Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

  The state security had converted the clearing by the stream into a makeshift courtroom, with tables set up for the prosecutors and a sound system with two enormous speakers. The man was accused of climbing electric poles and cutting copper wire to sell.

  “The theft caused extensive damage to the nation’s property and was done with the intention to damage our social system. It was an act of treason that aided the enemies of the socialist state,” the prosecutor read, his voice bellowing through the scratchy speakers. Then a man acting as a sort of lawyer for the accused spoke, although he offered no defense: “I have determined that what the prosecutor says is true.”

  “The accused is hereby sentenced to death and the sentence will be carried out immediately,” decreed a third man.

  The condemned man was bound to a wooden stake at the eyes, the chest, and the legs. The firing squad would aim to sever the ropes in order, three bullets in each location—nine in total, top to bottom. First the lifeless head would slump over so that the body would crumple in an orderly heap at the foot of the stake. Neat and efficient. It would look like the condemned was bowing in death as if to apologize.

  A murmur went through the crowd. It seemed Jun-sang was not the only one who thought execution was excessive punishment for a minor theft. The electric lines weren’t working anyway. The few meters of copper wiring the man had stolen probably had gotten him no more than a few bags of rice.

  “A pity. He has a younger sister,” Jun-sang heard somebody say.

  “Two sisters,” said another.

  Jun-sang figured the man’s parents must be dead. Clearly he knew nobody with influence to intervene on his behalf. He probably had a poor class background as well. Maybe he was the son of a miner, like the kids Mi-ran taught.

  As Jun-sang contemplated these possibilities, the shots rang out.

  Head. Chest. Legs.

  The head burst open like a water balloon. Blood spurted out over the dirt, almost spilling onto the feet of the crowd. Jun-sang felt as if he was going to vomit. He turned and elbowed his way back out of the crowd and headed home.

  FOR JUN-SANG, VISITS to Chongjin often yielded unpleasant discoveries about his own country. At the university, Jun-sang was insulated from the worst of the deprivations. He had enough to eat and electricity most nights. Students at Pyongyang’s top universities were among the most privileged citizens in a privileged city. But once he left the academic cocoon, reality slapped him in the face.

  The places he associated with happy memories were all closed—the restaurants where he’d eaten as a boy, the movie theater where he’d first spotted Mi-ran. There was no electricity except on the occasional public holiday, such as the birthdays of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.

  Evenings at home were spent in darkness, listening to his parents complain. His wealthy grandfather in Tokyo had passed away and the surviving relatives were not as generous about sending money to their poor relations. His mother’s rheumatism had gotten so bad she couldn’t walk to the market or use the precious sewing machine she’d brought from Japan.

  It was the same every night. His father sat smoking, the ember of his cigarette glowing red in the dark. He would exhale a cloud of smoke and sigh loudly, the preface to some bad news he was about to convey.

  “You know who died? Do you remember …”

  His father named teachers from Jun-sang’s high school. His math teacher. His Chinese teacher. The literature teacher who was a fellow cinema buff and used to lend Jun-sang copies of a magazine called Film Literature, about Eastern European cinema and the role of film in anti-imperialism. The teachers were all intellectuals in their fifties, who discovered they had no marketable skills after the school system stopped paying their salaries. Jun-sang used to drop in on his old high school teachers on his trips home from Pyongyang; the teachers were always happy to see this student who had done so well for himself. Now Jun-sang avoided seeing anybody from his high school. He didn’t want to hear who else had died.

  The deaths weren’t confined to the older people. Jun-sang’s mother told him about classmates who had died of starvation, guys who hadn’t passed their university exams and had to join the army instead. Jun-sang had lost touch with them, but he had taken comfort in the assumption that they’d done okay during the tough times because soldiers were supposed get the first provisions of food. After all, it was Kim Jong-il himself who proclaimed the songun idea, or “military first.” Schoolchildren were made to sacrifice so that a strong army could protect them from the bombs of the American bastards.

  Jun-sang could see now that it wasn’t true. The soldiers around Chongjin were a ragtag bunch with fake leather belts cinching tight the uniforms that no longer fit their skinny frames. Their complexions were sallow from malnutrition and many of them were only five feet tall. (The North Korean army had to lower its height requirement from five feet three in the early 1990s because of the stunting of the younger generation.) At night they abandoned their posts and clambered into private gardens, digging up kimchi pots and pulling up vegetables.

  Most of the families in his neighborhood had raised the walls around their houses, ignoring a regulation that restricted the height to 1.5 meters so that police could look in. Still, three times burglars managed to climb the wall and ransack Jun-sang’s yard. They yanked out garlic, potatoes, cabbage. Jun-sang’s father had kept careful notations in his gardening journal, writing down the types of seeds he used and the time it took them to germinate.

  “Why couldn’t they at least have waited until it was fully grown?” he wailed.

  Jun-sang’s mother was bereft when somebody stole one of their dogs. She had been raising jindo puppies since Jun-sang was a boy. She doted on her dogs, cooking their food herself. Her letters to him at school were filled with news of the puppies. She couldn’t bear the thought that in all likelihood the dog had been eaten.

  In truth, they were lucky it was only the dog that was killed. Everybody knew that the families who’d come from Japan had money, so they were frequently targets for thieves. An entire family in their village had been murdered in a botched robbery. Jun-sang and his family had to be more careful than ever before. They quickly ate their dinner behind the high walls of their house, hoping their neighbors wouldn’t see that they had enough to eat.

  EVER SINCE HE FAILED to muster genuine tears over Kim Il-sung’s death, Jun-sang had come to recognize his growing disenchantment with the system. Everything he saw, everything he heard or read pushed him further from politically correct thinking. His experiences at the university were also changing him. For the first time in his life he was exposed to new ideas.

  As a child, Jun-sang read whatever he could get his hands on—novels, philosophy, science, history, even the speeches of Kim Il-sung. The bookstore in town sold novellas that told stories about brutal Americans, cringing and cowardly South Koreans, and heroic North Koreans. Occasionally there were Russian novels—works by Tolstoy or Maxim Gorky. His high school was supplied books by the Educational Instruments and Materials Provisions Office and his father had a respectable collection of Greek and Roman history. Jun-sang enjoyed reading about ancient warriors—he loved the story of how Hannibal fought to topple the Roman empire and then poisoned himself rather than accept defeat.

  By the time he got to Pyongyang, he was ready for more modern fare. At the university, behind the librarian’s desk, was a small selection of Western books that had been translated into Korean. They were forbidden to the general public; only top students could have access to them. At some high level of the government, somebody had decided that the nation needed an intellectual elite with some knowledge of Western literature. The books had no publisher identified on the title pages, but the rumor Jun-sang heard was that they were published by the Inmin Daehakseup Dang, the Grand People’s Study House, a showcase national library at Kim Il-sung Square. The collection even included American books.

  Jun-sang’s favorite was Gone with the Wind. The melodramatic style of the
book was not unlike the tone of Korean fiction. He was struck by the parallels between the American Civil War and the Korean War. It was amazing to him how vicious the fighting could be between one people—clearly the Americans were as impassioned as the Koreans. He thought the Americans better off for the fact that they ended up one country, not divided like the Koreans. He admired the heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, for her pluckiness. She reminded him a little of North Korea’s own cinematic heroines who were always in the dirt, fighting for their land, but Scarlett was much more of an individualist—not a quality celebrated in North Korean literature. And North Korean heroines most certainly didn’t have love affairs.

  This was risqué stuff by North Korean standards. Jun-sang wanted to read more. He checked out everything he could find, from Sidney Sheldon’s Rage of Angels to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. He even read How to Win Friends and Influence People, the 1930s self-help classic by Dale Carnegie. It was his first exposure to Western ideas about business, and it shocked him. He couldn’t believe the advice that Carnegie was giving readers.

  Learn to love, respect, and enjoy other people.

  How could a product of the American capitalist system write something like this? Jun-sang asked himself. Weren’t all capitalists enemies who lived by the law of the jungle—kill or be killed?

  Jun-sang also borrowed books from his classmates. At a top university, many of the students had relatives in power who traveled abroad on business and picked up books and magazines. Korean-language material was available in China’s Yanbian prefecture, which has a large ethnic Korean population. Through one of his classmates, Jun-sang got a sex-education booklet that had been published by the Chinese school system. Yet another eye-opener! Junsang realized that he and his other unmarried friends in their twenties knew less about sex than the average Chinese schoolboy. How was he to have known that women menstruated? It explained a lot.

  He was just as surprised to read a speech that had been delivered at a Communist Party congress that criticized Mao for the Cultural Revolution. That will be the day, he thought, when the Workers’ Party criticizes Kim Il-sung.

  One day Jun-sang was approached by a classmate with whom he occasionally had traded books. The student looked around nervously before slipping a book to Jun-sang.

  “It’s a good one,” he whispered. “Maybe you want to read it?”

  The book was a slim volume about economic reform that had been published by the Russian government. The boy’s father had gotten it at a book exhibition at the Russian embassy in Pyongyang. It seemed to have been written in the early 1990s as Russia was trying to build a new free-market economy. Jun-sang realized immediately that he had something dangerous in his hands—North Koreans were required to submit any foreign literature they found to the police. He, the boy, and the boy’s father would be in serious trouble for having a book of this sort in their possession. Jun-sang quickly put it under the clothes in his locker. His dorm room had two bunk beds—four students to a room—so he had little privacy. He made sure to read the book under the covers with a flashlight.

  He read:

  In the early stages, capitalism was an inhuman competition to produce wealth. There was no concept of dividing wealth fairly or welfare for the common worker. Economic development took place in a disorderly fashion. … But modern capitalism has evolved considerably and corrected its previous faults. For example, antitrust laws ensure orderly production, but production that is not controlled by the state.

  The book went on to describe pension systems and the concept of insurance and welfare. It stated that socialist economic systems throughout the world had failed because of their inefficiency Jun-sang found himself nodding as he read along.

  IN 1996, JUN-SANG received his undergraduate degree. Rather than return to Chongjin, he decided to stay on at the university, taking a position at a research department. He was now officially an adult and had the right to leave campus. He moved out of his dormitory and took a private room. It was run-down, dirty, and poorly furnished, but he liked his landlords, an elderly couple who were hard of hearing and had poor vision. They suited Jun-sang’s purposes perfectly.

  Once he had a room of his own, Jun-sang took the last of his grandfather’s money and bought a Sony television. He registered the television with the Electric Wave Inspection Bureau, as required by North Korean law. Since North Korea couldn’t manufacture its own appliances anymore, imported sets had to be fixed to the government stations and then their tuners disabled—a North Korean version of crippleware that would prevent them from receiving any information from the outside world. 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. With radios it was easy—open up the set, cut the conveyor belt attached to the dial, and replace it with a rubber band that could turn the dial wherever you liked. Television required a little more expertise.

  The bureau put a paper seal over the buttons of the television set that certified it had been preset on the approved station. To get around the seal without damaging it, Jun-sang used a long, thin sewing needle to push the buttons. There was a back door to his room leading out to the yard and there he constructed an antenna. He experimented with it at night after everyone was asleep, turning it this way and that until he had what he wanted: South Korean television.

  Jun-sang listened to the television only late at night when the signal coming from some ninety miles away across the DMZ was clearest. He would wait until he was sure his landlords were asleep—the walls were so thin he could hear them snoring. The television wasn’t equipped with an earphone jack so he turned the volume up only until it was just audible. He would crouch with his ear pressed to the speaker until his legs and neck were so cramped he couldn’t hold the position any longer. He listened to television more than he watched it. He was always in a heightened state of alertness when his television was on. The Electric Wave Inspection Bureau was known to pay surprise visits at odd hours. A few doors down, a neighbor had dogs. If he heard them barking at night, Jun-sang would switch the television back to the central broadcasting channel and rush outside to take down the antenna.

  The television inspectors did come. One of them was a sharp-eyed fellow who noticed that a piece of Scotch tape covered the paper seal. Jun-sang had put the tape on to cover a spot where the pin had left a mark.

  “What’s the tape for?” the inspector demanded.

  Jun-sang’s heart pounded. He’d heard of an entire family that was taken away to the gulag because one member watched South Korean television. A friend of his who was merely suspected of listening to South Korean radio was held for a full year of interrogation, during which time he never saw sunlight. When he was released, he was deathly pale, his nerves shattered.

  Oh, I put the tape on to keep the seal from coming off,” he answered as nonchalantly as he could.

  The inspector frowned and went on his way.

  Jun-sang should have been more careful after his close call, but he could not contain his curiosity. He had an insatiable appetite for information, current information in real time. The television brought Jun-sang not only news of the outside world, but more information than he’d ever heard before about his own country.

  Jun-sang learned astonishing things that he had suspected but never knew. He heard President Bill Clinton saying that the United States had offered fuel oil and energy assistance but that North Korea preferred to develop nuclear weapons and missiles. He found out that the United States was supplying the country with hundreds of thousands of tons of rice as humanitarian aid.

  Members of a U.S. congressional delegation gave a news conference and said that two million people had died of starvation in North Korea. Human rights organizations estimated that 200,000 people were confined to a gulag of prison camps and that North Korea had the world’s worst human rights record.

  In
2000, South Korean television reported that the country’s president, Kim Dae-jung, was going to Pyongyang for a historic summit with Kim Jong-il. During the summit, South Korean television broadcast Kim Jong-il’s voice as he chatted with the South Korean president. Jun-sang had never heard the Dear Leader’s voice before; on North Korean radio and television his words were voiced by professional announcers who read his words in the quivering, awestruck tone reserved for the leadership. It preserved the mystique. “What do you think of our historical sights?” Jun-sang heard the Dear Leader saying in a voice that sounded old, tinny, and distinctly human.

  “He’s a real person after all,” Jun-sang said to himself.

  Listening to South Korean television was like looking in the mirror for the first time in your life and realizing you were unattractive. North Koreans were always told theirs was the proudest country in the world, but the rest of the world considered it a pathetic, bankrupt regime. Jun-sang knew people were starving. He knew that people were dragged off to labor camps; but he had never before heard these figures. Surely South Korean news reports were exaggerated, just like North Korean propaganda?

  JUN-SANG’S TRAIN rides home in particular reminded him of a description of living hell he had read in Buddhist scripture. The cars were so crowded that you couldn’t get to the toilet. Men urinated out the windows or waited for stops to relieve themselves outside in the fields, but sometimes they couldn’t make it and had to do it inside the car. Homeless children would run alongside the slow-moving trains begging, sometimes screaming for food. They would try to claw through the broken windows. There were long delays because the trains would break down trying to make the steep climb into the mountains north of Pyongyang. Jun-sang was once stuck for two days in a broken-down train in midwinter with an arctic wind gusting through the windowless car. He befriended other passengers—a woman with a twenty-day-old baby and a young man who was late for his own wedding. Together, they swiped a metal bucket and lit a fire inside, ignoring the conductor’s commands to put it out. Had it not been for the fire, they all could have perished from hypothermia.