A Kim Jong-Il Production Read online

  Before Choi had moved in, the house had been stocked with every amenity and luxury she, or anyone else, could have dreamed of requesting. In addition, to mollify her, Kim Jong-Il sent her gifts almost every day: Estée Lauder cosmetics, Japanese-made lingerie, and boxes full of dresses, both in the traditional style and in more modern cuts. The beauty products were the exact kind she used back in Seoul, and the clothes, from the underwear to the formal dresses, had been tailored to fit her perfectly. Every meal laid out for her was a banquet.

  On the afternoon of the fifth day, Hak-Sun burst into Choi’s room. “The Dear Leader Comrade Kim Jong-Il has invited you to a dinner party!” she announced breathlessly. “We must hurry up and get ready.” A Mercedes took them into Pyongyang, down a side street and into another walled compound. Waiting on the front steps was Kim Jong-Il. He smiled as Choi and Hak-Sun walked up to him.

  “Welcome, Madame Choi. Have you been able to rest up?”

  Choi said nothing but, following Hak-Sun’s lead, bowed at the waist—as slight a bow as she could manage.

  “Let’s go inside,” Kim said. He led them down the entrance hall, talking every step of the way. “The South Koreans are blabbing around saying I’m brain dead, a human vegetable,” he said, referring to the rumors of a car accident. He chuckled. “What do you think of that?” When Choi didn’t answer, he stopped and struck a vain, dramatic pose. “Come on, Madame Choi, what do you think: How do I look? I’m small as a midget’s turd, aren’t I?”

  Choi almost laughed. Unexpectedly, she felt her anxiety fade a little. Kim seemed pleased with his icebreaker. He showed her down another corridor and into a large room, ornately decorated, with fake flowers and bright lights everywhere. It looked, Choi thought, like a discotheque.

  “How about it?” Kim asked proudly. “What’s on the inside is always more important than what’s on the outside. From the outside something doesn’t look like much, but when you bother to come inside, it’s generally like this.” He walked her to a round table in the middle of the room where dinner was being served—Western and Korean delicacies, washed down with cognac, French white wine, ginseng wine, and soju. As Choi stood at her designated seat, she recognized the other guests: they were the men from the motor skiff in Repulse Bay, their long-haired wigs removed to reveal army crew cuts; the man who had looked after her during the sea journey to Nampo; and the bodyguards who had ferried her off the boat. She realized she had been invited to have a polite, sociable dinner with the men who had ripped her from her home and children and imprisoned her in a foreign land.

  Kim Jong-Il sat down and, as if released, the others did as well. A waiter poured the Dear Leader a full glass of Hennessy. Kim took a deep drink and looked at Choi. “Please, Madame Choi,” he said. “You must have a drink.”

  * * *

  It was the first of many of Kim Jong-Il’s dinner parties that Choi attended during her years in North Korea, usually on a Wednesday or Friday, starting at 8 p.m. and lasting into the early hours of the next morning. The dinners always took place in the same building, which Party members referred to as the Fish House, named after the floor-to-ceiling, twenty-five-foot-long aquarium of large ocean fish in the second-floor ballroom. Sometimes, like that night, the gatherings were small affairs, dinner followed by a movie, but more often the guest list stretched to forty or fifty people, members of the People’s Republic’s tiny core elite.

  Kim Jong-Il’s weekly parties were notorious in Pyongyang’s power circle for their influence on state policy. “Many key decisions are made there,” Hwang Jang-Yop said, “personnel matters in particular.” Kim invited important members of the Party and Politburo, influential generals, his favorite film and stage stars; the guest list was a reflection of the people who formed his inner circle—or who, through invitation to the party, were being auditioned to join. Kim’s younger sister, whom he loved dearly, was almost always present. Guests were handed a single whiskey, brandy, or cognac at the entrance, to be knocked back in one gulp, the price of admission. A few weeks in, Hak-Sun taught Choi to always carry a handkerchief when coming to a party so she could discreetly spit the cognac out before heading inside.

  Kim Jong-Il rarely came early, preferring to join the party once it was in full swing. When he arrived, guests stood and clapped until he had taken his seat. Once Kim had sat down—always at the head table, closest to the stage, with just a handful of special guests accompanying him—waiters would bring out the food. Kim liked to direct the band, interrupting it in midflow, requesting certain songs, often ordering a specific guest to stand up and sing a song of his own choice, sometimes because he liked their voice but equally often so he could belittle them. There was no refusing a request from Jong-Il. Whenever he spoke to another guest, Choi said, the guest “sprang to his feet with his mouth full of food and answered, ‘Yes, sir!,’” standing to attention until Jong-Il had waved at him to sit back down.

  After dinner there was mah-jongg and roulette to be played, and girls for the guests’ entertainment. The girls of the Joy Brigade were one of the great draws of Jong-Il’s parties. They were the most beautiful young women in Korea, hand-selected by Jong-Il himself, obedient and with exquisite manners. Officially part of the military, each girl was given the rank of “Lieutenant of the Bodyguard Division” and assigned to one of three “pleasure groups”: the “dancing and singing group,” which entertained guests, the “happiness group,” which provided massage, and finally the “satisfaction group,” which provided sexual services. Jong-Il himself never touched the girls at these functions; nor did he dance or sing. He preferred to sit, drink, smoke his Rothman Royals, and direct. He picked up his baton and conducted the band or encouraged guests to gamble with more panache. Occasionally he did gamble, briefly, always ending up playing a hand one-on-one with the dealer and going all in very quickly. (“I think I understood something of Kim Jong-Il’s personality as I watched from behind,” Choi says.) A Party staff member hovered near him throughout the evening, and anything the Dear Leader said that sounded remotely like an order was noted down, recorded, and disseminated throughout the Party, immediately becoming an official instruction—whether Jong-Il had said it in sober conversation at 8 p.m. or stinking drunk at three in the morning. In his drunken moods he promoted or fired guests on a whim. He was hard to keep up with in conversation, rambling, then changing subjects without warning, and delighting in saying things he shouldn’t.

  Occasionally, the party could veer into the absurd. Hwang Jang-Yop claimed to have witnessed several nights in which Jong-Il had staff hang six-foot-diameter balls filled with gifts—essentially gigantic piñatas—which he then shot at with a special gun, sending presents showering onto the guests, who shamelessly scrambled over each other to get to the best items. On at least one other occasion, according to Hwang, Kim instructed a handful of dancers to strip naked and start dancing, then ordered the members of the Politburo to dance with them, saying, “Dance, but don’t touch. If you touch, you’re thieves.” The men shuffled over to the women and danced, careful to keep their hands visible. After a short while Jong-Il barked at all of them to immediately stop. “These parties were probably the means through which Kim Jong-Il formed his group of vassals,” Hwang said. “By inviting his trusted subordinates to a party, he can observe their personalities at close range and imbue them with pride at being close attendants of the Great Leader.… At these drinking parties, those who get drunk only need to be respectful to Kim Jong-Il; they can say anything they like to anyone regardless of his title.”

  Jong-Il considered the party a sacred sanctum, and anyone who leaked what happened there was liable to be severely punished. He was adamant that the gatherings were none of his father’s business and must be kept a secret, and enforced this dictum violently and ruthlessly. In one famous story Hwang confirms, “one of Kim Jong-Il’s secretaries got drunk once and told his wife about Kim Jong-Il’s life of debauchery. The good wife, a woman of high cultural and moral standards, was genui
nely shocked, and after much thought, she decided to write a letter to Kim Il-Sung asking him to reprimand his son. Needless to say, the letter went to Kim Jong-Il, who threw a drinking party and had the woman arrested and brought before him. In front of all the guests at the party, he pronounced the woman a counterrevolutionary and had her shot on the spot.… The poor woman’s husband actually begged Kim Jong-Il to let him do the shooting. Kim Jong-Il granted the secretary his wish, and gave him the weapon to shoot his wife.”

  * * *

  Choi never saw any killings or piñatas in the ballroom. On one occasion she did witness a bizarre game, in which Jong-Il would suddenly, in the middle of dinner, shout out “Army uniforms!” and all the male guests had to reach for army uniforms tucked under their seats, put them on, and run around their table in circles until Jong-Il called for them to stop. Later he would call “Navy uniforms!” and it began again with a different costume. While the guests rushed around, a waiter helped Kim put on his own general or admiral jacket, gigantic stars and decorations clanging on his shoulders and chest. Once, after laughing at what the guests called disco dancing (“They just hopped around,” Choi said), she was asked to give everyone—generals, covert operatives, and dancing girls alike—a disco-dancing lesson. Another week she came to the party in a pink traditional hanbok dress. Jong-Il complimented her—“the long skirt goes so well with short hair”—and then declared that all female members of all theater groups should wear their hair short and their dresses longer to emulate her.

  Mostly Choi seemed to be there as a trophy, seated next to Jong-Il and proudly introduced to eminent guests. It was at these parties that Choi first realized it was not Kim Il-Sung who had ordered her abduction but his son. Jong-Il, despite his sociability, was an annoying host, demanding and boastful. “He thought he could do anything he wanted,” Choi remembered. “He was always showing off.” He talked about South Korean movies constantly, ridiculing them for the poor way their actors portrayed a North Korean accent (this coming from someone who had regularly used Koreans in whiteface makeup to play Caucasians), and he liked to make Choi sing for him. South Korean songs were his favorite, but everyone in the country except him was banned from listening to them (outside of his parties): finally he had someone who knew the lyrics to the tunes he was humming. Almost every week he asked Choi to join the band and sing a song or two for him, the more melancholy the better, like Patti Kim’s “A Parting (Farewell).”

  Sometimes I can’t help but think of him, even though he is aloof,

  About the promise of that night, something he may regret,

  Over the mountains we are separated, far far away.

  As Choi sang her voice would crack, her lip trembling. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Each time, thinking it a committed theatrical performance, the guests jumped to their feet and broke into deafening applause.

  * * *

  One night, about a month after her abduction, Choi was sitting in her room when the phone rang. She knew immediately it was Jong-Il: none of the phones in the house could make outgoing calls, and this line was reserved for the Leader’s son. She picked up and was surprised to hear Jong-Il excited—and, she thought, a little tipsy.

  “Are you doing anything?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Would you please come visit my home? It’s my birthday.”

  Within moments, a Mercedes arrived and ferried her to Jong-Il’s house. He was waiting at the door when the car pulled up the drive.

  “Madame Choi! How is your health? I hear you are getting better.” He led her inside and praised her outfit. She thanked him for the compliment.

  “Are you uncomfortable with anything?” he asked as they walked. “If you are uncomfortable, please let me know.”

  “Oh no. I am indebted to you for your concern.”

  He laughed. “Now, now—do you really feel that way?”

  They walked through the guest room, which had a movie projector set up in the corner. She was surprised by how modest the house was. “Dear Leader,” Choi ventured, emboldened by being in his home, “I’m sorry to ask this, but would you please send me home to South Korea? I have work to do there. I have a family, teachers, hundreds of students to take care of. I can’t sleep because I’m always thinking of them. Please.”

  Jong-Il made a show of thinking for a short while. “I understand your dilemma,” he said, finally, “but please bear with me. I have some plans for us.… This problem will soon be resolved.” He seemed about to say something else, Choi observed, but at that moment a chubby little boy came running into the room. The boy wore a dark blue military-style uniform. He had a round face and short hair, and looked like his father.

  “You have a son!” Choi exclaimed.

  “Yes, and a daughter—but she’s not here now.”

  Choi bent down toward the child. “What a handsome boy you are,” she said. “How old are you?”

  “Seven,” he replied.

  “What’s your name?” At this the boy looked unnerved. He looked at his father and spluttered, “Why is she asking me my name?”

  Jong-Il chuckled and patted the boy’s head. “When an adult asks you your name you should answer with good manners, by saying ‘My name is…’”

  “Oh.” He turned back to Madame Choi. “My name is Kim Jong-Nam.” The boy had never met someone who didn’t already know what his name was. As Jong-Il showed Choi to the dining room, a minder, who appeared to be Jong-Nam’s babysitter, appeared and led the boy away from the adults to another part of the house.

  Six men sat around the dining room table. A woman stood off to the side by herself. Kim walked over to her.

  “Teacher Choi, this is my wife,” Jong-Il said, even though he and Hye-Rim had never formally married, “and those are my relatives who have come to celebrate my birthday.”

  Choi had expected a large, debauched birthday party, not a small family dinner. Hye-Rim said hello. Choi thought she was about five foot two, the same height as Kim, and glamorous, even though she was dressed in casual Western home wear. “I’m very happy to meet you,” she told Choi in a very quiet voice, then, to Jong-Il: “You invited so many people at the last minute. What am I going to do?”

  “Oh, don’t worry. Madame Choi is a special guest.”

  Hye-Rim didn’t say anything. The last few years she had fallen prey to anxiety attacks and episodes of depression as Jong-Il drifted away from her, having affairs with actresses, with old university classmates, and with the wives of his father’s ambassadors. All his conquests, people noticed, looked strikingly like his late mother. In 1974 Kim Il-Sung, still unaware of his son’s life with Hye-Rim, had instructed Jong-Il to finally take a wife, and Jong-Il had meekly obeyed, marrying Kim Young-Sook, a typist in Kim Il-Sung’s office and the daughter of one of his generals. Young-Sook quickly bore him a daughter, but Jong-Il didn’t care for his official wife. He didn’t make her a member of the Party and she never meaningfully entered his life. “She had no more significance than the fact that she was the legal wife,” Hye-Rim’s sister later wrote of her. Around the same time Jong-Il started a third long-running relationship, with a Japanese-born dancer from the Joy Brigade named Ko Yong-Hui, who in the early 1980s would bear him two more sons. Hye-Rim threatened to run away with their son, even threatened to tell Kim Il-Sung about their secret relationship. Jong-Il had pleaded with her to have faith in him, to wait just a little bit longer—and then had ordered the staff at the resort to never let her out of the house, “for her own safety and privacy.” In 1975, two years after he had gotten rid of Uncle Yong-Ju and all but secured his hold on the succession, Jong-Il finally told his father about his firstborn son with Hye-Rim. Kim Il-Sung, aides say, was briefly upset, then overcome with pride when he laid eyes on his male grandchild. Hye-Rim, however, remained locked inside the four walls of her own home, terrified of Jong-Il’s fits of anger and megalomania. She had grown tired of the pain and loneliness. Anxiety chewed through her body like a disease.

 
For her Jong-Il’s birthday dinner, Hye-Rim served live carp, still moving on the plate, followed by pear kimchi, the spicy fermented cabbage stuffed inside the sweet fruit. Everyone drank Hennessy, taking turns to toast Kim Jong-Il, fresh glasses brought out for each new toast. Choi, too, offered a toast to the Dear Leader’s birthday. It seemed rude not to. Jong-Il was extremely cheerful.

  “My wife doesn’t know much,” he told Choi. “She is a simple homemaker—isn’t that what women should be? After all, the duty of a wife is to keep house and bring up the children. You know, you should go to the hot springs with her.” He called out to Hye-Rim, who was bustling in and out of the kitchen. “Dear, take Madame Choi to the hot springs next time you go. She has trouble with a weak heart.”

  Choi didn’t know how Jong-Il possibly knew this about her. She had mentioned nothing to the doctor who came to check up on her health. “Oh, do you?” Hye-Rim said. “I have the same condition. I’ll definitely have to take you to the hot springs.”

  As the party wore on, Jong-Il, like many family men of the late 1970s, left the table and returned with his Super 8 camera to record the merriment. He zoomed in on faces, focusing on Choi for a long time. When the table had been cleared he led his guests to the living room, slipped the freshly processed film into the projector, and played the footage for everyone. The picture came out blurry, shaky, and pink. Everyone laughed about it, including him.