The Aquariums of Pyongyang_ Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag - Chol-hwan Kang [49]
After my father and uncle emerged from their bout of depression, it was their turn to give moral support to my grandmother, who was teetering ever more precipitously between anger and desperation. They now tried to ply her with the very arguments she had recently used on them: there was still a chance they would get out one day; the family needed to stick together; they were like a five-man team, where the fate of each member depended on the fate of the group as a whole.
We did, indeed, stick together, and while Grandmother was never to recover her former joy for life, she did regain her equilibrium. At the same time, her political thinking also gradually began to change. When we first arrived at the camp, she had wanted to believe that our internment stemmed from a judicial error that the authorities might soon set aright. As time passed, however, her attention shifted to the camp itself, which she contended served no purpose in a Communist regime. If opponents and protestors were unhappy in North Korea, it was enough simply to kick them out. Running a camp such as Yodok was a crime, a concentration of inhumanity. Eventually, she went still further, asserting that though North Korea still wore the badge of communism, it had lost its soul. I think it was only then that she truly realized she’d been had. With the years, she stopped bemoaning her fate and beating herself up about it; but her criticisms didn’t stop, they just metastasized into anger and hate. She now saw the regime as closer to Hitler’s world than anything Marx or Lenin had envisioned. True communism she would never renounce, not even now that its actualization no longer seemed within easy reach.
Grandmother was also the first among us to fall seriously ill. She came down with a disease called pellagra, which was once common among North American Indians and caused by a diet too rich in corn. The malady was not difficult to diagnose. The sufferers’ skin turned rough, their nails fell off, and their eyes became ringed with deep wrinkles that made them look as if they were wearing glasses. The prisoners at Yodok called pellagra the “glasses disease” or the “dog disease,” because eating dog was a guaranteed antidote—though I suspect any meat would have done. If victims couldn’t get meat, they started losing their senses and trying to eat anything they could get their hands on. Sometimes this actually made them better, but many died from the disease.
In the spring of 1981, I was assigned to help bury the bodies of prisoners who had perished during the previous winter, when the frosthardened earth had made timely interment difficult. As with any detail, the work was carried out after school; but since it was considered somewhat unusual, we were rewarded with a few noodles to supplement our ration of corn. This would have sufficed to make interring bodies a desirable detail, but the work offered another very practical advantage. The burial team could strip the corpse of its last remaining clothes and either reuse them or barter them for other essentials. But the fringe benefits came at a price. Since Korean tradition requires that people be buried on a height, we had to carry the bodies up a mountain or to the top of a hill. We naturally preferred the hills at the center of the camp to the steep mountain slopes near Yodok’s perimeter. Their proximity allowed us to follow tradition without traversing