Nothing to Envy (28 page)

In the past, North Korea was an orderly, austere, and predictable place. If somebody was murdered, it was usually the result of a gang fight or a romantic jealousy. There was little theft because nobody had much more than anyone else. People knew what the rules were and which lines not to cross. Now the rules were in play—and life became disorderly and frightening.

A student in the Grand People’s Study House in Pyongyang, the largest library in North Korea
.

J
UN-SANG WITNESSED A PUBLIC EXECUTION ONE SUMMER WHEN
he was home for summer vacation. For days, sound trucks had been driving by announcing the time and date. The head of the
inminban
had knocked on doors telling people their attendance was expected. Jun-sang didn’t care for this sort of spectacle. He hated blood and couldn’t stand to see a person or an animal suffer. When he was twelve years old, his father had forced him to slaughter a chicken. Jun-sang’s hands trembled as he grasped the bird by the neck. “How can you be a man if you can’t do this?” his father berated him. Jun-sang dutifully brought down the hatchet, more afraid of his father’s ridicule than of a headless chicken, but refused to eat that night’s dinner. Watching the death of a human being was unthinkable to him. He vowed to stay away. But when the day arrived and all the
neighbors headed out to watch, he found himself falling in step with the crowd.

The execution was to take place on a sandy embankment of a stream not far from the hot springs resort where he and Mi-ran went on their nighttime walks. About three hundred people had already gathered, the children pushing forward to the front. Schoolboys competed to collect spent bullet cartridges from public executions. Jun-sang elbowed his way through the crowd to get a better look.

The state security had converted the clearing by the stream into a makeshift courtroom, with tables set up for the prosecutors and a sound system with two enormous speakers. The man was accused of climbing electric poles and cutting copper wire to sell.

“The theft caused extensive damage to the nation’s property and was done with the intention to damage our social system. It was an act of treason that aided the enemies of the socialist state,” the prosecutor read, his voice bellowing through the scratchy speakers. Then a man acting as a sort of lawyer for the accused spoke, although he offered no defense: “I have determined that what the prosecutor says is true.”

“The accused is hereby sentenced to death and the sentence will be carried out immediately,” decreed a third man.

The condemned man was bound to a wooden stake at the eyes, the chest, and the legs. The firing squad would aim to sever the ropes in order, three bullets in each location—nine in total, top to bottom. First the lifeless head would slump over so that the body would crumple in an orderly heap at the foot of the stake. Neat and efficient. It would look like the condemned was bowing in death as if to apologize.

A murmur went through the crowd. It seemed Jun-sang was not the only one who thought execution was excessive punishment for a minor theft. The electric lines weren’t working anyway. The few meters of copper wiring the man had stolen probably had gotten him no more than a few bags of rice.

“A pity. He has a younger sister,” Jun-sang heard somebody say.

“Two sisters,” said another.

Jun-sang figured the man’s parents must be dead. Clearly he knew nobody with influence to intervene on his behalf. He probably had a poor class background as well. Maybe he was the son of a miner, like the kids Mi-ran taught.

As Jun-sang contemplated these possibilities, the shots rang out.

Head. Chest. Legs.

The head burst open like a water balloon. Blood spurted out over the dirt, almost spilling onto the feet of the crowd. Jun-sang felt as if he was going to vomit. He turned and elbowed his way back out of the crowd and headed home.

FOR JUN-SANG, VISITS
to Chongjin often yielded unpleasant discoveries about his own country. At the university, Jun-sang was insulated from the worst of the deprivations. He had enough to eat and electricity most nights. Students at Pyongyang’s top universities were among the most privileged citizens in a privileged city. But once he left the academic cocoon, reality slapped him in the face.

The places he associated with happy memories were all closed—the restaurants where he’d eaten as a boy, the movie theater where he’d first spotted Mi-ran. There was no electricity except on the occasional public holiday, such as the birthdays of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.

Evenings at home were spent in darkness, listening to his parents complain. His wealthy grandfather in Tokyo had passed away and the surviving relatives were not as generous about sending money to their poor relations. His mother’s rheumatism had gotten so bad she couldn’t walk to the market or use the precious sewing machine she’d brought from Japan.

It was the same every night. His father sat smoking, the ember of his cigarette glowing red in the dark. He would exhale a cloud of smoke and sigh loudly, the preface to some bad news he was about to convey.

“You know who died? Do you remember …”

His father named teachers from Jun-sang’s high school. His math teacher. His Chinese teacher. The literature teacher who was a fellow
cinema buff and used to lend Jun-sang copies of a magazine called
Film Literature
, about Eastern European cinema and the role of film in anti-imperialism. The teachers were all intellectuals in their fifties, who discovered they had no marketable skills after the school system stopped paying their salaries. Jun-sang used to drop in on his old high school teachers on his trips home from Pyongyang; the teachers were always happy to see this student who had done so well for himself. Now Jun-sang avoided seeing anybody from his high school. He didn’t want to hear who else had died.

The deaths weren’t confined to the older people. Jun-sang’s mother told him about classmates who had died of starvation, guys who hadn’t passed their university exams and had to join the army instead. Jun-sang had lost touch with them, but he had taken comfort in the assumption that they’d done okay during the tough times because soldiers were supposed get the first provisions of food. After all, it was Kim Jong-il himself who proclaimed the
songun
idea, or “military first.” Schoolchildren were made to sacrifice so that a strong army could protect them from the bombs of the American bastards.

Jun-sang could see now that it wasn’t true. The soldiers around Chongjin were a ragtag bunch with fake leather belts cinching tight the uniforms that no longer fit their skinny frames. Their complexions were sallow from malnutrition and many of them were only five feet tall. (The North Korean army had to lower its height requirement from five feet three in the early 1990s because of the stunting of the younger generation.) At night they abandoned their posts and clambered into private gardens, digging up kimchi pots and pulling up vegetables.

Most of the families in his neighborhood had raised the walls around their houses, ignoring a regulation that restricted the height to 1.5 meters so that police could look in. Still, three times burglars managed to climb the wall and ransack Jun-sang’s yard. They yanked out garlic, potatoes, cabbage. Jun-sang’s father had kept careful notations in his gardening journal, writing down the types of seeds he used and the time it took them to germinate.

“Why couldn’t they at least have waited until it was fully grown?” he wailed.

Jun-sang’s mother was bereft when somebody stole one of their dogs. She had been raising jindo puppies since Jun-sang was a boy. She doted on her dogs, cooking their food herself. Her letters to him at school were filled with news of the puppies. She couldn’t bear the thought that in all likelihood the dog had been eaten.

In truth, they were lucky it was only the dog that was killed. Everybody knew that the families who’d come from Japan had money, so they were frequently targets for thieves. An entire family in their village had been murdered in a botched robbery. Jun-sang and his family had to be more careful than ever before. They quickly ate their dinner behind the high walls of their house, hoping their neighbors wouldn’t see that they had enough to eat.

EVER SINCE HE FAILED
to muster genuine tears over Kim Il-sung’s death, Jun-sang had come to recognize his growing disenchantment with the system. Everything he saw, everything he heard or read pushed him further from politically correct thinking. His experiences at the university were also changing him. For the first time in his life he was exposed to new ideas.

As a child, Jun-sang read whatever he could get his hands on—novels, philosophy, science, history, even the speeches of Kim Il-sung. The bookstore in town sold novellas that told stories about brutal Americans, cringing and cowardly South Koreans, and heroic North Koreans. Occasionally there were Russian novels—works by Tolstoy or Maxim Gorky. His high school was supplied books by the Educational Instruments and Materials Provisions Office and his father had a respectable collection of Greek and Roman history. Jun-sang enjoyed reading about ancient warriors—he loved the story of how Hannibal fought to topple the Roman empire and then poisoned himself rather than accept defeat.

By the time he got to Pyongyang, he was ready for more modern fare. At the university, behind the librarian’s desk, was a small selection of Western books that had been translated into Korean. They were forbidden to the general public; only top students could have access to them. At some high level of the government, somebody had decided that the nation needed an intellectual elite with some
knowledge of Western literature. The books had no publisher identified on the title pages, but the rumor Jun-sang heard was that they were published by the Inmin Daehakseup Dang, the Grand People’s Study House, a showcase national library at Kim Il-sung Square. The collection even included American books.

Jun-sang’s favorite was
Gone with the Wind
. The melodramatic style of the book was not unlike the tone of Korean fiction. He was struck by the parallels between the American Civil War and the Korean War. It was amazing to him how vicious the fighting could be between one people—clearly the Americans were as impassioned as the Koreans. He thought the Americans better off for the fact that they ended up one country, not divided like the Koreans. He admired the heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, for her pluckiness. She reminded him a little of North Korea’s own cinematic heroines who were always in the dirt, fighting for their land, but Scarlett was much more of an individualist—not a quality celebrated in North Korean literature. And North Korean heroines most certainly didn’t have love affairs.

This was risqué stuff by North Korean standards. Jun-sang wanted to read more. He checked out everything he could find, from Sidney Sheldon’s
Rage of Angels
to Gabriel García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. He even read
How to Win Friends and Influence People
, the 1930s self-help classic by Dale Carnegie. It was his first exposure to Western ideas about business, and it shocked him. He couldn’t believe the advice that Carnegie was giving readers.

Learn to love, respect, and enjoy other people
.

How could a product of the American capitalist system write something like this? Jun-sang asked himself. Weren’t all capitalists enemies who lived by the law of the jungle—kill or be killed?

Jun-sang also borrowed books from his classmates. At a top university, many of the students had relatives in power who traveled abroad on business and picked up books and magazines. Korean-language material was available in China’s Yanbian prefecture, which has a large ethnic Korean population. Through one of his classmates, Jun-sang got a sex-education booklet that had been published by the Chinese school system. Yet another eye-opener! Junsang
realized that he and his other unmarried friends in their twenties knew less about sex than the average Chinese schoolboy. How was he to have known that women menstruated? It explained a lot.

He was just as surprised to read a speech that had been delivered at a Communist Party congress that criticized Mao for the Cultural Revolution. That will be the day, he thought, when the Workers’ Party criticizes Kim Il-sung.

One day Jun-sang was approached by a classmate with whom he occasionally had traded books. The student looked around nervously before slipping a book to Jun-sang.

“It’s a good one,” he whispered. “Maybe you want to read it?”

The book was a slim volume about economic reform that had been published by the Russian government. The boy’s father had gotten it at a book exhibition at the Russian embassy in Pyongyang. It seemed to have been written in the early 1990s as Russia was trying to build a new free-market economy. Jun-sang realized immediately that he had something dangerous in his hands—North Koreans were required to submit any foreign literature they found to the police. He, the boy, and the boy’s father would be in serious trouble for having a book of this sort in their possession. Jun-sang quickly put it under the clothes in his locker. His dorm room had two bunk beds—four students to a room—so he had little privacy. He made sure to read the book under the covers with a flashlight.