Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

  For all its arrogant rhetoric about juche and self-sufficiency, North Korea was utterly dependent on the kindness of its neighbors. The country got subsidized oil, rice, fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, industrial equipment, trucks, and cars. X-ray machines and incubators came from Czechoslovakia; architects from East Germany. Kim Il-sung skillfully played the Soviet Union and China against each other, using their rivalry to extract as much aid as possible. Like an old-style emperor, he commanded tribute from neighboring realms: Stalin personally sent an armored limousine, Mao sent a complete train carriage.

  By the 1980s, Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il, who was increasingly assuming his father’s duties, offered “on-the-spot guidance” to address the country’s woes. Father and son were experts in absolutely everything, be it geology or farming. “Kim Jong-il’s on-site instructions and his warm benevolence are bringing about a great advance in goat breeding and output of dairy products,” the Korean Central News Agency opined after Kim Jong-il visited a goat farm near Chongjin. One day he would decree that the country should switch from rice to potatoes for its staple food; the next he would decide that raising ostriches was the cure for North Korea’s food shortage. The country lurched from one harebrained scheme to another.

  An enormous share of the country’s wealth was squandered on the military. North Korea’s defense budget eats up 25 percent of its gross national product—as opposed to an average of less than 5 percent for industrialized countries. Although there had been no fighting in Korea since 1953, the country kept one million men under arms, giving this tiny country, no bigger than Pennsylvania, the fourth-largest military in the world. The North Korean propaganda machine kept hysteria at a high level, ginning up incessant reports of imminent invasion by the imperialist warmongers.

  Kim Jong-il, who had been rapidly rising through the Politburo as he was being groomed for the succession, was named supreme commander of the North Korean armed forces in 1991. A few years later, billboards would go up around the country next to the juche monuments, introducing a new catchword, songun, or “military first,” and stating that the Korean People’s Army was at the center of all policy decisions. The younger Kim had long since outgrown his dabblings in cinema and turned his attention to bigger toys—nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.

  Ever since the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II, Kim Il-sung had dreamed of making his country a nuclear power, and research had been under way since the 1960s at a Soviet-designed nuclear compound at Yongbyon, in the mountains north of Pyongyang. But it was Kim Jong-il who put the nuclear program on the fast track, apparently believing it would boost North Korea’s standing and his own at a time when its international prestige was flagging. Instead of rebuilding aging factories and infrastructure, North Korea put its money into expensive secret weapons projects, claiming the need for a “nuclear deterrent” against American aggression. By 1989, North Korea was developing a reprocessing plant at Yongbyon to produce weapons-grade plutonium from the fuel rods of its nuclear reactors, and by the early 1990s the CIA was assessing that it had enough for one or two nuclear bombs. “Kim Jong-il didn’t care if he bankrupted the rest of the country. He saw the missiles and nuclear weapons as the only way to maintain power,” Kim Dok-hong, a high-ranking defector from Pyongyang, told me in an interview in Seoul in 2006.

  North Korea’s timing was terrible. Kim Jong-il realized that the Cold War was over, but he didn’t seem to grasp that his old Communist patrons were more interested in making money than bankrolling an anachronistic dictatorship with nuclear ambitions. The economy of his archrival, South Korea, had edged ahead in the mid-1970s; by the next decade, North Korea had been left in the dust. Never mind Communist solidarity, China and the Soviet Union wanted to do business with the likes of Hyundai and Samsung, not with state-owned enterprises in the North that didn’t pay their bills on time. In 1990, the year before it collapsed, the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations with South Korea in a devastating blow to North Korea’s world standing. China followed suit two years later.

  The Russians and the Chinese were increasingly fed up with North Korea’s failure to repay loans that had amounted to an estimated $10 billion by the early 1990s. Moscow decided that North Korea would have to pay prevailing world prices for Soviet imports rather than the lower “friendship” prices charged Communist allies. In the past, the Chinese, who provided three quarters of North Korea’s fuel and two thirds of its food imports, used to say they were close as “lips and teeth” to North Korea; now they wanted cash up front.

  Soon the country was sucked into a vicious death spiral. Without cheap fuel oil and raw material, it couldn’t keep the factories running, which meant it had nothing to export. With no exports, there was no hard currency, and without hard currency, fuel imports fell even further and the electricity stopped. The coal mines couldn’t operate without electricity because they required electric pumps to siphon water. The shortage of coal worsened the electricity shortage. The electricity shortage further lowered agricultural output. Even the collective farms couldn’t operate properly without electricity. It had never been easy to eke out enough harvest from North Korea’s hardscrabble terrain for a population of 23 million, and the agricultural techniques developed to boost output relied on electrically powered artificial irrigation systems and on chemical fertilizers and pesticides produced at factories that were now closed for lack of fuel and raw materials. North Korea started running out of food, and as people went hungry, they didn’t have the energy to work and so output plunged even further. The economy was in a free fall.

  North Korea was (and remains as of this writing in 2009) the last place on earth where virtually everything is grown on collective farms. The state confiscates the entire harvest and then gives a portion back to the farmer. But as harvests withered in the early 1990s, the farmers themselves were going hungry and began stashing some of the harvest away—there were stories from the countryside of roofs that collapsed under the weight of grain hidden away in the eaves. The farmers also neglected the collective fields for their private “kitchen gardens” next to their houses or small, steep plots they carved out of the side of uncultivated mountain slopes. Driving through the North Korean countryside, you could clearly see the contrast between the private gardens bursting with vegetables, bean poles soaring skyward, vines drooping with pumpkins, next to the collective fields with their stunted, haphazard rows of corn that had been planted by so-called volunteers doing their patriotic duty.

  The people who stood the most to lose were the city folk who had no land on which to grow their own food.

  For as long as she was married, Mrs. Song had gone every fifteen days with two plastic shopping bags to the same food distribution center. It was right in the neighborhood, tucked between two apartment complexes. This wasn’t like a supermarket where you plucked what you wanted from the shelf; the women waited in line outside an unmarked storefront with a big metal gate that swung open. Everybody had their assigned days—Mrs. Song’s were the third and the eighteenth—but still there was often a wait of several hours. Inside there was a small, unheated room with white concrete walls, and a cheerless woman sitting behind a small table covered with ledger books. Mrs. Song would hand over her ration book, a small sum of money, and coupons from the garment factory certifying that she had fulfilled her work duty. The clerks would calculate her entitlements: 700 grams each per day for her and Chang-bo; another 400 grams for her mother-in-law, since retired people got less; and 500 for each child still living at home. If anybody in the family was traveling, the rations for the days out of town would be deducted. Once the calculations were made, the clerk would pick up the official seal and with a self-important thump pound it into the red ink and onto receipts in triplicate, one of which she’d give to Mrs. Song. At the back of the warehouse, where they stored big vats of rice, corn, barley, and flour, another clerk would weigh out the rations and put them into Mrs. Song’s plastic bags.

  It was al
ways a surprise what might be in the bag, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. Looking back years later, Mrs. Song couldn’t pinpoint when it happened—1989, 1990, 1991—that her rations faded away. When they handed the bag back to her, Mrs. Song didn’t need to peek inside to confirm her disappointment. The bag was lighter than it used to be. They were being systematically shortchanged. One month she might get only twenty-five days’ worth of food, another month ten. Despite Kim Il-sung’s promises, rice was a luxury item for North Koreans. More often now, there was only corn and barley. Cooking oil had always come sporadically, but now it was never in the bag. Mrs. Song wasn’t the type to complain, not that she could have if she wanted to.

  “If I made a fuss, they would have just come and taken me away,” she said later.

  The North Korean government offered a variety of explanations, from the patently absurd to the barely plausible. People were told that their government was stockpiling food to feed the starving South Korean masses on the blessed day of reunification. They were told that the United States had instituted a blockade against North Korea that was keeping out food. That was not true, but it was believable. North Korea in early 1993 had threatened to pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and President Bill Clinton was threatening sanctions. It was convenient for Kim Il-sung to deflect blame. He could point the finger at the United States—North Korea’s favorite scapegoat. “The people of Korea have long suffered from the blockade and sanctions of the U.S. imperialists,” opined Rodong Sinmun.

  Koreans like to think of themselves as tough—and so they are. The propaganda machine launched a new campaign, playing up Korean pride by recalling a largely apocryphal fable from 1938-39 in which Kim Il-sung commanded a small band of anti-Japanese guerrillas “fighting against thousands of enemies in 20 degrees below zero, braving through a heavy snowfall and starvation, the red flag fluttering in front of the rank.” The Arduous March, as they called it, would later become a metaphor for the famine. Rodong Sinmun urged North Koreans to invoke the memories of Kim Il-sung’s sacrifice to strengthen themselves against hunger.

  No force on earth can bar the Korean people from making an onward march for victory in the revolutionary spirit of the “arduous march” and the DPRK will always remain a powerful nation.

  Enduring hunger became part of one’s patriotic duty. Billboards went up in Pyongyang touting the new slogan, “Let’s Eat Two Meals a Day.” North Korean television ran a documentary about a man whose stomach burst, it was claimed, from eating too much rice. In any case, the food shortage was temporary—agricultural officials quoted in the newspapers reported that bumper crops of rice were expected in the next harvest.

  When the foreign press reported on food shortages in the North in 1993, the North Korean news service was indignant.

  The state supplies the people with food at a cheap price so that people do not know how much rice costs. This is the reality of the northern half of Korea. All people live a happy life without any worries about food in our land.

  If North Koreans paused to contemplate the obvious inconsistencies and lies in what they were told, they would find themselves in a dangerous place. They didn’t have a choice. They couldn’t flee their country, depose their leadership, speak out, or protest. In order to fit in, the average citizen had to discipline himself not to think too much. Then there was the natural human survival instinct to be optimistic. Like German Jews in the early 1930s, who told themselves it couldn’t get any worse, the North Koreans deceived themselves. They thought it was temporary. Things would get better. A hungry stomach shouldn’t believe a lie, but somehow it did.

  Along with the new propaganda campaign, the regime stepped up its extensive network of domestic surveillance. The more there was to complain about, the more important it was to ensure that nobody did.

  Since the early 1970s, Mrs. Song had served periodically as inminbanjang, the head of her neighborhood group. Each year, the neighbors had to elect a leader, usually a married, middle-aged woman. Mrs. Song was well suited to the post because she was energetic, organized, loyal, and had what Koreans call good nunji, which might be loosely translated as “intuition.” She got along well with everybody. She had to make chore lists, assigning who among the fifteen families in her unit would clear sidewalks and trim grass in front of the building, collect and recycle garbage. She was also supposed to report any suspicious activity.

  Mrs. Song was assigned to a single agent from the Ministry for the Protection of State Security. Comrade Kang was a woman a few years older than Mrs. Song and married to a Workers’ Party official who was said to have connections in Pyongyang. Every few months, they would meet up at the district office or Comrade Kang would come to Mrs. Song’s apartment to enjoy a cup of home-brewed corn whiskey while getting reports from the neighborhood. Mrs. Song never had much to tell her. Life in the apartment building was uneventful. Nobody got in trouble—except for the one incident when Chang-bo complained about the boots.

  But then Comrade Kang became more persistent. As the food distribution became less frequent, she wanted to know if people were bad-mouthing the regime.

  “Are they complaining about the food? What are they saying?” the agent demanded. She had been waiting for Mrs. Song in front of the building and had cornered her in the entrance.

  “They don’t say anything,” protested Mrs. Song. It was true. In fact, Mrs. Song had noticed that conversations suddenly stopped whenever she walked into an apartment, leaving an awkward hush in any room she entered. Everybody knew the inminbanjang had to report to national security.

  Comrade Kang wasn’t satisfied.

  “You should complain first. You ask why is there no distribution of food. See what their reaction is,” she hissed, looking around to make sure nobody in the hallway overheard what she was suggesting.

  Mrs. Song nodded weakly, eager to slip away. She had no intention of complying. She knew that none of her neighbors were engaged in subversive activities. They weren’t enemies of the state. And she was simply too tired to worry about ideology.

  The lack of food sapped her energy. She was preoccupied all the time, her mind spinning as she tried to crunch numbers that simply wouldn’t add up. She was trying to figure out how to get food for her family. The clothing factory had stopped operating entirely in 1991, and for the entire last year she had received no money, only food coupons, which were now useless since the public distribution center had no food. In the past, Mrs. Song’s husband used to get extra gifts of food for working overtime—sometimes oil, crackers, tobacco, or liquor—but that had pretty much stopped. The shelves at the state stores were empty.

  After her factory closed, Mrs. Song swallowed her scruples about shopping on the black market, which did still have food, even rice at times, but the prices were prohibitively high. It cost 25 won to buy a kilo of rice that might cost less than one tenth of a won from the distribution center.

  Mrs. Song still scoffed at the idea of trying to work on the market. What could she do there? She couldn’t sell vegetables since she had no land. She had no business skills, other than the ability to count on an abacus. And with the four children, and her oldest daughter’s wedding, they’d not been able to save money. She wondered if she should try to sell something from her home. In her mind she took inventory of her possessions. The Oriental painting. The television. Her husband’s books. Maybe the sewing machine?

  JUST AS MRS. SONG went through her mental calculus, thousands of others did the same. What did they have to sell? Where could they get something to eat?

  Chongjin was basically a concrete jungle. Everything that wasn’t the steep slope of a mountain had long since been paved over. It wasn’t like you could go out to the woods and hunt birds or pick wild berries. The beach where Mrs. Song’s family collected shellfish had slim pickings and the water was too deep to fish from shore. The only suitable farmland in the city was the vegetable plots and the rice paddies at the small inlets in Nanam.

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bsp; People started going farther afield to get food. The orchards in Kyongsong county were a popular destination. On weekends, Chong jin families would hike down—the collective orchards were about three miles from the center of the city—often under the guise of a recreational excursion. Nobody wanted to admit they were doing it because they were hungry. The orchards were run by a collective farm, which raised the distinctive Korean pears that were exported to Japan for hard currency. Korean pears are about the size and shape of a grapefruit, but have the russet color of Bosc pears and the crisp texture of apples. The perfectly round orbs of fruit would often fall from the trees and roll under the fence that surrounded the orchard, making for easy pickings. Many of the fruit pickers were children. As school lunches got smaller and finally disappeared, children started cutting school to look for food. They could easily slip under wire fences. A young man, who was ten years old in 1992, recalled with some pride that he climbed on the back bumper of a bus and rode down to the last stop in Nanam, then walked an hour. Alone and small, nobody noticed him. He slipped his tiny body through the fence and loaded as many pears as he could carry into a sack. “I plucked as many as I could and handed them out to all my friends,” he said.

  Other memories of this period were bitter. Kim Ji-eun, who was at the time a recent medical graduate doing her residency, went to the orchards one weekend with her parents, a married sister, the sister’s husband, and two small children. Carrying the whiny toddlers most of the way, they didn’t get to the orchards until midafternoon. Too many others had come before them. They found one slightly rotten pear on the ground. They took it home and boiled it, then cut it into five parts for the children, the elderly parents, and Kim Ji-eun’s brother-in-law. Ji-eun and her sister didn’t get any.