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.

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.

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.

“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.

To a certain extent, all dictatorships are alike. From Stalin’s Soviet Union to Mao’s China, from Ceauşescu’s Romania to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, all these regimes had the same trappings: the statues looming over every town square, the portraits hung in every office, the wristwatches with the dictator’s face on the dial. But Kim Il-sung took the cult of personality to a new level. What distinguished him in the rogues’ gallery of twentieth-century dictators was his ability to harness the power of faith. Kim Il-sung understood the power of religion. His maternal uncle was a Protestant minister back in the pre-Communist days when Pyongyang had such a vibrant Christian community that it was called the “Jerusalem of the East.” Once in power, Kim Il-sung closed the churches, banned the Bible, deported believers to the hinterlands, and appropriated Christian imagery and dogma for the purpose of self-promotion.

The right to “universal free medical service … to improve working people’s health” was in fact written into the North Korean constitution.

She was working harder than ever and receiving less compensation for her efforts than ever before. She was hungry and exhausted, poor and loveless.

In the past, mothers who couldn’t produce enough breast milk would feed their babies a watered-down congee made from cooked rice; now most of them couldn’t afford the rice either.

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

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.

The result was that the face of the new economy was increasingly female. The men were stuck in the unpaying state jobs; women were making the money. “Men aren’t worth as much as the dog that guards the house,” some of the ajummas would whisper among themselves.

If sitting still meant you starved to death, no threat the regime levied could keep people home. For the first time, North Koreans were wandering around their own country with impunity.

But now she couldn’t deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.

Human rights advocates argued that China had a moral and legal responsibility to the people who had come in search of food and safety, but the Chinese insisted that those who’d crossed the river were illegal “economic migrants” and not entitled to protection under the U.N. Convention on the Status of Refugees, to which China was a signatory.

Everybody seemed to be in on the lie.

When denied nutrition, the body directs its resources toward the head and torso at the expense of the limbs. In famine literature, the syndrome is called “stunting.” A 2003 study by the World Food Programme and UNICEF found that 42 percent of North Korean children were permanently damaged in this way.