North Korea's Hidden Revolution by Jieun Baek

Author:Jieun Baek
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300224474
Publisher: Yale University Press

JI SEONG-HO: PORTRAIT OF A SURVIVOR

When people first meet Ji Seong-Ho, they are drawn in by his soft-spoken, humble demeanor and his admirable work ethic as a law student at Dongguk University in Seoul and as director of an NGO. Later they learn that his big eyes and tendency to smile easily belie an unimaginably painful past. His resilience, humility, and perseverance are all the more awe-inspiring if one knows of the obstacles he had to overcome to do the work that he does today.

In 1982, Ji Seong-Ho was born in Hoeryong City in North Hamgyong Province, and lived near the Hakpo coal mine. Hakpo is where citizens with extremely poor social standing live and die. He was the oldest of three siblings, and had a loving mother and a father who was a party member. Yet despite his father’s party membership, his family was constantly hungry. In middle school, he began noticing empty chairs in his classroom and realized that his classmates’ absence was not due to laziness, but rather to their malnourishment or death. In his city, deep in the mountains, the Dear Leader’s food distributions were only a myth. Neighbors who tried to survive by eating tree bark and grass passed away. His own grandmother perished due to starvation. But even as his classmates and their families were clearly dying, Ji Seong-Ho’s teachers were teaching students that they were living in a socialist paradise. He recalls Kim Jong-Il’s consistent message to the nation that “food would soon be made available like water coming down a waterfall.”

At the far end of Ji Seong-Ho’s home town was the political prison camp, Camp 22.13 Everyone knew that political prisoners in Camp 22 were forced to mine thousands of tons of coal. A train loaded with coal regularly went back and forth between the prison camp and a power plant, and Ji Seong-Ho identified an opportunity. He could scavenge, steal, and sell scraps of coal to buy food for his family. His mother, his twelve-year-old little sister, and he would time the perfect moment to jump and grab onto a freight train as it sped up, and then sneak aboard.

Soldiers guarding these coal-filled trains sometimes caught Ji Seong-Ho and others stealing coal, and would beat them until a few bones broke. Yet the difficult task of carrying forty-five-kilogram coal sacks on his four-feet, two-inch frame was worth these sporadic beatings because it was the only way to provide for his family in such desperate times, when news of dead neighbors elicited merely a few tongue clucks as a sign of obligatory mourning.

The freezing cold morning of March 7, 1996, started in a rather typical way for thirteen-year-old Ji Seong-Ho: he ran up to a moving train and pulled himself aboard it as it left the prison camp and headed toward the power plant. But on that fateful morning he felt dizzy, since he hadn’t eaten for several days. Although he had planned to jump off the train as it entered the next station, he lost consciousness.

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