Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

by Barbara Demick

Defectors are also nagged by the impermanence of their situation. Many, if not most, wish to return to North Korea. Most of them fled with the conviction that Kim Jong-il’s regime was on the verge of collapse and that they would return within a few years to a free North Korea. It was a reasonable assumption. In the mid-1990s, in the aftermath of Kim Il-sung’s death and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it was a matter of virtual consensus in the foreign-policy establishment that the end was imminent. Those who visit Pyongyang and snap photos of the towering monuments, the goose-stepping soldiers, and the kitschy socialist billboards are invariably astounded that the place has survived into the twenty-first century. “See it while it lasts” is how one travel agency advertises its tours to North Korea.