The Aquariums of Pyongyang by Chol Hwan Kang Page B

to see us, the new criminals. I had been made to believe—and had indeed wanted to believe—that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was the best country in the world. I looked up to Kim Il-sung as a god. Yet here were armed teachers beating and insulting their student charges.
    Over the course of my detention, I had half a dozen male teachers and two female teachers, both of whom were the wives of guards. Of all, only one deserved the title of instructor. The worst was the one we called the Wild Boar—the very same who had taken such exception to my knowledge of the Namhodu conference. Almost as ruthless was Pak Tae-seu, a.k.a. the Old Fox, who sometimes punished his students by making them stand naked in the courtyard all day with their hands behind their backs. We hated him so much we once got up the courage to damage his bicycle. To get us to denounce the culprits, he confined us all to our huts. When that didn’t work, he tried threats and thrashings and extra hours of work at night, when our sole desire in life was to sleep. But we never cracked.
    One of the most common forms of school punishment was latrine duty. There were always two monitors—fellow prisoners both—who stood at the school entrance to watch over the arriving students and pick out the latecomers. A student who was tardy
could expect to get a week’s worth of latrine duty, which consisted of cleaning the stalls or emptying the septic tanks. The tanks had to be emptied once a year, and if there was a dearth of students requiring punishment, the teachers would choose kids at random.
    One time a friend of mine from class started complaining to us because he’d been picked for the nasty job several times in a row. “I’m always the one,” he whined. “Don’t the teachers have anything better for us to do? It’s probably because they like shit!” Someone must have gone to squeal to the Wild Boar, because a minute later we saw him walking toward us looking mad as hell. He grabbed the guilty student and started beating him savagely, first punching him with his clenched fists, then kicking him. Battered and wobbly-legged, the boy fell into the septic tank, where he remained trapped for a long time, unable to find a foothold or get anyone to reach in and help him. Content with his work, the teacher lost interest and walked away. After a long struggle, my friend managed to reach the edge and climb out, but he was in such a sad state that no one wanted to help him wash up or bandage his wounds. A few days later he died. We never quite knew of what. But the story has an epilogue: a few days later, his mother went to see the teacher, weeping and asking for her son back. The Wild Boar calmly replied that the boy had said revolting things and deserved what punishment he got. As for his death, well, that wasn’t his responsibility. And then he kicked the mother out!
    The Wild Boar treated us more like animals than children—which, he never failed to remind us, was already a considerable indulgence on his part: “Since your parents are counterrevolutionaries, they deserve to die, and you, their children, along with them. Fortunately for you, the Party is kind and its Great Leader magnanimous. He has granted you a reprieve and the chance to redeem yourselves. You should be grateful, but instead you commit further offenses! Commit too many and you will not be forgiven!” We
would all lower our eyes, wishing for our torturer’s death. Boys and girls were equal beneficiaries of his undiscriminating brutality and his favorite punishment, which consisted of ordering a student down on all fours and making him or her crawl in front of the class, saying, “I’m a dog . . . I’m a dog. . . .”
    Our two women teachers were considerably less rough. We christened one of them, a rotund lady in her fifties, the Chinese Cabbage. Though she was stronger than almost any of the male