Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

  The North Korean government accused the United States and South Korea of sending in books and DVDs as part of a covert action to topple the regime. DVD salesmen were arrested and sometimes executed for treason. Members of the Workers’ Party delivered lectures warning people against the dangers of foreign culture:

  Our enemies are using these specially made materials to beautify the world of imperialism and to spread their utterly rotten, bourgeois lifestyles. If we allow ourselves to be affected by these unusual materials, our revolutionary mind-set and class awareness will be paralyzed and our absolute idolization for the Marshal [Kim Il-sung] will disappear.

  Information in North Korea, however, wasn’t spread by books or newspapers or movies as much as it traveled by word of mouth. People who didn’t have the means to watch foreign DVDs would hear about them from others. Unbelievable tales spread about the wealth and technological development of neighboring countries. It was said that the South Koreans had developed a car so sophisticated that it would start only if the driver blew into a breathalyzer to prove he was sober (untrue), and that ordinary Chinese peasants living across the border were so rich that they ate white rice three times a day (true).

  A North Korean soldier would later recall a buddy who had been given an American-made nail clipper and was showing it off to his friends. The soldier clipped a few nails, admired the sharp, clean edges, and marveled at the mechanics of this simple item. Then he realized with a sinking heart: If North Korea couldn’t make such a fine nail clipper, how could it compete with American weapons?

  For one North Korean student it was a photograph in the official media showing a South Korean on a picket line. The photograph was meant to illustrate the exploitation of the worker in capitalist society; instead the student noticed that the “oppressed” worker wore a jacket with a zipper and had a ballpoint pen in his pocket, both of which were luxuries at the time.

  A North Korean maritime official was on a boat on the Yellow Sea in the mid-1990s when the radio accidentally picked up a South Korean broadcast. The program was a situation comedy that featured two young women fighting over a parking space at an apartment complex. He couldn’t grasp the concept of a place with so many cars that there was no room to park them. Although he was in his late thirties and fairly high-ranking, he had never known anyone who owned a private car—and certainly not young women. He assumed the radio program was a parody, but after a few days of mulling it over, it struck him that yes, there must be that many cars in South Korea.

  He defected a few years later, as did the soldier who saw the nail clipper and the student who saw the photograph of the striker.

  IN HER WILDEST DREAMS Dr. Kim never imagined leaving North Korea. It was not that she was ignorant or lacking in curiosity about the world—she was an avid reader and loved tales of exotic faraway lands—but as far as she was concerned, North Korea was the very best country of all. Why go anywhere else?

  Throughout her childhood, Dr. Kim had heard from her father about his miserable life in China before he fled to North Korea in the early 1960s. Dr. Kim felt fortunate to have been born in North Korea and was especially grateful that the government had allowed her, the daughter of a humble construction worker, to go to medical school for free. She felt that she owed her education and her life to her country. It was her greatest ambition to join the Workers’ Party and repay the debt she owed her nation.

  “I would have donated my heart if the party told me. I was that patriotic,” she would later say.

  Dr. Kim was working extra hours in her volunteer job—as an assistant in the party secretariat—when she learned that the party did not feel the same way about her.

  The winter after Kim Il-sung’s death, Dr. Kim’s volunteer work required her to arrive at the hospital by 7:30 A.M., before any of the hospital’s other senior staff, so that she could tidy up the messy office of the party secretary, a female doctor in her fifties, a specialist in hepatitis, who was addressed as Comrade-Secretary Chung. The director’s office was a small room with the requisite portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il and walls lined with filing cabinets. The old wooden desk had drawers that didn’t quite close, so papers spilled out and were strewn across the floor. Newspapers, however, were meticulously arranged on the desk. They couldn’t be thrown on the floor lest somebody step on a photograph of Kim Jong-il or Kim Il-sung. Comrade-Secretary Chung wasn’t much of a reader or a writer; she was completely dependent on Dr. Kim to read the editorials in Rodong Sinmun and the local Hambuk Sinmun and prepare lectures for her. In return, Dr. Kim was confident the comrade-secretary would recommend her for party membership. She even dared to imagine that one day she might follow in the footsteps of her mentor and become the party secretary herself.

  As she sorted through the mess, Dr. Kim noticed a wooden filing cabinet had been left open. Her curiosity got the better of her. A large envelope poked out of the files. She opened it and saw that it contained a list of names that she recognized as hospital employees, all of whom were to be placed under extra surveillance. Comments next to each name indicated what it was that made them suspect. Mostly it had to do with class background—parents or grandparents who had been active churchgoers, children of former landowners, people whose families had emigrated from Japan, people with relatives in China.

  Her own name was on the list.

  Dr. Kim was incredulous. Her entire life, her behavior had been impeccable. She was a perfectionist by nature and held herself to an exacting standard. As a student, her grades were perfect. She was always the first to volunteer for extra work and to attend extra ideological sessions. Her father had come from China and still had relatives there, but Dr. Kim had never met or corresponded with them.

  It had to be a mistake, she told herself.

  Eventually the truth sank in. Comrade-Secretary Chung was stringing her along, exploiting her hard work and talent with absolutely no intention of letting her join the party. Even worse, Dr. Kim began to suspect that she was indeed under surveillance. She felt that the party officials at the hospital looked at her with interest.

  Her suspicions were confirmed about two years later when she received a surprise visit at the hospital from a national security agent. The man worked for the Bowibu, the police unit that investigated political crimes. At first Dr. Kim thought he had come to inquire about a patient or co-workers, but he was asking questions only about her, her family, and her job, until finally he came to the point. His purpose in visiting was to find out if she was planning to defect.

  “Leave North Korea?” Dr. Kim was indignant. She’d never considered such a thing. Of course, she had heard rumors of people who’d left, but she looked down on anyone who didn’t have the stamina to endure the Arduous March and would betray their country.

  “Why would I want to leave?” she protested.

  The agent enumerated the reasons. She had relatives in China. Her marriage had broken up. The hospital wasn’t paying salaries.

  “You! We’re watching you. Don’t run!” he told her gruffly before he left.

  Later, she replayed the conversation in her mind. The more she thought about it, the more that the Bowibu man’s reasoning made sense. He had planted the idea and she found she couldn’t shake it.

  Her life in North Korea was miserable. Her ex-husband had remarried soon after their divorce. Her six-year-old son lived with her former in-laws, as was typical in Korean divorces; by law and tradition, children belong to the father’s family and are listed only on the father’s family register. Dr. Kim could visit her son only on the occasional weekend, when she would fret about how small and skinny he was. Her ex-husband and in-laws didn’t have much food at home.

  She wasn’t faring much better. Other doctors supplemented their earnings by selling medicine or performing operations, particularly abortions. Dr. Kim didn’t have the training or the stomach for such things. Instead she cobbled together meals from her patients’ gifts of food, but after a while they didn’t have much to giv
e.

  Dr. Kim had quit pediatrics in 1997. She couldn’t bear looking into the eyes of starving children any longer. She switched to research, hoping that it would keep her from having to deal with dying people, but there were no conditions in which to do research. After breakfast, the doctors were preoccupied with finding food for dinner, and after dinner, they worried about the next breakfast. She began leaving work early to scavenge in the mountains for edible weeds. Sometimes she’d chop wood to sell. Her weight had fallen below 80 pounds. Her breasts shriveled and she stopped menstruating. From afar, she looked more like a twelve-year-old child than a woman in her early thirties. The first few days she’d gone without eating she’d felt so hungry she would have stolen food from a baby. But after four days or so, she felt nothing but a strange sensation that her body was not her own, that she was being lifted into the air and dropped down again. She was profoundly exhausted. She had no strength to get up in the morning. She quit her volunteer position at the party secretariat and by early 1998 had stopped going to work entirely. She tried various ways to make money—she sold alcohol or coal at the market. She didn’t lament the waste of her medical school training. At the height of the famine, it was enough just to stay alive.

  On one of her excursions to the market, she ran into an old friend. They had been classmates in high school, both of them the kind of popular, smart girls who might have been voted “most likely to succeed.” Her friend had been a class officer. They made polite small talk, telling each other that they looked well even though they were both sallow and emaciated. Then Dr. Kim inquired about her classmate’s family. Her husband and her two-year-old son had died, just three days apart, she said matter-of-factly.

  Dr. Kim tried to offer her condolences.

  “Oh, I’m better off. Fewer mouths to feed,” she told Dr. Kim.

  Dr. Kim couldn’t decide whether her friend was callous or insane, but she knew that if she stayed in North Korea any longer, she would either be the same, or she’d be dead.

  Before he died, Dr. Kim’s father had given her a list of his relatives’ names and last known addresses in China. It was a suicide note of sorts—her father had scribbled it in a shaking hand during the delirium of his self-imposed starvation. At the time, Dr. Kim was offended by the list, but she hadn’t thrown it away. She dug out the little box in which she had stored it, carefully unfolded the paper, and looked at the names.

  “They will help you,” her father had said.

  DR. KIM LEFT FOR China alone. She couldn’t afford to hire a guide or bribe the border guards, so she had to rely solely on her own wits and instinct. By March 1999 enough people were making the trip that you could pick up tips in border towns about the best spots to cross. The early-spring landscape was just beginning to thaw out from an exceptionally bitter winter, and the Tumen was still frozen in spots. Dr. Kim went to a spot that she’d heard you could walk across. Every few feet she would throw a heavy stone to test the thickness of the ice. At least on the Korean side, it was solid. She slid one foot forward, then the next, delicate as a ballerina. She made it about halfway before her stone disappeared into a patch of slush. She followed anyway and the freezing water came up to her waist. She cleared a path with her hands as if breaking through icebergs.

  Dr. Kim staggered up the riverbank. Her legs were numb, encased in frozen trousers. She made her way through the woods until the first light of dawn illuminated the outskirts of a small village. She didn’t want to sit down and rest—she feared succumbing to hypothermia—but she knew she didn’t have the strength to go much farther. She would have to take a chance on the kindness of the local residents.

  Dr. Kim looked down a dirt road that led to farmhouses. Most of them had walls around them with metal gates. She tried one; it turned out to be unlocked. She pushed it open and peered inside. On the ground she saw a small metal bowl with food. She looked closer—it was rice, white rice, mixed with scraps of meat. Dr. Kim couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a bowl of pure white rice. What was a bowl of rice doing there, just sitting out on the ground? She figured it out just before she heard the dog’s bark.

  Up until that moment, a part of her had hoped that China would be just as poor as North Korea. She still wanted to believe that her country was the best place in the world. The beliefs she had cherished for a lifetime would be vindicated. But now she couldn’t deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE BARTERED BRIDE

  North Korean wives of Chinese men, Tumen, 2003.

  IT SURPRISED NO ONE THAT OAK-HEE WOULD LEAVE NORTH KOREA at the first opportunity. From the time she was a schoolgirl, Mrs. Song’s oldest daughter stood apart from the Kim Il-sung idolatry that consumed her nation. As soon as she came home from school, Oak-hee would yank off the red scarf of the Young Pioneers. She didn’t bother to fake tears at Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994.

  Over the years, as her family got hungrier, she grew angrier. She blamed the government for mismanaging the economy and for the deaths of her brother and father. North Korean television incessantly played a song called “The Comrades’ March” (“We live in a socialist country with no worries about food or clothing. / Let’s straighten our chests and look at the world with pride”) and ran patriotic footage of waving flags, which Oak-hee found ridiculous.

  “No worries?” she would snort as she switched off the television.

  But the truth was that Oak-hee’s initial decision to defect from North Korea had as much to do with escaping her marriage as it had to do with escaping the system.

  The marriage had been tumultuous from the beginning. Oak-hee and Yong-su fought like other couples about sex and money, and when times got tough they fought about food and politics. Yong-su always won. If the argument wasn’t going his way, he would deliver a hard slap that would send her reeling across the room as the last word.

  Despite his drinking, Yong-su managed to keep his job as a conductor and apartment thanks to his family’s clout. The conductor’s job was among the most desirable within the railroad. When he was working the routes to the border, Yong-su could supplement his income by carrying goods to sell to Chinese traders. He’d pay 5 won for copper wire and scrap metal to workers who stripped it from their idled factories and resell it for 25 won. At first Oak-hee was surprised because her husband had, in the past, fancied himself something of a party official, even though he’d been rejected for party membership, and liked to deliver impromptu lectures on the evils of egoism and capitalism to his wife and anyone else who’d listen. He would chastise her for flippant remarks about Kim Jong-il. Now he waved away his earlier compunctions.

  “Anyone who does what the party says is stupid. Only money matters now,” he told her.

  Yong-su’s scrap-metal scam made him a relatively wealthy man in bad times. From his trips to the border he would bring home big bags of rice and bottles of soy sauce; for a time, they had stockpiles of corn in their apartment. Whenever Oak-hee would suggest that they take some food to her starving parents and brother, however, he flew into a rage.

  “How can you think about giving away our food at a time like this?” he yelled.

  Yong-su didn’t trust Oak-hee not to help her family, so he would leave only a bare minimum of food and money in the apartment even though his work took him away for days at a stretch and the railroad schedules were unpredictable. In 1998, he left Oak-hee and their son and daughter, then eight and six years old, for a week with nothing to eat. On June 5, a holiday called Children’s Day, their son was supposed to participate in a sports fair at his school. The children were told to bring a box lunch, but the house was completely empty. Oak-hee rushed around the city trying to beg food from her relatives, but nobody had much to give. She finally found her sister selling biscuits at the market and took a handful. She ran to the school at lunchtime to find her son standing in the playground waiting, his eyes filled with tears.

  “
I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” she told him, handing him a small bag of biscuits.

  Yong-su, a former musician, had a nice singing voice and a charming manner around women. Now, with some money in his pockets, he and his friends would pick up women and stay up late drinking. One night, when Oak-hee and the children had been asleep for hours, she heard Yong-su drunkenly stumble into the apartment and then a woman’s peals of laughter. Oak-hee didn’t know if it was a girlfriend or a prostitute, but she wasn’t about to get out of bed to find out.

  After that, Oak-hee began plotting her escape in earnest. It was possible for her to file for divorce, but it would mean losing everything. Although the Workers’ Party gave lip service to freeing women from their lowly place in traditional feudal society, the North Korean system was still stacked against them. In a divorce, the man kept the home and the children—no matter if he had been abusive or unfaithful. Oak-hee would be especially disadvantaged because of her family’s class status and without a father to negotiate on her behalf. Oak-hee figured her best hope would be if she was able to go to China to earn some money of her own. If she had enough for her own apartment, she might gain some leverage to force Yong-su to give her custody of the children.