The Aquariums of Pyongyang (7 page)

Growing up, I was never aware of my uncles' disaffection with Kim Il-sung: I was too young to imagine such a thing was possible. Looking back now, their transformation seems telling: the silence of one, the alcoholism of the other, my father's sudden obsession with music. They were each running away from reality, avoiding the words that might indict the political system or, worse yet, the parents who had brought them to live in it. My father was learning all the popular international songs by heart. He knew “Nathalie” and “La Paloma.” To our great joy, he also sang us the famous “O Sole Mio.” I now realize this was his way of escaping the military marching music and the glory hymns to Kim Il-sung.

I mentioned that he had been married to a woman whose family also had returned from Japan. Many marriages took place within this immigrant community, which proves just how difficult integrating into Korean society really was. The former Japanese residents, especially the young ones, had grown up in a different culture. This made communication with North Koreans difficult. Neighbors and security agents never let slip an opportunity to remind them that they were no longer in Japan, that they should express less originality, that they should show more respect for the laws.

Having been exposed to the wider world, my parents, like most former Japanese residents, felt superior to the people who never left
North Korea. Their payback was being viewed as strangers. The old enmity between Korea and Japan also played against us. To many people, my family's former immigration to Japan seemed more important than its decision to come back. The family's material advantages were also the cause of barely veiled jealousy. As part of the next generation, I always felt profoundly and unequivocally Korean—indeed, North Korean. Yet, even as a young child, I sensed the chasm that separated my parents from their neighbors. My mother's accent, which bore traces of her years in Japan, was the cause of constant laughter among my friends. Every time she got home from work and called me back inside, they would mimic her voice, making me blush with embarrassment. Finally I asked her not to do it anymore. I think I hurt her feelings, but she didn't say anything, and from then on, whenever she wanted me to come home, she walked over to where I was playing and gave me a little tap on the shoulder.

To put it simply, the repatriated Koreans didn't get on with the others, just as the Armenians from France and America didn't fit in with their Soviet kinsmen. Though growing sulkier by the day, Grandfather did rattle the chains occasionally. Supplied with the necessary paperwork, he sometimes got out the Volvo and took us on trips around the countryside. That's how we wound up visiting the famous tourist destination of Mount Kumgang, lately in the news because of tour groups brought there by a South Korean travel company, Hyndai, which pays the Pyongyang government millions of dollars in royalties. At the time, driving to Mount Kumgang in a car so emblematic of capitalist ostentation might have been seen as a provocation. We were verging on counterrevolutionary action! Yet the police seemed not to notice and gave us what authorizations we needed without much hassle, a solicitude due at least in part to the
generous sums my grandfather dispersed among the Security Force and the state.

Later the authorizations became more difficult to come by. Then the police began suggesting my grandfather should voluntarily bequeath his cherished Volvo to the government. The suggestions became recommendations, the recommendations an order. At last my grandfather had to cede his Volvo, most likely to some wellplaced police or government official who wanted a nice car in which to strut about town. As the family's situation worsened, Japan became an ever-expanding reservoir of idealized memories, nostalgic images, favorable dispositions. My family was once again a family of uprooted emigrants. That feeling of nostalgia is still in the family, but with every generation its object continues to shift. My grandfather lived in Japan full of longing for his native Cheju Island. My father lived in North Korea and was nostalgic for Japan. And me, I sit recalling my life's story in Seoul, gnawed at by the Pyongyang of my youth.

T
hough even more anxious and withdrawn, Grandfather remained the central character of the family. His pronounced eyebrows, round, sparkling eyes, and stentorian voice always enthralled me. So, too, did the respect shown him by Pyongyang's Party cadres. And yet this never got in the way of our intimacy. Our Sunday walks, in tones of high secrecy, he would tell me stories about his former days in Kyoto: about the jewelry shop where he stayed up all night filling his first orders, the rice warehouses he guarded against envious competitors, the stunning success of his gaming rooms; and the fortunes that grew and fell there in a matter of minutes. These stories were a source of constant enchantment for me. I listened, mesmerized, to their architect and hero, my grandfather. I loved him, and never could I have imagined that our conversations and Sunday walks might one day come to an end.

Yet he disappeared. It was in July of 1977. One night he didn't come home from work. The police said they knew nothing. The heads of my grandfather's department, whom my grandmother anxiously queried, finally told us he had left on a business trip, an urgent matter, they said. The order had come from the Party, and he had to decide right away. “But come back next week and you'll have some news,” they assured her. “There's no need to worry.”

My grandmother had her doubts about this business trip. Her husband was not the type to leave without warning. A week later, the authorities told her to keep waiting, but she was unable to restrain herself and went back to my grandfather's office. The reception she met with only deepened her fears. Everyone seemed embarrassed by the mere mention of her husband's name and avoided talking about him. The same wall of nervous silence soon cropped up everywhere Grandmother went.

My parents suspected that the Security Force was behind the mysterious disappearance, but they dared not admit this even to themselves. In the preceding months a number of their acquaintances had vanished in similar ways. Yet the family preferred to believe—my grandmother more than anyone—that there was no comparison between my grandfather and those others, who must have plotted against the state or committed some other grave offense. None of us was willing to face the possibility that the police had taken him away from us. We knew that Grandfather was never at a loss for words and that he often criticized Party bureaucrats and their management methods rather too sharply. We also knew that he rarely showed up at Party meetings and rallies, but then again, Grandmother attended enough for two! And had he not always been an honest citizen, entrusting his all to the Party? Had he not handed over his immense
fortune upon arriving from Japan? Had he not given the Party everything, down to his Volvo?

A few weeks after Grandfather's disappearance, I was playing on the riverbank when several of my friends came to tell me that a group of people were at my house. Puzzled, I got up and ran to our apartment.

Traditionally, people take their shoes off on entering a Korean home. Not doing so is a sign of disrespect to your host. To my astonishment, I noticed that though the living room was full of people, the entrance hall had only the usual number of shoes. What did this mean? I wanted to move forward, but there were so many people in the room it was hard to maneuver. Apart from my father, mother, grandmother, and sister, there were a number of other people whom I had never seen before. The only one missing was my uncle, who lived with us but was away for a few days at a professional conference in south Hamkyung Province. Who were these other people? I greeted my parents with a big wave, but they, who were ordinarily so happy to see me, responded strangely, remaining distant, like condescending adults who hadn't time for such trifles. My mother sighed and kept on repeating (as though someone would answer!), “But what is happening to us? But what is happening to us?” I pushed forward, determined to see what was going on: three uniformed men were rifling through our things as a fourth took notes. What extraordinary event was this? And how could they keep their shoes on? That was what shocked me the most, but when I tried to tell my mother, she didn't even answer me.

Our apartment consisted of four bedrooms and a living room. The smallest bedroom stored wrapped gifts my grandparents had requested from friends and family who had visited from Japan over the years. The cache of jewelry, clothes, and watches was to be presented
at the wedding of my third uncle—whenever that was going to be. (It is customary for Korean families to begin preparing for their children's wedding far—often years—in advance.) The room also contained several cameras and various darkroom materials that my father used in his work. These treasures greatly excited the security agents—for these were who our four visitors were. In the past, my parents had been “encouraged” to offer one of the cameras as a gift to the state but had always found a pretext for refusing. This time the agents were simply going to help themselves. My father later told me about the agents' secret councils in the corner of the room, about their mock indignation at finding the wedding gifts—as though we were smugglers or harborers of stolen goods—and about the spark of covetousness and joy in their eyes as they divvied up the loot in plain view of my distraught parents.

The agents then pressed on through the rest of the apartment, three searching, while the fourth continued to take notes. The inventory progressed slowly, and I soon grew bored of a situation that didn't really involve me, since the gentlemen seemed not the least interested in my aquariums. I went and got my sister, Mi-ho, and we started to play, indifferent to what might come next. We were soon running around, romping in the shambles left by the search. I started to jump up and down on my parents' big Japanese bed and encouraged my sister to do the same. My father noticed but made no attempt to stop this ordinarily forbidden game. Heartened, I jumped ever higher, until what was bound to happen, happened: I broke a mattress spring, or a lattice, I no longer remember which. My sister and I froze. A boundary had been crossed, we knew that. And yet Father still said nothing. I don't know what my sister thought of that paternal abdication, but it left me feeling very
strange. The order of things had changed. I was not yet worried, but I began to feel a certain malaise, the shape and cause of which I could not altogether comprehend. Perhaps this is why a hole persists there in my memory.

Yet I remember perfectly the moment I first heard pronounced the name of “Yodok.” One of the agents had begun rifling through my mother's lingerie, and seeing her private things tossed across the room, my mother allowed her voice to rise. Outraged, the man with the notebook jumped to his feet, ordering her to shut up, then pulled out a paper from which he read out loud. According to the document, my grandfather had committed “a crime of high treason,” the consequence of which was that his family—all of us there gathered, that is—was “immediately” to present itself at the secure zone in Yodok, a canton of which I had never heard. Everyone around me seemed to go dead. There was a long silence, then tears, and hands taking hold of one another. Clearly reaping pleasure from the effect of his words, the leader ordered his men to resume their work. The agents turned the place inside out, going through the bedding, the clothes, the mattresses, the kitchen utensils. I looked on bewildered, unable to understand what they could be looking for among the bowls and the plates and the pots and even my chest of toys. The inventory wound to a close around three in the morning. The agents performed their work according to well-defined rules—of their own invention—with a small cut going to the government, and a bigger cut going to them. My father's photo equipment and Omega wristwatch, my mother's and grandmother's jewelry, my uncle's wedding presents, and the family's Japanese color television set were all shared among the agents. No more than one item out of ten was left to the government.

There is one moment that particularly stands out in my memory of that night. My grandmother was having a face-off with the agents. They were trying to force her to sign a document, but she objected, pointing insistently at certain passages. The agents offered some perfunctory explanations, their tone alternating between calm restraint and outbursts of angry shouting. Suddenly I saw her reach for the pen holder and sign the paper. The next thing that happened surprised me even more: she had hardly finished signing when the men grabbed her and locked her up in one of the rooms!

When sunrise came and I learned we'd soon be leaving for that unknown place whose mention had so jolted my parents, I was not overly upset. I thought of it as a move to the country, an adventure, something to bring a little excitement to our lives. Truth be told, the idea actually pleased me. My one real concern was finding a way to bring my fish collection along. In some respects, our departure for Yodok resembled a move. We weren't being sent to the camps as criminals but as relatives of a criminal, which meant we were treated with a little more clemency. My grandfather had been picked up from work and taken away to a hard-labor camp without even the chance to pack a bag. His fate was like that of many people arrested in the USSR and Nazi Germany, whose history I was later able to read. We, at least, were allowed to bring a minimum of furniture, clothes, and even food.