round table. I thought that Kim Si-u had put it there to drink with his meal. But he poured some into a glass and offered it to me, much to my surprise. I felt so awkward that I flapped my hands.” Kim found this first drink potent with symbolism of his coming of age: “Although the glass was so small that it could be hidden in the palm of one’s hand, it was loaded with inestimable weight. At that table where Kim Si-u treated me as an adult, I solemnly felt that I should behave like a grownup,” he recalled.
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