A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea(13)
From time to time, a hygiene outfit carried out a lice check at school. If you were dirty, you got told off for poor hygiene. But if you admitted you bathed frequently, you were equally told off, in this case for “Japanese decadence.” As usual, you couldn’t win.
I couldn’t let the matter go and said to one of my friends, “They told us to keep ourselves clean, right? If they mean it, then they should be encouraging us to bathe every day.”
“What are you talking about? A bath every day? Only a Japanese bastard could advocate something like that,” he replied, as though I’d proposed something insane.
I was shocked. Not by his opinion so much as his tone. I’d thought he was my friend. How could he call me a “Japanese bastard” to my face?
Looking back on it, I don’t think people even realized it was an offensive term. To them, calling Japanese people bastards was just a statement of fact. North Koreans had been indoctrinated to think that all Japanese were cruel. And to be fair, I tended to call North Koreans “natives.” Most of the returnees did the same.
When we weren’t working on farms, the Youth League had other jobs, like collecting any resources that could be reused—scrap iron, rubber, empty cans, used paper, and the like. Sometimes we were instructed to search for scrap that could be used in tank or aircraft production. Our teachers would go on about the latest “tank production drive” or “aircraft production drive.” Targets were set every month for the number of pounds we had to collect.
But in North Korea, no one threw away anything of value or use. So it was impossible to meet the targets they’d set for us. Even so, if you failed to meet them—as you inevitably did time and again—you were severely reprimanded. As were your parents.
Although this may sound strange, the hardest things for me to collect were the required two rabbit pelts a year. These were used for making hats, earmuffs, and gloves to protect soldiers from the bitter cold. Kids were encouraged to keep rabbits and scavenge food for them on their way to school. This was nothing short of ludicrous, since our chances of catching a rabbit were incredibly remote. And anyone who did manage to trap a rabbit ate it immediately and then sold its skin at the farmers’ market. So, what did students do if they couldn’t catch rabbits? They had to go to the market and buy a skin. But one skin cost four or five won, a staggering amount when you considered that an average worker’s annual salary was only seventy or eighty won.
Needless to say, the teachers scolded any students who couldn’t come up with the requisite two pelts. How I remember their hectoring remarks: “If you can’t get rabbit skins, get some cement! If you can’t get cement, get some bricks!”
Cement and bricks were of course valuable as construction materials. If teachers could present a decent quantity of cement and a sufficient number of bricks to high-ranking party members, they would be in the officials’ good graces. So they piled pressure on their students to come up with the goods.
Parents of students who struggled in school gave teachers cigarettes or alcohol as a bribe. But the bribes were never enough. The teachers aggressively pressed for more and more. Students who couldn’t offer any further bribes didn’t want to go to school.
In winter, we were also tasked with gathering a set quota of firewood and charcoal. Some families didn’t bother with collecting wood and simply came up with alternative solutions. They made their own peat or even contrived to steal electricity for cooking purposes. Those kids had no way of meeting their targets. As a result, they’d run around the village the night before the deadline, stealing whatever firewood and charcoal they could lay their hands on.
Once beyond school age, individuals were all expected to carry out two functions: to contribute to production and to take part in military operations. The whole system was based on the “Four Military Lines.” The key tenets were “arm the entire people,” “fortify the entire nation,” “build a nation of military leaders,” and “complete military modernization.” So various militias were formed.
When I grew too old for the Youth League, I had no choice but to join one of these militias. In my case, it was the Laborers’ and Farmers’ Red Army. I enlisted when I graduated from high school and embarked on a period of training.
The training was professional enough. We learned how to dig trenches and fight to protect our position. We were well trained as snipers. Groups of individuals who were used to working together were formed into military units. The idea was that, in the event of a crisis, the units could be mobilized very quickly. We had exercises twice a year, at the hottest and the coldest time of year. We’d do things like climb a mountain or dig trenches out of the frozen ground. Right from the start, the one thing I kept asking myself was this: What was with the party’s obsession with militarizing the entire nation?
At the end of a particularly grueling training period, I said to my closest friend, “Jesus! I can’t do this anymore. It’s just too hard!” If a member of the secret police had overheard even this petty gripe, I’d have been sent to a concentration camp at once. I wasn’t the only one who complained, but it was dangerous to do so.
It was difficult for me to understand why no one ever seemed to question the point of the training, but I had to remember that they’d been brainwashed since they were babes by one or another barking, hysterical voice. When they were kids, it came from their teachers; later, it came from party officials, who drilled the same messages into them day after day after day. “The dictator of South Korea started the Korean War! He was a pro-American imperialist! The leader of a puppet government! A poodle!” As a result, the militarization of the nation was entirely justified in their eyes. They were the only bulwark against imperialist American or South Korean attacks. And anyone who doubted or questioned this wisdom must have been a counterrevolutionary. A subversive. A traitor.