From the New York Times:
10/17/2006
Even at 64 years old and in failing health, James Dresnok projects an imposing figure. Six-foot-five with a huge frame and giant jowls, he speaks into the camera with a firm, distinct Southern accent. Metal teeth glint as he talks. “I will give you the truth; I’ve never told anyone before,” says Mr. Dresnok, a former soldier, a defector and, for the last 44 years, a resident of Pyongyang, North Korea.
Mr. Dresnok is at the center of Daniel Gordon’s documentary “Crossing the Line,” along with the stories of three other American defectors who crossed the 2.5-mile, landmine-strewn demilitarized zone to live in North Korea. The documentary is Mr. Gordon’s third look inside the secretive Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The first, “The Game of Their Lives,” examined the 1966 World Cup soccer team that defeated the Italian team and made it, against all odds, to the Cup’s quarterfinals. Then “A State of Mind” followed two young girls participating in the North’s overwhelming Mass Games.
The director met his co-producer, Nick Bonner, in 1997 while researching the North Korean soccer team. Mr. Bonner has been working with North Korea from Beijing for 14 years as the director of Koryo Tours, a travel agency. “The Game of Their Lives” made the two men minor celebrities in North Korea. “We have taken an apolitical viewpoint, with interviews from both sides of the spectrum,” Mr. Gordon wrote in an e-mail message. “Our previous films have been shown both in North and South Korea,” a testament to the neutrality of the films, he wrote.
But “Crossing the Line,” which had its world premiere on Monday night at the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea, explores more political and controversial territory. “This was the story that we thought we could never tell,” Mr. Bonner said in an interview after the film’s premiere. “But we said to the North Koreans, if someone does not make this film soon, you won’t ever have any record.”
Mr. Dresnok was born poor in Norfolk, Va., in 1941. His parents divorced when he was 9. His father then abandoned him, and he ended up bouncing through a series of foster homes. On his 17th birthday he enlisted in the Army. When he returned from service in Germany, his wife wanted a divorce. Even now, decades later, the memory makes him cry. “I’m just thankful we never had any kids, because I swore I would never leave my children,” he says as he breaks down in the film.
Soon after, he re-enlisted and was assigned to South Korea, but his bitterness led him to spend his money on prostitutes and drinking. “I was fed up. If I died or I lived, I didn’t care.” At noon on Aug. 15, 1962, with a court martial looming for forging a pass, Pfc. James Dresnok took the 12-gauge shotgun he was cleaning and, wearing his fatigues, walked across the DMZ in broad daylight.
Once in the North, he joined Pvt. Larry Allen Abshier, who had defected three months earlier. In December 1963, Specialist Jerry Wayne Parrish also defected, and then Sgt. Charles Robert Jenkins in January 1965. Together, the four became propaganda heroes for the North.
After a couple of years in North Korea, though, the cultural differences felt overwhelming, so in 1966 the four fled to the Soviet Embassy in Pyongyang, asking for asylum. But the Russians turned them over to the North Koreans. Mr. Dresnok braced for a horrible punishment. But, he says, none came. They were ordered to undergo more “education,” Mr. Dresnok said, and he decided he would try to fit in. “Man is the master of his life, and little by little I came to understand the Korean people,” he said.
By 1972, Mr. Dresnok was considered rehabilitated and was granted North Korean citizenship. He married an Eastern European woman and had two children. After that wife died, he remarried and had another child. He started appearing in propaganda films in 1978 and acted in more than a dozen over the next decade. Many North Koreans still call him Mr. Arthur, after a character he played in one film.
Mr. Dresnok could barely contain his disgust when he talked about Mr. Jenkins, who left North Korea in 2004 and gave a series of high-profile interviews about the wretched life he endured in his four decades there. Mr. Dresnok calls him a liar and bore. As for Mr. Jenkins’s claim that Mr. Dresnok used to beat him sadistically, Mr. Dresnok responds that they once fought, but there were only two punches: “I hit him and he hit the ground.” After a few minutes he becomes visibly agitated and asks to change the subject.
Mr. Dresnok says he is a true believer in the North Korean system. “I wouldn’t trade it for nuthin’,” he states emphatically. He is proud that two of his three sons attend the prestigious Foreign Language School in Pyongyang, saying he could never have afforded such an education in the United States. “I don’t want my sons to be an illiterate old man like me.” But he is a celebrity in North Korea, and although Pyongyang is poor by Western standards, it is the city of the elite for North Koreans. “Anyone living in Pyongyang is privileged,” Mr. Bonner said. “But the main force behind us was human interest.”
But privilege is probably not the answer to understanding why Mr. Dresnok and the other American defectors decided to build their lives in North Korea; belief is. Three of the four American defectors, with the exception of Mr. Jenkins, came from broken homes, with missing or abusive fathers. They made homes in the most extreme totalitarian state in the world, where Kim Il-sung is portrayed at the ultimate father figure for the entire nation. Even though Mr. Dresnok has numerous health problems (mostly related to his smoking and drinking, which he refuses to stop), the North Korean government provides for him and his family.
Which leads into the second time Mr. Dresnok cries in the film. While talking about the North Korean famines of the 1990’s, he says that despite the hundreds of thousands who died, the North Koreans never cut his rations. “Why? Why do they let their own people starve to death to feed an American?” he asks as he tears up. “The Great Leader has given us a special solicitude. The government is going to take care of me until my dying day.”
