The Birth of Korean Cool (16 page)

Why stay in China, then? Because South Korea is not considered a livable option by many North Koreans. “In North Korea,” said Shin, “we were always taught that South Korea was
very poor. But when we were living in China, we realized that Chinese worshiped South Korea like gods. That’s when we started hoping to move to South Korea.”

Shin’s story is a fine example of the unexpected far-reaching effects of Hallyu. The Chinese veneration of South Korea partly stems from the popularity of “Korean cool,” and
that obviously comes from Korea’s success in technology, business, and pop culture. Without this Hallyu-induced fantasy about South Korea, Shin’s family and others like them might have
remained living illegally in China, forever fearing that they would be caught and sent back to North Korea.

Now that Shin has been immersed in Hallyu—right down to being a television personality in her own right—she says, “I’m proud to be Korean.”

I asked Shin a question I was almost sure she would not answer: what did she miss about North Korea? In the Korea of my youth, when dictator Chun Doo-hwan was president, it was illegal to
express anything that could be interpreted as sympathy toward North Korea. Had this interview occurred in, say, 1985, I could have been jailed for asking the question and Shin could have been
jailed for answering it—political asylum status notwithstanding.

Her answer was touching and typically Korean in its open sentimentality: “I miss my hometown, our home, friends, school, neighbors, teacher, the air, and the tree we planted in front of
our house. We just left everything as it was. I never got to say good-bye. I miss my hometown so much that I can hardly breathe. This one time when I was walking to school, I slipped on a rock in
the road. I even miss that rock. I still think about the schoolyard where I played with my friends. I could walk from home to there in ten minutes; now I wouldn’t even get there if I walked
ten years. There is no end to how much I miss it.”

Shin, who is working toward a career in broadcasting, seems to be flourishing and well-integrated into South Korean society; she  doesn’t even have a North Korean accent anymore. She
is aware of her good fortune. “People who were born into freedom don’t think there’s anything special about it,” she said. “But the freedom one gets from painful
effort is very special indeed. What I love best about South Korea is that it gave me this special type of freedom.”

Most rational people don’t believe they can be brainwashed. Yet I think I have been. Whenever I talk or write about North Korea, I have an involuntary physiological
reaction. I can actually taste something bitter in my mouth, even as I write these lines. It’s the result of years of anticommunist terror instilled in me during my years in South Korea. When
I see pictures of any of the North Korean Kim dynasty, I am terrified.

South Korea’s official stance on North Korea has changed dramatically since the 1980s. When I lived in Korea, we were basically led to believe that North Korea was the spawn of an orgy
between Satan, Beelzebub, Emperor Nero, and Pol Pot. This sentiment has since evolved into “Stop discriminating against North Korean refugees who choose to settle in our country. Especially
the women; they’re hot.”

I’m having a hard time adapting to the new open-mindedness. My 1980s-era South Korean education guaranteed that North Korea would always be the stuff of nightmares for me, a terror buried
deep in the unreachable, inalterable region of my brain.

Nowadays, North Korea is the focus of both fascination and hatred, and the butt of jokes by the likes of the American animated TV show
South Park
. Its late leader, Kim Jong-il, remains,
so far, the most media-exposed of the three generations of Kims who have ruled the country. Kim Jong-il’s life and legacy is the stuff of surreal legend both at home and abroad.

In his native North Korea, he is celebrated as a man of many superlatives, including being the alleged world record holder for the most holes in one in a single golf game—eleven out of
eighteen holes, and that was on his very first time ever on the green, according to his official biography. He has never made a bowel movement, supposedly. Kim Jong-il also invented the hamburger.
Almost touchingly, North Koreans have a lot of pride in their heritage, though it’s for absurd reasons. The few foreigners who have been permitted to tour North Korea report bizarre trivia
passed on to them by some pretty unironic local tour guides: Koreans are such a glorious race that they created not only the world’s great technological innovations but also the spoon.

Though this all sounds hilarious, I’m certain that North Koreans would never dream of laughing at any of it. Outside Korea, meanwhile, it’s easy to make a laughingstock of a man who
was the world’s largest importer of Hennessy whiskey and sported the worst male perm in the history of human hair.

Equally dumbfounding is the combination of gall and clownish insanity demonstrated by members of his family. Kim Jong-il’s eldest son, Kim Jong-nam, tried to enter Japan on a Dominican
Republic passport in 2001, for the purpose of visiting Disneyland Tokyo.
¹
So maybe it’s starting to make sense that he got passed over for the
leadership role, which instead went to his younger brother, the hapless Kim Jong-un.

When it comes to the way that South Koreans view North Korea, it’s an altogether different story. I cannot really appreciate the irony and surrealism of North Korean buffoonery. My deepest
fears cannot simply adapt to the times. When I lived in Korea, the atmosphere was thick with what I now realize was paranoia. Some tall buildings had signs near the hall windows saying that, for
reasons of national security, it was illegal to take photographs from the windows. The fear was that such photos could fall into the hands of North Korean spies, just in case those spies were
particularly interested in a view of the parking lot.

Most schools that I knew held an annual Anti-Communist Speech Contest. At my school, it was the only kind of speech contest there was. You cannot know how it feels to see a first-grade boy with
a bowl haircut stand on a pulpit in front of thousands of students, shaking his fist like Mussolini and shouting at the top of his lungs, “We shall obliterate the North Korean Communist
regime!” At which point the audience would roar and clap.

I’m pretty sure first prize was just an embossed certificate, but from the way these kids were getting into those speeches, you’d think their lives and their families’ lives
depended on it. I never, ever heard a fellow student laugh about these speeches, not even once. Not even when I was hanging out with my friends on our own time, off school grounds. Once I said
something like, “Can’t they have a speech contest on some other topic?” Everyone looked at me quizzically. I thought they would be impressed or at least scared by my revolutionary
bravado. Instead, they just thought I was some weird American girl. That was the last time I expressed my true opinion on anything while a student at a Korean school.

Every semester in art class, we had to make anti-Communist posters. I cannot think of anything at which I was less talented. Making anti-Communist posters is like learning to speak a foreign
language without an accent: age twelve is already way too old to start learning. I had no idea how to write a slogan or what kind of illustration was supposed to go with it. But no matter how
cynical and smart I thought I was, no matter how much I scoffed, the lesson of fear seeped into me anyway.

There’s an ancient rule of human nature, reiterated in some form by everyone from the Greeks to Shakespeare to Carl Jung: you become what you hate and fear most. This is what happened to
South Korea during the cold war. The country was so afraid of the north’s propaganda that South Korea developed a propaganda campaign of its own. It was not nearly as extreme as the
north’s, but some of the rhetoric had a similar ring.

Imagine someone telling you over and over again that something is evil, but without ever really giving you any concrete information about it. The combination of repetition and absence of
information make you increasingly scared. That’s what my education on North Korea was like.

I never, not ever, not once, saw photos of Kim Il-sung, even though the rest of the world had access to them. South Korean media only ran sketches of him; it was feared that real photos would
humanize him and possibly be appropriated for propaganda by communist sympathizers in the north. As a result of the absence of any images, he is the phantom that haunts my dreams. This photo
embargo has now been lifted; after the elder Kim died in 1994, the media gradually began to show photographs of his son and successor, Kim Jong-il.

There was much more media coverage of Kim Jong-il than of his father, not just in South Korea but in the world at large. Which is probably why I was far less afraid of the younger Kim. He lacked
his father’s charisma, looks, and gravitas. The scion’s maladroitness and inability to look good in a beige jumpsuit made him a lot less threatening. I’m not alone in thinking
that he was the most interesting member of the family. You have to respect a despot who isn’t such a workaholic that he forgets to develop some hobbies.

Kim Jong-il had real cultural ambitions. He was a known cinephile who fancied himself a rare blend of canny Hollywood producer and serious film auteur—even authoring a film theory book
called
The Art of Cinema
in 1973, followed by
The Cinema and the Art of Directing
in 1987. He offers such insights as “Language is extremely important in literature”
and “Compose the plot correctly.”

Dissatisfied with North Korea’s propaganda films, which he apparently admitted were artistically substandard, this François Truffaut of northern Asia did what any self-respecting
film producer would do in that situation: in 1978, he arranged for the abduction of South Korea’s top film director, Shin Sang-ok, and his actress ex-wife, Choi Eun-hee. He had them brought
to Pyongyang and forced them to make Cannes-caliber propaganda films for him. In Kim’s own mind, this howling human rights abuse was just the logical extension of his enthusiasm for his
hobbies.

When I was at school, North Korean studies were taught in a class called
doduk
, which means “correct conduct.” (Some prefer to translate it as “moral
education.”) Ordinary Korean students considered it an easy
A
; for me, it was one of my worst subjects.

The class, offered from first grade through the end of high school, was an education of the soul and spirit—basically, tips on how not to be a sociopath. It included lessons and parables
on how to conduct oneself as a good citizen, the importance of being respectful of elders, being gentle with nature (mostly trees—they didn’t care about animals at all), and basic
etiquette. However, there was a thinly veiled agenda. Hong Weonil, head of public affairs at the National Institute for International Education (one of the people I embarrassed with my Starbucks
cup), said that
doduk
was originally created as a way for Korea’s previous iron-fisted leaders to peddle their agenda. Previously, it was called
kookmin
yulli
—citizenship ethics. “It was created to justify the political dictatorship and political propaganda. After the country became more democratic, they changed the
curriculum,” said Hong.

My most vivid memory of
doduk
was the creepy watercolor illustrations in the textbook. They were an adult’s idea of what a child’s painting would look like, and as a result
they looked as though they were painted by someone inside an insane asylum. A typical image was a tableau of South Korean farmers gaily tilling the soil. There were also quite a few vivid drawings
of Seoul getting bombed to bits during the Korean War.

Many of the lessons taught in
doduk
are hard to disagree with, such as a gripping parable about a persimmon tree, wherein the moral was that if you cut off all the branches, it will
stop bearing fruit. Only later did I realize that all this “don’t be a stupid jerk” section of the class was just padding. It was a delivery vehicle for the real raison
d’être of the
doduk
class: to make a hard sell that communism was an imminent and evil threat.

The books contained frightening fictional stories illustrative of how bleak life was in the north. In one such story, which I believe was in the sixth-grade textbook, a boy in North Korea
idiotically asks his grandfather what life was like before communism. The grandfather waxes nostalgic about old Korea. A few days later, the grandfather gets dragged off by the communists for his
failure to keep his opinions to himself. For a twelve-year-old with no access to any other information on North Korea, this was terrifying stuff.

What we were taught was historically accurate. We learned that the founder of the North Korean state, Kim Il-sung, rose to power shortly after Korea was liberated from Japan at the end of World
War II. He declared himself the true leader of the Korean peninsula and formed a cult of personality around himself, modeled after that of his mentor, Joseph Stalin. He sent all political
undesirables, especially Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese, to labor camps or he had them executed. He was like a Bond villain.

I was relieved and a little surprised that starting in 2010, the Korean Ministry of Education made the radical move of issuing brand-new textbooks that expunged most of the content pertaining to
what they called “peace studies.” In other words, the texts finally moved past their cold war propaganda. The official ministry announcement at the time stated that the new texts have
cut “content that discusses South Korea’s economic superiority. . . . They will be based on objective facts. Rather than exaggerating the negative aspects of the North Korean system,
the texts will also discuss the north’s positive aspects. . . . We will move past our Cold War perspective on North Korea, and most likely ‘unification studies’ will give way to
‘security studies.’ ”
²
This is a far cry from the nightmare-inducing watercolors of yore.