of apprenticeship to a master who had ruled for nearly five decades and laid the foundations for the Communist world’s first dynastic succession.
THE SUN AND THE RISING SON
The first few pages of Kim Jong Il’s official biography have the flavor of the Book of Genesis, with its plethora of “begats” highlighting the genealogies of important individuals. Published in 1998, a respectable four years after the death of his father, the biography is plodding, lacking the drama and action of Kim Il Sung’s guerrilla days and the heady years after liberation from Japan. There would be multiple official biographies over the course of his tenure, sharpening, revising, and embellishing Kim’s superhuman exploits. Minus his father’s military credentials, charisma, and good looks, and burdened by the uncertainty of an unprecedented hereditary succession in the Communist world, Kim Jong Il required an official biography that emphasized his bloodline and a genealogy—bolstered by mythology and semi-truths—to elevate his legitimacy as the new leader. The genealogical account of Kim’s birth was most likely intended to imbue it with a sense of inevitability, a foreordained act of supernatural proportions, and to set him up as a key driver of the country’s destiny and the only proper vehicle for the continuation of his father’s will.
The 1998 biography highlighted Kim’s impeccably patriotic family and his essential Korean-ness. Kim was born on Mount Paektu, a significant location in Korea’s history, on February 16, 1942. His father was “the father of the Korean nation,” his mother was a “communist revolutionary fighter…who devoted her whole life to the struggle for the restoration of the country and the freedom and happiness of the people.” His grandfather, a “leader of the anti-Japanese national liberation movement, was a pioneer in shifting the direction from the nationalist movement to the communist movement in Korea.” His grandmother and uncles were “revolutionary fighters who dedicated their lives to the cause of national restoration.” Myths that were supposed to be taken as truth or believed as an article of faith peppered official accounts of his birth: a double rainbow and a new star appeared in the sky; a swallow foretold it. Kim was walking when he was three weeks old and talking by eight weeks; he could change the weather by making marks on a map. Official biographies claimed that even as a kindergartner Kim “had a thorough knowledge of the globe” and stood by his father’s side during the Korean War providing counsel while American planes swarmed overhead and bombs rained down. In her haunting memoir, Yeonmi Park recalled that she and her classmates learned that Kim Jong Il had supernatural powers: He wrote fifteen hundred books as a college student, and, when he was very young, covered the road with sand to make it a smooth ride for his father. “Even when he was a child,” she wrote, “he was an amazing tactician, and when he played military games, his team always won because he came up with brilliant new strategies every time.” She and her classmates, like good little soldiers, also played military games, “but nobody ever wanted to be on the American imperialist team, because they would always have to lose the battle.”
But Kim Jong Il wasn’t born in 1942 on Mount Paektu. The Kims’ first son had a Russian nickname—Yura—and he was probably born in 1941 in a Russian military camp in Siberia, where Kim Il Sung was in the Eighty-eighth Brigade. In the early 1980s, the regime changed his birth year to 1942 to better align with 1912, the year of his father’s birth.
Jong Il’s mother, Kim Jong Suk, was a guerrilla, a member of the women’s unit in the fight against the Japanese, though not a supernatural figure, as regime hagiography portrays her. Jong Suk married Kim Il Sung in 1940 and was his first recognized wife. She was a teenager when she joined Kim’s unit in 1935 and worked as a kitchen helper; at one point she was arrested by the Japanese for stealing food and supplies. Although Jong Suk suffered through the indignity of her husband’s wandering eye and his previous marriage, Kim Il Sung in his memoirs extolled his wife’s compassion, faithfulness, and devotion. “She snatched me from the jaws of death on several occasions,” he wrote admiringly. She dried his clothes against her warm body and cut off her hair to line her husband’s boots to keep his feet warm. And she never wavered in her revolutionary zeal, nor assumed an equal status with Kim