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.

The night sky in North Korea is a sight to behold. It might be the most brilliant in Northeast Asia, the only place spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand, and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent.

This is not the sort of thing that shows up in satellite photographs. Whether in CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, or in the East Asian studies department of a university, people usually analyze North Korea from afar. 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.

In 2004, Mi-ran was living in Suwon, a city twenty miles south of Seoul, bright and chaotic. Suwon is home to Samsung Electronics and a cluster of manufacturing complexes producing objects most North Koreans would be stumped to identify—computer monitors, CD-ROMs, digital televisions, flash-memory sticks.

(A statistic one often sees quoted is that the economic disparity between the Koreas is at least four times greater than that between East and West Germany at the time of German reunification in 1990.)

The food on our table went uneaten as she described watching her five-and six-year-old pupils die of starvation. As her students were dying, she was supposed to teach them that they were blessed to be North Korean.

In a larger space, the sexes became segregated. At mealtime, the women would huddle together over a low wooden table near the kitchen, eating cornmeal, which was cheaper and less nutritious than rice, the preferred staple of North Koreans. The father and son ate rice at their own table.

The North Korean standard of beauty calls for pale skin, the whiter the better, a round face, and bow-shaped mouth, but this girl looked nothing like that.

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

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.

Koreans were infuriated to be partitioned in the same way as the Germans. After all, they had not been aggressors in World War II, but victims. Koreans at the time described themselves with a self-deprecating expression, saying they were “shrimp among whales,” crushed between the rivalries of the superpowers.

“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.”

Despite the twentieth-century lingo of social engineering, this process was akin to an updating of the feudal system that had stifled Koreans in prior centuries. In the past, Koreans were bound by a caste system nearly as rigid as that of India. Noblemen wore white shirts and high black horsehair hats, while slaves wore wooden tags around their necks.

The old class structure drew heavily on the teachings of the Chinese philosopher Confucius, who believed that humans fit strictly into a social pyramid. 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 hostile class included the kisaeng (female entertainers who, like the Japanese geisha, might provide a bit more for high-paying clients), fortune-tellers, and mudang (shamans, who were also in the lower classes during the dynastic period). Also included were the politically suspect, as defined by a white paper o...

Singing is a highly valued talent in North Korea since few people have stereos.

When she was fifteen years old, her school was visited by a team of serious-looking men and women in somber suits. These were the okwa, members of the fifth division of the Central Workers’ Party, recruiters who scoured the country looking for young women to serve on the personal staff of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. If selected, the girls would be sent off to a military-style training camp, before being assigned to one of the leadership’s many residences around the country. Once accepted, they would not be permitted to visit their homes, but their families would be compensated with expensive gifts. It wasn’t exactly clear what jobs these girls did. Some were said to be secretaries, maids, and entertainers; others were rumored to be concubines. Mi-ran had heard all about this from a friend whose cousin had been one of those chosen.

The truth was devastating. The children had been thoroughly inculcated in the North Korean version of history. The Americans were the incarnation of evil and the South Koreans their pathetic lackeys. They’d studied photographs of their country after it had been pulverized by U.S. bombs. They’d read about how sneering American and South Korean soldiers drove their bayonets into the bodies of innocent civilians. Their textbooks at school were full of stories of people burned, crushed, stabbed, shot, and poisoned by the enemy. To learn that their own father was a South Korean who had fought with the Yankees was too much to bear. Sok-ju got drunk for the first time in his life. He ran away from home. He stayed at a friend’s house for two weeks until the friend convinced him he had to return.

The pro–North Koreans affiliated with a group called Chosen Soren, the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan.

Although some Koreans in the countryside kept dogs as farm animals, raising them in large part to eat in a spicy dog-meat stew called boshintang, it was unheard of to have a dog as a household pet. Who could afford an extra mouth to feed?

Historically, Koreans have measured their success in life by their proximity to power—part of a long Asian tradition of striving to get off the farm and close to the imperial palace.

Perhaps as a result of all these malcontents in the gene pool, what is now North Hamgyong province is thought to breed the toughest, hardest-to-subdue Koreans anywhere.

Women were expected to keep the factories going, since North Korea was perpetually short of men—an estimated 20 percent of working-age men were in the armed services, the largest per capita military in the world.

Juche drew on Marx’s and Lenin’s ideas about the struggle between landlord and peasant, between rich and poor. It similarly declared that man, not God, shaped his own fate. But Kim Il-sung rejected traditional Communist teachings about universalism and internationalism. He was a Korean nationalist in the extreme.

“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.

By the accounts of defectors, there is at least one informer for every fifty people—more even than East Germany’s notorious Stasi, whose files were pried open after German reunification.

The party issued regular edicts saying that men shouldn’t allow the hair on top of their head to grow longer than five centimeters—though an exemption was granted for balding men, who were permitted seven centimeters.

The most famous stores in the country were Pyongyang’s two department stores—Department Store No. 1 and Department Store No. 2, they were called—and their merchandise was about as exciting as their names.

The favored fabric was Vinalon, which didn’t hold dye very well, so there was a limited palette: drab indigo for factory workers uniforms, black or gray for office workers.

North Korean women paid attention to their appearance: Mrs. Song would skip breakfast rather than go to work without makeup.

There was a food shop, a stationery shop, a clothing shop. Unlike in the Soviet Union, you seldom saw long lines in North Korea. If you wanted to make a major purchase—say, to buy a watch or a record player—you had to apply to your work unit for permission. It wasn’t just a matter of having the money.

TO BE SURE, North Korea wasn’t the workers’ paradise that the propaganda claimed, but Kim Il-sung’s achievements were not insignificant. 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. Out of the wreckage of a country that had lost almost all of its infrastructure and 70 percent of its housing stock in the war, Kim Il-sung created what appeared to be a viable, if Spartan, economy. Everybody had shelter and clothing. In 1949, North Korea claimed to be the first Asian country to have nearly eliminated illiteracy. Foreign dignitaries who visited in the 1960s, often arriving by train across the Chinese border, gushed over the obviously superior living standards of the North Koreans. 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 impr...

As Communist countries went, it seemed more like Yugoslavia than Angola. It was a point of pride within the Communist bloc. 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. The North Korean regime didn’t publish economic statistics, at least none that could be trusted, and took great pains to deceive visitors and even themselves. Supervisors routinely fabricated statistics on agricultural production and industrial output because they were so fearful of telling their own bosses the truth. Lies were built upon...

In 1990, the year before it collapsed, the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations with South Korea in a devastating blow to North Korea’s world standing. China followed suit two years later.

North Korea was (and remains as of this writing in 2009) the last place on earth where virtually everything is grown on collective farms. The state confiscates the entire harvest and then gives a portion back to the farmer.

In order to fit in, the average citizen had to discipline himself not to think too much.

On weekends, Chong jin families would hike down—the collective orchards were about three miles from the center of the city—often under the guise of a recreational excursion. Nobody wanted to admit they were doing it because they were hungry.

They were the only family in the neighborhood to eat kimbab, a Korean interpretation of Japanese maki that is popular in South Korea, but virtually unknown in the North.

“Well, it is not like I don’t like you,” she answered in a tangled syntax of double negatives, which in Korean are especially ambiguous.

Mi-ran was in her last year of high school when the relationship began. She was intimidated by the relative sophistication of her college boy. In Pyongyang, Jun-sang could buy proper paper. He owned a ballpoint pen. His letters ran on for pages, long and eloquent. Their correspondence gradually evolved from stilted formalities to full-blown romance. Jun-sang had never seen a Hollywood romance, but his mind was fervid enough to conjure the clichés of modern love.

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. North Korean defectors insist that there is no premarital sex and no such thing as an unmarried student getting pregnant. “It would be unimaginably terrible. I couldn’t even think of that happening,” I was told by a North Korean woman who was herself no prude—she was working in the sex industry in Seoul at the time I met her. Certainly, North Korea doesn’t have the love hotels of South Korea or Japan. You can’t check into a regular hotel without a travel permit, and no hotel would ever admit an unmarried couple in any case. People from Chongjin have told me that unmarried couples who want to have sexual relations will go into the wilderness or even to a park by night, but I have never met anyone who has admitted to doing this.

Propaganda campaigns advise women to adopt “traditional hairstyles in accordance with the socialist way of life and the taste of the epoch.” For middle-aged women, that means hair cut short, and permed; unmarried women can wear their hair longer if it is tied back or braided. North Korean women are not permitted to wear skirts above the knee, or sleeveless shirts. Interestingly, South Korea had similar regulations about hair and dress in the 1970s under the military dictator Park Chung-hee.

It is a sign of how much North Korea remains frozen in time and how much South Korea has changed that the most radical differences between the two cultures are manifested in sexuality and dress.

SO IT WAS CONVENIENT that Jun-sang and Mi-ran’s relationship began just as the lights were going out. The darkness of North Korea by night has an absoluteness that people from the electrified world have never experienced. With no streetlights, no headlights, no ambient light seeping from windows or under doors, the darkness is an all-encompassing shroud. You can tell somebody is walking down the street only when you see the glowing tip of his cigarette.

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

“When it works, it works very well,” Dr. Kim told me years later. And when it didn’t? Patients would be strapped to the operating table to prevent them from flailing about. For the most part, North Koreans were stoical about enduring pain during medical treatment. “They weren’t like South Koreans, who scream and holler about the slightest little thing,” Dr. Kim said.

But North Korea’s Great Leader picked a convenient time to die, one that would prevent his legacy from being tarnished by the catastrophic events of the coming years. Had he lived a moment longer, North Koreans today would not be able to look back with nostalgia at the relative plenty they had enjoyed during his lifetime. His passing coincided with the last gasps of his Communist dream.

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 in this world.

Reading primers told stories of children who were beaten, bayoneted, burned, splashed with acid, or thrown into wells by villains who were invariably Christian missionaries, Japanese bastards, or American imperialist bastards.