The Aquariums of Pyongyang (24 page)

As for violence, it was everywhere. Anything that vaguely recalled affection or compassion was banished from the realm. Everyone threatened and was threatened, beat and was beaten. After the education I received at Yodok, I too became violent and had no qualms about hurting people. It wasn't until I left North Korea that I started acting more like a human being again. I remember once being attacked, on April 15, Kim Il-sung's birthday. As on every vacation day, most people just moped around the city, drinking and looking for a brawl. Fighting is always against the law in North Korea, but fighting on a holiday as solemn as Kim Il-sung's birthday is considered a political crime, punishable by hard labor. I was strolling with a group of friends—my gang, if you will—when we crossed paths with another gang. A few insults later, a fight broke out. At one point I was pinned down by several men and started swinging like a madman. Somehow, one of my punches landed in the eye of a former marine rifleman, who was the head of the gang. He reeled back in pain. I took advantage of his hesitation and ran away as fast as I could. It was a good thing, too; a little later, some agents from the Security Force came and arrested several people. That evening, I was sitting outside chatting with my sister's boyfriend when I saw the rival gang coming up the street. There were around twenty of them, a few wielding axes and shovels. This time I was really scared. But my sister's suitor stepped forward: “If you want to attack Kang Chol-hwan, you'll have to kill me first!” Thanks to his introduction, I was able to start a conversation with the gang leader whom I had punched. I offered my apologies, and he presented his compliments: “You are strong, Kang Chol-hwan. That's the first time anyone has punched me like that.” We became friends, and from then on I was his protégé. The
hierarchy of the street remained intact and I had nothing more to fear.

My behavior changed only gradually. In the camp I was beaten without being able to hit back, but now that I was out, I fought back systematically. Yet violence was repulsive to me. I fought and was mad at myself for fighting. But no matter how much I tried to avoid it, it always lay in my path. One day a gang started beating me with bottles, and instead of trying to fight back, I ran to find a nearby policeman whom I'd previously plied with little gifts. He tracked down my attackers and locked them up. Then he called me in. “Go into their cell and beat the crap out of them if you want,” he offered. “Only I don't want any trouble, so you can't kill them.” I started punching one of them, but then felt so ashamed I stopped and left the cell.

After that, I signed up for a tae kwon do course to help me control my emotions and stop people from messing with me. Once word got around, I was left in peace. One of the interesting things about North Korean hoodlums is the contempt they have for former political prisoners. Many gang members spend time in prison—that's a right everyone has—and though their families aren't dragged down with them, they consider the plight of Yodok's political prisoners a cakewalk compared to what they go through. The horrors these ruffians face in prison is on another level altogether. As far as they are concerned, “the little morons from camp number 15” have it good.

I eventually got a job as a deliveryman for my
gun
's Office of Distribution. Since the region where I worked was very mountainous and there weren't enough trucks to go around, we usually did our routes using oxcarts. (Making a virtue of necessity, Kim Il-sung
once wrote an homage to this mode of transport.) I enjoyed the work; we were always showing up with long-awaited supplies, so the people we met were happy to see us, greeting us with open arms and sometimes giving us tips. More important, by taking advantage of the price disparities between Pyongyang and the provinces, we were able to do a little side business. A pair of shoes that cost 5 to 10 North Korean won when it left the factory in Pyongyang could be sold for eight to ten times that in the provinces—almost half a typical factory worker's monthly salary.

In the beginning, I took my work very seriously, tackling it with all the energy and efficiency I could muster. My years in Yodok had trained me well! My colleagues and superiors appreciated my work, and I was tight with my local Party secretary whom I'd once supplied with hard-to-find wood. To show his gratitude, he regularly assigned me the easiest routes, which left me plenty of time to rest. As was inevitable, I gradually lost my enthusiasm for the work. Without the guards at my back I saw no particular reason to exert myself any more than my colleagues. What I wanted was to visit other regions of the county and to see if there was any business to be made. So, after paying off the Party secretary and receiving my traveling papers, I started travelling around to other
guns
to purchase merchandise, which I then transported by truck or through private individuals. I bought wild ginseng, traded alcohol for shoes, sold bear bile and civet cat navels—which apparently work wonders on victims of stroke. I wasn't making a fortune, but business was good. Before long I was ready to abandon the dung wagons and oxcarts and focus on developing my commercial ventures, which I did with the support of my friendly Party secretary.

The People's Office of Services had two functions: to organize the distribution of goods to nonactive parts of the population, and to offset
inefficiencies in the rationing system by procuring and distributing goods the system couldn't supply. These included everything from hair products to pastries, shoes to clothing, bread to bicycles. As the Party's main distribution network slipped into ever-deepening paralysis, the supplementary network became indispensable, though clunky and untenable. If we needed leather or gasoline, for example, we had to go to the army, where the person who ran the gas tank wielded more power than his commander-in-chief! I once procured a year's supply of gasoline for the price of a Seiko watch. The parallel distribution network was by far the more active part of the system, and it offered an entrepreneur the chance to make a lot of money. On my own relatively modest level, that's exactly what I did. I pocketed about 1,000 won per month, enough to pass for rich in North Korea. For most of the population, though, the situation was going from bad to worse. Eventually even ration tickets, the most basic currency, stopped being honored, because nothing was showing up at the stores, neither food, nor clothes, nor cleaning products.

The collapse happened suddenly. The clearest measure was the whiting that Koreans traditionally hang out to dry on the walls of their houses: the visible decline in the fish's numbers, which began in 1988, was a sign writ large of the nation's economic crisis. By 1990, drying fish were nowhere to be seen. That was also the year when the country's rice distribution was severely mismanaged. Here is one aspect of the current famine that doesn't attract enough attention. Besides the production problems that arise from inadequate work incentives, fertilizers, and working tractors, there is also the problem of distribution. The Yodok canton, for example, was still running surpluses as late as 1990, but no trains were available for transport. The only alternative transportation was the country's aging fleet of run-down trucks, which kept breaking down on the unpaved roads. Rice that was needed in the city sat
rotting in the countryside, while manufactured goods the country people needed never left the city.

As the situation worsened, peasants began raising their own goats and dogs and expending less energy on the collective farms. Considering how little their monthly salary of 100 to 150 won bought, they had little choice. A dog cost 300 won, a goat 400, a jar of honey 150. To keep from starving, peasants began cultivating thousands of hills abandoned by the collective farms, turning much of the countryside into a Far West of appropriated tracts. Demonstrating the same courage and tenacity I later discovered among the merchants of Namdaemun,
⁵
these peasants often worked their new plots at night after putting in a full day on the collective farms. Under the direction of incompetent, corrupt bureaucrats, they spent the daylight hours dozing off and dragging their feet. But at night, when time came to provide for their families, they worked like demons. Unfortunately, private farming was a major cause of flooding in 1996–97, because deforested slopes susceptible to soil erosion led to landslides and a dangerous buildup of the riverbeds. Though the Party was fervently opposed to private land use, the peasant movement grew so strong that the Party had no choice but to give ground. It never formally changed its laws, but it grudgingly tolerates the practice, and is content merely to remind the peasants that in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea no land belongs to a single owner, and that anyone taking possession of a plot risks having it confiscated. The movement and its revolts have been so vast that the Party has only moved to dismantle the most egregious land grabs. This is all very revealing of North Korea's present situation and its inevitable slide from communism to capitalism.

This wild trend toward privatization—or appropriation, if you prefer—explains why peasants are now having an easier time procuring food than workers who live in small towns, where famine has struck hardest. But the peasants suffer from another privation, of clothes, which they must buy from outlaw traveling salesmen. These merchants buy their stock on the cities' black markets or from one of the handful of surviving sweatshops and factories. Sometimes clothes are smuggled in from China. When I was still living in North Korea in the early 1990s, the terms of exchange were heavily weighed against the peasants. A pair of 40-won nylon socks cost them two kilos of corn. An egg earned them 1 won; a bottle of oil, 10 to 15 won; a chicken, 60 won; but it cost 100 to 150 won to buy fabric for a suit of clothes; 400 won for a pair of Japanesesewn pants; 100 to 130 won for a short-sleeved shirt made in China—and 250 if it were made in Japan. This explains why relatives of former Japanese residents always came to visit North Korea with armloads of socks, clothes, and alcohol, whose exchange value was astronomical.

The generosity of our family in Japan certainly made a big difference in our lives. It enabled us to purchase the benevolence of guards and minders and slowly to inch our way closer to Pyongyang. As a matter of law, former prisoners are not allowed to leave the zone where they have been assigned to live. As a matter of practice, bribery makes everything possible. We wrote to relatives asking for help, careful to disguise our meaning, so as not to provoke the censors. North Koreans are permitted to send letters out of the country as long as they don't criticize or complain about the regime. When our relatives suddenly received a letter from us after ten years of silence, they had a fairly good notion of what had become of us. During the years of our disappearance, they had made several
attempts to visit us in North Korea and were repeatedly turned away by the police, who told them we were on vacation. There was much concern in Japan about all the North Koreans who had suddenly left on extended vacations. Petitions got circulated about the issue. Korean residents in Japan appeared on television to talk about the disappearance of their relatives. Maybe some of this even played a role in our release, though my grandfather's death probably had more to do with that. While we will probably never discover what really became of him, it was believed that the authorities waited for a convicted political criminal to die before releasing his family.

Thanks to the power of money, we escaped the dreadful life of the North Korean backwater. Want to make a telephone call? You'll have to pass through the operator . . . and hold the line. . . . And to reach Japan, endless troubles. Officially, of course, it is quite possible. In fact, only special—that is, tapped—telephone centers are equipped for the job, and they only accept foreign currency. Want to go out? There is only one movie theater for the whole canton. And while the prices are risibly cheap, the film will infallibly be some glorification of North Korea, its army, the anti-Japanese partisans, and so on. Everyone struggled to get by, and those with no other resources stitched their living together by selling plastic bottles, nylon socks, and army surplus shoes and clothes, which were valued for their durability. Army “surplus” was the basis of a flourishing black market trade organized by army officers. It left the lowly North Korean foot soldiers wearing threadbare old uniforms and canvas boots that couldn't keep out the rain.

For permission to leave our canton, we had to pull out all the stops. A local pass could be had for a pack of cigarettes and a small quantity of alcohol, but an authorization to move to the
Pyongyang area required much more than that. For a long time our efforts were going nowhere, but a visit from our family changed everything. The Security Force agents, who had been treating our appeals with indifference—not to say contempt—suddenly took an interest in our well-being. They began talking to us and even stopped us in the street to shake our hands! Conditions were evidently ripe for some discreet negotiations. With the aid of a few rather sumptuous gifts—most notably, a Japanese color television—my sister and I were allowed to join our uncle in Pyungsung, a city twenty miles outside Pyongyang. The scientific research center in Pyungsung had requested him to rejoin the post he had held before his internment. As a student at the polytechnic university he had finished first in his class, and his talents were widely recognized. After Yodok, he resumed his chemistry studies, and in 1991 received his doctorate. He was in a good position: the institute's employees were treated as citizens of Pyongyang. It may come as a surprise to some that a former political prisoner was allowed to earn a master's degree and doctorate; but the fact is that my uncle worked in a field where he could be closely monitored and controlled. He also had the benefit of some fabulous luck: the institute's vice-president was his college roommate; and the roommate's uncle, one of Yodok's chief administrators, informed his nephew that the reasons for my uncle's arrest had been minor and that his personal file was clean.