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By Root 992 0

was to eat every insect he could get his hands on. Whether or not true, it won him the nickname Cockroach. Park Seung-jin, as he was really named, had lived his earlier moment of glory back in the 1966 World Cup in England. That year, the North Korean team on which he played miraculously made it to the final round, where in the first game it managed a 1–0 victory against the mighty Italians. To celebrate their victory, the players went on a wild drinking binge and, by the end of the night, were seen carrying on in public with some girls. By the next game day—two days later—they still hadn’t fully recovered. The team nevertheless got off to a strong start, taking an early 3–0 lead against the Portuguese. But then they fell apart, and Portugal stormed back to win the game 5–3.

In Pyongyang, the national team’s barroom antics were judged bourgeois, reactionary, corrupted by imperialism and bad ideas. Upon arriving back in Korea, the whole team—save for Park Douik, who, suffering from stomach pains on the night of the party, had been forced to stay in his hotel room—was sent to the camps. Unfortunately for Park Seung-jin, his celebrity won him few favors in Yodok, as he discovered when he was caught stealing nails and cement from the camp’s construction materials shop where he worked. He denied all wrongdoing and lashed out at the accusing guard. His punishment was a three-month stint in the sweatbox, which he somehow miraculously survived. By the time I arrived at Yodok, he’d already been there almost twelve years. And he was still there when I left the camp, though by then he was much weakened.

The sweatbox breaks even the sturdiest of constitutions. It is possible to survive it, but the cost is often crippling and the aftereffects are almost always permanent. It is simply grisly: the privation of food; close confinement, crouching on one’s knees, hands on thighs, unable to move. The prisoner’s rear end presses into his heels so unrelentingly that the buttocks turns solid black with bruising. Hardly anyone exited the sweatbox on his own two feet. If the prisoner needed to relieve himself, he raised his left hand; if he was sick, he raised his right. No other gestures were allowed. No other movements. No words. If the watchman pacing back and forth in front of the sweatbox failed to notice the raised hand, well, that was too bad. The prisoner continued to wait in silence. If he talked, he was beaten; if he moved, he was beaten. And if it was not a beating he got, it was a special punishment: he was made to crouch over the septic pit for half an hour, with his hands behind his back and his nose bowed downward. In the realm of horror, only punitive forced labor withstands comparison to the sweatbox. In a way, the two are equal and opposite. With forced labor, one has to move without stopping, excavate mountains of earth, lift massive logs into the back of trucks—all at an infernal pace. If nothing useful needs doing, a useless task will work just as well: digging a hole or a trench, for example, then filling it right back up. According to the Yodok veterans, the one appreciable difference between punitive forced labor and the sweatbox was that the latter automatically added five years to one’s detention.

NINE

DEATH AT YODOK

Our schoolwork continued on, as numbingly boring as ever. Disinterest, fear of beatings, and physical weariness collaborated to make dunces of us all. And assignments such as “summarize the Great Leader’s speech of July 3, 1954, and learn it by heart” were not the thing to awaken our intellectual curiosity. Then again, that was never the point. As long as we looked like we were paying attention, the teachers were content to let us sit and do nothing in peace.

We didn’t have that option in the afternoon, however, when the outdoor work was hard and demanded all our attention. To ensure that our minds and muscles stayed alert, our hoeing and weeding was supervised by armed guards, who could impose physical punishment if a production quota went unmet. Sometimes the guards’ attention slipped, but