“Ha! This guy wants to go to university,” a classmate said.
More people started laughing. I couldn’t understand it, so as you can imagine, I lost my temper. “Yeah. I want to go to university. What is wrong with that?” I said.
I found out the next day during my counseling session, which was kindly offered by the school principal and my class teacher. This “academic and career counseling” turned out to be a total joke. I learned that after high school graduation in North Korea, there were three paths to choose from. Except there weren’t. In reality, your path was chosen for you. Basically, if you were clever and your birth and background were good enough, you were sent to university. If you were physically strong, you went to the military academy or became a common soldier. The rest were sent to workplaces as laborers. The most important factor in path determination was not how hard you worked but your assigned caste.
The three castes were “nucleus” (or “core”), “basic” (or “wavering”), and “hostile.” Three criteria determined your caste: your birth and background, your perceived loyalty to the party, and your connections. Academic achievements had nothing to do with it, no matter how excellent they were. Your whole life was determined by which caste you’d been consigned to. If you were deemed “core,” a rosy future awaited you. But if you were deemed “hostile,” you were the lowest of the low and would remain so for life. No career path. No chance of bettering yourself. No way out.
It turned out the school principal was just another party apparatchik. On that particular day, his job was to inform me of which caste I’d been consigned to. I was told that I’d been deemed “hostile.” And that was that.
My head was spinning. I felt like I was about to sink through the floor, as if I were plunging into an abyss. Questions jostled for position in my mind. Deemed? By whom? What for? Hadn’t I studied hard? Hadn’t I worked hard for the party? Had it all been a waste of time and effort? What was going to happen to my family now?
I’d known that North Korea was no “paradise on earth” ever since I set foot in the place. But I’d thought that going to university was my one chance to better my position. After all, back in Japan, that had been one of the enticements to move to North Korea. They’d promised that we would get a good education for free. It was a huge incentive. But also a complete, barefaced lie. It’s difficult to put into words what this discovery did to me. I was totally and utterly shattered. The realization that I was consigned to spend the rest of my life at the very bottom of society with no chance of escape came crashing down on my head like an avalanche. I lost all hope for the future, and I felt like a part of me died that day.
The following day, some documents arrived from the People’s Committee Bureau of Labor. Knowing that no amount of effort or work would make any difference to my future, I didn’t care what kind of job I would get. With one exception. If you were a farmer, there was no hope of promotion—and no chance of ever escaping the village. Like my father. So when it came time to fill in the part of the form where you had to say what kind of job you hoped to do, I wrote:
factory work
In reality, it didn’t matter what you wrote. So even my pathetic “wish” to work in a factory was denied, and I was assigned to work on the village farm. When the instructor from the local People’s Committee came to announce my workplace, my dissatisfaction must have been clear, because he suddenly snapped at me, “The son of a farmer must be a farmer. That’s the way it is in this country. You should be grateful that you and the likes of your family get any work at all.”
And then, by way of consolation, he told me that farming wasn’t the worst job. It was, after all, better than working in the coal mine. And people like us—those of us who’d come over from Japan, the lowest of the low—should thank our lucky stars.
I knew of course that the party was hostile toward us, but I hadn’t realized until that moment that it was a deliberate policy to send Japanese people to the very bottom of society. I was stunned that this guy would openly admit such a thing.
Suddenly, I felt completely overwhelmed. By rage. Frustration. Despair. And all I could do was walk off in the direction of the mountain and weep. Someone once said, “If a crying baby could tear down the universe, it would.” That’s how I felt that day. I wanted to demolish the whole universe, but the sad truth was, it had already come crashing down around my head.
I couldn’t scream and cry and vent my despair at home because my mother would hear me, and she was already at the end of her tether. I couldn’t bear to cause her any more suffering. I also wasn’t sure how to talk to my sisters about how I felt. I didn’t want to break them too. So at home I kept quiet and silently cursed my fate. I knew then I was destined for a life of hell on earth, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
Before starting my new job, I tried to take a philosophical approach to the prospect of farmwork. I told myself that farmers work hard all over the world. It’s a tough life full of grueling days, but it has a kind of dignity to it. A nobility, even. No. That’s not the right word. It has a certain grandeur to it. Even when I was called up to do farmwork back in my days at elementary school, I always felt that I was contributing in some small way to a much larger endeavor. Farming consisted of many small parts—each of them laborious enough, no doubt—but each one required its own set of skills and a kind of wisdom.
It was a nice thought. As soon as I started working full-time on the farm, I was reminded of the North Korean way of farming that I’d witnessed back in my Youth League days. It was staggeringly crude and idiotic. As usual, the party barked out its policy in a fatuous, hysterical slogan: “Plant rice all over the country! Harvest all over the country!” To this day, I cringe at the memory of those words.
When I was a kid, I sometimes used to watch farmers at work in Japan. Even at the time, it struck me that growing crops was a bit like raising children. The farmers cherished and nurtured their crops, treating them with love and care. In North Korea, our instructors said the Japanese system was hopelessly inefficient. “Our country uses Juche farming. You must tame the land and become its master. That is the only way to cultivate large quantities of crops!” The Juche farming model essentially treated rice farming like factory mass production. Centuries of rice-planting techniques were treated with total contempt. We were ordered to shove them closer together, to plant more, to plant faster, to churn out as much as possible. The farmers knew better but had no choice but to do what they were told—and no motivation to try to do better.
By the time I started farming, all this nonsense had been going on for some time. The party members must have realized that things were not going well, because they had begun allowing farming families to form groups and take out leases on small plots of land. The idea was to increase farmers’ motivation. But they bungled it yet again. It didn’t matter how much effort you put into your independent plot or how much food you actually produced, because the party simply took it. No matter how carefully you’d tended your crop, your overall annual allocation remained the same. What kind of motivation does that provide?