Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

by Barbara Demick

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. A good deal of propaganda on both sides of the DMZ is devoted to how North and South Koreans are the same—han nar, one people, one nation—but after sixty years of separation the differences between the people are significant. South Korea is one of the world’s most technologically advanced countries. While most North Koreans are unaware of the existence of the Internet, South Korea has a higher percentage of homes on broadband than do the United States, Japan, and most of Europe. North Korea has been frozen culturally and economically for the last half century. Their languages are no longer the same; the South Korean version is now peppered with words borrowed from English. Physically, too, the people have grown apart. The average South Korean seventeen-year-old male, fed on milk shakes and hamburgers, is five inches taller than his North Korean counterpart. North Koreans talk and eat like South Koreans did in the 1960s.