At a fish market stall in Seoul, a man named Kang reached into a tank of live octopus and pulled out his lunch without flinching. He had spent thirteen years guarding the private villa of Kim Jong-il, had never once been allowed to look his leader in the face, and had been paid, for all of it, enough to buy twenty-three kilos of rice. The gap between that life and this one, a table of fresh sashimi, cold beer, and a city that simply lets you walk wherever you want, is the size of an entire world. And Kang is only now learning how to move through it.
Growing up where gratitude was your first language
Kang grew up in Hyesan, in the Ryanggang Province near the Chinese border. The earliest memory he can name is not a game or a meal but a phrase. By age three, before most children can reliably say the names of their parents, children there were taught to say ‘Thank you, Generalissimo Kim Il-sung’ and ‘Thank you, Generalissimo Kim Jong-il.’ The Kim family was, as he put it, a much greater presence than their own mothers and fathers.
The structure held even in small pleasures. On birthdays, the government distributed one kilogram of cookies and candy to each child as a gift from the leadership. Children would hold the bag tightly and cry with genuine gratitude. Kang did not recognize this as indoctrination until he arrived in South Korea. ‘I never saw it as propaganda,’ he said, ‘not until South Korea showed me our life was truly hell.’
His path into the bodyguard unit began at fifteen, when security officials started quietly reviewing his family’s loyalty history. The unit accepted only children from the most ideologically reliable families. At seventeen he enlisted. At thirty-one he was discharged.
What the guards found in the trash every morning
Bodyguards at the villa were required to stand ten to twenty meters away from Kim Jong-il, facing the opposite direction. The logic was defensive: facing away meant you could watch for threats approaching from behind. It also meant that in thirteen years of service, Kang never actually saw the man he was protecting.
The daily routine began in summer at five in the morning. First task: clean the villa grounds. Then breakfast, then two hours of what Kang called ‘propaganda education,’ sitting in an auditorium being lectured that Kim Jong-il was the sun, and that without the sun, revolution was impossible. After that, shooting practice, guard tactics, and escort drills. The guiding principle of marksmanship training was not technical. It was this: if you fail to stop the enemy, the General dies, and so do you.
Of the Pleasure Squad, which is what the women assigned to the villa were formally called, Kang described the system with a flatness that made it more disturbing than outrage would have. Girls were tested for sexually transmitted diseases at seventeen and entered the villa system permanently, unable to leave until they turned twenty-five. If Kim Jong-il developed a particular preference for one of them, she became, in Kang’s words, ‘his absolute property’ with no path back to ordinary society. When their time in the system ended, the women were assigned to senior officers through a process Kang described in detail: officers gathered at a cultural center, ten photographs placed face-down on each desk, each man drew one, looked at it, and if willing, took her home that same night. The women in the arrangement were referred to as ‘assigned goods.’ They had no vote in the outcome.
Kang accepted all of it at the time as simply the natural order of the General’s household. The question of whether it was wrong was not one the bodyguards asked.
For his entire thirteen years of service, no salary was paid during employment. At discharge, his total wages covered twenty-three kilos of rice. ‘I was devoted to my country,’ he said, ‘so I never expected pay.’
Crossing the Yalu River at five in the afternoon
The decision to leave came after Kang returned home post-discharge and found his elderly parents eating grass porridge. He had been taught this was the fault of American imperialism. He enrolled in college, married, and then his wife died after four years. That was the moment, he said, when he understood the system held no future.
He arranged contact with someone in China, waited for winter, and walked into the Yalu River in daylight. The water was frozen. He broke through the ice with his hands as he crossed. Guards on the North Korean side fired blank rounds and shouted at him to stop. He turned around, raised his fist, shouted back at them with a phrase his translation renders simply as ‘eat well and live well,’ and made a gesture that required no translation. A large crowd of people finishing their afternoon shift watched him defect in broad daylight.
He cried the entire way across, not from fear but from the grief of leaving the land where, as he put it, his ancestors’ umbilical cords are buried.
The man who now speaks proudly
Living in Seoul, Kang struggles most with the English loan-words saturating South Korean daily life, and with his North Korean dialect, which identifies him immediately. For a long time he stayed quiet at work and in public. He no longer does. Asked what message he would send to anyone watching, he said: ‘Freedom is absolutely never free. Within the ordinary lives you all live, there is this noble spirit sacrificed by our ancestors and those who came before us.’
His mother is still in North Korea. His son, now twenty years old, is still there. His father died three years ago. Communication runs through smuggled Chinese phones that can receive international calls.
When Kim Jong-il died in 2011, Kang was still living in the North. On the inside, he said, he cheered. He could not show it. Most people around him quietly assumed that now, finally, they would eat.
Two Kangs at an American bar in Itaewon
Later in the evening, a second defector joined the table, also named Kang, also a former North Korean soldier. The two had met while escaping through Vietnam. At an American bar in Itaewon, a plate of Southern barbecue pork arrived, the first either of them had seen in person. The second Kang studied it carefully before picking it up with his hands. He said the portions explained something he had always wondered about American physiques.
The first Kang had not spoken to his own parents in ten years.
That rice was still on the table, untouched, in a small bowl near the edge.
The city outside kept moving, indifferent to all of it, the way cities do.
