The Aquariums of Pyongyang_ Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag - Chol-hwan Kang [13]
In June 1949, the Koreans who previously had belonged to the Japanese Communist Party migrated en masse into the newly created Korean Worker’s Party, as the North Korean communist party was called. Like its counterparts all over the world, the KWP showed a formidable knack for creating associations with the allure of democracy and openness to the general public. There were women’s associations, movements for the defense of culture and peace, sports clubs, and various other groups which the Party could influence from the shadows. My grandmother was among the Party’s most active organizers and eventually became director for the Kyoto region. This responsibility came as a supplement to her ordinary commitments as a party member. Had it been humanly possible, I’m sure her relentless activism would have driven her to join even more associations.
Yet she somehow still found time to take charge of her children’s upbringing, which she did in a manner all her own. During their years in Kyoto, my grandparents lived in an opulent house located in a picturesque, well-to-do neighborhood dotted with vestiges of Japan’s historic past. The children had their own rooms. The kitchen, or rather kitchens, for there were more than one, were enormous, and paradox of paradoxes, their servants were Japanese—at a time when most domestic workers in Japan were Korean. These luxuries had my grandfather’s hand written all over them. Nothing frightened my grandmother more than the effect such comforts might have on her and her family. Was anything more noxious to one’s sense of justice than needless luxury? Were not her days in desperate poverty responsible for her understanding of the world? And what a demonstration of the Communist dialectic it had been: the negative turned positive, black misery sublimated into heightened consciousness, suffering into solidarity! “Luxury,” she once told me in reference to that period in her life, “is never a leaven to the desire for justice.”
And so Grandmother raised her kids as though they were poor. My father told me that he and his siblings often wore darned socks and threadbare clothes, even though their parents had enough money to buy them a new wardrobe several times over. Another anecdote confirms that the kids didn’t look like daddy’s boys and girls. A rather comic scene took place when, following Japanese custom, my father’s teacher was supposed to drop by the house for a parent-teacher conference. Since the teacher had never visited before, my father led the way. The closer they got to the house, the more astonished and incredulous the teacher became. “You must be lost,” said the teacher. “We’re going toward the rich neighborhood.” “No, no,” retorted my father. “It’s just around the corner.” The teacher continued to voice his astonishment, but there was no mistake, and the bewildered man soon found himself standing inside a beautiful house in Kyoto’s poshest neighborhood. I later saw the house in a home movie my father had shot and brought with him to the North. It was a luxurious threestory villa with a pool and a garden.
I have always been at a loss to understand why my grandparents sent their kids to ordinary Japanese schools rather than institutions run by the Chosen Soren. These bastions of the counterculture were favored by parents who wanted their children tapped into their Korean roots. Why my father, uncles, and aunts never attended these schools will forever remain a mystery.
The Chosen Soren education network remained strong throughout the 1960s and 1970s and comprised some 150 institutions spanning primary school to university. By the 1980s, however, the network had been substantially weakened by the integration of Japan’s 700,000 Korean residents into the mainstream culture, as well as by North Korea’s withering public image and the general lack of interest in becoming “a proud soldier of General Kim Il-sung.”
Though it has lost much of its power and glory, the Chosen Soren still exists. In May