She glanced at them only once. To her, they did not look like soldiers; with their broad-rimmed puffy caps they looked more like members of a band, ready to pick up musical instruments rather than weapons. They looked funny, weak, and incompetent, when she knew them to be cagey and paranoid and dangerous to everyone, including themselves.
One said, “Yie Chung-Cha, you are to be commended. His Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un has been informed and sends his personal thanks. You will be rewarded appropriately.”
She handed back the soiled towel and soap.
“How appropriately?”
The generals glanced at each other, their features showing their amazement at this comment.
“The Supreme Leader will determine that,” said the other. “And you will be grateful for whatever he decides.”
His companion added, “There is no greater honor than to serve one’s country.”
She stared up at them both, her features unreadable. Then she turned and walked down the corridor and made her way out of the camp. As she passed, many watched her. None attempted to make eye contact. Not even the most brutal of all the guards there. Word of what she had done had already made its way through the camp. Thus none wanted to look Yie Chung-Cha in the eye because it might be the last thing they ever saw.
Her gaze never wavered. It pointed straight ahead.
Outside the four-meter fence a truck awaited. A door opened and she climbed in.
The truck immediately drove off, heading to the south, to Pyongyang, the capital. She had an apartment there. And a car. And food. And clean water. And some wons in a local bank. That was all she needed. It was far more than she had ever had. Far more than she had ever expected to have. She was grateful for this. Grateful to be alive.
Corruption could not be tolerated.
She knew that better than most.
Four men dead today by her hand.
The truck drove on.
Chung-Cha forgot about the corrupt administrator who had demanded euros and sex in payment for her escape. He was not worth any more of her thoughts.
She would return to her apartment. And she would await the next call.
It would come soon, she thought. It always did.
And she would be ready. It was the only life she had.
And for that too she was grateful.
No greater honor than to serve one’s country?
She formed spit in her mouth and then swallowed it.
Chung-Cha looked out the window, seeing nothing as they drew nearer to Pyongyang. She spoke to none of the others in the vehicle.
She always kept her thoughts to herself. That was the only thing they couldn’t take from her. And they had tried. They had tried mightily. They had taken everything else. But they had not taken that.
And they never would.
H
ER APARTMENT. UNTIL THEY TOOK
it away. It had a bedroom, a miniscule kitchen, a bathroom with a shower, and three small windows. About two hundred square feet total. To her, it was a magnificent castle.
Her car. Until they took it away. It was a two-door model made by the Sungri Motor Plant. It had four tires and a steering wheel and an engine and brakes that usually worked. Her possession of the vehicle made her a rare person in her country.
The vast majority of her fellow citizens traveled on bicycles, took the metro or the bus, or simply walked. For longer commutes there was the rail. But it could take up to six hours to go barely a hundred miles because the infrastructure and equipment were so poor. For the very elite there were commercial aircraft. Like with the rail service, there was only one airline—Air Koryo. And it flew mostly old, Russian-made aircraft. She did not like to ride on Russian wings. She did not like anything Russian.
But Chung-Cha had her own car and her own apartment. For now. That was stark proof of her worth to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
She walked into the kitchen and ran her hand over one of her most prized possessions. An electric rice cooker. This had been her reward from the Supreme Leader for her killing of the four men at Bukchang. That and an iPod loaded with country-and-western music. As she held the iPod she well knew that it was a device that most of her fellow North Koreans didn’t even know existed. And she had also been given one thousand wons. That might not seem like much to some, but when you have nothing, anything seems like a fortune.
There were three classes of people in North Korea. There was the core, made up of loyalists to the country’s leadership and, for lack of a better term, purebloods. There was the wavering class, whose total loyalty to the leadership was in doubt. It was this class that represented the majority of the country, and for whom many lucrative jobs and government positions were out of reach. And, lastly, there was the hostile class, made up of enemies of the leadership and their descendants. Only the most elite of the core group had rice cookers. And the elite numbered perhaps one hundred and fifty thousand in a country of twenty-three million. There were more people in the prison camps.
It was quite a feat for Chung-Cha to have attained what she had, because her family was of the hostile class. Rice in one’s belly was a mark of wealthy, elite status. However, exclusive of the ruling Kim family—which lived like kings, with mansions and water parks and even their own train station—even the most elite of North Koreans existed at a level that would be looked upon as very near poverty in developed nations. There was no hot water; the electricity was totally unreliable, with only a few hours of it a day at best; and travel outside the country was nearly impossible. And a rice cooker and some songs was the reward given by one’s enormously rich leadership for enduring torture and suffering and for killing four men and uncovering corruption and treason.
But still, for Chung-Cha, it was far more than she had ever expected to have. A roof over her head, a car to drive, a rice cooker; it was like all the wealth in the world was hers.
She moved to a window of her apartment and looked out. Her place overlooked the center of Pyongyang, with a nice view of the Taedong River. A city of nearly three and a half million souls, the capital was by far the largest metropolis in the country. Hamhung, the next most populous city, had barely a fifth of Pyongyang’s people.
She liked to look out the window. She had spent a good part of her earlier life dearly wishing for a window that looked out onto anything. For over a decade at the labor camp her wish had not come true. Then things had changed. Dramatically.
And now look at me
, she thought.
She put on her coat and boots with the four-inch heels that made her taller. She would never wear such footwear on a mission, but the women in Pyongyang were very much into their thin high heels. Even women in the military, working construction, and in the traffic police wore them. It was one of the few ways to feel, well, liberated, if that was even possible here.
The monsoon season, running from June to August, had passed. The cold, dry winter would begin in about a month. Yet now the air was mild, the breeze invigorating, and the skies clear. These were the days on which Chung-Cha liked to walk through her city. They were rare times, for her work carried her to many other parts of her country and the world. And there never was occasion for a leisurely walk during any of those times.
On the left breast of her jacket rode her Kim pin. All North Koreans wore this decoration, depicting either or both Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il, both dead, but both never to be forgotten. Chung-Cha did not want to always wear the pin, but if she did not her arrest would be imminent. Even she was not so important to the state that she could ever forgo this sign of respect.
As she walked she took in observations she had made long ago. In many ways the capital city was a twelve-hundred-square-mile tribute to the ruling Kim family on the banks of the Taedong that flowed southward into Korea Bay. Pyongyang translated into “flat land” in Korean, and it was well named. It was only ninety feet above sea level and stretched outward smooth as a
bindaetteok
, or Korean pancake. The main boulevards were broad and largely devoid of cars. What passed by on the roads were mostly trolleys or buses.
The city did not seem like it had millions of residents. While the sidewalks were fairly full with pedestrians, in her work Chung-Cha had visited cities of comparable size in other countries where far more people were out and about. Perhaps it was all the surveillance cameras and police watching that made the citizens want to hide from view.
She walked down the steps to the metro. Pyongyang had the deepest subway system in the world, over a hundred meters in the ground. It ran only on the west side of the Taedong, while all foreign residents lived on the east side. Whether this was intentional or not she didn’t know. But being North Korean, she assumed it was. Central planning combined with paranoia had been elevated to a high art here.
Citizens queuing up for the next train did so in precise straight lines. North Koreans were drilled from an early age to form pristine lines in under a minute. There were straight lines of humanity all over the capital city. It was part of the “single-hearted unity” for which the country was known.
Chung-Cha did not join the queue. She purposely waited apart from it until the train entered the station. She rode the train to another section of town and came back to the surface. The green spaces in Pyongyang were immense and many in number, but not as immense as the monuments.
There was the Arch of Triumph, a copy of the one in Paris, but far bigger. It commemorated the Korean resistance to Japan from the 1920s to the 1940s. There was the Washington Monument lookalike Juche Tower, which was one hundred and seventy meters tall and stood for the Korean philosophy of self-reliance.
As she passed it Chung-Cha nodded silently. She relied only on herself. She trusted only herself. No one here had to tell her that. She didn’t need a monument shooting into the sky to make her believe
that
.
There was the also the Arch of Reunification, one of the few that featured Korean women. Dressed in traditional Korean garb, they held between them the map of a united Korea. The arch straddled the Reunification Highway, which went from the capital city all the way to the DMZ.
Symbolism again, she knew.
Chung-Cha had two notions on reunification. First, it would never happen, and second, she didn’t care if it did or not. She would not be unified with anyone, north or south.
Later, she passed the Mansudae Grand Monument, which was an enormous tribute to the memory of North Korea’s founder, Il Sung, and also to his son, Jong Il.
Chung-Cha passed by this monolithic structure without looking at it. This was a bit dicey on her part. All North Koreans paid tribute here by standing and gazing lovingly at the statues of the two men. All brought flowers. Even foreign tourists were required to lay floral offerings here or else be arrested and/or deported.
Yet Chung-Cha walked on, almost daring a nearby policeman to stop her. There were limits to her patriotism.
Towering over the entire city was the white elephant of Pyongyang, the Ryugyong Hotel. It was begun in 1987, but construction funds ran out in 1992. Although construction had restarted in 2008, no one knew if it would ever be completed or whether even one guest would sleep there. For now it was a 330-meter-high monstrosity with nearly four million square feet of space in the shape of a pyramid.
Interesting central planning there, she thought.
Her belly grumbling, Chung-Cha entered a restaurant. North Koreans typically did not eat out because it was a luxury most could not afford. If a group did go out, it was usually on state business with the government footing the bill. At times like that the workers would eat and drink prodigious amounts, going home drunk on
soju
, or rice liquor.
She had passed other restaurants offering typical Korean fare like kimchi—spicy pickled vegetables that every Korean woman knew how to make—boiled chicken, fish, and squid, as well as the luxury of white rice. She kept going past all of these and entered the Samtaesung Hamburger Restaurant, which served burgers, fries, and shakes. Chung-Cha had often tried to reconcile in her mind how a restaurant serving what would be recognized around the world as American food could exist here when there was not even a U.S. embassy located in Pyongyang because the two countries did not have official diplomatic relations. An American citizen in trouble here had to go crawling to the Swedish embassy, and even then only for medical emergencies.
She was one of the few patrons here, and all the others were westerners.
She ordered a hamburger rare, fries, and a vanilla milk shake.
The waiter looked at her severely as though silently admonishing her for eating this Western garbage. When she showed him her government ID he bowed perfunctorily and hurried away to fill her order.
She had chosen a seat with her back against the wall. She knew where the entrances and exits were. She noted anyone moving in the space, whether it was toward or away from her. She didn’t expect trouble, but she also anticipated that anything could happen at any time.
She ate her meal slowly, chewing her food thoroughly before swallowing. She had endured starvation for well over a decade. That hollow feeling in your belly never left you, even if you had ample food the rest of your life. Her diet at Yodok had consisted of whatever she could find to eat, but mostly corn, cabbage, salt, and rats. At least the rats had given her protein and helped to stave off diseases that had killed many other prisoners. She had become quite adept at catching the rodents. But she liked the taste of the burger better.
Chung-Cha was not fat and never would be. Not so long as she was working. Maybe as an aged woman living somewhere else she would allow herself to grow obese. But she did not dwell on this prospect for long. She doubted she would live long enough to grow old.
She finished her meal and paid her bill and left. She had one place she wanted to go. Something she wanted to see, although she had already seen it before. Everyone in North Korea probably had.
It had been recently moored on the Botong River in Pyongyang to become part of the Fatherland Liberation War Museum. This was so because it was a ship—a truly unique ship. It was the second oldest commissioned ship in the U.S. Navy, after the USS
Constitution
. And it was the only U.S. naval vessel currently held by a foreign power.
The USS
Pueblo
had been in North Korean hands since 1968. Pyongyang said it had strayed into North Korean waters. The United States said it had not. The rest of the world used twelve nautical miles out to sea as the demarcation for international waters. However, Pyongyang did not follow what other countries did and claimed a fifty-nautical-mile boundary. The
Pueblo
was now a museum, a testament to the might and bravery of the homeland and a chilling reminder of the imperialist intentions of the evil America.
Chung-Cha had taken the guided tour, but she did so with a perspective different from other visitors. She had read an uncensored account of the sailors aboard the
Pueblo
. This was an unheard-of thing in her country, but Chung-Cha’s work often carried her out of North Korea. The sailors had been forced to say and write things that they did not believe, like admitting to spying on North Korea and denouncing their own country. But in a famous photo of some of the seamen, they surreptitiously had been giving the finger to the North Korean cameraman and symbolically to their captors while seemingly just clasping their hands. The North Koreans did not know what a raised middle finger meant and asked the sailors about it. To a man they said it was a Hawaiian symbol of good luck. When
Time
magazine had run a story exposing the truth of the gesture, the sailors were reportedly severely beaten and tortured even more than they already had been.
When they were released in December 1968, eighty-two of them walked single file across the Bridge of No Return in the DMZ. One sailor had not walked across. He had died in the initial attack on the ship, the only fatality of the incident.
Chung-Cha finished the tour and made her way back to land. She looked back at the ship. She had been told that the Americans would not decommission the ship until it was returned to them.
Well, then it would never be decommissioned, she thought. North Korea had very little. And so they never gave anything back that they had taken. After the Soviets had left and North Korea had its independence it was as though it was this little country against the world. It had no friends. No one who truly understood it, not even the Chinese, whom Chung-Cha considered to be among the wiliest race on earth.
Chung-Cha was not a religious person. She knew no North Koreans who were. There were some Korean Shamanists, others who practiced Cheondoism, some Buddhists, and a relative handful of Christians. Religion was not encouraged since it could be a direct challenge to the country’s leaders. Marx had had it right, she thought: Religion was the people’s opium. Yet Pyongyang had once been known as the Jerusalem of the East because of the Protestant missionaries who had come in the 1800s, with the result that over a hundred churches had been erected on the “Flat Land.” That was no more. It was simply not tolerated.