Because my mother had spent her whole life in the center of the country, far away from any outside influences, she didn’t know anything about the black market. She didn’t even understand the concept of business. This all changed during the 1990s, when the famine and an economic collapse turned the whole country into a nation of traders in order to survive. But before that, capitalism was something dirty to North Koreans, and money was too disgusting for most people to mention in polite conversation.
