Kim Jong Il

by
Rob Rhee

My father looks more like Kim Il-Sung than Kim Jong-Il even though he played Kim Jong-Il twice on Late Night with Conan O'Brien and once for a Geico commercial that never aired. Like Kim Jong-Il my father thinks of Kim Il-Sung when he's acting like Kim Jong-Il.  It's an easy role for him considering he was born the mischievous slave-tormenting son of a wealthy landowner who, like Kim Il-Sung, spent his later years intoxicating himself on myth and posterity. This comparatively authentic version of the impish North Korean dictator held supremacy in the early summer months of 2005 before interest in Kim Jong-Il and consequently my father, whose suspicious fluency portraying a deranged Communist villain-prince lacked other outlets, were replaced by Hurricane Katrina and the increasing instability in Iraq.   

My father's father, Rhee Soo Hwan, was born in 1920 in the town of Sapyo on the east coast of what is now North Korea. He belonged to the traditional ruling class of landed aristocrats, known as yangban, who controlled Korea during the six hundred year reign of the Choson Dynasty, which ended with the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-1945). Throughout this period most yangban, my great-grandparents included, collaborated with the unpopular and often ruthless Japanese colonial government as a means of protecting their land and privileges.

Early in his life, my grandfather was sent to boarding school in Manchuria where he learned Confucian ethics, Chinese politics, and black market economics. When returned home he was a twenty-nine year old shining example of a man; filial yet self-reliant, modest yet ambitious, noble yet realistic enough to use the idiosyncrasies of colonization to his advantage. With surprisingly little actual knowledge he convinced the war-preoccupied Japanese to entrust him with the management of greater and greater portions of his neighbors' land. When he turned thirty years old he controlled every property he could walk to, in every direction.

Three years later, in a town only reachable via strong horse or a wood-burning-car, my grandfather, gallivanting in the later, met my grandmother on her parent's farm, which he had come to confiscate in the name of the Japanese. They married quickly and conceived quickly. On the day my father was born, nine months later, my grandfather took him to the highest point of their ninety-nine-room palace and marked out his place in the world.
Holding a small slippery arm in his fingers he signed the earth from sky to sky. He wrote--you are my first son. He marked two points in time and drew a line. I am the second son of Sung Gae Rhee, he said, the eight-generation grandson of Grand Prince Im-Yeong, the fourth brother of Sejong the Great of Choson, who gave us the alphabet in which everything is written. This land, these people: these two hands belong to you.

By the time my father could tell this story the Korean War had come and gone. My grandfather, having lost his titles and deeds to communist reforms in the North, had moved the family south and started a lucrative business salvaging metal from the eclectic military carnage that had been building up in the waters surrounding Korea.  Five years later he lost everything to a scam involving an actual gold mine, which instead of producing the promised wealth of sand gold--like regular gold only more valuable--returned the more probable combination of lawsuits, debt collectors, and body pains.
In the years that followed, my father and his four brothers lost their belief in the sand gold lifestyle that was to be their birthright. The family with six children moved from an honest mansion on the water to a trailer attached to a church. Everyone old enough to complain went to work: my grandmother mending clothes with my aunt, and my father and his brothers delivering newspapers on foot. My grandfather started some more failed businesses, including a rabbit factory, a homeopathic pharmacy and a line of traditional ginger teas, but he never did put his hands to actual work.

Twenty years later, dying of lung cancer in an American hospital in Seoul at the age of fifty-two my grandfather cried bitterly and demanded new doctors, new hospitals, experimental procedures.  He marked two points in time and drew a line on an axis now bisected, collapsed, and forgotten.  Bury me in Sapyo, he warned, or the chain will be broken. A six hundred year old chain feels less like jewelry than a yoke, they laughed, but he was focused, suddenly more hurried than afraid. Promise me, he begged my father, his first son. Promise me, you will become the president of a Unified Korea.

***
When my father played Kim Jong-Il on TV he was sixty-two years old and on his way to becoming a successful character actor and not a mailman, a missionary, a real estate agent (again), or a CEO. He had been speaking about all these possibilities with equal weight up until that point, but afterward just waited for phone calls and cheered on North Korea's bizarre forays into nuclear brinkmanship. He landed one more role as a North Korean refuge on Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn, where he assayed comedian Bruce Bruce with a parade of axe kicks, and was thereafter considered unpredictable.
Two years earlier I went to visit him at Chelsea Piers, where he had been teaching golf at the time, and found him sleeping on the floor in the crawl space between a practice net, in use at the time, and a wall. I was expecting to find him swinging a golf club on his feet, and putting me through college, not lying there, with balls slapping loudly above him or ricocheting off poles inches from his body. He had a pillow in a t-shirt under his head and a jacket manipulated into a complex orb of knots wedged between his thighs and stomach protecting his crotch.

When they terminated his contract my mother was much less surprised than fascinated by their use of the word terminated. She kept using the word against him like he was a bug until he told her he was leaving for Korea to star as the despised Terauchi Masatake in a major motion picture (if he got the part). As he was leaving she said I'm kicking you out.
That summer my father left for Korea to get his teeth fixed or star in a historical melodrama. While there he either looked up old classmates or, at the public baths, befriended a group of old men who had also lost their jobs and spent their days pretending to be at work; taking long baths, sleeping on their stomachs, and reading people's fortunes for lunch money.  He spent a year deciphering their routine or participating in it.

For a man who had once been, among other things, a member of the Korean CIA, a millionaire import-export tycoon in upstate New York, and the personal golf instructors of Rudy Giuliani and Virginia Wade, my father, then a sixty-two-year-old out-of-work actor, felt as if he had barely narrowed down the field of life's possibilities. In twenty years, at most, he would be gone and forgotten. His name would join the list of Choson princes that never became king. The incumbency of death pre-empted his every plan and rushed the enjoyment out of his daily routine of waiting for phone calls after breakfast in bed, sending emails after lunch, and in the evenings watching television for research and eating himself to sleep.

Six months later, having pre-emptively failed in Los Angeles, I called him in

Korea and said I was moving back to New York. In two weeks he found a 4-bedroom apartment on Roosevelt Island and two female borders to subsidized the costs.  The girls, the first of many, were both design students in their early twenties from rich Korean families who spent most of their time on the phone. They didn't speak much English though sometimes they would cook for me; an activity often spontaneously chaperoned by my partially dressed, partially awake, wholly interactive father.

I want to say I chose this over other, much worse, possible living situations, though really, at the time I enjoyed the days I spent with my father much more than the nights I spent with my friends, who had their own budding careers, tiny apartments, and happy relationships. My father and I were more or less in the same predicament emotionally and professionally, except I was young and he was overqualified and it felt good to know I had someone beat even if that someone was half my biological self.

When he was teaching golf my father's advice was universal: keep your head down, feet on the ground, and swing slowly. Play your own game. Envision your shot. Tuck in your shirt so you can feel it stretch on your backswing. He told his students he was a Zen Master, which meant his memory was completely impersonal. I told him what Rauschenberg said about his studio practice--I pretend there's this guy Rauschenberg and he's a painter. And I try to do things to help him out--and he agreed that Rauschenberg was probably a Zen Master too.

Sometimes you end up becoming your own unknown. You look out from your life at sixty-three or twenty-four and see the paths of your becoming branching out in all directions, pointy, spectacular, and urchin like. On one of these paths is a person just like you wearing an olive polyester jumpsuit and a fool's haircut that lasts months. On another there's a stranger doing the exact same thing. On yet another there's the actual you giving a speech to 70 million non-latitudinal Koreans from the top of your first house in Sapyo. So you take the closest step forward, hoping you're moving towards yourself.