Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

  Mrs. Song tried to live her life according to Kim Il-sung’s teachings, which she had memorized during all those evenings in the factory’s study hall. Even her everyday conversation was peppered with their aphorisms. “Loyalty and filial devotion are the supreme qualities of a revolutionary” was a particularly handy quote for taming a rebellious child. The children were never to forget that they owed everything to the national leadership. Like other North Korean children, they didn’t celebrate their own birthdays, but those of Kim Il-sung on April 15 and Kim Jong-il on February 16. These days were national holidays and they were often the only days people would get meat in their ration packages. Later, after the energy crisis began, these were the only days there was electricity. A few days before each birthday, the Workers’ Party would distribute to every child more than two pounds of sweets. It was a truly impressive gift for kids, all kinds of cookies, jellies, chocolates, and chewing gums. These treats weren’t to be eaten until the day of the birthday, but some mothers ignored that, though Mrs. Song went by the book. When the time came, the children lined up in front of the portraits to express their gratitude. In unison, they would bend from the waist, bowing deeply, with feeling.

  “Thank you, dear father Kim Il-sung,” the children repeated as their mother looked on with satisfaction.

  Years later, Mrs. Song looked back at this time with nostalgia. She considered herself lucky. Chang-bo proved to be a good husband. He didn’t sleep around. He didn’t hit Mrs. Song or the children. He enjoyed his drink, but was a cheerful drunk, cracking jokes as the laughter rippled down his increasingly ample belly. They were a happy family full of love. Mrs. Song loved her three daughters, her son, her husband, and, at times, even her mother-in-law. And she loved Kim Il-sung.

  Mrs. Song would take away from those years a few cherished memories. There was the very occasional Sunday when neither she nor Chang-bo reported to work, when the children were not in school and they could spend time together as a family. Twice, in those years, they managed to go to the beach, which was only a few miles from their apartment. Nobody in the family could swim, but they walked on the sand, picking up clams, which they took home and steamed for dinner. Once, when her son was eleven years old, she took him to Chongjin’s zoo. It was a place she had visited on a school trip. She remembered seeing tigers, elephants, bears, and a wolf when she’d gone as a child, but now there were only a few birds left. Mrs. Song never went back.

  The complications began when Mrs. Song’s children reached adolescence. The most difficult of the four was her oldest daughter. Oak-hee was the spitting image of Mrs. Song—she was built compact and round, buxom and pretty. But on Oak-hee the same plump lips were fixed in a petulant pout. Her personality was all sharp edges. Instead of her mother’s forgiving nature, she had a keen sense of outrage and seemed permanently aggrieved. As the oldest daughter of a working mother absent from the house from dawn until late at night, Oak-hee had to assume much of the housework, and she didn’t do it cheerfully. Oak-hee wasn’t a martyr like her mother. She couldn’t tolerate the small stupidities that made life so grueling. It wasn’t that she was lazy so much as rebellious. She refused to do anything she thought pointless.

  She complained about the “volunteer work” that North Korean teenagers were expected to perform out of their patriotic duty. Starting at the age of twelve, kids were mobilized in battalions and sent out to the countryside for rice planting and transplanting and weeding. She dreaded springtime, when she had to hoist buckets of soil and spray pesticides that stung her eyes. While the other kids were cheerfully singing “Let Us Safeguard Socialism” as they marched, Oak-hee glowered in silence.

  The absolute worst was when it came to collecting “night soil” from the toilets in the apartment building. North Korea was chronically short of chemical fertilizer and needed to use human excrement since there were few farm animals. Each family had to provide a bucketful each week, delivered to a warehouse miles away. In exchange, you were given a chit certifying that you’d done your duty and that chit would later be traded for food. This foul-smelling chore was usually assigned to the older children, so Oak-hee set her considerable imagination to finding a short cut. Actually, it turned out to be easy to cheat. The warehouse where the full buckets were submitted was not guarded (after all, who wanted to steal a bucket of shit?). Oak-hee figured out that she could sneak in, grab a full bucket, and then submit it as her own and collect her chit.

  Oak-hee cheerfully boasted about the ruse when she got home. Mrs. Song was furious over the deception. She’d always known that Oak-hee was the most clever of her four children—she could read by the age of three and impressed their relatives by memorizing long passages from Kim Il-sung’s writings. But the incident with the night soil confirmed her mother’s fears that Oak-hee was an individualist who lacked the collective spirit. How was she to survive in a society where everybody was supposed to march in step?

  After Oak-hee finished high school, Mrs. Song’s husband used his connections to get her a job with a construction company’s propaganda department. Oak-hee had to write up reports about work teams that were exceeding their quotas and the remarkable progress that the company was making building roads. The company had its own sound truck, actually a broken-down army van with slogans plastered on its side (“Let us model the whole society on the juche idea”). As the truck cruised by construction sites, Oak-hee would take the microphone and read her reports, broadcasting the achievements of the company through screechy loudspeakers. It was a fun job that didn’t require any heavy lifting and, like any position in the propaganda department, carried some prestige.

  Mrs. Song and her husband sought to further secure Oak-hee’s future by finding her a suitable husband in the Workers’ Party. Mrs. Song hoped to find someone just like her own husband, so she instructed Chang-bo to look around for a younger version of himself. While he was taking a train to Musan on a business trip, he sat next to an engaging young man. Choi Yong-su came from a good family in Rajin, a city just north of Chongjin. He was a civilian employee of the Korean People’s Army, a musician who played the trumpet. Anybody with a military position above the rank and file had some clout in North Korea and was sure to get into the party. Chang-bo thought the young man looked promising and invited him home to visit.

  Oak-hee and Yong-su got married in 1988 in the traditional North Korean style—in front of the statue of Kim Il-sung, who symbolically presided over all marriages in the absence of clergy. They put on their best clothes—she a beige jacket and black trousers, and Yong-su a dark suit—and stood stiffly side by side to pose for a photograph in front of the towering bronze statue. They deposited a bouquet of flowers and considered their union to have been blessed in spirit by the Great Leader. They went back to the family apartment to gorge themselves on a banquet prepared by Mrs. Song. The tradition was to have two receptions, at the homes of the bride and groom, a bit of a competition for each family to show off. These were expensive affairs since neighbors and co-workers were invited and the bride’s family had to provide a cupboard full of quilts, kitchenware, a mirror, and makeup table, and if the family was wealthy, perhaps a sewing machine or appliances. Mrs. Song was feeling insecure; she knew Yong-su’s family was of a higher class, so she went all out to make a good impression. She’d laid out tables full of food—rice cakes, pollack, boiled octopus, fried tofu, hairy crab, and three varieties of dried squid. It was the most lavish meal the family would ever eat together and it might have been the high point of the marriage.

  Yong-su turned out to have a taste for neungju, a cheap homebrewed corn liquor. After downing a few cups, his lighthearted musician’s charm would vanish and a mean streak would overtake him. The swagger that Oak-hee at first found seductive now felt menacing. The young couple had moved into their own apartment near the railroad station, but Oak-hee often ran back home. One day she would show up with a black eye, the next with a split lip. Within six months of the marriage, Yong-su got into a fight with a c
o-worker and was expelled from the military band. He was sent to work at the iron-ore mines at Musan. He now had no chance of joining the Workers’ Party. You had to apply for membership in your twenties and undergo review by your party secretary. Without party membership, Yong-su’s career path would be limited. Oak-hee, who was by then in a difficult pregnancy, had to give up her job. Her situation was more precarious than ever.

  NOT LONG AFTER, Mrs. Song’s son began to give her grief too. Unlike Oak-hee, he had always been the model child. Nam-oak was a sturdy boy who resembled his father, muscular with an impressive height of five foot nine. He rarely raised his voice or quarreled. Whatever his parents or older sisters instructed, he would do without complaint. Oak-hee marveled that the same set of parents could have produced a child so unlike herself. “He’s so quiet you don’t even know he’s there,” she would say about her kid brother. Nam-oak was only a middling student, but he excelled at sports. He was happiest playing by himself, kicking a ball again and again against the concrete wall of the apartment building. At the age of eleven, a coach measured the length of his forearms and legs and tapped him for a special athletic school in Chongjin. It was in keeping with the Communist approach to competitive sports that the regime—not the families—decided which children would be plucked out of regular schooling to be groomed for the national teams. Nam-oak did well enough that at fourteen he was sent to Pyongyang to train in boxing.

  For the next seven years, Nam-oak was permitted to come home only twice a year, each time for a twelve-day vacation. Mrs. Song barely saw him. He was never one to cry on her shoulder like her daughters, but now he seemed like a complete stranger. Then she got wind of a disturbing rumor. Nam-oak had a girlfriend in Chongjin, a woman five years older than himself. When he came home from Pyongyang, he would often stay in her apartment. This was scandalous on two counts: North Korean men didn’t as a rule date older women, and premarital sex was strongly discouraged. Nam-oak could be kicked out of school or expelled from the Socialist Youth League, thereby ruining his chances for future entry into the Workers’ Party. As the only son, he carried the responsibility of making a good match and continuing the family line. Mrs. Song and her husband tried to question him, but all they got was uncomfortable silence. Nam-oak became increasingly alienated from his own family, sometimes not even bothering to visit on vacations.

  Next, Chang-bo had a brush with the law. One night he and Mrs. Song were home watching the television news with some neighbors. Mrs. Song and her husband were among the few families in their apartment building to own their own television set. In 1989, televisions cost the equivalent of three months’ salary, about $175, and you weren’t allowed to buy one without special permission from your work unit. They were usually bestowed by the government in the name of Kim Il-sung as a reward for extraordinary ser vice. Chang-bo got theirs because his father had been an intelligence officer who had infiltrated the south during the Korean War. The set was manufactured by the Japanese company Hitachi, but had a Korean brand name, Sonnamu, meaning “pine tree.” Televisions and radios in North Korea are preset so that they can receive only official government channels. Still, the programming was relatively entertaining. Besides the usual speeches of Kim Il-sung, on a typical weeknight you might have sports, concerts, television dramas, and movies produced by Kim Jong-il’s film studio. On weekends, you might get a Russian movie as a special treat. Mrs. Song and her husband were proud of their television. They usually left the door open to their apartment when it was on so that neighbors could wander in and watch with them. It was in keeping with the collective spirit of the times.

  The program that got Chang-bo in trouble was an innocuous business report about a shoe factory producing rubber boots for the rainy season. The camera panned over crisply efficient workers on an assembly line where the boots were being produced by the thousands. The narrator raved about the superb quality of the boots and reeled off the impressive production statistics.

  “Hah. If there are so many boots, how come my children never got any?” Chang-bo laughed aloud. The words tumbled out of his mouth before he could consider the consequences.

  Mrs. Song never figured out which neighbor blabbed. Her husband’s remark was quickly reported to the head of the inminban, the neighborhood watchdogs, who in turn passed on the information to the Ministry for the Protection of State Security. This ominously named agency is effectively North Korea’s political police. It runs an extensive network of informers. By the accounts of defectors, there is at least one informer for every fifty people—more even than East Germany’s notorious Stasi, whose files were pried open after German reunification.

  Spying on one’s countrymen is something of a national pastime. There were the young vigilantes from the Socialist Youth League like the one who stopped Mrs. Song for not wearing a badge. They also made sure people weren’t violating the dress code by wearing blue jeans or T-shirts with Roman writing—considered a capitalist indulgence—or wearing their hair too long. The party issued regular edicts saying that men shouldn’t allow the hair on top of their head to grow longer than five centimeters—though an exemption was granted for balding men, who were permitted seven centimeters. If a violation was severe, the offender could be arrested by the Public Standards Police. There were also kyuch’aldae, mobile police units who roamed the streets looking for offenders and had the right to barge into people’s houses without notice. They would look for people who used more than their quota of electricity, a lightbulb brighter than 40 watts, a hot plate, or a rice cooker. During one of the surprise inspections, one of the neighbors tried to hide their hot plate under a blanket and ended up setting their apartment on fire. The mobile police often dropped in after midnight to see if there were any overnight guests who might have come to visit without travel permits. It was a serious offense, even if it was just an out-of-town relative, and much worse if the guest happened to be a lover. But it wasn’t just the police and the volunteer leagues who did the snooping. Everybody was supposed to be vigilant for subversive behavior and transgressions of the rules. Since the country was too poor and the power supply too unreliable for electronic surveillance, state security relied on human intelligence—snitches. The newspapers would occasionally run feature stories about heroic children who ratted out their parents. To be denounced by a neighbor for bad-mouthing the regime was nothing extraordinary.

  Chang-bo’s interrogation lasted three days. The agents yelled and cursed at him, although they never beat him—at least that’s what he told his wife. He claimed afterward that his gift with language helped him talk his way out of the bind. He cited the truth in his defense.

  “I wasn’t insulting anybody. I was simply saying that I haven’t been able to buy those boots and I’d like to have some for my family,” Chang-bo protested indignantly.

  He made a convincing case. He was a commanding figure with his potbelly and his stern expression. He looked like the epitome of a Workers’ Party official. The political police in the end decided not to push the case and released him without charges.

  When he returned home, he got a tongue-lashing from his wife that was almost harsher than the interrogation. It was the worst fight of their marriage. For Mrs. Song, it was not merely that her husband had been disrespectful of the government; for the first time in her life, she felt the stirrings of fear. Her conduct had always been so impeccable and her devotion so genuine that it never occurred to her that she might be vulnerable.

  “Why did you say such nonsense when there were neighbors in the apartment? Didn’t you realize you could have jeopardized everything we have?” she railed at him.

  In fact, they both realized how lucky they were. If not for Chang-bo’s excellent class background and his party membership, he would not have been let off so lightly. It helped, too, that Mrs. Song had at various times been head of the inminban in the building and commanded some respect from the state security officers. Chang-bo’s offhand remark was precisely the kind of thing that could re
sult in deportation to a prison camp in the mountains if the offender didn’t have a solid position in the community. They had heard of a man who cracked a joke about Kim Jong-il’s height and was sent away for life. Mrs. Song personally knew a woman from her factory who was taken away for something she wrote in her diary. At the time, Mrs. Song hadn’t felt any pity for the woman. “The traitor probably deserved what she got,” she’d said to herself. Now she felt embarrassed for having thought such a thing.

  The incident seemed to blow over. Chastened by the experience, Chang-bo was more careful about what he said outside the family, but his thoughts were running wild. For many years, Chang-bo had been fighting off the doubts that would periodically creep into his consciousness. Now those doubts were gelling into outright disbelief. As a journalist, Chang-bo had more access to information than ordinary people. At the North Hamgyong Provincial Broadcasting Company, where he worked, he and his colleagues heard uncensored news reports from the foreign media. It was their job to sanitize it for domestic consumption. Anything positive that happened in capitalist countries or especially South Korea, which in 1988 hosted the Summer Olympics, was downplayed. Strikes, disasters, riots, murders—elsewhere—got plenty of coverage.