All Monsters Must Die (17 page)

In the 1960s, impossible love was a major theme in South Korean films; specifically the power of tradition and the misery that befalls those who try to undermine custom. In both traditional family life and political life, it was disastrous for anyone to cross society's strict boundaries.

BY THE EARLY
1970s, Shin had a shot at becoming the king of South Korean cinema, with Choi as his queen. But Shin and his director colleagues had grown increasingly frustrated by the strict censorship laws, and they began to air their complaints openly. General Park was convinced that Shin was mobilizing the directors guild. When news spread that Shin had also initiated an affair with the young actress Oh Su-mi, the scandal was too much for the dictator. Madame recounted this without bitterness. In 1975, Shin's working permit as a producer was revoked, which meant he was prohibited from working at all. In the same breath, their marriage broke apart.

THE CONDENSATION FROM
Madame Choi's glass made a small pool on the marble table. She sat up straight and searched her memory. Maybe she was also searching for the words that would make the unbelievable believable. Finally, she began telling us the story of her kidnapping. How in January 1978 she had turned fifty. How she spent all of her time at the film school that she had started with Shin. How she had travelled to Hong Kong for the business meeting. How the trip was supposed to last no more than ten days, but it would be ten years before she set foot on South Korean soil again.

We had been speaking with Madame Choi for close to three hours. She wasn't showing signs of fatigue, only vague charges of suppressed emotion every now and then. She seemed to have forgotten that the interview was supposed to have lasted only an hour. Now she wanted to take us to lunch.

A taxi was hailed for us, and we sailed into Seoul's viscous traffic. The weather forecasters had predicted that the stormy weather would soon culminate in rain, and their predictions were accurate down to the hour. We had one day left until the rainy season began.

WE WERE LET
off on a boulevard lined with sycamores and led into a
bulgogi
restaurant. Steel platters with glowing coals were placed before us. Madame instructed the personnel and soon the table was covered with dishes: two kinds of octopus, two types of kimchi, pepper, garlic in oil, bean paste, and lettuce and perilla leaves to wrap the meat in. Madame ordered several bottles of
soju
and filled our glasses.

She continued telling her story about her time in captivity in the golden palace in North Korea. She talked about her idleness and how she passed the time; how she had longed for her children, worried about her students at the film school, and thought about Shin.

Suddenly, Madame whimpered. She took out a handkerchief and dabbed her eyes behind her large, tinted glasses. She was remembering Shin's appearance at Kim Jong-il's surprise party. She turned to our interpreter and put her fingers between his eyebrows.

“Here were large, white flecks,” she said, her voice thick with emotion. “His hair was grey and stood on end. His ankles were completely swollen.”

For a moment, Madame sat in silence with her memories. Then she served us our meat, which had finished grilling, and we wrapped it in the leaves. We toasted with our
soju
, but Madame looked sombre. The memories of Shin's hardships had taken hold of her; she said she had a guilty conscience. She had been a luxury-prisoner living in a mansion, and he had suffered the worst.

But once Shin was released and the two were reunited, they were given everything they needed for film production. The resources were unbelievable, and they got to choose their locations in the Soviet Union and China.

“Kim Jong-il was extremely knowledgeable about art and film,” said Madame. “He was on the same level as Shin.”

We were stunned by her words of praise for her kidnapper, the figure who is always depicted as a mad playboy, ridiculous in his brown creepers, his lifted soles, that chubby body — “North Korea's only fat man” — the applauding baby hands, and above all his hair, that blow-dried swell meant to make him look taller but which actually made him look like an obscure rockabilly artist.

Then we realized that we'd misunderstood an important part of this story. We'd been thinking of it as a Faustian bargain, where the artist-couple chose to sell their souls to those in power. We'd spoken about the princely theme: to be forced to produce, to become an extension of that power. Now Madame was talking about the enormous opportunities they'd been given. For the first time, they didn't have to worry about money. While there was indeed a political agenda, dictated by Kim Jong-il, it had all been very informal when it came to the kidnapped guests. Kim Jong-il loved their films and encouraged them to create.

They hadn't moved from freedom to imprisonment. After all, at the time Korea was made up of two dictatorships. They'd just moved from one prison to the next. And both dictators loved their films.

MADAME WAS FILLING
our glasses. Her back was to the large television in the restaurant, so she couldn't see the commercial, which we guessed was for a hair trimmer. A Kim Jong-il lookalike was being filmed from the back, sitting in a barber's chair. The hairdresser had just put the finishing touches to the hair at his neck. “Kim” turned and smiled.

The real Kim Jong-il rearranged the calendar as he saw fit. Shin Sang-ok was born in October, but Kim decided to host a birthday banquet for him in September. In February the next year, they were invited to celebrate Kim Jong-il's birthday. Like Madame's previous invitation to the firstborn son's birthday, this was a sign of being favoured absolutely by the dictator, a favouritism that didn't even extend to members of his innermost political circle. Many were green with envy.

ONE OF THE
films Shin and Madame made in North Korea was
Salt
(
Sogeum
, 1985). We'd seen it listed in an anthology about female filmmakers in South Korea as Choi Eun-hee's fourth and final film as a director. But now she denied directing it. She said her name was often added as co-director, but she didn't know why. Shin was the director and Madame had played the lead. At the 1985 Moscow International Film Festival, she was awarded the Best Actress prize for her performance in
Salt
.

The grand international productions were what mattered to the couple because these allowed them to stretch the boundaries of their imprisonment. They were issued passports and could move around the Eastern bloc, even if North Korean “bodyguards” constantly shadowed them. Shin was clever about satisfying the system. He used the
KAPF
texts, which always had a revolutionary foundation, as a starting point. And then he put his own spin on them.

IN 1986, THE
couple was invited to be on the jury at a film festival in Vienna. They were chaperoned by their bodyguards. On the way to the festival's cinema they were given the unusual opportunity of taking their own taxi. Their overcoats were in the taxi behind them. At one point, a couple of cars cut between the two vehicles. Shin and Madame noted this and convinced their driver to turn right at a crossing, in the direction of the American embassy. Soon, the bodyguards realized that they'd been shaken off. They radioed the chauffeur in the couple's car and asked him where they were. At that moment, Shin and Madame handed the driver a bundle of cash and convinced him to lie about where they were going.

The car neared the American embassy, and at last found a place to stop. They threw themselves out of the taxi and rushed onto the grounds of the embassy. Madame and Shin asked for political asylum in the United States. But Madame has never forgotten that Shin pushed past her in order to get through the door of the American embassy first.

OUR LUNCH ENDED
with cold glass noodles in large stainless-steel bowls. It was a meal in itself. Glass noodles should be easy to swallow, but they clumped together and slid around our mouths like a second tongue. Madame, on the other hand, hungrily slurped hers up. It had been Shin's favourite dish, she said. He used to empty his bowl with only two lifts of his chopsticks.

Madame continued her story, looking worried as she spoke about Kim Jong-il. The dictator had refused to believe that they had left him out of their own free will. He sent a letter in which he offered to help them get back to Pyongyang. Madame spoke as if she were in his debt. She and Shin made seven films during those eight years and another ten were in development. They had paid back everything that had been put in an Austrian bank account for their services in North Korea. Every dollar. That's probably why she was still alive, she speculated. Otherwise she might have been murdered by North Korean agents.

The staff started to clear the table. Madame stood up and grabbed her handbag. We followed her to the cash register, where she elegantly placed the bill on the counter. It had been taken care of without either of us noticing.

Outside the restaurant we met Madame's son, who was going to take her to the hospital for a regular check-up. The man was in his forties, and he was one of the two children that Madame and Shin had adopted. Shin and his lover, Oh Su-mi, also had two children but Oh died in a car accident in Hawaii and, since then, Madame had looked upon Oh's children as her own.

We said goodbye and slowly started walking back down the sycamore-lined boulevard to the hum of the traffic.

THE NEXT DAY,
we took a trip to the old city wall in Seoul and saw traces of shamanistic rituals in the forest. Food had been offered to the forefathers, even though small signs had been posted stating that shamanistic rituals were forbidden.

Shamanism still has sweeping importance in South Korea. Regular citizens and politicians, members of the military, and leaders of business turn to shamans, mediums (
mudang
), and clairvoyants (
jumsung-ga
) for help with important questions, even if they often don't acknowledge it publicly. Many still think it would be irresponsible to not pay a specialist (
chonmunga
) for advice when naming a baby. Destiny is written into a name.

Shamanism has deep roots, deeper than the Confucianism imported from China, and often this more impassioned and unbridled belief system has a stronger impact on daily life. The flashes of hot temper and open superstition you encounter in South Korea are far from the restraint and unflagging integrity of the people in neighbouring Japan. In North Korea, the supernatural powers that the ruling dynasty possesses, according to propaganda, are presumably tied to the shamanistic tradition ingrained in Korea.

AFTER WE WANDERED
along the city wall, we sat in a screening room in the film archive and watched
Salt
, the film Madame had told us about the previous day. It's a story about one woman's unrelenting hardships, in the vein of Maxim Gorky's socially engaged melodramas.
Salt
introduced a number of new concepts in North Korean film, Madame had explained. Before, cinema was considered the fruit of the nameless collective's efforts, but with this film the director's and actors' names were listed in the credits. Dialect was used for the first time instead of standardized North Korean, which was a dramatic development. The public was shocked by certain scenes. One rape scene was so explicit that Kim Il-sung himself was forced to publicly defend it, explaining that it was motivated by art.

Salt
takes place in the 1930s, when the Japanese colonial rulers and the Chinese landowners made a pact that essentially enslaved all Koreans. Salt was a valuable commodity and is a metaphor for living under oppression. The Koreans live an impoverished life in all respects, “like food without salt.” After numerous humiliations and a life of poverty, Madame's character becomes a salt smuggler who gets caught at the Chinese–Korean border. Only in the last scene, when the Communist rebels have killed the Chinese militia group that attacks the smugglers, she understands who the righteous ones are in the political struggle. She realizes that “Communism is the salt of the world.” In this way, Shin resolved an ideological problem.

IT WAS REMARKABLE
watching Madame play a mother to small children — at the time of filming, she was fifty-seven years old. Even more remarkable was imagining the circumstances of the film's production. Shin had just recovered from his four years of imprisonment on a grass diet, some of it spent in an isolation cell where he couldn't even lie down. Now he was shooting scenes where Madame was thrown in prison, starved, abused, and raped. She plays a victim of social injustice. They themselves were prisoners with a certain amount of artistic freedom and great economic freedom. It was the art itself — their empathy, skills, and vision — that Kim Jong-il coveted. He understood that certain things couldn't be bought with money or created in a laboratory. People with specialized skills and unique talent were simply useful bodies that had to be obtained, and one had to hope that they wouldn't fall to pieces. Maybe those years of imprisonment were meant to give them experiences that they could then channel into art. Perhaps this had been his plan.

* * *

IN A PARKING
lot on our way out of Panmunjom in the
DMZ
, we bump into Alejandro Cao de Benós de Les y Pérez. This complicated name belongs to a thirty-four-year-old Spanish man of noble birth, known for his participation in the documentary
Friends of Kim
. There he was simply called Alejandro, short and sweet. He was, and is, president of the Korean Friendship Association (
KFA
).

In the documentary, the camera followed his officious progress, travelling around the country and participating in a peaceful march calling for reunification, as well as various “acts of solidarity” with the North Korean people. After the march, members of the
KFA
join a group of North Korean workers for an hour. As part of this performance, Alejandro carries a pile of stones in solidarity with a labourer and makes a lofty proclamation about North Korea: “We are constructing a paradise, a worker's paradise. And that's the most important thing.”