Lyric and lament from North Korea

Jang Jin-sung is most accurately described as a former “court poet,” since North Korea’s secretive leader, Kim Jong Il, runs his government rather the same way European royalty hundreds of years ago ran theirs. Early Modern literati won grand favors for depicting the leader of the day as, say, anointed by God, worshipped by all, and blessed with a divine capacity for miracle-making. (Think Gloriana and The Faerie Queen. Think cherubim and seraphim continually crying “Holy, holy, holy.” That’s the idea.) Such was life in 1568 England. Fast-forward to 2008 North Korea, where government myth-makers use thoroughly modern media to achieve the same effect—and where Jang Jin-sung worked for years writing tributes in verse to the Dear Leader. Until, that is, he finally met the man in person.

“The first time I met Kim Jong Il, I felt overwhelmed with emotion,” Jang said in an interview with RFA’s Sookyung Lee. “But once I realized that he was the world’s richest king, ruling over the poorest country on the face of the Earth, that was a turning point.”

“To me, he was no longer a god, and I came to think that I could no longer live under that system. Preserving that regime while the people of North Korea are starving to death, that is an abomination,” Jang said.

Jang, who uses a pseudonym to avoid endangering relatives he left behind, met Kim twice—a great honor, but not his only accolade. In tightly closed North Korea, literature—like all the arts—remains under strict government control. All literature and publishing is dictated by the Workers’ Party Propaganda and Agitation Department, the General Federation of Korean Literature, and the Culture and Arts Department of the Party’s Central Committee. Jang was a member of the latter two and enjoyed the privileged life of North Korea’s elite.

But he fled that life and all its relative comforts to cross the Tumen river into China, and eventually settled in South Korea, where he has just published a volume of poetry titled For 100 Won, My Daughter I Sell. The title poem recounts the true story of a dying mother who sells her own daughter to a stranger for 100 won in a move she hopes will allow her child to survive—and then spends that small sum of money on a loaf of bread for the girl.

Jang’s poetry, published for the first time by the Internet news organization www.Chogabje.Com and broadcast by RFA’s Korean service, has topped the best-seller list in South Korea and made its author a media darling.

The poems evoke gruesome, haunting themes, such as the appalling famine that swept through North Korea in the 1990s and continues even now. The title poem, “For 100 won, my daughter I sell,” is perhaps the most disturbing of all—even more so when Jang explains that it’s based on an incident he witnessed.

“It happened at a market in the Tongdaemun district of Pyongyang. A lot of people witnessed that tragic scene and cried that day,” he said. “As they watched her, she tried to appear unaffected in the beginning, but after she gave her daughter that mother’s parting gift, one last piece of bread, and as she wailed, all the onlookers broke into tears. Even now, my eyes still tear up when I think of that instant.”

Grigore Scarlatoiu has translated the poem in full:

Exhausted, in the midst of the market she stood
“For 100 won, my daughter I sell”
Heavy medallion of sorrow
A cardboard around her neck she had hung
Next to her young daughter
Exhausted, in the midst of the market she stood
A deaf-mute the mother
She gazed down at the ground, just ignoring
The curses the people all threw

As they glared
At the mother who sold
Her motherhood, her own flesh and blood
Her tears dried up
Though her daughter, upon learning
Her mother would perish of a deadly disease
Had buried her face in the mother’s long skirt
And bellowed, and cried
But the mother stood still
And her lips only quivered

Unable she was to give thanks to the soldier
Who slipped a hundred won into her hand
As he uttered
“It is your motherhood,
And not the daughter I’m buying”
She took the money, and ran
A mother she was,

And the 100 won she had taken
She spent on a loaf of wheat bread
Toward her daughter she ran
As fast as she could
And pressed the bread on the child’s lips
“Forgive me, my child”

In the midst of the market she stood
And she wailed.

Jang Jin-sung believes that North Korea’s only hope is its people:

Tiny it is,
But the speckle of hope
Transcends
Darkness supreme
Through the power of life
Firefly of my soul
The glimmer is a firefly.