The Aquariums of Pyongyang_ Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag - Chol-hwan Kang [16]
The Koreans who enthusiastically cast off from the port of Nikada on Japan’s western coast were like those Armenians who left from the Port of Marseilles fifteen years earlier, tossing loaves of good white bread, that had been distributed to them, to their relatives on shore. Several years later they were cursing themselves and anyone who had ever told them about that land of supposed plenty. They sent desperate appeals to France, were willing to do anything just to get out. But it was too late. It was just the same for the returning Korean patriots. They set off full of confidence and hope, often with Japanese spouses and children who had only known life in Japan, and they, too, were heading for a big fall, at the bottom of which they would find isolation, poverty, daily surveillance, and sometimes, the concentration camps.
At the end of a fifteen-hour voyage, my grandparents landed in Chongjin in northeastern Korea. My third uncle later told me about the family’s arrival: “It was like the city was dead—the strangest atmosphere. The people all looked so shabby and aimless in their wandering. There was a feeling of deep sadness in the air, and no movement betrayed the slightest hint of spontaneity.” My uncle was frightened by these shadows, who were so at odds with the earthly paradise he had been led to expect. A sense of dull terror lent new weight to the warnings his family had received prior to its departure. But what reason had they to heed the reactionaries’ drivel? My uncle downplayed one incident that later came back to him like a boomerang: when the passengers descended down to the docks, several Koreans, who had arrived from Japan a few weeks earlier, took advantage of the general mayhem of family reunions to whisper their astonishment at the new arrivals’ decision to immigrate.
One of them came up to my uncle. “What happened?” he asked. “We sent our friends and family letters warning people not to come! Why didn’t your family listen?” My uncle turned suddenly pale. My father stepped forward and answered in his place, asking the young man how long he’d been in the North. “A few months,” he answered, “but that’s long enough to understand.” My father insisted that the Chosen Soren had hidden nothing of the difficulties and challenges involved in building the country. “But it’s just propaganda,” responded his interlocutor. “You’re not going to build a new life here; your parents will be stripped of all their belongings, then left to die. You’ll soon find out what these North Korean Communists are all about.”
The furtive exchange cast a palpable chill. This wasn’t the sort of welcome my father and uncle had expected. Yet it was true that these detractors had only recently arrived. Big moves always take some adjustment; these people just hadn’t been there long enough. And why had that strange man come up to them afterward? Might they not have been provocateurs? Grandmother later pointed out that if their intention really was to get us to turn back, they certainly picked the wrong time and place to do it. “We were wearing rosecolored glasses when we arrived. Our faith in our new life was anchored so deep, had been cultivated for so long, that these grim warnings simply couldn’t touch us.” Besides that, it looked like the North Korea dream might still prove a reality: the receiving officials waited on the family hand and foot. While the other newly arriving immigrants were summarily routed off to various cities around the country, my family received the sort of attention generally reserved for Party cadres. Grandfather had brought his car over on the ship. It was a late model Volvo—probably the only one of its kind in all North Korea. The officials suggested the family drive the Volvo to Pyongyang while a second, government, car followed with the family’s luggage. The authorities trusted them and tried to