Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

  All that changed with the famine. Without food distribution, there was no reason to stay at your fixed address. If sitting still meant you starved to death, no threat the regime levied could keep people home. For the first time, North Koreans were wandering around their own country with impunity.

  Among the homeless population, a disproportionate number were children or teenagers. In some cases, their parents had gone off in search of jobs or food. But there was another, even stranger, explanation. 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.

  The kochebi, the wandering swallows, stood out among the crowds in the station. Just like Hyuck, they wore adult-sized indigo factory uniforms that hung from their bodies. There were surplus uniforms now that the factories had closed, so the authorities sometimes handed them out for free. They called them “social outfits.” Few of the children had shoes. If they did, they would soon swap them for food and instead use plastic bags to cover their feet. They often suffered frostbite.

  In the first years of the food shortage, the children at the train station survived by begging food, but before long there were simply too many of them and too few people with food to spare. “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.

  When begging failed, the children picked up anything on the ground that was vaguely edible. If they couldn’t find food, they would pick up cigarette butts and reroll whatever tobacco remained with discarded paper. Almost all the children smoked to dampen their hunger.

  Hyuck sometimes joined up with children who formed themselves into gangs to steal together. Chongjin always had a nasty reputation due to its street gangs, but their activities took on new urgency in hard times. There was a natural division of labor between the bigger kids—who were faster and stronger—and the little ones, who were less likely to get beaten up or arrested if caught. The big ones would rush at a food stand, toppling everything onto the ground. As they sprinted off with the angry vendor in hot pursuit, the little kids would scoop up the food.

  Another trick was to find a slow-moving train or a truck carrying grain and slit the sacks with a sharp stick. Whatever spilled out was fair game for the children. Eventually, the railroad company hired armed guards with shoot-to-kill orders to prevent such thefts.

  It was a dangerous life. The children couldn’t sleep without worrying that somebody, perhaps another gang member, would steal what little they had. There were strange stories going around about adults who preyed on children. Not just for sex, but for food. Hyuck was told about people who would drug children, kill them, and butcher them for meat. Behind the station near the railroad tracks were vendors who cooked soup and noodles over small burners, and it was said that the gray chunks of meat floating in the broth were human flesh.

  Whether urban legend or not, tales of cannibalism swept through the markets. Mrs. Song heard the stories from a gossipy ajumma she had met there.

  “Don’t buy any meat if you don’t know where it comes from,” she warned darkly. The woman claimed she knew somebody who had actually eaten human flesh and proclaimed it delicious.

  “If you didn’t know, you’d swear it was pork or beef,” she whispered to a horrified Mrs. Song.

  The stories got more and more horrific. Supposedly, one father went so insane with hunger that he ate his own baby. A market woman was said to have been arrested for selling soup made from human bones. From my interviews with defectors, it does appear that there were at least two cases—one in Chongjin and the other in Sinuiju—in which people were arrested and executed for cannibalism. It does not seem, though, that the practice was widespread or even occurred to the degree that was chronicled in China during the 1958-62 famine, which killed as many as 30 million people.

  Even without cannibals or other predators in their midst, the children couldn’t survive long on the streets. The younger ones rarely lived more than a few months. Mrs. Song’s oldest daughter, Oak-hee, who lived in a second-floor apartment across from the station, used to pass the children every day on her way home.

  “Those little ones will be dead by morning,” Oak-hee would tell herself, in part justifying her own decision to walk by without helping.

  Most of the people I met from Chongjin spoke of the large number of bodies scattered around the station and on the trains. A factory worker told me she was riding a train from Kilju to Chongjin in 1997 and realized that a man seated in her carriage was dead. He was a retired army officer and clutched in his rigid fingers his Workers’ Party membership papers. She said the other passengers were completely blasé about the corpse. She presumed that the body was removed when the train reached Chongjin Station.

  At the station, employees from the cleaning staff regularly made rounds through the public areas, loading bodies onto a wooden handcart. They would walk through the waiting rooms and plaza out front, trying to figure out which of the huddled figures on the floor hadn’t moved since the day before. Hyuck says that some days they removed as many as thirty bodies from the station. It was difficult to identify them because often their documents, along with better clothing and shoes, had been stolen. Since it was likely that the family was dead or dispersed, the bodies would be buried in mass graves. This was a disgrace in a Confucian society, where it is widely believed that the location of an ancestor’s grave is critical to present-day fortunes.

  Several such burials near the Chinese border were witnessed by the South Korean Buddhist organization Good Friends, and one by an American aid official, Andrew S. Natsios. He saw what appeared to be bodies wrapped in white vinyl sheets being loaded into a large pit near a graveyard. Afterward, the workers stood around the pit with their heads bowed in what appeared to be a silent meditation or service.

  Hyuck believes his father was probably buried in one of those graves. An acquaintance he met years later told him that his father had lived at the train station for a while in the winter of 1994 and in 1995 he’d entered a hospital. The proud man who vowed he would never steal was likely one of the first to die of starvation.

  ONCE HE GAVE UP hope of finding his father, Hyuck had no reason to stay in Chongjin. He started to sneak onto trains. It was easy. The trains lurched slowly along rutted tracks, making frequent unscheduled stops. Hyuck would run after a train and grab on to the railing between the carriages and hoist himself up with his monkeylike arms. The cars were so crowded the police could barely get through the aisles to check travel permits and tickets. Hyuck didn’t like closed spaces anyway, so he would scramble up to the roof. The trains were slightly rounded on top, like bread loaves. He would find a level spot in the middle where he would flatten himself to avoid the electric lines overhead. With his pack as a pillow, he would lie on his back that way for hours, rocked by the motion of the train, staring up at the clouds moving overhead.

  At first, Hyuck went no farther than the outskirts of the city. He returned to Kyongsong, where he had swiped pears and corn as a boy. It was harder now to steal—the farms were patrolled by armed guards—so Hyuck ventured farther afield. He went back to the orphanage in Onsong. By now, Onsong didn’t look any better than Chongjin. The lush woods he remembered from the orphanage grounds were similarly stripped bare. He knew that only a few miles away from the orphanage, just on the other side of a ridge of squat hills visible from his dormitory window, was a slender gray ribbon of water—the Tumen River—that ran as far as you could see. And on the other side of the river, there was a place where the trees still had bark and the cornfields weren’t guarded by guns.

  The place was called China.

  THE BORDER BETWEEN China and North Korea extends for 850 miles along two rivers, both originating at the dormant volcano known as
Mount Paektu to the Koreans and Mount Changbai to the Chinese. To the south, the Yalu River is the famous line where Chinese troops pushed back U.S. forces during the Korean War. Much of the official business between China and North Korea today takes place across the Yalu, mostly at its mouth near the Yellow Sea. Compared with the Yalu, the Tumen is barely more than a piddling stream, shallow with gentle currents. To the north, it runs a meandering course that delineates the northeastern border of North Korea before spilling out southwest of Vladivostok. It is narrow enough that even during the rainy season, when the waters are high, a swimmer could easily make it across.

  The boys at the orphanage weren’t allowed to play near the Tumen. The entire shoreline was a closed military area. If they got too close while swimming in one of the tributaries they would get chased away by the border police. The riverbanks were flat and sandy with nothing growing tall enough to provide cover. But an hour or two’s hike south of Onsong was a sparsely inhabited area with bushes and tall grass along the banks. The border guards were spaced far enough apart that one could sneak through after dark. The guards worked two to a post so that one could sleep while the other watched, but after 1:00 A.M., often both fell asleep.

  The first time Hyuck crossed the Tumen, it was late 1997. This was the dry season and the river level was low, the sandy banks on either side of the border reaching toward each other like extended fingertips. But the water was icy, and when Hyuck stepped into it the cold hit him like a knockout punch. Though it came up no higher than his chest, the currents kept sweeping him off his feet. He was dragged downstream, so that he ended up crossing on a diagonal. When he finally clambered out on the other side into the cold air, his clothes froze like a suit of armor.

  Hyuck never before had much interest in China—another Communist country as poor as his own, he thought. It didn’t look much different at first glance, but as he ventured farther from the river he could see fields stretching for miles where the corn had been harvested. Little redbrick houses had cribs of husked corn filled as high as the tile roofs and trellises with curling stalks of pumpkins and beans. He wandered into a small town. It was livelier than he’d imagined, with taxis, motor scooters, and bicycle pedicabs. The signs were in both Chinese and Korean. He was happy to learn that many of the residents, although Chinese citizens, were of Korean origin and spoke his language. They immediately picked him out as a North Korean, and not just from his shabby clothing. At fifteen, he was just four foot seven, but his head was large for his body, a telltale sign of chronic malnutrition. When children are poorly nourished over a long period, their heads develop to a normal size, but their limbs are stunted.

  At a market, Hyuck met a man who was selling used dishes, jewelry, and bric-a-brac. He asked Hyuck if he could bring over some irons from North Korea—the old-fashioned kind that would heat up over hot coals. Almost all North Korean families had these irons at home, but people barely bothered to use them anymore—especially since their clothing was all synthetic. Hyuck was able to buy the irons in North Korea for almost nothing and resell them in China for the equivalent of ten dollars each. It was more money than he’d ever seen in his life. With his profits, he went back to North Korea and bought more items to sell. Pottery, jewelry, paintings, jade. He bought a podegi, a cloth that Korean women traditionally use to carry babies. By strapping the merchandise to his back with the cloth, he could carry more than he could in a knapsack.

  Hyuck started making regular border crossings. He learned the spots where the border guards were inattentive, lazy, or corrupt. He learned that it was best to strip off all your clothing before getting into the river. He became adept at keeping his balance as he walked through the water with his clothing and merchandise held high over his head (wrapped tightly in plastic in case he stumbled). He never stayed too long in China because he’d been warned that the Chinese police would hand over any North Koreans they found on the wrong side of the river.

  He stopped stealing. If he wanted a bowl of noodles, he bought it with his own money. He bought trousers, a T-shirt, a blue parka, and sneakers so that he wouldn’t look like a refugee. He was trying to go straight and take control of his life. Buying merchandise privately and selling it for a profit was illegal, and crossing an international border without a travel permit compounded the crime. At sixteen, Hyuck was legally considered an adult, and his misdeeds from here on would be taken seriously.

  CHAPTER 12

  SWEET DISORDER

  North Korean guards stand at attention in Pyongyang.

  NORTH KOREANS HAVE MULTIPLE WORDS FOR PRISON IN MUCH the same way the Inuit do for snow. Somebody who commits a minor offense—such as skipping work—might be sent to a jibkyulso, a detention center operated by the People’s Safety Agency, a low-level police unit, or maybe a rodong danryeondae, a labor camp, where the offender would be sentenced to a month or two of hard labor, such as paving a road.

  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. Satellite intelligence suggests they house up to 200,000 people. Emulating the Soviet gulag, Kim Il-sung set up the camps shortly after taking power to sweep aside anybody who might challenge his authority. Rival politicians, descendants of landlords or Japanese collaborators, Christian clergymen. Somebody caught reading foreign newspapers. A man who, after too many drinks, cracked a joke about Kim Jong-il’s height. “Insulting the authority of the leadership” is the most serious of what are called “antistate crimes.” A woman at Mrs. Song’s factory was sent away for writing something politically incorrect in a diary. The North Koreans I know whisper of somebody they knew—or knew of—who disappeared in the middle of the night and was never heard from again. 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. Since they are not blood relatives, spouses are usually left behind and forced to divorce. Little is known about what happens inside the kwanliso and few emerge to tell their tales.

  Another type of labor camp is called the 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.

  KIM HYUCK WAS arrested shortly after his sixteenth birthday. He was staying in the home of a friend in Onsong, not far from the orphanage, which was the closest thing to a home that he’d known, and he always found himself drawn back to it. He had just returned from one of his many jaunts to China—one trip too many, as it turned out, because his travels had attracted the attention of the police.

  Hyuck was waiting for the August heat to die down so he could chop some wood. Around four P.M. he went out to the yard in back of the house. He spotted a man, then another, watching him. He could see just enough of them to note that they weren’t wearing uniforms, but there was something in the intensity of their gaze that made him realize they were looking for him. He took his ax and walked slowly around to the front of the house, thinking he could quickly scale the wall and run. But he could see there were more men in front. Maybe eight in total. So he stayed put and started chopping the wood, as though the crack of the splitting wood could chase away his own anxiety and still his pounding pulse.

  The undercover police dragged Hyuck to an office building in the center of Onsong. They turned out to be from the Bowibu, the national security agency that investigates political crimes. It was more serious than he’d thought. While in China, Hyuck had sketched a map for some Chinese traders who wanted to sneak into North Korea. This was tantamount to treason under the North Korean criminal code’s Article 52, Betrayal of the Fatherland: “Any citizen of the Republic who flees to a foreig
n country or to the side of an enemy, including the seeking of asylum in a foreign embassy … (or) assists an agency or citizens of a hostile country, by serving as a travel guide or interpreter, or by providing moral or material support … shall be subject to the death penalty.”

  The police quickly extracted a confession with the help of a square wooden stick. They pounded Hyuck on the back, shoulders, legs, feet, and arms, actually everywhere but his head since they wanted to keep him conscious. He curled himself into a fetal position to ward off the blows. They didn’t have their own jail, just an office. They kept him locked in a room so small he couldn’t lie down and even leaning his bruised body against the walls was excruciating. He couldn’t sleep at night and yet by day he felt himself drifting off into sleep or some other oblivion even as he was being beaten. Hyuck had no idea what to expect. For all his misadventures, he’d been arrested only once before—when he’d stolen rice cakes as a ten-year-old. He’d always been the kind of kid who was able to wriggle out of any jam. Now he was being treated as a serious criminal, as an adult. He felt trapped, defeated, without dignity. During interrogation, he babbled away. He would have told his tormentors whatever it was they wanted to know, but all they wanted was to find the Chinese traders and Hyuck simply didn’t know where they were.

  After a few months, they transferred him to an ordinary county jail where the beatings started all over again.

  Hyuck didn’t have a trial, but the national security police eventually dropped the charges of treason against him because they’d been unable to find the Chinese traders and didn’t want to be held accountable. Hyuck was charged instead with illegal crossing of the national frontier. That in itself was a serious crime, punishable by three years in a labor camp.