Meanwhile, so-called farming experts kept barking at us to mechanize our farming techniques and use new fertilizing chemicals. But we had no equipment for mechanization. And there were no chemicals. We were being ordered to do the impossible.
Maddeningly, I couldn’t even go straight home after work. I had to log my daily production total before I left. And then, twice a week, I had to attend a kind of ideological study meeting no matter how exhausted I was. Week after week, we were inundated with the thoughts of Kim Il-sung, the heroic history of the Korean Workers’ Party, or earnest analysis of some ridiculous party newspaper article. And after the meeting, we were forced to stay for further discussions and presentations that always boiled down to the same thing: the brilliance of Kim Il-sung’s political philosophy. So there we were, pretending to take an interest in our Fearless Leader’s latest musings, until about ten o’clock at night, hungry and exhausted. I suppose you could call it brainwashing of sorts, but to be honest, we were all too tired to pay much attention. It was just more propaganda and hot air. But if we were foolish enough to miss a study meeting, we were suspected of being dissidents and put under surveillance by the secret police. As if all that weren’t enough, we also had to endure the time-wasting farce of our Laborers’ and Farmers’ Red Army training twice a year. In the end, all that mattered was whether our loyalty toward Kim Il-sung appeared credible. So we became masters at faking it. Everyone did. To do anything else could have gotten us killed.
Everywhere we heard the endless drip drip drip of that wretched word Juche. “Our Juche farming method . . . the revolutionary Juche approach to production . . .” It was always the Juche something or other. Everybody nodded, but no one ever seemed to question what the word actually meant.
The word could be translated in a number of ways. It could mean self-reliance, autonomy, independence, or responsibility—all the things we weren’t allowed to have. According to the Juche “philosophy,” “human beings are the masters of the world, so they get to decide everything.” It suggested we could reorganize the world, hew out a career for ourselves, and be the masters of our destiny. This was laughable, of course, but that’s always the way with totalitarian regimes. Language gets turned on its head. Serfdom is freedom. Repression is liberation. A police state is a democratic republic. And we were “the masters of our destiny.” And if we begged to differ, we were dead.
Even as people faced incredible hardship and deprivation of both the physical and mental variety and wasted away under food shortages, we weren’t allowed to think for ourselves or take any initiative. The penalty for thinking was death. I can never forgive Kim Il-sung for taking away our right to think.
After a few months, I asked to be transferred to the “machinery division,” which was about to get hold of three Russian tractors. Tractor drivers’ man-hours counted double, so naturally, everyone wanted to be a tractor driver. I was hardly surprised when I encountered the usual prejudice when I first applied.
“You do realize that tractors can be driven on the roads?”
“Erm, yes.”
“And you realize that roads in this country are classified as military secrets?”
Huh?
Bizarrely, that was the truth. At the time, all railroads, roads, and rivers were military secrets. You revealed their locations at peril of death.
“Doesn’t it occur to you that someone like you shouldn’t have access to that information?”
Someone like me. A Japanese traitor in the making. But I refused to accept yet another rejection, so I wrote to the People’s Committee in the village.
As you know,
I wrote with mock indignation,
I’ve worked hard to build the great socialist future of the motherland. And now I want to work harder still. So I wish to be a tractor driver. I appreciate that tractors have to travel long distances, and I’ll never remember the route from one journey to the next, but I’ll do my best.
To my astonishment, my application was accepted. I received a few driving lessons and passed the tractor-driving test on the first attempt. Things seemed to be finally looking up.
Around the same time, my father was suddenly transferred from the farm to some sort of fruit-producing cooperative. No one knew why. But he continued to work his backside off. We both did. But no matter how hard we worked, we couldn’t make enough to support our family. My sisters were still in school, and I’ll never forget how lousy we felt about not being able to support them properly. I can’t even describe the hopelessness and despair I felt walking into my house in Dong Chong-ri after a long day of work and facing their hunger. It didn’t matter what we did—there was simply never enough food to go around.
In theory, if you were able-bodied, you got seven hundred grams of food a day. The elderly and sick got three hundred grams a day. That’s right. If you were sick or old, you were penalized. But the reality was even worse. The reality was “no work, no dinner.” So old people had to work until they died. They truly did.
My mother still wasn’t allowed to work. She still went to the mountain every day to pick mushrooms and weeds. We ate some, and she sold the rest on the black market. The secret police clamped down from time to time, and there was always a guy on the lookout for them. Whenever he yelled, “Police!” the market traders instantly vanished. They occasionally managed to bribe the police to leave them be, but you had to be smart, because the police would double-cross you without compunction.
We could just barely survive; it was hand to mouth. But somehow, I still thought I could miraculously find a better job. Even so, I have to admit that I enjoyed driving the tractor. We lived under constant surveillance so stifling you couldn’t breathe. But on the tractor, I was strangely free. It was one of the only times I was entirely in my own world, and I could survey things, unobserved. I can’t tell you what pleasure that gave me.
People ridiculed me. “What on earth are you doing?” they asked. “Why are you working so hard?” They didn’t understand that driving that tractor was the only freedom I had, my only respite from the orders and insults that assaulted us day in and day out. So no, I wasn’t crazy. Work was my only refuge.
And I just enjoyed driving that tractor.
CHAPTER 3
There’s a saying, “Sadness and gladness follow each other.” As I see it, people who experience equal amounts of sadness and happiness in their lives must be incredibly blessed. Some people lead a painful life full of nothing but sorrow. I should know.
I became a tractor driver in the summer of 1966. Soon thereafter, a letter arrived via the Red Cross from my mother’s brother in Japan. By the time we received it, it was dog-eared and the ink had run in some places. My mother had sent her relatives several letters over the years, but she’d never gotten any response.
When this letter finally came, my mother opened it with great excitement. She read it silently and quickly. But when she came to the second page, the letter fell out of her hands and she collapsed on the floor.
“Mom! What’s wrong? What happened?” I asked, running over to her.
I picked up the letter and saw that it contained news of her mother’s death:
Your mother was calling your name until she passed away.
I recalled my grandmother’s last words to me. “You’re Japanese,” she’d said. I remember how sad her eyes were. She knew her history. She understood what awful things go on under colonial rule. I knew that my grandmother had tried desperately to change my mother’s mind about leaving Japan but to no avail. I still remember looking for her at Shinagawa Station—but she hadn’t come to see us off.
After my grandmother’s death, my mother’s face quickly developed deep wrinkles. She suddenly became more weathered, worn, and frail. These weren’t the wrinkles of old age; they were wrinkles of pain. I wanted to make her life easier, but I couldn’t see any way of doing that. Whatever effort I made, our food allocation remained the same. Everything remained the same.