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January 13 - January 24, 2025
The North Korean government accused the United States and South Korea of sending in books and DVDs as part of a covert action to topple the regime. DVD salesmen were arrested and sometimes executed for treason.
Our enemies are using these specially made materials to beautify the world of imperialism and to spread their utterly rotten, bourgeois lifestyles. If we allow ourselves to be affected by these unusual materials, our revolutionary mind-set and class awareness will be paralyzed and our absolute idolization for the Marshal [Kim Il-sung] will disappear.
He defected a few years later, as did the soldier who saw the nail clipper and the student who saw the photograph of the striker.
They made polite small talk, telling each other that they looked well even though they were both sallow and emaciated. Then Dr. Kim inquired about her classmate’s family. Her husband and her two-year-old son had died, just three days apart, she said matter-of-factly. Dr. Kim tried to offer her condolences. “Oh, I’m better off. Fewer mouths to feed,” she told Dr. Kim. Dr. Kim couldn’t decide whether her friend was callous or insane, but she knew that if she stayed in North Korea any longer, she would either be the same, or she’d be dead.
But now she couldn’t deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.
Yong-su’s scrap-metal scam made him a relatively wealthy man in bad times. From his trips to the border he would bring home big bags of rice and bottles of soy sauce; for a time, they had stockpiles of corn in their apartment. Whenever Oak-hee would suggest that they take some food to her starving parents and brother, however, he flew into a rage. “How can you think about giving away our food at a time like this?” he yelled.
Oak-hee’s man, whose name was Minyuen, had none of the charm of her husband, but he had a sweetness that made him seem almost too innocent for this world. The first time he took her to bed, he carried her and washed her feet in a basin of warm water. He cooked her special meals and wouldn’t permit her to do the dishes. His parents similarly doted on her.
Many had run away from husbands and children, rationalizing their actions by the thought that they could bring money and food back for their families. Oak-hee was disgusted by these women, as she was with herself. She had never forgiven herself for leaving her children. What bitches we’ve become. The hunger has turned us so wicked, she thought.
In all, the women at Nongpo appeared to Oak-hee to be less terrified than angry. As they performed their forced labor—making bricks, weeding the fields—their faces were fixed in a grimace of resentment. Our whole lives we have been told lies. Our lives are lies. The whole system is a lie, Oak-hee thought, and she was sure the other women thought as she did.
MRS. SONG WAS NOT SURPRISED TO LEARN THAT OAK-HEE WAS at Nongpo. She’d thought it was only a matter of time before her daughter landed in prison. She hadn’t heard anything from Oak-hee since she’d run away from her husband three years earlier, but Mrs. Kim had assumed she was in China with the rest of those whores and traitors. If she’d betrayed the fatherland, she deserved to be in prison. But a daughter is a daughter.
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.
Only a small fraction of the 100,000 or more North Koreans in China are able to make it to South Korea. In 1998, there were just 71 North Koreans who requested South Korean citizenship; in 1999, the number rose to 148; in 2000, there were 312 defectors; and in 2001, there were 583. In 2002, 1,139 North Koreans were admitted. Since then, anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 have been arriving steadily each year.
By living frugally and continuing to work, she was soon able to afford to travel—something once beyond the reach of her dreams. She joined tour groups that catered to older women and explored every corner of South Korea. She even went back to China—this time as a tourist. She traveled to Poland with a group of fellow North Korean defectors who were speaking at a human rights conference. She made friends. She even dated a little. She loved going to the market to try new foods—mango, kiwi, papaya. She enjoyed eating out. She didn’t develop a taste for pizza or hamburgers, but she came to love
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“When I see a good meal like this, it makes me cry,” Mrs. Song apologized one night as we sat around a steaming pot of shabu-shabu, thinly sliced beef cooked in broth and dipped in a sesame sauce. “I can’t helping thinking of his last words, ‘Let’s go to a good restaurant and order a nice bottle of wine.’”
One day when I’d taken the train to Suwon to meet her, we spotted each other from across the crowded waiting room. As soon as we pushed in close enough to be within earshot, she called out, unable to restrain her excitement a moment longer, “Look at me. I did my eyes!” She’d had plastic surgery to add the extra little crease in her eyelids to make herself look more Caucasian. It was the ultimate South Korean experience. Mrs. Song had arrived.
“In North Korea, they don’t want you when you’re too old to work,” she said. “They’d just as soon get rid of you. In South Korea, I saw old people singing and dancing. I thought of my mother and how hard she had worked her whole life. I thought she deserved to live a little.”
Young people, born long after the end of the Korean War, have less sentimentality about the missing other half of Korea. They would rather ignore the impoverished, nuclear-armed dictatorship looming above them. In the blur of their busy lives, working the longest hours of any developed nation, playing hard, driving their Hyundais fast, and listening to their iPods loud, it is easy to forget.
Despite the gnawing hunger and her quarrels with the Workers’ Party, she still felt she owed a debt to the country that had provided her schooling. As it happened, Dr. Kim’s resolve weakened during her first hours in China when she saw the big bowl of white rice and meat set out for the dog. With each passing day, there was a fresh observation that would heighten her outrage over the lies she’d been fed. Everything that transpired propelled her further and further away from the fatherland and from the beliefs she once held dear, until it became impossible for her to return.
Thousands of South Korean missionaries—sometimes joined by their Korean-American counterparts—have flocked to northeastern China, where they work quietly so as not to provoke the Chinese authorities, operating small, unregistered churches out of private homes.
Guilt and shame are the common denominators among North Korean defectors; many hate themselves for what they had to do in order to survive.
The fate of the sisters weighed heavily on the family, darkening every happy moment. Even as Mi-ran gave birth to a healthy baby boy and her brother, Sok-ju, was accepted at a university in Australia, the family couldn’t rejoice. It seemed especially unfair.
Not being a believer herself, Mi-ran had no such solace. Her guilt troubled her sleep and intruded on a schedule that was so busy she wasn’t supposed to have time to think. Her sisters had paid the ultimate price so she could drive a Hyundai.
He tried to comfort himself. He remembered a poem by the nineteenth-century Hungarian poet Sandor Petofi that he’d recited as he crossed the Tumen River: Liberty and love These two I must have. For my love I’ll sacrifice My life. For liberty I’ll sacrifice My love.
The sidewalks were crowded, mostly with women, since it was a weekday and most South Korean women don’t work after they have children.
“If you were going to come to South Korea, why didn’t you come sooner?” she asked. Jun-sang was at a loss to answer. At this point in the conversation, Mi-ran was crying and the implications of her words were clear. She was married and had a baby. It was too late.
He didn’t let little jabs from South Koreans bug him. His confidence ran deep, to the core. He was never self-pitying and never expressed regrets about defecting, although he worried about not seeing his parents again.
His favorite was a translation of 1984. He marveled that George Orwell could have so understood the North Korean brand of totalitarianism.
North Korean defectors often find it hard to settle down. It is not easy for somebody who’s escaped a totalitarian country to live in the free world. Defectors have to rediscover who they are in a world that offers endless possibilities.
Choosing where to live, what to do, even which clothes to put on in the morning is tough enough for those of us accustomed to making choices; it can be utterly paralyzing for people who’ve had decisions made for them by the state their entire lives.
While the persistence of North Korea is a curiosity for the rest of the world, it is a tragedy for North Koreans, even those who have managed to escape.
But the heir apparent, the eldest son, Kim Jong-nam, had disgraced himself with a dissolute lifestyle and an embarrassing arrest in 2001, when he’d tried to enter Japan on a forged passport to visit Disneyland with his son. So the youngest Kim son was whisked back to North Korea, and the state mythmakers and propagandists had been ordered to work overtime to establish his credentials.
Kim not only defied expectation, he outperformed his father by almost any metric of job performance: economic stewardship, military leadership, even personal popularity. In the years since taking over, he has managed the difficult balancing act of liberalizing the economy while tightening political control.
COMPARING THE STYLES of the two leaders, Kim Jong-un is far more ruthless than his father.
In 2017, Kim’s erstwhile rival for the leadership—half-brother Kim Jong-nam—was as sassinated with VX nerve gas at the crowded international airport in Kuala Lumpur, presumably on the order of Kim Jong-un. The young leader had left no doubts about who was in charge.
When Sony Pictures was about to release The Interview, a 2014 satirical film in which a television journalist is sent to assassinate Kim Jong-un, North Korean hackers broke into the studio’s computer network and stole and released a trove of confidential data—salaries, medical information, screenplays, and personal emails. A studio head, Amy Pascal, had to resign over racism-tinged emails in which she joked that she would mention films about slavery at an upcoming meeting with President Barack Obama. Sony set aside $15 million to cover damages. It was a public relations coup for North Korea to
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North Korea has an army of hackers, trained at universities like the one Kim Jun-sang attended, and they have earned billions for the regime through cyberattacks on banks and cryptocurrency exchanges.
It didn’t take much prodding for her to admit their ambivalence toward Kim Jong-il. They blamed him for the famine and a series of calamitous economic policies. “When Kim Il-sung died, I cried desperately. I didn’t know how we could go on living. When Kim Jong-il died, I cried too, but not so much,” she told me. Kim Jong-un’s resemblance to his grandfather was his greatest asset. “We don’t mind that he’s fat,” another woman assured me.
