her sister shared similar artistic tastes and preferences and watched movies together. She also remembered that Hye Rim described him as a “meticulous and humorous comedian.” Song’s nephew Li Il Nam, a frequent visitor to the residence who defected in 1982, recalled, “From what I heard, my aunt was disappointed in her [first] marriage and was quite taken by Kim Jong-il.” In 1971, Song gave birth to a prized first son named Jong Nam.
Kim kept his relationship with Song and his little family away from his father, for fear of his disapproval—she was born in South Korea, after all, and divorced—and to avoid jeopardizing his chances during the delicate succession process. Kim adored Jong Nam, who was born when Kim was around thirty years old. He was a chubby little boy, with full cheeks, thick legs, and a bit of a paunch peeking over his waistband in a country where most boys his age were undernourished. They lived in a mansion, reportedly staffed by servants, hundreds of bodyguards, and a handful of cooks. The young boy lived in luxury; he wore diamond-studded watches and was surrounded by piles of toy guns, modern gadgets, and video games. He had a ten-thousand-square-foot playroom and crates of toys sent by North Korean diplomats stationed in Europe and East Asia who had been tasked with procuring the latest in childhood playthings. Jong Il jealously guarded his precious secret with the help of apparatchiks who feared devastating reprisals if any information about the mother and child leaked. To keep things contained, Jong Nam was tutored at home rather than attending school. The situation understandably caused friction between the boy’s parents; Song threatened to reveal their secret to Kim Il Sung, according to her niece Li Nam Ok, who defected from North Korea in 1992. Li said that Jong Il warned Song off with a pistol.
Despite his official second marriage in 1973 or 1974 to a woman his father approved of—his first in the late 1960s reputedly ended in divorce—Kim spent most of his time with his son. He co-slept with him and spared nothing to keep the isolated boy happy, according to Song’s nephew. Li Il Nam described how the pampered boy was allowed to read South Korean novels and watch South Korean and Japanese television shows, pastimes that would have landed any other North Korean in a gulag. Jong Nam once ordered his servants to kidnap a South Korean comedian he liked and bring the man to his villa to entertain him. The kidnapping didn’t happen, but the incident shows the extent of Jong Nam’s privilege and his view of how much power his father wielded. In fact, even though Kim’s agents didn’t carry out the abduction, Li said they found a North Korean farmer who resembled the comedian and trained him for months to impersonate his routines. One of Jong Nam’s cousins wrote in his memoir that the little prince “ruled the roost” and was “the king and the commander of the house.”
The one thing little Jong Nam did not have was freedom. The only playmate his age was his cousin Li Nam Ok, the daughter of his mother’s sister, who came to live with them to keep the family company. She would later say that Jong Nam accepted the situation because he never questioned his father. Having once been a prominent actress, his mother suffered from her isolation in a gilded cage; she sought treatment for depression and other mental and physical ailments in Moscow for extended periods. Jong Nam found some respite from the stifling atmosphere in North Korea when his father sent him to school in Moscow and Geneva between 1978 and 1988. He returned to Pyongyang when he was eighteen.
Covetous though he was of his secret family, Kim had already turned his amorous attention elsewhere. He had taken up a new lover, Ko Yong Hui, a Japanese-born actress who quickly bore him two sons and a daughter: Jong Chol (1981), Jong Un (1984), and Yo Jong (1989). Born in Osaka in 1952, Ko was part of the Korean diaspora with her family during the first half of the twentieth century and the era of Japanese colonization of Korea. At the end of World War II, approximately two million Koreans were living and working in Japan, having been conscripted by the Japanese government to fill the labor shortage or voluntarily moving there to seek economic opportunities. Ko’s family moved to Pyongyang in 1961 as part of a program