The Aquariums of Pyongyang_ Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag - Chol-hwan Kang [40]
The North Korean state separated even the irredeemables into different categories. I never learned what sort of criteria they used, but several detainees affirmed that certain irredeemables were condemned to work details so difficult and brutal that they soon died. These unfortunates were usually sent to large, isolated work sites, where they worked under a cloak of total secrecy building military complexes or assembling sensitive products such as missiles or other sophisticated munitions. In North Korea, such work is never entrusted to common citizens, or even to detainees who have a chance of one day getting out. Military secrets were best left to the irredeemables, who could take them to their graves. The system constitutes an important source of savings for the state: not only did it conserve the executioners’ bullets, it furnishes from a labor force that demanded no salary and very little food.
There were various rumors in the camp about irredeemables who had engaged in savage, desperate revolts. Were they true stories or fantasies of revenge? According to one often-repeated story, a few years before our arrival at Yodok, the irredeemables held in the neighboring zone went on a rampage and killed a number of guards with axes, sickles, and pitchforks. The army was called in and immediately encircled the camp before any of the convicts could escape. It was said that no quarter was given to the male prisoners. This might explain why, by the time I arrived in Yodok, the high-security zone was filled mostly with old people, women, and children.
After meeting a few irredeemables, I lost any lingering doubt I might have had about the reality of this and other rumored rebellions. These prisoners’ states of mind were so estranged from ordinary human thinking. In my part of the camp, the detainees still held to the hope of getting out one day. They set their teeth, suffered in silence, tried to hold out. Hope clung to their bodies even when it seemed to abandon their minds. But those in the high-security zone harbored no hope of returning to normal life. What reason could they have for patience? They must have thought—like Karl Marx’s own proletariat—that they had only their chains to lose. In a life so grim, death was the only future close at hand.
EIGHT
CORN, ROACHES, AND SNAKE BRANDY
My first winter in the camp was very trying, especially January and February of 1978. It wasn’t school that was the problem anymore—that slap I got for knowing too much about the life of Kim Il-sung had taught me how to keep my mouth shut. I had also grown accustomed to the afterschool work of felling and hauling trees, so that wasn’t the problem either. No, the greatest difficulty now had to do with nourishment. I was always hungry and had problems digesting the little food I did get. Our meals were so unchanging they started to make me sick. Grandmother noticed what was happening and, to break the monotony, sometimes cooked me some of our remaining rice. But she had resolved to make our little stock—the one buffer we had against extreme deprivation—last as long as possible, and would never cede to my pleas for more.
Corn was always on the menu: sometimes it was accented with the herbs Grandmother made us gather; sometimes it was plain; sometimes it was mixed with acorn paste, which was every bit as bland as the corn. The acorns first had to be boiled and crushed into a paste, then molded into a block, and finally set out to dry and harden. After that, small bits of the block could be broken off and mixed with water and salt. From beginning to end, the process took several days.
We also created our own variation of oksusupap, a traditional dish of rice and corn. We used the camp’s flour mill to crush the dried corn kernels into rice-sized