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January 13 - January 24, 2025
There was no contact permitted with ordinary citizens.
In South Korea, I began to talk to North Koreans who had defected, escaping to South Korea or China, and a picture of real life in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea began to emerge.
Chongjin is North Korea’s third-largest city and one of the places that were hardest hit by the famine of the mid-1990s. It is also almost entirely closed to foreigners. I had the good fortune to meet many wonderful people from Chongjin who were both articulate and generous with their time. Nothing to Envy grew out of that original series of articles.
This book is based on seven years of conversations with North Koreans.
But North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world.
The young couple would walk through the night, scattering ginkgo leaves in their wake. What did they talk about? Their families, their classmates, books they had read—whatever the topic, it was endlessly fascinating. Years later, when I asked the girl about the happiest memories of her life, she told me of those nights.
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.
In 1948, the Republic of Korea was created under the leadership of the seventy-year-old Syngman Rhee, a crusty conservative with a PhD from Princeton. Kim Il-sung, an anti-Japanese resistance fighter backed by Moscow, quickly followed suit by declaring his state the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—North Korea. The line along the 38th parallel would solidify into a 155-mile-long, 2.5-mile-wide thicket of concertina wire, tank traps, trenches, embankments, moats, artillery pieces, and land mines.
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.
Mi-ran often found her father’s passivity maddening. Only later did she understand this was a survival mechanism. It was as though he had hammered down his own personality to avoid drawing undue attention to himself. Among the thousands of former South Korean soldiers who tried to assimilate into North Korean society, many slipped up.
She had every expectation that she would be selected to attend a performing arts high school. She wailed for days when she was rejected. Their mother must have known the reason, but she nevertheless marched to the school to demand an explanation. The headmaster was sympathetic, but unhelpful. She explained that only students with better songbun could secure placement in performing arts schools.
Sok-ju had spent months cramming for an exam to win admission to the teachers’ college. He knew every answer perfectly. When he was told he had failed, he angrily confronted the judges to demand an explanation. The truth was devastating.
He was not cowardly, but he was a dutiful son, as much a creature of the Confucian system as any other North Korean.
For these nationalists, North Korea looked to be the true motherland because it had severed itself from the Japanese colonial past, whereas Syngman Rhee’s pro-U.S. government had elevated many Japanese collaborators.
In fact, Japanese Koreans, who were known as kitachosenjin, after the Japanese term for North Korea, Kita Chosen, lived in a world apart. They had distinctive accents and tended to marry one another.
The new immigrants from Japan quickly shed their idealism. Some of the early immigrants who arrived in North Korea wrote letters home warning others not to come, but those letters were intercepted and destroyed. Many of the Japanese Koreans, including some prominent in Chosen Soren, ended up being purged in the early 1970s, the leaders executed, their families sent to the gulag.
Jun-sang had overheard his parents whispering these stories. When they came to take you away, there was no warning. A truck would pull up outside your house late at night. You’d get maybe an hour or two to pack up your belongings. Jun-sang lived with a fear that was so internalized that he wasn’t able to articulate it, but it was ever-present. He knew by instinct to watch what he said.
The South Koreans were a disgrace because of their dependence on the United States. “Establishing juche means, in a nutshell, being the master of revolution and reconstruction in one’s own country. This means holding fast to an independent position, rejecting dependence on others, using one’s own brains, believing in one’s own strength, displaying the revolutionary spirit of self-reliance,” he expounded in one of his many treatises. This was seductive to a proud people whose dignity had been trampled by its neighbors for centuries.
Kim Il-sung didn’t want to be Joseph Stalin; he wanted to be Santa Claus. His dimpled cheeks made him appear more cuddly than other dictators. He was to be regarded as a father, in the Confucian sense of commanding respect and love.
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.
Like other North Korean children, they didn’t celebrate their own birthdays, but those of Kim Il-sung on April 15 and Kim Jong-il on February 16.
The absolute worst was when it came to collecting “night soil” from the toilets in the apartment building. North Korea was chronically short of chemical fertilizer and needed to use human excrement since there were few farm animals. Each family had to provide a bucketful each week, delivered to a warehouse miles away. In exchange, you were given a chit certifying that you’d done your duty and that chit would later be traded for food.
Oak-hee and Yong-su got married in 1988 in the traditional North Korean style—in front of the statue of Kim Il-sung, who symbolically presided over all marriages in the absence of clergy.
They had heard of a man who cracked a joke about Kim Jong-il’s height and was sent away for life. Mrs. Song personally knew a woman from her factory who was taken away for something she wrote in her diary.
Father and daughter would talk for hours, always taking care to keep their voices at a whisper in case a neighbor was snooping around. And, at such times, they always made sure that Mrs. Song, the true believer, was not at home.
In fact, proper Communists didn’t shop, period. Kim Il-sung had created about as anticonsumerist a culture as could exist in the twentieth century.
In the first two decades after the 1945 partition of the peninsula, the north was richer than the capitalist south. Indeed, in the 1960s, when Korean scholars bandied about the term “economic miracle,” they meant North Korea. Merely to feed the population in a region with a long history of famine was an accomplishment, all the more so given that the crude partition of the peninsula had left all the better farmland on the other side of the divide.
In fact, thousands of ethnic Koreans in China fled the famine caused by Mao Zedong’s disastrous “Great Leap Forward” to return to North Korea. North Korea put tile roofs on the houses, and every village was wired for electricity by 1970.
Even a hard-bitten CIA analyst, Helen-Louise Hunter, whose reports on North Korea from the 1970s were later declassified and published, grudgingly admitted she was impressed by Kim Il-sung’s North Korea.
People pointed to North Korea’s gains—especially relative to South Korea—as proof that communism was actually working. Or was it? So much of the supposed North Korean miracle was illusory, based on propaganda claims that couldn’t be substantiated.
For all its arrogant rhetoric about juche and self-sufficiency, North Korea was utterly dependent on the kindness of its neighbors. The country got subsidized oil, rice, fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, industrial equipment, trucks, and cars. X-ray machines and incubators came from Czechoslovakia; architects from East Germany. Kim Il-sung skillfully played the Soviet Union and China against each other, using their rivalry to extract as much aid as possible.
By the 1980s, Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il, who was increasingly assuming his father’s duties, offered “on-the-spot guidance” to address the country’s woes. Father and son were experts in absolutely everything, be it geology or farming. “Kim Jong-il’s on-site instructions and his warm benevolence are bringing about a great advance in goat breeding and output of dairy products,” the Korean Central News Agency opined after Kim Jong-il visited a goat farm near Chongjin.
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.
Instead of rebuilding aging factories and infrastructure, North Korea put its money into expensive secret weapons projects, claiming the need for a “nuclear deterrent” against American aggression.
“Kim Jong-il didn’t care if he bankrupted the rest of the country. He saw the missiles and nuclear weapons as the only way to maintain power,” Kim Dok-hong, a high-ranking defector from Pyongyang, told me in an interview in Seoul in 2006.
Never mind Communist solidarity, China and the Soviet Union wanted to do business with the likes of Hyundai and Samsung, not with state-owned enterprises in the North that didn’t pay their bills on time.
The Russians and the Chinese were increasingly fed up with North Korea’s failure to repay loans that had amounted to an estimated $10 billion by the early 1990s. Moscow decided that North Korea would have to pay prevailing world prices for Soviet imports rather than the lower “friendship” prices charged Communist allies.
Enduring hunger became part of one’s patriotic duty. Billboards went up in Pyongyang touting the new slogan, “Let’s Eat Two Meals a Day.” North Korean television ran a documentary about a man whose stomach burst, it was claimed, from eating too much rice.
If North Koreans paused to contemplate the obvious inconsistencies and lies in what they were told, they would find themselves in a dangerous place. They didn’t have a choice. They couldn’t flee their country, depose their leadership, speak out, or protest. In order to fit in, the average citizen had to discipline himself not to think too much.
Other memories of this period were bitter. Kim Ji-eun, who was at the time a recent medical graduate doing her residency, went to the orchards one weekend with her parents, a married sister, the sister’s husband, and two small children. Carrying the whiny toddlers most of the way, they didn’t get to the orchards until midafternoon. Too many others had come before them. They found one slightly rotten pear on the ground. They took it home and boiled it, then cut it into five parts for the children, the elderly parents, and Kim Ji-eun’s brother-in-law. Ji-eun and her sister didn’t get any. The
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These private agricultural efforts were small enough that they didn’t raise the ire of the Communist authorities. At least in the beginning, before the food shortage grew into a famine, they staved off hunger.
Jun-sang would have preferred to study literature or philosophy, or, had there been such a program, filmmaking, but his father steered him into science, knowing it was the only way for a boy without good songbun to get to Pyongyang.
Although she feigned surprise, she had noticed Jun-sang lurking around her neighborhood and had even dared to hope that perhaps it was because of her. The green uniform had not failed to impress her. He looked like a naval officer with the shiny double row of buttons. Although she had never dated, Mi-ran knew by instinct that she should play hard to get.
in fact, complaining about your own song-bun was tantamount to criticizing the regime.
AN ASIDE HERE ABOUT sex in North Korea: the country doesn’t have a dating culture. Many marriages are still arranged, either by families or by party secretaries or bosses. Couples are not supposed to make any public displays of affection—even holding hands in public is considered risqué.
After Kim Il-sung took over, he melded traditional Korean conservatism with the Communist instinct to repress sexuality. He closed not only brothels, but the more ambiguous kisaeng houses where women entertained wealthy men. Pornographers were executed. Notwithstanding his own excesses and those of Kim Jong-il, a playboy in his youth, party officials caught in adulterous affairs lost their jobs.
Jun-sang’s experiences in Pyongyang gave Mi-ran a glimpse into a remote world of privilege. At the same time, it was hard to listen without a trace of jealousy.
Mi-ran had a sudden insight into her own future. She saw it laid out before her like a straight, featureless highway—a job in a factory, marriage (most likely to a fellow factory worker), children, old age, death. As Jun-sang prattled on about his roommates at the university, she grew more and more miserable.
“Things can change,” Jun-sang wrote. “If you want more in life, you must believe in yourself and you can achieve your dreams.” Mi-ran would later credit Jun-sang’s words of encouragement with changing her life.
To her great surprise, she was accepted into a teachers’ college. The Kim Jong-suk Teachers’ College—named for Kim Jong-il’s mother—was the best of the three teachers’ colleges in Chongjin. How did she get so lucky when her sisters had failed? Mi-ran herself was rather mystified, as she was a very good student but not at the top of her class.
