Exit Emperor Kim Jong-il: Notes from His Former Mentor by John H. Cha & K. J. Sohn

Author:John H. Cha & K. J. Sohn [Cha, John H.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781458202178
Publisher: AbbottPress
Published: 2012-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

You walk down the village road, pass by a neighbor’s house like you do every day. If you see smoke rising up their chimney, you know they’re all right. If you don’t see smoke coming out of their chimney for several days, you know they’re all dead.

At a recent lunch in Seoul with a group of defectors, the menu included a side dish made out of squash. I delved into the squash roasted to golden brown, saying over and over, “This is wonderful, this is wonderful.”

A young fellow seated across the table frowned, forcing a smile, and said, “I can’t stand the sight of the squash; I don’t even want to smell it.”

I asked him, “Why not?”

He replied, “I had squash day and night for years. That’s all I had. Squash stew, fried squash, boiled squash, baked squash, squash gruel … I don’t remember eating anything else.”

I stopped eating the squash. It didn’t taste good any longer.

The young fellow said, “In retrospect, I was fortunate. I had squash to eat, at least.”

I understood what he meant. He felt fortunate that he had managed to live to tell his story.

A minister from Chicago whom I’d met some time ago told me about his congregation in a church in Pyongyang. “These people feel very fortunate to eat one bowl of corn gruel a day. It’s a feast for them. They would hold hands and thank God for the meal. It is remarkable how they survive. Their urine has no smell and their feces look like rabbit dung, you know those little pellets. Still, they go on and keep their faith in God. They’re truly remarkable.”

The good minister, who appeared to weigh over two hundred pounds, went on like this, and I failed to understand his twisted logic in lavishing his praise for the starving people. He ought to have been telling them that humans were meant to eat three meals a day, not praise them for their ability to subsist on one bowl of gruel a day.

My mother used to say that being hungry was part of life in her youth. She remembered the times when pebbles on the ground appeared appetizing: “When you’re hungry, you don’t think of anything else. Pebbles look like cookies. Intellectually, you know that you can’t chew or digest them, but you don’t care. You feel as though you could sink your teeth into them. You see a mound of sand, and soon, you begin to wish that it was a mound of rice. You begin to imagine that you’re scooping it up in your hand and shoving it in your mouth. You know that you can’t eat sand; that your stomach can’t handle it, but you find yourself fighting the urge to scoop it up into your hands and eat it. Sometimes you see little kids eating dirt. They can’t control the urge.”

I have never seen my mother throw away food. It made her sick to see people waste food. When we went out to restaurants, she always brought home leftovers.

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