Conversation with Hwang
By Oh Kong-dan
In the late summer of 1998 my husband and I traveled to South Korea to research a book that was based in part on interviews with North Korean defectors. The most important meeting we had in Seoul was with Hwang Jang-yop, who had arrived in Korea in the spring of 1997.
By the time we met him he was settled in a safe house inside a government compound, closely guarded because he was the highest ranking defector to come down to the South ― and he would retain that distinction to the day of his death. Hwang was of course best known as the architect of North Korea’s official ideology, Juche. In the United States, policy pundits were saying, ``Think about it! Hwang’s defection is like Thomas Jefferson defecting to England.”
I asked contacts in the Korean government to arrange an interview with Hwang, who was not meeting many people except government officials, both by choice and because the government was keeping him under wraps. Fortunately, I was able to receive government permission for the interview and a date and time were set.
On the morning of the meeting, I received a phone call from the relevant government office informing me that the interview had been cancelled because Hwang had a minor health problem that caused one of his eyes to become bloodshot and he didn’t want to meet foreigners in this condition. I had been introduced to him under my husband’s name, which was my legal name, so Hwang assumed that he would be meeting two Americans.
I did not have any time available to meet another day, so I told the official that we would not mind if his eye was red and asked him to tell Hwang that ``He is meeting a genuine Korean woman whose parents were born near his own county.” The bonds of the village were strong: He agreed to meet with us.
When he first walked into the meeting room with his colleague Kim Duk-hong, who had defected with him, he was wearing a neatly tailored black suit, and one eye was indeed very red.
When he saw my face, he seemed to relax a bit and silently shook my hand. I decided to be a bit forward with him: ``Hwang Jang-yop Sonsaengnim, I am a Korean-born in the south but my father and mother were born in the north so I can speak the Pyongan-namdo dialect. I now live and work in Washington, but I am 100-percent genuine Korean so we can speak in your native dialect today.”
Hwang sighed loudly and thanked me for the introduction. He seemed to relax even more and then he told me his story, the same story he had told to the media: ``As a person who worked for the Korean Workers Party for more than 50 years, I made a bold decision to leave my motherland.
I could not continue working as a party member any longer in the midst of starving workers and farmers. While they were dying, top leaders only repeated that they were establishing a paradise on earth. I could not tolerate that big lie any more. I spent many nights debating with myself and finally decided to go to the South to find colleagues with whom I could pursue the goal of dismantling the big lie and helping the unfortunate people of the North. I am a failed person. I don’t want to live long. I apologize to my family and hope that they treat me as if I were dead. I am so sorry about them. But I had to choose this route to do my best as a human being.”
It was 12 years before I would see Hwang again, on the occasion when he made his last trip to Washington in the summer of 2010. During those years I had not tried to meet him, but even if I had tried it might have been difficult because South Korea’s Sunshine Policy put visible and invisible restrictions on Hwang.
As it turned out, Hwang made two major miscalculations in his life. First, he too long ignored the unrealistic implications of Juche, which was useful as a political tool for the Kim regime but not at all a useful guide for building an economy that would benefit the people.
Second, like so many others he incorrectly predicted that the Kim regime would collapse soon after the 1995-1998 famine, not understanding how cleverly Kim Jong-il would remain in power, how helpless the ordinary North Korean people were, and how misguidedly generous South Korea and the United States would be toward the Kim regime.
In the era of the Sunshine Policy, Hwang was rejected by both the North and South Korean governments and his was a voice crying out in the wilderness. His aspiration to work for the freedom of North Korean people was not allowed to bloom for almost ten years, and by then his presence no longer had the impact it did when he first arrived in South Korea.
The death of Hwang is a reminder to us that the important mission of reunification remains to be fulfilled and that until it is fulfilled, millions of Koreans in the North and thousands in the South will continue to suffer from the policies of the Kim regime.
Through no fault of his own, Hwang’s example was never able to burn as brightly as it should have. However, in the example of the other 20 thousand North Koreans who have come to South Korea we can see a collective light that points toward the inevitable reunification of the two Koreas.
If that light is ignored, the social and economic price of reunification will be that much greater and we will someday look back and realize that we ourselves have made a major miscalculation by not preparing for the future.
Oh Kong-dan is a research fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. She is a major expert on Asian affairs. Her recent publications include the report, ``Moving the U.S.-ROK Alliance into the 21st Century" and the book ``The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom." She can be reached at kohassig@ida.org.