Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

by Barbara Demick

It is baffling how a nation of 23 million people can appear as vacant as the oceans. North Korea is simply a blank.

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

They don’t stop to think that in the middle of this black hole, in this bleak, dark country where millions have died of starvation, there is also love.

“Mansei Chosun,” they cried. Long live Korea!

Besides the United States and South Korea, troops of fifteen nations joined a U.N. coalition—among them Britain, Australia, Canada, France, and the Netherlands.

At about 7.30 P.M. the Communist forces started bombing the U.N. positions; at around 10:00 P.M. they fired flares so the soldiers would see the “hills and valleys come alive with thousands of enemy soldiers,” a U.S. soldier later wrote about the attack.

“The life of a POW was worth less than a fly,” Huh wrote. “Every day that we walked into the mines, I shuddered with fear. Like a cow walking to the slaughterhouse, I never knew if I would emerge alive.”

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.

And just like the caste system of old Korea, family status was hereditary. The sins of the father were the sins of the children and the grandchildren.

The bureaucratic center is laid out in an orderly grid. There is a university, a metallurgy college, a mining college, an agricultural college, an arts college, a foreign languages college, a medical school, three teachers’ colleges, a dozen theaters, and a museum of revolutionary history devoted to the life of Kim Il-sung.

What distinguished him in the rogues’ gallery of twentieth-century dictators was his ability to harness the power of faith. Kim Il-sung understood the power of religion. His maternal uncle was a Protestant minister back in the pre-Communist days when Pyongyang had such a vibrant Christian community that it was called the “Jerusalem of the East.” Once in power, Kim Il-sung closed the churches, banned the Bible, deported believers to the hinterlands, and appropriated Christian imagery and dogma for the purpose of self-promotion.

And, at such times, they always made sure that Mrs. Song, the true believer, was not at home.

“Even if the road is harsh, we’ll protect the party,” they had to sing as they went out on their excursions, the managers trying to prop up the group’s morale.

Kimchi thieves were common in Chongjin. Even in a society as collectivist as North Korea, no one wanted to share their kimchi with a stranger.

North Korea’s defense budget eats up 25 percent of its gross national product—as opposed to an average of less than 5 percent for industrialized countries. Although there had been no fighting in Korea since 1953, the country kept one million men under arms, giving this tiny country, no bigger than Pennsylvania, the fourth-largest military in the world.

While everybody else watched the program, his eyes darted back and forth between the television set and Mi-ran. She had ripened into a beautiful teenager. He stared at her, trying to discern what it was about the particular alignment of eyes, nose, mouth, and hair that had so captivated him. He wondered whether it would be worth the risk to his reputation to ask her out. He decided that it was.

“My studies. I’m supposed to be studying hard, but I can’t concentrate because I think about you,” he blurted out.

Kim Il-sung also discouraged early marriages, giving a “special instruction” in 1971 that men should marry at twenty and women should marry at twenty-eight.

Back in Pyongyang he visited a foreign-currency shop and with his Japanese yen bought Mi-ran a barrette shaped like a butterfly and studded with rows of square rhinestones. To Mi-ran it was most intricate and exotic—she had never owned anything so pretty in her life. She never wore it because she didn’t want her mother to ask about it. She kept it hidden away, wrapped up in her underwear.

“Things can change,” Jun-sang wrote. “If you want more in life, you must believe in yourself and you can achieve your dreams.”

“I really wanted to abandon everything and go back home to see her. I realized for the first time in my life what human emotion is all about,”

They laughed more. They talked more. Later, when they were older and living in comfort and security, they would strangely look back at those first years together as some of the happiest of their lives. In their giddiness, they paid little attention to what was happening around them.

Kim Il-sung collapsed with a massive heart attack. He died a few hours later. The announcement of his death was delayed for thirty-four hours. Although Kim Jong-il had been designated the heir two decades before, Pyongyang needed to prepare the announcement of the first hereditary succession in the Communist world.

At the time of his death, Kim Il-sung was eighty-two years old, well beyond the life expectancy for Korean men of his generation.

She heard her father’s words replaying in her ears. “The son is even worse than the father.” “Now we’re really fucked,” she said to herself. Only then did tears of self-pity fill her eyes.

A propaganda film released shortly after his death claimed that Kim Il-sung might come back to life if people grieved hard enough for him.

When the Great Marshal died, thousands of cranes descended from heaven to fetch him. The birds couldn’t take him because they saw that North Koreans cried and screamed and pummeled their chests, pulled their hair and pounded the ground.

There was one five-year-old girl in her class who cried so loudly and was so demonstrative in her grief that Mi-ran worried she would collapse. But then she noticed the girl was spitting in her hand to dampen her face with saliva. There were no actual tears.

Many others showed their distress by killing themselves. They jumped from the tops of buildings, a favorite method of suicide in North Korea since nobody had sleeping pills and only soldiers had guns with bullets. Others just starved themselves.

The right to “universal free medical service … to improve working people’s health” was in fact written into the North Korean constitution.

The baby stayed with her in-laws in keeping with Korean tradition; custody goes to the father’s family in the case of divorce.

“They would look at me with accusing eyes. Even four-year-olds knew they were dying and that I wasn’t doing anything to help them,” Dr. Kim told me years later. “All I was capable of doing was to cry with their mothers over their bodies afterward.”

Years later, when I asked her if she remembered any of the children who had died on her watch, she answered sharply, “I remember all of them.”

In the classroom teachers often sang “We Have Nothing to Envy in the World,” which had a singsongy tune as familiar to North Korean children as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

We have nothing to envy in this world.

Our enemies are the American bastards Who are trying to take over our beautiful fatherland. With guns that I make with my own hands I will shoot them. BANG, BANG, BANG.

Her own mother remembered the American GIs who drove through her town as tall and handsome. “We used to run after them,” her mother recalled. “Run after them? You didn’t run away?” “No, they gave us chewing gum,” her mother had told her. “You mean they didn’t try to kill you?” Mi-ran was incredulous when she heard her mother’s story.

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

If she wasn’t going to share her food with her favorite pupil, she certainly wasn’t going to help a perfect stranger.

it was the “simple and kindhearted people who did what they were told—they were the first to die.”

Mrs. Song pounded and pounded on his chest, screaming for help even as she knew it was too late.

“Everybody who was going to die was already dead.”

“If the ajummas [married women] hadn’t been allowed to work, there would have been a revolution,” he said.

It is worth noting here how extraordinary it was for anyone to be homeless in North Korea. This was, after all, the country that had developed the most painstaking systems to keep track of its citizens. Everybody had a fixed address and a work unit and both were tied to food rations—if you left home, you couldn’t get fed.

The image of the baby rolling around the back of the truck struck a chord of terror in Mi-ran and for years that terrifying scene would recur both in her waking mind and in her dreams.

Uri Abogi, our father, we have nothing to envy in the world. Our house is within the embrace of the Workers’ Party. We are all brothers and sisters. Even if a sea of fire comes toward us, sweet children do not need to be afraid. Our father is here. We have nothing to envy.

“Nuna, nuna.” Her brother was calling her, using the Korean word for “older sister.” She reached out for his hand and was gone from North Korea forever.

Up until that moment, a part of her had hoped that China would be just as poor as North Korea. She still wanted to believe that her country was the best place in the world. The beliefs she had cherished for a lifetime would be vindicated. But now she couldn’t deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.

Then he asked for a show of hands: Who would promise not to run away again to China? The women squatted in sullen silence. Oak-hee looked around. Not a single woman raised a hand.

We will do as the party tells us. We will die for the general. We have nothing to envy. We will go our own way.