The Aquariums of Pyongyang (16 page)

I
changed jobs many times that year. None was easy, but in the monotonous life of a child prisoner any change is welcome. I worked in the cornfield, buried corpses, gathered herbs up in the mountains. The outdoor work saved me from developing full-blown pellagra, whose first symptoms—the infamous glasses and the mad desire to eat everything—I had begun to develop. Up in the mountains I caught frogs and boiled their eggs in water, and this helped me fight off the disease.

For several weeks I also filled in at the gold mine, located on the lower slopes of the camp's northern hills. Toward the end of the Japanese occupation, the mine had been assessed insufficiently profitable and shut down. Now that there was a free labor force, however, the calculations had changed. Seven to eight hundred men were employed in the mine. Working in teams of five, as in the rest of the camp, they entered the shafts without any protective gear—not even so much as a hard hat—and with
only a flashlight or candle-powered storm lantern to light their way.

One day we learned that a special mobilization had been decreed to augment national gold production and to help raise foreign currency for Kim Il-sung. To fill the new quotas, the guards transferred several agricultural teams over to the mining site. My team was one of them, though we were spared the difficult details in the farthest depths of the mine. That, fortunately, would have required additional training, something that was considered a waste of time during a mobilization period. My team's work consisted mainly of gathering and transporting minerals extracted by the veteran miners. While my job was relatively safe, I was very much affected by the scariness of the place. All of the galleries, even the deepest ones, which ran down a hundred yards, were poorly shored up. Cave-ins were common and left many miners permanently crippled. The place was so frightening it was considered cursed. According to camp legend, it always drew lightning during storms and, according to a few old-timers, several people—among them one guard—had been struck dead there by lightning bolts.

The mine work was as exhausting as it was dangerous. Since we didn't have wheelbarrows, we were left to transport the excavated dirt on our backs, in sacks that we then dumped into oxcarts at the mouth of the tunnel. From there the gold-bearing earth was wheeled to a water basin, where other prisoners would pan it for nuggets. Since the river that wound through the camp was also believed to bear gold dust, during the mobilization period, special teams were formed and made to stand in the water and pan that, too.

Despite the dangers, mining did have a few advantages. To compensate for the difficult working conditions, miners were given slightly more food and sometimes even a little oil. Since the guards
didn't dare descend into the shafts, the miners were also left in relative peace with no one around to insult and bark orders at them. The snitches were still around, however, and their presence was enough to maintain discipline and guarantee a steady output. To avoid being punished with an extra night shift, the miners had to keep moving from six in the morning until noon, and then again from one in the afternoon until seven or eight in the evening.

My tenure in the mines marked a new stage in my life at the camp; it made me realize there were others even less fortunate. At least I didn't have to spend all of my days in the subterranean dust and darkness. I had also triumphed over the “yellow spring,” pellagra, and even my interminable diarrhea. Finally, I had gotten to know the internal workings of the camp and discovered how to pull the strings necessary for survival. I learned how the work routine functioned and how assignments were organized; I figured out the guards' system for reshuffling work teams, changing orders and standards, and assigning team leaders. When a special campaign was launched, I was prepared for it, knowing I had nothing to fear from these punctual mobilizations that would end in a week or two, at which point I would rejoin my family.

I also understood the camp's system of indirect supervision, which made the work team, rather than the guards, the primary means of surveillance. The official security agents only kept a close eye on the newest arrivals—to break them in, mostly. Once prisoners were established the guards tended to keep their distance during the day, reasserting themselves in the evening, when it came time to tally the day's production. That's when they really got tense. If our quota wasn't filled, we were supposed to keep working until it was, but since the guards would have to stay out in the cold, too,
and wait to get home to their families, they sometimes overlooked the shortfalls. Recognizing this made me feel a lot less powerless. In short, I'd made it through the adaptation period that, depending on the detainee, could last anywhere from several months to several years. I was twelve years old now, and I no longer wanted to die. I even started to develop that sixth sense all prisoners have for sniffing out informants. While I now realize they were just as much victims of the system as I was, back then I thought of them as agents of voluntary evil.

A few months after my arrival, a kid who was part of my gang was selected to be an informant. The moment he got the news he came to tell us about it, warning, in jest, that we'd better start watching what we said around him. Unfortunately, we couldn't help but take him at his word. We grew more suspicious of him by the day. Whenever he was around, we refrained from criticizing the guards and teachers and refused to complain about work. The unhappy child became increasingly isolated from the group and was eventually pushed out altogether. His situation was truly perverse, and ultimately it provided him all the motivation he needed to become a genuine snitch.

Living under constant threat of denunciation, my friends and I came to hate these spies with a passion. We held them in contempt and always tried to get them back for their treachery, no matter what honor might be due their age or former station in life. Our classmate was only twelve years old, but Cho Byung-il was in his sixties—a ripe, almost biblical age by camp standards, and one ordinarily worthy of respect. A former cadre of the Korean Communist Party in Japan, he'd become one the camp's most dreaded informants. Many prisoners had him to thank for extra work details; his snitching had even sent several people to the sweatbox. While he was hated by all the prisoners at Yodok, it was the children who
despised him most. His bald head and round face were the targets of countless taunts and jeers. One day, as we were passing in front of the soybean-processing shop where he worked, he tried to peek out at us and eavesdrop on our conversation. When we saw his head appear in the shop window like a rising moon, we nearly split our sides laughing. For a long time after that, just mentioning that scene was enough to make us crack up. I'm sure Cho Byung-il felt miserable about his social and physical decline. He suffered from malnutrition just like the rest of us and, eventually, from incontinence, too, a disability the camp's hospital made no attempt to treat. In the end, his death was as ghastly as it was miserable. He had always lived by himself, apart from the other bachelors. One day, some prisoners who had suffered from his informing locked him into his hut and left him to die of hunger. The authorities knew what was happening, but did nothing. Cho Byung-il had grown too old and weak to be of use.

I remember another informant at Yodok whose specialty was snitching on kids. Once, we decided to exact our revenge by setting a trap for him at a spot he crossed several times a day. There, we dug a hole resembling the fugitive trap we had once discovered up in the mountains. In place of sharpened stakes, we filled the ditch with excrement from the latrines. The trick seemed easy and risk free. As luck had it, the infamous Wild Boar came along first and wound up burying his foot ankle-deep in feces. We saw the whole thing from our little hiding place, and now had every reason to try to keep our location secret; but our teacher was so outraged and was having such a hard time extricating himself from the mess that we just couldn't restrain ourselves. We started laughing so hard we cried. Within a minute he had us collared and was giving us the thrashing of a lifetime. When he was done, he ordered us to scoop
out all the excrement by hand and carry it over to the neighboring garden plots, where it would serve as fertilizer for the guards' summer vegetables. The abominable chore took days, during which time several of us saw our hands break out in strange-looking pimples and blisters.

Fortunately, that fall the Wild Boar was temporarily transferred to another camp and replaced by the only teacher I had at Yodok whom I still remember fondly. Thanks to this man, my life at Yodok took another turn for the better.

Shortly after his arrival, he called me into the teachers' hut and kindly began asking me a series of questions: What was my name, why was I at Yodok, when had I arrived? and so forth. Then he asked me how long it had been since I'd last had a sweet.

“Not since I've been here,” I answered.

“Would you like one?” he asked. And with that, he handed me a piece of candy, which I immediately stuffed into my mouth. As I sucked, he told me not to mention it to the others.

In class, he spoke in a normal tone of voice and called us by our first names. Unaccustomed to such treatment, we were on our guard at first, despite the happiness we felt at finally having a teacher who behaved humanly. He stayed on in the camp for only a year or a year and a half, but it was his confidence and protection that led to my being selected warrener.

As in every school in North Korea, save in the capital, the students at Yodok had the responsibility of raising rabbits. This had nothing to do with teaching us about anatomy or rodent physiology, nor was it a matter of inculcating students into a love of animals or nature. The animals were raised to provide skins for the army's winter coats. Each class had about two hundred rabbits, which were
tended to by student guards of the class's choosing. Rabbits were serious business in North Korea, and bringing up a quality pack could make a teacher's reputation. Each wanted to present the most beautiful rabbits and the largest litters, so as to provide the army with the greatest number of skins. One teacher at Yodok even tacitly encouraged us to steal corn for “our” rabbits, so they would be the best-fed nest in the school.

The position of rabbit guard was desirable for the simple reason that it replaced one's afternoon work detail. The job consisted mostly of cleaning the cages twice a week, which was easy because trays under the cages caught all the droppings. (The cages were built this way in order to protect the delicate health of the rabbits, whose feet must never remain too long in the damp.) When the other students went out to gather grass for the rabbits, I was supposed to weigh their harvest and report it to the teacher. Some of the gatherers were girls whom I liked, so when they came back a few pounds short, I just closed my eyes and jotted down the requisite 70 pounds. I also had to maintain the fires in the guardhouse adjacent to the school and in the special room dedicated to the study of Kim Il-sung's revolution. We and our parents could damn well freeze to death, but Kim Il-sung's relics, posters, and pictures needed always to stay warm.

Another, more difficult, part of the job was protecting the rabbits from rats that tried to squeeze into the cages at night to devour the young. To try to control the problem, we set up rat traps using wooden boxes, but the captured rats very often chewed their way out. The only viable solution was to mount a guard. The late hours were hard on kids who were only twelve or thirteen years old, but it gave us a chance to steal a few fruits and vegetables from the fields otherwise reserved for the guards. The rabbits were our allies in these endeavors, disposing of the pits and peels that threatened to
denounce our thieving. Thanks to them, I was able to taste melon for the first time in three or four years.

Given how hungry we were, it was inevitable that our stealing would eventually get out of hand. The armed sentinel who guarded the vegetable field always fell asleep in the first hours of his watch. The temptation was just too great. While we were never caught red-handed, the pillaging eventually became conspicuous, and our teacher let us know that we, the students, were the leading suspects. He quoted the loss estimates and threatened serious consequences should the trend continue. We were in a tight spot and needed to weigh our options carefully. Apart from the teacher's warnings, we also had to consider another, more immediate danger. A new guard had been assigned the night watch, and he was likely to be less sleepy and quicker on the draw than his predecessor. Yet if the theft ended from one night to the next, it would be tantamount to admitting our guilt—with God only knows what consequences. We ultimately decided we should keep on stealing for a while, making the best we could of the moonless nights and the aural cover of what turned out to be the new guard's snoring. In the end, it was so easy we almost felt sorry for the guard, who was always getting chewed out by his superior.