The Aquariums of Pyongyang_ Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag - Chol-hwan Kang [34]
Newly arrived and still unfamiliar with what passed for good behavior, I was overanxious to win the teacher’s good graces and demonstrate my superiority over the rest of the class. Perhaps the other kids in the room really were bad eggs, but I certainly wasn’t. My grandmother had been a member of the National Assembly, and my grandfather had given his entire fortune to the Party. To show I was one of Kim Il-sung’s good soldiers, I kept asking questions and putting in my two cents whenever possible.
What a mistake! As the teacher was lecturing about the Namhodu conference and Kim Il-sung’s brilliant speech of April 27, 1936, I became aware that he was confusing the circumstances surrounding this address with the intrigues of the Dahongdan conference. I raised my hand and asked him about the possible confusion. The man with the revolver walked over with a heavy step and slapped me hard across the face. There was a burst of laughter in the room. The new guy had just got his first lesson. I was terror stricken—though more outraged than sad, more hate-filled than despairing. I decided that I would do everything in my power to undermine that vile brute who was passing himself off as a teacher. I would do like the others and sit there without saying a word. Yet my silent compact would prove a weak palliative against the lasting pain of that episode. In receiving that slap I grasped that my life had fallen into a “nasty place,” to recall the phrase of my former Pyongyang comrades.
The break with my former world didn’t coincide with my arrival at the camp. In some respects, the place itself was not to blame. I could sometimes forget my detention and let myself be transported by the pleasure of being in the country. The river and the distant mountains were often a source of relief and consolation. But that first day of class remains a horrible memory. I felt something tear inside me then—something that connected me to the only other life I had known. From then on, I felt the same fear in front of certain teachers as I had felt the day of our arrival, when from inside the truck I heard the guards shouting abuses at the people clamoring to see us, the new criminals. I had been made to believe—and had indeed wanted to believe—that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was the best country in the world. I looked up to Kim Il-sung as a god. Yet here were armed teachers beating and insulting their student charges.
Over the course of my detention, I had half a dozen male teachers and two female teachers, both of whom were the wives of guards. Of all, only one deserved the title of instructor. The worst was the one we called the Wild Boar—the very same who had taken such exception to my knowledge of the Namhodu conference. Almost as ruthless was Pak Tae-seu, a.k.a. the Old Fox, who sometimes punished his students by making them stand naked in the courtyard all day with their hands behind their backs. We hated him so much we once got up the courage to damage his bicycle. To get us to denounce the culprits, he confined us all to our huts. When that didn’t work, he tried threats and thrashings and extra hours of work at night, when our sole desire in life was to sleep. But we never cracked.
One of the most common forms of school punishment was latrine duty. There were always two monitors—fellow prisoners both—who stood at the school entrance to watch over the arriving students and pick out the latecomers. A student who was tardy could expect to get a week’s worth of latrine duty, which consisted of cleaning the stalls or emptying the septic tanks. The tanks had to be emptied once a year, and if there was a dearth of students requiring punishment, the teachers would choose kids at random.
One time a friend of mine from class started complaining to us because he’d been picked for the nasty job several times in a row. “I’m always the one,” he whined. “Don’t the teachers have anything better for us to do? It’s probably because they like