Nothing to Envy Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

I have always been interested in reading about North Korea - one of the countries George Bush labeled the “axes of evil”.  The author of “Nothing to Envy Ordinary Lives in North Korea ”, Ms. Barbara Demick, was the Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times.  After interviewing about 100 North Koreans who defected to Seoul and visiting North Korea herself nine times, she wrote this book about the poignant stories of six North Koreans who once lived in Chongjin, a poor industrial town in the northeast.  The book is so absorbing from start to end and I am going to write in some length to introduce to you the tragic experiences of the six defectors.

The darkness

Demick began her book with a striking satellite photo of the Korean peninsula at night – prosperous South Korea lit up by cities and commerce, in stark contrast with the total darkness of North Korea.

Photo Source: 

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2006/10/061011-d -6570c -001.jpg

Mi-ran and Jun-sang

Mi-ran and Jun-sang were once lovers.  Mi-ran is the daughter of a kaolin miner, a South Korean prisoner of war and the ‘tainted blood’ has disqualified Mi-ran from moving up the social ladder.  On the other hand, Jun-sang came from a high-ranking family.  They took advantage of the complete absence of electricity and had romantic walks in the pitch black night, the only time the police in Chongjin could not locate them.  Had they been caught holding hands in the daytime, Jun-sang could have lost his job prospects.  According to Mi-ran’s recount, “It took us three years to hold hands. Another six to kiss.  At the time I left North Korea, I was 26 years old and a schoolteacher, but I didn’t know how babies were conceived.”

Jun-sang eventually went to a college in Pyongyang to study science and continued the romance with Mi-ran from afar.  However, the situation became far worse after the famine was at its peak in the 1990s.  Mi-ran witnessed her once cheerful students eaten away slowly by malnutrition-their limbs became bony, stomachs blown up, heads disproportionate to their bodies.  Fewer and fewer students showed up in class each month.

Compared to Mi-ran, Jun-sang had lived a relatively better life.  As a future scientist, he enjoyed more and better food at school.  He also had access to pirated broadcasts from the South.  However, as he had always been, like other North Koreans were, so isolated from the outside world all his life, when he first saw or heard reports of the lives of South Korean, he was skeptical about them. 

Despite the truth being laid out before the bare eyes of North Korean, the government assured its citizens that all was fine.  Officials accused the “American imperialist bastards” of creating the shortage by imposing on North Korea a blockade of food and oil.  In 1998, Mi-ran fled across the northern border to China and then flew to Seoul . She split with her lover and left without a word fearing that he would tell the secret police.

Devastated, Jun-sang followed her six years later to South Korea .  But it was too late: by then, she had married a South Korean.

Mrs. Song and Oak-Hee

Two defectors were a daughter and mother.  Mrs Song was a good communist housewife and head of the block’s inminban. Oak-hee, was her rebellious and enterprising daughter.  

In most part of her life, Mrs Song was committed to the cult of Kim Jong-il. She polished his photograph daily.  Family members who expressed the faintest sign of doubt about the regime were severely scolded by her.  She kept her job in a local factory till the very end even with no wages. When her husband died of starvation in their marriage bed, she still told herself that the country's misfortune was the fault of the American devils.

About Mrs. Song’s daughter, Oak-hee, I recalled her narratives of how North Koreans’ food rations were exchanged with a bucket of human poo.  The fields in North Korea were fertilised with human excrement.  Oak-hee was required to produce and bring to a barn a bucket of poo every week so that she would receive a chit for their food rations.  When nobody was watching the buckets of poo, Oak-hee would steal one and pretend it was her family's. 

However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea ’s frail economy also collapsed and the country ran out of money, goods and most importantly, food.  All the frogs in the country had disappeared into frying pans.  Dogs, which are traditionally on the Korean menu, had even less chance.  Half-dead from hunger, Mrs Song saw on sale in the market place rare sacks of rice stamped with Stars and Stripes, which were of course American food aid but sold for personal profit by the North Korean military.

Oak-hee’s hunger and hard life at home eventually sent her on a dangerous flight across a river into China.  She discovered from television the truth about her homeland when she crossed the border.  She later tricked her mother into visiting China and then lured her to South Korea.

With the deaths of her husband and son from slow starvation, and the flight of Oak-hee, Mrs. Song decided to leave North Korea and seek a new life with her daughter.  With Oak-hee’s arrangement and refugee smugglers’ assistance, Mrs Song went across the border into China.  One of the first things she saw was a dog being fed on a bowl of rice and meat.  The fact that dogs in rural north-eastern China ate better than the people of North Korea crumbled what Mrs Song had known and believed into dust.

Demick met with Mrs. Song regularly for dinner after she had settled into South Korean life.  According to Demick, Mrs Song said one night as they sat around a pot of shabu shabu, “When I see a good meal like this, it makes me cry,” “I can’t helping thinking of my husband’s last words, ‘Let’s go to a good restaurant and order a nice bottle of wine.' And when it came to her son, she was unable to speak.

(to be continued)