The Aquariums of Pyongyang_ Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag - Chol-hwan Kang [7]
Reading this book is a first step toward making the repression in North Korea a major concern for human rights defenders around the world.
Pierre Rigoulot
ONE
A HAPPY CHILDHOOD IN PYONGYANG
In the 1960s, North Korea’s disaster was not yet on the horizon. In economic terms, the country was going neck and neck with the South, and in Pyongyang, the regime’s privileged showcase, it seemed the Party’s talk of triumph and promise might actually hold true. I know what I’m talking about; Pyongyang is where I was born and grew up. I even lived some happy years there, under the guardian eye of Kim Il-sung, our “Great Leader,” and his son, Kim Jong-il, our “Dear Leader.”
To the child I was, Kim Il-sung was a kind of Father Christmas. Every year on his birthday, he would send us gift packages of cakes and sweets. Our beloved Number One chose them himself, with a care and kindness that gave his gifts a savoriness all their own. Thanks to his generosity, we also had the right, every third year, to a school uniform, a cap, and a pair of shoes.
Our mothers said these polyester uniforms were sturdy, easy to wash, and permanently pressed. As for the shoes, daily use showed them to be of excellent quality. The ceremony for the distribution of uniforms, a most solemn event, was held in the large hall adjoining the school, which was specially decorated for the occasion with slogans and portraits. The parents in attendance applauded speeches by the school principal and several representatives of the Party. Student delegates got on the rostrum and thanked the Party in their little childish voices, pledging allegiance to the Clairvoyant, and pouring imprecations on all our enemies, American imperialism first among them, “because its claws still grip part of our dear Fatherland.” At the end, the student delegates were entrusted with the precious gifts, which they distributed to the rest of the pupils the following day.
Kim Il-sung was actually even better than Father Christmas, because he seemed eternally young and omniscient. Like his son, Kim Jong-il, who was said to be in line to succeed him, he was more like a god to us than Father Christmas. The newspapers, the radio, posters, our textbooks, our teachers: everyone and everything seemed to confirm this. By marrying our singular Korean genius with the immutable ideals of the Communist revolution, these two masterminds, these two darlings of the universe, were building for us the Edenic socialist state. Had not Kim Il-sung’s political acumen and incomparable intellect already been the cause of wonders, against the cruel American invaders, for example, whom he dealt the most humiliating of defeats? Only much later did I learn how the war was really started and what happened in its aftermath. Like millions of other North Korean children, I was taught that thanks to the military genius of our Great Guide and, to a lesser degree, the international aid of China, to whom we were united “like lips to teeth,” our valiant People’s Army had routed the Americans. Kim Il-sung—a.k.a. the Light of Human Genius, the Unequaled Genius, the Summit of Thought, the North Star of the People—was the object of a personality cult extravagant enough to rival that of Stalin or Mao Tse-tung, and indeed, even to outlive them. In 1998, the People’s Supreme Assembly even made the astounding decision to name Kim Il-sung president “for all eternity”—four years after his death!
To my childish eyes and to those of all my friends, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il were perfect beings, untarnished by any base human function. I was convinced, as we all were, that neither of them urinated or defecated. Who could imagine such things of gods? In the portraits of their paternal faces I found comfort and all that was protecting, kindly, self-assured.
Like other children, I started grammar school at the