Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (78 page)

I told Chung I was surprised by his remarks; I had understood that the regime treated handicapped people shabbily. “There’s different treatment for each group, but basically North Korean society is for the handicapped,” he replied. “They have a specific policy regarding handicapped people. The best treated are those who become disabled while in the army—amputees and people who lose their sight, for example. Kim Shi-kwon, who became paralyzed in the Korean War, is the symbol of the disabled. He gets the most from the regime. There’s always a car waiting to take him anywhere; doctors come to check him.”

When I spoke with Chung he had been in South Korea for under half a year since his defection—he was still in the custody of the intelligence service pending his qualification for citizenship—but already he felt prepared to make a comparison. “The South Koreans don’t have the kind of compassion the North Koreans have,” he asserted. “In North Korea a friend lost a leg when a grenade exploded. He was helpless for the time being, but a very attractive woman factory worker volunteered to live with him. This is the result of training in selflessness.”

In each North Korean province, Chung said, “there are two special schools for the disabled. They call them ‘schools for the blind’—even if the problem is cerebral palsy. They have all the basics for dealing with problems
such as sight and hearing impairment: braille, sign language and so on. There are special factories for the handicapped to work in. The North Korean regime says that, as long as you have that revolutionary spirit burning inside you, you get this special treatment.”

Recent history however, had been unkind to the disabled along with everyone else. “It’s true that discrepancies are developing in the socialist countries,” Chung said. “They don’t have the resources for the normal people, so how can they provide properly for the disabled?” North Korea’s special schools, he said, “don’t have the resources for improvement.” Still, “even though North Koreans may not have the doctors and the medicine, they’re trying.”

Up to this point, Chung had been positive in his recollections. But he abruptly changed his tone when I asked him to estimate what percentage of the people had internalized the officially encouraged attitude of loving and helping the other person—had become examples of North Korea’s “new man,” similar to the ideal Christian. “Although the system provides special privileges for the disabled, you can’t fool human nature,” he replied. “People are not all that kind to the disabled. In the 1960s, Pang Hwa-su, an elementary pupil, got third degree burns all over his body. Doctors really did peel off their own skin to graft onto him. Now he’s a well-grown man. But the doctors today are like vampires. They’re not for the people. The case where the woman volunteered to live with the amputee—that hardly ever happens. In North Korea there are about twenty-five severely paralyzed people a year. For each of them, the regime selects a woman and forces a marriage. Basically the women go through that kind of ordeal because they get re-warded by the government and because the summons is like the word of God. They get color televisions, money, and so on, if they agree, but if they refuse they’ll be sent to prison camp.”

I asked if there had been some turning point when popular altruism started to decline. “It’s hard to say,” Chung repled. “Maybe it was after 1985, possibly because of the food shortages. The second major cause may be repression, but they probably don’t even realize that. I realized it while I was working there, visiting the schools for the blind to do research.”

Chung was born in 1969 in Pyongyang, the capital. His father was a warehouse clerk. His mother stayed home to keep house. He told me he had gone to Chanhyun Elementary School and Songbuk Junior and Senior Middle School. That set me off on a line of questioning about the top schools in Pyongyang. The real elite, he told me, attended Mangyongdae Revolutionary School and Namsan Junior-Senior Middle School. “Namsan Junior was called, in 1948, Pyongyang First Elementary Junior School. After the Korean War they called it Namsan Junior and it was specifically for offspring
of Korean War heroes and very high party officials.” Over the decades, Chung said, the regime—unhappy-with the qualifications of the class of 1958 at Kim Il-sung University—had tried various strategems for expanding the pool of Namsan applicants in order to bring in brighter youngsters. The children of somewhat less exalted officials were admitted if they were relatively gifted intellectually. “In 1984, they changed the selection system. Before 1984, 100 percent of those accepted were high officials’ kids, but after 1985 two out of five were not from that background but were geniuses—although they still had to have proper class backgrounds. After 1985, the competition was about 300 to one, and you could enter from any part of the country.”

I asked about the difference between Namsan Junior-Senior and Man-gyongdae Revolutionary School. “Mangyongdae was an orphanage for children of Korean War martyrs, and it also accepted children of especially loyal members of the regime—spies working in South Korea for example,” Chung said. “There are special cases where high army officers send their kids or grandchildren to get them trained for the army. You couldn’t term this a normal, average school. More members are sent to the army and become the central members of the army.”

After his own graduation in 1986 from the lesser SongbukSenior, Chung himself went into army. “I was a writer in the army, writing propaganda for the regime,” he told me. “North Korea has ten army corps. I was in the Second Corps, Ninth Division. At the same time I was taking a correspondence course in film production from Pyongyang Research Movie College and was a member of the national Writers’ Coalition. In the Ninth Division I was in the mobile propaganda unit. I did my studying while I was with my military unit and occasionally visited the college for an exam. My work was to go around boosting the morale of my fellow soldiers. We put on stage shows, comedies, song and dance performances. I was both producing and writing. From 1988 until I defected I worked as a producer. At the beginning I had a goal in mind, which motivated me. The goal was to workdiligently, enter the party and attend university.”

So, I asked, had he been opportunistically trying to get ahead without particularly believing in the propaganda? “Yes,” he replied. I asked when he had stopped believing. “I can’t give you a turning point,” he said. “It was gradual change while I was growing up. Since I know a lot about the regime, I started to know the discrepancies. That’s when my heart changed. In Jilin Province, China, in 1938, Kim Il-sung formed a ‘soviet’ and made a speech: ‘My ultimate goal is for the people to to eat rice with meat soup, live under a tile roof and-wear silk clothes.’ Over the decades he has done none of it. One incident comes to mind: My elder brother’s marriage ceremony in 1990. It’s a tradition that you put rice cakes and chestnuts on the table. The ‘rice cakes’ at his wedding were made of radish and the ‘chestnuts’ of dirt.”

A more specific turning point for him, Chung said, came in 1991— “after
I heard South Korean radio programs. South Korea sent propaganda balloons. I got a radio from a balloon and started listening to South Korean broadcasts—M.BC, CBS [the Christian Broadcasting System], KBS. When I acquired the radio I was suffering from self-contradictions. I had to write North Korean propaganda saying that all the people were living well and had plenty to eat. I felt the discrepancies. I listened to KBS programs specifically targeted to North Koreans. At first I didn’t believe them but later I acknowledged some of what they said. Even to this moment I don’t believe all of it.”

I asked what he thought of the U.S. plan for Radio Free Asia broadcasts to North Korea. “It will fail,” was his first reaction. “People don’t have the radios. The frequencies would be blocked. For that to be possible, to try to move North Korean society through mass media, you’d have to make radios available first. Loyal people are selected to pick up the South Korean balloon drops. I was part of that. It’s government policy to pick them up. It’s hard because they usually fell on residential areas. I think the balloon-drop strategy is very effective. They mostly come in July or August. North Koreans always look up to the sky then: ‘Maybe today I’ll be lucky’ When the balloons drop, dogs run toward them to get food. If this is so successful, you may ask, why isn’t it changing North Korean society? The answer is there are usually only one or two radios per balloon—not enough.”

Radio was involved in Chung’s own decision to defect. “I had entered the party last year and had a chance to enter university, but I got caught with a radio,” he told me. “I could have gotten out of it and gone to the university, since I knew people, but it would have been a black mark against me all through my career. But my main reason for defecting was artistic. In North Korea I could only produce what the government told me to make. I wanted to express myself creatively. I want to study to become a producer in South Korea.”

I asked him whether North Korean soldiers wanted war. “Any ordinary soldier wants to fight,” Chung said. “He’s never experienced defeat. Ignorance makes him want to fight.”

Although Chung argued that the “new man” attitude had decayed, especially among doctors, I heard a somewhat different view from Stephen Linton. Linton, an American, grew up in South Korea as the son of missionaries and organized a North Korea–focused philanthropic foundation that he named for a missionary forebear, the Reverend Eugene Bell. I had first met Linton when he served as interpreter for the U.S. table tennis team in Pyongyang in 1979. I trusted him and his organization to use effectively my own periodic, modest contributions. His brother John was a medical doctor working in Seoul, and one of the Eugene Bell Foundation’s specialties was providing
equipment and medicine to help North Korean hospitals cope with an alarming jump in cases of tuberculosis. “I don’t know about doctors giving flesh,” Steve Linton told me, “but take fluoroscopes—you can look through somebody and use a screen instead of film. There’s a crude kind of fluoro-scope that requires the radiation source on one side, the patient in the middle and the doctor on the other side, to diagnose TB. They know it’s hard on the doctor. Cataracts are the first effect. If you’re lucky that’s all. Otherwise brain damage. I can’t help respecting somebody “who will look into an X-ray machine.”

Even as my hosts in Pyongyang in 1989 were assuring me that all was well in paradise, North Korea was in trouble. A visitor, tightly restricted in what he could see while inside the country, could only sense that something was amiss. But evidence was building up outside to show that the regime was failing in its elementary duty of feeding the people.
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That failure threatened Pyongyang’s single-minded efforts to maintain loyalty to Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il at a fever pitch. More and more of the Kims’ subjects started to make the connection, as Chung Seong-san did, between economic backwardness and the policies of their top leaders.

The connection came most readily to the minds of North Koreans who, like Dong Young-jun, were stationed abroad, and who thus were exposed to information and viewpoints unavailable to their stay-at-home countrymen. Food shortages worsened to the point where even some elite expatriates feared for their livelihoods if they should return home. Kang Myong-do, son-in-law of a prime minister, Kang Song-san, told the Seoul newspaper
Joong-Ang Ilbo
that North Korean spies in China, to avoid being sent home, had fabricated and submitted reports setting out a need for them to remain in China. Their specific scam was to tell their Pyongyang masters that South Korean special forces had been sent to kidnap North Koreans in China and take them south. “Kim Jong-il and Kang Song-san still believe that,” Kang Myong-do told the newspaper.
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The story illustrates the fact that China had become more prosperous than North Korea. People living just across the border in China’s Yanbian region were in perhaps the best position to notice that shift. “North Koreans were better off than people in China, including Yanbian, until the early 1970s,” one such person, an ethnic Korean professor at the Yanbian Academy of Social Sciences, told me.
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“During the 1960s lots of Koreans from China went over to North Korea because life there was much better than in China. There was a lot of internal strife in China during the 1960s. From the 1970s, the situation in North Korea started deteriorating because the government spent too much on the military after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam War. Gradually China, including Yanbian, pulled ahead.

The difference was that people in China not only had money; they also had something to spend it on. The North Koreans got their salaries but there was nothing to buy with their money.”

The professor, speaking in 1992, said that people in North Korea had been “hungry although not actually starving, since the mid-1970s. The exception is Pyongyang. I have an aunt in Pyongyang who is the widow of a 1930s martyr in the anti-Japanese struggle. I visited her and found she had plenty. She was well taken care of. She had lots of sacks of rice. For the others, the government has been trying to improve the situation but there’s been no real improvement since the 1970s. Laborers get eighteen kilograms of grain per month; office workers, fifteen kilos. Both China and North Korea distribute food directly to the people as a means of coping with scarcity. The basic principle is: If there’s a scarcity, the state must ration. If there’s a surplus, let people buy it in the stores. There are a lot more side dishes in China, and meat is now very common in China. Chinese can buy meat in stores. In North Korea, the stores’ stocks are very limited. Meat and dairy products there are still rationed by the state, because of their scarcity.”

Still, the professor told me, it would be a mistake to imagine that people’s natural complaints translated into significant active dissent. “I can’t judge the amount of complaining, since it’s suppressed,” he said, “but people do complain everywhere. The government won’t tolerate dissent. People get executed. So an uprising would be next to impossible. It’s important to note that, whatever happens, people do conform to the rules and regulations. They believe in the ideology.”