The Aquariums of Pyongyang (4 page)

When I wasn't in school, I could usually be found playing outside with the kids in my neighborhood. My favorite thing was to meet up under the weeping willows that ran along the Daedong River not far from where I lived. My friends and I knew the place well and felt completely safe there. At regular intervals we could hear a nearby bell, whose ringing had gradually become an integral part of the landscape. In warm weather, we waded in the water, catching
dragonflies and other insects. And winter could be just as wonderful, during the festive time in late December, for example, when the statues of Kim Il-sung were decorated with footlights and draped with banners wishing us a happy New Year. Winter break ran from December 31 to mid-February, and when we tired of snowball fights, we would go back to our beloved river to ice-skate or play a game of ice hockey.

It would be bad grace to deny I had a happy childhood, but my family was better off than most, living in a newly built neighborhood that was exceptionally quiet, airy, and verdant. Situated near the main train station, Kyongnim-dong might have been less beautiful than the perimeter areas reserved for the nomenklatura, but it certainly came a close second. In my mind's eye, I remember it more as a park than as an urban neighborhood. Our apartment was large enough to comfortably accommodate all seven of us: my parents; my little sister, Mi-ho, whose name means “beautiful lake” and who is two years my junior; my paternal grandparents; one of my uncles—my “third uncle,” according to Korean usage, which ranks uncles and aunts according to age and hierarchical standing; and me. My family enjoyed a level of comfort foreign to most North Korean homes, even in Pyongyang. We had a refrigerator, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, and even the most sought-after of all luxury goods: a color television set, on which, to our great delight, we could watch the dramatic political-crime series “Clean Hands.” Even our clothes seemed rich compared to those of our neighbors, to whom my grandmother would often give away what we no longer needed.

There was no real poverty in our neighborhood or anywhere else—at least in the big cities. North Korea hadn't yet begun to suffer the major food and energy shortages it knows today. The
rationing system worked well, and at the beginning of every month families received coupons for procuring food and heating oil. At our house, things were even better. My grandfather, who held a supervisory position in the state's goods distribution network, had access to almost anything, including nearly unlimited supplies of meat. People privileged enough to know this important man sometimes dropped by for a visit only to depart with a little something extra in the bottom of their bag, a supplement to the rations provided by the government.

Other images from that time come back to me. We lived a few dozen steps from the Soviet embassy, and children of the diplomatic corps sometimes ventured onto what my comrades and I considered
our
territory. We watched with hostile curiosity as the group of foreign-tongued blond children walked through our neighborhood. We would harass them and try to pull their hair, and they'd push us aside or run away; but somehow the clumsy overtures never broke out into a general melee. Yet when it came to fighting among ourselves, we never let an opportunity slip. I was a difficult child—stubborn, vindictive, determined—never missing an opportunity to measure myself up against a competitor. My fights were sometimes stopped by my grandfather, who absolutely adored me. If I was on the short end of a brawl, he would break it up and call both me and my adversary hooligans, but whenever he saw I had the upper hand, he stayed out of it—beaming with pride.

In North Korea, kids my age were encouraged to cultivate a spirit of competition. I remember a time when students in every class posted numbers representing their relative position in terms of physical strength. The various classes then organized fights to measure their number one against the number one of other classes.
Koreans can be violent, but they are also saccharine sentimentalists, who are easily brought to tears by the soppiest songs and most mawkish novels. I therefore hope I will be forgiven for cherishing another memory, this one of a little six-year-old girl. I was seven years old and I thought she was beautiful. So did a movie director, who spotted her and put her in one of his movies. She must have liked me as much as I liked her, because for a long time we were inseparable. “We'll be marrying you two before long,” my grandmother once joked.

The prediction delighted the little girl but threw me into a violent rage. Why such fury? Perhaps my grandmother had unintentionally hit on a tender spot. Sex was a taboo subject in the North Korean educational system, and maybe in my mind as well. Was my anger an attempt to mask my embarrassment? Whatever the reason, that first love meant a lot to both me and the little girl: years later, when she was in high school and I was in the camp, she dared to inquire about my well-being. I went to visit her when I finally got out, but it was too late. Ku Bon-ok—the “real jewel” that the definition of her name rightly presaged—had married and moved away. To where I never learned.

I had one other childhood love: aquarium fish. Raising pigeons was the more popular hobby among my friends, but that never did it for me. My thing was fish, and they were more important to me than anything. Even sitting in class and listening to my teacher, I was with them in my thoughts. I worried that they were bored without me, that their water was at the wrong temperature, that an evildoer had broken into the house and done something to them. Almost all the kids I knew had an aquarium, but coming from a well-to-do family, I had about ten of them lining the walls of my room. As luck had it, not far from us was a store that sold water plants, colored pebbles,
and other accessories. To make sure I always had the most original merchandise, I would wake up early and be the first to arrive upon opening. The lady who ran the store liked her assiduous young client and paid me a big smile every time I came and asked, in my most serious nine-year-old manner, to reserve such-and-such species from the next shipment of fish.

I wanted to own the most beautiful fish in the neighborhood, and the biggest and the strangest. One day I had the idea of adding specimens from the neighboring river to my collection. The trick had never been tried. So I caught a few fish, quickly brought them home, dropped them into an aquarium, and ran back out to fetch my friends so they could admire my new acquisitions. But alas, by the time we returned, the new lodgers had departed this world.

The competition for aquarium fish was as stiff as for physical strength, and jealousy gnawed at us whenever someone got a fish more beautiful than our own. One time a kid in my neighborhood invited us over to see an exotic fish he had just received as a gift, a truly magnificent specimen with huge bulging eyes. Yet no sooner had the boy owner stepped away from the aquarium, when one of his guests plunged a hand into the water and ripped out one of the fish's eyes. The fish was too beautiful to live in someone else's aquarium.

M
y family's relative wealth was due not only to my grandparents' social status but also to the fact that they had once lived and prospered in Japan. My grandmother was the first to exile herself there. She was born near the southern tip of the Korean peninsula, on the island of Cheju, famous for its windy weather, its horses, and the strong character of its women. To this day you see them on television wearing wetsuits and diving into the ocean in search of shellfish, while their men stay home minding the children.

On older maps, the island often appears under the name of Quellepart. The appellation originated with the arrival of a group of French missionaries, who asked everyone they saw
en quelle partie
—in
which part—of Korea they had landed.
¹
Whether called Quellepart or Cheju, it's the largest of the many islands scattered around the Korean coast, and in recent years it has developed into a major tourist site. In fact, it's now the number one destination among South Korean newlyweds, who flock there on their honeymoons.

In the 1930s, though, life on the island was very difficult. Much of the population emigrated to Japan, to find work at the center of the colonial empire to which Korea had belonged since 1910.

Grandmother was the third daughter in a poor household, where a typical meal consisted of sweet potatoes, occasionally accompanied by fish. At age thirteen, she left the island for Japan. It seems she was an intelligent child. She told me with a laugh that when she was young her father always said, “Ah, if you'd been a boy, you really could have been somebody.”

She set out on her own, intending to find work in a textile factory in Kyoto. As it turned out, she came up an inch or so short. The factory owners weren't allowed to hire anyone under the age of thirteen, and since girls never had any identification papers, factory owners had to judge age solely on the basis of height. A bit short for her age, my grandmother was told to come back after she had grown a little. Still, she didn't want to go back to Korea. She begged in the streets for a time and slept in the factory dormitory, where a few workers from back home had taken her under their wing. She told me most of her food came from poulterers, who gave her the chicken heads their customers didn't want. I have the impression that wasn't the worst of it, either. She lived that way for a year, until she grew another inch or two and was hired by the factory. The
work was hard, but she liked it. She was proud to earn her first wages and shortly repaid the girls who had helped her out. What little money was left over she sent back home to her family.

The Socialist movement was gaining ground in Japan, especially among teachers. So it is no surprise that Grandmother was first introduced to the ideas of socialism by her night school instructor. My grandmother was a bright student, attentive, curious, quick to learn. Several of her teachers grew attached to her and, through their discussions, tried to direct the young, upright girl toward socialism.

She joined the Japanese Communist Party at age twenty, which was around the same time she met her husband-to-be, who was, like her, a native of Cheju. The oldest of three children, he had set out for Japan to extricate himself from an ill-begotten marriage arranged by his parents. He was fifteen years old at the time, his wife about the same. The two young people never loved each other, and the marriage quickly proved a failure. Eventually my grandfather decided to run away, leaving his wife back home with his parents. According to Confucian tradition, which continues to hold sway in present-day Korea, a married woman belongs to her husband's family and remains so, irrespective of divorce or separation. If she tries to return to her parents' home, she will most likely be turned away.

My grandfather had a more auspicious landing in Japan than did my grandmother. Within a short time, he found work in a jeweler's shop and learned gold plating. After quickly mastering the technique, he established his own shop to manufacture novelty jewelry. About that time he met my grandmother. The man who wanted to make a fortune and the woman who wanted to make revolution fell in love and married. My father was their first child. In 1934, the couple traveled back to Cheju and moved in with my grandfather's family, a step that may shock the Western mindset, but that was not
at all rare in Korea. The first wife had no choice but silently to endure the presence of the new wife under the same roof.

Their return was short-lived. My grandparents soon were on their way back to Japan. In the meantime, however, Grandmother made the best of her sojourn on Cheju. In her fervor she managed to expand substantially the number of Communist contacts and help organize numerous discussion groups and meetings on the island. For my grandfather, on the other hand, revolutionary ideas held no interest; it was only his love for my grandmother that allowed him to bear them at all. What he saw in his wife's fascination with revolutionary change was something akin to his own passion for financial adventurism. In their own way, both were looking for the absolute. A quiet life, without fire, without plans, without struggle, was anathema to them. That's why Grandfather was so in love with Grandmother. When she said “revolution,” he heard “passion,” and felt as though he'd never been closer to anyone. The spirit she brought to her undertaking mattered more to his besotted eyes than did the substance of her enterprise. Her enthusiasm for the Communist revolution—and her conviction—outweighed his lack of interest in the cause; he let her have her way, and he felt happy. Yet Grandfather never allowed money to cut him off from the plight of those less fortunate than he. Indeed, he gave so generously to the poor that he often teased his wife by saying that he did more for social justice today than communism could ever do tomorrow. He also sent a lot of money to his in-laws, who would otherwise have struggled on in crushing poverty.