Devastated by your optimism: thoughts on reading Thae Yong Ho's memoir about the North Korean slave state

Like a lot of the world, I've had some more time at home lately than I'm used to. I've made every effort to use the time well, rather than get lost in a haze of worry and sloth. I wrote a novel, then some short stories. I read the book of a writer I've gotten to know and reviewed it. In the last six weeks, though, I did work closer to my professional life as a Korean translator than my private passion as a writer. I read Thae Yong Ho's memoir, The Three-Story Secretariat's Password. Thae, if you're not familiar because your life doesn't revolve around things Korea-related, was one of the most high-profile North Korean defectors of the last twenty years. He was the deputy ambassador in London when he and his family defected in 2016. He'd spent a long career in North Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so he knows a lot about North Korean decision-making of the last three decades at a reasonably high level. He didn't have first-hand access to the Kim family, but he did have insider access that gave him pretty good second-hand insight. There's no English version of his book, meaning I had to grind through the Korean, which took me about six weeks. The style is straightforward enough; it's just a long book, and I was stopping to take notes through a lot of it.

A word on the reliability 

Thae comes off as generally quite credible. He is careful to separate what he knows first-hand from what he doesn't know for sure, or what he merely heard as rumor or his own conjecture. When he can, he tells exactly who was involved and when, although on occasion, he has to obscure names, because he doesn't want his former colleagues and friends who are still stuck inside North Korea to suffer from what he writes.

There are maybe a few reasons to be a little bit suspect of Thae. The general drift of his messaging on North Korea pretty neatly matches what any North Korea hawk would say: North Korea has never negotiated in good faith on nuclear weapons, and only ever used negotiations as a stall tactic to buy time to keep developing its nuclear program. Any American skeptic of North Korean genuineness, like John Bolton, would agree. Thae is currently a member of South Korea's parliament for the conservative South Korean party, so his account is likely to support a tough-on-North-Korea narrative, one that differs from the ruling party led by President Moon Jae-in. So he has a political interest in pushing the narrative he's pushing.

But I don't think that automatically rules out the possibility he's being largely honest. That would be a chicken-and-egg type of fallacy, assuming his views on North Korea are a result of his politics, not that his politics are a result of his hard-won views on North Korea. He has joined with the right because he thinks their views are more likely to bring about the change in North Korea he wants to see based on a lifetime in North Korea. Nobody is immune from bias, but his memoir came off to me more as his honest account of why he thinks the way he does than an attempt to get others to think as he does by any means necessary.

One could also say that the book maybe suffers in parts from a little bit of indulgence in self-praise. But I look at this the same way I read St. Paul when he addressed a Jewish audience: "I was circumcised when I was eight days old. I am a pure-blooded citizen of Israel and a member of the tribe of Benjamin--a real Hebrew if there ever was one!" Thae knows his audience may include North Koreans who are either reading bootleg copies of the book or perhaps assigned to read it by the Ministry of State Security in North Korea. He wants to let them know that he wasn't just some slouch in the North Korean system who left because he couldn't hack it. He was a good North Korean, with a proud family history, and he left because he was disgusted by how the Kim family betrayed socialism's ideals. The indulgences are there to convince North Koreans, not audiences outside the country. They don't greatly hurt the book's reliability.

A word on the title

Thae's English Wikipedia page translates the title (Korean: 3층 시기실의 암호) as "Cryptography From the Third-Floor Secretariat." That's a very literal translation, one that doesn't take into account how Thae himself explains the "three-story secretariat." If I just looked at the title by itself in Korean, I'd also guess it referred to the third floor of a building, but Thae very specifically explains that it's not the third floor, but that the building is referred to as the "three-story secretariat office." It's the building that the ruling North Korean party, the Korean Workers' Party, uses as its headquarters, a building Thae says even North Koreans didn't know about until a North-South summit hosted Moon Jae-in there.

"Cryptography" (암호), meanwhile, can also mean a secret code or just a password. The title refers to a password that Thae was sent in order to open an email from the party with instructions to buy tickets to an Eric Clapton concert in London. Kim Jong Un's older brother Kim Jong Chol was to attend. (The media eventually got wind of it and it became a huge story.) After Thae escorted Kim Jong Chol all over London for three days, his children asked him how Kim could spend thousands of dollars on a concert and hotel and restaurants when millions in North Korea were struggling. It was a moment of shame for Thae, and it was a pivotal moment in his change of heart that led to his defection.

Whenever I felt like giving up on reading this whole book, I would look at Thae's stern face, which felt like an accusation that I was not working hard enough. 

Back story on a number of the big North Korea stories for the last 30 years

In addition to the Kim Jong Chol/Eric Clapton story, Thae also had a driver's-seat view of a number of stories that got North Korea notoriety. One was the threat to a salon owner in London when the owner used Kim Jong Un's likeness for an advertisement. Thae was one of the two men from the North Korean embassy who went to the salon. Thae also had to try to keep the film maker who made Big Bang in Pyongyang, about Dennis Rodman's disastrous trip to bring basketball diplomacy to North Korea, from sending the version of the movie he made to film festivals. The regime didn't like that it mentioned Kim Jong Un's brutal killing of his uncle Jang Song Thaek, and they told Thae to threaten to sue. The filmmaker pointed out that there was no contract, so North Korea was welcome to sue. Thae wasn't responsible for the failure to sign a contract, but he was still reprimanded for not stopping the movie.

These stories, the ones with the highest degree of validity because of Thae's direct involvement, do a lot on their own to show how capricious the Kim family is, but also how methodical it can be in its cruelty. Even though Thae did not have direct involvement in things like the killing of Jang Song Thaek or nuclear arms talks, it isn't hard to see how he goes from the things he did experience directly to make deductions about other things he wasn't in the room for.

North Korea as a slave state

The most emotional parts of the book came when Thae spoke from the heart about the existential horror of being a North Korean. He frequently calls North Korea a slave state, its citizens slaves, and calls his own leaving an escape from slavery. He compares the struggle to topple the Kim family and reunite the two Koreas under one, democratic government to the U.S.'s own struggle to rid itself of slavery.

I often am trying to correct people who go around thinking that all North Koreans are just sad, terrified, and brainwashed all the time. I point out that North Koreans experience happiness, love their children, and value their lives. I explain that the partially marketized economy--not so much a result of reforms as bending to the inevitable--means that sometimes, North Koreans can move ahead within fixed bounds. They aren't just automatons. They're real people who don't respond that differently to their situation from how we would.

That's all true, but reading Thae's book, I started thinking about slavery scholarship in our country. When I was in college, I started seeing scholarship emerging on the diversity of the slave experience, how it meant a lot more than the field and the lash for everyone. Some slaves were allowed to hire themselves out after their regular work was done, and keep part of the wages of their labor. Some slave owners treated their slaves somewhat leniently, both out of a sense of decency and also just out of the economic reasoning that it made more sense to keep their property in good working order. Some masters allowed their slaves to buy their way to freedom, or to learn to read or a trade.

That's all true, and as far as it's always a good thing to bring precision to any field of study, I'm all for the more detailed scholarship. But some people have capitalized on the precision of this study to suggest that slavery "wasn't really that bad" for most slaves. It's linked to the same school of thought that wants black people in America to "get over" slavery because it was 160 years ago. No amount of precision in scholarship should ever overrule the primary fact that it's still slavery.

After reading Thae's book, I feel like my own desire to see North Koreans as real people has at times just been pedantry masking itself as erudition. Yes, the reality of life for North Koreans is a lot more complicated than the popular picture of brainwashed, goose-stepping soldiers who worship their leader like a god. But slavery is still slavery. Yes, it's important to try to understand the specifics of that slavery, but nothing should distract anyone from the central fact that North Korea's people are not meaningfully free.

If that's true, what responsibility do I have? What responsibility do we all have? There were four million slaves in the U.S. at the outbreak of the Civil War. There are twenty six million people in North Korea today.

Thae doesn't believe it will require war to unite the peninsula and free North Korea's slaves. He thinks that keeping sanctions on North Korea will eventually put enough strain on the regime that it will fall on its own. He believes that already, there are seeds of the regime's downfall planted. Young people don't think of Kim Jong Un as a god, or even particularly like him. And when officials try to interfere in the markets run throughout the country, people actually fight back.

I wish I could share his optimism that freeing North Korea's slaves could come without bloodshed, but I don't. While conventional wisdom is that if a regime is too repressive, the people eventually have nothing to lose and will rebel, this isn't true in a perfectly repressive country. Thae spells out how North Korea managed to not fade away like the Soviet Union did because, in the minds of its rulers, it kept its ideological purity while the Soviet Union did not. The playbook of strategic patience and economic pressure might work on an amateur repressive country, but North Korea is the uncontested champion.

Economic pressure might work if the world really made up its mind it wanted to do this, and if we approached it with the kind of energy we once approached things like ending apartheid in South Africa. But as Thae himself admits, even in South Korea, younger people don't have much interest in reunification. (I wrote about this before when talking about a South Korean soap opera.) If even South Korea can't get excited to free the slaves they share a history and language with, I don't know how the rest of the world will.

All of which is very depressing to consider. Thae's genuineness, optimism, and determination to live to try to bring about the abolition of slavery in North Korea ended up making me feel more dispirited than uplifted. But if Thae can rally himself to keep fighting for it, so can I. Unlike many of the other things wrong with the world, I actually know enough about this to contribute to it in some way, if nothing else, than by helping to increase knowledge about North Korea. Thae claimed Kim fears nothing as much as the truth, but the truth works two ways: both the truth about the outside world making it into North Korea and the truth about North Korea making it to the outside world.