A Kim Jong-Il Production Page 10

  Hesitating, she looked to the horizon. In the distance, Chinese fishing ships gently bobbed in the water, the smoke of their cooking fires rising thin and white against the blue sky. The freighter rushed past them and they were gone.

  Nearby on the deck, the ship’s crew were laying out several different national flags, ready, she had been told by the men, “for when we need them.” Choi thought of her own family with anguish. She squeezed her fingers on the handrail, her knuckles turning white. She had to do it.

  She pushed back on her heels and prepared to jump, but the guards spotted her. They ran to her, grabbed her arms, and pulled her back. She tried to fight them off, but it was no use.

  As they dragged her back to her cabin, she silently cursed herself for not listening to Shin Sang-Ok.

  * * *

  The two years after Shin Film’s closing were a sad, difficult time. Choi didn’t act in another film. She spent most of her time trying to save the Anyang performing school from being sucked into the vortex of Shin Film’s bankruptcy. The school had seven hundred pupils and she felt responsible for every one of them. They had to be looked after.

  In the fall of 1977, she was visited by a man calling himself Wang Dong-Il, who told her he ran a film studio in Hong Kong. Wang had a similar performing academy at home, and he wondered if Choi might want to form an affiliation, and perhaps also run the Hong Kong school? He invited her to the Hong Kong Film Festival later that year to discuss the project further. Choi was unable to travel to the festival, so regretfully turned down the invitation. Wang stayed in touch. One day he sent her a film script, asking her if she would direct it. The paycheck would be enough to save the Anyang school—for a while. Choi agreed to fly to Hong Kong and discuss the project.

  Before she left she called Shin. They hadn’t seen each other in weeks. He had been flying back and forth to the United States and to Hong Kong, trying to find a way to restart his filmmaking career, so far without success.

  When she told him her news, he sounded uncertain. “Isn’t it weird for someone from Hong Kong to come and ask you to be a director, when they have so many famous directors and staff members at their disposal?” he asked. He couldn’t find work: Why had someone gone out of their way to hire Choi when she wasn’t even a director? “And why do the Chinese want to be affiliated with an unestablished acting school such as Anyang?”

  Shin “was always trying to look out for me,” Choi later said, but she wondered if she heard some resentment and jealousy in his voice. She ignored him. She would prove to him that she could do fine without him. On January 11, 1978, she packed her bags and boarded a Cathay Pacific flight from Kimpo Airport, destination Kai Tak Airport, Hong Kong.

  As the chauffeur-driven car sped smoothly through the brand-new underwater tunnel linking Kowloon to the island of Hong Kong, Choi apologized to Wang Dong-Il for being unable to accept his invitation sooner, and for only being able to stay a few days. The car emerged back into the orange evening light, and straight into a canyon of skyscrapers.

  Hong Kong, then still under British rule, was experiencing dramatic changes as it reinvented itself, moving away from a manufacturing economy to become one of the world’s leading financial centers. The skyline bristled with cranes as a result of the Ten-Year Housing Program started in 1972 to provide quality housing for nearly two million people. Supermarkets and corporations were replacing mom-and-pop stores and local businesses. Banks and brokerage houses blossomed, and nearly half a million Hong Kong citizens were becoming stock investors.

  Wang dropped Choi off at the Parma Hotel, where a room had been reserved for her on the sixth floor, with a stunning view of Victoria Harbor. They would meet again the next morning, he told her, at 10 a.m. sharp.

  * * *

  For the next two days Wang showed her the city, wining and dining her at the best restaurants. For all the luxurious hospitality, Choi was frustrated by the lack of business talk—and made uneasy by two Chinese-looking men she noticed following her, taking pictures as she explored the city. On the third day Wang was nowhere to be found, so Choi went to the local Shin Film office, which was still open, waiting for Shin Sang-Ok’s future to be decided. The Hong Kong company director, Lee Young-Seng, and the manager, Kim Kyu-Hwa, awaited her, along with a woman in her early fifties and a cute little girl of about twelve years of age. Kim introduced the woman as an old friend of his, and the girl as her daughter. “Hello, I am Lee Sang-Hee,” her mother said, greeting Choi. That night at dinner, Mrs. Lee and Choi bonded, Mrs. Lee telling Choi that she was a huge fan and had seen all her movies. Mrs. Lee offered for her and her daughter to spend the next day with Choi while she waited for Wang—who, she had been told, was unexpectedly detained, but would be able to resume and conclude talks with her shortly—and Choi accepted.

  The next day, January 14, Choi met with Mrs. Lee and her daughter. Mrs. Lee seemed overexcited. “She talked nonstop,” Choi said. “She wanted to introduce me to her many acquaintances in Japan, especially an older man who was interested in culture and art. He would be useful in the management of my school, she thought.” Halfway through lunch at a Japanese restaurant, Mrs. Lee excused herself to make a phone call, and when she returned told Choi she had just spoken to one of those influential acquaintances. Would she like to meet him today? Choi, who had no prior engagements, agreed. Her friend, Mrs. Lee told her, lived about an hour’s drive away, in a house on Repulse Bay.

  * * *

  Repulse Bay, on the far southern side of Hong Kong, had been used in the nineteenth century as a base by pirates, who preyed on the British merchant ships on their way to trade with Japan. The pirates had long ago been repulsed—hence the bay’s name—and the strip of land turned into tourist beaches.

  Choi looked out the window as their taxi drove down the deserted road. It was 4 p.m. in winter, and the air coming off the sea was cool. She could see houses in the near distance, villas and vacation homes, the nearby beach empty of people. She had no idea where they were. Suddenly Mrs. Lee asked the taxi to stop beside a small strip of beach.

  “We’re getting out,” she said.

  “Should we ask the taxi to wait?” Choi asked.

  “We can phone for one and it’ll come right away.”

  Mrs. Lee got out of the car, Choi and the little girl following. The woman stood and looked around.

  Choi asked what was going on but got no answer. Mrs. Lee seemed to be waiting for someone. After a minute, Choi and the young girl wandered toward the sea. It was late afternoon and their shadows were stretching across the sand.

  Mrs. Lee’s voice rang out, calling for them. Choi turned around and saw her standing by the waves about forty yards away, motioning Choi to come over. There was a group of long-haired men by her side. A small white motor skiff bobbed in the water, with more young men, all with long hair, sitting inside it, looking in her direction. Uneasily Choi walked over. Mrs. Lee explained that the man they were meeting had sent the men to take them to his secluded villa, ten minutes away across the bay. Choi hesitated. The little twelve-year-old girl seemed happy enough, surely a good sign, but Choi wasn’t comfortable. She didn’t know where she was. She had only met this woman the day before. A queasy uneasiness twisted her stomach. She had been in enough bad situations to recognize that this was another.

  “I have a six o’clock dinner engagement…” she said.

  “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” Mrs. Lee said, in the same agitated tone she’d had all day. “It only takes ten minutes to get to the villa. You will have plenty of time to get to your engagement.”

  Choi was about to reply when the men in the motorboat nodded at one another, leaped out, and grabbed her. She tried to fight, but they overpowered her and threw her into the boat. Directed to follow, Mrs. Lee and her daughter climbed in as well. The skiff’s motor rumbled to life. Choi was terrified. I am being robbed, she thought. The boat turned and headed away from the bay—toward the open sea. Choi turned to Mrs. Lee, but she looked serene. Sh
e put a cigarette between her lips and offered Choi one. “Everything is all right,” she said.

  One of the long-haired men called Choi’s name. She turned to him. He was middle-aged, probably the oldest of the group.

  “How do you know my name?” she asked.

  “I’m Korean,” he said, using the North Korean term chosun rather than the South Korean term hanguk.

  Choi’s heart sunk into her stomach. “Where is this boat going?” she asked in a weak voice.

  “Madame Choi,” he said solemnly, “we are now going to the bosom of General Kim Il-Sung.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  The man took the long-haired wig off. “I said, we are going to the bosom of the Great Leader, Comrade General Kim Il-Sung.”

  Screaming, Choi jumped to her feet, and the boat rocked side to side. Hands reached up for her and pinned her back down onto her seat. Her vision blurred. Her body went limp, and she fainted.

  She drifted in and out of darkness. She remembered feeling someone carrying her up a gangway, someone giving her an injection, then oblivion swallowing her back up. When she finally woke she was aboard a freighter, in the captain’s cabin. A large ceremonial portrait of Kim Il-Sung smiled down at her.

  She was on the ship for six days, a doctor and his wife looking after her and managing her shock, and two other men, including the middle-aged man from the boat, whom she later learned was Im Ho-Gun, Deputy Director of North Korea’s covert operations department, keeping a twenty-four hour watch on her. Choi could hear Mrs. Lee sobbing in the next cabin, and gathered that she had agreed to help the men take Choi but had not foreseen they would force her to come along. Choi, too, cried. She couldn’t eat but forced herself to drink the broth of the noodle soup they brought her. On the fourth day they took her up to the deck and she stared into the ocean, trying to gather the strength to throw herself in. On the fifth day a typhoon forced the boat to drop anchor, and she watched the storm pass. At 3 p.m. on the sixth day, January 22, 1978, the ship pulled into Nampo Harbor, North Korea. They unloaded Madame Choi onto another small white motorboat, which took her to a small quay a twenty-minute ride from the main port.

  Her legs wobbled as she stepped onto the pier. She followed the guards with her head bowed, struggling to stay on her feet. “Someone important is coming,” one of them whispered.

  A short man in his midthirties was walking toward her. He wore a thick, fashionable wool coat over a dark Mao-collared uniform. A shiny Mercedes idled behind him, and a photographer stood by his side, camera ready. With a smile, the small man extended his hand to her.

  “Thank you for coming, Madame Choi,” he said. “You must be exhausted from the journey. Welcome. I am Kim Jong-Il.”

  REEL TWO

  GUESTS OF THE DEAR LEADER

  “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

  —The Wizard of Oz (Frank Morgan), The Wizard of Oz, screenplay by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf, from the book by L. Frank Baum; directed by Victor Fleming.

  10

  The Hermit Kingdom

  Choi knew the name, but little more, of the man grinning in front of her. The South Korean newspapers had been full of headlines for the past year that Kim Jong-Il had been in a terrible car accident and that he was a human vegetable, strung up to medical equipment on a hospital bed in one of his father’s villas. Some papers dismissed the car accident story and said he had survived a botched assassination. Yet here he stood in front of her, fully intact and disarmingly genial.

  She stared at his outthrust hand and slowly, her own hand trembling, reached out to shake it. Immediately a flash popped—twice, three times—as the photographer took photos of the moment. Choi sunk her chin inside her coat collar.

  “Don’t take my picture!” she cried. Her voice sounded like someone else’s, thin and hysterical. In a rush of thoughts it came to her that she didn’t want a record of this moment, that besides, she was unkempt and would look terrible on film, and then that it was absurd to worry about that. Jong-Il gave a slight sign to the photographer, who put his camera down.

  “You look very nice,” he told Choi. “Those bell-bottom slacks suit you very well.” She was wearing the same clothes she had put on the morning of her abduction. She didn’t answer. Kim let go of her hand and suggested she take a walk around the pier to steady herself after the long journey. He signaled to two of his men, who gently each took one of Choi’s arms and led her up and down the pier for ten minutes. Finally they walked her over to the long, imposing black Mercedes, Kim walking ahead of her. The driver, who wore an army uniform, jumped out of the front seat and opened the back door. Kim moved aside to let Choi climb in, then stepped inside himself, the bodyguards cramming in the front seat by the driver. Smoothly, the engine giving a quiet noise like a lion’s yawn, the car turned and pulled away in the evening light. Behind it, two more Mercedes-Benzes turned their lights on and followed.

  * * *

  In spite of living most of her life in Seoul, just thirty-five miles south of the border, Choi knew next to nothing about North Korea. Her own government demonized the North Koreans at every turn, and since the end of the Korean War the North had kept itself reclusive and apart, releasing little information to the outside world. What little information North Korea shared suggested a quiet, peaceful prosperity within their borders, in direct contradiction to the Kims’ clear, terrifying zeal for murder, kidnapping, and terrorism outside of them.

  Choi thought of all of this as she stared out the car window at the landscape outside. Next to her Kim Jong-Il was making pleasant conversation, as if they were on a short taxi ride to dinner, asking her questions she didn’t hear and didn’t answer. It had been cold when she got off the ship and now she noticed snow across the fields and on the side of the road. “The road was unpaved,” Choi wrote later. “There were no signs of people and the scenery had the desolation of a war zone.” They drove through a small village. “Red and white posters were unfurled at every intersection. They bore slogans such as ‘Long Live Kim Il-Sung,’ ‘Long Live the Korean Workers’ Party,’ ‘Speed Battle, Annihilation Battle,’ ‘Absolutism and Unconditionality.’…” Two hours later the road had become lined with apartment buildings, none higher than ten stories. They were entering Pyongyang. Choi squinted but couldn’t make much out. The city was pitch black—the street lights off, the windows in the homes and offices dark. As she would learn later, North Korea had defaulted on $2 billion worth of foreign loans in 1976 and had started to ration electricity.

  “This is Potong Gate,” Kim was saying next to her, pointing at the invisible sights out the window, “and that’s Moran Peak…”

  Forty-five minutes later, the car pulled off the main road and onto a winding, unpaved drive that led to a guardhouse. The soldier standing there saluted and the gate rose behind him. A few dozen yards down the road they came to another guardhouse, another saluting soldier. At the end of the drive, tucked in between tall pine trees, was a grand, single-story villa. The car stopped.

  Inside, Kim gave Choi a tour of the ostentatious villa: the en-suite bedrooms, the living room and library, the home cinema. There was a tacky crystal chandelier or two in every room and Japanese gadgets on every surface, giving the house a gauche, unrefined energy—“a Las Vegas–meets–Vladivostok feeling,” as Choi described later. They circled back to the front of the house, where a woman in her early forties stood waiting. She wore simple clothes and her expression was hard to read.

  “This is Comrade Kim Hak-Sun,” Jong-Il told Choi. He turned to Hak-Sun. “Take good care of our guest. Make her feel comfortable.” Then, to Choi, in a gentler voice: “Please make yourself at home.” He took a step back and nodded to one of his men, who immediately approached Choi.

  “Madame Choi, you are carrying a South Korean passport on you. Please let me have it.” There was no point resisting, so Choi took her passport out of her handbag and handed it to him. “You also have a South Korean id
entification card,” he said. “Please hand it over.” After she did the man walked over to Kim Jong-Il and handed him the documents. He pocketed them, nodded, and left.

  Kim Hak-Sun indicated to Choi to follow her outside and to the dining hall, a separate building about 150 yards from the main house. Inside, the dining table was groaning under the weight of “fried shrimp, raw fish, beef ribs, and a smorgasbord of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese dishes,” Choi said. Her throat tight, her stomach churning, all she could eat, no matter how much Hak-Sun encouraged her, was some soup.

  Later that night Hak-Sun led Choi to the master bedroom, which had been prepared for her.

  “Good night,” the North Korean woman said before retiring to her room. Choi pushed the bedroom door shut. She noticed it didn’t lock.

  None of the doors in the house did.

  * * *

  The villa, Choi learned, was called Building Number 1. It was to be her home for the next nine months. Every day Kim Jong-Il sent her fresh flowers and a doctor who would check on her health and dispense nutritional supplements. Every night for the first several weeks, she called out the names of her children and cried herself to sleep.

  The North Koreans spoke little, if at all. The doctor, Choi observed, was “refined and gentlemanly” but evasive. If she asked about his hometown, whether he had ever been to the South, or if he knew why she had been kidnapped, he suddenly went quiet or changed the subject. The guards and Kim Hak-Sun behaved the same way, although Hak-Sun, who spent every day and night in the house, eventually grew close with Choi. Hak-Sun’s job, as Choi’s “guidance officer,” was to supervise her at all times, look after her every need, and tactfully introduce her to North Korean ways. In younger days she had been a singer in the Mansudae Art Troupe, which is how she had met Kim Jong-Il and, she told Choi, become his “confidante.” Whether this was a euphemism Choi couldn’t tell. But Kim Jong-Il trusted Kim Hak-Sun entirely, and as she grew too old for the Art Troupe—the Kims liked their entertainers no older than twenty-five—she had been posted as the attendant here, in Kim Jong-Il’s compound. To pass the time Hak-Sun played the piano, softly singing tunes taken from The Collection of 600 Songs and The Kim Jong-Il Songbook, all of them hymns glorifying the Leaders Great and Dear. She and Choi also took walks in the gardens outside the house, during which Choi noticed there were four other buildings in the compound, which was surrounded first by a concrete wall and, on the outside perimeter, by a barbed-wire fence. Armed soldiers patrolled every side of the wall at all times of day and night.