A Kim Jong-Il Production Read online

  The crowd had erupted into applause as Shin and Choi bounded up to the stage together. Shin had directed and produced the winning film, but Choi had starred in it, as in the majority of his other films. Shin was best known for his films about women (usually played by Choi) and made for women—the “rubber-shoed masses” living in Seoul and in the countryside provinces who made up South Korea’s most fervent cinema audience. Husband and wife were inseparable in the mind of the public, a glamour couple whose joint company, South Korea’s only film studio, Shin Film, and its logo of a flaming torch were immediately familiar to everyone.

  Coming up to the stage Choi had walked ahead of her husband, a subtle indication of the modernity of this couple’s relationship. As she neared President Park she stopped and bowed deeply, going so far as to drop to one knee, a wry grin on her face. The president and his First Lady burst out laughing at her cheeky mimicry of obsequiousness. Behind her Shin reluctantly nodded his head forward, as little a movement as he could get away with. Recognition he liked; rubbing elbows with the powerful likewise. Bowing down to them—that made him feel distinctly uncomfortable. Maybe it had something to do with his deep distrust of politicians. He had, after all, grown up in a Korea that had been swallowed up into the Japanese empire, given up, by politicians, to be colonized after thirteen hundred years of sovereignty. When he turned seventeen he had left Korea to study in Japan, only to find on his return that he couldn’t go to his hometown anymore, because it was now, suddenly, in a completely different country, North Korea—all because of the maneuverings of politicians. Leftists, rightists, they were all the same to Shin, an ill to be borne and, if possible, taken advantage of.

  Maybe it was that. Or maybe he just hated someone else being the center of attention.

  On the lawn of the Blue House, Shin stretched his shoulders back and glanced over at Choi, talking with guests a few feet away. She was ravishing in a long dark dress, a cluster of ornamental jewelry drawing the eye to her breasts, as if the plunging neckline weren’t mesmerizing enough. (The First Lady, in contrast, wore a traditional hanbok dress, long and baggy under the waist, hiding the shape of the hips and legs under endless folds, the collar closed at the neck.) Choi’s thick dark hair was pulled back to accentuate her striking face. Glittering earrings dangled from her ears and carefully applied makeup highlighted those famous dark eyes and full lips.

  Choi had been famous much longer than either director Shin or President Park; in fact, she had already started making a name for herself on the stage before the end of the Pacific War, when Korea was still one country. Since then she had been a fixture in movie fanzines and the gossip papers. During the traumatic Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953, she had worked as a stage entertainer for both sides, and there were rumors that she had lived as an army camp prostitute, undressing in the soldiers’ beds at night after she’d sung and danced for them on a stage earlier in the evening. Competing rumors said that she had spent most of the war as the mistress of an American general. After the armistice there had been further scandal when she’d left her first husband, an older, well-respected cameraman who suffered from tuberculosis and had been crippled in the war, for the young, attractive, struggling filmmaker Shin Sang-Ok. With Choi as his leading lady, Shin’s fortune had suddenly skyrocketed—and with the success of their elegant, sophisticated movies, Choi had seen her status dramatically elevated from scandalous loose woman to national treasure.

  The photographer waved at everyone to stand still and move closer together. A moment later, the camera’s flash bulb popped, immortalizing these three people, who, each in their own way, were about to catapult South Korean cinema from obscurity into international recognition. The camera captured Shin with his hands behind his back and his shoulders arched, a proud, irreverent smirk on his face. The president stood next to him with the stiff bearing of an army man, his black suit melting into the darkness the flash wasn’t powerful enough to illuminate around them, his face an enigmatic, faintly menacing mask.

  As for Choi, she stood slightly turned to her right, captivated, her eyes glued to her husband.

  2

  Director Shin and Madame Choi

  “I call my wife Madame Choi,” Shin wrote many years later. “I call her this as a sign of my respect and affection for her.”

  They had met in Daegu, 150 miles south of Seoul, in the second half of 1953, just a few months after the end of the Korean War. Seoul had changed hands four times during the conflict, the retreating side blowing the bridges and tearing buildings to the ground each time; Pyongyang had been so badly bombed by American planes that only three major buildings were left standing by the time the armistice was signed. Daegu, however, had been held by the United Nations for the course of the conflict and escaped such widespread destruction, so that now, so soon after the fighting had ended, there were still parks to walk around, schools to study in, homes to live in, and—crucially for Shin and Choi—theaters to go to.

  This particular evening Shin took his seat in one of the city’s auditoriums, eagerly anticipating the show to come. He didn’t especially care about the material: he had come to scout the play’s star, Choi Eun-Hee, for his second film, a semidocumentary titled Korea, which he hoped would showcase the beauty of a country most famous now for war, poverty, and destruction. Choi Eun-Hee was already an established actress, but Shin knew precious little about her. The play was a swashbuckler, with much sword handling and acrobatic jumps. Midway through the evening, as Shin remembered it, Choi collapsed. A gasp rippled through the audience. “I shot up to the stage,” Shin said, and kneeled by her side. He asked her if she was all right. When Choi didn’t respond, Shin, in front of the stunned crowd, picked her up, popped her across his shoulder, and carried her, on his back, to the nearest hospital.

  Choi had collapsed from exhaustion, and after a doctor examined her, she and Shin started talking. Shin was worried about Choi’s current state. She looked fatigued and underfed. Her husband was unable to work because of a war injury. And she was poor, she told him—too poor to heat the house. Shin, who had always had his sights on fame and success, had never imagined that such a famous actress could be so poor. But she had persevered, pouring all her emotions into her work, something he respected and admired. Shin told her he was about to start work on Korea, and would she like to be in it? He was a young, unproven director and she was reluctant, so he promised her a good fee—as much as he could afford. Choi accepted the part.

  “He had a beautiful smile,” Choi later wrote of the dashing young film director she met that night. “He looked like he had no concerns or difficulties in life.” Her scenes in Korea were filmed mostly in Seoul, and she and Shin spent a lot of time together, either on set or sitting in cafés: Choi smoking, watching passersby, and talking about acting and filmmaking, Shin rattling through his ambitions and ideas, how he dreamed of running an independent, integrated studio like those of the Hollywood Golden Age, making any films he wanted. When Choi returned to work on the stage, Shin waited outside the theater after every rehearsal and performance to walk her home, both of them taking their time ambling along the streets, sometimes caught outdoors past the official curfew and having to sneak home like teenagers, careful not to get caught.

  Some people worked in show business out of a longing for glamour, others out of a need to be the center of attention. Shin and Choi were different: they both felt a deep passion for their work. It had been so their entire lives. Choi told Shin how she had seen a stage performance as a child in Pusan and fallen in love with it immediately; and how her conservative father had refused to acknowledge her interest, because in Korea actresses were traditionally viewed as little better than courtesans. Besides, a respectable girl’s duty was to marry and raise children. So Choi, barely a teenager but already headstrong, had run away from home to pursue her dreams, and had made a success of herself. In return Shin told her about his childhood in Chongjin, in the north of the country, and how he had fallen in love
with movies as a young boy, sitting in the traveling tent that came through town to show the moving pictures by foreigners with names such as Georges Méliès, Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and Fritz Lang. It was such an elaborate, hypnotic process: the men busying themselves around the projector, one focusing the lens while others cranked the film through the machine by hand; the boys carrying the heavy reels back and forth while another child fanned the older men sweating in the hot tent. During the film the byeonsa, a male stage performer, narrated the silent black-and-white pictures that flickered to life on the screen like a magical window into an unknown world of hard men, beautiful women, and the odd comedy tramp, where men rode horses in vast deserts and criminals double-crossed each other in crowded cities of tall buildings and twisted light. Between showings water was poured on the screen to cool it off and prevent its catching fire.

  Almost every day, Shin would tell her, “Any film I make, I want you to be in it.” He described all the roles she could play, from the famous heroines of popular tales to barely defined ideas he was still sketching out in his mind. “This,” Choi said, “was how he said he loved me.” One day they were in a café when Choi ran out of cigarettes. She smoked Lucky Strikes, but the café didn’t carry the brand, so Shin stood up, ran out, and returned with a pack of Luckys. Choi was touched. She opened the packet, slipped one between her lips, and offered him one.

  “I don’t smoke,” Shin said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t like smoking. My mother smoked.”

  “Then don’t you dislike me smoking in front of you?” she asked.

  He smiled. “Please, do as you wish. I don’t mind.” As he said this he leaned forward and lit Choi’s cigarette for her. No one had ever behaved this way around her. He didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink, he didn’t gamble; he was gentle and chivalrous. She liked his kindness. As for Shin, his feelings were undeniable. “It was my destiny,” he later said, “to meet her.”

  * * *

  Choi was twenty-seven when she met Shin, but already she had endured a life of pain and struggle. After running away from home at seventeen, her acting career began, unexpectedly, in an air-raid shelter during a drill, when she noticed an actress she liked, Moon Jung-Bok, huddled nearby. There were no class distinctions in the bomb shelters, so Choi gathered the courage to speak to the older woman, who invited her to come see her at her theater troupe’s office in Seoul. She asked Choi if she had her parents’ permission to leave home and start work. “Yes,” Choi lied.

  She started work in the troupe’s costume department, mending dresses; within a month she was put onstage to play a bit part; and within a couple of years she had an acting career of her own. Offstage she was shy and quiet, but when she performed she came alive. In 1947, at age twenty-one, she was cast in her first film and shortly thereafter married the film’s cameraman, Kim Hak-Sung, who was twenty years older than her. She soon regretted the decision. Kim had already been married, to a bar girl who had run away because of his physical violence. He beat Choi, too, and expected her to fulfill all of her duties as a wife (washing, cleaning, cooking, child rearing) as well as be the main breadwinner, since her career was on the rise while his had been slowing down.

  When the Korean War broke out in 1950, Choi and her husband failed to make it out of Seoul in time to escape the North Korean army, and she was signed up by the newly established local Communist Party office as an entertainer for the troops and sent north. A year later Choi and some other performers took advantage of a few hours of panic during a retreat and broke off from their assigned platoon. They were taken in by the South Korean army and ordered to resume their work as army entertainers, only now for the opposite side. Being taken in by her own side should have been a relief for Choi, but instead her “rescue” was the beginning of two years of hell. Where the North Korean soldiers had been disciplined and focused on nothing but battle, the South Korean men eyed her like a piece of meat and wolf-whistled when she walked through the camp. One day a military police officer called her into his office, which had been set up in a deserted village near the front line. A pistol and an open bottle of soju rested on the table in front of him, and he stank of alcohol. He told her that her past work as an entertainer for the North Korean military was treason punishable by death. Luckily, he said, he had the power to erase her offense, and he felt in a lenient mood. He stood up out of his chair, walked over to her, and struck her, hard. He hit her several more times before pinning her to the ground and pressing the gun against her head. She felt him fumbling to open his trousers, his hot breath and the strong smell of the soju on her face. As he pushed himself inside her she heard screaming coming from the next room. On the other side of the wall, a singer who had performed with her since the beginning of the war was also being held to the ground while a policeman raped her. Choi desperately tried to fight the drunk man off, but he was big and heavy. There was no stopping him.

  When the war was over Choi was sent back home, and her ordeal, in a society where rape traditionally went unreported and women were usually held responsible for the dishonor that came with it, remained a shameful secret. She found her husband in a hospital, badly injured from shrapnel to the legs. Kim would walk with a cane for the rest of his life. Husband and wife settled back into the new routine of daily life where they and everyone else were suddenly poor and living in ruins, unspoken anguish weighing them down. Soon rumors of Choi’s alleged promiscuity during the war began swirling around town. Kim Hak-Sung grew morbidly jealous. He took to hitting his wife with his walking stick, beatings so bad they left her covered in blood and welts. One day, Kim held her down and violently raped her.

  Choi didn’t know how to run away. Korean women had no rights, only duties. A “wise mother, good wife”—the epitome of female perfection—was obedient to her husband, focused on raising the children, and loyal and respectful to her in-laws. It was her responsibility to preserve the family, whether her husband was a saint or whether he cheated on her or beat her. Only a few decades earlier, women still ate at a separate table from their husbands and were only allowed their leftovers. Women had few legal rights, and society looked unkindly on those who brought dishonor and gossip upon their husbands. Divorce was no option either: it may have been legal, but “one to the last,” went the Korean saying—you married once, and you stayed married. The fate you made for yourself on that day was the fate you were stuck with for the rest of your life.

  So Choi remained even when Kim forced himself upon her, even when the beatings left her with a scar on her face that never faded for the rest of her life. She had nowhere else to go.

  * * *

  It was Shin Sang-Ok who brought Choi’s hopes and dreams back to life. He talked endlessly of wanting to “rebuild Korean cinema.” He had the ambition she’d had, what felt like a lifetime ago, when she was seventeen and ran away from home, before the beatings, the violations, and the degradation. Spending time with him made her feel hopeful again.

  Shin’s life had been much easier. Born into an affluent family, his father a doctor of oriental medicine, Shin had gone to all the best schools and, having shown artistic promise from an early age, was eventually sent to study painting in Tokyo, the buzzing metropolis and capital of the all-powerful Japanese empire in which Korea was a colony. When the Second World War brought about the empire’s fall, Shin returned to a Korea he struggled to recognize: the Allied powers had divided the country in half, creating two states. Shin settled to a life in Seoul, in the South, because his hometown of Chongjin was in the North, now off-limits to him. All the moderates were gone, too: suddenly everyone was either a Communist or a rightist, a patriot or a terrorist, an ex–freedom fighter or an ex-collaborator. There were student riots, brutally crushed by tanks and baton-wielding thugs in policemen’s uniforms. There were American soldiers everywhere, broad shouldered and straight toothed, with pockets full of money and Korean girlfriends on their arms.

  Nineteen, confident, tall, and da
shingly good-looking, Shin found work painting propaganda posters for the American occupation forces and film posters for the handful of commercial cinemas that were still in business. He became an apprentice at the tiny, ramshackle, but independent Koryo Film Studio, its equipment antiquated and badly maintained, like a studio from old Hollywood’s Poverty Row. When the Korean War broke out, Shin, now in his midtwenties, served in the government’s Military Promotion Department, attached to the Air Force, making documentaries informing civilians about the course of the conflict and educating them in modern warfare. He used the opportunity—and the Mitchell 16mm cameras and free film stock the U.S. Army provided the South Korean propaganda departments, which Shin “borrowed” liberally during his time off—to make his first film as a director, The Evil Night. Rather than share a one-room “evacuation apartment” with several Seoul families whose homes had been bombed or destroyed, Shin had lately found cheap alternative accommodation sharing a room with a yangbuin girl—a “Western princess,” the name for a prostitute who catered exclusively to American GIs. The Evil Night told the story of a yangbuin girl; its tiny budget was cobbled together with loans from Shin’s father, his brother, and his new roommate. When the war ended the film was released to enthusiastic reviews and almost no business.