Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

by Barbara Demick

But North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world.

WE HAVE NOTHING TO ENVY IN THE WORLD.

For the 1,300 years prior to the Japanese occupation, Korea had been a unified country governed by the Chosun dynasty, one of the longest-lived monarchies in world history. Before the Chosun dynasty, there were three kingdoms vying for power on the peninsula. Political schisms tended to run north to south, the east gravitating naturally toward Japan and the west to China. The bifurcation between north and south was an entirely foreign creation, cooked up in Washington and stamped on the Koreans without any input from them. One story has it that the secretary of state at the time, Edward Stettinius, had to ask a subordinate where Korea was.

While the Chinese Red Guard also rooted out “capitalist roaders” during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, it resulted in a chaotic reign of terror in which neighbor denounced neighbor. The North Koreans were methodical to a fault. Each person was put through eight background checks.

Kim Il-sung took the least humane elements of Confucianism and combined them with Stalinism. At the top of the pyramid, instead of an emperor, resided Kim Il-sung and his family. From there began a downward progression of fifty-one categories that were lumped into three broad classes—the core class, the wavering class, and the hostile class.

the strength of the regime came from its ability to isolate its own citizens completely.

Kim Il-sung didn’t want to be Joseph Stalin; he wanted to be Santa Claus.

He was to be regarded as a father, in the Confucian sense of commanding respect and love. He wanted to ingratiate himself into North Korean families as their own flesh and blood.

North Korea invites parody. We laugh at the excesses of the propaganda and the gullibility of the people. But consider that their indoctrination began in infancy, during the fourteen-hour days spent in factory day-care centers; that for the subsequent fifty years, every song, film, newspaper article, and billboard was designed to deify Kim Il-sung; that the country was hermetically sealed to keep out anything that might cast doubt on Kim Il-sung’s divinity. Who could possibly resist?

He wasn’t merely the father of their country, their George Washington, their Mao, he was their God.

Many of her neighbors had done the same. They were on their knees, banging their heads on the pavement. Their wails cut through the air like sirens.

Lights were rarely switched on during the day because the electrical supply was diverted to keep the Kim Il-sung statue illuminated around the clock.

The proud man who vowed he would never steal was likely one of the first to die of starvation.

But now she couldn’t deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.

“I had a dream the other night about my children,” she told me. “I’m holding my son’s hand. I’m carrying my daughter on my back. We are all running, trying to escape from North Korea. There is a tall man wearing a railroad conductor’s uniform, walking toward us. I’m not sure, but I think it is my husband and he’s trying to stop us.” She wakes up to the fact that she’s a world away without them.

Guilt and shame are the common denominators among North Korean defectors; many hate themselves for what they had to do in order to survive.