Nothing to Envy (43 page)

The September week I was in Pyongyang was a warm one, and I saw several women wearing slinky high-heeled sandals. I also saw for the first time a middle-aged woman who was overweight—not close to achieving an American standard of obesity but odd enough a sight that I pulled out my camera and tried to catch a shot of her before she turned a corner.

Pyongyang is often said to be a Potemkin village, an elaborate artifice for the benefit of outsiders. A foreign visitor will stumble over suspiciously well-dressed people posing in various improbable situations—for example, young women with brightly rouged cheeks in traditional dress sitting on concrete benches under the statue of Kim Il-sung, pretending to read books. It takes a moment before you spot what’s wrong with the picture. I once watched a delegation of soldiers in crisp uniforms approach the statue with a wreath of flowers. When they bowed low as a show of respect, their pants hitched up just enough to reveal that they weren’t wearing socks. There’s been a chronic shortage of socks in the military.

On another trip I made to Pyongyang earlier in 2008 as part of a delegation accompanying the New York Philharmonic, the city was lit up as though it were Christmas. Floodlights bathed Kim Il-sung Square and garlands of tiny white lights illuminated the main streets. The delegation of more than three hundred people, including musicians and journalists, stayed in the Yanggakdo Hotel (often nicknamed “Alcatraz” for its location on an island in the river, which prevents tourists from wandering off). Although it was February and freezing outside, the rooms were so overheated that we had to strip down to T-shirts. A press center had been set up with Internet access. Dinner was a multicourse banquet of salmon, crab gratin, lamb, sliced pheasant, and Viennese-style chocolate cakes. Our breakfast buffet table was decorated with ice sculptures and carved melons and filled with a generous array of foods—perhaps a little weird, but it was a great show. Even the most cynical journalists among us got the impression that North Korea was on its way up, steadily recovering from the arduous march of the 1990s.

Of course, we’d been had. It was a blip, a brief interlude of light in the grim, dysfunctional country that is North Korea. After the Philharmonic and its entourage left, the Internet disappeared. The lights went out. The week after the concert, I spoke by telephone to the U.N. World Food Programme’s representative in Pyongyang, Jean-Pierre de Margerie, who told me, “As soon as you guys left, it was pitch dark again.”

THE WORLD FOOD PROGRAMME
, which has the largest presence in North Korea of the various aid agencies, has a grim assessment of the economic situation there. A survey of 250 North Korean households conducted in the summer of 2008 found that two thirds were still supplementing their diets by picking grass and weeds in the countryside. Most adults didn’t eat lunch for lack of food. When questioned about where they would get their next meal, those surveyed replied that they didn’t know or they offered vague answers, such as, “I’m hoping my relatives who live on a cooperative farm will deliver some potatoes tonight,” according to de Margerie. Some of the interviewees cried as they were being questioned.

U.N. agencies describe a population that has been chronically undernourished for years. “Teachers report that children lack energy and are lagging in social and cognitive development. Workers are unable to put in full days and take longer to complete tasks,” a group of U.S. aid agencies wrote in another report in 2008. Hospital staff reported that they were seeing 20 to 40 percent increases in digestive disorders caused by poor nutrition.

As soon as you leave Pyongyang, the real North Korea comes into view, albeit through the windows of buses or fast-moving cars. Even aid officials stationed in Pyongyang are not allowed into the countryside without an escort. In September 2008, on an excursion through Nampo (the west coast city where Mi-ran saw her first dead body), I saw people who appeared to be homeless sleeping in the grass along the main street. Others squatted on their haunches, heads down, apparently having nothing else to do at ten o’clock on a weekday morning. Walking barefoot along the sidewalk was a boy of about nine years old wearing a mud-stained uniform that hung below his knees. That was the first time I’d seen one of the notorious wandering swallows, the
kochebi
.

There was evidence all along the twenty-five-mile drive between Pyongyang and Nampo of the extent to which North Korea’s able-bodied population was enlisted in the production of food. Middleaged office ladies were marched out to the countryside, carrying pocketbooks and with shovels slung over their shoulders. On the side of the road, older people sifted through the grass on their hands and knees in search of edible weeds. The countryside reeked of the night soil that is still used instead of chemical fertilizer. There were few motorized vehicles in the fields. Trucks belching smoke appeared to have been retrofitted to burn wood and corn cobs instead of gasoline. People carried huge sacks on their backs, hunched over as they walked along rusted railroad tracks that clearly hadn’t been used in years.

SEVERAL OF THE PEOPLE
whose lives I’ve followed in this book are able to contact their families in Chongjin occasionally through illegal telephones in Musan, Hoeryong, and other border towns that pick up Chinese signals. Most of them have been sending money in through middlemen in China, and, at least until the currency reform, the families of defectors were among the richest people in their neighborhoods. “My husband says security agents always come by looking for something. They even come by to shave because they know he’s the only one who has razors,” Oak-hee told me.

But the currency reform wiped out whatever cash these families had been able to save. “Life was hard before but it’s gotten so much harder since,’’ said Mrs. Song when I saw her in January 2010, six weeks after the revaluation. She and others like her worried that the political instability in North Korea and the desperation it caused might lead to retaliation against the families of defectors.

The widening gap between rich and poor has led to a rise in crime. Chongjin has witnessed a number of grisly murders. The husband of Mrs. Song’s second daughter worked as a security guard for the railway until 2006, when he and his wife came to South Korea at Oak-hee’s invitation. At the time of his defection there were so many thieves stealing food from the cargo warehouses that guards were issued guns with live ammunition and shoot-to-kill orders. Similar rules apply to the narrow plots alongside the tracks where corn is grown for the families of railroad workers. Chongjin also has a surprisingly large drug problem because of the widespread availability of “ice,” or crystal methamphetamine, which is produced in small factories and sold inside the city and at the Chinese border. It’s both cheap and cuts the appetite, making it a drug well-suited for the North Korean lifestyle.

Chongjin did not experience the little boomlet of new construction that I observed in Pyongyang. Except for a couple of gas stations along the main road, nothing of significance has been built downtown in years. The newest building is a garish pink structure put up in the late 1990s to house a permanent exhibit of Kimjongilia, a flower named for the Dear Leader. Façades along Road No. 1 have been repainted in pastel shades of wintergreen and peach, but the cornices are crumbling—a constant danger to pedestrians below. New posters spaced at regular intervals along the side of the road tout the government’s latest slogan about rebuilding the economy:
kyungjae jeonsun
, the economic frontline. A few years ago private restaurants had started up inside empty buildings that once housed state-owned restaurants or companies, some of them with karaoke clubs, but most have since closed down.

“Chongjin looks like a city moving backward in time. Everything is in a state of disrepair and it appears to be getting worse,” said Anthony Banbury, Asia regional director for the World Food Programme, who visited in 2008. “At most of the factories, there is no sign of activity. At best one smokestack out of eight is puffing smoke.”

Desperate for foreign currency, the regime has allowed a trickle of visitors to Chongjin in the past few years, usually on their way to or from Mount Chilbo, a tourist site to the south. The foreigners have not been impressed. A European friend of mine who visited in 2010 described Chongjin as a city of “incredible misery.” Work crews that included elderly people and children were building a road in the center of the city; my friend observed them working from five a.m. until late at night, carrying heavy stones and smashing them with hammers into gravel. “It is exactly watching a movie about prison laborers,” he said.

Eckart Dege, a German geographer who generously contributed photographs to this book, witnessed the same kind of manual labor on a 2008 trip on the road to Kyongsong, where Mi-ran and Jun-sang grew up. “There were thousands and thousands of people carrying dirt from the hills in shovels and laying it down in little heaps, as though they were building the pyramids,” Dege said. Inside the city, he also noted the unusually large number of people squatting in a position that is almost emblematic of North Korea, knees bent up to the chest, balancing on the balls of the feet. “In other places in the world people are always doing something, but here they were just sitting.”

It is a North Korean phenomenon that many have observed. For lack of chairs or benches, the people sit for hours on their haunches, along the sides of roads, in parks, in the market. They stare straight ahead as though they are waiting—for a tram, maybe, or a passing car, a friend or a relative. Maybe they are waiting for nothing in particular, just waiting for something to change.

—Barbara Demick
July 2010         

My deepest gratitude goes to the six North Koreans profiled in this book. They gave generously of their time, endured prying questions, and relived painful memories for no motivation other than to help me and my readers understand their world. I am grateful to the members of their families as well for their help. Jinna Park deserves special thanks for her love of language and patience in interpreting most of the interviews that went into this book. The late Dr. Jae Nam introduced me to the first people I met from Chongjin. I could not have learned as much about North Korea as I did without the help of a very courageous woman I will call K, who gave up a comfortable retirement in the United States and who, despite her advanced age, worked tirelessly with her husband on behalf of North Korean refugees. She is one of many people whose names should be mentioned here.

Besides the people featured in this book, there were many other North Korean exiles who helped fill in the blanks about their country: Joo Sung-ha of Dong-a Ilbo, who will someday write his own book; Kim Do-seon; Kim Yong-il; Cho Myong-chol; Kim Hye-young; and Kim Tae-jin.

I also relied on the work of many nongovernmental organizations devoted to North Korean issues. The Seoul-based Good Friends publishes an excellent newsletter on North Korea. Lee Young-hwa of Rescue the North Korean People provided guidance and steered me to photographs and videos that enriched the descriptions of Chongjin. Other excellent sources included Tim Peters, Michael Horowitz, Suzanne Scholte, Han Ki-hong of
Daily NK
, Sunny Han, Reverend Kim Young-shik, Chun Ki-won, Human Rights Watch, and the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights. Do Hee-yun’s research into POWs and abductees helped me to capture the story of Mi-ran’s father.

Among the people in the humanitarian aid community, I wish to thank Katharina Zellweger of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation; the American agronomist Pil-ju Kim Joo; and from the
United Nations’ World Food Programme, Jean-Pierre de Margerie, Gerald Bourke, and Tony Banbury.

Korea experts who were unusually generous with their time were Michael Breen and Scott Snyder, as well as Stephan Haggard, Marcus Noland, Nicholas Eberstadt, Bob Carlin and Leonid Petrov, Brian Myers, Daniel Pinkston, Donald Gregg, David Hawk, and Brent Choi. I was helped enormously by the scholar Andrei Lankov, whose writings are quoted frequently in this book. Fellow journalists Donald Macintyre and Anna Fifield were as obsessed with North Korea as I was and shared with me their ideas and inspiration. Charles Sherman offered constant encouragement for this project, as did other friends and colleagues in Seoul, including Jennifer Nicholson, Jennifer Veale, Scott Diaz, Sue-Lynn Koo, Patricio Gonzalez, Pascal Biannac-Leger, Lachlan Strahan, and Lily Petkovska. Others whose work in Korea helped to shape this book were Moon Il-hwan, Tim Savage, Paul Eckert, Jasper Becker, Choe Sang-hun, Kim Jung-eun, Donald Kirk, and Bradley Martin, whose own book,
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader
, is cited frequently here. Chi Jung-nam and Lim Bo-yeon accompanied me on many interviews with North Koreans.

I’d like to thank the people who provided photographs for this book: Eckart Dege, a geographer who traveled to Chongjin and Kyong-song county in autumn of 2008; photographers Jean Chung and Eric Lafforgue; and journalists Anna Fifield and Jonathan Watts. Jiro Ishi-maru of Asia Press helped me track down photographs of Chongjin that were taken by North Koreans at great risk.

Among those whose research went into this book were Lina Park Yoon, Park Ju-min, Hisako Ueno, and Rie Sasaki. Howard Yoon was a great help in shaping the book proposal.

My friends Julie Talen and Tirza Biron served as writing coaches, helping me transform a style learned at daily newspapers into one suitable for a book. Without Jim Dwyer, I don’t know that I could have gotten this book published. Margaret Scott and Terri Jentz talked me through the book proposal and writing processes. Others who contributed valuably to this book were Gady Epstein, Molly Fowler, Ed Gargan, Eden Soriano Gonzaga, Lee Hockstader, Aliza Marcus, Ruth Marcus, Nomi Morris, Evan Osnos, Catherine Peterson, Flore de Preneuf, David Schmerler and Isabel Schmerler, Lena Sun, Jane Von Bergen, Nicholas Von Hoffman, Eric Weiner, Laura Wides-Munoz, and Tracy Wilkinson. Many years later, I am still thankful to my college
writing teacher, the late John Hersey, who taught his nonfiction writing students to seek structures and models in the work of other writers. His own book
Hiroshima
was an inspiration to me as I wove together the stories of the six people in this book.

I was extremely lucky to find as my agent Flip Brophy, who rose from a bad bout of the flu over Christmas 2006 to take on this project and whose support has gone beyond the call of duty. My publishers, Julie Grau and Celina Spiegel, understood the concept of the book completely from day one. And Laura Van der Veer helped put the pieces into place.

At the
Los Angeles Times
, I wish to thank Simon Li, who first hired me to cover Korea, and editors Dean Baquet, John Carroll, Marc Duvoisin, Doug Frantz, Marjorie Miller, and Bruce Wallace, who encouraged the kind of investigative reporting that made me proud to work for the newspaper. Julie Makinen expertly edited a series of articles about Chongjin that were the germ of this book. Mark Magnier, John Glionna, Valerie Reitman, Ching-ching Ni, Don Lee, and David Pierson were among many colleagues at the
Los Angeles Times
who were particularly helpful.

At Princeton University, where I spent 2006-2007 as a Ferris fellow at the Council of the Humanities, Carol Rigolot gave me a place to write at Henry House. Among the other fellows, Lisa Cohen, Martha Mendoza, T. R. Reid, and Rose Tang gave valuable advice, along with my friends on the faculty, Gary Bass, Maryanne Case, Gabe Hudson, and Jeff Nunakawa.

Finally, special thanks to my mother, Gladys Demick, who, when I told her I was moving to Korea with her only grandchild, instead of complaining, replied, “What a great opportunity!” Her encouragement has been the foundation of my career. And to my son, Nicholas, who cannot remember any time in his young life when he was not competing with North Korea for my attention, and who must have asked me dozens of times, “Aren’t you done with that book yet?” I can finally answer yes.