Nothing to Envy (29 page)

He read:

The book went on to describe pension systems and the concept of insurance and welfare. It stated that socialist economic systems throughout the world had failed because of their inefficiency Jun-sang found himself nodding as he read along.

IN 1996, JUN-SANG
received his undergraduate degree. Rather than return to Chongjin, he decided to stay on at the university, taking a position at a research department. He was now officially an adult and had the right to leave campus. He moved out of his dormitory and took a private room. It was run-down, dirty, and poorly furnished, but he liked his landlords, an elderly couple who were hard of hearing and had poor vision. They suited Jun-sang’s purposes perfectly.

Once he had a room of his own, Jun-sang took the last of his grandfather’s money and bought a Sony television. He registered the television with the Electric Wave Inspection Bureau, as required by North Korean law. Since North Korea couldn’t manufacture its own appliances anymore, imported sets had to be fixed to the government stations and then their tuners disabled—a North Korean version of crippleware that would prevent them from receiving any information from the outside world. North Koreans joked that they were like “frogs in the well.” The world for them extended no further than the circle of light above their heads. Tech-savvy types had figured out how to get around the system. With radios it was easy—open up the set, cut the conveyor belt attached to the dial, and replace it with a rubber band that could turn the dial wherever you liked. Television required a little more expertise.

The bureau put a paper seal over the buttons of the television set that certified it had been preset on the approved station. To get around the seal without damaging it, Jun-sang used a long, thin sewing needle to push the buttons. There was a back door to his room leading out to the yard and there he constructed an antenna. He experimented with it at night after everyone was asleep, turning it this way and that until he had what he wanted: South Korean television.

Jun-sang listened to the television only late at night when the signal coming from some ninety miles away across the DMZ was clearest. He would wait until he was sure his landlords were asleep—the walls were so thin he could hear them snoring. The television wasn’t equipped with an earphone jack so he turned the volume up only
until it was just audible. He would crouch with his ear pressed to the speaker until his legs and neck were so cramped he couldn’t hold the position any longer. He listened to television more than he watched it. He was always in a heightened state of alertness when his television was on. The Electric Wave Inspection Bureau was known to pay surprise visits at odd hours. A few doors down, a neighbor had dogs. If he heard them barking at night, Jun-sang would switch the television back to the central broadcasting channel and rush outside to take down the antenna.

The television inspectors did come. One of them was a sharp-eyed fellow who noticed that a piece of Scotch tape covered the paper seal. Jun-sang had put the tape on to cover a spot where the pin had left a mark.

“What’s the tape for?” the inspector demanded.

Jun-sang’s heart pounded. He’d heard of an entire family that was taken away to the gulag because one member watched South Korean television. A friend of his who was merely suspected of listening to South Korean radio was held for a full year of interrogation, during which time he never saw sunlight. When he was released, he was deathly pale, his nerves shattered.

Oh, I put the tape on to keep the seal from coming off,” he answered as nonchalantly as he could.

The inspector frowned and went on his way.

Jun-sang should have been more careful after his close call, but he could not contain his curiosity. He had an insatiable appetite for information, current information in real time. The television brought Jun-sang not only news of the outside world, but more information than he’d ever heard before about his own country.

Jun-sang learned astonishing things that he had suspected but never knew. He heard President Bill Clinton saying that the United States had offered fuel oil and energy assistance but that North Korea preferred to develop nuclear weapons and missiles. He found out that the United States was supplying the country with hundreds of thousands of tons of rice as humanitarian aid.

Members of a U.S. congressional delegation gave a news conference and said that two million people had died of starvation in North Korea. Human rights organizations estimated that 200,000
people were confined to a gulag of prison camps and that North Korea had the world’s worst human rights record.

In 2000, South Korean television reported that the country’s president, Kim Dae-jung, was going to Pyongyang for a historic summit with Kim Jong-il. During the summit, South Korean television broadcast Kim Jong-il’s voice as he chatted with the South Korean president. Jun-sang had never heard the Dear Leader’s voice before; on North Korean radio and television his words were voiced by professional announcers who read his words in the quivering, awestruck tone reserved for the leadership. It preserved the mystique. “What do you think of our historical sights?” Jun-sang heard the Dear Leader saying in a voice that sounded old, tinny, and distinctly human.

“He’s a real person after all,” Jun-sang said to himself.

Listening to South Korean television was like looking in the mirror for the first time in your life and realizing you were unattractive. North Koreans were always told theirs was the proudest country in the world, but the rest of the world considered it a pathetic, bankrupt regime. Jun-sang knew people were starving. He knew that people were dragged off to labor camps; but he had never before heard these figures. Surely South Korean news reports were exaggerated, just like North Korean propaganda?

JUN-SANG’S TRAIN
rides home in particular reminded him of a description of living hell he had read in Buddhist scripture. The cars were so crowded that you couldn’t get to the toilet. Men urinated out the windows or waited for stops to relieve themselves outside in the fields, but sometimes they couldn’t make it and had to do it inside the car. Homeless children would run alongside the slow-moving trains begging, sometimes screaming for food. They would try to claw through the broken windows. There were long delays because the trains would break down trying to make the steep climb into the mountains north of Pyongyang. Jun-sang was once stuck for two days in a broken-down train in midwinter with an arctic wind gusting through the windowless car. He befriended other passengers—a woman with a twenty-day-old baby and a young man
who was late for his own wedding. Together, they swiped a metal bucket and lit a fire inside, ignoring the conductor’s commands to put it out. Had it not been for the fire, they all could have perished from hypothermia.

On one trip in 1998, when the North Korean economy was at its worst, Jun-sang was stuck at a small town in South Hamgyong province where he usually switched from the eastbound trains to the northbound line up the coast. The tracks were flooded and a cold, driving rain drenched the waiting passengers. Jun-sang took what shelter he could find on the platform. As he waited, his attention was drawn to a group of homeless children, the
kochebi
, who were performing to get money for food. Some of them did magic tricks, some danced. One boy, about seven or eight years old, sang. His tiny body was lost in the folds of an adult-sized factory uniform, but his voice had the resonance of a much older person. He squeezed his eyes shut, mustering all his emotion, and belted out the song, filling the platform with its power.

Jun-sang knew the song by heart from his childhood, except the lyrics had been updated. In the verse “Our father, Kim Il-sung,” the child substituted the name of Kim Jong-il. It was beyond reason that this small child should be singing a paean to the father who protected him when his circumstances so clearly belied the song. There he was on the platform, soaking wet, filthy, no doubt hungry.

Jun-sang reached into his pocket and gave the boy 10 won, a generous tip for a street performer. It was less an act of charity than gratitude for the education the boy had given him.

He would later credit the boy with pushing him over the edge. He now knew for sure that he didn’t believe. It was an enormous
moment of self-revelation, like deciding one was an atheist. It made him feel alone. He was different from everybody else. He was suddenly self-conscious, burdened by a secret he had discovered about himself.

At first he thought his life would be dramatically different with his newfound clarity. In fact, it was much the same as ever before. He went through the motions of being a loyal subject. On Saturday mornings he showed up punctually at the ideological lectures at the university. The Workers’ Party secretary droning on about the legacy of Kim Il-sung sounded like he was on autopilot. In winter when the auditorium was unheated, the lecturer would wrap up as quickly as possible. Jun-sang often snuck a peak at the other members of the audience. There were usually about five hundred people, mostly graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. During the lecture, they jiggled their feet and sat on their hands to stay warm. But their faces were still and expressionless, as blank as mannequins in a department store window.

He realized suddenly he wore the same vacant expression on his face. In fact, they all probably felt exactly the same way he did about the contents of the lecture.

“They know! They all know!” he nearly screamed, he was so certain. These were supposedly the finest young minds in the nation. “Anybody with a functioning brain cannot
not
know that something is wrong.”

Jun-sang realized he was not the only nonbeliever out there. He was even convinced that he could recognize a form of silent communication that was so subtle it didn’t even rise to the level of a wink or a nod. One of the university students, a young woman, gained some acclaim when she wrote in her diary about her admiration for the Dear Leader. An article appeared about her in
Rodong Sinmun
and she won an award for her loyalty. The university students ribbed her mercilessly. They thought she was a freak, but because they couldn’t say so, they just teased her instead.

“Who’s the lucky guy who will get to marry
you
?” they asked her. But that was as far as they could go.

North Korean students and intellectuals didn’t dare to stage protests as their counterparts in other Communist countries did.
There was no Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. The level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take root. Any antiregime activity would have terrible consequences for the protester, his immediate family, and all other known relatives. Under a system that sought to stamp out tainted blood for three generations, the punishment would extend to parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins. A lot of people felt if you had one life to give, you would give it to get rid of this terrible regime, but then you’re not the only one getting punished. Your family would go through hell,” one defector told me.

It was impossible to start a book club or conduct a political discussion. Any free exchange of ideas would invariably lead to forbidden territory. In any group of three or four people, there had to be at least one spy for the various intelligence agencies. Jun-sang suspected that his best friend from high school was a government informer. The boy had been the school’s best student, even better than Jun-sang, but he couldn’t attend university in Pyongyang because a childhood case of polio had left him with a limp. When Jun-sang came home from Pyongyang, the friend would complain loudly about the government, encouraging Jun-sang to respond. There was something bold and contrived in his tone that made Jun-sang worry about entrapment. He avoided the friend entirely.

He reminded himself: You don’t talk politics as long as you live in North Korea. Not with your best friend, not with your teachers or your parents, and certainly not with your girlfriend. Jun-sang never discussed his feelings about the regime with Mi-ran. He didn’t tell her he was watching South Korean television, and reading pamphlets about capitalism. He certainly did not tell her that he had begun to harbor fantasies of defecting.