The Reluctant Communist (17 page)

In 1982, Hitomi, Anocha, and I went to a musical at the Mansudae Art Theater. The Song of Paradise was the name of the show. We were in a box seat along the side on an upper balcony. In the box seat next to ours were two young Japanese women. We could not see them because there were dividers between the boxes, but we could hear them speaking Japanese. I tried to mess with them by saying the only Japanese words I knew as loudly as I could. I would go, cough, cough, “Arigato!” over the divider. My wife, who was sitting next to me, would secretly pinch me hard to get me to shut up. When the show was over, we dallied as long as we could on the street to catch a glimpse of them. Eventually, they did come out. We saw them get into their car with their leader and drive off. Japanese were not the only abductees, of course. Dona, Anocha, and, to a lesser extent, Siham were all abductees, after all. We never met any other people who confessed to being stolen from their homelands, but over the years we would learn to spot people we suspected were not there by choice. The way they looked, the types of leaders they were with, the cars they were chauffeured in—you just learned to develop a hunch for these things. I have looked at all the pictures of suspected female Japanese abductees, and none of them looked like the two women in the theater or the woman we used to see frequently in Pyongyang. I cannot guarantee I would be able to recognize them again like I could Ishioka and Arimoto, but so far I haven’t seen any other photos of people who look familiar.

Americans were a real rarity in North Korea. Some of them would come in for diplomatic meetings or NGO work, I suppose, but I never met any of them. The only people I was 100 percent certain were American were our foursome. And there was Suhr Anna. I am sure about her, too. I am not sure the whole history I heard about her is true, but I am sure she was American. She was a legendary (or maybe “notorious” is the right word) person in North Korea. The supposed backstory on her was that her husband was a radio broadcaster in Seoul when the war broke out. His radio show made a broadcast railing against the war, and the South Korean Army came and shot him, but she escaped to the North. Once set up in the North, they say, she became Seoul City Sue, the Tokyo Rose figure who made Englishlanguage radio broadcasts during the war trying to break the morale of American soldiers in the South by telling them how their girlfriends back home were probably cheating on them or just by reading the names of American soldiers who had been killed that day. I don’t know if anybody has been able to answer the question of whether she was a true believer or a kind of abductee or prisoner herself who was forced to help North Korea against her will.

Later, she became in charge of all English publications for the Korean Central News Agency. Abshier had dinner with her once, in 1962, just after he had crossed over. That dinner was part of a photo spread for a propaganda pamphlet called “Lucky Boy.” There was a picture of them in that pamphlet just laughing their heads off like they were having the best time in the world. Abshier said Suhr Anna told him that it was hard at first to live in North Korea but that he would eventually come to like it.

I met her in 1965 when I went to the “foreigners only” section of the No. 2 Department Store. I was by myself. (Our leader at the time had just said, “Yeah, go on; go ahead,” when I asked to go to the store and let me go alone.) I recognized her from the “Lucky Boy” pamphlet, so I walked up to her and said, “Hello, Suhr Anna-senseng” (senseng is the Korean word for “teacher”). It was winter, and she was wearing a black leather overcoat, very put-together. She looked surprised and turned, looked at me, and said, “Oh, you must be the American who just came over.” I said, “Uh-huh,” but she was spooked. The second we met, she wanted to get the hell out of there. She excused herself, saying she really needed to be going, and was gone.

That was the last I heard of her until 1973. We were teaching at the military school, and one of the instructors said he was going to the Korean Central News Agency to pick up some texts or booklets or something. Dresnok said, “Say hello to Suhr Anna for us!” The teacher dropped his things and said, “You want me to say hello to that dead, goddamn spy!?” We had no idea what he was talking about. He told us that they caught her in 1969 as a double agent. She had been secretly feeding information to the South for years, he said, and they executed her. I have no idea if any of this is true, but that is what they told me, and we certainly never saw her again or heard from anyone who had.

People always ask me about Joseph White, the U.S. Army private who walked across the DMZ in 1982, the first GI to do so since I did. But I never met White and never saw him, except for watching the press conference he did in Pyongyang shortly after he crossed on TV. He was wearing his uniform and gave some predictable words of praise to Kim Il-sung and the paradise he had created in North Korea. Watching White, I considered myself lucky that I never had to do one of those press conferences. I never heard from him or saw him again. On April 15, 1984, though, we were having a holiday party, as always, for the cadres (April 15 is Kim Il-sung’s birthday), and I said to one of them, “Why don’t you bring White here? We could use another face, and if they got along, he could be Anocha’s new husband.” (As early as 1972, the Tall Cadre had told us that we were such a bunch of fuck-ups that they would never, ever put any more Americans with us, so I knew this was a long shot.) But this cadre—a guy we called the One-Hour Cadre since he never overstayed his welcome, unlike all the others—just said, “Uh-uh. We can’t use White.” He said that White had had some sort of accident or stroke and was now paralyzed. And that was the end of that. I have found out since getting to Japan that the most often told story about White was that he drowned around 1985. I don’t know which story about him is true. Maybe both. Maybe neither.

Anocha left in April 1989. A few months before her departure, some cadres came to say that they had found her another husband. She wanted to stay and have the husband come here. And we wanted that, too. The Organization said that would not happen. Her new husband was a German and did some sort of business that required frequent trips abroad, so maybe it wound up being a big step up for Anocha. Regardless, we were sad to see her go because she was the person in the apartment building we were closest to by far. Hitomi was particularly sad because they had become very good friends over the years. The night before Anocha left, she came over to our apartment for a farewell party. It was just the three of us. She brought a bottle of wine and a cassette tape of American rock and roll songs from the 1950s and1960s. We got drunk and did the twist all night long, playing “Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard over and over and over again.

Most of our contact with foreigners was with people whose presence there could easily be explained—students, diplomats, businessmen. I know the Organization preferred we didn’t associate with them, but as long as we did it in limited doses, there wasn’t much they could do to stop it. A lot of Syrians were studying medicine at the No. 11 Hospital, which was right near the Pyongyang Shop, for example, so we would see them often and got to know some of them pretty well. Siham would speak Arabic with them, and she would frequently trade foreign currency with them. She would trade money with them on our behalf, too, saying she got a better rate because they were more comfortable dealing with her, but she always took a monstrous cut. Through acting in the movies, I also became friends with people like the son of the Cuban ambassador. And through a chance meeting in the Pyongyang Shop, I became buddies with the Nigerian ambassador, too.

One big character in our lives was an Ethiopian named Sammy who was a composition student at the Pyongyang music college. Sammy would hang around the Pyongyang Shop’s restaurant every afternoon. He was there so often, it was like his home. I doubt he ever studied. He was the person who slipped us most of the movies we would watch. In 1989, Parrish bought a VCR for about 620 won. Having a VCR was legal, but the biggest problem was that there was nothing to watch. We told Sammy we were sick of watching North Korean propaganda movies on tape, and he said he would start bringing us real movies.

We soon developed a handoff system. Whenever we went to the Pyongyang Shop’s restaurant, we would take a bag with us. Sammy, as I said, was almost always guaranteed to be there. As you walked in the restaurant, there was a window to the left that had long, floor-length curtains. Behind these curtains was the drop-off point. After we walked in, Sammy would get up, disappear for a few minutes, come back, and sit down at our table. While we were chatting, he would mention that “things were in position.” That was our signal that the tapes were there and the coast was clear. One of us would get up and grab the tapes he had just left there.

Thanks to Sammy, we got to see a pretty steady supply of Western movies. We would watch them at Parrish’s house, with all the curtains drawn and the volume turned down as low as possible. That was how we became familiar with Michael Jackson’s music. Sammy brought us “Thriller” on video. I have to say, Michael Jackson seemed like a pretty strange guy even then. Some of the many movies he lent us included a lot of the James Bond movies, Titanic, Cliffhanger, Coming to America, and many of the Die Hards. Sometimes it seemed like there were as many Die Hard movies as James Bond movies. For a few years in the early 1990s, Parrish got into the black market tape-selling business. He got a second VCR and would duplicate the tapes he borrowed from Sammy, cramming about four movies onto one cassette at LP speed, and then he would give them to his son, Michael, to sell to some Chinese he knew in a nearby town.

My daughters didn’t watch the movies much. I think it was hard for them to relate to them. They seemed so strange and otherworldly; they could hardly make sense of them. In Coming to America, for example, Eddie Murphy stars as an African prince who finds a wife in New York City, but Brinda and Mika had always been taught that black people in America were still basically slaves, so to see these shots of all the races walking around freely and basically getting along with each other on the streets of New York City was too much for them. Even though Coming to America was a fairy tale involving princes and princesses, I tried to tell them that it was still a better view of what the world was really like than the life we were living. I would always tell them, “We are not in the real world. This is not the real world.” But they didn’t believe me. It was the only world they knew.

7 | Domestic Life

I am well aware that we Americans and our families were a special, even privileged group in North Korea and that our tales of hardship do not compare to the truly unimaginable suffering that so many North Koreans endure every day. Perhaps millions of North Koreans have already starved to death since famines began hitting the country in the mid-1990s, and a huge percentage of the country’s citizens still live with the constant torture of not having enough food to eat or clean water to drink. In addition, many hundreds of thousands, if not more, have been worked to death and are still being worked to death in the nation’s prisons and gulags. Our situation, it is true, was never remotely that dire. We always had a shelter and never went without food for more than a day or two. But even so, the life we lived was never easy, and our “privileged” existence here would have been considered unspeakable in much of the rest of the world. Our battles with cold, hunger, thirst, poverty, and inadequate sanitation were constant, day in and day out, year in and year out.

I can begin with the cold, since that is the thing that I can still feel deep down in my bones. Our apartment building had a heating system, but it was a good day when we actually had adequate heat. Our house used a hot-water system fired by a coal-burning boiler that sat in the basement. We were responsible for tending to our own boiler. At first, we split the job up. Every year we would start the fire in October or November. Parrish, Dresnok, and I would then each take ten days per month until we shut it down, usually in March. Parrish developed some health problems, mostly involving his kidneys, in 1986, and he bowed out. Then Dresnok came down with heart trouble in the early 1990s, so that left it to me to keep the apartment warm.

Every year we got about twenty tons of coal for the winter. Some trucks would usually bring it in several big shipments over a couple of days in September. We had a storage room in the basement to keep the coal dry, but the leaders would sneak in and help themselves, chipping away at our supply. The first step when you get a coal delivery is to sift the rocks out of it and put it in storage. Then, you can’t just shovel the coal straight into the furnace. You need to make it more stable and slower burning by mixing it with clay. We had a huge mound of clay outside, which we used to make this mixture: We blended three shovels full of coal with one shovel of clay, stirred it with water, and formed it into a mound or brick. But the clay-and-coal bricks need to be dry, so it is best to build them well in advance. It is important to always have enough on hand, because if the fire goes out, it takes at least half a day to build a good, hot boiler fire from scratch. And you can’t let an extinguished fire set for more than a couple of hours because not only will you get cold, but the water will freeze and the pipes will burst, and then, brother, you really have problems.

The pipes were crooked, so half of the building was never properly heated. And sometimes, because of bad construction, air pockets would form in a pipe somewhere and water would get stuck, so you’d have to boil the hell out of the tank to just force the water through the system. Or you’d have to plunge an outlet valve to get things moving again. If you take care of the boiler like you should, you really should be there all day, stoking the fire and tending to it. But in practice, I would load and stoke it three times a day: once at dawn, once around lunch, and once before I went to bed. Three times a day, I would go right up into that fire. I’d come out covered in soot, blacker than night. That’s why I kept a separate set of clothes outside. I would change into and out of them just to stoke the fire, so I didn’t track soot into the house too badly. But washing up three times a day, scrubbing coal off of your face without hot water? Now that’s a chore. Finally, around 1997, I got one of the leaders to agree that I needed some help, so after that, I usually had an Organization flunky on rotation with me.