The Aquariums of Pyongyang_ Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag - Chol-hwan Kang [70]
Alone in the heights, I escaped the abuse of guards: the blows, the forced labor, the sweatbox. Beatings didn’t appear on the official list of sanctioned punishments, but they were the camp’s most common currency. No trifle was too small to serve as a pretext for a beating—of a child or an adult. For example, the South Korean government used balloons to drop leaflets on their northern neighbor. Upon finding such a leaflet, a prisoner was supposed to turn it over to a guard or tear it up right away without reading it. The problem was, despite the paper’s weight and roughness, it was much prized for its potential hygienic use. One day, a newly arrived and still unsuspecting prisoner happened upon one such crumpled sheet and rushed to hand it over to a guard. The agent looked very smug at first, but as he began to unfold the sheet, his expression suddenly changed. The paper had already been used. The guard beat the hapless prisoner with such furor that he was unable to move for several days.
I somehow was always able to dodge such thrashings and avoid the camp’s most dangerous work details. Not all children were so fortunate. In the spring of 1986, three of my schoolmates were transferred to the gold mine, where their job was setting and detonating dynamite. They had to light the fuse first and run for cover second. They must have been especially tired one day, because they didn’t manage to get very far before the blast went off. Two of them were killed. The third, who was partially protected by a turn in the tunnel, had half his face blown off. Poor kids! The guards had no scruples about how they used them. They actually preferred children for the job, because they were smaller and quicker. Gold mine accidents were second only to malnutrition as Yodok’s leading cause of mortality. They were responsible for more deaths than even the felling of trees, not to mention the innumerable casualties that resulted from cave-ins and mishandled tools.
Soft-skinned city boy that I was, I was lucky to get out of there alive. Yet the harsh living conditions and never-ending work were precisely what saved me, because they left me no time to dwell on my condition. My every minute was accounted for. There were lessons to follow under threats from brutalizing instructors, trees to chop down, sacks of gold-laden earth to haul, rabbits to watch, fields of corn to harvest. My life was absorbed entirely in my efforts to get by and obey orders. I was, fortunately, able to accept my condition as fated. A clear-eyed view of the hell I had landed in certainly would have thrown me deeper into despair. There is nothing like thought to deepen one’s gloom.
Yet I wasn’t always able to repel the feeling of misfortune. I had dreams in which I died or witnessed the death of another prisoner, crushed by falling trees, for example, or stoned, like the unlucky hanged fugitives. At night, all the scenes I tried to erase from my memory returned: the cries of pain, the disfigured faces, the crushed limbs. When my eyes closed, the doors that shut out my fears and memories opened wide. Occasionally I saw Pyongyang again, something that caused me strange and useless pain; at times I wondered whether the camp was the dream, or Pyongyang. I was a bit like Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), who wakes up asking himself, Where does reality start? Where does the dream end? Was it I who dreamed of being a butterfly, or the butterfly who dreamed of being me? My obsession with death was not confined to nightmares, but