The Reluctant Communist (25 page)

On June 14, my family and I left Tokyo to achieve a dream that over most of the last forty years I never thought would come to pass: We were headed back to my hometown. My sister Pat and brother-in-law Lee picked us up at the airport and took us to their large, beautiful brick home right in the heart of historic Weldon, a town not far from Rich Square, where I grew up. As we entered the house for the first time, my mother was there waiting for me. I just cannot put into words the feelings that came over me as I laid eyes on her and gave her a hug and a kiss. It was a moment that I will never forget.

Pat had warned me ahead of time that our mother’s Alzheimer’s had become very advanced over the past year. Our reunion was dramatic and emotional, but I have to admit that it probably meant more to me than it did to her. She knew I was her son Robert and that I had been gone a very long time, but there was not much more that she was able to comprehend. As with many people suffering from Alzheimer’s, she had good days and bad days. Some days she would be able to recognize and register who Hitomi and I were. On other days, she would confuse me with my brother, Gene, or really not even be able to make out that we were her children at all. There were times that it was very sad to watch, to see this woman who had always been so strong and such a powerful figure in my life laid low by her failing mind.

I try to live my life without regret, and no part of my journey out of North Korea could have been helped or speeded along, but I do wonder what it would have been like to be reunited with my mother when she still understood everything and I could have explained to her everything that had happened. I am so happy that I got to see her, and that she was still coherent enough when I got out of North Korea in July of 2004 that she could at least understand that I was not a communist defector who lived there by choice or abandoned his family on purpose. But I am sorry and sad that she had slipped so far into Alzheimer’s by the time I arrived that I could not tell her all the details myself.

My trip home was, as much as possible, a private affair spent catching up with all of my long-lost relatives and friends. All of my surviving siblings came over to Pat’s house at various points throughout the week. Some of my old buddies from Rich Square came over one evening. And many nieces and nephews visited as well, some flying in all the way from California to see me. We just sat in Pat’s living room talking about the old times, and I told stories about what life was like in North Korea. Everybody was excited to meet Mika, Brinda, and Hitomi. I doubt my daughters ever realized they had such a large family. I am extremely grateful to have a family like that, one that was supportive of me all the years I was gone and continues to be supportive now. A big highlight of the trip was also filling up on all the Southern home cooking I had been missing for decades. Smoked ham, blackeyed peas, macaroni and cheese, cornbread, seven-layer salad, and pineapple upside-down cake—and that was just one meal. My daughters developed a particular fondness for the cornbread Pat would make.

We did try to get out of the house as much as we could, but the Japanese media, who were camped outside Pat’s house and followed us wherever we went, made that very difficult. It is hard to overestimate just how famous my wife is in Japan and how much media interest there is in her every move. For our trip to the United States, every Japanese network, newspaper, and wire sent a full crew to report, multiple times a day, on the details of our visit. They followed us wherever we went. I understand that the media just had a job to do, and I am thankful that people seem genuinely interested in our story, but I wish we could have had more time to ourselves. We visited my father’s grave and drove around some of my old haunts in Rich Square. We went shopping a few times, went bowling, and had dinner or lunch at restaurants a couple of times. One day we took a trip to the North Carolina Zoo, which Brinda and Mika particularly enjoyed.

I was amazed at how much the area I had grown up in had changed. Since I had managed to stay somewhat current with the outside world while I was in North Korea by listening to the radio or watching smuggled videotapes, my culture shock in either Japan or America was not as great as you might expect. I had never used a computer before arriving in Japan and had never seen one in real life, for example, but thanks to the movies, I knew what they were, what they did, and what they looked like. But the size of things in America did surprise me. We went to a Wal-Mart, and even compared to Japanese stores, the place was enormous. Same with cars. Japan makes some of the best cars in the world, but the cars in the United States (even the Japanesemade ones) are so much bigger than the cars in Japan. The other big surprise I had in the United States was how completely integrated society was and how equally whites and blacks treated each other. It was clear that the South had made a lot of progress in that regard over forty years.

I was a little surprised, to be honest, at what a controversial figure I was in my hometown. I knew that I was infamous, and that my status as a suspected defector and my appearance in North Korean movies had made it very difficult for my family, but since I had been out for a while and thought that the accurate details of my story were fairly well-known, I did not expect the more extreme and hate-filled things some of my critics in the United States said about me. More than what they said, I was surprised at why they said it—that is, I was surprised at how ignorant people were about my case and what North Korea is really like. Going AWOL to avoid combat is a serious crime, and abandoning troops under your command is one of the worst things a military man can do. I know that, I have admitted that, I am sorry for that, and I have spent my life having to live with my conscience and the consequence of my actions on that day; at my court-martial, I asked the U.S. Army’s and America’s forgiveness. But clearly that message had not gotten through back home. Maybe it is partly my fault—perhaps I have not been vocal enough about my regret—but upon my arrival in America, I was astonished to learn that some people were convinced that I was a communist sympathizer and willing defector, that I had spent forty years in North Korea by choice (“I don’t know why he chose to come out now if he liked it there so much,” I heard one lady interviewed on the TV news say), or that I did things like appearing in movies or teaching English to military cadets because I wanted to.

I sometimes wonder if my critics know just how common a military crime desertion is and how rare lengthy jail sentences for it really are. I do not imagine everyone will be able to forgive me for what I did, but all I ask is that those who judge me at least know what they are judging me for before they say things like I should be lined up against a wall and shot. That said, I did receive a tremendous amount of support and goodwill from the vast majority of people I encountered and heard from while I was in North Carolina. I think it is significant that the only strangers who approached me on the street were those with a kind word and a smile, a pat on the back, and a “Welcome home.”

Upon returning from the States, I focused my attention on finishing this book, which was published in Japan in October 2005. When that was done, I turned my attention to removing one of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of living a happy life in Japan: not having a driver’s license. Since no driving schools on Sado or even the largest nearby mainland city of Niigata had English-speaking instructors, I moved to a small boarding house just outside of Tokyo and enrolled in the Koyama Driving School.

Everyone there was very nice to me, but getting my license was not easy. I went for lectures and driving lessons every day. I was a great driver in the United States and in the army: When I was stationed in Germany, I was even in charge of the motor pool. But I had not driven a car in forty years, so I was pretty rusty. And with all of the signs in Japanese, many of the rules of the road so different than those in the United States, and driving on the left side of the road, I had my work cut out for me. I would go home every night and read the books and try to memorize all the rules for driving. But since I was never much for book learning, this was pretty slow going. And the days when we drove on real Tokyo streets made me so nervous, I never got any sleep the night before. Psychologically, it was very tough. But with hard work and lots of dedication, I made it. And I am glad I did, because now I am more confident than ever. One of my instructors told me, “If you can drive in Tokyo, you can drive anywhere,” and I believe that is true. After twenty days of lessons, I went back to Niigata, and on my third try, I passed the driving test.

When I returned to Sado, I bought a Daihatsu Move, and I cannot tell you how happy being able to go where I want, when I want, has made me. Later, in the spring of 2006, I even went back to the same Tokyo driving school to get my motorcycle license. In Japan, you don’t need a special license to drive a 50cc motorcycle, so for a while I would tool around Sado on that. But it is so small and slow that you need to ride on the shoulder of the road with all the cars whizzing past you. To me, that felt pretty unsafe, so I went back to driving school to get a proper motorcycle license. Since I knew all the basics, getting my motorcycle license took me only ten days. Now, on nice days, I will ride around Sado on a 250cc Honda Magna that I bought. That is a lot more power than a 50cc, but it is still a lot easier to manage than the bikes at the driving school, where instructors make you learn on a 400cc.

After all of the commotion surrounding the book’s initial publication, my life has finally settled down to a very comfortable routine. Every morning, my wife and I get up and have coffee and breakfast together. Between 8:00 and 9:00, Hitomi leaves for her job at city hall on Sado. Most days around that time, at least during the summer, I head out to my farm. Well, I call it my “farm,” but at 225 by 100 feet, it is really just a big garden on the land attached to my father-in-law’s old home. Every year I plant corn, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, cabbage, watermelon—a whole bunch of stuff. I plant so much that it is more than Hitomi and I can eat, and we wind up giving a lot away to neighbors or a local restaurant we like to go to. I also tend to the rabbits my wife and I keep.

After I check on the garden for a little while, I head out to work. I work seven days a week. On weekends, I work at the Sado Gold Mine, which is one of Sado’s major tourist attractions. I am a groundskeeper there. On all other days, I work at a cookie factory at Rekishi-densetsu-kan Park in Mano City. That park is also a big tourist attraction, and the cookies from Sado are famous and one of a kind. I work in the store, helping to stock the shelves and meet the guests who come in. The people of Sado have gotten used to having me and Hitomi around. They don’t even glance twice when they see us on the street and around town. But tourists who come to Sado from other parts of Japan, they are a different story. When they see me in that shop, they just about go crazy. (Their reaction when they see Hitomi, if they happen to catch her out on the street, is even more extreme.) I shake their hands, pose for pictures, and speak to them as well as I can, considering how bad my Japanese still is. That is one of the parts of living in Japan I am most sheepish about: My Japanese still isn’t very good. The manager of the cookie factory is happy to have me, because my presence makes a lasting impression on the guests and maybe gives them one more thing to talk about at home when they return from their trip to Sado. Recently, in fact, the cookie factory started putting a sticker with my name and signature on it on every box of cookies. My wife was against that at first. She thought it was too much, me acting like my head was too big, like I was some sort of big shot. But I told her I didn’t think anyone who gets up every morning and farms and works in a cookie store could really have too big of a head, and after a while she agreed that that was probably true.

During the evenings, my wife and I usually enjoy a quiet dinner at home and watch TV or a movie. Every Monday, I help out with a local English class, just to give the students more practice speaking with a native speaker. Sometimes my wife and I will go to dinner with some of my wife’s coworkers at one of a number of small restaurants on the island and finish up with karaoke at a nearby bar. I am particularly fond of singing Elvis Presley songs. (Former prime minister Koizumi is also an Elvis fan.) On weekends, I often go fishing with a coworker from my wife’s office. The fishing on Sado is excellent: I frequently bag fifty fish in a day. If my daughters are in town for the weekend, the whole family will take a day trip to the beach or go hiking. I haven’t really gotten the hang of our home computer, except to check the news and print photographs, but I think I would have an easier time if the operating system wasn’t in Japanese. Lately, I have taken up photography, and I like to shoot home movies with my video camera.

To be honest, I do not have many big hopes or plans for the future. After living for forty years in North Korea, just to be out and living in freedom and comfort in Japan with my wife and daughters is more than I ever thought I would get out of life. If I do have hopes for the future, they are modest ones. My biggest desire is that my wife and I continue to have a good life at home together on Sado and that my daughters make the most of their futures, building lives that make them happy and fulfilled. It is up to them to determine what will make them happiest, of course, but I imagine that would mean a husband, children, good jobs, close friends, and a lifetime of good health.

My daughters live in Niigata with a family originally from Sado as they go to college. After months of studying only Japanese, they passed their Japanese fluency exam in April 2006, and now they are taking courses that more directly focus on their careers. Mika has decided to be a kindergarten teacher, so she is enrolled in a local teachers’ college. Brinda, meanwhile, wants to go into the wedding and events planning business, so she is currently studying at business school. They come home for a weekend once a month or so, and I am always so happy to see them. I am amazed at how quickly they are growing and how well they are adjusting to Japan. But their futures are now up to them, and I thank God that they are in a place where they are able to make such choices. Our choices are what make us who we are. Nobody knows that better than me.