Nothing to Envy (42 page)
Authors: Barbara Demick
“If you were going to come to South Korea, why didn’t you come sooner?” she asked.
Jun-sang was at a loss to answer. At this point in the conversation, Mi-ran was crying and the implications of her words were clear. She was married and had a baby. It was too late.
AS THE MONTHS
dragged on, the novelty of having rediscovered each other wore off. When we spoke, one often sounded exasperated with the other. Jun-sang complained rather peevishly that Mi-ran wasn’t as beautiful as she used to be. Mi-ran had promised to introduce him to some women but never did. When they communicated, it was by e-mail or text message. The instant gratification of modern communication killed some of the magic between them. Their relationship was one that thrived in the adverse conditions of North Korea. Emotions somehow meant more when they were handwritten on precious scraps of paper and conveyed on slow trains running out of fuel.
“Now that I can call him on the phone whenever I want or send him a text, I’m not so interested,” Mi-ran admitted. “It’s hard for me to understand now why I spent so many years obsessing about this guy.”
The reversal in their social status didn’t help. In North Korea, Jun-sang had the better class background, the money, the fancy Japanese sweaters, and the Pyongyang education. Now he was fresh off the boat with no money and no connections. His North Korean education was useless in South Korea. Everything he’d learned about science and technology was obsolete. He had no immediate prospects of a good career and was stuck doing odd jobs such as delivering food on a motorbike. On his rounds one day, he was knocked over by a taxicab. He picked himself up off the pavement
and, finding no damage to himself or the bike, rode off. When he got back to the restaurant and recounted what had happened, his boss roared with laughter. If Jun-sang hadn’t been such a clueless greenhorn, he would have collected some settlement money from the driver.
Jun-sang shrugged it off. He didn’t let little jabs from South Koreans bug him. His confidence ran deep, to the core. He was never self-pitying and never expressed regrets about defecting, although he worried about not seeing his parents again. He took enormous satisfaction in the tiniest freedoms in his new life. He dressed in denim precisely because he’d been unable to in North Korea. He grew his hair down to his shoulders. (“It was always my dream to grow my hair long. I figured I’d have to do it before I turn forty so I don’t look like a loser,” he told me.) He read voraciously. In North Korea, he’d managed to get something of a liberal arts education, but there were gaps. I often gave him books to read. His favorite was a translation of
1984
. He marveled that George Orwell could have so understood the North Korean brand of totalitarianism.
The last time I saw him, we met at Lotte World, a huge shopping and entertainment complex in the southern part of Seoul. It was a Sunday afternoon just before the lunar New Year and the place was jammed. We pushed our way through the crowds, looking for a place to talk, until we found seats at a revolving sushi bar, the latest rage in South Korea. Plucking our sushi from the conveyor belt, Jun-sang told me he had gone back to school to get a pharmacist’s license. During school vacations, he installed ventilation systems on a construction site in the suburbs. These seemed like odd choices for somebody of his background. I suspected he would be doing something different by the next time we met.
North Korean defectors often find it hard to settle down. It is not easy for somebody who’s escaped a totalitarian country to live in the free world. Defectors have to rediscover who they are in a world that offers endless possibilities. Choosing where to live, what to do, even which clothes to put on in the morning is tough enough for those of us accustomed to making choices; it can be utterly paralyzing for people who’ve had decisions made for them by the state their entire lives.
Defectors are also nagged by the impermanence of their situation. Many, if not most, wish to return to North Korea. Most of them fled with the conviction that Kim Jong-il’s regime was on the verge of collapse and that they would return within a few years to a free North Korea. It was a reasonable assumption. In the mid-1990s, in the aftermath of Kim Il-sung’s death and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it was a matter of virtual consensus in the foreign-policy establishment that the end was imminent. Those who visit Pyongyang and snap photos of the towering monuments, the goose-stepping soldiers, and the kitschy socialist billboards are invariably astounded that the place has survived into the twenty-first century. “See it while it lasts” is how one travel agency advertises its tours to North Korea.
While the persistence of North Korea is a curiosity for the rest of the world, it is a tragedy for North Koreans, even those who have managed to escape. Jun-sang has little chance of seeing his parents again unless the regime collapses in their lifetime. Mi-ran’s best hope for her sisters is that they can survive until the day the gates to the labor camps are opened and the long-term political prisoners are set free.
This is where I leave the story. North Korea remains the last bastion of undiluted communism in the world. Mrs. Song has just retired. Oak-hee runs her karaoke business in Suwon. Dr. Kim is in her last year of medical school and Jun-sang in his first year of pharmacy school. Mi-ran gave birth to her second child, a daughter, in December 2007. I can only excuse myself for leaving the story incomplete because the people in it, like Korea itself, remain works in progress.
WAITING
A bus stop on Chongjin’s main street, 2008
.
D
URING THE FIVE YEARS THAT I SPENT IN SEOUL REPORTING
for the
Los Angeles Times
, I attended numerous dinners with fellow journalists, diplomats, and academics. Invariably the conversation would turn to North Korea, with the participants speculating about when Kim Jong-il’s regime might collapse.
The persistence of the North Korean regime is something of a mystery to many professional North Korea watchers. During the 1990s, imminent collapse was the virtually unchallenged consensus. (“The Coming Collapse of North Korea’’ was the title of an op-ed essay by the noted North Korea scholar Nicholas Eberstadt, published in June 1990.) Against all odds, North Korea survived the breaching of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the market reforms in China, the death of Kim Il-sung, the famine of the 1990s, and two terms of George W. Bush’s presidency. Bush famously lumped North Korea into the “axis of evil” along with Iran and Iraq, and insinuated that he would send Kim Jong-il packing as he did Saddam Hussein. Yet in 2010, Bush is gone and Kim Jong-il is still in power, albeit in poor health. The last of the twentieth-century dictators, he is a living anachronism.
Kim runs his country as though it were the thick of the Cold War, churning out bombastic propaganda, banning most foreigners from visiting, threatening real and imagined enemies with nuclear weapons and missiles. North Korea conducted two nuclear tests, in 2006 and 2009. Nearly two decades of diplomacy on the part of successive U.S. administrations has failed to produce an agreement under which North Korea would give up its weapons programs in return for diplomatic recognition by the United States and a permanent settlement to the Korean War.
As of this writing, tensions with the South are higher than they’ve been since the early 1990s. On March 26, 2010, an explosion ripped apart a South Korean patrol boat, the
Cheonan
, in the Yellow Sea. Forty-six sailors were killed. South Korea announced on May 20 that investigators found overwhelming evidence that the boat was attacked by a North Korean torpedo. Wary of retaliating with force, South Korea is cutting off what remains of its economic assistance to North Korea. The election in 2007 of the conservative Lee Myung-bak to the South Korean presidency put an end to a decade of economic and cultural exchanges that were the pride of Kim Dae-jung’s “sunshine policy.” The tours to Mount Kumgang, once a key source of hard currency for the North Koreans, were suspended in 2008 after North Korea refused to apologize for the apparently accidental shooting of a South Korean tourist.
THE BELLIGERENT MOOD
in Pyongyang goes hand in hand with the economic hard line. Decades after the rest of the Communist world capitulated to capitalism, Kim Jong-il is trying to run the economy the same way his father did in the 1950s. If anything, he’s been taking the country on a great leap backward, rescinding the market reforms that had allowed people like Mrs. Song to survive.
Over the past few years, the Workers’ Party has issued a succession of ridiculous rules with no apparent purpose other than to squeeze the natural workings of the market economy. They have banned all vendors except for women aged forty and over; all the men and younger women are supposed to be reporting to their jobs in state-owned factories, no matter that the factories can’t pay wages. There are increasing restrictions on what can be bought and sold. Special police roam the markets and confiscate all the now-illegal products. Along with rice and corn, soybeans have been banned from the market with the absurd explanation that they might be taken into China and resold to the enemy in South Korea. The party has issued prohibitions against Chinese toiletries (claiming they cause blisters) and Chinese snack foods (claiming they cause stomach ailments). The more fashionable clothing brought in from China has been banned on the grounds that it is too flashy and antisocialist.
If there is no plausible excuse, the party has said simply that people shouldn’t buy products “made in China” because they need to support their own North Korean goods. “We’re supposed to be buying North Korean products instead of Chinese. But North Korea doesn’t make anything—it all comes from China—so there is nothing to buy,” said a frustrated North Korean businessman I interviewed in China in 2009. “Our general wants to bring back socialism the way it used to be.”
Until recently, people were managing to outwit the police, keeping whatever was banned under the table, or moving their wares before an inspection. But that changed in late 2009, when the Workers’ Party pulled out its heavy artillery. On November 30, the party announced that it would invalidate all of the currency in circulation and issue new bills. The ostensible reason was to prevent inflation by knocking off two zeroes from the won, which was trading at the time at 3,500 to the U.S. dollar, in order to “strengthen the national currency and stabilize the circulation of money,” an official of the Workers’ Party explained. In fact it was a trick. The North Korean regime wanted to confiscate the cash that had been accumulated by people working in the market. The rules limited people to trading no more than 100,000 won for the new currency, which meant that nobody would have more than about $30 to their name.
The North Korean regime had pulled this same currency stunt five times before, most recently in 1992, but this time people who’d been working at the markets had accumulated some savings, so what existed of a nascent middle class was wiped out overnight.
“I don’t know how to explain it. It was as though your head would burst. In one day all your money was lost. People were taken to the hospital in shock,” a seventeen-year-old girl from Musan told me in March, when I was on the Chinese side of the border interviewing those recently arrived from North Korea. The girl had come out three weeks earlier.
Along with the currency exchange, the Workers’ Party ordered all the markets closed and banned the use of foreign currency. People were angry enough this time that there was resistance. Police trying to close down markets scuffled with vendors. Instead of turning in their invalidated currency as instructed, some people stuffed it in toilets, threw it in the ocean, or scattered it on the streets—in part to get rid of the evidence that they’d made money and in part to express their outrage. One man in Chongjin who burned his invalidated currency was executed for treason, having in the process put the portrait of Kim Il-sung that appeared on some bills up in flames.
People were told they would be able to buy whatever they needed at very reduced prices from the state-run stores; supposedly rice that had previously cost 2,500 won would be available with the new currency for 25 won. But the government stores had no rice, corn, flour, or cooking oil to sell.
With the markets closed, food was available only from a handful of vendors selling in back alleys, and the prices were exorbitant. A kilo of rice soared to the equivalent of two weeks’ salary. A single egg cost a week’s wages. Prices would sometimes double or triple in a single day, and exchange rates fluctuated so wildly that foreign trade came to a halt out of confusion.
In the space of a few hours, the exchange rate in the Koryo Hotel, where most business people stay in Pyongyang, swung between 41 and 120 won to the euro. Depending on what rate you got, a cup of coffee at the hotel cost anywhere from $11 to $32. Almost all the restaurants and stores in Pyongyang closed down. Some of the few foreign businesses operating in North Korea threatened to pull out. The economy, in essence, had collapsed.
BY THE END OF
December 2009, the Workers’ Party was forced to revoke its ban on the markets and in February issued a rare public apology from Premier Kim Yong-il (not to be confused with Kim Jong-il), who reportedly admitted that currency reform was pushed ahead without “sufficient preparation” and that the party regretted causing “great pain to the people.” To underscore the apology, the regime found a scapegoat in the planning and finance director, Pak Nam-ki, a seventy-seven-year-old party stalwart who had frequently been photographed with Kim Jong-il. He was reportedly executed by firing squad in a Pyongyang stadium in mid-March.
For all the regrets, it was impossible to undo the damage done. Chinese traders were reluctant to sell without cash in advance, but their North Korean counterparts had no money. North Koreans I met in March near the border said that food was scarcer than at any time since the 1990s. The disruption to the economy was exacerbated by a poor harvest, which was in part the result of declining fertilizer and seed contributions from South Korea.
“The situation is unbearable. People are starving again,” I was told by a talkative fifty-six-year-old from Musan who gave her name as Li Mi-hee. She’d come across the border into China in mid-December, two weeks after the currency exchange, but spoke regularly to her adult son who had an illegal Chinese mobile phone. “It is not like the 1990s, when the food disappeared gradually. From one day to the next everything fell apart. Nobody talked about it back then, but now people are complaining.”
A friend of mine who travels regularly to the North Korean city of Rajin, a special trade zone just north of Chongjin, said that the markets had no rice, no vegetables, no fruit, no corn, and just a small amount of flour when he visited in early March. An official to whom he regularly brings a bottle of Scotch this time accepted the gift with disappointment. “Next time bring rice instead.”
THE ECONOMIC DEBACLE
couldn’t have come at a more delicate time for the North Korean regime. Kim Jong-il is trying to pull off the most daring maneuver yet: the installation of his youngest son as his successor. Kim Jong-un, who was born in either 1982 or 1983, is a cipher even by North Korean standards—a figure so unknown, as of this writing, he could probably walk through the streets of Pyongyang without being recognized. The Workers’ Party began introducing Kim Jong-un (or at least the idea of him, since he hasn’t appeared in public) in late 2009, and party cadres in Pyongyang were called to a celebration for his birthday on January 8, 2010. Portraits of him are supposed to be hung on the walls next to those of his father and grandfather as the year progresses.
The succession has been pushed into fast-forward by Kim Jong-il’s obvious poor health. He was left with an arm partially paralyzed by a stroke in 2008 and is reportedly suffering from kidney disease, and possibly diabetes and cancer. A fifty-year-old woman from Hamhung I interviewed in March during my trip to the border said that she’d been told about Kim Jong-un at an ideological lecture. “What I learned in the training session is that he is very young, under thirty, and because he is so young people say he will be smarter and bring new perspectives.” Others were less confident. “What can we expect from Kim Jong-un, when his father runs the country so badly that his people are starving to death?” said Li Mi-hee, the woman from Musan.
When North Korea runs short of food, the regime feeds its population with more propaganda. In Pyongyang, young party cadres stand under dim streetlamps muttering the words they have to memorize from Kim Jong-il’s New Year’s address about his plans to improve the living standard of his people. Posters urging people to work harder to develop the economy through a “150-day battle’’ are followed by a new campaign for a “100-day battle” urging still more sacrifice for the country.
Their hard work will be rewarded, they are told, in 2012 when North Korea will celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il-sung’s birth. The propaganda line has it that in 2012 North Korea will be a “strong and prosperous nation.’’ The people, though, are skeptical. “They say things will be better, that people will live well by 2012, but I can do the math—it’s only two years away—and I wonder how it can possibly get better when people are starving now,’’ said a twenty-eight-year-old woman from the outskirts of Pyongyang who escaped into China in 2009.
AT THE TIME OF
my last trip to North Korea, in late 2008, the campaign for 2012 had already begun. In Pyongyang, I was surprised to see half a dozen new buildings under construction and others covered with scaffolding, mid-renovation. The sound of chain saws and jackhammers filled the air. It was nothing compared to other Asian capitals where the cityscape is in a perpetual state of reinvention, but nonetheless remarkable for Pyongyang, a city that seems stuck in the 1960s. Other than a few monuments to the leadership, virtually nothing new had been built in Pyongyang in decades. My guide said that 100,000 new units of housing would be completed by 2012. The Pyongyang Grand Theater, which stages revolutionary operas, was also under renovation. Already the oldest and most elegant of the city’s movie theaters, the Taedongmun Cinema, had undergone renovation. Most amazing was that the façade of Pyongyang’s most notorious clunker, the 105-story, pyramid-shaped Ryugyong Hotel, was being restored. Construction on it had stopped nearly two decades earlier for lack of money. The Egyptian conglomerate Orascom had agreed to take on the project as part of a $400 million deal to set up a mobile telephone network. The network is now working, and although the telephones can only be used to make local calls, it has gone a long way toward dragging North Korea into the twenty-first century.