Few defectors have emerged from the long-term political prisons that make up the North Korean gulag, so much of what is known is based on satellite intelligence and hearsay.
The most detailed account of life in the gulag comes from Kang Cholhwan’s Aquariums of Pyongyang. Kang spent much of his childhood in Yadok, the most notorious of the political prison camps.
Statistics and some of the terminology used for the prisons come from this meticulously researched human rights report: David Hawk, The Hidden Gulag (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Committee on Human Rights, 2003).
The 927 centers were a cross between homeless shelters and prison camps. Natsios estimates that between 378,000 and 1.9 million North Koreans passed through the camps over the course of a year. (The Great North Korean Famine, pp. 74-75).
Former Chongjin residents have differing accounts of when the purge of the 6th Army took place. Kim Du-seon, the former trade official, lived close to the military base in Nanam and told me in an interview on August 26, 2004, that the largest movement of military vehicles was in the fall of 1995.
The incident is mentioned in the following authoritative study of the North Korean military: Joseph S. Bermudez, Jr., The Armed Forces of North Korea (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2001), p. 202.
The information on students executed for streaking comes from White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, p. 30.
CHAPTER 13: FROGS IN THE WELL
On the reading habits of North Koreans and North Korean literature, see Brian R. Myers, Han Sorya and North Korean Literature: The Failure of Socialist Realism in the DPRK (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell East Asia Series no. 69, 1994).
The quotation from the Russian economic treatise is based on Jun-sang’s recollection. I was not able to locate the original book.
CHAPTER 14: THE RIVER
Family reunions were agreed to at the landmark summit between Kim Jong-il and Kim Dae-jung in June 2000 and commenced two months later. As of this writing, 16,212 Koreans have participated in face-to-face meetings and another 3,748 have seen one another through video links. More than 90,000 South Koreans remain on a waiting list to participate in reunions. South Korean Red Cross figures quoted in Korea Herald, May 13, 2009.
The most comprehensive study I have seen of North Korean defection is Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, eds., The North Korean Refugee Crisis: Human Rights and International Response (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, 2006).
CHAPTER 15: EPIPHANY
As of October 1998, only 923 North Koreans had come to South Korea. See Yonhap News report of October 11, 1998, citing figures from the South Korean Ministry of Unification.
The figures on East German defectors are quoted in Haggard and Noland, The North Korean Refugee Crisis (p. 54), and attributed to Albert O. Hirschman, “Exit, Voice and the Fate of the German Democratic Republic: An Essay in Conceptual History,” World Politics 45:2 (1993).
Information about DVDs comes from a North Korean smuggler I interviewed in Bangkok in May 2005. He said that people brought videotapes into the country in the 1990s, but that the coming of the DVD boosted the business because the disks were slim enough to be hidden under other goods.
The lecture was published by the Chosun Workers’ Party Press, April 2005. A copy was provided to me by Rescue the North Korean People.
CHAPTER 16: THE BARTERED BRIDE
The estimated number of North Korean women sold to the Chinese comes from Choi Jin-i, a North Korean poet and writer who defected to South Korea and was herself in an arranged match in China. I interviewed many women in Chinese villages near the North Korean border as well. “North Korea’s Brides of Despair,” Los Angeles Times, August 18, 2003.
There have been several excellent reports on the phenomenon:
Mucio, Norma Kang. An Absence of Choice: The Sexual Exploitation of North Korean Women in China (London: Anti-Slavery International, 2005).
Denied Status, Denied Education: Children of North Korean Women in China (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2008).
Revisions of the North Korean criminal code in 2004 slightly reduced penalties for illegal border crossing. See Haggard and Noland, The North Korean Refugee Crisis, p. 18.
Nongpo Detention Center is described in some detail in David Hawk’s report The Hidden Gulag. The report also includes a satellite photo of the facility and other prison camps. Former detainees have said that it was common practice to kill babies born to the inmates, because their fathers were Han Chinese. Oak-hee said she did not know of infanticide taking place at the time she was there. She believes it is possible that the practice was discontinued in 2001 before her arrest.
CHAPTER 17: OPEN YOUR EYES, SHUT YOUR MOUTH
The title of this chapter comes from a lecture entitled “How to Thoroughly Crush the Schemes of the Enemies Who Disseminate Unusual Lifestyles,” Chosun Workers’ Party Press.
On the various “planned escapes” out of North Korea, Blaine Harden of The Washington Post wrote, on November 18, 2007:
A low-budget escape through China via Thailand to Seoul, which requires treacherous river crossings, arduous travel on foot, and several miserable weeks in a Thai immigration jail, can cost less than $2,000, according to four brokers here. A first-class defection, complete with a forged Chinese passport and an airplane ticket from Beijing to Seoul, goes for more than $10,000. From start to finish, it can take as little as three weeks.
CHAPTER 18: THE PROMISED LAND
On the South Korean constitution and how it applies to the status of North Korean refugees, see Haggard and Noland, The North Korean Refugee Crisis. They write in their conclusion (p. 75), “If China’s stance has been unconstructive, South Korea’s could be described as ambivalent, even shamefully so.”
The figures on the number of North Korean defectors settled in South Korea come from the South Korean Ministry of Unification and are quoted as well in the above report, p. 54. There was a notable increase in the number of defectors received in 2008, which might be the result of a more conservative government in Seoul. The two preceding governments, under Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, took great pains to avoid giving offense to Pyongyang.
The sociologist Yoon In-jin was originally interviewed for my story “Fleeing to Culture Shock,” Los Angeles Times, March 2, 2002.
On the Hanawon reeducation program, see Norimitsu Onishi, “North Korean Defectors Take a Crash Course in Coping,” New York Times, June 25, 2006.
The figures on the German economies come from Werner Smolny and Matthias Kirback, “Wage Differentials Between East and West Germany,” University of Ulm and Centre for European Economic Research, Mannheim, March 17, 2004.
The most readable book about postwar South Korea is Michael Breen’s The Koreans (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 1998).
CHAPTER 19: STRANGERS IN THE HOMELAND
On the role of Christian activists in bringing out North Korean refugees:
Macintyre, Donald, “Running out of the Darkness,” Time, April 24, 2006.
Reitman, Valerie, “Leading His Flock of Refugees to Asylum: A Missionary Helps North Koreans Flee via China and Mongolia,” Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2002. The refugees featured in this story from Erenhot, China, took the same route through Mongolia as Kim Hyuck.
On the role of religion in North Korea, see David Hawk, Thank You, Father Kim Il-sung (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2005).
On the subject of height, see Sunyoung Pak, “The Biological Standard of Living in the Two Koreas,” Economics and Human Biology 2:3 (2004), pp. 511-18.
I wrote a long piece on the subject of stunting, “A Small Problem Growing: Chronic Malnutrition Has Stunted a Generation of North Koreans,” Los Angeles Times, February 12, 2004.
The height difference plays a major role in North Koreans’ difficulty in adjusting to life in South Korea. Don Oberdorfer writes of an incident in which two diminutive North Korean soldiers, aged nineteen and twenty-three, accidentally
drifted into South Korean waters. They were overheard saying in a military hospital that they would never marry a South Korean woman because “they’re too big for us.” The soldiers were sent back to North Korea at their own request. (The Two Koreas, p. 314.)
CHAPTER 20: REUNIONS
Mi-ran’s cousin was arrested and briefly served time in jail for fraud for falsifying passports. But the South Korean government ended up red-faced when the news reached South Korea that many former POWs and their families had escaped North Korea, only to be turned away by South Korean diplomats in China. South Korean veterans were outraged and the South Korean Ministry of Defense apologized. I wrote about one of these cases: “Fifty Years After Korean War’s End, Ex-POW Returns Home,” Los Angeles Times, December 25, 2003.
As of 2005, sixty-two former South Korean POWs had escaped North Korea across the Tumen River. Several hundred were believed to still be alive in North Korea.
Translation of the Sandor Petofi poem “Szabadság, Szerelem” by G. F. Cushing from the Corvinius Library of Hungarian History, http://www.hungarian-history.hu/lib/timeless/chapter23.htm.
EPILOGUE: WAITING
Eberstadt lays out the reasons he was wrong about North Korea’s imminent collapse in “The Persistence of North Korea,” Policy Review, October/November 2004.
Economic statistics are from the Bank of Korea, Seoul.
Information about the current state of the North Korean economy also came from the following:
Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Programme (FAO/WFP) Crop and Food Security Assessment Mission to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, December 8, 2008.
Stephan Haggard, Marcus Noland, and Erik Weeks. “North Korea on the Precipice of Famine,” Erik Weeks Peterson Institute for International Economics, May 2008.
On U.S. aid agencies, see “Rapid Food Security Assessment. North Pyongan and Chagang Provinces, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” Mercy Corps, World Vision, Global Resource Services, Samaritan’s Purse, June 2008.
On tensions at the markets in Chongjin: Good Friends: Center for Peace, Human Rights and Refugees, North Korea Today, no. 275, May 2009; “City of Chungjin Declares, ‘Do Not Sell Any Items Other Than Agricultural Products,’” “Mass Protest Against Control over Commercial Activities at Chungjin,” North Korea Today, no. 206, April 2008.
Also on market activity, see Kyungnam University, Institute for Far Eastern Studies, “New Restrictions on DPRK Market Trading,” NK Brief, November 15, 2007. The institute quotes from an internal Workers’ Party document it obtained, explaining the need for “a crackdown on markets that have degraded into hotbeds of anti-socialism.”
PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS
All photographs courtesy of the author
with the following exceptions:
photograph courtesy of NASA.
U.S. Army photograph courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library.
photograph courtesy of the U.S. Naval Historical Center.
photographs courtesy of Eckart Dege.
photograph courtesy of Gerald Bourke and the World Food Programme.
photograph courtesy of Lee Jun and ASIAPRESS.
photograph courtesy of Ahn Chol.
photograph courtesy of Eric Lafforgue.
photograph courtesy of Jonathan Watts.
photograph courtesy of Anna Fifield.
photograph courtesy of the World Food Programme.
photograph courtesy of Chung Sung-Jun and Getty Images.
photograph courtesy of Jean Chung.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BARBARA DEMICK is the Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. Her reporting on North Korea won the Overseas Press Club’s award for human rights reporting as well as awards from the Asia Society and the American Academy of Diplomacy. Her coverage of Sarajevo for The Philadelphia Inquirer won the George Polk Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. Her previous book is Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood.
Copyright © 2010 by Barbara Demick
Map copyright © 2010
by Mapping Specialists, Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
SPIEGEL & GRAU is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Demick, Barbara.
Nothing to envy : ordinary lives in North Korea /
Barbara Demick.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-385-52961-7
1. Koreans—Korea (North)—Social conditions—21st century—Case studies. 2. Koreans—Korea (North)—Economic conditions—21st century—Case studies. 3. Korea (North)—Social conditions—21st century. 4. Korea (North)—Economic conditions—21st century. I. Title.
HN730.6.A8D46 2009
306.095193′090511—dc22 2009022420
www.spiegelandgrau.com
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Author’s Note
Chapter 1 - Holding Hands in the Dark
Chapter 2 - Tainted Blood
Chapter 3 - The True Believer
Chapter 4 - Fade to Black
Chapter 5 - Victorian Romance
Chapter 6 - Twilight of the God
Chapter 7 - Two Beer Bottles for Your IV
Chapter 8 - The Accordion and the Blackboard
Chapter 9 - The Good Die First
Chapter 10 - Mothers of Invention
Chapter 11 - Wandering Swallows
Chapter 12 - Sweet Disorder
Chapter 13 - Frogs in the Well
Chapter 14 - The River
Chapter 15 - Epiphany
Chapter 16 - The Bartered Bride
Chapter 17 - Open Your Eyes, Shut Your Mouth
Chapter 18 - The Promised Land
Chapter 19 - Strangers in the Homeland
Chapter 20 - Reunions
Epilogue: Waiting
Acknowledgments
Notes
Photograph Credits: All Photographs Courtesy of the Author with the Following Exceptions:
About the Author
Copyright
Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
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