opinion

Kim Yong Sin, a resident of neighbourhood unit No. 46 of Sojang-dong in Pothonggang District, Pyongyang, is nearly 80 years old.

He often tells his grandchildren stories of what he experienced under two different systems.

He was born as a son of a day labourer in Japan.

His parents worked their fingers to the bone not to make their children keep living in poverty, but in vain.

“However, the greater torment was their contempt for and discrimination against us Koreans,” he bitterly recalls still now.

One evening in the year when he was ten years old, he fell on the ground to hurt his head as he entered the dark courtyard with water buckets in both hands. He still remembers the sorrow of national discrimination welling up inside him while he covered the bleeding wound up with his hands. Only his house was not supplied with electricity in their village. He cried all night, after hearing from his mother that power supply to his house was cut off for the mere reason that his family was Korean, although some other families in the village had failed to pay the power rent.

He experienced such discrimination at school as well. One day, he was beaten by Japanese kids who always kept a jealous eye on him as he had a strong sense of national dignity. That night, he gave vent to his anger while asking his father why they were living in a foreign land.

“All the sorrow began to fade after I entered a Korean school,” he said.

At the school, he came to know about his motherland, a dreamlike country where people became masters of everything and children were learning to their heart’s content and fulfilling their hopes while being put forward as the kings of the country.

He could hardly sleep with a yearning for the socialist motherland. When he was 17, he finally got aboard the ship bound for his homeland with the national flag of the DPRK in his chest.

The motherland warmly embraced him.

He studied at Kim Il Sung University as he wished while being provided with all conditions necessary for study and life by the state. After graduation, he became an official of a national agency and was awarded the title of Labour Hero by devoting his sincere efforts to the country.

His life dramatically changed.

He often tells his children and grandchildren about the past when he was maltreated like a rubble stone on the roadside in a foreign land and the happy days he has spent in the embrace of the motherland and asks them to make sincere efforts to repay the benevolence of the country.