Mrs. Song left, not even bothering to close the door behind her. She had nothing more that could be taken away, only her own life, which didn’t matter much anymore. She couldn’t understand why she was still alive. She thought she would just keep walking until she could collapse in the grass. She wanted to lie down and die. But somehow, she didn’t. She started another business instead.
THIS WAS A STRANGE side effect of the famine: Just when things were hitting bottom, with deaths reaching the hundreds of thousands, a new spirit of enterprise was born. The collapse of the socialist food distribution system presented an opportunity for private businesses. It wasn’t as though everybody could trek out to the mountains to pick leaves and berries and scrape pine bark; people had to buy their food somewhere and somebody had to supply it to them. North Koreans needed vendors: fishmongers, butchers, and bakers to fill the gap left by the collapse of the public system.
All of it was highly illegal. Kim Jong-il had taken an even harder line against individual enterprise than his father. “In a socialist society, even the food problem should be solved in a socialist way. Markets and peddlers create egoism among people,” he said in a December 1996 speech, one of the few in which he acknowledged the food crisis. Other than vegetables grown at home, food was not supposed to be sold on the market. To sell rice or any other grain was strictly forbidden; North Koreans considered it illegal and immoral, a stab in the heart of Communist ideology. Any private endeavor fell under the rubric of an “economic crime” and the penalties could include deportation to a labor camp and, if corruption was alleged, possible execution.
Then again, death was a virtual certainty for people who didn’t show some private initiative. A human being needs at least 500 calories per day on average to survive; a person subsisting on a diet made up of what could be foraged in the woods would not survive more than three months. The imminence of death gave reluctant capitalists like Mrs. Song new courage.
After the debacle of trading rice, Mrs. Song knew she had to stick to the simplest possible business that didn’t require travel or a big initial investment. Her most marketable skill, her only marketable skill, was cooking. But cooking was getting more and more difficult, as the supply of firewood grew ever more scarce. The hills nearby had turned brown and the tree line receded farther out of reach.
After some deliberation, Mrs. Song decided her future lay in cookies. Cookies needed only ten minutes in the oven; a modest bundle of firewood could bake four or five batches. They were easier to bake than bread and they made a quick meal for hungry people on the move.
Mrs. Song was joined in the cookie business by her youngest daughter, Yong-hee, who was newly divorced—her marriage having broken up after only three months when Yong-hee discovered that her husband was a compulsive gambler. Yong-hee borrowed some money to buy scrap metal and found an unemployed welder from the steel mill to make it into an oven. It was basically a square box, divided in two so that charcoal could burn in the lower compartment while cookies could bake in the upper one. He also made a cookie sheet. Mrs. Song and Yong-hee walked through the markets of the city, taking note of the other vendors. There were many women who’d had the same idea, and for a while Mrs. Song took a job with one of them to watch and learn. She bought samples from other vendors to taste and compare. When she found one she liked, she tried to replicate the recipe.
Their trial efforts were dismal. The first batches were not suitable to sell to the public, not even by desperate North Korean standards. Mrs. Song and her daughter ate their failures rather than waste the precious ingredients. Eventually she figured out that she had to use more sugar and leavening. She added milk to the recipe. The dough was cut in rectangles so it looked more like biscuits—a not-too-sweet and easy-to-digest snack food.
Mrs. Song got up at 5:00 A.M. to do the baking. The competition was stiff and her cookies needed to be fresh. She didn’t have a cart or even a crate from which to sell her product, so she put the cookies in a plastic basin that she would carry wrapped on her back like a baby until she got to a main street with a lot of pedestrians and not too many competitors. She hung around markets and the big square in front of the train station. With her back still aching, she’d painfully ease herself into a cross-legged position on the ground with the cookies on her knees.
Her back still hurt from the accident, so she called out to passersby with the same enthusiasm she’d deployed as head of the inminban to get her neighbors to recycle garbage and collect night soil for the good of the fatherland.
“Gwaja sassayo.” The words had a singsongy rhythm in Korean. “Buy cookies.”
Mrs. Song was a natural saleswoman. People were drawn to her warmth; if they were going to buy cookies, they would just as soon buy from her as from one of the dozens of other women doing the same. At the end of a fourteen-hour workday, she had about 100 won—50 cents—in her pocket, and a few bags of other goods, sometimes red peppers or a few lumps of coal, that she took in exchange for cookies. It was just enough for her to buy food for dinner and the ingredients for the next batch of cookies. She would trudge home exhausted and drop off to sleep, only to wake in a few hours to start all over again. Only now, she wasn’t going to bed hungry.
THOUSANDS OF MIDDLE-AGED women were doing much the same thing as Mrs. Song. They were self-employed. They ran no workshops or stores; they didn’t dare to set up the kiosks that were so ubiquitous in Russia during the time of perestroika. They knew nothing of business other than what they had been taught—all private endeavor was egoistic. 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; young people with more endurance could make the hike into the distant mountains to get the firewood that Mrs. Song couldn’t reach and trade it for her cookies. If you owned a ladder, you could collect copper wire from the electric lines (no danger of electrocution anymore) and sell it for food. If you had the key to an abandoned factory, you could dismantle the machines, the windows, and the flooring to put to new use.
Whether a baking sheet or a wheelbarrow, it had to be made individually, by hand, because virtually no factories were operating. Women cut up scraps of canvas, melted discarded pieces of rubber, and stamped out crude sneakers. Old tires, wooden doors, and wires made a cart for transporting merchandise from market to home.
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.
Doctors, too, found other ways of making money. They didn’t have drugs themselves, but they could perform simple procedures in the hospital or at home. The most lucrative were abortions, which were technically illegal without special permission but were nonetheless a common form of birth control. To the extent that women were still getting pregnant—hunger impaired both libido and fertility—families didn’t want to have children that they couldn’t afford to feed. When Oak-hee took a friend to get an abortion years earlier, it cost 400 won, the equivalent of 17 pounds (8 kilos) of rice, but these days the price could be as low as a bucket of coal.
Dr. Kim wasn’t trained to perform operations. She survived with her pen, writing doctor’s notes stating that patients were required to stay home from work on medical grounds. Absenteeism in North Korea was punishable by a thirty-day stay in a detention center, even though jobs were no longer providing salaries. But people needed to take time off to hunt for food and fuel. In return, they gave Dr. Kim small gifts of whatever they found that day to eat. She cringed at writing the false notes—it violated every oath she had ever made to her profession and her country—but she knew she was helping her patients and herself to survive.
Mi-ran’s resourceful mother stumbled into another business t
hat thrived on adversity. Through the connection of the oldest daughter, she got permission to operate a mill. Unlike her ice cream and tofu businesses, which failed once the electricity went out, the mill was a traditional one, operated by hand. Tae-woo, who had built beams inside the mines, made a wooden shed for the mill. Neighbors were enlisted to help raise the roof. Even Jun-sang, who happened to be home for vacation, came by to help. Once the mill was finished, people came from miles around carrying sacks of corn. It was cheaper for them to buy whole corn and then decide how much of the corn to throw in the grinder, whether to include the stems, leaves, cobs, and husks—or even whether to throw in some sawdust. It was indigestible unless it was finely pulverized, so mills were an important business.
IF YOU COULDN’T come up with anything to sell, you sold yourself.
Even though Kim Il-sung had closed down the kisaeng houses, prostitution had never been completely stamped out, but it took place with the utmost of discretion, through private arrangements inside people’s homes. The famine not only put prostitution back onto the street, it brought out a new class of prostitute—often young married women desperate to get food for their children. They often asked for nothing more than a bag of noodles or a few sweet potatoes as payment. Their gathering point was the square outside the main Chongjin train station. Given the long waits for trains, there were invariably hundreds of people loitering in the plaza. The women worked the crowd as though they were mingling at a cocktail party. Their clothing was drab and modest since the Public Standards Police would arrest any woman who wore a skirt that was too short, a shirt that was too low-cut or tight, blue jeans, or showy jewelry, so the prostitutes signaled their intent with a swipe of red lipstick and a beckoning glance at a passing man.
Oak-hee lived directly across from the train station, where her husband worked. Whenever she saw the women, she’d lower her eyes in embarrassment, resisting the impulse to stare. There was one woman, however, who managed to make eye contact and sometimes appeared to be giving Oak-hee a little smile. She was a little better dressed than the others, more confident, and somehow more professional.
One day as she was leaving her apartment building, Oak-hee found this woman just a few feet from her front door, almost as though she was waiting for her.
“Listen, sister,” she said familiarly. “My brother just came from out of town and we have something to discuss in private. Think you could loan us a room?”
She nodded toward a man who stood shuffling his feet behind them, his face averted. Oak-hee was a little squeamish about sex, but she could recognize a good deal when she saw one. Her husband was at work. Her children were at school. The prostitute paid her 50 won to use the room for one hour. She became a regular after that, not only paying for the room, but bringing candies for Oak-hee’s children.
Of course, it was all illegal, but then again, so much was these days. It was a crime to accept remuneration for any service—be it sex or bicycle repair. But who cared anymore? Everybody needed a scam to survive.
MOST BUSINESS TOOK place at the old farmers’ markets. Even in the glory days of communism, Kim Il-sung had grudgingly permitted the markets to operate with the restriction that they could sell only supplementary foods that people raised at home in their “kitchen gardens.” When her children were young, Mrs. Song used to go to an empty lot near her apartment to buy eggs, which, if she had the money, made a nutritious treat for breakfast. Depending on the season, she might find hot red peppers drying in the sun, dried fish or cabbage. People often brought in used clothing, shoes, and dishes, but it was forbidden to sell anything newly manufactured, which had to be sold at a state store.
During the 1990s, even as the death grip of famine tightened around Chongjin, strangely, more and more food appeared at the markets. Cabbages, radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, scallions, and potatoes were for sale. The vegetables came from secret gardens that dotted the mountains in the countryside. Farmers had discovered their best chance of survival was to dig their own plot into the slopes, even on land that in the past they had thought too steep to cultivate. Attention was lavished on the private plots, the vegetables in rows as perfectly even as typewriter keys, the beans and squash tied to stakes and trellises, while the collective farms were slovenly with neglect.
There was also suddenly white rice, lots of it, in big 40-kilo burlap sacks imprinted with Roman letters (UN, WFP, EU) and the interlocking olive branches of the United Nations symbol and the U.S. flag, which every North Korean recognized from the propaganda posters where it was invariably shown dripping with blood or pierced with bayonets.
Why was there rice in sacks with the flag of North Korea’s most dreaded enemy? Somebody told Mrs. Song that the North Korean army had captured rice from the American warmongers. One day Mrs. Song spotted a convoy of trucks driving away from the port with similar burlap sacks stacked in the back. Although the trucks had civilian license plates, Mrs. Song knew they had to belong to the military—nobody else had gasoline—and she finally figured out that this was humanitarian aid that somebody in the military was selling for profit at the market.
No matter where it was from, people in Chongjin were happy to see white rice, which hadn’t been available at the public distribution center for years.
Every time she went to the market, Mrs. Song saw something that astonished her. Peaches. Grapes. Bananas. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a banana—maybe twenty years ago, when Chang-bo brought some home as a treat for the children. One day she saw oranges, real oranges! Mrs. Song had never tasted an orange—she only recognized it from pictures. Another day, she saw a mottled yellow-brown fruit with green spikes growing from the top.
“What is that thing?” she asked a friend, who told her it was a pineapple.
For the first time, the markets stocked household goods so cheap even North Koreans could buy them. The results of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms of the 1970s and 1980s were seeping into North Korea. From China came writing paper, pens and pencils, fragrant shampoos, hairbrushes, nail clippers, razor blades, batteries, cigarette lighters, umbrellas, toy cars, socks. It had been so long since North Korea could manufacture anything that the ordinary had become extraordinary.
The clothing was also a revelation, an invasion of alien colors from another world. Pink, yellow, tangerine, and turquoise—colors as luscious as the tropical fruits now on the market, in fabrics much softer and shinier than anything made in North Korea. Occasionally you’d see some better-quality clothes at the market with the labels ripped out. The vendors would whisper that these came from areh dongae, “the village below,” a euphemism for South Korea. People would pay more for clothing from the enemy state.
Every time Mrs. Song went to the market it seemed bigger and bigger. It was no longer just the old ladies squatting over tarpaulins in the dirt; there were hundreds of people laying out merchandise on wooden crates or carts. Vendors brought in tables and display cases and umbrellas to protect their wares from the sun.
The biggest market in Chongjin sprang up in an industrial wasteland near the Sunam River, which cut inland from the port through the center of the city. Behind the pitiful wreckage of the Chemical Textile factory, the Sunam Market would eventually become the largest market in North Korea. It was organized much like markets elsewhere in Asia—several aisles devoted to food, others to hardware, pots and pans, cosmetics, shoes, and clothing. It wasn’t until 2002 that Kim Jong-il belatedly legalized the markets. The Chongjin authorities, however, had recognized their de facto reality years earlier and begun to regulate them. The market authorities charged the vendors 70 won a day rent—about the price of a kilo of rice. The vendors who couldn’t afford the rent set up outside the gates, and so the market expanded further, spilling onto the sloping banks of the river. Mrs. Song’s cookie business never rose to the level where she would get her own booth. She didn’t want to pay the rent. But she did become part of a community of vendors who worked around the edges of a market in Songpyeon
, a district west of the port where she moved once she made a little money.
The markets were magnets for all sorts of other businesses. Outside Sunam, along a whitewashed wall crawling with hollyhocks, was a line of crude wooden carts. Their owners usually slept on top, waiting for customers who needed merchandise transported. Chongjin had no taxis, not even the rickshaws or pedicabs of China (the North Korean government thought them demeaning), but people had decided to fill a void by setting themselves up as porters. Hairdressers and barbers trained by the government’s Convenience Bureau, the agency that was supposed to provide all services, set up mobile haircutting services. All they needed was a pair of scissors and a mirror. They worked near the food market, often getting into quarrels with the other vendors, who didn’t want hair wafting into their food. The hairdressers clipped quickly, one eye making sure a razor didn’t nick an ear, the other looking out for the police, who would confiscate their equipment if they were caught engaging in private business. Still, it was lucrative. Women with stomachs growling from hunger would shell out their last won for a perm.
By a market at the train tracks, people set up makeshift restaurants with planks of wood laid across bricks for tables, overturned buckets for chairs. The customers ate quickly, their spoons scraping small metal bowls of steaming soup or noodles. The cooks sweated over cylindrical metal stoves no bigger than paint cans, cranking old-fashioned bellows to fan the fires. It was not unusual to see a woman squatting over the fire with a baby strapped onto her back.