Nothing to Envy (13 page)

Mi-ran was in her last year of high school when the relationship
began. She was intimidated by the relative sophistication of her college boy. In Pyongyang, Jun-sang could buy proper paper. He owned a ballpoint pen. His letters ran on for pages, long and eloquent. Their correspondence gradually evolved from stilted formalities to full-blown romance. Jun-sang had never seen a Hollywood romance, but his mind was fervid enough to conjure the clichés of modern love. His letters conjured up images of himself and Mi-ran running toward each other against the backdrop of a sky streaked orange and pink. He quoted to her from the novels he read in Pyongyang. He wrote love poems. On paper there was no trace of the reticence that had held him back for so long.

Jun-sang posted his letters to Mi-sook, who by then was working in an office where she could receive mail away from the scrutiny of her parents. She was the only person Mi-ran told about the relationship. Jun-sang told nobody. They never discussed the reasons for the secrecy, since sex and class background were not to be discussed openly in North Korea—in fact, complaining about your own
song-bun
was tantamount to criticizing the regime. But the fact of Mi-ran’s tainted blood hovered unspoken. They both knew if they were eventually to marry, it could hurt Jun-sang’s career and his prospects of joining the Workers’ Party. Certainly, if Jun-sang’s father were to find out, he would forbid the romance. North Korean society demands that people stick to their own. Jun-sang knew he would be expected to marry somebody from the Korean-Japanese community. In any case, Jun-sang’s father didn’t approve of his son dating.

“Finish school first. Don’t waste your time chasing girls,” he lectured.

AN ASIDE HERE ABOUT
sex in North Korea: the country doesn’t have a dating culture. Many marriages are still arranged, either by families or by party secretaries or bosses. Couples are not supposed to make any public displays of affection—even holding hands in public is considered risqué. North Korean defectors insist that there is no premarital sex and no such thing as an unmarried student getting pregnant. “It would be unimaginably terrible. I couldn’t even think of that happening,” I was told by a North Korean woman who
was herself no prude—she was working in the sex industry in Seoul at the time I met her. Certainly, North Korea doesn’t have the love hotels of South Korea or Japan. You can’t check into a regular hotel without a travel permit, and no hotel would ever admit an unmarried couple in any case. People from Chongjin have told me that unmarried couples who want to have sexual relations will go into the wilderness or even to a park by night, but I have never met anyone who has admitted to doing this.

The prudishness is part of traditional Korean culture. It is easy to forget when you’re in Seoul and see schoolgirls wearing thigh-high tartan skirts that just a century ago respectable Korean women wore full-body coverings that would rival anything required by the Taliban. The nineteenth-century British travel writer Isabella Bird Bishop wrote of seeing women in a village north of Pyongyang in 1897 wearing burkalike contraptions that she described as “monstrous hats like our wicker garden sentry-boxes, but without bottoms. These extraordinary coverings are 7 feet long, 5 broad and 3 deep, and shroud the figure from head to toe.” Women of the middle and upper classes were not permitted to leave the family compound except during specially designated times when the streets were cleared of men. Bishop had traveled extensively as well in the Islamic world, but she pronounced Korean women as being “very rigidly secluded, perhaps more absolutely so than women of any other nation.”

The wicker baskets are long gone, but the old attitudes persist. After Kim Il-sung took over, he melded traditional Korean conservatism with the Communist instinct to repress sexuality. He closed not only brothels, but the more ambiguous
kisaeng
houses where women entertained wealthy men. Pornographers were executed. Notwithstanding his own excesses and those of Kim Jong-il, a playboy in his youth, party officials caught in adulterous affairs lost their jobs.

Kim Il-sung also discouraged early marriages, giving a “special instruction” in 1971 that men should marry at twenty and women should marry at twenty-eight. As a North Korean newspaper reported, “The Motherland and nation hope and believe that the youngsters will uphold the beautiful tradition of marrying only after they have done enough for the country and people.” In fact
that was not Korean tradition at all—in the past women were expected to be married by the time they were fourteen. The regulation was designed to keep up the morale of the soldiers, so they wouldn’t fear losing their girlfriends while completing their service; it also kept down the birthrate. Although the ban on early marriage was lifted in 1990, North Koreans still do not look kindly on young couples, however innocent the relationship may be.

Propaganda campaigns advise women to adopt “traditional hairstyles in accordance with the socialist way of life and the taste of the epoch.” For middle-aged women, that means hair cut short, and permed; unmarried women can wear their hair longer if it is tied back or braided. North Korean women are not permitted to wear skirts above the knee, or sleeveless shirts. Interestingly, South Korea had similar regulations about hair and dress in the 1970s under the military dictator Park Chung-hee. It is a sign of how much North Korea remains frozen in time and how much South Korea has changed that the most radical differences between the two cultures are manifested in sexuality and dress. A few years ago, while on a trip to the pocket of North Korea that is frequented by South Korean tourists, I saw a North Korean hotel doorman look like he was on the verge of fainting at the sight of a young South Korean woman in low-cut jeans and a midriff-revealing top. Many North Korean defectors I have interviewed told me the thing that they found most surprising about South Korea was that couples kiss in public.

SO IT WAS CONVENIENT
that Jun-sang and Mi-ran’s relationship began just as the lights were going out. The darkness of North Korea by night has an absoluteness that people from the electrified world have never experienced. With no streetlights, no headlights, no ambient light seeping from windows or under doors, the darkness is an all-encompassing shroud. You can tell somebody is walking down the street only when you see the glowing tip of his cigarette.

After dinner, Jun-sang would come up with excuses to leave the house. Though he was a university student, twenty years old and a head taller, he was still terrified of his father.

“I’m off to see my friends,” Jun-sang would call out, naming one or another of his high school buddies. He promised to be home by 9:00
P.M.
, fully knowing it would more likely be midnight. Then he would bolt before his father could ask questions.

The walk to Mi-ran’s house took about thirty minutes. His steps were urgent, even though he knew he might have a long wait before she finished helping her mother clean up after dinner. He had no excuse now to hang out around her house, because his friend from boxing class—her neighbor—had moved away. So he stood in the shadows, keeping so still that he could feel the pounding of his heart.

By this time, the few places they might have gone on a date had closed. The Kyongsong County Culture Hall had no electricity to run the movie projector. The few restaurants that had operated years earlier were now closed. Along the waterfront in downtown Chongjin, next to the port, is the Chongjin Youth Park, on a lake, with rowboats and dilapidated amusement park rides, but travel regulations were so strict that a permit was required just to go from the suburbs into the city. They dared not enter the park in Kyongsong behind the train station where they might run into someone they knew.

Long walks were the best choice. There was only one road, running through town and heading up to the mountains. They walked as briskly as they could without appearing to be running away from something. They didn’t speak as they walked past the billboard of a smiling Kim Il-sung, the signposts urging, “If the Party Decides, We Do” and “Let’s Protect Kim Jong-il with Our Lives.” A large colorful billboard of soldiers with bayonets was on one side of the street, where the road passed under a wide archway painted with blue flowers. Where the slogans petered out, the town ended and they could relax into the darkness. Their pupils dilated so they could take in the scenery without straining their eyes. Overgrown trees lined both sides of the road, leaning across to one another so that they formed a tangled canopy overhead. On clear nights the stars peeked through the branches. After a few minutes, the road began to climb so that a valley opened up on one side of the road as the hills rose steeper on the other. Thickets of pine clung to the rocky hillside,
and between them, large unkempt mounds of purple wildflowers spilled over the rocks.

The road crossed over a small stream with sandy banks and turned sharply to the left, where it opened up into the Onpho hot springs resort, known as the only place in Korea where the alkaline waters gushed out from the sand, and at temperatures of 130 degrees (Fahrenheit) they were reputed to cure ills from indigestion to infertility. Up the road, blocked off by checkpoints, was a villa for Kim Il-sung—one of about thirty in scenic locations around the country maintained for his convenience. A sizable military presence kept people from straying onto the private road. Visible from the road, although also closed to the public, was a spa reserved for party officials. The spa for the public, barely operating because of the economic crisis, was a dilapidated cluster of stone and concrete buildings. The resort opened in 1946—its founding was celebrated in a mural of Kim Il-sung surrounded by doctors—and looked as though it hadn’t been repaired since. The large overgrown grounds looked lush and wild by night. The young couple wasn’t interested in the scenery. Their excitement at being together made them forget even their aching feet as they walked for miles into the night.

Walking and talking, that was all they did. The conversations were animated, consuming. When they were face-to-face, Jun-sang had none of the romantic bravado of his letters. He was polite, respectful, not daring even to hold Mi-ran’s hand until they’d been dating for three years. He courted her with his stories. He described his friends, his dormitory. He told her how the students were organized into battalions and had to march in step, arms and legs swinging, as they reported for roll call in the courtyard. He regaled her with a travelogue about Pyongyang, where she had been only once, on a primary school field trip to see the monuments. Pyongyang was the epitome of modernity—as the propaganda claimed, a city offering the world’s greatest achievements in architecture and technology. Jun-sang told her of the twin-towered Koryo Hotel with the revolving restaurant on top. He had never been inside, but gawked at the silhouette on the skyline—along with that of a 105-story pyramid under construction that was supposed to be the biggest in Asia. Jun-sang described the Pyongyang metro, a hundred yards underground,
its stations adorned with chandeliers and gilded mosaics of Kim Il-sung.

Back in Pyongyang he visited a foreign-currency shop and with his Japanese yen bought Mi-ran a barrette shaped like a butterfly and studded with rows of square rhinestones. To Mi-ran it was most intricate and exotic—she had never owned anything so pretty in her life. She never wore it because she didn’t want her mother to ask about it. She kept it hidden away, wrapped up in her underwear.

Jun-sang’s experiences in Pyongyang gave Mi-ran a glimpse into a remote world of privilege. At the same time, it was hard to listen without a trace of jealousy. She was in her final year of high school and she feared it would be the end of her education. She had seen her sisters’ disappointment as one by one they discovered that their father’s background would thwart their ambitions. One even needed permission from the board of education to take the college entrance exam. Of her three sisters, only the eldest had gone on to college, and even then she was barred from the performing arts program despite an excellent singing voice. She ended up in a physical education program and dropped out halfway through to get married.

Mi-ran had a sudden insight into her own future. She saw it laid out before her like a straight, featureless highway—a job in a factory, marriage (most likely to a fellow factory worker), children, old age, death. As Jun-sang prattled on about his roommates at the university, she grew more and more miserable. He sensed her depression and probed more deeply until at last she told him how she felt.

“I feel I have no purpose in life,” she blurted out.

He listened thoughtfully. A few weeks later, after he had returned to Pyongyang, he sent her a letter.

“Things can change,” Jun-sang wrote. “If you want more in life, you must believe in yourself and you can achieve your dreams.”

Mi-ran would later credit Jun-sang’s words of encouragement with changing her life. Once a good student, she had let her grades drop in high school. What was the point in knocking herself out if her path would be blocked anyway? But now Jun-sang’s ambition had rubbed off on her. She hit the books. She begged her mother to relieve her of her household chores so she could have more time to study. She asked her teacher to allow her to take the university qualifying
exam. If she didn’t make it to college, she wouldn’t have herself to blame.

To her great surprise, she was accepted into a teachers’ college. The Kim Jong-suk Teachers’ College—named for Kim Jong-il’s mother—was the best of the three teachers’ colleges in Chongjin. How did she get so lucky when her sisters had failed? Mi-ran herself was rather mystified, as she was a very good student but not at the top of her class. She’d thought there were many young women from better families with grades at least as good as her own who would have sought the coveted places in the freshman class.

In the autumn of 1991, she moved out of her parents’ house and into the college dormitory. The school was in the downtown Pohang district, across from the museum and behind the park at the back of the Kim Il-sung statue.