A Kim Jong-Il Production Page 4
Mostly, it seemed, he just loved making films. Everything else seemed small and unimportant. Choi Eun-Hee wrote later, with a mixture of disquiet and admiration, that Shin would have sold his own wife, “without hesitation,” if doing so helped him to make a film. Shin’s contemporary, film critic Kim Chong-Won wrote of Shin that “he would have jumped down to hell if he had to in order to make movies.”
As for Choi, she was the embodiment of modern Korea at a time when the country was torn between the traditional and the modern. Still driven by its old Confucian values, post–Korean War South Korea was entering an era of flashiness and consumption, encouraged by President Park, who was aggressively encouraging Korea to emulate the capitalist West. Modern American appliances became such sought-after signs of status and wealth that the middle-class Korean homes of the day could look a touch surreal: refrigerators standing proudly like trophies in the home’s front foyer, toasters displayed in the living room, empty packaging set out on mantelpieces silently boasting of the family’s access to certain goods and products. President Park himself was known for his flashy aviator sunglasses and the way he smoked his cigarettes from long, thin holders. As so often, the battle between the preservation of traditional ways of life and the acceptance of modern culture was fought over what was and wasn’t considered appropriate, or safe, for women to do. Time and time again in Shin’s films, Choi Eun-Hee personified that struggle, whether she played a prostitute, a war widow, a chaste student, a queen, or a promiscuous barmaid.
Offscreen, Choi’s public image was similarly pulled between these two forces. Male audiences couldn’t help but sexualize her, and after watching any film she starred in men’s conversation unfailingly drifted from the quality of the movie to Choi’s body. The popular media, encouraged by Shin Film’s publicists, portrayed Choi as a dutiful and devoted wife who worked hard, both on set and at home, for her husband, a woman who loved knitting and ironing her husband’s shirts. “She is a great actress and a great wife at the same time,” exclaimed the fanzines and newspapers.
But then there was the Choi Eun-Hee who campaigned for women’s rights, who so publicly made her name outside of the family unit that some consider her the first fully professional woman in South Korean cinema. She directed three of her own films in the 1960s, the third Korean woman ever to step behind the camera, and all three were critical and commercial successes. When one of Shin’s more popular directors, Lee Jang-Ho, married, it was Choi who officiated at the wedding—a duty almost unheard-of for a woman to perform. She was more bankable than her husband and a canny networker, more at ease with the rich and powerful than Shin ever was. Duty, emancipation, sexuality: Choi carried and expressed them all at the same time, her work and her life both an embodiment of the limitations placed upon women and a prism through which to glimpse a world in which there were none.
Throughout it all, husband and wife were always mentioned together: Shin and Choi, Shin Film and its star Choi, the director Shin Sang-Ok and the female lead Choi Eun-Hee. In the public mind as in their own lives, they were inseparable—through the highs, and through the lows.
* * *
With the money from their films they bought a Western-style house in Seoul’s Jangchung-Dong district, just around the corner from the National Theater, and settled into an idyllic domestic routine. They installed an editing bed and projector at home, editing their films together. Choi loved the house deeply. After they moved in she started buying expensive furniture for each room, but as the weeks passed she noticed that different pieces would temporarily disappear. It wasn’t long before she figured out what was happening: any time Shin came home to a piece he liked, he took it away to dress a film set. At first the habit annoyed Choi, but soon she came to love even this about her husband, another sign of his infinite passion for making films.
It was a busy but blissful existence, and the only thing lacking, for Choi, was a child. Children mattered little to Shin—“Our films are like our children,” he told her—but he didn’t have any objections, so long as they could find the time to raise a family around their demanding work schedules. When they finally tried, however, Choi discovered she was unable to bear children. Whether the cause was genetic or due to damage from the sexual abuse she had undergone a decade earlier was impossible to confirm, but Choi was heartbroken just the same. In Korean culture it was a terrible shame for a woman to fail to produce a child for her husband; an almost weekly plot point in soap operas featured barren women crying and begging forgiveness from their families. Shin didn’t seem to care—“I like you just the way you are,” he told her time and again—but for Choi, who in 1970 was entering her forties and longed desperately for a family, the pain only grew worse. So they decided to adopt. In 1971 they brought a baby girl, Myung-Im, into the family, followed three years later by a boy, Jung-Kyun. The first time Myung-Im called her “Mum,” Choi cried with joy.
* * *
As the 1960s drew to a close, South Korea was, against all expectations, becoming a regional power: peaceful, economically independent, its people’s dignity restored. Homes were being fitted with running water and reliable electricity, and the first skyscrapers had begun to spear up into the Seoul skyline. The one storm cloud on the horizon was the country’s shadowy neighbor: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
During the war, North Korean soldiers had demonstrated a fanatical devotion to the People’s Republic, swarming down upon the enemy in suicidal human wave attacks, professing an ideological commitment that many South Koreans found bewildering in people whom they had, until very recently, called their neighbors and brothers. Nor had the war’s end concluded the conflict. Within a few years Kim Il-Sung’s army was again multiplying its attacks and provocations on the South. In 1958 Kim’s men hijacked a Korean Air plane, releasing only some of the passengers and crew two months later (eight people remained in North Korea, their fates unknown). Then in 1965, North Korean jets had opened fire on an American reconnaissance plane over the Sea of Japan. At the same time the Pyongyang regime had hermetically sealed its borders, letting few foreigners in and virtually no information out, so that the outside world was only given sporadic, unsettling glimpses of what lay within.
As a result, South Korean schoolchildren were shown cartoons on the dangers of the satanic “Reds,” and taught always to be vigilant and committed, if needed, to fighting them. Many were even taught that Northerners were actually red-skinned, with hooves, horns, and spiky tails. On the news the government never referred to Northerners as Koreans, referring to them only as “the Reds” or “the Northern monsters.” There were rumors that even being “exposed to communism” for a few hours could turn you Red. Under the National Security Law, introduced in the late 1940s but reinforced under Park, it became a crime punishable by jail—and, on occasion, by the death penalty—to sympathize with or praise the North, to recognize it as a political entity, or to dispute the government’s stance on any issues related to North Korea. Soon people were jailed for reading socialist pamphlets, for listening to North Korean music, even for owning North Korean stamps. Any unsupervised contact with a North Korean citizen—even if that citizen was your own brother, sister, mother, or father, and had become a North Korean for no reason other than where on the peninsula they had stood in the second half of 1945—was a most serious breach of the law.
Moreover, ordinary South Koreans had never seen Kim Il-Sung’s face, for his likeness was banned in all forms, lest the simple sight of it foster feelings of dissent or, God forbid, latent Marxism. Nor did South Koreans know anything at all about his son, Kim Jong-Il.
4
A Double Rainbow over Mount Paekdu
No place holds more mystical power over the Korean people’s consciousness than Mount Paekdu, densely forested and shrouded in mist, where the nation’s great founder and first emperor, Tangun, descended from the skies more than five millennia ago. Tigers, leopards, bears, wolves, wild boar, and deer roam in the shadows of the birch an
d pine trees. It is here, according to Kim Jong-Il’s official biography, in a humble log cabin tucked away under the snow-covered evergreen trees, that the Dear Leader was born on February 16, 1942.
Kim’s father, Comrade Great Leader Kim Il-Sung, had conducted the resistance against the Japanese oppressor for years and had made Paekdu the secret headquarters camp for the Korean Revolutionary Liberation Army. Among the partisans was a small group of female fighters; the bravest of these women, Kim Jong-Suk, had become the Great Leader’s bodyguard and then his wife. At the height of winter, at the very end of a stormy, freezing February night, Kim Jong-Suk had huddled in the cold cabin, with nothing but a small fire for warmth, and given birth to the Dear Leader. The very instant that the infant slipped out of his mother’s womb the thunderstorm relented and the skies fell quiet. The dark clouds parted and a double rainbow—the most vibrant double rainbow man’s eyes had ever seen—shone overhead, bright in the pale dawn sky. A new star appeared in the heavens at that exact moment, to mark the day forevermore.
The Dear Leader’s birth had long been expected, foretold by a swallow, who had sung of how a prodigious general was coming who would rule all the world. When the newborn’s first cry echoed throughout the base, the guerrilla fighters rushed out of their tents and huts. They hugged and celebrated and blessed the birth. They burst into joyful song, pledging to fight harder than ever for an early liberation of the fatherland. Some took out their knives and carved messages of hope in the trees while others painted messages in bloodred ink.
The newborn was the newest addition to an honored line of patriots: his father, Comrade Kim-Il Sung, was leading the resistance against the Japanese, his grandfather had been imprisoned for his own revolutionary activities, and his great-great-grandfather had planned and led the small group that had attacked and burned the armed American ship the General Sherman when it had forced its way up the Taedong River in 1866. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the Leader’s newborn son would add to this long list of achievements.
As his biography attests, Jong-Il did not disappoint. At just three weeks old he was walking around the camp. At eight weeks he was talking. As a three-year-old, shortly before the Korean Revolutionary Liberation Army successfully liberated the fatherland from the Japanese, he walked into a classroom containing a map of the Japanese islands. The child dipped several fingers into an inkpot, marched straight up to the map, and smeared it with black ink. As soon as he did so, the most violent typhoons and hurricanes lashed the real Japan, resulting in great destruction and many deaths.
* * *
A few years later, in the summer of 1952, the boy’s father, Great Marshal Leader Kim Il-Sung, stood among the rocks in the mountains of Kangwon province. Since Jong-Il’s birth he had defeated the Japanese and chased them out of Korea; now he was fighting the American imperialists who were trying to take over Korea from the south. Kim Jong-Il came walking up to his father. The boy, just ten years old, had volunteered to visit the front line, where his father was personally leading the fighting.
“Do you know what day today is?” Kim Il-Sung asked his son.
“It is the birthday of my late grandfather,” Jong-Il answered.
Pleased with his son’s answer, the Leader picked up a heavy packet wrapped in red cloth. “When I was fourteen years old,” he told his son, “my mother gave me a very important gift, which had been left to me by my father. On his deathbed he gave this gift to my mother, with orders to give it to me when I was old enough to join the fight for independence. The gift was his two pistols, which he carried with him always. Before he died he told my brothers and me, ‘I am leaving this world without realizing my dreams. I trust that you will realize them for me. Don’t you ever forget that you are sons of Korea. You must recover Korea even if your bones are smashed and your body is cut to pieces.’ It was the last thing Father told us.” With this the Leader handed the packet to his son. Jong-Il unfolded the red fabric. Inside were the two old pistols.
“I give this to you today,” the Leader said. “Take it as a baton in the relay race of our revolution. These guns keep the will of our family genealogy—you must take care of them all your life.” He stepped closer to his son and repeated the words of wisdom that he had often heard his own father say: “Armed struggle is the supreme form of struggle for independence. When you fight an enemy who is armed, you need to be armed yourself to fight and win the duel. Remember this: a revolutionary must never part with his gun throughout his life. Guns are your closest friend.”
Jong-Il had already seen enough to understand what his father meant. Even if North Korea’s war for independence was finally won—as of course it would be—vigilance must never be abandoned. The guns would always be needed, and so would a leader.
And so it was decided, in the fog of the Fatherland Liberation War, that Kim Jong-Il would in time succeed his father as Leader, and continue defending the Korean people.
* * *
These accounts of Kim Jong-Il have been the undisputed truth for decades. North Koreans are taught these stories every day, by rote, from the moment they are old enough to walk, and no one is allowed to contest them.
None of them, of course, are true. It’s not just the obvious things—the talking swallow, the double rainbow, the new star in the sky, the apparent use of magic to unleash natural disasters on Japan. Yes, there was in the 1930s a Korean revolutionary force and later a war, and yes, during the war a baby was born to revolutionaries Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Suk—but Kim Jong-Il wasn’t born in 1942, nor was he born in Korea, and he wasn’t a prodigy. His ancestors hadn’t orchestrated the burning of the General Sherman or any other U.S. ship, for that matter. And Kim Jong-Il never stood on the front line of the guerrilla battles of Kangwon Province, because there were no guerrilla battles of Kangwon Province, instead just a sad, drawn-out, futile trench war that lasted nearly three years. For the first two decades of his life, the boy wasn’t even called Kim Jong-Il.
Nothing illustrates Kim’s awareness of the power of a good story better than the official, state-approved story of his own birth, which is, in itself, a story about the creation of story. The myth of Kim Jong-Il’s birth has echoes, like much of the Christian messianic canon, of an archetypal hero narrative. The exceptional, long-suffering mother; the absent father off fighting for a noble cause; the precocious wisdom and the proud lineage: Kim devised his story deliberately and ticked all the necessary boxes, mapping out classic patterns and paradigms. It took Kim a few years and several drafts to get it right; elements of the story started appearing in official propaganda in the 1970s, to be rewritten in the early 1980s, then stamped into history in Jong-Il’s first official biography, published in 1984, then “updated” and reissued in 1995, this version introducing details like the log cabin and the exact name of the nearest village, Samjiyeon-Gun, which all citizens were now expected to visit regularly to “educate” themselves. Many marveled that the log cabin was still standing, fifty-three years and two wars after Kim’s birth, but they shouldn’t have; the army had only just built it. The paint on the “spontaneous” carved messages on the trees was still drying when the first visitors climbed off the bus.
If North Koreans were allowed to know what the rest of the world knows, they would know that Kim Jong-Il was in fact born on February 16, 1941, not 1942, in a Soviet army camp near Khabarovsk, a Russian town almost eight hundred kilometers north of Mount Paekdu. The date had been altered in order to align the son’s birth more harmoniously with his father’s, putting an exact thirty years between them. Traditionally, Koreans attach great importance to five-year anniversaries: 1942 reads more tidily than 1941, thirty years better than twenty-nine. (This detail of the story was introduced in the 1982 edition, with the real 1941 date approved by the government up until then; to reset the timeline the Central News Agency exhorted the Korean people to celebrate Kim’s fortieth birthday two years in a row, as if nothing had happened.)
Kim Jong-Il’s father, Kim Il-
Sung, was born on April 15, 1912, in a hamlet on the southwest outskirts of Pyongyang. He was only seventeen when the Japanese first arrested him for starting a local Marxist-Leninist union that promoted anti-Japanese activities. They threw him in jail and broke his fingers. When they released him he joined a band of guerrillas in Jilin, in northeastern China, who were fighting for Korean independence. He was a charismatic, passionate man with a common touch, an easy leader of men. For some years, he led a disorganized band of Korean resisters (there was never any such thing as the “Korean Revolutionary Liberation Army”). A couple of Kim’s raids into Japanese-controlled villages had made headlines, and the Japanese governor of Korea eventually put a not-inconsequential price on his head. In 1935, to evade capture and certain execution, Kim fled Korea and folded his troops into the Chinese army. In China, Kim was best known for his unusual recruitment methods, which involved kidnapping Korean boys of suitable age to fill the ranks, and for the Mafia-style protection racket he imposed on the local ginseng and opium farmers. But Kim never did any real damage to the Japanese, and by 1940 he had traded his coarse guerrilla camouflage garb for a fresh Red Army uniform, becoming a battalion leader in the Eighty-eighth Special Reconnaissance Brigade of the Soviet Twenty-fifth Army.
Kim Il-Sung’s wife, Jong-Il’s mother, was one of the women the Korean guerrillas kept to do their menial chores and housework. Kim Jong-Suk was, by all accounts, a woman who could handle herself. She was famous for once allegedly saving Kim Il-Sung’s life in battle, shielding his body with her own and shooting down two Japanese when she and Kim were ambushed. She fought, the official documents say, “with fury.” She was striking if not beautiful, small in build, with long eyelashes and tanned skin from spending days outdoors. Lee Min, one of the female comrades who shared her quarters, remembered her as quick and generous. Kim Il-Sung himself, in his memoirs, describes his wife as considerate, sacrificial, and devoted. Their relationship was built with traditional, hierarchal formality.