The Aquariums of Pyongyang_ Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag - Chol-hwan Kang [38]
The retreat of that other universe was also manifested in my mother’s absence, which was growing ever longer. In the beginning, I hardly thought of her. Our days were so full, we hadn’t time to think about anyone, and at night we were so tired I barely had the energy left to utter her name. The memories didn’t come on their own, and I had no desire to help them along. Yet as the days and weeks passed, my sister and I longed more and more for Mother’s return. When we asked Grandmother about it, she pleaded ignorance. Father, for his part, counseled patience, but he acted like someone who no longer believed his own words.
I feel almost guilty complaining publicly about the life I led at Yodok. Yes, guilty, for Yodok is by no means the toughest camp in North Korea. Far worse exist, and they are shrouded in such secrecy that for a long time it was impossible to talk about them with any precision. Rumors about these places circulated constantly at Yodok, but firsthand accounts were rare. Most of the prisoners in these camps were irredeemables serving life sentences. There were a few exceptions, however, and they sometimes got transferred to Yodok. According to them, our camp was paradise compared to the others. Such judgments were always difficult for us to believe, and we would press these rare birds for more details. They said that the guards in other camps would breathe down their necks, pushing them to work ever harder, and that they had Kalachnikovs slung over their shoulders, ready to fire at the slightest hint of provocation. At Yodok, the guards only had revolvers, and these rarely came out of their holsters. The surveillance, furthermore, was not always that close. The guards at Yodok never let their work put them out. The only thing they cared about was our production quota. Harassing inmates for its own sake was rarely part of the program.
Like the irredeemables in Yodok, the inmates of the other hard-labor camps were members of landholding families, capitalists, U.S. or South Korean agents, Christians, or members of purged Party circles deemed noxious to the state. The various prisoners were given the same treatment, regardless of their crime. Unlike Yodok’s redeemable population, who stopped work early on bad-weather days, the irredeemables labored equally long hours during the winter and summer months. The men and the women lived separately and were grouped according to their health and vigor, with the strongest prisoners assigned to the most backbreaking work. Their children received an education that was even less worthy of that title than what we had. After barely three years of middle school, the kids were classified as adults and assigned to fatigue duty from morning until night. At Yodok, the children of irredeemables had their own schools, and we were strictly forbidden from mixing. Their clothes, too, were more threadbare, torn, and dirty than anything we wore. A final detail: they were all given special haircuts, which marked them as lifers, and made it impossible for them to pass for citizens if they ever tried to escape.
Yodok and the hard-labor camps did have several points in common, the first of these being the snitches. During the first days and weeks of our detention, my father and uncle felt most oppressed by the physical demands of forced labor and the looming threat of punishment. The slightest wrong move, it seemed, could mean extra work or a stint of solitary confinement in a sweatbox. This fear, they soon realized, was the consequence of the network of snitches that pervaded the camp. The informants were at every turn.