The Aquariums of Pyongyang_ Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag - Chol-hwan Kang [59]
The quarantine area was divided into two wards, one for contagious patients, the other for psychiatric cases. In neither ward was medicine ever available. The patients simply waited for their illness to pass. If they died, that was just too bad. If they made it, they were sent back to work. The camp had many cases of madness, which put both the patients and their families at great risk. A mad person could say just about anything. If it was favorable to Kim Il-sung, nothing bad happened to the patient’s relatives. If, however, the comments were inappropriate, the patient and his family could pay with their lives. Madness struck young and old alike, the newly arrived and the veterans, as the climate of terror, scant food, and insufficient sleep put us all perpetually on the edge of delirium. Unbalanced prisoners had to work like everybody else, only their rations were made proportional to the amount of work they performed. If they worked a little, they had little to eat. If they didn’t work at all, they starved to death.
I saw many fits of madness at the camp. One student had to leave school for a month after a severe beating by his teacher left him delirious. Another instance of madness happened to a good friend of mine, whose father had been Kim Il-sung’s history teacher as well as the national minister of education. The boy’s family arrived at the camp the same time we had, and he and I were in the same class. One day in the middle of a lesson he suddenly started raving, then stopped and broke into uncontrollable laughter. When I asked him what was so funny, he told me that the previous day his brother had given him something very delicious to eat. He glanced about with a strange look in his eye and made nonsensical replies to all our questions. Finally, the teacher sent him home. We didn’t see him again for six months. Then he was back, apparently sane, only more reserved and taciturn than we had previously known him to be.
TWELVE
BIWEEKLY CRITICISM AND SELF-CRITICISM
In 1984, I turned fifteen. I was a scrawny kid, even by camp standards, but I had more stamina than most prisoners my age. I could walk briskly for hours with a heavy load, having come a long way since the time I passed out from carrying a log. No matter how much healthier the newly arrived kids may have looked, none could keep up with me. At Yodok, habit, training, and trickery counted more than strength. Arriving at the camp at the age I did left me plenty of time to develop these qualities.
My stamina gradually won me the respect of my fellow prisoners. Even the guards—who weren’t exactly the accommodating type—never exerted extra effort to treat me like a “troublemaker” or make my life miserable.
So do I dare admit it? Some mysterious bond had come to attach me to that place. I’ve heard it said that the most miserable slave is one who is content with his fate. That wasn’t my case; I wasn’t content. But Yodok was the big cage where I’d grown into adulthood and wised up to life’s tough realities. It was my cage—and though I was a hungry prisoner, draped in rags, I had learned to love the scents wafted by the springtime breeze, the tender green of the season’s first leaves, the last glow of pink in the evening sky as the sun sank behind the mountains. I could never look at those mountains, where I was sent to gather wild ginseng and other medicines with my friends, without being moved: I would recall the time we accidentally came nose to nose with a bear and had to hightail it down the mountain; the meal we made of a captured snake; the sweetness of the wild berries we picked. These were precious