Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (81 page)

We talked about my observations regarding fanaticism as a quality that had seemed to be at its peak when I first visited Pyongyang in 1979. Ko agreed, saying things were changing. “The younger generations of the late 1970s and today are totally different,” he said. “I was one of the fanatics until 1987. Up until about 1985, most people were that way But toward the end of the ’80s people started having doubts about the socialist ideal, and about whether we could really beat South Korea in war. The difference is that the new younger generation are doubters, not fanatics. That earlier younger generation of the late ’70s—those people have now become family men, mainly interested in stability.” Ko said people tended to develop doubts between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-nine.

The challenge for people who harbored doubts was to keep their lips zipped. Regarding Kim Jong-il, “the only thing they can talk about is the fact he is the son of Kim Il-sung,” Ko said. “They don’t dare discuss whom he married, who his half-brother is, the fact that he’s short—any of these could send them to prison. There is twice as much repression as when Kim Il-sung was in power. After the late ’70s it got so bad that if you went to a store, asked for toothpaste, were told there wasn’t any and complained, asking, ‘What kind of a store is this?’ you could be sent to prison as a political dissident. While I was in university there were about 1,000 students. Each year about ten students disappeared for such transgressions—even for saying there was bad blood between Kim Jong-il and Kim Pyong-il,” his younger stepbrother.

I asked Ko how, if people could not talk freely, he had learned how people viewed Kim Jong-il. “Inside North Korea you can’t hear that kind of complaint,” the ex-diplomat told me. “But when people visit an overseas embassy and have a drink, they say things like ‘Kim Jong-il should maybe spend more time on the scientific and technical side’—something very indirect, so that if there were any repercussions they could hope to get away with it. Another indirect conversation you could hear among high officials relates to China’s reforms. They would say, ‘China is doing very well nowadays.’ They don’t directly say that North Korea should be like China.”

***

Another North Korean who experienced a moment of truth while abroad was Kim Ji-il, “who studied physics in Kharkov, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union), from 1984. (In chapter 15, we met Kim as an elementary school class president who in criticism sessions stumbled on the pronunciation of that mouthful of a Korean word for “advance-guard stormtrooper,”
keunuidaekyeolsade
.) He defected to Seoul in 1990.
¹¹
A handsome fellow with heavy eyebrows, Kim—like only one other male defector to South Korea among the dozens I spoke with—did not wear a gold watch. His timepiece was a black, plastic, digital sports model. “My wife tells me I should wear a formal watch, like other businessmen, but I like casual,” he explained when I commented on that nonconformist fashion touch. As for being a businessman, he was working at Sunkyong Corporation in the foreign trade department, developing exchange projects with other countries. He told me he hoped to get involved in trade with North Korea eventually, but wasn’t yet pursuing any deals with Pyongyang.

Born in 1964, Kim Ji-il grew up in Pyongyang, where his father was a construction engineer building factories and energy projects. His mother was a professor of Russian at the Foreign Languages University. Maternity leave was seventy-seven days, so Kim was sent to a nursery at around two months of age. Later, “in kindergarten, when they gave us our snacks, they would say, ‘Our Great Leader gave us these.’ The kids would have to say ‘Thank you, Great Fatherly Leader.’” I had been wondering how family relationships had fared in a country-where the Great Leader was everyone’s father. I asked Kim Ji-il whether, despite exposure to the constant propaganda focus on Kim Il-sung, he had been close to his parents. “Very close,” he replied. “When my father returned from a business trip, he would bring me snacks. He helped me with my home-work. I remember walking around with my parents, being with them quite a lot.”

Kim Ji-il seemed to have had an unusually happy childhood. Even an involuntary family move away from Pyongyang when the boy was twelve was a positive experience for him. “Because of the 1976 axe-murder incident there was a fear of war, so everyone at my father’s workplace moved to Ku-jan County in North Pyongan Province. That was my first real encounter with nature. I could see down into the river, could jump from a cliff into the river. I took hiking trips into the mountains, hunting for rabbits and game.”

I asked if he had loved the Great Leader. “I wouldn’t say I loved Kim Il-sung,” he replied. “I didn’t know him personally. But we were brought up to
idolize
Kim Il-sung. There was an element of habit in it. Everybody idolized Kim Il-sung. It was the thing to do.” I told him that reminded me of the situation in a small Southern town in the United States where pretty much everyone is an evangelical Christian and one either believes in that faith or at
least gives it lip service. He had been away from North Korea long enough to grasp the comparison. “The mechanics of Kim Il-sung’s ideology and religion are the same,” he said. “In Christian society if you say ‘I’m an atheist,’ they’ll point their fingers at you. It’s the same in North Korea. If you say ‘I don’t believe in Kim Il-sung,’ you’ll get in trouble. In religion, though, God is invisible. In North Korea, Kim Il-sung is alive and you can see him.”

Kim Ji-il had been a rather cool customer, though, in the ideology department. And his impression was that his approach had been pretty much universal among his countrymen. “The extent of idolization of Kim Il-sung is about the same for everyone,” he asserted. “In religion there may be fanatics, but no one in North Korea is a fanatic.” I pressed the point: How about hysterical young people crying because they are so touched by the benevolence of the Great Leader? “At official gatherings I’ve seen it, but normally you would never see it,” he said. “I think it’s acting.” (Tell that to Dong Young-jun, who assured me his tears had been very real.)

I told Kim Ji-il the story of how, on my first trip to North Korea, in 1979, my interpreter grabbed my camera to keep me from photographing children running around on a schoolyard. The photographer’s argument was that such photos would not convey the unity, the single-mindedness, of the North Korean people. “That’s what the people at the top want foreigners to see: unity,” Kim commented. “But as I say, all that idolatry you saw in the schools is habitual behavior. When no one was watching, we would just go wild like any kids around the world.”

Kim did his undergraduate studies at Kim Il-sung University, from 1980 to 1984. It was then that he began to harbor real doubts about the regime. “When I was little and they said our uniforms had been given by Kim Il-sung, I though, ‘Wow, for free? What a kind and generous man!’ But after I went to university, my mentality began developing. When they gave us presents, I said, ‘Where does Kim Il-sung get the money to supply all these presents?’ I knew there was a Kim Il-sung fund, but where did he get the money? That was the start of my doubts. Twice a year they would give ‘gifts’ to all the students around the nation, so I began to wonder how fat that fund was.” Expressing such doubts could be dangerous. “Two or three spies were assigned per thirty people at the university—one from the party, one from State Security, one from Public Security. Most people can speculate who the spies are. You just have to watch your back.”

I wondered whether it was because he came from an elite background that Kim Ji-il thought the fanaticism of other North Koreans that he had encountered was feigned. Were the common people more likely to be genuinely fanatical? “I didn’t think of myself as elite,” he told me. “At the university there were so many people of higher rank than I.” He did recognize that he was different, in terms of privilege, from the great mass of North Koreans, but he said he did not believe there was a great difference in ideological
fervor. “The common people are overworked and hungry,” Kim said. “Maybe outwardly they would profess faith in the regime, but behind the officials’ backs they would complain more than the elite, I think.”

He himself, while living in North Korea, was “never full, but I didn’t have such a problem that I was reduced to eating weeds. Harking back to the 1970s, I don’t remember thinking, ‘We don’t have enough food.’ You never had a feeling there was plenty, but it wasn’t as bad as in the ’80s.” After he began his studies abroad, he had a two-month home leave in 1987 and noticed that things had started getting worse.

I asked how he had managed to go abroad to study. “From the early 1950s to the late ’60s, many students were sent to Eastern Europe to study,” he said. “My dad went to East Germany. From the late ’60s until the early ’80s no more students were sent. But then, in 1984 or so, Kim Il-sung went to Eastern Europe. He realized North Korea was far behind, so he said we’d better send some students. That’s how the opportunity came to me. Those sent overseas were all science and engineering students. They selected students still in the university who they believed had intact ideology that wouldn’t be swayed by encounters with capitalism. The ones who made the judgment were officials sent by the party to work in a special university department where they inspected students’ lives. The procedure was first to select the ‘ideologically intact’ students and then test those in their fields to find the ones to send abroad.”

With the doubts about the regime that he had told me he harbored even as an undergraduate, I wondered how Kim Ji-il had passed the scrutiny of the screening committee for overseas study. Was it acting? “I did have some doubts at the time but I didn’t oppose the regime so I didn’t really have to pretend or act,” he replied. “In North Korea even if you had doubts, you couldn’t satisfy your curiosity because you had no way of hearing the truth.”

However, Kim continued, “the moment I set foot in the Soviet Union I changed. I saw a wave of individualism. People all dressed differently. Party members weren’t forced to attend every single meeting but could skip some. I liked the way the stores worked: If you had money, you could buy, unlike the ration system in North Korea. This was a totally different world. I got to know the real details by making friends with Russians and talking with them. In essence, I think the mentality of Russians and Americans was essentially the same. I got there during the time when Konstantin Chernenko held the top job, but he was quickly followed by Gorbachev. I watched the unfolding of
perestroika
and
glasnost.
I became anti-regime after about a year in the Soviet Union. I went back to North Korea in the summer of 1987 for two months of home leave. My intent was not to say anything but to wait until I came back for a longer time before trying to change people’s minds.”

In 1988, Kim Ji-il began thinking he really did not want to return to
North Korea. “But I didn’t think of defecting to South Korea until the moment of my defection,” he told me. “If it were only a matter of ideological changes, everyone in North Korea should defect.” For anyone who might actually go so far as to defect, “there’s always a plus alpha. My plus alpha was my wife and my daughter. I had met my wife, a Soviet citizen, on campus. She was willing to go with me anywhere in the world. North Korea would have been no problem for her. But North Korean society would not have accepted her. An international marriage would be unthinkable there. It was a secret marriage. My daughter was born in 1989 and I didn’t tell my government.” I wondered: How could he have kept his marriage secret? “That shows how much freer we were in the USSR than in North Korea,” Kim replied.

At first Kim’s wife advised him, “Go back to North Korea. Defecting would affect your parents.” Kim was “in a dilemma,” he told me. “It was time to return to North Korea and I had to choose between my family in North Korea and my wife and daughter, whom I couldn’t take back with me. I chose the wife and child. I didn’t want my daughter to be brought up without a father.” Having made his decision, he defected by traveling to Eastern Europe and presenting himself at a South Korean embassy.

At the time of Kim’s defection, his father was in Germany making a deal with a German company. His mother back in Pyongyang worked in broadcasting as an editorial writer. A younger sister worked at Yongseong Nutrition Institute, which had a factory that packaged high-quality food for consumption by the elite. A younger brother was studying at Kim Chaek University of Technology. He told me, hopefully: “Coming to South Korea doesn’t mean I’m losing my parents. I believe they’re alive. They may have suffered, but I believe they’re alive. The trend is such that for North Korea to survive it must adapt to the free-market system as the Chinese have done. I believe North Korea will do it. That will bring openness and a lot of foreign cultural influences.”

I mentioned the plans that were brewing at the time in Washington to broadcast North Korean news to North Koreans in their own language via Radio Free Asia. “It’s a good idea,” Kim said. “I listened to Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America in Russian. They-were a success in the Soviet Union. They reported stories that weren’t in the Soviet press. My wife’s family also listened.” Among the radios owned by North Koreans, “some of the Japanese imports are short-wave. At customs they are stuck on one channel. But civilian and military high officials have short-wave radios that are not fixed to one channel.”