My factory and another factory decided to band together to build a five-floor apartment block. I knew there was some sort of manager on the project, but he wasn’t a professional engineer. We’d all heard the stories. Apartments would be built, winter would come, and the buildings would fall apart come spring due to inferior cement, improper steel frames, and winter temperatures way below zero. When I heard of this building project and its dodgy manager, I naturally had my doubts. But I still envied the people who’d get to live there. I didn’t know who’d get selected, but I knew it wouldn’t be me.
Except a miracle happened. An acquaintance somehow managed to secure a proper apartment for us. We were over the moon at our good fortune.
Then I had another stroke of luck. One of the managers in the other factory sought me out. “I think we could help each other. There’s this job I need done. I can’t pay you for it, but if you’d be prepared to take it on, I can help you fix up your place,” he said.
The manager was true to his word. He installed a Korean stove under the floor and came up with a decent door and produced some pieces of furniture.
Our apartment was on the fourth floor. We had a toilet and a proper kitchen—luxuries beyond belief. It was the first time I’d lived in a normal place since my family’s house had gone up in flames; it was the first time my children had ever had a home of their own.
By the eighties, things had actually changed for the better for returnees. Returnees regularly received money from their relatives back in Japan, and a chosen few could even visit them. A chosen few, mind you. They were called members of “homeland delegations.” I could never quite work out which homeland was being referred to, or how these people were chosen, and there was no chance of entire families visiting relatives, of course. Who would ever have returned to North Korea if they had all their loved ones with them? Those who got to leave for visits returned with hard currency and everyday products that were the height of luxury in the impoverished hellhole that was North Korea. As returnees grew wealthier, the party’s attitude toward them changed. In the old days, if returnees said the slightest thing wrong, they’d be purged or whisked off to a concentration camp. Now they were considered a positive asset, so the party started treating them better. A canny move, it turned out. There were ways of using hostages.
The black market was also thriving. It seemed the more messed up a country became, the more the black market prospered. If you were lucky enough to have money coming in from Japan, you could get rice or meat. It would cost you ten times the official rate, but that didn’t matter if you had access to foreign currency. Yesterday, you were scraping along at rock bottom, a social pariah, but now you had members of the party over for dinner. Yesterday, you were just another “hostile.” Today, you were welcomed into the fold.
But we were in no position to enjoy that kind of good fortune. Our relatives in Japan had cut us off. Our fellow returnees mocked us and despised us, wanted nothing to do with us. I could hardly bear the hypocrisy of it. I was scrabbling for whatever work I could find to make some kind of living, while they sponged off their relatives and reveled in their unearned new status.
My children were old enough to be aware of the discrepancy between what we had and what others had. One day, one of them asked, “Dad, why don’t we have any nice things? All the other returnees have fridges and televisions. They get all sorts of gifts from their relatives in Japan. I thought you said our grandfather did great things in Japan.” What broke my heart more than anything else was that they weren’t allowed to do taekwondo like their classmates, because I couldn’t afford the correct uniforms for them. So they just sat there, at the edge of the room, watching the other kids participate. It wasn’t even my children who told me this; I heard about it from their classmates’ parents. Myong-hwa and Ho-son knew better than to ask me to buy them uniforms. So they tried to spare me the pain and humiliation by not bringing up the subject.
In the autumn of 1984, I found a new job, this time in a food-distribution center. Products from various factories were collected here and were then driven to delivery points in each district. The prices, fixed by the government, were the same all over the country. The amount delivered depended on the size of the local population.
One of my coworkers there eventually hooked me up with a job in soybean paste and soy sauce distribution. Any kind of job connected with food was a ticket to a better life. Not only did it give you access to food for your family, but it also gave you access to party bigwigs. If you played your cards right and sent enough goodies their way, you could get televisions or fridges or other perks in return. In the West, I guess you’d call it corruption. In North Korea, it was just standard operating procedure. Suddenly I had access to soybean paste and soy sauce. There was no way I would let such an opportunity pass me by.
When I delivered soybean paste and soy sauce to nearby villages, I couldn’t help but notice how thin and tired the local farmers looked. They all had the same pinched and starving appearance. Their food ration was supposed to be one and a half pounds a day, but they only received about half that amount. It didn’t help that they were constantly being called away from their work for military training or other urgent projects. Because they were unable to attend to their land, everything went to wrack and ruin. I saw countless farms overrun with weeds simply because the farmers had no time to look after them.
Around this time, a rift developed between Ho-chol and his stepmother. Adolescent sons and their stepmothers don’t get along; it seems to be a law of nature. He’d hit puberty and become volatile. My wife had also grown more distant and withdrawn from her own children and seemed to be shrinking into herself. Ho-chol returned to my village, Dong Chong-ri, to live with my father for a while. I asked my boss to find him a position in the Hamju area—food-storage work, anything that would keep him from being consigned to the thankless toil of being a farm laborer, which would be his only option if he stayed in Dong Chong-ri. In a rare stroke of luck, my boss managed to get Ho-chol a job.
On Ho-chol’s seventeenth birthday, March 25, 1989, I lied to my wife. I told her I was going to work, but when I left the house, I picked up some bread and went to visit my son. I hadn’t seen him for two months, and he looked more mature than before. We went to the river and had lunch together. We shared the corn rice and bread that I’d brought. It was hardly a birthday feast, but it tasted good.
We enjoyed chatting, but when we got to talking about the past and everything we’d been through, I couldn’t help but weep. He tried to comfort me but ended up crying himself. He was always an empathic child, and as he grew into a man, he was one of the few people in the world who I felt truly understood me. I tried to give him some advice.
“Grow up. Get married and learn to stand on your own two feet, because I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen to me. If you’re sick, if you need help, just tell me, okay? I’ll always do whatever I can for you.”
We shook hands firmly and separated.
Only a few days later, a policeman summoned me. He claimed that my son had stolen a goat, and he wanted me to pay for it. I immediately went to my son’s place to find out what was going on.
When I found him, I saw that he had bruises all over his face.
“I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ve been framed,” he said.
He explained there were about forty workers in his workplace; he was the youngest. Some bad apples who worked there had stolen some potatoes and sweet corn from the village storage shed. Worse still, they’d killed some domestic animals and eaten them. Then they’d blamed everything on my son.
“They told me, ‘You’re a returnee and very young, so you’ll be treated with more lenience. So you need to take the blame for everything, okay?’ I didn’t feel like I had a choice.” His voice trembled.
And then Ho-chol told me they’d beaten him up.
I looked at my son. I knew he hadn’t done anything wrong. The sight of his bruises broke my heart.