He ruled his country, not only with an iron fist, but one bathed in the blood of untold millions he mercilessly starved, tortured and killed.

So there's something curiously disturbing about watching images of North Koreans convulsively weeping over Kim Jong Il -- a man who's inflicted so much pain on his people.

Don't be fooled.

The public display of maniacal grief is a dance, mandated by a regime that imprisons those who give any hint of disloyalty.

It's a cult my grandparents abandoned decades before I was born -- a decision that shaped my future in ways they couldn't have imagined.

Two years before the Korean War, my grandfather, grandmother and my aunt, who was 7 years old, fled the north for the south. My grandmother was pregnant with my mother at the time, almost full-term. She and my grandfather decided the risk of escape was worth more than the oppressive future that lay before them.

Their journey was fraught with peril. Had they been caught, they would have been imprisoned in the North Korean gulags -- torture chambers where, by some estimates, 2.5 million have been killed under the Kim family dictatorship.

But as much as I think about that brave decision my grandparents made 63 years ago, I also think about the branch of the family tree they left behind.

My 93-year old grandmother, Oh Tae Nam, died last year. She took with her the memories of her upbringing -- her parents, her three brothers, and at least one sister, whom she rarely talked about. Too painful to discuss, she swallowed her grief. Any dream she had of reunification, she tucked away. Why? She recognized a truth about North Korea that can only come from having lived in the cloistered country.

Any window of change opens from the bottom, not the top.

So for all the hope that a sudden leadership transition offers a rare opportunity to reach out to an isolated nation -- don't expect the North Korean people to start flooding the streets, demanding democracy and reform, like the wave of demonstrations we've seen in the Middle East.

You will not see a Pyongyang Spring.

The power structure in North Korea -- from the political brokers to the military apparatus -- is too entrenched in a family dynasty that has just a singular goal: To perpetuate their own power.

It works.

For proof, look no further than the intense outpouring of emotion from the North Koreans themselves -- wailing with such veracity that it's difficult for the outside world to fathom.

No tears shed for "Dear Leader" in my family. I suspect my grandmother would have reacted with a mild shrug.

@RosaHwangCTV

This is a photo of my grandmother, Oh Tae Nam, taken in April 2010 in Busan, South Korea -- about a month before she died. That's her grandson (my brother) Thomas Hwang. Photo credit: Tammy Toperosky-Hwang.

This photo is from 1961. My grandmother is in white. In the middle, my aunt and uncle. My mom, at 13 years old, is on the far right. And the 2 young boys are my uncles.