The Aquariums of Pyongyang_ Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag - Chol-hwan Kang [28]
Besides the huts, there were several large horseshoe-shaped buildings, which housed the single prisoners. My uncle told us they slept five or six to a room and seventy to one hundred per structure. Like the family units, these buildings were edged with small plots where prisoners could grow their own vegetables, but over the years, these areas kept shrinking. They first became the site for the buildings’ common kitchens and two outhouses, and later for stables housing the bulls and cows used for drawing carts. In each single building, the guards selected one prisoner to be barracks chief and lord over his fellow singles. From the remaining prisoners, four were assigned to work in the kitchen. These were always three women and one man, the latter being largely responsible for gathering and hauling wood. Some of the singles were in Yodok because they belonged to criminal families. Others were just petty criminals: people who missed an official march, exhibited want of enthusiasm for the Great Leader, or lacked requisite zeal in their denunciation of traitors to the state. Such wrongdoers usually spared the prisons for hardened criminals. They were, however, kept under special surveillance and forbidden from leaving their hut at night.
The collection of ten huts that made up our immediate surroundings constituted what we prisoners called a “village,” a word ill-fitted to the disorganized jumble of huts devoid of streets, a center, periphery, or official buildings. Formally, these settlements were known as “workers’ groups,” and each one was assigned a number for identification. Among ourselves, we shunned these cold, bureaucratic appellations and came up with a more poetic nomenclature of our own. Workers’ group number 2 was the “Royal Pine Village,” workers’ group number 4, the “Chestnut Tree Village,” and workers’ group number 10—where we lived—was “The Village on the Plain.”
Each village consolidated a specific category of detainees. Ours, which was built in 1974, was inhabited solely by former Japanese residents and their families. The segregation served as tacit recognition of our difficult integration into North Korean society, as well as a way of isolating all mention of the capitalist hell existing outside the country’s borders. For the same reason we were also forbidden—under threat of severe punishment—from having any contact with prisoners from other villages. Furtive messages were occasionally exchanged, however, during campwide ceremonies or up in the mountains, where we were sent to gather medicinal herbs under slack surveillance by the guards. Our communications were usually confined to notes about the layout of the camp, as we worked to expand the limited picture handed down to us by camp veterans. We traded information about the population of the various villages, the severity of the guards, the availability of food, and so forth.
All this came later, though. On first arriving at Yodok, we were like sailors just landed on a desert island, still marked by our recently departed world, but obliged to rediscover the gestures of a more remote past: to grab an ax, chop down a tree, build a fire, and cook something into a meal. We didn’t have much time: night would be falling soon, and in the dark we would be at a complete loss. My uncle, who knew the place a little better than the rest of us, offered to help. He went out and chopped down a small tree for firewood, but the green logs burned so piteously and raised so much smoke that one of our neighbors offered some of his own stock—along with the suggestion that we start working on a woodpile of our own.
The greatest challenge of the night was still before us, however. We needed to figure out how to cook rice over an open flame. The problem had never before presented itself,