The Reluctant Communist by Charles Robert Jenkins, Jim Frederick Page B

was more often than not just another set of Organization eyes or another person you had to worry about stealing from you. The food she made was an afterthought: It was almost always too little and barely edible. The rice was filled with bugs, the vegetables were wormy, and the meat, if there was any meat at all, was often spoiled.
    In June of 1965, a cadre arrived to tell us that the Organization needed our house—which was in a prime location in east Pyongyang—for some other purpose, so we were being moved to a bigger and better house in Mangyongdae, about thirty minutes away. Mangyongdae is still very close to central Pyongyang and is famous throughout North Korea as the ancestral homeland of Kim Il-sung’s family. The house we were moved into was high on a hilltop and definitely bigger, big enough that Parrish and I were able to have our own room while Dresnok and Abshier shared a room. We also got beds. The leaders’ area, which was two large rooms, had its own entrance. Off to one side of the house was the Ping-Pong room, so dubbed because it had an old Ping-Pong table in the middle of it. We used the room as our study and the table as a desk. (It was a pretty uncomfortable one, too. Sitting on a regular chair, the table came up to my armpits.) One time, some officers came back with some paddles and built a “net” by laying a stick across two bricks set on either side of the center of the table, but that was the only time I ever saw anybody play Ping-Pong there.
    This house was bigger, but it was by no means better. It had no heat and no running water. We had to go one hundred fifty yards down the hill with two buckets on a yoke to fetch the drinking water. Even though the Taedong and Potong Rivers ran nearby, we couldn’t do anything with that water, since they dumped sewage in the river just a few miles upstream. At first, we didn’t have any buckets, so we borrowed buckets from an army unit nearby that was growing corn. That lasted a few weeks until we noticed that the army was using those same buckets to fertilize their corn with shit from their own latrine. “But we wash out the buckets!” they claimed, when we told them how disgusting that was. We weren’t having any of that. We made the leader get us some of our own buckets. During the winter, however, the well would dry up or freeze up completely. When that happened, we would try to cut ice or melt snow if there was any. A couple of times, when there was no snow and dying of thirst became a real possibility, they had to bring Russian-made water tanker trucks with emergency drinking water.
    At this house, they moved us on to more advanced studies. We graduated from simple tales of history and freedom fighters to more complicated passages on the Juche Idea, or Kimilsungism, which was Kim Il-sung’s homegrown theory of communism. Juche’s biggest message was absolute self-reliance. North Koreans doing everything themselves was better, according to Kim Ilsung’s theory, than relying even on other communist countries like China and the Soviet Union for trade. I’m no economist, but it is a crazy theory. And the more you study it, the less sense it makes. Sometimes, I would look around, and I couldn’t believe that a whole nation seemed to believe this gibberish. And of course it was all horseshit anyway, because any fool could see that not only would North Korea collapse without trade with other countries, but that it also relied on a steady stream of handouts and gifts just to feed itself.
    People always ask me if I think I was brainwashed, or they ask how long it took me to undo all the propaganda I absorbed. I can honestly say that I was never brainwashed, and all four of us Americans never bought into any of the phony history, economics, social theory, and Kim Il-sung worship that they shoved down our throats. I can’t tell you why, except to say that it all looked as heavy-handed and ridiculous to us from the inside as it does from the outside.