I will remember one fateful afternoon in July 1994 in vivid detail for the rest of my life.
I was nearly eight years old. It was pouring rain outside. At the time, we were living in a small house, and the rain was pounding down so hard that the roof was leaking. With my dad, I was running from one end of the room to the other trying to arrange buckets to collect the rain and avoid flooding in the house. Suddenly, we heard a loud knock at the front door. When we opened the door, we found a man who looked quite bewildered standing on our porch, dripping wet. It was the head of our neighborhood, known as the inminbanjang. Just the mention of his name struck fear throughout the neighborhood, because he was in charge of monitoring and reporting to the authorities everything that happened on our block.
The entire country was littered with these worrisome people, who even to this day ensure that the regime maintains its iron grip over the lives of twenty-five million North Koreans.
“Make sure you watch the news tonight,” the inminbanjang ordered us, and he seemed as confused as we were. There must have been something important planned for the broadcast that night.
Then, as quickly as the man had arrived, he disappeared again through the pouring rain. It was the first time we had ever received this kind of directive from him.
* * *
When the news came on that night, I sat in front of the television next to Keumsun and my father. We were a little excited because we were very curious to find out what was going on, but we were also a bit nervous. Something truly extraordinary must be happening. As usual, the anchorwoman in her traditional Korean outfit, in the middle of Pyongyang with the Taedong River in the background, appeared on screen. But this evening, she carried a sullen look on her face, like she was on the verge of crying.
“President Kim Il-sung has died,” she announced suddenly, fighting back tears.
My father was paralyzed from shock. The anchorwoman might as well have told us that the sky had just collapsed. My sister and I watched our father nervously. The images being displayed on the television had us all stupefied. I didn’t really understand everything that was going on, but I knew something unimaginable must have just happened.
Shortly afterward, my mother came home from work in tears. I’d never seen her like this before. At the hospital, she had learned of the news with her coworkers, and one of them had suffered a heart attack from the shock. On that day, many people across the country died from shock. My mom was devastated, because she loved our president with all her heart. In Pyongyang, when she was a child, she had gone to school near Mangyongdae, the little farmhouse where Kim Il-sung was born. Going to Kim Il-sung’s birthplace has become a national pilgrimage for North Koreans; I visited it myself when I was very little. My mom told me that once, Kim Il-sung himself visited them at school—my mom stood within one meter of him! He was very tall and had a warm smile, according to my mother. He always looked very cheerful and friendly on the pervasive portraits of him throughout the country, like the one sitting above the entrance to the train station at Eundeok.
He was a god to us, and the mere possibility that he could die seemed unthinkable. Could we still live without our god? Without our father? He was the man who had liberated us from the clutches of Japanese rule, he was the founder of our nation, he was the father of all North Koreans. When his death was announced, daily life took a hiatus across the entire country until the funeral, which was televised a few days later. All around North Korea, scenes of mass hysteria broke out: soldiers rolled around on the floor in tears, women yelled in anguish. On the TV screen, the rain falling behind her, the anchorwoman explained that “even the sky was mourning the death of the Great Leader.”
* * *
Today, even as I am living in the heart of Seoul, this phrase continues to resonate in my mind, because for me, it represents the indoctrination that we were subjected to and that is still in full force in North Korea. That day, on July 8, 1994, I truly did believe that the sky was crying from despair at the death of Kim Il-sung. I know now, of course, that the downpours were because we were in the middle of monsoon season, and it always rains a lot in Korea during that time of year. But at the time, I was completely brainwashed and believed everything I heard in school and at home. There was no reason for me not to believe—there was no way for me to hear any other version of the truth. Even the adults had no outside information with which to compare what we were learning in school and on TV.
My expatriation has allowed me to unlearn some of the propaganda fed to us and let me judge reality through my own eyes: my country is ruled under the hands of a bloodthirsty family dynasty. The Kims are not our loving fathers, but are ruthless tyrants. However, today, the overwhelming majority of my fellow countrymen to the north have no way of seeing the truth. My people are completely isolated in a closed-off world. They cannot be blamed if they don’t revolt, because they don’t know how to form their own opinions and they don’t fully understand the true scope of their misfortune. It’s difficult to measure the harsh reality of the dictatorship. Internet access is limited exclusively to the highest-ranking members of the Party. Watching foreign television programs, making phone calls abroad, or exchanging mail with foreigners are all strictly forbidden and punishable by imprisonment in one of the country’s infamous labor camps.
Nevertheless, largely as a result of bribery, more and more information has been filtering in through the Chinese border, thanks to street vendors and smugglers. But their influence barely makes it past the surface. Along the border between North Korea and South Korea, the world’s most heavily militarized border, watchtowers and mines form an impenetrable wall: no messages can reach North Korea except for a few pamphlets denouncing the Kim regime’s crimes, sent over the heavily fortified border by balloon. Many families torn apart by the end of the Korean War in 1953 remain without news about their parents who live on the other side of the Demilitarized Zone, or “DMZ.” Such is the name given to the barbed barrier that still separates the two sides of the Korean peninsula.
* * *
Like everyone else, on the day after Kim Il-sung’s death, I was devastated. In the early morning, my mother sent Keumsun and me to the mountains to collect flowers in Kim Il-sung’s honor. It was a task that we carried out, just like all the other children in North Korea, on the birthdays of each one of our leaders. If you came back empty-handed, or worse, with yellow flowers, you could get into a lot of trouble. You would become a laughingstock and be punished by the teachers. Yellow was considered the color of our enemies, the Americans. We thought that all Americans were blond, and so we were taught to hate the color yellow.
On this evening, July 9, 1994, there was not a single flower left standing after the children had raided all the flower fields.
As for me, after collecting flowers, I came back and attended a ceremony downtown for public grieving and, in the midst of that frenzy, I started to cry as well. I didn’t know exactly why I was crying, but I felt that it was necessary to do so. I remember that standing right next to me, there was a girl who did not manage to actually cry.
She’s just pretending, I thought while watching the single tear forming in the corner of her eye. She had no choice but to at least try. She risked being looked down upon if her eyes remained dry.
However, our pain was genuine. We loved Kim Il-sung and his son and successor, Kim Jong-il, with all our hearts. They were to us what Santa Claus is to other children across the world. April 15 and February 16, their respective birthdays, were marvelous days for the kids. We received one kilogram of sweets each on them. The night beforehand, we were always about as excited as we could possibly be, and I could never manage to fall asleep. The morning of their birthdays, with my uniform completely clean, I would proudly go collect my clear plastic bag of goodies with the inscription “We have nothing to envy in the world” written on the exterior. I suppose that this was one way the regime ensured we understood that there was no one happier than us. Inside the bags, there were packs of chewing gum, toffees, sugar-covered soybean paste, and cookies. On the way back, I would hold my bag tight against my body, hidden underneath a cloth that my mom had given me, in order to avoid having my sweets stolen by other children.
* * *
Even after I arrived in South Korea, it took me a long time to see the truth about my home country. I did not want to believe that Kim Jong-il was a ruthless dictator. In Seoul, I read a book written by Kim Jong-il’s former Japanese cook, who fled to Tokyo to escape from his clutches after having prepared sushi for him for many years. In his book, Kenji Fujimoto recounts in great detail the cruelty of our leader. It was so far from the image of a saintly guardian that I had learned about in school that, at first, I refused to acknowledge what I was reading.
In school, as a child, every morning we would read an anecdote about the exemplary life of Kim Jong-il. In a fairytale-like story, we were told that, on the day he was born, a star appeared above Mount Paektu, the enormous volcano where our nation was founded several millennia ago. We sang songs in praise of our liberator, the great Kim Il-sung. When I visited Pyongyang as a little girl, my dad showed me a tree in a park situated along the Taedong River, which, as a young boy, Kim Il-sung had climbed in order to try to catch a rainbow. I was told that was how he had gotten the idea to launch a socialist revolution.
* * *
Today, these lies have been dispelled in my mind. In Seoul, I have learned about the horrific labor camps in my home country, where at least a hundred and fifty thousand prisoners are slowly dying right this moment. I was unaware of the existence of these camps when I lived in North Korea; I only knew that people were disappearing. In Seoul, you often hear about other defectors who have escaped like I have. I understand now that our country was in fact a vast prison, where the detainees were unaware of the extent of their misfortune, since their first priority was always fighting for their lives.
All of these questions came back to me in November 2010, many years after my escape, when North Korea suddenly bombarded a South Korean island in the Yellow Sea. Four people were killed as a result of the attack, just sixty-six kilometers away from Seoul. My sister and I thought that war was about to break out.
“They are insane!” Keumsun said to me.
For me, I do not believe that there will be an all-out war, just like I don’t think the regime will ever give up its power, nor will it abandon its atomic weapons, which it is building in secret. And I constantly wonder if I will ever get the chance to return to North Korea, a North Korea liberated from tyranny and free of pain and hunger.