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.
I read Barbara Demick's remarkable Nothing to Envy: real lives in North Korea (2010) during an epic two-and-a-half day train ride across the western and mid-western United States, from Emoryville to Chicago. The further I got into it, the more I found myself cherishing the continual sensation of movement in my little metal world, for the welcome - if sometimes jarring - contrast it offered to the experiences of Demick's interviewees.
The central triumph of Demick's book is the way she puts North Korea's people - specific, individual people - at the front and centre of her account. Too often, whether in the pronouncements of Western leaders, in media coverage, or in supercilious comedic films, the story of North Korea is shrunk down to that of a monolithic, basketcase state and its eccentric Dear Leader(s). Witness the sniggering coverage of Kim Jong-il's death in 2011: North Koreans are all brainwashed, or they're all too afraid to break ranks, or something else, but either way they're all "all" - there are no individuals.
Retelling the recent history of North Korea through the daily lives of six of the North Koreans she interviewed, Demick reminds us of what we should have known all along: North Koreans, like anyone else, are complicated individuals who don't all think alike or respond in the same way to their situations. Indeed, the people she spoke to - each of them after they'd left the country - weren't all in identical situations. Her interviewees include a factory worker (Song Hee-suk, aka 'Mrs Song', as Demick tends to call her), a teacher (Mi-ran), a homeless child (Kim Hyuck), and a doctor (Kim Ji-eun, the Dr Kim whose first impression of China upon her defection from North Korea in 1999 is described in the passage at the head of the post). Some were well-connected, while others were outsiders: Mi-ran was systemically disadvantaged by her "tainted blood" (her father was a former South Korean soldier and prisoner of war forced to settle in the North after the Korean War), while her sometime boyfriend Jun-sang was seen as suspect because he's descended from Japanese immigrants. Some, like Mrs Song, were long-term true believers, while others - like Mrs Song's daughter, Oak-hee - were sceptical about the regime from a young age.
They each have their own lives and loves and hopes - not all of which revolve around the political situation in their country! - as Demick discusses in a tone-setting passage in her opening chapter:
By the mid 1990s, nearly everything in North Korea was worn out, malfunctioning. But the imperfections were not so glaring at night. The hot-springs pool, choked with weeds, was luminous in the reflection of the sky.
The night sky in North Korea might be the most brilliant in Northeast Asia, the only place spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent. No artificial lighting competes with the intensity of the stars.
As the young couple would walk through the ginkgo leaves, what would they talk about? Their families, classmates, books - whatever the topic, it was fascinating. Years later, when I asked the girl about the happiest memories of her life, she told me of those nights.
This is not the sort of thing that shows up in satellite photographs. Whether in CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, or in any East Asian Studies department, people analyze North Korea from afar. They don't stop to think that in the middle of this bleak country where millions have died of starvation, there is love.
As noted above, it's not quite an inside view. Foreign access to actual North Koreans living in North Korea is very strictly controlled and regulated by the state; foreigners are restricted to Pyongyang, and Demick notes that only certain "handsome, politically correct" North Koreans are permitted to live there ("the regime goes to great lengths to ensure that its inhabitants make a good impression with their appearance and are ideologically sound"). Necessarily, then, Demick's interviewees are all refugees: defectors who escaped to neighbouring China and South Korea (and this, too, is part of the tapestry of the book: the varying experiences of trying to adapt to - sometimes tough and unwelcoming - life elsewhere), in many cases with their names changed to protect their family members who did not or could not leave with them.
Nonetheless, several of Demick's subjects give a vivid account of what it was like to fully buy into the message, before they became disillusioned. The most heart-wrenching story belongs to Mrs Song, the eldest of the interviewees and once an eager and irrepressible factory worker, who for a long time had no doubts at all that what she was constantly being told was true: that individual suffering (not least her own) was necessary for the collective good, that Kim Il-sung was a superhuman leader, and that the rest of the world was a howling wasteland where life was even worse (this idea can be seen also in Dr Kim's reaction to what she sees in China, quoted above). Demick sums up the ideology the regime promotes through a snapshot of the North Korean film industry:
Under Kim Jong-il's direction, the Korean Feature Film Studio on the outskirts of Pyongyang was expanded to a 10-million-square foot lot. It churned out forty movies per year. The films were mostly dramas with the same themes: The path to happiness was self-sacrifice and suppression of the individual for the good of the collective. Capitalism was pure degradation. When I toured the studio lot in 2005, I saw a mock-up of what was supposed to be a typical street in Seoul, lined with run-down storefronts and girly bars.
For Mrs Song, everything bad was to be taken in stride; and anyone who fell foul of the regime must have done something to deserve it. (If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear, etc.) Six days a week of eight-hour shifts, a daily couple of hours of Party indoctrination, and four young children to care for, were nothing to her; at Party self-criticism sessions, she expressed her anxiety that, even on just five hours' sleep a night, she was not working hard enough. Life was always one of privation, but especially after the mid-1990s economic collapse in North Korea (something whose details and causes were carefully kept from its information-starved populace), food supplies became severely limited, and water and electricity unreliable at best. Nonetheless, for a long time Mrs Song clung to her belief that this was the only way, and looked askance at those who sought ways round the system:
It was a topsy-turvy world in which she was living. Up was down, wrong was right. The women had the money instead of the men. The markets were bursting with food, more food than most North Koreans had seen in their lifetime - and yet people were still dying from hunger. Workers' Party members had starved to death; those who never gave a damn about the Fatherland were making money.
"Donbulrae," Mrs. Song muttered under her breath. Money insects.
In the past, she took comfort in knowing that she and everyone else she knew were more or less equally poor. Now she saw the rich getting richer; the poor getting poorer.
Among the profiteers was the army, a state body that incorporates some 20% of the adult male population, or one million people (making it the fourth largest military in the world), and eats up an estimated 25% of North Korea's GNP. Military personnel - themselves in penury, it must be said - commandeered and sold rice sent into the country by overseas aid agencies.
Only when the 1990s famine took the lives of her husband and her son - along with those of two million other North Koreans - did her belief begin to crumble, but even then she would not give up on her home. Devastatingly, Mrs Song's suffering was worsened by her ideological commitment, by her refusal to cheat the system and - as she saw it - betray her fellow North Koreans by buying food via the black market rather than from state distribution centres. Some of Demick's other interviewees had fewer scruples; both Mi-ran and Jun-sang's families, we're told, did much better during the lean years (if hardly comfortably) because they had fewer illusions. Mi'ran saw her primary school class, however, reduced from fifty children to just fifteen. Even Mrs Song's daughter Oak-hee, who by then had grown up and left home, took to making money to support herself by renting her spare room to a prostitute as a workplace.
Sad stories abound. Mi-ran and Jun-sang, whose families lived near each other when they were growing up in Chongjin, pursued a long-distance, largely epistolary relationship through the years he was at university and then working in Pyongyang, and she was a teacher in a distant village (she herself was unable to get to university because her access to a top school was quietly but inescapably blocked by some layer of bureaucracy within the regime, owing to her father's "tainted blood"). Mi-ran long nursed the desire to escape the country. Jun-sang came to feel the same, though - perhaps because for a time he was successful within the system - his disaffection came more abruptly, something he pinpoints to an encounter with a starving boy singing propaganda songs for money, on a railway platform:
His tiny body was lost in the folds of an adult-sized factory uniform but his voice had the resonance of a much older person. He squeezed his eyes shut, mustering all his emotion, and belted out the song, filling the platform with its power. [...] "Our father is here. We have nothing to envy."
Overcome with pity, Jun-sang gave the boy a very generous ten-won tip:
It was less an act of charity than gratitude for the education the boy had given him. He would later credit the boy with pushing him over the edge. He now knew for sure that he didn't believe. It was an enormous moment of self-revelation, like deciding one was an atheist. It made him feel alone. He was different from everybody else. He was suddenly self-conscious, burdened by a secret he had discovered about himself.
Both of them dreamed of leaving, and made separate, secret plans to go. Neither ever dared tell the other, for fear that the other was still the believer they pretended to be, and would report them to the authorities (informants, including neighbours, co-workers and even family members, were rife, and presumably rumoured/feared to be even more so than they actually were). In October 1998, after her father Tae-woo died, Mi-ran, her mother and her two sisters all escaped to the sanctuary of Tae-woo's surviving South Korean family, travelling one by one - in a really heart-in-mouth episode, even in the retelling - to reduce the risk they would be caught together. Before she left, Mi-ran destroyed ten years' worth of letters from Jun-sang, in an effort to avoid implicating him should she be caught, or once her disappearance was noted. Obviously, when Jun-sang heard, a few months later, the rumours of where she had gone, he was devastated. The pair finally found each other again in 2005, but by then it was too late: Mi-ran was married to someone else.
Mi-ran and Jun-sang simply could not afford to take the risk of telling each other; defection was an extremely dangerous enterprise. We learn this in particular through the experience of the destitute young orphan Kim Hyuck, who was caught during his first attempt to leave the country, and sentenced to a prison camp for three years. The place slept fifty people to a room, on bare concrete floors; he estimates that two or three people died each week, in his room alone. He finally reach South Korea in a later attempt, in 2001, but struggled for a long time to adapt to life there.
Dr Kim defected in 1999, in large part - she told Demick - because a government agent had "planted the idea and she found she couldn't shake it": she was approached, and warned that she was being watched because she was seen as a likely defector:
"Why would I want to leave?" she protests.
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!"
Increasingly unable to do her job because of dwindling medical supplies - she was reduced to making gruelling hikes out into the desolate countryside on her days off, in search of plants and herbs she could use to treat her patients - and deciding that the listed reasons actually did add up to a good motive to leave, she did so. Like Hyuck, it took her several years to settle into life outside North Korea, however, a process Demick explores in detail.
By contrast, Oak-hee left North Korea not because of disaffection with the regime - she was never, we're told, particularly enamoured of it in the first place, having grown up during the period of its greater privation ("as her family got hungrier, she grew angrier") - but because she was in an abusive marriage. Seeking a divorce in North Korea would mean automatically and completely relinquishing her home and children to her husband, and so for a long while she stayed. But one evening, after a particularly brutal assault, she fled her home still in her night-dress. Her escape was one of the more difficult: lacking relatives or money or the right contacts to help her on her way, and defecting at a time (1998) when security was tighter than it became - both on the North Korean side of the border, and in China, where the authorities carried out periodic raids to deport refugees - she had to use more desperate means.
Oak-hee's only way across, and only way of staying safe once she was across, was to sell herself to one of the many Chinese men willing to buy (and hide) a North Korean bride. This too was risky - in the year 2000, the Chinese arrested 8000 such women in a single sweep, not to mention the risks of further domestic abuse that lurked in these heavily unequal, dependent arrangements - but she was lucky in her buyer. She remained with her 'husband' for two years, before moving, with his help, to a town where she could earn the money to bring her children across to join her. She was arrested and deported, but managed to leave the country a second time (the borders had grown increasingly leaky, and people's desperation ever greater; in 1998, a total of 923 North Koreans had defected, but by 2001 somewhere in the region of 100,000 people managed it - there was a now well-travelled refugee infrastructure). This time, with the money and contacts built up during her earlier stay, she was soon able to arrange to have her mother, Mrs Song, taken to South Korea - under false pretences, because Mrs Song would never have gone voluntarily. Again, Demick takes plenty of time to tell the story of Mrs Song's painful acclimatisation: for a long time she feels angry, bewildered and betrayed. The process of liberating Oak-hee's children took longer: at the time the book was published, Oak-hee had just been able to prise one of her children away from their father, but the other remained in North Korea.
Demick also explores, fascinatingly, some of the ways the regime convinced people like Mrs Song, and kept a lid on the sceptics. The tools of indoctrination she describes are morbidly amusing in their directness, at least to an audience lucky enough never to be subjected to them without alternatives, or to the mechanisms of enforcement that lurked behind them. Children were started young, with messages that ranged from the odd but innocuous:
Whether they were studying math, science, reading, music, or art, the children were taught to revere the leadership and hate the enemy. For example, a first-grade math book contained the following questions: "Eight boys and nine girls are singing anthems in praise of Kim Il-sung. How many children are singing in total?"
to the downright sinister:
A first-grade reading primer published in 2003 included the following poem, entitled 'Where Are We Going?':
Where have we gone?
We have gone to the forest.
Where are we going?
We are going over the hills.
What are we going to do?
We are going to kill the Japanese soldiers.One of the songs taught in music class was 'Shoot the Yankee Bastards':
Our enemies are the American bastards
Who are trying to take over our beautiful fatherland.
With guns that I make with my own hands
I will shoot them. BANG, BANG, BANG.
Much of the propaganda centred around the personality cult of first Kim Il-sung, and then of Kim Jong-il. The two Kims were utterly ubiquitous, their portraits everywhere and their speeches broadcast and re-broadcast on state TV and radio, voiced by suitably heroic-sounding actors. Speaking to Denick, Jun-sang recalled the first time he heard Kim Jong-il's actual voice, with an illegal aerial he used to pick up South Korean TV: it was disappointingly "old, tinny, and distinctly human". This illicit source of information was also his first opportunity to get any sense of the scale of the 1990s famine death toll, in the form of solid numbers rather than personal impressions of death.
Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il were presented as the benevolent fathers of their people, caring for and watching over their well-being. The iconography of the regime was often friendly rather than forbidding - colourful murals would show Kim Il-sung surrounded by adoring children ("Kim Il-sung didn't want to be Joseph Stalin; he wanted to be Santa Claus"). Via Mrs Song, we catch a stunning glimpse of the real or perceived pervasiveness of the regime and its agents, of the degree of its ambition to intrude on private, domestic space:
In Mrs. Song's home, as in every other, a framed portrait of Kim Il-sung hung on an otherwise bare wall. People were not permitted to put anything else on that wall, not even pictures of their blood relatives. Kim Il-sung was all the family you needed – at least until the 1980s, when portraits of Kim Jong-il, named secretary of the Workers' Party, were hung alongside those of his father. The Workers' Party distributed the portraits free of charge along with a white cloth to be stored in a box beneath them. It could be used only to clean the portraits. This was especially important during the rainy season, when specks of mold would creep under the corners of the glass frame. About once a month, inspectors from the Public Standards Police would drop by to check on the cleanliness of the portraits.
Mrs. Song didn't need the threat of an inspection to clean her portraits. Even in the mad scramble of the mornings, rolling up the bed mats, making lunches, hustling the children out the door, she would give the portraits a quick swab with the cloth.
And through Demick's interviewees' discussion of his death in 1994, we get some sense of what it felt - still feels? - like to live within such an environment, where one all-encompassing figure is thought to be the only guarantee of security and comfort in a world that you are constantly being reminded is horrifically dangerous. Again, there was a range of responses. Kim Hyuck was too young to properly understand what was going on at the time, and initially was simply delighted that there was no school that day. Mi-ran recalls seeing a crowd gathered, spontaneously, and hearing "the rhythm of sobbing" and a "heaving sound"; she
was numb. She couldn't understand it. She was a schoolteacher in training, an educated woman who knew that mortals were made of flesh and blood and lived finite lives. But Kim-Il-sung, she thought, was something other. If the Great Marshall could die, then anything could happen.
Jun-sang found himself unable to mourn like those around him - or like the crowds whose images were soon being broadcast constantly on the television - and couldn't understand why (this was some time before his revelation with the boy at the train station). Dr Kim's father simply stopped eating, and starved to death within a few weeks. There were widepread reports of heart attacks and suicides, and increasingly social pressure was brought to bear on the holdouts who were not demonstrating sufficiently hysterical patriotic grief. For Mrs Song, meanwhile, the world seemed on the verge of collapse:
Nothing made sense. She started to scream. "How are we going to live? What are we going to do without our marshal?" The words came tumbling out.
Her husband didn't react. He sat pale and motionless, staring into space. Mrs Song couldn't keep still. She was pumped up with adrenaline. She rushed down the staircase and out into the courtyard of the building. Many of her neighbours had done the same. They were on their on knees, banging their heads on the pavement. Their wails cut through the air like sirens.
Highly, highly recommended.
~~Nic