Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

by Barbara Demick

So much about North Korea remains impenetrable that it would be folly to claim I’ve gotten everything right. My hope is that one day North Korea will be open and we will be able to judge for ourselves what really happened there.

North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world.

In the past, Koreans were bound by a caste system nearly as rigid as that of India.

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.

And just like the caste system of old Korea, family status was hereditary. The sins of the father were the sins of the children and the grandchildren.

She was a type preferred by casting directors at Kim Jong-il’s film studios: she had a face as plump as a dumpling, which made her look well fed even when she wasn’t, and a bow-shaped mouth that made her look happy even when she was sad.

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.

during the long winters and as integral to the culture as rice. The North Korean regime understood you couldn’t keep Koreans happy without kimchi.

In the past, the Chinese, who provided three quarters of North Korea’s fuel and two thirds of its food imports, used to say they were close as “lips and teeth” to North Korea; now they wanted cash up front.

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.”

But out of hunger and desperation, they were reinventing the concept of a free-market economy, which required unlearning a lifetime of propaganda. They had figured out that there was value in bartering skills;

“Charity begins with a full stomach,” the North Koreans like to say; you can’t feed somebody else’s kids if your own are starving.

North Koreans joked that they were like “frogs in the well.” The world for them extended no further than the circle of light above their heads. Tech-savvy types had figured out how to get around the system.

Mrs. Song was debriefed for two hours every morning, after which she had to write out notes of what had been discussed. She was asked to detail the location of major landmarks in Chongjin—the offices of the Workers’ Party, the security offices, the boundaries of the gu and dong, the districts and neighborhoods into which all Korean cities are organized. She found that she actually enjoyed the debriefing sessions: they gave her a chance to reflect on her life.

“When I see a good meal like this, it makes me cry,” Mrs. Song apologized one night as we sat around a steaming pot of shabu-shabu, thinly sliced beef cooked in broth and dipped in a sesame sauce. “I can’t helping thinking of his last words, ‘Let’s go to a good restaurant and order a nice bottle of wine.’”

Unlike the reclusive Kim Jong-il, the new leader liked to strut about for the cameras with his wife on his arm, she often wearing Chanel-style tailored suits.

Once, at the statue, I observed a delegation of soldiers in their crisp, pressed uniforms proffering bouquets of flowers. When they bowed down low to show their respect, their pants hitched up just enough to reveal that they wore no socks.

“They always say things are tough,” said Mrs. Song, who used to speak to her older siblings living in Chongjin a few times a year. “‘Send more money.’ ”