The Reluctant Communist (18 page)

Even with all of my best efforts, the apartment was still colder than hell. The bathrooms, hallways, and kitchens were not piped for heat at all, so the warmest parts of the house could get up to sixty degrees on good days, while other parts would plunge well below freezing. Cooking oil and soy sauce freezing in the closet was a regular winter occurrence. We would routinely walk around and sleep in four or five layers of clothes. I remember one time I had a cold, so I went to bed with a couple of aspirin and a glass of water. I put the water on my nightstand, and it froze right there in the glass overnight.

Because it was the furthest away from the boiler and on the windiest corner, Mika and Brinda’s room was also one of the coldest rooms in the apartment building. To help them in the cold winters, I improvised an electrical floor heating system. I took four hundred yards of 0.7 millimeter copper-insulated wire and laid it down on the cement floor of their room in a back-andforth, back-and-forth pattern. Then I covered over that with another layer of thin cement. I hid a flip switch behind their wardrobe. It threw some pretty good heat, even though the current rarely ran at the 220 volts it was supposed to. And this heating system only worked when we had electricity, which was pretty rare.

I would say that before 1997 we had electricity about half the time through the summer and very rarely during the winter. After 1997, we had electricity during the summer only sporadically and almost never during the winter. In the final few years, we had almost no electricity at all, except on major holidays. For example, we could usually count on a couple of days of steady electricity around Kim Jong-il’s birthday on February 16. During long stretches, when we had no continuous power, perhaps twice a week we would get an hour or two of electricity. When that happened, we would focus our energies on pumping water into the house. Back in 1978 and 1979, I had dug the well myself—30 feet deep, 7.5 feet long, and 7.5 feet wide. It was about a hundred yards away from the apartment building, and we had to pump the water up to a holding tank on a hill about a hundred yards past the apartment building.

We had an electric motor to pump the well. It was a fourteenkilowatt motor, but we really needed a twenty-one-kilowatt one to do the job, so even when the electricity was working, it was so weak that the water would rarely get to the tank even on the best days. So usually, we pumped water straight to the apartment building. But even then, it would usually only get as far as Parrish’s and Dresnok’s places on the first floor. So my family and Anocha would have to carry our water up from their houses in buckets. We had a twenty-gallon tank and a fifteen-gallon tank in the kitchen and another fifteen-gallon tank in the bathroom. Brinda and Mika have probably carried more buckets of water up a flight of stairs than they could count.

After that, we would have to boil every ounce of water we had for drinking. In North Korea, lots of people suffer from intestinal problems from drinking untreated water. Between boiling water for drinking and cooking food, that left very little gas for heating water for our baths. We had a bathtub that I bought from a supply man for 335 packs of cigarettes, but the fuel was simply too valuable to waste on bathing water. We did our cooking with gas, which came in four-gallon cans that we would refill at the hardware store. The cans themselves were hard to get, and gas was scarce. More than a few times we took our can in to get refilled and some bigwig cadre or someone from an embassy showed up and raised a fuss. The people at the hardware store simply gave them our gas and our can. And that was that. There was nothing you could do about it, except to give them a good cussing until you felt better and start trying to work angles to get yourself a new can. When we didn’t have gas, we would go outside and build a wood fire to boil our water. Everyone in my family can probably count on one hand the number of hot baths they took at home in North Korea. It is the reason that going to the public bathhouse in Pyongyang once a week was such a treat.

Then there were the toilets. In the winter, since we never had the electricity to fill the main water tank on the hill and thus never had running water, we would have to dump a bucket of water into the bowl to flush the toilet. And the take-away pipes of the toilets were so small, they would frequently clog up. It would be a stretch to say we had a septic tank. Our sewage ran raw onto the open ground about forty yards away from our house and down a hill. Rats would frequently come up the pipes. A live rat once came up through Siham’s toilet. She chased that thing around the bathroom with the nearest pipe or club she could find—maybe it was a plunger—but the rat ran right back down the toilet. Once every few years a rat would die in the plumbing, so I would have to go up into the plumbing system and fish out the rat that was plugging up the whole works.

Since electricity was scarce everywhere, candles were one of the hardest things to get in the whole country, even in the foreigners’ shops. But that didn’t matter, since North Korean candles were total crap anyway. It was better to make your own. At the hardware store, you could usually get paraffin, so I would buy it in one- or two-kilo blocks. Then I would break it up into chunks and put it in a teapot to melt it. I would also throw in the stubs of crayons I would tell the girls to save from school. That gave it a little color. Once the paraffin was melted, I would pour it into a plastic pipe about eight or ten inches tall that was stopped up on one end with a soda bottle top (which fit its circumference exactly). I had already made a hole in the soda top and knotted some cotton string (other fibers won’t work) on the outside and run the string up through the inside of the pipe and out the other end. At the top end, I would hold the string taut with a hairpin while also lining it up to make sure the string didn’t touch the edges. Then I would dip the pipe into a coffee can of cold water to speed its hardening. With five or six pipes working at once, I could make about one hundred candles a day. Try as I did, I could never find exactly the right cotton string, the kind that disintegrated as it burned. All the string I could ever find would char but not evaporate as it burned, so unless you kept your eye on the wick, it would grow long, droop, hit the outside edge of the candle, melt it, and cause it to fall over. That’s why every night I had to patrol the house a few times, tugging the tops off of the burnt wicks with tweezers.

Since we rarely had any electricity, we had a hand-cranked generator for our television, a black-and-white Chinese portable I bought for $31. Later, we could run it off of a twelve-volt battery I bought. The battery was rechargeable off of house current (which rarely mattered since the whole reason we had the battery in the first place was because the house current never worked) or by using a gasoline-powered generator I had outside. Gasoline, however, was even harder to come by than cooking gas, so we usually made do with the hand crank.

Starting in the early 1990s, we were no longer paid in won. Each of the families received a flat $120 a month. (In 2003, they switched us to 120 euros per month.) If we tried to buy all our food in dollar stores, however, the money wouldn’t have lasted a week, so we needed a way to get some won. By that time, money was tight all over the country, so it was no problem to get our leaders to trade money for us on the black market, as long as they got a cut. This is an indication of how bad things had gotten by the 1990s. In decades past, a leader never would have participated in this type of corruption. It would have been our heads if they had found out, but now the leaders themselves were doing the exchanging. But their price was steep. It varied over the years, but often you could get twelve to fifteen hundred won per dollar on the black market, and the leaders would frequently take half of that.

Every month, I would change about $30 or $40 so I could buy staples like rice and flour from the government ration supply people who came once a month. Rice in North Korea is so dirty, you can wash it all you want and even after the fourth washing the water still looks like milk. It has bugs and stones in it. Sometimes the stones are so big and there are so many of them that I think they put them there on purpose to boost the weight. But at least it was usually edible. Those were the only foods that came reliably from the supply people. And toward the end, even those were less reliable. The flour stopped coming first, and then from the mid-1990s onward, sometimes the rice wouldn’t come, either. But if the supply people brought eggs, it was guaranteed that half the eggs would be rotten. If they brought a frozen pig, measured by weight, you would discover later that they had stuffed the pig with water before freezing so more than half of your pig’s weight was going to melt away into nothing.

All the rest of our food we had to get however we could, whether it was to buy, barter, or grow it. On my plot (which was about fifty by twenty-five feet), I could grow tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, red pepper, spinach, cabbage, garlic, and corn. We usually grew enough vegetables to make it through the year. We had an old Italian freezer, but it was a tricky juggling act to keep the vegetables from spoiling. If we got a full few days of electricity, the freezer would keep the food cool for four to five days. Then, if the electricity was out for a long time, you found yourself oddly wishing it was as cold as possible so you could move the frozen food outside to keep. So we would be cold as hell, but we would be glad that at least the food was not spoiling. There are always silver linings, I suppose.

Our biggest field was of corn. We would dry the corn on the roof of the house, and in a good year, I could grow 500 pounds of dried corn. That was a popular thing to trade. I could trade dried corn for moonshine or corn noodles. I grew so much corn so we could save all of our rice for Mika and Brinda. We had to send 60 kilograms (or 132 pounds) of rice to school every month. That’s 2.2 pounds per daughter every day, even though a student’s ration is only a pound per day, so you can see that someone, somewhere, was skimming more than half of what we sent. But that’s just the way North Korea works. Growing all that corn allowed my wife and I to have corn noodles for lunch every day of our lives for more years than I care to remember. There is no food in the world that I am more sick of than corn noodles. I will never eat another corn noodle as long as I live.

In the 1990s we saw a noticeable difference in the desperation of people because of hunger. Stealing was always a problem in North Korea. If you didn’t watch your things, someone would always be happy to relieve you of them. But with the food shortages of the 1990s, hunger drove both the people and the army to bolder and more desperate extremes. It became a routine for us as the corn ripened to pull all-night guard watches because otherwise the army would pick us clean. And on the nights before the first, the eleventh, and the twenty-first of every month, we also stood watch all night. Those were the eves of market days, and locals looking to sell anything they could get their hands on would clean us out of everything we were growing if we let them. Begging also became common. People would come to our house asking for food. If our food situation allowed us to help them, we would. If we couldn’t, we couldn’t. One time a soldier came to Siham’s door begging for anything she could spare. That shocked us. It was one thing for the army to steal. But for a soldier to beg? That is something that never would have happened in decades past, when the country could at least feed itself.

In 1995 some cadres came by and told us, “Thanks to the great benevolence of Kim Jong-il, we are sending all of your children to the Foreign Language College in Pyongyang.” That is when I knew that the Organization intended to turn all of our kids into spies. I don’t believe that they had this plan from the very beginning. I don’t believe that we were part of a spy “breeding” program or anything like that. But I do believe that once we all started to have families, someone got to thinking about it and realized what they had in us. It was certainly obvious to me once I started thinking about it. Consider: Few people in the outside world even knew that we Americans were in the country. Fewer still realized that we were married, and even fewer than that knew we had children. Just looking at them, it dawned on me pretty early on that our children would be the perfect raw material for North Korean spies, simply because they looked nothing like how a person would expect a North Korean spy to look. Dona and Dresnok’s kids looked like Europeans. Siham and Parrish’s kids looked like Middle Easterners. And Hitomi and my girls looked like Asian Americans.

Imagine how powerful, because it was so unexpected, a North Korean spy with Asian American features would be? There are so many children of South Koreans and American GIs running around South Korea. My girls could have poked around Seoul and U.S. Army installations throughout South Korea endlessly without arousing any suspicion, certainly less suspicion than young adults who look fully Korean. They could show up at a personnel office, for example, saying they were trying to track down their father who had skipped out on their South Korean mother. Isn’t there anything the U.S. Army could do to help, any procedure for requesting records that might help them find their father? Now imagine how much more potent, because they are even more unexpected, the children of Dresnok and Dona, Parrish and Siham—all of whom do not have an ounce of Asian blood in them—would be doing spy work for North Korea in Europe, the Middle East, or even the United States.

For that reason, I was against them going to the Foreign Language College the second I heard the plan. (The school is sort of misnamed since it also has high school–level classes in addition to being a college.) Now, I should say that my girls had a long way to go—perhaps a decade or more of training—in political indoctrination, language skills, and spy craft—before they could even come close to being competent spies. They hadn’t bought into the ideology enough, for starters. Even that would have taken years more. But it is widely known that enrollment at the Foreign Language College is a well-trod first step toward eventually becoming a spy. Take, for example, Kim Hyon Hui, the North Korean spy who posed as a Japanese tourist when she boarded Korean Airlines Flight 858 in Baghdad on November 29, 1987, and hid a bomb onboard that exploded in midair and killed all 115 people aboard. Her first step in a decade of spy training was to graduate from the Foreign Language College.