Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

by Barbara Demick

It is axiomatic that one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic.

IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT PEOPLE REARED IN COMMUNIST COUNTRIES cannot fend for themselves because they expect the government to take care of them. This was not true of many of the victims of the North Korean famine. People did not go passively to their deaths. When the public distribution system was cut off, they were forced to tap their deepest wells of creativity to feed themselves.

IN A FAMINE, people don’t necessarily starve to death. Often some other ailment gets them first. Chronic malnutrition impairs the body’s ability to battle infection and the hungry become increasingly susceptible to tuberculosis and typhoid. The starved body is too weak to metabolize antibiotics, even if they are available, and normally curable illnesses suddenly become fatal. Wild fluctuations of body chemistry can trigger strokes and heart attacks. People die from eating substitute foods that their bodies can’t digest. Starvation can be a sneaky killer that disguises itself under bland statistics of increased child mortality or decreased life expectancy. It leaves behind only circumstantial evidence of “excess mortality”—statistics that show higher than normal deaths during a certain period.

Yet another gratuitous cruelty: the killer targets the most innocent, the people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend. It was a phenomenon that the Italian writer Primo Levi identified after emerging from Auschwitz, when he wrote that he and his fellow survivors never wanted to see one another again after the war because they had all done something of which they were ashamed.

North Korean students and intellectuals didn’t dare to stage protests as their counterparts in other Communist countries did. There was no Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. The level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take root. Any antiregime activity would have terrible consequences for the protester, his immediate family, and all other known relatives. Under a system that sought to stamp out tainted blood for three generations, the punishment would extend to parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins. “A lot of people felt if you had one life to give, you would give it to get rid of this terrible regime, but then you’re not the only one getting punished. Your family would go through hell,” one defector told me.

In the nearly half a century that elapsed between the end of the Korean War and Mi-ran’s defection in October 1998, only 923 North Koreans had fled to South Korea. It was a minuscule number if you consider that while the Berlin Wall stood an average of 21,000 East Germans fled west every year.

IN ARTICLE III OF its constitution, South Korea holds itself out as the rightful government of the entire Korean peninsula, which means that all of its people—including North Koreans—are automatically citizens. The right of North Koreans to citizenship was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1996. The reality, however, is more complicated. In order to exercise the right of citizenship, North Koreans must get to South Korea by their own volition. A North Korean cannot demand the right at the South Korean embassy in Beijing or at one of the various consular offices. Out of residual loyalty to its Communist ally and also to prevent millions of North Koreans from streaming across the border, China will not permit asylum seekers to present themselves at these diplomatic offices.

A good deal of propaganda on both sides of the DMZ is devoted to how North and South Koreans are the same—han nar, one people, one nation—but after sixty years of separation the differences between the people are significant. South Korea is one of the world’s most technologically advanced countries. While most North Koreans are unaware of the existence of the Internet, South Korea has a higher percentage of homes on broadband than do the United States, Japan, and most of Europe. North Korea has been frozen culturally and economically for the last half century. Their languages are no longer the same; the South Korean version is now peppered with words borrowed from English.

The disconnect between the flashy new upgrades and the abject poverty of North Koreans suggests that Kim Jong-un has directed his efforts at the elites, improving their living standards to buy loyalty and ensure the survival of his own leadership.

I asked her how many people she thought were still true believers. She lowered her voice and didn’t equivocate. “Zero,” she answered firmly. “It’s not belief in

During the 1990s, it was the unchallenged consensus of the pundits that North Korea was about to collapse. But when it defied all odds, surviving the breakup of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, a famine, China’s reform and opening, and then the death of Kim Il-sung, the regime took on an aura of invincibility. The successful transition to the third generation is yet another sign of the durability of the Kim dynasty.

Once a laughingstock mocked as a relic from another century, North Korea doesn’t look quite as incongruous in a world where strongmen—in China, Russia, Hungary, the Philippines, and Myanmar, to name a few—rule unchecked by the traditional bulwarks of democracy. Despotism is back in fashion. Those of us who hoped North Korea would become more like the rest of the world are dismayed that the rest of the world has become more like North Korea.

You can leave but never completely escape the terror that is North Korea. The fear is pervasive. It shadows you from behind, a dark shape around the corner, a startling noise, and it clings to North Korean defectors forever.