The Aquariums of Pyongyang_ Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag - Chol-hwan Kang [63]
Many other leaders’ birthdays were important enough to serve as a pretext for pedagogic celebrations or breaks from the normal routine. On such days, candy was dispensed to all the kids in the country, sometimes even to those in the camps. I remember Kim Il-sung’s seventieth birthday in 1982. As soon as I got my candy, I ran home to show it to my grandmother. By this time, her faith in the Worker’s Party was long gone. “Ah, yes,” she said. “We gave them everything we had, and in return we get years in the camp and a few cheap candies. There’s something to celebrate, my child. And a big thank you to Kim Il-sung!” I ate the gifts anyway. They were the first goodies I’d tasted in a very long time.
The other birthdays were less solemn events, occasioning the dispensation of more modest rewards, but they were greatly appreciated. On January 1 (New Year’s Day), February 16 (Kim Jong-il’s birthday), September 9 (anniversary of North Korea’s declaration of statehood), and October 10 (anniversary of the Party’s founding), we would gather to watch an edifying television program or a revolutionary film. We were let off work early to see the screening, but sometimes we were so tired, we immediately fell asleep.
I remember one movie about the life of Kim Il-sung in which the main actor looked just like the Great Leader himself. He was taking his troops through the vast Manchurian plain, frozen solid by cold and snow. The fierce struggle of Kim Il-sung’s partisans and the cruel treatment meted out to them by the Japanese were supposed to arouse our sympathy, but they wound up doing the opposite. We were struggling as hard at Yodok as Kim Il-sung’s partisans in the frozen plain; what we saw on the screen was parallel to our own condition. The dungeons, brutalities, inhumane guards, and meager food supplies depicted on the screen didn’t move us; we were living with these things every day. Except our misery wasn’t inflicted by enemies but by our own compatriots!
I remember another film about a man named Kapyong, who signs up to be an auxiliary in the Japanese army. There wasn’t a kid in the country, Yodok included, who hadn’t seen the movie at least a dozen times and knew every word by heart. In the movie, Kapyong goes to work for the Japanese out of necessity and from a lack of political consciousness. Then he meets Kim Il-sung, sees the light, and is transfigured into a true patriot. He then sings a lament about the humiliations he has suffered at the hands of “Fascists.” In the theaters back in Pyongyang, all the kids would sing along with it. At Yodok we did the same thing, except that during the refrain, instead of bemoaning the fate of “poor Kapyong,” everyone substituted their own names.
The propaganda was so grotesque, the teaching method so crude, we were bound to reject it. Like every education institution in North Korea, the camp’s school had a room dedicated to the study of Kim Il-sung’s revolution. On one wall hung a huge portrait of the Great Leader, and everywhere you looked were photos illustrating the different stages in his heroic life. It was forbidden for anyone to enter the room with bare or dirty feet. We had to wear socks—and not just any socks. For this occasion we had to put on the special pair given to us on Kim Il-sung’s birthday, the pair reserved for visiting the holy sites. What did it matter that we suffered from the cold in winter and waded in puddles during the rainy season with only rags around our feet? Wearing Kim Il-sung’s socks for such workaday purposes would have been a sacrilege. The Party’s code of conduct required that we reserve them for the Kim Il-sung annex, no matter how much we needed them in our daily lives.
One day I came to school having forgotten that the Wild Boar had scheduled a visit to the Kim Il-sung room. I was wearing my ordinary socks, which were full of holes and barely holding together after half a dozen darnings by my grandmother. I was panicstricken,