A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea(12)

I checked to see whether any of the party officials were watching me. They weren’t, so I wandered off for a smoke.

After that, I noticed that the permanent farmworkers did hardly any work at all. They spent all their time telling the members of the Youth League and the soldiers what to do. But at the end of the day, the farmers claimed they’d put in a full day’s work, and the officials logged their hours without question. We didn’t protest. When you find yourself caught in a crazy system dreamed up by dangerous lunatics, you just do what you’re told.

Though I kept my mouth shut, I couldn’t help but wonder why the farmers were so blatantly two-faced. When listening to the bogus agricultural “experts,” they were embarrassingly humble and self-deprecating. But when speaking to us, they turned into tyrants. The reason for this became obvious later that year, at harvest time.

Harvest was known as the “autumn battle.” I don’t know who came up with that expression, but it has the stamp of Kim Il-sung all over it. Everything was a “battle” or a “march” or a “war.” Stirring words to encourage the people to fight hard. And always uttered with that overblown intonation that sounded simultaneously preposterous and deranged.

Come harvest time, we were instructed to line up in the fields just as we had in the spring. Some clown shouted, “Go!” and we moved off together, reaping the rice with our sickles. Sure enough, the instructors were busy barking orders, the full-time farmers pretended to work, and the only people doing any real work at all were the members of the Youth League. It was backbreaking work.

As the sun began to set, I felt a surge of relief at the thought that our workday was nearly over. Except it wasn’t. As the evening grew dark, one of the instructors told us to line up old tires on the path that ran between the rice fields. I had no idea who’d brought the tires and placed them there, but we lined them up as instructed.

“What’s with the tires?” I asked one of the farmers.

“We have to finish the harvest today,” he answered quietly. “Orders from the top.”

As night fell, the farmers set fire to the old tires. The light from the stinking flames would enable us to work all night.

Why not go to bed and resume the harvest the next day? The rice wasn’t going anywhere in the next six hours. What was the big hurry? The answer was simple: bureaucracy.

The village farms were administered by local “instruction committees.” These committees were in charge of everything—machinery, irrigation, materials. Farmers had no choice but to follow the committee’s instructions. The system was known as the “feasibility concept.” Feasibility concept! That’s what happens to language in countries like North Korea. A totalitarian dictatorship is a “democratic republic.” Bondage is known as “emancipation.”

But back to the “feasibility concept.” Bureaucrats in charge of farm production paid no attention to location whatsoever. North, south, east, west—it made no difference. They couldn’t have cared less about the unique features of a particular area. Rigidly uniform agricultural policies were passed off as universal truths. They completely ignored any local environmental conditions and issued the same order to everyone. “Finish planting the rice seedlings by such and such a date!” “This is the deadline for the harvest!” No matter how bizarre the directive, farmers had to keep to the schedule. And so sometimes we worked all night.

If a farmer had the audacity to object to the absurdity of some directive, he was told, “The reason you can’t get the job done on time is your total lack of loyalty to Kim Il-sung and the party.” And everyone knew what that would mean. So no one dared to complain.

Soldiers and members of the Youth League were sent to work on farms just twice a year, but the real farmers had to work under these ridiculous conditions all the time. They knew that, however long they worked and however much effort they put in, they wouldn’t be rewarded for their labors; their pay would be the same. And they had to follow the instructions of amateurs who didn’t know what they were talking about. So of course they lost all motivation. Who could blame them?

Working on the farm was physically tough, but I was a teenager at the time, so I could cope with it. The thing I hated most about the work was that I couldn’t take a bath or shower at the end of the day. I’d come home caked in mud and smelly with sweat, and all I wanted was to wash it all away. But our house didn’t have a bathtub. Nobody’s house did. In 1960. In paradise on earth.

In the end, we cobbled together our own makeshift bathtub and tried to make the best of it. I imagine other “returnees” did the same thing. But did they sit in their jerry-rigged tubs, as I did, reminiscing about the past? I remembered the funny washtub of my childhood; I remembered gazing up at the clouds and dreaming of a future of untold possibilities. Instead, here I was, gazing out on hell. I guess I should have wept at the sadness of my plight. But I didn’t. Even back then, I was past weeping.

Our ramshackle bath drove our neighbors wild. To them, it was a symbol of Japanese decadence. Bathing was an act of bourgeois self-indulgence; so was changing our clothes every day. Our older neighbors accused us of acting “like landlords.” At first, I didn’t understand what they meant, but I gathered from their hateful looks that they were referring to some long-lost upper class.

The people around me hardly ever seemed to change or wash their clothes. They hardly ever showered or cleaned themselves. The dirt was ingrained on their bodies, and they were filthy.