Chung-Cha had taken the guided tour, but she did so with a perspective different from other visitors. She had read an uncensored account of the sailors aboard the Pueblo. This was an unheard-of thing in her country, but Chung-Cha’s work often carried her out of North Korea. The sailors had been forced to say and write things that they did not believe, like admitting to spying on North Korea and denouncing their own country. But in a famous photo of some of the seamen, they surreptitiously had been giving the finger to the North Korean cameraman and symbolically to their captors while seemingly just clasping their hands. The North Koreans did not know what a raised middle finger meant and asked the sailors about it. To a man they said it was a Hawaiian symbol of good luck. When Time magazine had run a story exposing the truth of the gesture, the sailors were reportedly severely beaten and tortured even more than they already had been.
When they were released in December 1968, eighty-two of them walked single file across the Bridge of No Return in the DMZ. One sailor had not walked across. He had died in the initial attack on the ship, the only fatality of the incident.
Chung-Cha finished the tour and made her way back to land. She looked back at the ship. She had been told that the Americans would not decommission the ship until it was returned to them.
Well, then it would never be decommissioned, she thought. North Korea had very little. And so they never gave anything back that they had taken. After the Soviets had left and North Korea had its independence it was as though it was this little country against the world. It had no friends. No one who truly understood it, not even the Chinese, whom Chung-Cha considered to be among the wiliest race on earth.
Chung-Cha was not a religious person. She knew no North Koreans who were. There were some Korean Shamanists, others who practiced Cheondoism, some Buddhists, and a relative handful of Christians. Religion was not encouraged since it could be a direct challenge to the country’s leaders. Marx had had it right, she thought: Religion was the people’s opium. Yet Pyongyang had once been known as the Jerusalem of the East because of the Protestant missionaries who had come in the 1800s, with the result that over a hundred churches had been erected on the “Flat Land.” That was no more. It was simply not tolerated.
And to her it did not matter. She did not believe in a benign higher being. She could not. She had suffered too much to think of a heavenly force in the sky that would let such evil walk the earth without lifting a hand to stop it.
Self-reliance was the best policy. Then you alone were entitled to the rewards—and you alone bore responsibility for the losses.
She passed an open street market and stopped, tensing for a moment. There was a foreign tourist not five feet from her. It was a man. He looked German, but she could not be sure. He had his camera out and was about to take a picture of the marketplace and the vendors.
Chung-Cha looked around for the tour guide who must accompany all foreigners. She did not see any such person.
The German had his camera nearly up to his eye. She shot forward and snatched it from him. He looked at her, stunned.
“Give that back,” he said in a language that she recognized as Dutch. She did not speak Dutch. She asked him if he spoke English.
He nodded.
She held up the camera. “If you take a picture of the street market you will be arrested and deported. You might not be deported, actually. You might just stay here, which will be worse for you.”
He paled and looked around to see several Korean vendors staring at him with malice.
He sputtered, “But why? It’s just for my Facebook page.”
“You do not need to know why. All you need to do is put your camera away and go and find your tour guide. Now. You will not receive another warning.”
She handed him back the camera and he took it.
“Thank you,” he said breathlessly.
But Chung-Cha had already turned away. She did not want his thanks. Maybe she should have just let the crowd attack him, let him be beaten, arrested, thrown in prison, and forgotten about. He was one person in a world of billions. Who would care? It was not her problem.
Yet as she walked down the street she thought of the man’s question.
But why? he had asked.
The answer to that was both simple and complex. An open street market said to the world that North Korea’s economy was weak, its traditional stores few in number, and thus the need for vendors in the street. That would be a slap in the face to a leadership acutely sensitive to world opinion. Conversely, an abundance of goods at a street market, if seen by the rest of the world, could result in international food aid being reduced. And since many North Koreans were barely surviving, that would not be a good thing. Pyongyang was not representative of the rest of the country. And yet even people here starved to death in their apartments. It was part of the so-called eating problem, which was very simple. There was not enough food. This was why North Koreans were shorter and lighter than their brethren to the south.
Chung-Cha did not know if either of these explanations was true. She only knew that these were the unofficial explanations for why the simple act of taking a picture could have such horrendous consequences, in addition to the fact that North Koreans did not like to have their pictures taken by foreigners. And things could get violent. The perpetrator would be arrested. That was reason enough never to leave your tour guide’s side while in North Korea.
Our ways are just different because we are the most paranoid country on the face of the earth. And perhaps we have good reason to be. Or perhaps our leaders want to keep us united against an enemy that does not exist.
She didn’t know how many other North Koreans had such thoughts. She did know that the ones who had publicly expressed them had all been sent to the penal colonies.
She knew this for a fact.
Because her parents had been sent to Yodok for doing that very thing. She had grown up there. She had nearly died there. But she had survived, the only one of her family to do so.
And her survival had come at a terrible price.
She had had to kill the rest of her family to be allowed to live.