Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

  The date was September 9, 1993, and Kim Ji-eun would never forget it because it was the first time in her life that she would go an entire day without food. Few others could remember with such precision. The end of an era did not come in a single moment. It took years before people understood that their world was irreversibly altered.

  CHAPTER 5

  VICTORIAN ROMANCE

  Kyongsong County Culture Hall.

  MI-RAN WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL WHEN SHE FIRST NOTICED THAT city people were taking trips to the countryside to scavenge for food. When she would bicycle into Chongjin, she’d see them, looking like beggars with their burlap sacks, heading toward the orchards that lined both sides of the road. Some would even come farther down the road to the cornfields that stretched for miles south from her village toward the sea. The city people could also be found picking up firewood in the mountains near the kaolin mines where her father worked. It was surprising because she’d always figured that people who lived in Chongjin were way better off than anyone from Kyongsong. Chongjin had the universities, the big theaters, restaurants that were only for the Workers’ Party members and their families, not for a girl like herself.

  Kyongsong was essentially a cluster of villages around a small downtown that was like Chongjin in miniature—an overly wide main street with a large stone monument celebrating Kim Il-sung’s victory over the Japanese in World War II. There were a couple of ceramic factories that processed the kaolin from the mine where Mi-ran’s father worked, and a large manufacturer of electrical parts, the June 5 factory, named for a day in 1948 when Kim Il-sung visited and provided on-the-spot guidance. Her village wasn’t exactly the countryside, but there was far more land available than in the city. Near the coast, the terrain was flat, sandy, and relatively fertile. Inland, as you climbed in elevation, the mountains were dense with pine thickets. The narrow strips between the harmonica houses were painstakingly cultivated with red peppers, radishes, cabbages, and even tobacco, because it was cheaper to roll your own than to buy cigarettes, and virtually all the men smoked. People whose roofs were flat would put pots up there to grow more vegetables. These private agricultural efforts were small enough that they didn’t raise the ire of the Communist authorities. At least in the beginning, before the food shortage grew into a famine, they staved off hunger.

  When the paycheck her father brought home from the mines grew smaller and smaller until it eventually disappeared, Mi-ran’s mother stepped into the breach. She was never much of a housewife, but she was resourceful when it came to making money. She took in sewing, made homemade tofu, and for a time raised pigs—although there wasn’t enough feed to sustain them. More successful was a recipe she invented for imitation ice cream. She bought a used freezer called a North Pole machine. Because it was almost impossible to buy milk or cream, she would use the water left over from the making of tofu and flavor it with red beans and sugar. She poured this strange concoction into ice cube trays and froze it. Koreans love to indulge their children and if there was a spare won in the house, they’d give it to their child for a treat. Sometimes Mi-ran’s mother would hawk her wares on the back of a friend’s truck. Workers’ Party edicts forbade making private money, but she shrugged them off. It wasn’t that she was a rebel so much as a pragmatist who didn’t give much thought to ideology. The money she earned selling her ersatz ice cream allowed her to buy corn and sometimes rice on the black market.

  MI-RAN’S SECRET ADMIRER was also insulated from the hunger. Jun-sang’s paternal grandparents came to visit almost every year from Japan on the ferry. By the early 1990s, the boat no longer came to Chongjin, but to the port of Wonsan—farther down North Korea’s east coast. Jun-sang’s family would go to meet them at the dock, and the ritual involved much crying and hugging, during which Jun-sang’s harabogi, or grandfather, could slip a fat envelope of cash into his son’s pocket. It had to be done discreetly so that nobody with authority would see and demand a cut of the money. The envelope sometimes contained more than $2,000 worth of Japanese yen. The Koreans in Japan were well aware that their relatives in North Korea would go hungry without hard currency.

  Jun-sang’s family was also lucky to have a private yard. His father was a fastidious gardener, subdividing his modest walled domain into tidy vegetable plots. Hunched over, working in the garden, he showed his young seedlings a tenderness he’d rarely accorded his children. He recorded in a small notebook the seeds he planted, the depth of the furrows, the days it took for the seeds to germinate, and how long it would take for the vegetables to grow and ripen. Jun-sang’s mother still had the fine kitchen equipment her family had brought from Japan. With a razor-sharp knife, she’d slice up carrots and radishes julienne-style, lay the crisp slivers of vegetables on top of freshly steamed rice, and roll them up in sheets of dried seaweed. They were the only family in the neighborhood to eat kimbab, a Korean interpretation of Japanese maki that is popular in South Korea, but virtually unknown in the North. With their home-grown vegetables and their black-market rice, they ate better than all but the most elite members of the Workers’ Party.

  The family’s chief source of pride was Jun-sang himself. The years of drudgery, of studying until 1:00 A.M. and rising at dawn, the relentless nagging by his father, and his own wish to fulfill his family’s ambitions for him, had all paid off. Jun-sang had been accepted to a university in Pyongyang. It wasn’t Kim Il-sung University—the family’s standing wasn’t high enough for that—but it was a school that trained scientists and was more merit-based in its choice of students. North Korea, badly lagging in technology behind South Korea and Japan, could no longer afford to squander what talent it could find. Jun-sang would have preferred to study literature or philosophy, or, had there been such a program, filmmaking, but his father steered him into science, knowing it was the only way for a boy without good songbun to get to Pyongyang.

  It was a tremendous achievement for a boy from North Hamgyong province to be accepted into the North Korean equivalent of MIT. It meant that Jun-sang wouldn’t have to serve in the military. He would have a good chance of raising his family’s songbun. It would be a path to Workers’ Party membership. Notwithstanding some incipient doubts about the political system—he was beginning to wonder why the East Germans tore down the Berlin Wall if communism was so great—he knew that party membership and a Pyongyang education was his ticket to the core class.

  Jun-sang was proud of himself. He was a modest boy, careful not to show off his brains or his money, but these days when he came home from Pyongyang he felt like a returning hero. Like soldiers, university students were supposed to wear their uniforms even when they were off campus. The ensemble consisted of a green double-breasted jacket and pants, a white shirt, and a tie. The green of his uniform was meant to allude to a quote from Kim Il-sung that described youth as being like “the green mountains.” With his newly minted confidence, Jun-sang again began to think about asking Mi-ran out. Five years had passed since he first spotted her at the movie theater. Much to his amazement, he hadn’t forgotten her. There were girls at his university in Pyongyang—smart girls, pretty girls—but none had captured his interest like she had.

  Jun-sang had come to know Mi-ran somewhat. During high school, he had befriended her sister Mi-sook. Two years older than Mi-ran, she was the family’s tomboy. She played on the women’s volleyball team and was often around the gym where Jun-sang’s friends practiced. He also had a friend from boxing class who lived in the same row of harmonica houses as Mi-ran. It gave Jun-sang an excuse to hang out in her neighborhood.

  Mi-ran’s family had managed to acquire a television, and like Mrs. Song, they too maintained an open-door policy. One day while visiting his friend, Jun-sang slipped into her house with some other neighbors. While everybody else watched the program, his eyes darted back and forth between the television set and Mi-ran. She had ripened into a beautiful teenager. He stared at her, trying to discern what it was about the particular alignment of eyes, nose, mouth, and hair
that had so captivated him. He wondered whether it would be worth the risk to his reputation to ask her out. He decided that it was.

  JUN-SANG PLANNED to make his move during a visit home from Pyongyang in the spring of 1991, his first year of university. He mooned around the center of Kyongsong, hoping that a “chance encounter” might provide the opportunity to speak to her. On the last day of his vacation, he spotted her at the market, but before he could get close enough to speak, he saw that her mother was a few paces behind her.

  Soon after, Jun-sang confided his predicament to her sister Mi-sook, who agreed to act as a go-between. Jun-sang went to the house on his next vacation at a prearranged time. Mi-sook was hovering near the door. She called out to Mi-ran, “Little sister. Come out and talk to my friend.”

  Mi-ran stuck her head out the door. She let out a little yelp of embarrassment and ducked back in.

  “Come, little sister, or I’ll have to drag you out,” Mi-sook persisted.

  Finally she went outside to greet him. Face-to-face with her for the first time, he felt beads of sweat dampening the freshly ironed collar of his uniform. As he began to speak, he heard the telltale quiver in his voice. It was too late to turn back now so he pushed on. He couldn’t think of small talk, so he just laid it out. He told her everything. Starting with spotting her at the movie theater. He ended by asking her if she would be his girlfriend.

  “My studies. I’m supposed to be studying hard, but I can’t concentrate because I think about you,” he blurted out.

  Mi-ran didn’t say anything. She stood there, not averting her eyes as he might have expected, but not responding either. He felt like his head was going to explode. He tried harder to engage her in conversation.

  “Didn’t you notice me watching you all this time?” he asked.

  “No, really, I didn’t have a clue,” she said.

  He waited expectantly for her to say more.

  “Well, it is not like I don’t like you,” she answered in a tangled syntax of double negatives, which in Korean are especially ambiguous. He wasn’t really sure what she was saying, but he suspected it was a guardedly positive response. She promised to explain her feelings in a letter. For all her aloofness, Mi-ran was in fact thrilled. Her suitor was handsome, sweet, and frankly a great catch. She knew only a couple of boys who were going to college and none of them were in Pyongyang. Although she feigned surprise, she had noticed Jun-sang lurking around her neighborhood and had even dared to hope that perhaps it was because of her. The green uniform had not failed to impress her. He looked like a naval officer with the shiny double row of buttons. Although she had never dated, Mi-ran knew by instinct that she should play hard to get. She struggled to find the perfect way to say yes without appearing too eager. The end result was an awkwardly formal letter in her very best handwriting.

  “Rather than create a situation where you cannot concentrate on your studies because of your unhappiness, I will for the moment accept your proposition,” she wrote to him a few weeks later.

  At least initially, the relationship took on a nineteenth-century epistolatory quality. The only way they could stay in touch was by letter. In 1991, while South Korea was becoming the world’s largest exporter of mobile telephones, few North Koreans had ever used a telephone. You had to go to a post office to make a phone call. But even writing a letter was not a simple undertaking. Writing paper was scarce. People would write in the margins of newspapers. The paper in the state stores was made of corn husk and would crumble easily if you scratched too hard. Mi-ran had to beg her mother for the money to buy a few sheets of imported paper. Rough drafts were out of the question; paper was too precious. The distance from Pyongyang to Chongjin was only 250 miles, but letters took up to a month to be delivered.

  Mi-ran was in her last year of high school when the relationship began. She was intimidated by the relative sophistication of her college boy. In Pyongyang, Jun-sang could buy proper paper. He owned a ballpoint pen. His letters ran on for pages, long and eloquent. Their correspondence gradually evolved from stilted formalities to full-blown romance. Jun-sang had never seen a Hollywood romance, but his mind was fervid enough to conjure the clichés of modern love. His letters conjured up images of himself and Mi-ran running toward each other against the backdrop of a sky streaked orange and pink. He quoted to her from the novels he read in Pyongyang. He wrote love poems. On paper there was no trace of the reticence that had held him back for so long.

  Jun-sang posted his letters to Mi-sook, who by then was working in an office where she could receive mail away from the scrutiny of her parents. She was the only person Mi-ran told about the relationship. Jun-sang told nobody. They never discussed the reasons for the secrecy, since sex and class background were not to be discussed openly in North Korea—in fact, complaining about your own song-bun was tantamount to criticizing the regime. But the fact of Mi-ran’s tainted blood hovered unspoken. They both knew if they were eventually to marry, it could hurt Jun-sang’s career and his prospects of joining the Workers’ Party. Certainly, if Jun-sang’s father were to find out, he would forbid the romance. North Korean society demands that people stick to their own. Jun-sang knew he would be expected to marry somebody from the Korean-Japanese community. In any case, Jun-sang’s father didn’t approve of his son dating.

  “Finish school first. Don’t waste your time chasing girls,” he lectured.

  AN ASIDE HERE ABOUT sex in North Korea: the country doesn’t have a dating culture. Many marriages are still arranged, either by families or by party secretaries or bosses. Couples are not supposed to make any public displays of affection—even holding hands in public is considered risqué. North Korean defectors insist that there is no premarital sex and no such thing as an unmarried student getting pregnant. “It would be unimaginably terrible. I couldn’t even think of that happening,” I was told by a North Korean woman who was herself no prude—she was working in the sex industry in Seoul at the time I met her. Certainly, North Korea doesn’t have the love hotels of South Korea or Japan. You can’t check into a regular hotel without a travel permit, and no hotel would ever admit an unmarried couple in any case. People from Chongjin have told me that unmarried couples who want to have sexual relations will go into the wilderness or even to a park by night, but I have never met anyone who has admitted to doing this.

  The prudishness is part of traditional Korean culture. It is easy to forget when you’re in Seoul and see schoolgirls wearing thigh-high tartan skirts that just a century ago respectable Korean women wore full-body coverings that would rival anything required by the Taliban. The nineteenth-century British travel writer Isabella Bird Bishop wrote of seeing women in a village north of Pyongyang in 1897 wearing burkalike contraptions that she described as “monstrous hats like our wicker garden sentry-boxes, but without bottoms. These extraordinary coverings are 7 feet long, 5 broad and 3 deep, and shroud the figure from head to toe.” Women of the middle and upper classes were not permitted to leave the family compound except during specially designated times when the streets were cleared of men. Bishop had traveled extensively as well in the Islamic world, but she pronounced Korean women as being “very rigidly secluded, perhaps more absolutely so than women of any other nation.”

  The wicker baskets are long gone, but the old attitudes persist. After Kim Il-sung took over, he melded traditional Korean conservatism with the Communist instinct to repress sexuality. He closed not only brothels, but the more ambiguous kisaeng houses where women entertained wealthy men. Pornographers were executed. Notwithstanding his own excesses and those of Kim Jong-il, a playboy in his youth, party officials caught in adulterous affairs lost their jobs.

  Kim Il-sung also discouraged early marriages, giving a “special instruction” in 1971 that men should marry at twenty and women should marry at twenty-eight. As a North Korean newspaper reported, “The Motherland and nation hope and believe that the youngsters will uphold the beautiful tradition of marrying only after they have done enough for
the country and people.” In fact that was not Korean tradition at all—in the past women were expected to be married by the time they were fourteen. The regulation was designed to keep up the morale of the soldiers, so they wouldn’t fear losing their girlfriends while completing their service; it also kept down the birthrate. Although the ban on early marriage was lifted in 1990, North Koreans still do not look kindly on young couples, however innocent the relationship may be.

  Propaganda campaigns advise women to adopt “traditional hairstyles in accordance with the socialist way of life and the taste of the epoch.” For middle-aged women, that means hair cut short, and permed; unmarried women can wear their hair longer if it is tied back or braided. North Korean women are not permitted to wear skirts above the knee, or sleeveless shirts. Interestingly, South Korea had similar regulations about hair and dress in the 1970s under the military dictator Park Chung-hee. It is a sign of how much North Korea remains frozen in time and how much South Korea has changed that the most radical differences between the two cultures are manifested in sexuality and dress. A few years ago, while on a trip to the pocket of North Korea that is frequented by South Korean tourists, I saw a North Korean hotel doorman look like he was on the verge of fainting at the sight of a young South Korean woman in low-cut jeans and a midriff-revealing top. Many North Korean defectors I have interviewed told me the thing that they found most surprising about South Korea was that couples kiss in public.

  SO IT WAS CONVENIENT that Jun-sang and Mi-ran’s relationship began just as the lights were going out. The darkness of North Korea by night has an absoluteness that people from the electrified world have never experienced. With no streetlights, no headlights, no ambient light seeping from windows or under doors, the darkness is an all-encompassing shroud. You can tell somebody is walking down the street only when you see the glowing tip of his cigarette.