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The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: Live from Sydney
00:57:10
A special episode, recorded live at The Sydney Opera House. A young Malaysian Australian man begins to appreciate his culture through the lens of rap music, a comic’s questionable joke makes him the most hated man in Australia, and a journalist goes undercover in North Korea.
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- [00:00]
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- [01:02]
Dan Illich
Series 10 is here.
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Omar Musa
It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple watch ever.
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Dan Illich
Making it even more comfortable on your.
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Omar Musa
Wrist whether you're running, swimming or sleeping.
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Dan Illich
And it's the fastest charging Apple watch getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.
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Omar Musa
The Apple Watch Series 10 available for.
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Dan Illich
The first time in glossy jet black aluminum compared to previous generations. IPhone Xs are later required charge time and actual results will vary.
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Jay Allison
From PRX this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jay Ellison, producer of this radio show and in this hour we bring you a special program recorded live at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. The sold out show took place on the main stage of the Sydney Opera House in Australia. The theme of the evening was the Razor's Edge and the host is author and storyteller David Crab.
- [02:10]
Dan Illich
Now the theme tonight is the Razor's Edge. And when I think about the Razor's Edge, I think a lot about New York living. I've been there 16 years and I feel so constantly frazzled this whole trip. We were in Melbourne for a week and we've been here for about a week and a half. I just keep trying to think of what sort of international offense I can do that will keep me here. But America won't take me back.
- [02:34]
Omar Musa
Because.
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Dan Illich
Do you guys realize how lovely like you've got it so, so good down here. Do you know that? It's a beautiful place. What we like doing is instead of giving you a bio, we like asking each of the storytellers a question related to the theme. And what we asked all the storytellers tonight was tell us something your mother warned you was very dangerous but that you later found out was not and our first storyteller said, my mom was really afraid of me getting a tattoo and she made me afraid of it. But later I found out they weren't that scary. And I kept talking to him about this and I said, well, what was it like when you got your first tattoo? And he told me that he went to get his first tattoo in Macedonia and he was greeted by his tattoo artist, a guy named Mitko, who had no visible tattoos anywhere on his body. So he said, man, where are your tattoos? And he was like, I would never get a tattoo. Ladies hate them. That's not an encouraging show of support there, but we had the pleasure of having the storyteller with us in Melbourne before this, and he's just amazing. Welcome to the stage, Omar Moussa.
- [03:51]
Omar Musa
Thank you very much. My mother moved from country New South Wales to Malaysia in the late 1970s to work in the theatre world. And she got put in charge of directing the first Malay language version of Hamlet by an unknown up and coming writer. And they were auditioning all these different guys for the main role of Hamlet. And no one was quite cutting the mustard until this guy walked through the door and he had long black hair, he was a bit mysterious. He came from the land of Borneo, the land of headhunters and pirates and orangutans and jungles, and he auditioned for it and he was perfect. And he went on to become the first Malay Hamlet. He also went on to become my father, which to me was a far more auspicious achievement. And he moved to Australia in around 1980, so I guess less than 10 years after the white Australia policy properly ended. And as I was growing up, you know, I was definitely in between worlds. I was wearing sarongs at home and speaking Malay and praying five times a day and eating food with my hands and everything. And my father always told me, you will be an outsider in this country. If you want to get anywhere, you will have to work twice as hard as the white kids. You will have to be fearless and ferocious and fierce. And he also told me that you should be proud of your culture. You should be proud of being Malay, you should be proud of being Muslim, even if people tell you that you shouldn't be. And so I guess when I got into my teens and I was trying to find my feet in this world and in this country, I decided, yes, I'm going to own this, I'm going to own being Muslim, and I want to display it in some kind of outward, physical way. And so my father had told me that A Muslim man should always wear a hat. It's a very seemly thing for a Muslim man to do. So I decided to go out in Queanbeyan and Canberra and find my great Muslim hat. So if any of you are from Canberra, you might remember the Community Aid Abroad shop. Got any Canberrans out there? Oh, yeah, most of Canberra's here. So I went to the Community Aid Abroad shop. It was in Civic Interchange, right next to that old takeaway that's still there, probably still selling the same battered salves and chico rolls, like, literally the same ones. And I went in amongst all the incense and the mats and the wooden carvings and the white do gooders. And there, shining like a beacon, was the hat rack. And there I saw my great Muslim hat. It was a majestic thing made out of this black cloth. It had gold threads through it, green, red, it was shining. And I decided I would wear this hat. I bought it for $22. I had saved up my ducats from working at Kingsley's Chicken in Queanbeyan, across from the Royal Hotel. Great place, by the way, Delicious fried chicken, completely unethical. And I would wear my great Muslim hat every day. And at school, if my teachers told me to take it off, I would say, you are being very, very culturally insensitive. And I would even wear it when I was running track. So for a brief period in my life, I harboured this ambition to be an Olympic runner before, you know, genetics and laziness caught up with me. And so I was standing there about to run the 800 meters at the starting blocks. I used to train with this really good friend of mine and I was wearing my great Muslim hat. And he took one look at it and he kind of gave me this withering look I'd never seen before. And he said, man, I can't stand it how you wear that hat all the time. Why are you always trying to be so ethnic? Why can't you just be like the rest of us? Why can't you just be like a normal Australian? And I remember I was running around the track and I was furious. I was also a bit sad. And I was trying to figure out why it was that me just repping my culture, repping my heritage, had offended him so much. But looking back on it now, I don't think I was exactly repping my heritage, because I think that my great Muslim hat had actually been woven by some indigenous Guatemalan tribes people. But I was 14 at the time, man. You know, I was trying my hardest. So another way that I decided to connect with my Muslim heritage and my Malay identity was through poetry. My father and my mother had told me that there was a rich tradition of performing poetry in the archipelago and that you perform it with full body and that it's not just isolated to a dusty old ivory tower for academics, it's something that lives on the streets and in the villages. And so I was looking for all these Muslim role models and I didn't really see that many in Australia. So I came across Malcolm X and the Black Muslims and Muhammad Ali, who was the coolest man in the world, and he was a Muslim and he was a poet. And so I went and on SBS they played this documentary about the Black Muslims and I taped it to vhs. I'm sure some of you remember what that was. And I would watch it every few days because I loved the speaking, I loved the oratory, I loved all the speeches. But There was this 30 second clip right at the end where these two guys get on stage and they start speaking a very percussive type of poetry over a heavy drum beat. Now, one of them has a very deep, distinctive baritone voice, something like a preacher. The other one is a little bit more of a wild card. He's got a hat back, he's got sunglasses, gold teeth and a massive clock around his neck. So of course it was Public Enemy. And I was just. Yeah, yeah, round of applause for Public Enemy.
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Suki Kim
Yeah.
- [09:06]
Omar Musa
So I was sitting there just astounded, and I thought to myself, this is the coolest shit that I've ever seen in my life. And I decided right then and there, this was the sort of poetry that my father was talking about. This was the sort of poetry that I would one day make. So the years passed. I quit Kingsley's, I left my great Muslim hat behind and I went to university and I was working as a phone operator at the Department of Health in Canberra during the SARS crisis. Maybe a story for another moth. And I decided that I need to save up some ducats and go to Malaysia for the first time since I was 9 years old. And I'm ashamed to say that when I was there, when I was nine, the whole time I was just complaining that I want to eat some Western food, which stands at odds with me now because I'm a great laksa and durian hunter these days. So I went to Borneo and I saw my grandparents for the first time and they were getting very old and they insisted that we go to this small plot of land that was on the border of Brunei and Malaysian Borneo. And these were my grandmother's ancestral lands. So her people had come hundreds and hundreds of years ago from Java to teach the Sultan of Brunei to cultivate wet rice. So we got dropped off in the middle of the highway. And I always remember my grandfather, he was wielding this parang, which is the Malay word for a machete, and he was cutting his way through the undergrowth. And now the machete in Borneo is seen as a very dangerous thing, part of headhunting culture or piracy. But at that moment, as I saw him cutting through the undergrowth, forging a lane from the road to this old, dilapidated hut in the middle of the jungle, suddenly in my head, I realized that the parang can be a very constructive tool. It can be something that forges a path, but between places that don't usually connect, places that don't usually communicate. So we get to this hut in the middle of the jungle, and there's a family of orangutans living there, and we have to shoo them out of the house. And my grandparents tell me that when my father spent time at this little piece of land, he would sit in front of the hut and he would read the Quran with this very deep, mellifluous, beautiful voice. And suddenly dozens of orangutans and families of monkeys would start climbing down from the trees and sit in front of him like a rapt audience, like you guys, you beautiful orangutans out there. And they would sit in front of him and listen to him reading the Quran. And it was then we only had an oil lamp, and we were dragging water from the river. And my grandparents were telling me about their lives of hardship and about their family history and about my family history. And I decided at that moment I would start going back to Malaysia every year because it anchored my soul in some way. And so I guess all of this culminated a few years ago when I went to my cousin's wedding in Kuala Lumpur in the outskirts. And we all had to dress in this traditional baju melayu, which is kind of. It's a traditional Malay Muslim outfit. And I guess it's kind of long pyjama pants, very colorful, a long baju with fake diamonds at the chest. And then you wear this kind of thick type of sarong that is woven with gold, and you turn it into a thick band of fabric and lift it up over your belly button. Now, I didn't know how to do it, and everyone could just do it so easily, and it came so naturally, and it kind of suddenly exposed this Rift between me and my family. But they all gathered around me. They made me suck my big Western belly in. And they lifted up and they tied the sarong perfectly. And they said, no, you need one more thing. You need one more thing. And they gave me a jet black songkok, which is the traditional Malay Muslim cap. And they perched it jauntily on my head, tipped it to the side, and of course, I got some jet black Ray Bans so that I look extra boss, you know. And then we went to the wedding, and we were sitting there eating our ayam masat mera, eating the durians, eating the rendang. And there was a special display of the ancient form of Malay martial arts, which is called silat. So people flipping and rolling around and fighting each other. But then at a certain point, someone decided to bring out a more modern contraption, a modern form of entertainment, which was the karaoke machine. So if I got, any of my Asians out there would feel me, you know. So I bring it out, and all these people start singing these really saccharine love songs. I couldn't understand a word, but I knew exactly what they were talking about. Then suddenly my cousin says to me, he says, hey, Omar, I want you to get on stage. I want you to do that thing that you do, that type of poetry, that hip hop, that thing that you do in Australia. I want you to perform in front of us for the first time. Now I'm shitting myself being here at the Sydney Opera House, but I think that that was the scariest show that I've ever had to do. It was a family reunion. I was standing there bared, completely exposed before my family for the first time, performing something that I loved. And I said, I set sail on a river of thoughts A dreamtime Never land Carry the torch for my fam I lighted up, stand up proud Try to represent my folks the only way I know how so I honor them every time I jam on the drums do it for my fam in the shanties and slums do it for my people, the ordinary people. I do it for my uncle who fell for the needle. And I stood there and they were cheering and applauding and clapping their hands. And I went and I sat down next to my grandmother. And my grandmother looked at me with these piercing eyes, and she said, you know, I never learned how to read or write. I said, I know. She said, you know, I've been illiterate my whole life. I left home at the age of nine and tapped rubber and lived on the streets I said, I know, she said, but I have 150 poems in my head that I created when I was living out there, kicked out of home at the age of nine. Ab Pantouns, the traditional improvised form of Malay poetry. This poetry that you're doing now is like the poetry that I used to help me get through these hard times. And it was then that I realized I had found my own parang, my own machete, my words, a way that I could my words that could cut through worlds, that could cut through time and even generation. And it was that moment that I wondered what is more powerful, the language of words or the language of feeling. Thank you.
- [15:22]
Jay Allison
Omar Moussa Omar Musa is a Malaysian Australian author, rapper and poet from Queanbeyan, Australia. He's the former winner of the Australian Poetry Slam and the Indian Ocean Poetry Slam. His debut novel is Hind Here Come the Dogs. We'll be back in a moment with more stories from this live Moth event at the Sydney Opera House. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlanta Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
- [16:10]
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- [18:50]
Jay Allison
This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jay Allison. You're listening to a special edition of the show with stories recorded live at an event held held in Sydney, Australia. Here's your host, David Crabb.
- [19:03]
Dan Illich
Now, we asked our next storyteller the same question about a thing that his mother told him was dangerous, but then he found out it wasn't and he answered very, very quickly. He said, girls. But I discovered in my mid-20s that they were just people, too. Welcome to the stage, Dan Ill.
- [19:32]
Omar Musa
The most dangerous thing I've ever done in my career is use a pun. Comedians, we hate puns. Puns are comedy punctuation. They're good for getting from one place to the next and they're kind of devoid of meaning. That's why we hate them so much. I don't know about America, but in Australia we have very lax pun control laws and our puns are usually handed down by our fathers. And my dad's favorite pun is, you know, I tried to be a trapeze artist once, but I couldn't get the hang of it. It's doubly funny because what you don't know about my dad is that my dad is quadriplegic. So when he sets it up, you know, it's, I tried to be a trapeze artist once. You can just see people go, oh, is that why you're in the wheelchair? But then when he says, but I couldn't get the hang of it, they just laugh out of sheer terror. It's amazing. It's amazing stuff to watch. That's what we call in show Business an A grade pun. And the reason why I'm telling you this is because, you know, wrong jokes and dark humor is kind of how I've learned to deal with tragedy my entire life. Like being facetious is a family trait. It was 2008 and I was not the well established C grade celebrity that stands before you. I was putting together a fringe festival show at the Melbourne Fringe Festival. Now, fringe festivals are great places for comedians and artists to try out new work that might be not quite ready for everyone to see. But anytime you put on a fringe festival show, you put your heart and your art and your wallet on the line every time. And we were a few days out from opening our show and we hadn't sold a ticket. Now, my show was a musical comedy about a mine disaster in Northern Tasmania in a town called Beaconsfield in April 2006. In Australia, the Beaconsfield mine disaster was the only story that existed. A mine collapse killing one man and trapping two men underground. But I was more interested in what was happening on the surface above ground at Beaconsfield. It was like the town was about 50, but it kind of grew to 500 overnight. And media and journalists started mining the local people for ratings gold. Every TV show, every radio station, every magazine and journalist, anyone with a public profile went to Beaconsfield to do their part for their careers, to be seen to be doing their part for the miners. At the same time. It was really weird. One breakfast show had a musical concert in a park next to the mine. The very next day, the rival People breakfast show held a very similar musical concert. Straight after, celebrity reporter Richard Carlton, he got an exclusive interview with the miners families. He actually had a heart attack and died in the middle of a press conference. One of our most famous TV presenters, David Koch, or Kochi, as we call him in Australia, jumped over the media barricades and into the back of an ambulance to score an interview with one of the minutes miners. It was really ridiculous. Watching at home, I was disgusted. I thought this was crazy. A whole bunch of basically making reality TV out of this tragedy. And I thought it was abhorrent. And I just thought, I need to write something about this. I need to write about this media exploitation of this disaster. So I did. I thought it was kind of like a Robin Hood affair, you know, like I thought, you know, I was doing a good thing. Rob from the Rich give to the poor. But for me, the pun came first. Beaconsfield, a musical in a flat minor. Yeah, yeah, thanks for your applause. Yeah, see, yeah, yeah, see, not so bad. I know what you're thinking. Grade A pun. My dad loved it, so whatever. So I flew to Beaconsfield. I spent a week in the mine, interviewing the locals, putting their stories in the show. And then fast forward six months. We were three days out from opening night and me and the director, Luke, were standing on the stage and we hadn't sold a ticket. Theatre is a strong word. It was like the living room of a 200-year-old terrace in South Melbourne. And standing on that stage, looking at 30 empty seats, it might as well have been 3,000. And I tried everything. I emailed every media outlet in Melbourne, tried to get them to write a story about the show, but no one in Melbourne wanted to touch it. And I was just at my end. I'd flown people from all over Australia to be part of this. I had a great director and a great musical director. People from Sydney and Melbourne were all part of it. And I was just thinking, ah, there must be something I could do. And I thought, well, I have one last idea. So I emailed the Launceston examiner, the local paper in Beaconsfield. I thought, I don't know, maybe someone will read about it in Launceston and then pop over to Melbourne for the weekend and check out the play. Maybe, I don't know. A couple hours later, my phone rang and it was a reporter from the Launceston Examiner. And she was very serious, nonplussed, very professional. She wanted to know all about the show and she asked if I had time. Standing on that empty stage in Melbourne, I suddenly had plenty of time in my schedule to talk to anyone about it. I was so excited to talk to her about all these jokes I'd written. I was having a great time. I was telling her about how Macquarie bank ran the mine at a loss and how we wrote this song about Richard Carlton's death called the Carlton Cardiac. It was about the print media's jealousy of Richard Carlton and how that was really funny. We said it was an arresting tune and it was really exciting. I was laughing and having a great time. She. She wasn't laughing. She said, are you going to bring it to Beaconsfield? And I said, yeah, of course. I lied. I wasn't going to. She hung up and I went to bed. And I woke up at about 11 o'clock that night. My friend Chris was calling me. Dan. Just letting you know. I was just listening to Tony Delroy's what the papers say you're going to be on the front page of the Age tomorrow. Oh, my God. The Age. The most important and prestigious newspaper in Australia, according to people that live in Melbourne. Wow. I went to bed. The first phone call the next day was at 6:00 in the morning. It was Matt and Joe from Fox fm. They're your standard Fox FM breakfast crew. Whoa. Tell us about your shop. What's it like? Whoa. Good luck. Zing. Boing. The next phone call was from Neil Mitchell on three. Aw, he's a shock jock. He just yelled at me for five minutes straight. You're the worst person in the world. How dare you? Would you write a musical about Hitler? And I said, well, Mel Brooks has already done that. I'm not here to encourage your jokes. And I was like, well, what are you here for? I don't really know what's going on. So for about five minutes straight, it was the most abusive phone call I ever had. It was insane and about a million people were listening. Then, for the next two hours, 20 more phone calls from journalists and radio people all over Australia just calling me up to tell me what a hole I was. My inbox email. My email inbox was filling up as well with lots of emails from people telling me what a jerk I was and just random death threats and stuff like that. There was one email that stood out, though. It was from Senator Guy Barnett, and the subject just said, call me. I was like, oh, wow, this is important. Now, the senator could either be one or two things. He could be just a massive fan of my sketch comedy work and wanted me to emcee his Liberal Party fundraiser. I assume a free chopper would be included in that. Or he was really excited that someone was talking about the media hypocrisy of that story. When I called him up, you would be surprised to figure out that it was neither. He was frothing over with rage. He said, if you come to Beaconsfield, you'll be hung, drawn, quartered and dragged through the streets from the back of a ute. I don't know if that's still Liberal Party policy. I think they just take your citizenship now. I think it's a lot easier. I was like, wow, incredible. TV were calling too. So I had to call a press conference. I texted the cast and said, meet me at the theatre half an hour before for the press conference. When I got to the theatre, there were two groups outside the theatre. One, the cast who couldn't get inside the theatre because, two, there was 30 journalists blocking the entrance. I don't know who I was scared of most, the cast or the journalists. So the lights went on, the camera started Rolling the mics got shoved into my face. At that point I thought, oh, my goodness, if all of you had just bought a ticket, we wouldn't be in this problem. They started firing questions at me. Why did you call the song the Carlton Cardiac? Isn't that offensive to the family? I was like, well, I'm just stating his facts, you know, his name was Richard Carlton. He had a Cardiac. Surely Beaconsfield, a musical in a flat minor, is a little bit bad taste. And I said, do you have any idea how hard it is to write a musical in a flat minor? It's very difficult. Why haven't you changed the name of the musical? Because Beaconsfield, a rock opera, would just set expectations far too high.
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What?
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Next September 11th, the sitcom. I'll think about it. It was incredible. I thought I was killing it. I was like, coming back with jokes, you know, really dark jokes, because that's kind of, you know, what I've always done as a kid growing up. But that night we went back to watch ourselves on and it was pretty much impossible to not watch ourselves on tv. We were on every single channel that night. And I was far from killing it. I was nervous, I was a wreck. I was really defensive. I was looking at me going, I hate this guy. I was the most hated man in Australia that day. I had written a musical about media hysteria that was causing media hysteria in every question I asked. Just. I just dug myself into a bigger hole. The rest of the day was really hard. I was emotionally and physically drained. It was exhausting. And I was really nervous about everything. Suddenly our little play had a lot more attention on it than we ever dreamed of it or we ever wanted. We just needed to sell out a few shows. 30 seats that night. I got drunk and went to bed and just prayed it would all blow over. But I woke up to amazing text messages and emails and messages from my friends supporting me, saying, you know, keep your head up, it's great. One voicemail message from my brother, who at the time was a major in the Army. He had 200 people under his command and he said, oh, Dan, I'm just letting you know that I've spoken to a few of the boys and they're quite happy to go around tonight if there's any problem. Problems? The Australian army was going to be deployed to protect my 30 seat theater. Fantastic. I politely declined. And then later that morning, there was one more phone call. It was. I just picked it up and answered. Hello, Dan, it's James Carlton here. James Carlton is a broadcaster, a journalist, Works at Radio national here in Australia. But he's also the son of the late Richard Carlton, the 60 Minutes reporter who had died. Dan, I just want you to know, while the world is angry with you, I want you to know that no one ever spoke to us. The family's not angry with you. I'm not angry with you. And this kind of hypocrisy that you're pricking with your art is just the kind of thing dad would love. And I can't explain how that phone call made me feel. It was. It was just magical. For the first time in about 48 hours, I felt just okay. We opened the show, we sold out the run, the reviews were absolutely extraordinary. The best I've ever had in my career so far. And I changed the name of the musical. I changed it to Beaconsfield the Musical, because puns are devoid of meaning and they're just comedy punctuation. Standing outside the theatre on closing night, drinking a beer, where just four days before, I'd been in the wrath of the Australian media. I was facing down a current affairs camera running down the street. I thought I would never use my jokes to hurt people again unless they truly deserved it. Thank you.
- [33:06]
Dan Illich
Dan Illich.
- [33:08]
Jay Allison
Dan Ilick is one of Australia's most prolific comedic voices. He's been making television in Australia for 10 years and is a regular on comedy panels and news magazine programs. Recently, Dan was senior producer of satire for Al Jazeera's digital platform for millennials. In a moment, our final story from this live event is in Sydney, Australia. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by prx. This is the Moth Radio Hour from prx. I'm Jay Allison, producer of this radio show. You're listening to a live Moth event held in Sydney, Australia, with the theme the Razor's Edge. Here's your host, David Crabb.
- [34:15]
Dan Illich
I asked our last storyteller the question, what was something that your mother told you to be wary of that actually wasn't scary? And she said, my mom told me that men were dangerous. And then I found out they were. And I said, well? And I said, well, they're not. I mean, they're not all dangerous. And she said, no, actually, for me, they are, because I only like the dangerous ones. A big round of applause for your final storyteller, Sookie Kim.
- [34:54]
Suki Kim
So I was packing my suitcase when there was a knock at the door. I knew it was there, so I ignored it and I kept packing and she kept knocking. So finally I gave up. And I opened the door. So There she was, 24, British, one of the evangelical Christians that I had been working with for the past six months. She said, he's dead. For a moment I was confused. I thought she meant God. This was a Christmas time and there had been a lot of these Bible study meetings lately, which is why I didn't want to open the door. It was exhausting pretending to be one of them for months. And this was my last day teaching. I just wanted to get out of there. Then she said, pointing at the ceiling, and now whispering, she said, he died. Then I knew she meant the other God in that world, Kim Jong Il, the then Great Leader of North Korea. So the place was Pyongyang. The time was December 2011. I had been teaching at an all male university in Pyongyang. I was University of Science and Technology that was funded, founded and operated by a group of evangelical Christians from around the world. Now religion is not allowed in North Korea and proselytizing is a capital crime. This group of evangelical Christians, however, had struck a deal with the North Korean regime, an unofficial one, to fund the education of the sons of elite. In exchange for access, they promised to not proselytize. But they were getting a footing in a country of 25 million devout followers of the Great Leader. And if he were to fall, then they would need another God to replace him. So I pretended to be one of them, to be there. But I only got away with it because the real missionaries were pretending to not be missionaries. So why did I go through such an extreme to be there? Writing about North Korea with any depth or meaning is impossible unless you are embedded there. A full immersion was the only way. I had been to North Korea since 2002 and returned there repeatedly. And if I were to just write whatever they showed me, then I would be the regime's publicist, not a writer. And I didn't want to wait for North Korea's permission to tell North Korea's truth according to North Korean regime's agenda. The only other way to get to the realities of North Korea is through the defectors who flee North Korea. And they tell their stories to journalists and NGO workers out of North Korea, and often years later. And I feel bad for saying this, but I have traveled to all the regions and talked to many, many defectors. And it was always difficult to tell how much of these stories to believe, because the worse the story, the more reward there is, and verification is nearly impossible. But this was also personal. I was born and raised in South Korea into a family that was torn apart by the Korean War. In 1950, when North Korea bombed South Korea, my grandmother, who was living in Seoul, packed her five children, including my mother, who was then four years old, to flee. And all the southbound trains were jam packed. So the family secured seats in the back of a truck. And it's when the truck was about to pull off, somebody shouted, young men should give up seats for women and children. So my grandmother's first child, my uncle, who was then 17, got up and said, I'll get a ride and I'll join you in the next town. He never arrived, and later the neighbors reported seeing him with his hands tied, being dragged away by North Korean soldiers. In 1953, after millions of Koreans died and families got separated, an armistice was signed and the Korean War paused. And along the 38th parallel, which is an artificial division originally drawn by the United States with the help of The Allies, the 5,000 year old kingdom of Korea was split in half. From that point, my grandmother waited for her son to come home. Like millions of Korean mothers on both sides of Korea, over 70 years have passed and that border, which Koreans thought was temporary, is still there. Even though I moved to America when I was 13 years old, this family history haunted me. Later, as a writer, I became obsessed with North Korea and to find out what is really going on there. So I went undercover as a teacher and a missionary. When I got there in 2011, they were preparing for year 100. The North Korean calendar system begins at the birth of the original Great Leader. To celebrate the occasion, the regime had shut down all universities and put all universities to into construction field to build Great Leader monuments. In actuality, however, the then Great Leader was dying and his young son was about to take over. They put older youth, scattered them to prevent any possible revolt outside. This was the time of North Korean Spring and the Arab Spring. And they didn't want North Korean Spring. And the only ones who did not get sent to construction fields were my students. The campus was a five star prison. None of us were allowed out. The students were never allowed out. The teachers were allowed out in group outings with minders to visit great little monuments. Every class was reported on and recorded. Every conversation was overheard, every room was bugged, every lesson plans had to be pre approved. And I ate meals with three students. Every meal. And they never veered from the script. They went everywhere in campus in pairs and groups and watched each other. In order to get to know them better. I assigned letter writing and essay writing. Although many of them were Computer majors. They didn't know the existence of the Internet. Although many were science majors, they didn't know when a man first walked on the moon. The vacuum of knowledge about anything other than their Great Leader was shocking. But I was under a strict set of rules to never tell them anything about the outside world. Once a student said he listens to rock and roll on a birthday. And usually they all said they only listen to songs about the Great Leader. And when he blurted this out, he looked around to check who might have heard him, and he froze. And the fear that I saw on his face was so palpable that I knew that whatever punishment that would go with this slip was something beyond my imagination. So I changed the topic. What really disturbed me about that was that I had been waiting for that slip in order to understand their world better. But when that slip happened, I became nervous and worried. And I began to question what it was that I was doing there. Then I began to notice something strange about my students. They lied very often, very easily. The lies came in different tiers. Sometimes they lied to protect their system. There was a building on campus called Kim Il Sung ISM Study hall, which means Great Leader Ism Study hall, where they went to study. Great Leader studies every day, and they had to guard this building 24 7. So I would see them guarding the building all night. But if I ask them, how was your night? They'll say they slept really well and felt really rested. Sometimes they would just regurgitate lies that they'd been taught. They'll say, you know, the scientists in their country changed blood types from A to B. Sometimes they lie for no apparent reason, as if the line between truth and lie just wasn't clear to them. They would tell me that they should have cheated better than they did. Or they'll say, hackers in their country gets rewarded if he hacks really, really well. Initially, I was really upset. Upset and repulsed by these rampant lies. But as I spent months and months there with them in that locked compound, I began to really understand their predicament. And I felt such empathy and love. They were so easy to love, but impossible to trust. They were sincere, but they lied. But if all you've ever known were lies, then how can you expect them to be any other way? It's as if their great humanity was in constant conflict with the inhumanity of their system. But then, I was there, pretending to be something I'm not in order to get to the truth of the place. In that world, lies were necessary for survival. But then, one Day, a student asked me about a national Assembly. There was no way I could explain that without bringing up democracy and the outside world. But I was nervous. You know, the other students at the table were watching this conversation. So I answered as honestly as I could and as vaguely as I could. That night, I couldn't fall asleep. I was afraid that the student was trying to trick me into saying something so he could report on me. And I was in fact writing a book in secret. I had pages and pages of notes hidden on USB sticks which I kept on my body at all times. And I thought, if those were discovered, then would I disappear the way my uncle had? And would my mother then have to repeat the life of heartbreak that my grandmother lived through being in North Korea? If you tap into that fear that's beneath the propaganda, is bone chillingly depressing. That night, I felt more alone and more afraid than ever. But then the next day, I ran into a friend of his, and he said, he thinks like you. Then I realized the student was not making reports on me. The student was, in fact, genuinely curious. Now this was even worse. I was now afraid of the consequence of that curiosity, that I might have inspired. My role there was to plant a seed of doubt. But then what would happen to the student that I might have reached? Would he then be punished for questioning the regime? Or would he be doomed to a life of unhappiness? I was no longer sure if our truth, the truth of the outside world, would in fact help them. I adored my students. I called them my young gentlemen. And they opened up to me little by little through those letters that I signed. And in those letters, they talked about missing their mothers, their girlfriends, and also being fed up with the sameness of everything because their lives were only about the Great Leader. The only break they ever got was playing group sports. Some evenings, I would watch them play soccer and basketball. And I would marvel at the beauty and this exuberant energy and joy and grace of their youth. And I wanted to show them, tell them about this incredible world outside, filled with infinite possibilities that they so deserved. But I knew that I couldn't. All I was capable of doing was to observe that while their bodies bounce, their mind remains stuck in that timeless vacuum. On my last day, Kim Jong Il's death was announced to the world. Everything came to a sudden end. And I saw my students from the distance as they were hauled away to a special meeting. They. Their faces looked at me, but their eyes didn't see me. It's as if their souls had been sucked out of them. And they had just lost their God, their parent, and the reason for everything in their world. I never got to say goodbye to them. The horror of North Korea goes beyond famine and gulags. To survive there, real human beings have to not only believe in the lies of the Great Leader, but also perpetuate them, which is a mental torture. It's a world where every citizen is complicit in the deprivation of their own humanity. Towards the end of my stay, a student said to me, we always think of you as being the same. Our circumstances are different, but we think of you as the same as us. We really want you to know that we truly think of you as being the same. But are we really the same? Maybe we were at some point. But three generations of the Great Leader have now happened. And for 70 years the world sat back and just watched, which to me that silence is indefensible. Lies run so deep there because the center is rotten and that rottenness is irrevocable. What would happen to my students, my young gentlemen, as they become the soldiers and slaves of their great leader, Kim Jong Un? If my uncle had managed to survive, would it be the same boy that had jumped off that truck? Thank you.
- [52:54]
Dan Illich
Suki Kim.
- [52:57]
Jay Allison
Suki Kim is the author of a New York Times best selling investigative memoir. Without you, there is no Us My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite. Her first novel, the Interpreter, was a finalist for a PEN Hemingway Prize. Born and raised in Seoul, she lives in New York City. That's it for this episode of the Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time. And that's the story from the Moth. Your host this hour was Dave Crabb. The stories in the show were directed by Katherine Burns, Jennifer Hickson and Maggie Sino. The rest of the Moss directorial staff include Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin, Janess and Meg Bowles. Production support from Whitney Jones, Janelle Pifer and Ali Sebastian Wolf. Mall Stories are True is remembered and affirmed by the Storytellers. This event was recorded in Sydney, Australia by Aseem N. Jaw and produced in partnership with the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Our theme music is by the Drift. Other music in this show from Volcano Choir, Boards of Canada and Guy Curd. You can find links to all the music we use at our website. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. Moth Radio Hour is presented by the public radio exchange prx.org for more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website themoth.org.