The Girl with Seven Names

I would like to shed my North Korean identity, erase the mark it has made on me. But I can’t. I’m not sure why this is so, but I suspect it is because I had a happy childhood. As children we have a need, as our awareness of the larger world develops, to feel part of something bigger than family, to belong to a nation. The next step is to identify with humanity, as a global citizen. But in me this development got stuck. I grew up knowing almost nothing of the outside world except as it was perceived through the lens of the regime. And when I left, I discovered only gradually that my country is a byword, everywhere, for evil. But I did not know this years ago, when my identity was forming. I thought life in North Korea was normal. Its customs and rulers became strange only with time and distance.

Yet what struck me most was that neither of my parents seemed that upset. Our home was just a low, two-room house with state-issue furniture, common in North Korea. It’s hard to imagine now how anyone would have missed it. But my parents’ reaction made a strong impression on me. The four of us were together and safe - that was all that mattered to them.

This is when I understood that we can do without almost anything - our home, even our country. But we will never do without other people, and we will never do without family.

No one was ever told their precise ranking in the songbun system, and yet I think most people knew by intuition, in the same way that in a flock of fifty-one sheep every individual will know precisely which sheep ranks above it and below it in the pecking order. The insidious beauty of it was that it was very easy to sink, but almost impossible to rise in the system, even through marriage, except by some special indulgence of the Great Leader himself. The elite, about 10 or 15 per cent of the population, had to be careful never to make mistakes.

At the time my parents met, a family’s songbun was of great importance. It determined a person’s life, and the lives of their children.

They had to be the highest objects in the room and perfectly aligned. No other pictures or clutter were permitted on the same wall. Public buildings, and the homes of high-ranking cadres of the Party, were obliged to display a third portrait - of Kim Jong-suk, a heroine of the anti-Japanese resistance who died young. She was the first wife of Kim Il-sung and the sainted mother of Kim Jong-il. I thought she was very beautiful. This holy trinity we called the Three Generals of Mount Paektu.

About once a month officials wearing white gloves entered every house in the block to inspect the portraits. If they reported a household for failing to clean them—we once saw them shine a flashlight at an angle to see if they could discern a single mote of dust on the glass—the family would be punished.

The school year started in September, with a long vacation in the winter, not the summer, due to the difficulty of keeping the schools warm in North Korea’s harsh winters. My kindergarten had a large wood-burning stove in the middle of the classroom and walls painted with colourful scenes of children performing gymnastics, children in uniform, and of a North Korean soldier simultaneously impaling a Yankee, a Japanese and a South Korean soldier with his rifle bayonet.

Kindness toward strangers is rare in North Korea. There is risk in helping others. The irony was that by forcing us to be good citizens, the state made accusers and informers of us all. The episode was so unusual that my mother was to recall it many times, saying how thankful she was to that man, and to the passengers. A few years later, when the country entered its darkest period, we would remember him. Kind people who put others before themselves would be the first to die. It was the ruthless and the selfish who would survive.

Propaganda seeped into every subject. In our geography lesson we used a textbook that showed photographs of parched plots of land, so arid that the mud was cracked. “This is a normal farm in South Korea,” the teacher said. “Farmers there can’t grow rice. That’s why the people suffer.” Maths textbook questions were sometimes worded emotively. “In one battle of the Great Fatherland Liberation War, 3 brave uncles of the Korean People’s Army wiped out 30 American imperialist bastards. What was the ratio of the soldiers who fought?”

The one luxury we did buy for the new house was a Toshiba colour television, which was a signal of social status. The television would expand my horizon, and Min-ho’s, dramatically. Not for the “news” it broadcast—we had one channel, Korea Central Television, which showed endlessly repeated footage of the Great Leader or the Dear Leader visiting factories, schools or farms and delivering their on-the-spot guidance on everything from nitrate fertilizers to women’s shoes. Nor for the entertainment, which consisted of old North Korean movies, Pioneers performing in musical ensembles, or vast army choruses praising the Revolution and the Party. Its attraction was that we could pick up Chinese TV stations that broadcast soap operas and glamorous commercials for luscious products. Though we could not understand Mandarin, just watching them provided a window onto an entirely different way of life. Watching foreign TV stations was highly illegal and a very serious offence.

It is mandatory from elementary school to attend public executions. Often classes would be cancelled so students could go. Factories would send their workers, to ensure a large crowd. I always tried to avoid attending, but on one occasion that summer I made an exception, because I knew one of the men being killed. Many people in Hyesan knew him. You might think the execution of an acquaintance is the last thing you’d want to see. In fact, people made excuses not to go if they didn’t know the victim. But if they knew the victim, they felt obliged to go, as they would to a funeral.

As I travelled back to Hyesan, I thought the whole visit had seemed like a strange dream. I could not believe Pyongyang was in the same country where people were dying on the sidewalks in Hamhung, and vagrant children swarmed in the markets of Hyesan. In the end, though, not even Pyongyang stayed immune. The regime could not prevent famine coming to the heart of its own power base

I realize now what an extraordinary imposition I was making on him and what a kindness he was doing me. I thanked him, but he held up his palm. He’d been trading with my mother for years, he said. He valued her custom and trusted her.

My uncle and aunt made me feel instantly welcome. I was family - it made no difference to them that they had not seen me in years.

“You know all the history they teach you at school is a lie?” This was his opening shot.

He started counting off the fallacies he said I’d been taught. He said that at the end of the Second World War the Japanese had not been defeated by Kim Il-sung’s military genius. They’d been driven out by the Soviet Red Army, which had installed Kim Il-sung in power. There had been no “Revolution.”

I had never before heard my country being criticized. I thought he’d gone crazy.

I thought of my uncle’s tirade against North Korea when I’d arrived in his apartment in Shenyang over six years ago, and the bizarre truths he’d told me about the Korean War, and the private life of Kim Jong-il. I’d refused to believe him. Ever since, I’d closed my mind to the reality of the regime in North Korea. Unless it directly affected my family, I had never wanted to know. I thought the reason people escaped was because of hunger, or, like me, out of an unexamined sense of curiosity. It had never occurred to me that people would escape for political reasons.

“People may be hungry now,” my mother said. Her voice trailed off uncertainly. “But things will get better. We’re all waiting for 2012.”

I groaned. This date was the centenary of the birth of Kim Il-sung, now less than three years away. For years, Party propaganda had been trumpeting it as the moment when North Korea would achieve its goal of becoming a “strong and prosperous nation.”

The officials in immigration wanted Marlboro Reds, they had told me, the most expensive cigarettes. Once it was plain to them that I was agreeable, and opening a channel to them, their corruption became naked. At every one of my visits they’d ask how much money I had withdrawn from the ATM.

I’d seen Korean-Chinese expose North Korean escapees to the police in return for money. I’d known people who’d been trafficked by other humans as if they were livestock. That world was familiar to me. All my life, random acts of kindness had been so rare that they’d stick in my memory, and I’d think: how strange. What Dick had done changed my life. He showed me that there was another world where strangers helped strangers for no other reason than that it is good to do so, and where callousness was unusual, not the norm.

Behind the bluster, I sensed fear. Dictatorships may seem strong and unified, but they are always weaker than they appear. They are governed by the whim of one man, who can’t draw upon a wealth of discussion and debate, as democracies can, because he rules through terror and the only truth permitted is his own. Even so, I don’t think Kim Jong-un’s dictatorship is so weak that it will collapse any time soon. Sadly, as the historian Andrei Lankov put it, a regime that’s willing to kill as many people as it takes to stay in power tends to stay in power for a very long time.

I know that the mask may never fully come off. The smallest thing occasionally sends me back into a steel-plated survival mode, or I may ice over when people expect me to be open. In one edition of the popular South Korean defectors’ show, each woman’s story was spoken through floods of tears. But not mine.