Mrs. Song set out with 10,000 won stashed in her underwear, layers of winter clothing disguising the bulges. She took the train to South Pyongan province and bought 200 kilos of rice. On the morning of November 25, 1995, she was on her way home, less than a day’s journey away, with the sacks of rice stuffed under her seat. Chang-bo’s connections as a journalist had allowed her to get a choice sleeping berth in the third car of the train—the first two being for Workers’ Party officials and military officers. It was at times like these that she appreciated the privileges of her rank. The train was long, and each time it rounded a curve, the back cars would come into view just long enough for her to see that the people without connections were all standing. They were packed in so tightly that they appeared to be one dark mass of humanity. Still more people clung to the roof. She had just climbed down from her berth at about 8:30 A.M. and was chatting with the other passengers in her sleeper—a soldier, a young woman, and a grandmother—about the poor condition of the tracks. The train had stopped and started throughout the night and was lurching so violently that they couldn’t eat their breakfast. Their words came out in short bursts of staccato, each new jolt punctuating the conversation, until there was one bounce that lifted Mrs. Song right out of her seat and dumped her rudely on what seemed to be the floor. She was lying on her side, her left cheek pressed against something cold that turned out to be the metal frame of the window. The carriage was on its side.
She heard screams from behind. The train was a cage of twisted metal. The crowded back carriages had been almost entirely destroyed and most passengers killed. The elite front cars somehow were spared. The final death toll from the accident, which took place near Sinpo, 150 miles down the coast from Chongjin, was rumored to be about 700, although like most North Korean disasters, it was not reported.
Mrs. Song emerged from the wreckage with a gash in her cheek, the skin ripped off her leg, and a sprained back. The contents of the sleeper had fallen on top of her, but the fact that it was a closed compartment probably saved her life. She returned to Chongjin four days after the accident. She had always thought of herself as a lucky person—for being born under the loving care of Kim Il-sung, for her wonderful family—and now felt especially so, for having survived the train wreck. She was so clenched in pain that she had to be carried off the train upon her return to Chongjin, but when she glimpsed her husband and even her son, with whom she hadn’t spoken for months, on the platform, she again counted her blessings. No matter that most of her rice had been lost.
Mrs. Song’s injuries proved more debilitating than she had thought. Once the euphoria wore off, she realized that she was badly hurt. She saw a doctor who gave her painkillers and warned her not to get out of bed for three months. She ignored the advice. Somebody needed to gather food for the family.
IN A FAMINE, people don’t necessarily starve to death. Often some other ailment gets them first. Chronic malnutrition impairs the body’s ability to battle infection and the hungry become increasingly susceptible to tuberculosis and typhoid. The starved body is too weak to metabolize antibiotics, even if they are available, and normally curable illnesses suddenly become fatal. Wild fluctuations of body chemistry can trigger strokes and heart attacks. People die from eating substitute foods that their bodies can’t digest. Starvation can be a sneaky killer that disguises itself under bland statistics of increased child mortality or decreased life expectancy. It leaves behind only circumstantial evidence of “excess mortality”—statistics that show higher than normal deaths during a certain period.
The killer has a natural progression. It goes first for the most vulnerable—children under five. They come down with a cold and it turns into pneumonia; diarrhea turns into dysentery. Before the parents even think about getting help, the child is dead. Next the killer turns to the aged, starting with those over seventy, then working its way down the decades to people in their sixties and fifties. These people might have died anyway, but so soon? Then starvation makes its way through people in the prime of their lives. Men, because they have less body fat, usually perish before women. The strong and athletic are especially vulnerable because their metabolisms burn more calories.
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.
As Mrs. Song would observe a decade later, when she thought back on all the people she knew who died during those years in Chongjin, it was the “simple and kindhearted people who did what they were told—they were the first to die.”
In her own family, Mrs. Song’s mother-in-law was the first to go. Chang-bo’s mother had come to live with them shortly after their marriage in keeping with a tradition that confers on the oldest son responsibility for his parents. It is of course the daughter-in-law who carries the burden, so the relationship between a Korean wife and her mother-in-law is often fraught with resentment. Mrs. Song’s mother-in-law had been a merciless critic in the early years of the marriage, especially after the birth of the three girls. She mellowed only a little after her grandson was born, but Mrs. Song took her filial duties seriously and worked hard to please.
Spring is always the leanest season in Korea because the autumn harvest is running out and the fields are being tilled for the next crop. This year, it was especially hard for Mrs. Song, who was recuperating from her train accident six months earlier. Her mother-in-law was seventy-three years old, a very ripe old age given North Korean life expectancy, and it would have been easy enough to dismiss her death as “her time to go,” but Mrs. Song had no doubt that the tough old lady would have lived many more years if fed properly. Unable to work or hike into the mountains, she threw whatever weeds and grass she could find near her home into the soup. Her mother-in-law turned into a brittle sack of bones, with the telltale signs of pellagra around her eyes. In May 1996, she took ill with violent stomach cramps and dysentery. She was dead in a few days.
Mrs. Song had failed in the worst possible way a Korean woman could fail her family. Her despair at the death of her mother-in-law was heightened by the propaganda campaign that autumn that urged all citizens to work harder through the hard times. Posters showed a man with a bullhorn exhorting people to “charge forward into the new century in the spirit of victory in the Arduous March,” followed by a helmeted soldier, a miner with a pickax, an intellectual wearing eyeglasses and carrying a blueprint, a farmer with a kerchief, and a general carrying a red flag. Even Kim Jong-il was reported by the official news service to be eating simple meals made of potatoes.
Now that it was just the two of them, Mrs. Song and Chang-bo decided to move again, to an even smaller place. This one was little more than a shack, its floor bare concrete and its walls crumbling plaster so fragile that Mrs. Song couldn’t even hang the obligatory father-and-son portraits. She wrapped them carefully and left them in a corner. They had few possessions left. She had sold all of Chang-bo’s books, except for the works by Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, which one was not permitted to sell. She had sold her beloved kimchi urns. All they needed now were two pairs of chopsticks, two spoons, a few bowls and pans.
Chang-bo had quit the provincial radio station and took a new job with a broadcasting operation run by the railroad. The railroad had no money to pay him—just a promise that he would have a higher priority for the next distribution of food. But the food never arrived. After a few months, Mrs. Song and her husband had run through all the money they’d made selling the last apartment. Their oldest daughter, Oak-hee, would occasionally sneak a sack of corn from her own home, but she had to be careful not to be caught by her ill-tempered husband, who would beat her for “stealing food.” His family had money, but didn’t care to share with the in-laws.
Mrs. Song still couldn’t hike into the mountains, so she got up ever earlier, at 6:00 A.M., then 5:00, in the hope of getting the overnight growth of sprouted weeds, which might be more tender and easier to digest. She would cook her weeds and bark until they were soft, adding salt to make a porridge and then mixing in a few spoons of cornmeal.
Mrs. Song didn’t feel hungry so much as depleted. After she finished eating, the spoon would drop from her hand with a clang into the metal dish. She would collapse into a heap on the floor without bothering to change clothes, falling into a deep sleep until somehow her instinct for survival told her that, although it was still dark, she had to resume the search for food. She had lost her will to do anything else. She stopped combing the curly hair of which she used to be so proud; she didn’t bother washing her clothes. Her weight dropped so much she couldn’t get the single pair of trousers she owned to stay up over her hips. She had the sensation that she was already dead, floating above the empty receptacle of what once had been her body.
It was Chang-bo, though, whose health suffered the most. He had been an uncommonly large North Korean, weighing nearly 200 pounds in his prime. He was so heavy that his doctor some years back advised him to take up smoking as a way to lose weight. 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. His skin became flaky, as though he was suffering from a bad case of eczema. His jowls sagged and his speech slurred. Mrs. Song took him to a doctor at the Railroad Management Bureau Hospital who diagnosed a mild stroke. After that episode, Chang-bo found it difficult to work. He couldn’t focus. He complained of blurry eyesight. He couldn’t lift the fountain pen he used for writing.
Chang-bo took to his bed, or rather to the quilts on the floor that was all they had left. His legs swelled up like balloons with what Mrs. Song had come to recognize as edema—fluid retention brought on by starvation. He talked incessantly about food. He spoke of the tofu soups his mother made him as a child and an unusually delicious meal of steamed crab with ginger that Mrs. Song had cooked for him when they were newlyweds. He had an uncanny ability to remember details of dishes she had cooked decades earlier. He was sweetly sentimental, even romantic, when he spoke about their meals together. He would take her hand in his own, his eyes wet and cloudy with the mist of his memories.
“Come, darling. Let’s go to a good restaurant and order a nice bottle of wine,” he told his wife one morning when they were stirring on the blankets. They hadn’t eaten in three days. Mrs. Song looked at her husband with alarm, worried that he was hallucinating.
She ran out the door to the market, moving fast and forgetting all about the pain in her back. She was determined to steal, beg—whatever it took—to get some food for her husband. She spotted her older sister selling noodles. Her sister wasn’t faring well—her skin was flaked just like Chang-bo’s from malnutrition—so Mrs. Song had resisted asking her for help, but now she was desperate, and of course, her sister couldn’t refuse.
“I’ll pay you back,” Mrs. Song promised as she ran back home, the adrenaline pumping her legs.
Chang-bo was curled up on his side under the blanket. Mrs. Song called his name. When he didn’t respond, she went to turn him over—it wasn’t difficult now that he had lost so much weight, but his legs and arms were stiff and got in the way.
Mrs. Song pounded and pounded on his chest, screaming for help even as she knew it was too late.
AFTER CHANG-BO’S DEATH, their son, Nam-oak, came to live with Mrs. Song. They had been estranged ever since he’d taken up with his older girlfriend. In truth, Mrs. Song’s relationship with her only son had been uneasy since he was a teenager. It was not that he was outwardly rebellious, it was that she had a hard time breaking through his silence. Now, in the face of so much tragedy, the fact that he was living out of wedlock with an older woman seemed trivial. And the truth of the matter was that they needed each other. Mrs. Song was alone. Nam-oak’s girlfriend’s family was even worse off than his own and they had nothing at all to eat in the house.
Nam-oak had spent his entire youth training to be a boxer, but conditions were so bad at the athletic school that he came home one winter with his ear damaged from frostbite. He returned to Chongjin and got a job at the railroad station through family connections that dated to the Korean War, when Mrs. Song’s father had been killed in the U.S. bombing. Just as they did with his father, the Railroad Management Bureau couldn’t pay Nam-oak a salary, but there was the expectation that he would get priority for food when the distribution system resumed.
Mrs. Song’s son was a strong, fit young man, the spitting image of his father but more athletic, more muscular, and at five foot nine, taller. He needed a lot of fuel to survive. When at first his body fat disappeared, he looked as lean and taut as a marathon runner, but eventually the muscle, too, was consumed, turning him into a cadaver. In the cold winter of 1997-98 when the temperatures dropped below freezing, he caught a bad cold that turned into pneumonia. Even with his weight loss, Nam-oak was too heavy for Mrs. Song to carry to the hospital—there were no ambulances working by now—so she went herself and explained his condition. A doctor wrote her a prescription for penicillin, but when she got to the market she found it cost 50 won—the same price as a kilo of corn.
She chose the corn.
Nam-oak died in March 1998, alone in the shack. Mrs. Song was at the market again scrounging for food. He was buried on a hill above town, next to his father’s grave, close enough that it was visible from her home. The Railroad Management Bureau was able to provide a coffin, as it had for Chang-bo.
BY 1998, AN ESTIMATED 600,000 to 2 million North Koreans had died as a result of the famine, as much as 10 percent of the population. In Chongjin, where food supplies were cut off earlier than the rest of North Korea, the toll might have been as high as 20 percent. Exact figures would be nearly impossible to tally since North Korean hospitals could not report starvation as a cause of death.
Between 1996 and 2005, North Korea would receive $2.4 billion worth of food aid, much of it from the United States. But as much as the North Korean regime was willing to accept foreign food, it rejected the foreigners who came along with it. Aid agencies trying to help were initially restricted to Pyongyang and other carefully groomed locations. When they were allowed out of their offices and hotels, shabbily dressed people were ordered off the streets; during visits to schools and orphanages, only the best-dressed and best-fed could be seen. The government was asking for more aid and at the same time concealing those most in need. Aid agency staff living in Pyongyang weren’t even permitted to study the Korean language.
In 1997 a few aid officials were allowed entry to Chongjin, with even greater restrictions than in Pyongyang. An aid worker for the French agency Action Contre la Faim (Action Against Hunger) wrote in a journal that she was not allowed to leave the Chonmason Hotel, located near the Chongjin port, on the grounds that she might be hit by a car. The agency pulled out soon afterward, reporting that it could not verify that aid was getting to the intended recipients. Doctors Without Borders also withdrew from the country. While big ships laden with donated grains from the U.N. World Food Programme started docking at Chongjin’s port in 1998, the relief was off-loaded into trucks by the military and driven away. Some food reached orphanages and kindergartens, but much of it ended up in military stockpiles or sold on the black market. It took nearly a decade working inside North Korea before the U.N. agency was able to set up a satisfactory monitoring system. 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.”
CHAPTER 10
MOTHERS OF INVENTION
A makeshift restaurant in Chongjin.
MRS. SONG DID NOT ATTEND HER SON’S FUNERAL. GRIEF, hunger, and the accumulated stress of the past few years had
taken hold of her mind and body. She couldn’t bring herself to return to the shack where her son had died. “I left him to die alone, I left him,” she moaned repeatedly. She refused to eat. She wandered the streets until she collapsed.
Her daughters went out to look for her and found her lying in the weeds near their house, delirious with hunger and hypothermia. It was late March, but the temperatures at night were low enough to kill a seriously malnourished person. The daughters were shocked at their mother’s appearance. Mrs. Song had been vain about her thick, curly hair; now it was matted and filthy. Her clothes were caked with mud. They carried her back to the home of the second daughter, stripped her, and bathed her as though she were a child. In fact, at fifty-two, Mrs. Song was so emaciated that she barely weighed more than Oak-hee’s eight-year-old son. The women pooled their money to buy a bag of noodles for her. After fifteen days of consuming proper food, Mrs. Song was coherent enough to remember exactly what had happened and to plunge again into despair over the enormity of her loss.
Three deaths in three years—her mother-in-law in 1996, her husband in 1997, and her son in 1998. Mrs. Song had lost everything, including her Dear Marshal, whose loss she still grieved as much as that of her husband and son.
She finally worked up the courage to return home, to the shack that she considered the scene of the crime; she alone was responsible for the deaths in her family. As she walked, she looked up at the bald hills and saw simple wooden stakes that marked the graves of the recently deceased; her second son-in-law had made markers like that for both her husband and her son, who were buried on the hill. When she reached the shack she found the door ajar. She’d nailed it shut before she left because she didn’t have a padlock, but somebody had clearly pried it open. She pushed the door open and stuck her head in to make sure nobody was lurking inside. The shack was empty. No people. No stuff. The dented aluminum pot she’d used for cooking porridge, the cheap metal bowls in which they ate it, the pair of chopsticks, the blanket in which her son was wrapped when he died—it was all gone. The thief had even removed the glass from the portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, leaving the portraits behind.