Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

by Barbara Demick

Instead of marking time from the birth and death of Christ, the modern era for North Koreans would now begin in 1912 with the birth of Kim Il-sung so that the year 1996 would now be known as Juche 84.

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

All ingenuity was devoted to the gathering and production of food. You woke up early to find your breakfast and as soon as it was finished, you thought about what to find for dinner. Lunch was a luxury of the past. You slept during what used to be lunchtime to preserve your calories. Ultimately it was not enough.

The signature dish is Pyongyang naengmyon, cold buckwheat noodles served in a vinegary broth with myriad regional variations, adding hard-boiled eggs, cucumbers, or pears.

Yet another gratuitous cruelty: the killer targets the most innocent, the people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend. It was a phenomenon that the Italian writer Primo Levi identified after emerging from Auschwitz, when he wrote that he and his fellow survivors never wanted to see one another again after the war because they had all done something of which they were ashamed.

They ran no workshops or stores; they didn’t dare to set up the kiosks that were so ubiquitous in Russia during the time of perestroika.

For the first time, the markets stocked household goods so cheap even North Koreans could buy them. The results of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms of the 1970s and 1980s were seeping into North Korea. From China came writing paper, pens and pencils, fragrant shampoos, hairbrushes, nail clippers, razor blades, batteries, cigarette lighters, umbrellas, toy cars, socks. It had been so long since North Korea could manufacture anything that the ordinary had become extraordinary.

The biggest market in Chongjin sprang up in an industrial wasteland near the Sunam River, which cut inland from the port through the center of the city. Behind the pitiful wreckage of the Chemical Textile factory, the Sunam Market would eventually become the largest market in North Korea.

Joo Sung-ha, a North Korean defector from Chongjin who became a journalist in Seoul, told me he believed that Kim Jong-il had tacitly agreed to let women work privately to relieve the pressure on families. “If the ajummas [married women] hadn’t been allowed to work, there would have been a revolution,” he said.

But Mrs. Song knew better. It was a topsy-turvy world in which she was living. Up was down, wrong was right. The women had the money instead of the men. The markets were bursting with food, more food than most North Koreans had seen in their lifetime, and yet people were still dying from hunger. Workers’ Party members had starved to death; those who never gave a damn about the fatherland were making money.

“Donbulrae,” Mrs. Song muttered under her breath. Money insects. In the past, she took comfort in knowing that she and everyone else she knew were more or less equally poor. Now she saw the rich getting richer; the poor getting poorer. People who would have been branded economic criminals a decade earlier strutted around in leather shoes and new clothes. Others were starving even though they were working full-time. Inflation was out of control. The black-market price of rice would hit 200 won per kilo by the end of 1998. Even after salaries were restored, an ordinary office worker or teacher couldn’t afford to buy his family even two or three days’ worth of food each month. The children scrounged through the dirt on their hands and knees, picking out grains of rice or corn that spilled from the split seams of the burlap sacks.

North Koreans called them kochebi, “wandering swallows”—children whose parents had died or gone off to find food.

CHONGJIN STATION. That was where people went when they had nothing left and no place else to go. It wasn’t quite like giving up and lying down by the side of the road. The movement of the trains created an illusion of purpose that kept hope alive against all odds. It allowed one to fantasize that a train would pull into the station with something to eat or that a train might be going someplace better and you could hop aboard.

Facing a food shortage, many North Korean families conducted a brutal triage of their own households—they denied themselves and often elderly grandparents food in order to keep the younger generation alive. That strategy produced an unusual number of orphans, as the children were often the last ones left of entire families that had perished.

It was a dangerous life. The children couldn’t sleep without worrying that somebody, perhaps another gang member, would steal what little they had. There were strange stories going around about adults who preyed on children. Not just for sex, but for food. Hyuck was told about people who would drug children, kill them, and butcher them for meat. Behind the station near the railroad tracks were vendors who cooked soup and noodles over small burners, and it was said that the gray chunks of meat floating in the broth were human flesh.

The stories got more and more horrific. Supposedly, one father went so insane with hunger that he ate his own baby. A market woman was said to have been arrested for selling soup made from human bones. From my interviews with defectors, it does appear that there were at least two cases—one in Chongjin and the other in Sinuiju—in which people were arrested and executed for cannibalism. It does not seem, though, that the practice was widespread or even occurred to the degree that was chronicled in China during the 1958-62 famine, which killed as many as 30 million people.

When children are poorly nourished over a long period, their heads develop to a normal size, but their limbs are stunted.

As much as any city in North Korea, Chongjin had strayed from the party line. By 2005, Chongjin’s Sunam was the biggest market in North Korea, with more variety of merchandise than anything in Pyongyang. You could buy pineapples, kiwis, oranges, bananas, German beer, and Russian vodka. Right in the market, you could buy illegal DVDs of Hollywood films, although the vendors kept them under the counter. Sacks of rice and corn obviously intended as humanitarian aid were sold out in the open. Sex was sold just as blatantly. The prostitutes soliciting in front of Chongjin’s train station didn’t bother to disguise intent. Compared with straitlaced Pyongyang, Chongjin was the Wild West.

Listening to South Korean television was like looking in the mirror for the first time in your life and realizing you were unattractive. North Koreans were always told theirs was the proudest country in the world, but the rest of the world considered it a pathetic, bankrupt regime.

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.

THE LESS THEY COULD CONFIDE IN EACH OTHER, THE MORE strained their relationship was.

Much of the pleasure he took from reading was in the anticipation of telling Mi-ran about it later.

The night before their departure she took out a carefully wrapped bundle from her clothing cupboard. It contained every letter she had ever received from Jun-sang. She had kept them with all the gifts he had given her over the years. Her most prized possession, the butterfly-shaped barrette decorated with rhinestones, she would leave behind. The letters had to be destroyed. She ripped each one into tiny pieces before throwing them out. She didn’t want anybody to learn of the decade she and Jun-sang had spent obsessed with each other. Nobody knew except his brother and two of her sisters. Now more than ever it was important to keep the romance a secret.

Dr. Kim looked down a dirt road that led to farmhouses. Most of them had walls around them with metal gates. She tried one; it turned out to be unlocked. She pushed it open and peered inside. On the ground she saw a small metal bowl with food. She looked closer—it was rice, white rice, mixed with scraps of meat. Dr. Kim couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a bowl of pure white rice. What was a bowl of rice doing there, just sitting out on the ground? She figured it out just before she heard the dog’s bark. 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.

North Korean women had a certain mystique to the Chinese. Despite the toll taken by the famine on their bodies and complexions, North Korean women were thought to be among the most beautiful in Asia. South Korean men talked about buk nyeo, nam nam— northern women, southern men—which allegedly was the most desirable genetic combination. Chinese men found North Korean women more modest and obedient than their Chinese counterparts.

Tens of thousands of North Korean women have been sold to Chinese men. By some estimates, three quarters of the roughly 100,000 North Korean refugees living in China are women and more than half of them live in arranged unions with Chinese men.

The reality, however, is more complicated. In order to exercise the right of citizenship, North Koreans must get to South Korea by their own volition. A North Korean cannot demand the right at the South Korean embassy in Beijing or at one of the various consular offices. Out of residual loyalty to its Communist ally and also to prevent millions of North Koreans from streaming across the border, China will not permit asylum seekers to present themselves at these diplomatic offices.

IT IS NOT EASY for people earning less than a dollar per month to be integrated into the world’s thirteenth-largest economy. South Korea’s per capita income of roughly $20,000 per year is fourteen to fifty times greater than North Korea’s.

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.

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.

THE SAD TRUTH is that North Korean defectors are often difficult people. Many were pushed into leaving not only because they were starving, but because they couldn’t fit in at home. And often their problems trailed after them, even after they crossed the border.

After a while, as he murmured the words of the prayers, he felt the comfort he had not enjoyed since his early childhood when he recited a poem about Kim Il-sung and had something greater than himself to believe in. Only this time when he said “Uri Abogi,” our father, he meant God, not Kim Il-sung, and when he spoke of the son, he meant Jesus, not Kim Jong-il.

After more than a year of being strung along, Hyuck concluded that his brother was probably dead. “My brother was nearly six feet tall. There’s no way he could have survived,” he told me. One advantage of being short was that you needed less food.

Liberty and love These two I must have. For my love I’ll sacrifice My life. For liberty I’ll sacrifice My love.

The instant gratification of modern communication killed some of the magic between them. Their relationship was one that thrived in the adverse conditions of North Korea. Emotions somehow meant more when they were handwritten on precious scraps of paper and conveyed on slow trains running out of fuel.

often gave him books to read. His favorite was a translation of 1984. He marveled that George Orwell could have so understood the North Korean brand of totalitarianism.

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.

Many analysts expected that the regime would implode from infighting after Kim Jong-un purged his uncle. But for now the young man looks to be firmly planted on the throne, running the country as though it were the Cold War, churning out bombastic propaganda, banning most foreigners from visiting, threatening real and imagined enemies with nuclear weapons and missiles. He is practically the last of the dictators in this mold, a living anachronism.