In Order to Live Read online

  During the 1950s and 1960s, China and the Soviet Union poured money into North Korea to help it rebuild. The North has coal and minerals in its mountains, and it was always the richer, more industrialized part of the country. It bounced back more quickly than the South, which was still mostly agricultural and slow to recover from the war. But that started to change in the 1970s and 1980s, as South Korea became a manufacturing center and North Korea’s Soviet-style system began to collapse under its own weight. The economy was centrally planned and completely controlled by the state. There was no private property—at least officially—and all the farms were collectivized, although people could grow some vegetables to sell in small, highly controlled markets. The government provided all jobs, paid everyone’s salary, and distributed rations for most food and consumer goods.

  While my parents were growing up, the distribution system was still subsidized by the Soviet Union and China, so few people were starving, but nobody outside the elite really prospered. At the same time, supply wasn’t meeting demand for the kinds of items people wanted, like imported clothing, electronics, and special foods. While the favored classes had access to many of these goods through government-run department stores, the prices were usually too high for most people to afford. Any ordinary citizen who fancied foreign cigarettes or alcohol or Japanese-made handbags would have to buy them on the black market. The usual route for those goods was from the north, through China.

  • • •

  My father went into the military sometime around 1980, when he was in his late teens. Like most North Korean men from the middle and upper classes, he was conscripted for ten years of service, although with connections that could be reduced to as little as two. But less than a year after my father joined the army, he got very sick with a burst appendix. After four or five surgeries to control complications from the infection, his military service was over for good. This could have been a catastrophe for him, because North Korean men without military backgrounds are usually shut out of the best jobs. But when he returned to Hyesan with nothing to do, his father suggested he study finance. He was able to enroll in a three-year program at the Hyesan Economic College. The rest of the family was also doing well. My father’s older brother Park Jin was attending medical school in Hyesan, and his eldest brother, Park Dong Il, was a middle school teacher in Hamhung. His older sister had married and moved to Pyongyang where she worked as a waitress, and his little sister was attending school in Hyesan.

  But disaster struck in 1980 when Dong Il was accused of raping one of his students and attempting to kill his wife. I never learned all the details of what happened, or even if the charges were true, but he ended up being sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. It was only because of Grandfather Park’s connections that he escaped execution. It is common for nonpolitical prisoners to be released from prison before they die, to save the government the trouble of sending their bodies home. So after serving twelve years, Dong Il was let out on sick leave and he returned to Hyesan. Nobody in the family ever spoke about his past. I remember him as a frail and quiet man who was always kind to me. He died when I was still a little girl.

  In North Korea, if one member of the family commits a serious crime, everybody is considered a criminal. Suddenly my father’s family lost its favorable social and political status.

  There are more than fifty subgroups within the main songbun castes, and once you become an adult, your status is constantly being monitored and adjusted by the authorities. A network of casual neighborhood informants and official police surveillance ensures that nothing you do or your family does goes unnoticed. Everything about you is recorded and stored in local administrative offices and in big national organizations, and the information is used to determine where you can live, where you can go to school, and where you can work. With a superior songbun, you can join the Workers’ Party, which gives you access to political power. You can go to a good university and get a good job. With a poor one, you can end up on a collective farm chopping rice paddies for the rest of your life. And, in times of famine, starving to death.

  All of Grandfather Park’s connections could not save his career after his eldest son was convicted of attempted murder. He was fired from his job at the commissary shortly after Dong Il was sent to prison, although no official reason was given for his dismissal. Fortunately, his younger sons were less affected by the scandal and managed to complete their educations. My uncle Park Jin finished medical school and became a professor at Hyesan Medical University and later became administrator at the medical college. He was an excellent student and clever political player who managed to succeed despite his family’s problems. My father earned his degree in economic planning and, like his father before him, was hired to work in the finance office in Hyesan’s city hall. But after only a year, there was a restructuring in the administrative offices and he lost his job. His poor songbun had finally caught up with him.

  My father realized he would have no future unless he found a way to join the Workers’ Party. He decided to become a laborer at a local metal foundry where he could work hard and prove his loyalty to the regime. He was able to build good relationships with the people who had power at his workplace, including the party representative there. Before long, he had his membership.

  By that time, my father had also started a side business to make some extra money. This was a bold move, because any business venture outside of state control was illegal. But my father was unusual in that he had a natural entrepreneurial spirit and what some might call a healthy contempt for rules. He also had the luck to be living at the right time and in the right part of the country to turn his business into a big success. At least for a while.

  Hyesan already had a long-established tradition of cross-border trade with China and a small but lively black market for everything from dried fish to electronics. During the 1980s, women were allowed to sell food and handicrafts in makeshift markets, but general trading was still an underground and specialized activity. My father joined a small but growing class of black market operators who found ways to exploit cracks in the state-controlled economy. He started small. My father discovered that he could buy a carton of top-quality cigarettes for 70 to 100 won on the black market in Hyesan, then sell each cigarette for 7 to 10 won in the North Korean interior. At that time, a kilogram—2.2 pounds—of rice cost around 25 won, so cigarettes were obviously very valuable.

  The government had placed more restrictions on travel in North Korea, and there was a lot of paperwork involved in traveling out of town. First my father needed permission to leave the factory where he worked. He would negotiate a fee with a doctor to write him a note saying he was sick, then he would tell his supervisor that he needed to go out of town for a few days for treatment. The supervisor would issue him papers. Then my father would go to the police and bribe them for a travel permit.

  My father traveled by train to small cities where there weren’t big black markets. He hid the cigarettes in his bags, all over his body, and in every pocket. He had to keep moving to avoid being searched by the police, who were always looking for contraband. Sometimes the police discovered him and confiscated the cigarettes or threatened to hit him with a metal stick if he didn’t turn over his money. My father had to convince the police that it was in everybody’s interest to let him make a profit so that he could keep coming back and giving them cigarettes as bribes. Often they agreed. He was a born salesman.

  Although I know he would have preferred a safer and more conventional life as a high government official, that was never to be his fate. Almost anywhere else, business would have been my father’s vocation. But in North Korea, it was simply a means to survive. And it made him an outlaw.

  Three

  Swallows and Magpies

  My father’s business began with cigarettes and soon grew to include Chinese-made clothes, a product in high demand. In the summer of 1989, he traveled to Kowon, a small city near No
rth Korea’s east coast, to sell his goods, and while in town stopped to visit with his friend Byeon Min Sik, another ambitious young man whom my father had known in Hyesan. It was there that my father met his friend’s younger sister, Keum Sook. My mother.

  She was four years younger than my father, and her songbun status was just as poor as his, also through no fault of her own. While my father had to struggle because his brother was in prison, she was considered untrustworthy because her paternal grandfather had owned land when Korea was a Japanese colony. The stigma passed down through three generations, and when my mother was born in 1966, she was already considered a member of the “hostile” class and barred from the privileges of the elite.

  My mother’s father, Byeon Ung Rook, came from North Hamgyong province in the northernmost part of Korea. His family wasn’t very wealthy, but they owned just enough property to be considered landlords. By the time my grandfather Byeon was born in 1931, the family had already lost their money. That was the same year that Japan decided to expand its empire by invading and occupying the three Chinese provinces that make up Manchuria, just north of the Korean border.

  Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Koreans had already settled in Manchuria, and the border was notoriously porous. When Japan occupied both regions during the 1930s and 1940s, it was even easier to travel back and forth.

  In 1933, when my grandfather Byeon was two years old, the whole family moved to Hunchun, China, just across the Tumen River from Hamgyong. When World War II broke out, he was still a schoolboy, but he ended up in the fighting. My mother never knew which army he belonged to, because my grandfather never spoke of it.

  After the war ended, he remained in China but often visited his North Korean homeland. When he was twenty-two years old, right before the Korean War began in 1950, he made a visit to Onsong, a border town where his father had once owned property. There he met a group of men who were on their way to the Soviet Union to work as loggers. He joined them for dinner, and they kept buying rounds of drinks. Finally, he left them to walk back alone to the inn where he was staying, but he was so drunk that he lay down on the railroad tracks and fell asleep. My grandfather woke up the next day in an Onsong hospital with an arm and a leg missing and no idea how he got there. He was told that a train had run over him while he slept, and he’d survived only because a railroad monitor found him and brought him to a doctor.

  Grandfather Byeon remained in North Korea to heal. His arm was completely gone, but enough of his leg remained that he was fitted with a prosthetic limb and learned to walk without crutches. By the time he recovered, the Korean War was ending. In fact, the devastating injury might have saved his life, because he would almost certainly have ended up fighting in a conflict that claimed more than three million lives.

  The United States dropped more bombs on North Korea than it had during the entire Pacific campaign in World War II. The Americans bombed every city and village, and they kept bombing until there were no major buildings left to destroy. Then they bombed the dams to flood the crops. The damage was unimaginable, and nobody knows how many civilians were killed and maimed.

  After the war, the North Korean government set up nursing centers for the disabled who had no families to care for them. One of these facilities in Onsong was where Grandfather met his future wife, Hwang Ok Soon. She was an orphan from a rural community in what was now South Korea, and her father had been a resistance fighter against Japan during Korea’s colonial days. When she was ten years old, he was arrested and never heard from again. After that, Grandmother Hwang was abandoned by her family, and ended up working as a farm laborer in Tumen, China—which was then part of the Japanese empire.

  She returned to her home country after the Japanese surrendered and Korea gained independence. Unfortunately, she was living in the Communist North when Korea was partitioned. In 1952, she was working at a munitions factory in the port city of Chongjin on the East Sea when her leg was injured in a bombing raid and had to be amputated.

  She was sent to a nursing facility to recover and learn to use her wooden leg. She was still young and single, but it was not likely that an able-bodied person would marry someone with a disability. So her best hope was to find a husband with a similar condition. My grandfather Byeon apparently had the same idea, and he was visiting nursing homes all over the northern provinces, looking for a bride. The way she told the story, my grandmother saw him walking around the hallways and took pity on him. “This man is in bad shape,” she thought. “If I don’t marry him, he’ll never find a wife.”

  They were wed shortly after the war ended, and she traveled the 150 miles north with him, across the Chinese border to his home in Hunchun. By 1956, my grandmother was pregnant with their first child, my mother’s older sister. She was also miserable and homesick. Even though she had spent time in China, she never learned to speak Chinese. And she had a terrible craving for seafood, especially octopus the way it is prepared in Cheongjin. Finally, she couldn’t stand it anymore, and she left her husband behind while she went to find some octopus to eat. She could be an extremely emotional woman, and very strong-willed. When she made up her mind to do something, she could not be dissuaded. My grandfather had no choice but to follow her.

  Cheongjin was once a small fishing village, but the Japanese had turned it into an industrial port, and the North Korean government was rebuilding it as a major manufacturing and military center. My grandparents agreed that it was no place to raise a family. They were both loyal followers of Kim Il Sung, and they worried about the capitalistic tendencies in the border areas. They didn’t want their children to be tempted by smuggling and other criminal activities.

  They traveled south by rail to find a place to settle deep in the countryside. This was how my mother’s family came to live in Kowon, a small city near a big agricultural river delta backed by rolling mountains. There were rice paddies and orchards, and none of the corrupting influences of the bustling border towns. It should have been a fresh start, but they came to Kowon at the time that Kim Il Sung began purging North Korea of class traitors. All citizens had to be investigated to determine their loyalty and record their songbun. Unfortunately, my grandfather was very truthful, and he told the investigator that his father was a landowner from Onsong. From then on he was cursed with a bad songbun, and there was no chance for him to join the party and get ahead in life. He was assigned a job in a button factory.

  My mother’s older sister was born in Kowon in 1957, followed by three more children—two boys and then my mother, the youngest, who was born on July 16, 1966. They all grew up to be loyal followers of the regime, like their parents.

  My mother was an excellent student and a gifted singer and musician who accompanied herself on the accordion and guitar. In North Korean propaganda videos, you often see beautiful women dressed in traditional hanbok—the colorful jackets and high-waisted skirts that make them look like floating flowers—who sing such high and mournful songs that the audience bursts into tears. That’s what my mother did so well.

  When she was young, she wanted to perform professionally, but her teachers told her she had to study to go to university. Her father also discouraged a career as a performer. Instead she concentrated on her studies and memorized poetry praising the Great Leader and his son, Kim Jong Il, his chosen heir.

  It was unusual for a North Korean woman of her status to get a higher education. But my mother was such a good scholar that she was accepted at a college in the nearby city of Hamhung. If given a choice, she would have liked to have become a doctor. But only students from better families are allowed a say in what they will study. The school administration decided she would major in inorganic chemistry, and that’s what she did. When she graduated, party officials sent her back to Kowon to work in a chemical factory there. She was assigned a low-level job making the ingredients for fragrances to put in soap and toothpaste. A few months later, she was allowed to switch to a better job a
t another factory that made clothes for export to the Soviet Union.

  Despite what others might call disappointments, she never questioned the regime’s authority to control her life. Unlike North Koreans who grew up along the borders, my mother had no exposure to the outside world or foreign ideas. She knew only what the regime taught her and she remained a proud and pure revolutionary. And because she had a poet’s heart, she felt an enormous emotional connection to the official propaganda. She sincerely believed that North Korea was the center of the universe and that Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il had supernatural powers. She believed that Kim Il Sung caused the sun to rise and that when Kim Jong Il was born in a cabin on our sacred Mount Paektu (he was actually born in Russia), his arrival was marked by a double rainbow and a bright new star in the sky. She was so brainwashed that when Kim Il Sung died she started to panic. It was like God himself had died. “How can the Earth still spin on its axis?” she wondered. The laws of physics she had studied in college were overcome by the propaganda that was drilled into her all her life. It would be many years before she realized that Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were just men who had learned from Joseph Stalin, their Soviet role model, how to make people worship them like gods.

  • • •

  My mother was still living at home and working in the clothing factory when she met my father in the summer of 1989. It had become my father’s habit to stay with her brother Min Sik while he was conducting his black market business in Kowon. Since Min Sik also lived with his parents, my mother and father saw each other quite often, but they didn’t speak to each other except for polite greetings.

  There was no concept of “dating” in North Korea at that time. Our culture has always been extremely conservative about relations between men and women. If you grow up in the West, you may think that romance occurs naturally, but it does not. You learn how to be romantic from books and movies, or from observation. But there was no model to learn from in my parents’ time. They didn’t even have the language to talk about their feelings. You just had to guess how your beloved felt from the look in his eyes, or the tone of her voice when she spoke to you. The most they could do was hold hands secretly.