Eyes on North Korea’s walls

Casey Lartigue and Han Song-mi record a podcast interview with Jamin Coller, host of “If I’m Really Honest,” Sept 8. Courtesy of Freedom Speakers International

Anyone who has read the North Korean refugee memoir “Greenlight to Freedom” may notice a striking omission: the names of North Korea’s dictators Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il never appear. That's not an accident.

In 2021, as we started working on her memoir, North Korean refugee Han Song-mi told me she didn't want to mention Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il. She had grown up under their portraits, seen the propaganda, and attended the mandatory celebrations. But they weren't part of her story and she’s not an expert on North Korea so she didn't want to discuss them. That's why, when we published her book a year later, we never mentioned the dictators by name.

I told her, however, that she could expect others to ask about those dictators. During an interview for the podcast "If I'm Really Honest" that was uploaded on September 25, the dictators came up again. Han explained that, as a child, she believed the portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il could see and hear her. If she did something wrong, she thought they would know. She was taught, as apparently most children are warned, that even birds and mice could hear what they say.

It isn't only the slogans at school or the songs on the Korean Central Broadcasting Station. It's the feeling that you are never unobserved, even in your own home.

Han described how this belief affected her daily behavior. When she was living with her aunt and uncle, they would wait until she had gone to sleep before they would eat dinner. In the podcast, she said when she was starving and tempted to steal food from them, she would look at the portraits, make eye contact, and then put the food down. The portraits became an omnipresent judge.

This psychological control was reinforced through mandatory weekly self-criticism sessions that Han attended. Each week brought the stress of having to criticize herself and then choose someone else to criticize. The system deliberately made people complicit in monitoring and judging each other, creating a web of mutual surveillance that made trust impossible.

The message was clear: there is nowhere to hide, no moment of privacy, no relationship that cannot be monitored.

Inside North Korea, the broader system of surveillance reportedly has expanded. What a child once believed while looking up at a portrait is now reinforced by the state's real-world monitoring and controls.

The effectiveness of this system becomes clear when you consider its practical results. Han's mother escaped without telling anyone — not even her own daughter — because she couldn't trust that the information wouldn't be reported. (Coincidentally, the podcast aired on the 20th anniversary of the last day Han saw her mother in North Korea.) The regime has successfully created a society where family members can't confide in each other about life-changing decisions. Trust can cost lives.

The portraits that inspire fear have been supplanted by CCTV cameras in markets and border areas, tracking software on phones and computers, and neighborhood informant networks that make private life almost impossible.

Accessing foreign media — dramas, music, news — has long been punishable, and since the 2020 “Reactionary Thought and Culture Law,” those caught distributing it face severe consequences, including long prison terms or even execution.

Despite the allegedly watchful portraits, Han escaped from North Korea in 2011. FSI recently hired her as our Manager of External Relations. During the podcast interview, I said I should put my own portrait behind Han's desk at the Freedom Speakers International office to make sure she is working hard. She is used to my sense of humor and laughed it off, just as she can now laugh off her childhood fears in North Korea.

For all the influence those portraits had in her childhood, they didn’t earn a place in her book. Even when their names surface in an interview, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il appear only as background figures in her story.