Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

  On one trip in 1998, when the North Korean economy was at its worst, Jun-sang was stuck at a small town in South Hamgyong province where he usually switched from the eastbound trains to the northbound line up the coast. The tracks were flooded and a cold, driving rain drenched the waiting passengers. Jun-sang took what shelter he could find on the platform. As he waited, his attention was drawn to a group of homeless children, the kochebi, who were performing to get money for food. Some of them did magic tricks, some danced. One boy, about seven or eight years old, sang. His tiny body was lost in the folds of an adult-sized factory uniform, but his voice had the resonance of a much older person. He squeezed his eyes shut, mustering all his emotion, and belted out the song, filling the platform with its power.

  Uri Abogi, our father, we have nothing to envy in the world.

  Our house is within the embrace of the Workers’ Party.

  We are all brothers and sisters.

  Even if a sea of fire comes toward us, sweet children do not need to be afraid.

  Our father is here.

  We have nothing to envy.

  Jun-sang knew the song by heart from his childhood, except the lyrics had been updated. In the verse “Our father, Kim Il-sung,” the child substituted the name of Kim Jong-il. It was beyond reason that this small child should be singing a paean to the father who protected him when his circumstances so clearly belied the song. There he was on the platform, soaking wet, filthy, no doubt hungry.

  Jun-sang reached into his pocket and gave the boy 10 won, a generous tip for a street performer. It was less an act of charity than gratitude for the education the boy had given him.

  He would later credit the boy with pushing him over the edge. He now knew for sure that he didn’t believe. It was an enormous moment of self-revelation, like deciding one was an atheist. It made him feel alone. He was different from everybody else. He was suddenly self-conscious, burdened by a secret he had discovered about himself.

  At first he thought his life would be dramatically different with his newfound clarity. In fact, it was much the same as ever before. He went through the motions of being a loyal subject. On Saturday mornings he showed up punctually at the ideological lectures at the university. The Workers’ Party secretary droning on about the legacy of Kim Il-sung sounded like he was on autopilot. In winter when the auditorium was unheated, the lecturer would wrap up as quickly as possible. Jun-sang often snuck a peak at the other members of the audience. There were usually about five hundred people, mostly graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. During the lecture, they jiggled their feet and sat on their hands to stay warm. But their faces were still and expressionless, as blank as mannequins in a department store window.

  He realized suddenly he wore the same vacant expression on his face. In fact, they all probably felt exactly the same way he did about the contents of the lecture.

  “They know! They all know!” he nearly screamed, he was so certain. These were supposedly the finest young minds in the nation. “Anybody with a functioning brain cannot not know that something is wrong.”

  Jun-sang realized he was not the only nonbeliever out there. He was even convinced that he could recognize a form of silent communication that was so subtle it didn’t even rise to the level of a wink or a nod. One of the university students, a young woman, gained some acclaim when she wrote in her diary about her admiration for the Dear Leader. An article appeared about her in Rodong Sinmun and she won an award for her loyalty. The university students ribbed her mercilessly. They thought she was a freak, but because they couldn’t say so, they just teased her instead.

  “Who’s the lucky guy who will get to marry you?” they asked her. But that was as far as they could go.

  North Korean students and intellectuals didn’t dare to stage protests as their counterparts in other Communist countries did. There was no Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. The level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take root. Any antiregime activity would have terrible consequences for the protester, his immediate family, and all other known relatives. Under a system that sought to stamp out tainted blood for three generations, the punishment would extend to parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins. A lot of people felt if you had one life to give, you would give it to get rid of this terrible regime, but then you’re not the only one getting punished. Your family would go through hell,” one defector told me.

  It was impossible to start a book club or conduct a political discussion. Any free exchange of ideas would invariably lead to forbidden territory. In any group of three or four people, there had to be at least one spy for the various intelligence agencies. Jun-sang suspected that his best friend from high school was a government informer. The boy had been the school’s best student, even better than Jun-sang, but he couldn’t attend university in Pyongyang because a childhood case of polio had left him with a limp. When Jun-sang came home from Pyongyang, the friend would complain loudly about the government, encouraging Jun-sang to respond. There was something bold and contrived in his tone that made Jun-sang worry about entrapment. He avoided the friend entirely.

  He reminded himself: You don’t talk politics as long as you live in North Korea. Not with your best friend, not with your teachers or your parents, and certainly not with your girlfriend. Jun-sang never discussed his feelings about the regime with Mi-ran. He didn’t tell her he was watching South Korean television, and reading pamphlets about capitalism. He certainly did not tell her that he had begun to harbor fantasies of defecting.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE RIVER

  The Tumen River as seen from China.

  THE LESS THEY COULD CONFIDE IN EACH OTHER, THE MORE strained their relationship was.

  In the past, Jun-sang and Mi-ran gossiped for hours about their classmates, their colleagues, their families. As they strolled in the dark, he recounted entire plots of films he had seen and books he had read. He recited poems. He loved her natural curiosity, the way she was unembarrassed by what she didn’t know, which was so different from his striving colleagues at the university. Much of the pleasure he took from reading was in the anticipation of telling Mi-ran about it later. During their long months apart, he would store up his best material, rehearsing it in his mind, imagining the way her eyes would flicker with delight, how she would laugh out loud without the coy gesture of covering her mouth. Now he held back even though his head was bursting with ideas he couldn’t share.

  Not that he didn’t trust her—he felt closer to Mi-ran than anybody outside his immediate family. As other friends drifted away, she loomed larger at the center of his life. What good would it do to tell her anyway? If she knew what he knew, wouldn’t it just make her as unhappy as it had made him? How could she continue teaching hungry children to sing songs that praised Kim Jong-il if she knew how rich the South Koreans were? Why did she need to know about capitalist reforms in China or Russia? He worried about Mi-ran. With her bad class background, she had to be more cautious about her conduct than others. A slip of the tongue would be all it took to get her sent away. When they spoke together about her starving pupils, they used euphemistic language about the “situation” and the “Arduous March.” Anything more explicit could steer them into the treacherous territory of identifying who was responsible.

  The other matter left unspoken was personal. Jun-sang suspected Mi-ran was hurt by his decision to stay on at the research institute after his graduation in 1997. It was harder than ever to continue a relationship with the miserable train rides home and the equally pathetic postal system. Once he got home, the logistics were also daunting. Neither had a telephone and neither wanted to leave notes at the other’s house. In order to make plans Jun-sang would have to arrange to catch Mi-ran outside her house or at the school. During a blizzard, Jun-sang trudged for hours through blinding snow to the school, using railroad tracks as his guide. By the time he arrived, his fingers stinging from the cold, he found out she had left
for the day.

  They saw each other twice a year—during summer and winter vacations. After long periods apart, it took time to overcome the initial awkwardness. Mi-ran had changed. The daring cropped hair she had when they first met was long gone. She now looked more like other young Korean women, with her hair grown out to shoulder length and pinned back. He was surprised to see that she had begun wearing makeup.

  The fact of the matter was that they were full-fledged adults now—he was twenty-seven years old and she was twenty-five. The obvious question of their future went unanswered.

  The subject came up unexpectedly during one of his visits. Mi-ran had attended a wedding party for one of her classmates earlier in the day. After dinner, she and Jun-sang met up behind her house and hiked up to the hot springs resort. It was a clear evening and the place was deserted. They circled the path under the trees and strolled past the artificial waterfall and the reflecting pool. They settled on their favorite bench with a view of the moon over the mountains.

  Mi-ran was entertaining Jun-sang with a description of the wedding and her friend’s new husband.

  “I don’t see why people need to get married so young,” Jun-sang interjected. He had been reading classical Korean poems lately and from the vast repertoire rumbling around his head, he retrieved one about the woes of a young bride.

  If a tiger in the mountains came upon us could it be any more frightening than a mother-in law?

  Could the coldest frost be chillier than your father-in-law?

  Bean pods, even if they burst when you step on them, would never stare as rudely as your husband’s younger brothers.

  No, not even the hottest pepper could be as bitter as the life of a married woman.

  Jun-sang thought the poem was hilarious. Mi-ran laughed, but hesitantly; he wondered if she took it as a cautionary message.

  In fact, Jun-sang hadn’t thought much about marriage, or at least he was trying to push such thoughts away. On the one hand, he couldn’t imagine himself married to anybody but Mi-ran, even though marrying her would dash his chances of getting into the Workers’ Party. Without the party, he had little chance of getting a permanent position at a university in Pyongyang. But that was under the current regime. What if he left North Korea, perhaps with her? What if the North Korean regime collapsed? Jun-sang knew from his late-night television watching that North Korea was the last Communist country of its kind, save perhaps Cuba. Just like the Berlin Wall had come down in 1989 allowing the Germanys to reunite, the Koreas might one day be together. Every time he walked past another body on the street swarming with flies or spotted another filthy child on the verge of death, he felt the end was near. They were living as though in a state of war, tragedy bombarding them from all sides. Under such conditions, Jun-sang couldn’t plan for the next week, let alone think about marriage.

  He was suddenly overcome with sadness for himself and for Mi-ran and the unhappy life in which they found themselves. He hadn’t wished to offend her with the poem. More as a gesture of consolation than anything else, he did something he’d never done before: he leaned over and kissed her.

  At least it was sort of a kiss. It was little more than a brush of the lips on her cheek that trailed off before reaching the mouth, but it was far more physical intimacy than they’d shared before. They had known each other for thirteen years, dating for the past nine, and had done nothing more than hold hands.

  Mi-ran looked startled. She didn’t seem to be angry, just nervous. She stood up abruptly from the bench and gestured for him to do the same.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s keep walking.”

  MI-RAN WAS taken aback by the kiss. Although she had only the dimmest idea of the mechanics of sex, she knew that a kiss could lead to a place she didn’t want to go. She had heard tell of girls sleeping with men and the terrible trouble they got into. There was no birth control to be had. Instead there were expensive and dangerous abortions.

  Unlike her dreamy boyfriend, Mi-ran had thought plenty about marriage. Two of her three sisters were married with children and her high school friends were getting engaged. She had to think seriously about her future. She didn’t think Jun-sang would ever marry her.

  To be sure, her situation had improved. By the 1990s, Kim Jong-il had bigger enemies to tackle than the families who had fought on the wrong side of the Korean War fifty years earlier. Like a childhood scar disappearing under the wrinkles of old age, the stigma was fading. Even under North Korea’s law, once three generations passed, the tainted blood would be diluted. Mi-ran and her younger brother had been admitted to teachers’ college. Her oldest sister’s good looks had trumped her poor class background and she had married well; her husband was a civilian military employee and they lived on a closed military base in one of the few areas nearby where the forests hadn’t been ravaged. She kept the family supplied with pine mushrooms, a precious commodity that they could trade for other food.

  Still, Mi-ran had to accept certain limitations. She doubted, for example, that she or anybody else in her family could ever get a residency permit for Pyongyang. If she and Jun-sang married they would at best live in Chongjin. She would feel responsible for his sacrifice. When she looked at him, so pale and serious behind the eyeglasses he had gotten at school, she worried how he would fare back in Chongjin. He might end up like his mentors, those starving intellectuals who could quote Tolstoy by heart but were utterly clueless about how to feed themselves.

  Then there were his parents. She’d never met them, but she’d heard about them. They would surely throw a fit if Jun-sang tried to marry her. His father might threaten suicide; his mother would feign illness. Jun-sang was a dutiful son, if nothing else. He would never disobey his parents.

  People who came from Japan usually married their own kind, anyway. They would fix him up with a girl who had Japanese money or he’d meet a smart, sophisticated girl at university. Mi-ran’s romantic, poetry-quoting boyfriend was simply out of her league. Face the facts, she told herself.

  She tried to imagine what her life would be like without him. Ordinary. Without poetry. Marriage to a factory worker or miner like her father. Children. Life forever in the mining village or at best in Chongjin. She could feel the walls closing in.

  Her teaching job had turned to misery. There were only fifteen students left in her class, down from fifty when she’d started. She dreaded entering the decrepit building every morning, as the departed classmates cast a deep sadness over the school. The children didn’t laugh the way they used to. Nobody could concentrate on their studies—not the students, not the teachers, who hadn’t been paid since the year after Kim Il-sung’s death. When Mi-ran asked the principal when salaries might resume, the woman chuckled.

  “Maybe when we’re reunited with South Korea,” she quipped.

  Mi-ran thought about pursuing another career. Maybe she could work at the market or find a job at one of the sewing factories. She had worked so hard to get into college, to become a teacher and slip into mainstream society. Now it seemed it had all been for nothing.

  MI-RAN’S OTHER BIG worry was her father. Now in his mid-sixties, he seemed to be shrinking before her eyes. Tae-woo’s sinewy body curved with age and he had grown gaunt. It embarrassed her mother, who prided herself on her ability to provide for the family. Tae-woo spent his days puttering around the house, sometimes starting a project, fixing a table or a cabinet, and then forgetting what he was doing midway. Once so quiet, he now talked constantly to whoever was in the house or to himself. He spoke of things that had gone unmentioned for nearly half a century. He reminisced about his childhood in South Chungchong province and about his beautiful sisters. He boasted about his father and an ancestor somewhere along the line who was a yangban, a nobleman. His rheumy eyes watered during these ramblings. During the wedding of Mi-ran’s third sister, he did something that the family had never seen before: he got drunk.

  Mi-ran’s father had always distinguished himself from other North Korean me
n of his generation by his refusal to drink. It was in fact something of a defense mechanism. In the 1960s he had seen several friends—like himself, former South Korean POWs—get in trouble for talking too much while drunk. But now, Tae-woo felt he could be a little less careful. The wedding party was held at their home. They served Mi-ran’s mother’s home-brewed corn liquor. Tae-woo downed three cups of the potent brew. By the time the guests were leaving, he started singing a sentimental South Korean song from his childhood, oblivious to who might hear.

  I used to hold my mother’s hand.

  Then I let go to reach for the fruit and cake.

  Oh, how I miss holding my mother’s hand.

  MI-RAN’S FATHER DIED in 1997 at the age of sixty-eight. Mi-ran wasn’t at home, but her brother was with him. He reported to the sisters that their father’s last word was mother.

  In the months before his death, Tae-woo had spoken more lucidly than before about his family. He insisted that his only son memorize the names of their ancestors on the family register, a ledger in which Korean families record their heritage. He had been the only boy himself in the family and so his own son would carry on the family line.