Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

by Barbara Demick

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.

No artificial lighting competes with the intensity of the stars etched into its sky.

in the middle of this black hole, in this bleak, dark country where millions have died of starvation, there is also love.

WE HAVE NOTHING TO ENVY IN THE WORLD.

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.

The line along the 38th parallel would solidify into a 155-mile-long, 2.5-mile-wide thicket of concertina wire, tank traps, trenches, embankments, moats, artillery pieces, and land mines.

Kim Il-sung took the least humane elements of Confucianism and combined them with Stalinism.

the core class, the wavering class, and the hostile class.

the strength of the regime came from its ability to isolate its own citizens completely.

The very idea of selling at a market was repugnant. This was no place for a proper Communist! In fact, proper Communists didn’t shop, period.

North Korea’s defense budget eats up 25 percent of its gross national product—as opposed to an average of less than 5 percent for industrialized countries. Although there had been no fighting in Korea since 1953, the country kept one million men under arms, giving this tiny country, no bigger than Pennsylvania, the fourth-largest military in the world.

Enduring hunger became part of one’s patriotic duty. Billboards went up in Pyongyang touting the new slogan, “Let’s Eat Two Meals a Day.”

“Things can change,” Jun-sang wrote. “If you want more in life, you must believe in yourself and you can achieve your dreams.”

North Korean doctors are expected to serve the people selflessly. Because of a shortage of X-ray machines, they often must use crude fluoroscopy machines that expose them to high levels of radiation; many older North Korean doctors now suffer from cataracts as a result. They not only donate their own blood, but also small bits of skin to provide grafts for burn victims.

Making one’s own medicine is an integral part of being a doctor in North Korea. Those living in warmer climates often grow cotton as well to make their own bandages. Doctors are all required to collect the herbs themselves;

The most coveted was peony root, which was used as a muscle relaxant and to treat nervous disorders. Wild yam was thought to regulate menstrual cycles. Dandelion was used to stimulate digestion and ginger to prevent nausea.

If anything, Kim Il-sung appeared greater in death even than life.

It is axiomatic that one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. So it was for Mi-ran. What she didn’t realize is that her indifference was an acquired survival skill.

By 1995, virtually the entire frog population of North Korea had been wiped out by overhunting.

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 the “simple and kindhearted people who did what they were told—they were the first to die.”

Now the protuberant belly of which he had been so proud—fat being something of a status symbol in North Korea—had turned into a hollow pouch.

By the end of 1998, the worst of the famine was over, not necessarily because anything had improved but, as Mrs. Song later surmised, because there were fewer mouths to feed. “Everybody who was going to die was already dead.”

People educated themselves. A coal miner, an uneducated man, found a book on Oriental medicine and pored over it to recognize medicinal herbs that could be found in the mountains around Chongjin. He became as good as the doctors in identifying the herbs, but much better at getting out to the remote areas because he was used to physical labor.

Indeed, the place looked frozen in time, as if the clocks of world history had stopped in 1970.

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.

NORTH KOREANS HAVE MULTIPLE WORDS FOR PRISON IN MUCH the same way the Inuit do for snow.

jibkyulso, a detention center operated by the People’s Safety Agency,

rodong danryeondae, a l...

The most notorious prisons are the kwanliso— which translates as “control and management places.” These are in fact a colony of labor camps that stretch for miles in the northernmost mountains of the country.

Sentences for the kwanliso are for life. Children and parents and siblings are often taken away as well to get rid of the “tainted blood” that carries over for three generations.

kyohwaso, which means “enlightenment center,” reflecting the camp’s purported goal to rehabilitate the wayward. These were for the nonpolitical prisoners, people who had illegally crossed borders, smuggled, or simply conducted business. These camps were less terrifying than political camps because in theory a prisoner could be released—if he or she managed to survive.

Starvation was the way the regime preferred to eliminate its opponents.

Listening to South Korean television was like looking in the mirror for the first time in your life and realizing you were unattractive.

He now knew for sure that he didn’t believe. It was an enormous moment of self-revelation, like deciding one was an atheist. It made him feel alone. He was different from everybody else. He was suddenly self-conscious, burdened by a secret he had discovered about himself.

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 Korea has been frozen culturally and economically for the last half century.

Even though he hated the North Korean regime, he found he’d get defensive when South Koreans criticized it.

Guilt and shame are the common denominators among North Korean defectors; many hate themselves for what they had to do in order to survive.

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

His favorite was a translation of 1984. He marveled that George Orwell could have so understood the North Korean brand of totalitarianism.

North Korean defectors often find it hard to settle down. It is not easy for somebody who’s escaped a totalitarian country to live in the free world. Defectors have to rediscover who they are in a world that offers endless possibilities. Choosing where to live, what to do, even which clothes to put on in the morning is tough enough for those of us accustomed to making choices; it can be utterly paralyzing for people who’ve had decisions made for them by the state their entire lives.

North Korea remains the last bastion of undiluted communism in the world.

COMPARING THE STYLES of the two leaders, Kim Jong-un is far more ruthless than his father.

“He is the perfect dictator―smart, pragmatic, highly realistic, and brutal,”

I asked her how many people she thought were still true believers. She lowered her voice and didn’t equivocate. “Zero,” she answered firmly. “It’s not belief in the system that keeps us going. It is belief in life.”

Despotism is back in fashion. Those of us who hoped North Korea would become more like the rest of the world are dismayed that the rest of the world has become more like North Korea.

North Korea remains the only country in the world that willfully keeps most of its population off the Internet, but its security services closely monitor the press and social media in other countries to keep tabs on defectors.

Censorship has become extraterritorial.