The Aquariums of Pyongyang_ Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag - Chol-hwan Kang [42]
I don’t remember anything bad being said about the North Korean regime or its leaders at any time during our first year of detention. My relatives found joy simply in evoking their childhood memories. Sometimes the two brothers would softly intone old Japanese melodies. Father loved to sing “A Song for My Mother” to my grandmother to thank her for all her attempts to cook us something edible. The song had to do with a loving mother who sits knitting gloves, her eyes made red by icy winds and want of sleep. The lyrics lacked a certain poetry, but they moved us and made the tears flow from Grandmother’s eyes. She was the one who had originally dragged the family into this whole mess, but she was also the one who made it possible for us to resist. She made it possible with her care and encouragement and pluck. It’s only thanks to her that I survived, and the same goes for my sister. The poor girl needed all the care and attention she could get. People are horrified when they hear how old I was when my family got taken to Yodok, but then I tell them about Mi-ho, who was only seven. I don’t know if that child faced the same hardships I did in the camp; we almost never saw each other during the day, and at night she was as exhausted as everybody else and immediately collapsed into sleep. That was something else the camp stole from us—our sibling bond. I think about her now with great regret and affection. She survived because she was strong—very strong. For despite my grandmother’s support, she ultimately was left to confront the snitches, the agents, the weariness, and the hunger all alone.
The spring of 1979 had arrived. It was my second spring in the camp, and it followed a winter that camp veterans counted as mild. Spring is a hard season for the detainees of Yodok, the worst, I believe. Many withstand the cold of winter only to perish in the season of rebirth. Children and the elderly are most afflicted. The prisoners often called it “the yellow season,” because people felt out of shape and weak at the slightest physical exertion; they suffered from dizzy spells and in the most severe cases saw the sky as yellow instead of blue. Those who were unable to protect themselves in the preceding months died. The key was to take advantage of the fall, when fruit and vegetables could still be found, to consume like bears in hibernation, eating enough to get through winter and fight through spring. That’s the most important thing I learned in school. I didn’t learn it from my teachers, of course, but from fellow students, some of whom had already been in the camp for close to three years. They explained that to survive, one had to steal corn and soybeans, to do it methodically, systematically, eating as much as one could in the fall and stashing the rest against the harder times of the seasons to follow. There was no other way to survive.
Our corn rations were extremely meager: adults who worked from sunup to sundown had a daily allowance of 500 grams; others, including children, were allotted 400 grams. Vegetables were not distributed at all, and the few cabbages and turnips we managed to grow in our little plot were nowhere near enough to feed a household. Despite the risks of getting caught, we wound up stealing whatever we could get our hands on. We stole from the vegetable fields, from the agent’s plots, from the cornfields. We also took advantage of logging expeditions to gather wild berries, which could only be found up in the mountain, since around the villages everything was picked clean. The detainees were like goats: they devoured everything. Whatever they didn’t eat right away, they dried and ate in the winter; and when any kind of animal fell into their hands, they ate that, too.
Despite these precautions, more than a hundred people died in our village every year—out of a population of two to three thousand. Many former Japanese residents were interned in 1976 and 1977, the year of my arrival in the camp. That period and the months that immediately followed were among the most murderous I ever knew at Yodok. The newly