Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

  Mi-ran regretted that she hadn’t asked Jun-sang what was going on—she hadn’t mentioned it because she didn’t want to ruin their few hours together—but now, back at home, she started noticing things she hadn’t before. She had remarked when she first came to the kindergarten on the small size of her pupils; now they looked like they were growing younger, time turning backward, like a movie reel run in reverse. Each child was supposed to bring from home a bundle of firewood for the furnace in the school basement but many had trouble carrying it. Their big heads lolled on top of scrawny necks; their delicate rib cages protruded over waists so small that she could encircle them with her hands. Some of them were starting to swell in the stomach. It was all becoming clear to her. Mi-ran remembered seeing a photograph of a famine victim in Somalia with a protruding stomach; although she didn’t know the medical terminology, she remembered from her teachers’ college course on nutrition that it was caused by severe protein deficiency. Mi-ran also noticed that the children’s black hair was getting lighter, more copper-toned.

  The school cafeteria had closed for lack of food. The students were instructed to bring a lunch box from home, but many came empty-handed. When it was only one or two who didn’t have lunch, Mi-ran would take one spoon each from those with to give to those without. But soon the parents who sent lunch came in to complain.

  “We don’t have enough at home to share,” pleaded one mother.

  Mi-ran heard a rumor that the school might get some biscuits and powdered milk from a foreign humanitarian aid agency. A delegation was visiting another school in the area and the children with the best clothing were brought out, the road leading to the school repaired, the building and courtyards swept immaculately clean. But no foreign aid arrived. Instead, the teachers were given a small plot of land nearby on which they were ordered to grow corn. The corn was later scraped off the cob and boiled until it puffed up like popcorn. It was a snack to ease the children’s hunger pangs, but it didn’t provide enough calories to make a difference.

  The teachers weren’t supposed to play favorites, but Mi-ran definitely had one. The girl was named Hye-ryung (Shining Benevolence), and even at the age of six she was the class beauty. She had the longest eyelashes Mi-ran had ever seen on a child and they surrounded bright round eyes. In the beginning, she was a lively, attentive student, one of the ones who delighted Mi-ran by the way she stared adoringly at her teacher as though trying to capture every word. Now she was lethargic and sometimes fell asleep in class.

  “Wake up. Wake up,” Mi-ran called out to her one day when she saw the girl slumped over her desk, her head turned so that her cheek pressed against the wooden desk.

  Mi-ran cupped her hands under the girl’s chin and held up her face. Her eyes had narrowed to slits sunken beneath swollen lids. She was unfocused. The hair spilling out around Mi-ran’s hands was brittle and unpleasant to the touch.

  A few days later, the girl stopped coming to school. Since Mi-ran knew her family from the neighborhood, she thought she should stop by the home to ask after her. But somehow she held back. What was the point? She knew exactly what was wrong with Hye-ryung. She had no way of fixing it.

  Too many others in her class were in the same situation. They’d flop over their desks during lessons. At recess, when others went scampering out to the monkey bars and swings, they stayed put, either sleeping at their desks or stretched out on the nap-time mats.

  Always the same progression: first, the family wouldn’t be able to send the quota of firewood; then the lunch bag would disappear; then the child would stop participating in class and would sleep through recess; then, without explanation, the child would stop coming to school. Over three years, enrollment in the kindergarten dropped from fifty students to fifteen.

  What happened to those children? Mi-ran didn’t pry too deeply for fear of the answer she didn’t want to hear.

  THE NEXT TIME MI-RAN saw Jun-sang it was winter. It was his turn to surprise her. He had come home from school early for vacation. Rather than dropping by her house and risking an encounter with her parents, he came to the kindergarten. School had let out for the day, but she was still there, cleaning the classroom.

  The classroom had no adult chairs, so Mi-ran folded herself into the little chair behind the wooden desk where her favorite pupil was so easily able to wedge her tiny body. She told Jun-sang what was happening to her students. He tried to reassure her.

  “What can you do?” he said. “Even a king couldn’t help these people. Don’t take it all on your shoulders.”

  The conversation was awkward, as they talked around the embarrassing truth. Neither was suffering for lack of food. What Jun-sang’s father couldn’t grow in his vegetable patch next to the house, they bought on the black market with their stash of Japanese yen. Oddly enough, Mi-ran was eating better than she had in years, a result of having left the college dormitory for her parents’ home. In the midst of the economic crisis, somehow the family’s poor class standing didn’t matter so much. Mi-ran’s gorgeous eldest sister had married surprisingly well, her good looks trumping the troubled family background. Her husband was in the military and used his connections to help the rest of the family. Mi-ran’s mother continued to find new ways to make money. After the electricity went out, she couldn’t operate the freezer she used for her soy-milk ice cream, but she started a few other businesses—raising pigs, making tofu, grinding corn.

  A DECADE LATER, when Mi-ran was a mother herself, trying to lose her postpregnancy weight through aerobics, this period of her life weighed like a stone on her conscience. She often felt sick over what she did and didn’t do to help her young students. How could she have eaten so well herself when they were starving?

  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. In order to get through the 1990s alive, one had to suppress any impulse to share food. To avoid going insane, one had to learn to stop caring. In time, Mi-ran would learn how to walk around a dead body on the street without paying much notice. She could pass a five-year-old on the verge of death without feeling obliged to help. If she wasn’t going to share her food with her favorite pupil, she certainly wasn’t going to help a perfect stranger.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE GOOD DIE FIRST

  Propaganda poster for the Arduous March.

  IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT PEOPLE REARED IN COMMUNIST COUNTRIES cannot fend for themselves because they expect the government to take care of them. This was not true of many of the victims of the North Korean famine. People did not go passively to their deaths. When the public distribution system was cut off, they were forced to tap their deepest wells of creativity to feed themselves. They devised traps out of buckets and string to catch small animals in the field, draped nets over their balconies to snare sparrows. They educated themselves in the nutritive properties of plants. They reached back into their collective memory of famines past and recalled the survival tricks of their forefathers. They stripped the sweet inner bark of pine trees to grind into a fine powder that could be used in place of flour. They pounded acorns into a gelatinous paste that could be molded into cubes that practically melted in your mouth.

  North Koreans learned to swallow their pride and hold their noses. They picked kernels of undigested corn out of the excrement of farm animals. Shipyard workers developed a technique by which they scraped the bottoms of the cargo holds where food had been stored, then spread the foul-smelling gunk on the pavement to dry so that they could collect from it tiny grains of uncooked rice and other edibles.

  On the beaches, people dug out shellfish from the sand and filled buckets with seaweed. When the authorities in 1995 erected fences along the beach (ostensibly to keep out spies, but more likely to prevent people from catching fish the state companies wanted to control), people went out to the unguarded cliffs over the sea and with long rakes tied together hoisted up seaweed.

 
Nobody told people what to do—the North Korean government didn’t want to admit to the extent of the food shortage—so they fended for themselves. Women exchanged recipe tips. When making cornmeal, don’t throw out the husk, cob, leaves, and stem of the corn—throw it all into the grinder. Even if it isn’t nutritious, it is filling. Boil noodles for at least an hour to make them appear bigger. Add a few leaves of grass to soup to make it look as if it contains vegetables. Powder pine bark to make cakes.

  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.

  AFTER THE GARMENT FACTORY CLOSED, Mrs. Song floundered, wondering what to do with herself. She was still a good Communist with a natural dislike of anything that reeked of capitalism. Her beloved marshal, Kim Il-sung, had warned repeatedly that socialists must “guard against the poisonous ideas of capitalism and revisionism.” She liked to quote that particular saying.

  Then again, nobody in the family had gotten paid since the Great Leader’s death—not even her husband, with his party membership and prestigious job at the radio station. Chang-bo wasn’t even getting the free wine and tobacco that were the customary perks of a journalist. Mrs. Song knew it was time to put aside her scruples and make money. But how?

  She was about as unlikely an entrepreneur as one could imagine. She was fifty years old and had no business skills other than the ability to tally numbers on the abacus. When she mulled this predicament with her family, however, they reminded her of her talents in the kitchen. Back in the days when you could get ingredients, Mrs. Song enjoyed cooking, and Chang-bo liked to eat. Her repertoire was naturally limited in that North Koreans had no exposure to foreign cuisines, but their own was surprisingly sophisticated for a country whose name is now synonymous with famine. (In fact, many restaurateurs in South Korea come from north of the border.) North Korean cooks are creative, using natural ingredients such as pine mushrooms and seaweed. Whatever happens to be fresh and seasonal is mixed with rice, barley, or corn, and seasoned with red bean paste or chilies. 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. If she was busy, Mrs. Song bought noodles from a shop; if not, she made them from scratch. Using the limited range of ingredients from the public distribution system, she could make twigim, batter-fried vegetables that were light and crisp. For her husband’s birthday, she turned rice into a sweet glutinous cake called deok. She knew how to make her own corn liquor. Her daughters boasted that her kimchi was the best in the neighborhood.

  Her family urged her to make her first stab at business in the kitchen and that the best product would be tofu, a good source of protein in difficult times. Tofu is widely used in Korean cooking, in soups or stews, fried crispy or fermented. Mrs. Song would use it in place of fish, sautéing it with oil and red pepper. In order to raise the money to buy soybeans, the family started selling their possessions. The first to go was their prized television—the Japanese model they’d gotten thanks to Chang-bo’s father’s intelligence service during the Korean War.

  Making tofu is relatively easy, if labor-intensive. Soybeans are boiled, then ground, and a coagulating agent is added. Then, like cheese, it is squeezed through a cloth. Afterward, you are left with a watery milk and the husks of the soybeans. Mrs. Song thought it might be a good idea to complement her tofu business by raising pigs, which she could feed with the residue from the tofu. Behind their apartment building was a row of sheds used for storage. Mrs. Song bought a litter of piglets at the market and installed them in one of the sheds, securing the door with a big padlock.

  For a few months, the business plan was a success. Mrs. Song converted her tiny kitchen into a tofu factory, boiling big vats of soybeans on the ondol stove in the apartment. Chang-bo tasted her recipes and approved. The piglets grew fatter on the bean husks and soy milk and whatever grass Mrs. Song could clip for them each morning, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to get wood and coal to fuel the stove. The electricity was working only a few hours a week, and even then its use was restricted to a single 60-watt light-bulb, a television, or a radio.

  Without fuel to cook the soybeans, Mrs. Song couldn’t make tofu. Without the tofu, she had nothing to feed the hungry pigs. It took hours for her to pick enough grass to satisfy them.

  “Listen, we might as well eat the grass ourselves,” she told Chang-bo, mostly in jest. Then she thought about it a bit and added, “If it doesn’t poison the pigs, it won’t poison us.”

  So they began their grim new regimen, quite a fall from grace for a couple who had fancied themselves gourmets. Mrs. Song would hike north and west from the city center to where the landscape hadn’t yet been paved, carrying a kitchen knife and a basket to collect edible weeds and grass. If you got out to the mountains, you could maybe find dandelion or other weeds so tasty that people ate them even in good times. Occasionally, Mrs. Song would find rotten cabbage leaves that had been discarded by a farmer. She would take the day’s pickings home and mix it with whatever food she had enough money to buy. Usually, it was ground cornmeal—the cheap kind made from the husks and cobs. If she couldn’t afford that, she would buy a still cheaper powder made out of the ground inner bark of the pine, sometimes extended with a little sawdust.

  No talent in the kitchen could disguise the god-awful taste. She had to pound away and chop endlessly to get the grasses and the barks into a soft-enough pulp to be digestible. They didn’t have enough substance to be molded into a recognizable shape like a noodle or cake that might fool a person into thinking he was eating real food. All she could make was a porridge that was flavorless and textureless. The only seasoning she had was salt. A little garlic or red pepper might have disguised the terrible taste of the food, but they were too expensive. Oils were unavailable at any price and their complete absence made cooking difficult. Once while visiting her sister’s sister-in-law for lunch, Mrs. Song was served a porridge made out of bean and corn stalks. Hungry as she was, she couldn’t swallow it. The stalks were bitter and dry, and stuck in her throat like the twigs of a bird’s nest. She gagged, turned beet red, and spat it out. She was mortified.

  In the year after Kim Il-sung’s death the only animal product she consumed was frog. Her brothers had caught some in the countryside. Mrs. Song’s sister-in-law stir-fried the frogs in soy sauce, chopped them into small pieces, and served them over noodles. Mrs. Song pronounced it delicious. Frog wasn’t typically part of Korean cuisine; Mrs. Song had never tried it before. Unfortunately, it would be her last opportunity. By 1995, virtually the entire frog population of North Korea had been wiped out by overhunting.

  By the middle of 1995, Mrs. Song and her husband had sold most of their valuable possessions for food. After the television went the used Japanese bicycle that was their main means of transportation, and then the sewing machine with which Mrs. Song had made their clothes. Chang-bo’s watch was gone, as was an Oriental painting given to them as a wedding present. They sold most of their clothes and then the wooden wardrobe in which they stored them. The two-room apartment that had always seemed too small to contain the family and its clutter was now empty, the walls entirely bare except for the portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. The only thing left to sell was the apartment itself.

  This was an odd concept. In North Korea, you don’t own your own home; you are merely awarded the right to live there. But an illegal real estate market had cropped up as people quietly swapped homes, paying off bureaucrats to look the other way. Mrs. Song was introduced to a woman whose husband was one of a number of North Korean workers who had been sent to work in the lumberyards in Russia and who therefore had some disposable income to spend on a better apartment.

  Mrs. Song’s apartmen
t was in an excellent location in the heart of the city, which was ever more important now that the trolleys weren’t working. Mrs. Song and Chang-bo had lived there for twenty years and had many friends—it was indeed a tribute to Mrs. Song’s good nature that she had run the inminban for so many years without making enemies. She and Chang-bo agreed they didn’t need so much space anymore. It was just the two of them and Chang-bo’s mother. The girls were all married. Their son had moved in with his girlfriend, the older woman of whom Mrs. Song disapproved. It was a disgrace, she thought, but at least it was one less mouth to feed.

  The apartment fetched 10,000 won—the equivalent of about $3,000 on the official exchange rate. They moved to a single room. Mrs. Song decided she would use the money for another business venture: trading rice.

  Rice is the staple of the Korean diet—in fact, the same word, bap, means rice or a meal. After 1995, Chongjin residents could get rice only if they had cash to buy it on the black market. North Hamgyong province was too cold and mountainous for rice paddies. With the exception of a small marshy inlet near Nanam, all the rice consumed in the city had to be transported in by train or truck, which jacked up the price since the road and rail lines were in such bad shape. Mrs. Song figured she could buy rice down the coast where it was cheaper, and carry it up by train. Trading rice—or any staple grain, for that matter—was highly illegal (sales of vegetables and meat were more tolerable to the government), but since everybody was doing it, Mrs. Song decided it would be okay to join in. She’d make a small profit and keep some rice for herself and Chang-bo. Her mouth watered at the thought. They hadn’t had a proper bowl of rice since 1994. Corn was half the price.