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By Root 954 0

memories, of friendship and solidarity. These things were rare in Yodok, and I held them close. They gave me strength, unlike the old memories, whose return saddened me and sapped my strength. I hadn’t renounced the memory of my aquariums, but I now thought of them as belonging to another world, the abandoned world of Pyongyang; of my grandfather, who was condemned for being a “criminal”; of my mother, whom they’d kept back and forced to divorce my father; of Japan, as it had come alive in the stories of my uncle and father. This past had no place in my new life, which could accommodate no softheartedness, mine or anybody else’s.

That’s how I gradually grew into adulthood, though as far as the camp was concerned, the transition happened all at once, with “The Last Class.”3 Our teacher had a pithy way of illustrating what that transition really meant: “Up to now,” he told us on the last day of school, “when you made a mistake, even a serious one, no one shot you for it. But from here on out, you’re responsible adults, and you could get shot. Consider yourselves warned.” While waiting for a death sentence to test the full extent of my new responsibility, the very next day I was allowed to taste the simple joys of adult life in Yodok: physical labor from morning until night, distended quotas, the occasional distribution of third-quality tobacco, public criticism and self-criticism sessions, and so forth.

Criticism and self-criticism sessions were nothing new to me. Such meetings took place in every North Korean school, Yodok’s included. But outside the camp, these ideological exercises tended to be peaceable and rather formal in nature. Nothing much happened if you didn’t criticize well enough or happened to criticize too sharply. At Yodok, the stakes were much higher. Punishments consisted of hours of nighttime wood chopping, even for ten- and thirteen-year-old children.

The atmosphere was strained. You could feel the fear and hatred spreading through the room. The kids were not as adept at controlling their emotions as adults, who knew that the wisest thing to do was accept whatever criticism they received. The adults understood that it was just a routine that had nothing to do with what their fellow prisoners really thought of them. Soon enough, the criticized person would have to criticize his criticizer. Those were the rules; there was nothing personal about it. Yet the faultfinding of peers was hard for kids to accept, especially if it struck them as unfair. They would get angry, argue, interrupt each other. While the short Wednesday meetings, which lasted only twenty minutes, were hardly long enough to cause major damage, the Saturday afternoon sessions, which went on for nearly two hours, were considerably more lively and tension-filled. A special session also could be called if something unusual took place in school. The substance of adults’ criticisms was basically the same as the children’s: “I wasn’t careful enough during work hours . . . I arrived late yesterday because I was being careless, etc. . . .” The major difference was that the children’s sessions were conducted among one’s classmates.

As for the adults, each work team had its own location for Wednesday sessions, while on Saturday the different teams met together in a single large building, on whose walls hung the portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. At the far end of the room was a platform with a table where the prisoner sat to present his self-criticism. Next to the table stood two guards, along with a representative of the prisoners. There were no other chairs in the room. The other prisoners sat on the floor in groups of five, clustered with their fellow team members. The assembly hall was always overcrowded. Some prisoners dozed off, others became nauseous from the intensity of the body odor that hung in the air—there was no soap at Yodok.

Sometimes we met in smaller groups to prepare our Saturday presentation in advance. Four of us would discuss our misdeeds for the week, while the fifth team member took notes. Afterward, the report was