Choose Your Tractor

In A River in Darkness, Masaji Ishikawa describes a childhood and youth that most people today can barely imagine surviving.

He lived in North Korea with his family of Japanese descent, and he was marked from the start as inferior, officially. He was considered “hostile class,” which meant fewer food rations, fewer opportunities, constant suspicion, and almost no path upward. The government watched everything. Neighbors informed on one another. Any misstep could cost you your life.

Jobs were scarce, especially for someone like him. Most work assignments were arbitrary and brutal, designed less to produce value than to grind people down. And the physical toll was brutal. Cold nights, empty stomachs, bodies slowly wasting away. Then, improbably, he was assigned a tractor.

When he drove the tractor, the noise swallowed the world. The guards faded. The hunger receded. The fear loosened its grip. People mocked him. Others, already defeated by the system, questioned him. Why are you working so hard? Why care? Especially when the outcome was fixed, when the effort would never be rewarded, when the system would never notice or thank you.