“Famine is something that happens in South Korea, or Africa, but not in a socialist country like North Korea,” Hye-jin Lee (23) explains; it never occurred to her that what she was living through was, in the international arena, referred to as a famine that was both contemporary and anachronistic in its character. Precipitated by the floods of the mid-1990s, food insecurity was well under way because of political and economic stubbornness toward opening up in the wake of the Soviet bloc collapse, but for Hye-jin Lee (23), what was happening in North Korea was first understood by what it was not: it was not a famine.
North Koreans, cut off from the information flows of global media, still managed to learn the stereotypical representations of famine: a skeletal body, usually black, in a parched and sun-cracked landscape. Not well known in the wider world, least of all in North Korean school books, is the history of socialism’s relationship to famine or the conspicuous way that censorship and famine occur together. In North Korea, famine is a feature of capitalist systems, which naturally run amok. In such descriptions, usually seen in the North Korean media organ KCNA, hunger in places like America is conflated with famine.
What North Koreans were experiencing was, officially, a March of Suffering. On the ground it was often referred to as “the busy time.” Life got busy. People were swept up in the process of getting by. In the oral accounts, in the earliest years of the March of Suffering, people identified the starting point differently according to where they lived geographically and their occupations. Those farthest from Pyongyang and to the north, for instance, and those farthest in the employment network from government office, such as farmers and miners, identified the start of the busy years as the late 1980s into the early 1990s. Because of the gradual and insidious way famine occurs, and because famine is not general to a whole nation or area, this gradually developing archipelago muddles recognition of what is happening. For North Korea, too, preexisting undernutrition already predisposed people to going without and making do, and this blurred recognition of anything being amiss.
In the late 1980s the Soviet Union cut aid to North Korea, there was a 10 percent reduction in Public Distribution System (PDS) rations under the rationale of patriotism. The vast majority of people in North Korea obtained access to food through the PDS, which was tasked from its earliest history with distributing food, among other things, throughout the country. This food came from the surplus production of farmers, purchased at low cost by the central government. In exchange, farmers were given seed, fertilizer, insecticides, and farming equipment, and they were permitted to grow a small plot of vegetables for personal household consumption. Farmers were also given a food ration from the harvest. The central government transferred the purchased food into the PDS. Non-farmers received a ration twice monthly at a low, subsidized price.1 Local warehouses were tasked with distributing the food rations.
Two key features of the PDS food ration system are worthy of note. First, the system ensured that mobility was discouraged. To receive their ration, individuals had to appear at their designated local warehouse. Second, the system of distribution was not equal, but differences in political rank, among other factors, determined the amount given to each recipient. At its earliest history, North Korea had sixty-four categories. The Kim family and Politburo were at the top, “below them Communist Party Cadres, internal security, military officers and at the bottom descendants of families who had been members of the old Korean nobility, business people and large land owners.” Although this sixty-four-category system simplified its categories over time, the PDS was in operation from 1950 through the mid-1990s.2
The food shortage got to the worst point during 1988 at Cheongjin. I lived in Cheongjin. But how did the food situation change since 1988? The distribution started to slow down bit by bit. Before in 1987, there was some sort of distribution. In society, when a woman gives birth, then she gets some benefits. It was good treatment. When she gives birth, they give 10 kg of rice to congratulate her. That was the happiest moment. For instance, if the mother would try to breast-feed her child, but there would be no milk, then there was a special powder for the baby to eat, a formula called ahm. They would give you that for six months. So the baby can eat even when it isn’t being breast-fed. There were those benefits. That program was there during 1987, but it started to slow down in 1988. Because of the food shortage, the supplies that would be given twice a month changed to once a month. Then often the supply cart would just check in at the supply station and say that you would get food the next time the supply comes in, and leave. Then you just go back home. After a few days, when you hear from the department that the new cart had arrived, people would get in line to get the food. You were supposed to get 15 days’ worth of food, but we only got 3 days’ worth. So the people would start to complain on the way back home. Can’t we get more? Why aren’t the supplies coming in? We would start saying those kinds of things. (Mi-hee Kun, 53)
Seasonal variations in nutrition are reflected in the development and height of children born in autumn, who fare better than those born in the winter.3 Son preference, a feature of both Koreas before the division, is largely absent in the North. This has been attributed to the resiliency observed in women and girls, particularly during the famine years.4 North Koreans had adjusted to inadequate food resources since the partition of the peninsula. The society Jung-ok Choi (21) knew was described as hard-working and determined: “Whenever, whatever happens, people are quick on their feet, North Korean people. They always lived like that. They were ready to do whatever they had to do on their own.” North Koreans were used to shortages of food and other resources such as fuel and electricity. Adapting to fluctuations in resources was a regular feature of life.
It was difficult for interviewees to recall a precise moment in time when the famine took hold in North Korea. This is certainly due to the fact that famine is not a sudden event, but it is also because North Koreans were familiar with undernutrition and shortage. North Korea has long triaged resources and food according to regional and occupational rationale. Whether or not the situation slipped into famine for certain individuals depended on their geographic location, social class, occupation, and some means by which they could increase their access to food. The emergence of famine was contingent on these variables. Therefore, a family in a northern remote town who earned their living through farming or mining fared far worse than someone in the same town who was a factory worker, a member of the labor party, or a local authority figure in charge of supervising the housing estate. Greater inconsistency for the starting point of the famine emerged in the oral accounts of those individuals coming from Pyongyang, for many of them didn’t realize anything was amiss until the late 1990s. A family in Pyongyang may only have known about the famine as late as 1997, while others in Cheongjin noticed food shortages as early as 1988.
The year 1995 was suggested by many as the year it all began, perhaps because that was the year floods first destroyed enough crops to compel the government to seek international aid, setting a precedent. The floods were a convenient opportunity to request aid without losing face. Shortages of food had been an issue many years before this, but the shortages resulting from the floods brought a new point of comparison. The spectacle of famine is seen long after the contributing and precipitating factors have already done their damage. By the time people saw wandering, homeless children, beggars, and bodies of the dying and dead piled in train stations, the famine process had already been well under way for years. When the state provided an explanation for what was wrong—the flooding and cold snaps, sanctions from the outside, enemy forces, U.S. and Japanese imperialism—this seemed rational, and the solution for it, which was collective endurance, would ensure both individual and, more importantly, national survival.
Lack of information, misinformation, and extensive adaptation to undernutrition and shortages limited a critical interpretation of the earliest famine years. Reaction to shortages was dulled by previous familiarity with shortage, which had been met with ingenuity, adaptation, and endurance. Adept at getting by on little, interviewees explained that they put their hopes on the future, trusting that soon things would turn around. They prepared themselves by enduring as best they could and waiting. People continued to work hard; they knuckled down, endured the hunger without complaint, and reassured themselves that the postponed delivery of the public distribution was only temporary.5 As this cycle between reprieves grew larger, the famine years created a new norm. It was only when coping strategies were more socially extreme—for example, theft, disappearances, and parents leaving children to search for food—that interviewees identified signs that the busy years had become something different, that the social life they had once known had begun to change. Jung-ok Choi (21) shared her earliest memories of North Korea, just before the onset of the famine.
A lot of people from my region, North Hamgyong Province, come out [from North Korea]. It’s because the region is near the Chinese border. I was born in Cheongjin in 1984, my parents were laborers, average laborers. From when I was very small we had livestock. We raised pigs. With those pigs and our labor we were able to eat. We didn’t eat well, but we had enough maize growing up. (Jung-ok Choi, 21)
There were others who were comparatively better off, deemed more politically loyal. They were in charge of keeping an eye on others. Young-mi Park (65), a grandmother, lived comfortably in North Korea, and although she lived in the same small city as Jong-Ok, she never had the experience of eating maize. She lived on a better diet that was the privilege of her class, but she also witnessed how differently those around her ate and lived. As an apartment “monitor,” a position that involved keeping an eye on the activities of others and rounding up people for work units and other activities, she understood the circumstances of her surroundings better than most.
From the time I was born until I escaped North Korea, I never tried the so-called maize. My family never ate that. My kids had friends who ate it, but we didn’t. We lived in an apartment, and I was positioned as the monitor of the entire apartment complex (inminbanjang). The office selects people who are better off for the position of monitor because you aren’t working all the time and can keep an eye on things. In that job I got a close look at things. There were many occasions where people were so poor it was considered fortunate to have two meals of maize a day. Many people passed lunch and dinner hungry, leaving for work early the next morning. If they earn some money they can then buy some corn rice or corn flour to live on. Being monitor of the whole apartment, I knew the situation of all thirty families I was responsible for. You just know, once you are monitoring, what they are eating in that house, what is going on in this house or that house. There was a family of five that didn’t even have proper clothes to wear. There was nothing for them to wear when the clothes were washed. And nothing to eat. They would head out each day to figure out what to sell to make some money to get food. On the days that they didn’t get anything I would give them some of our leftover food, I would call them over during the holidays to give them a little bit of meat and some side dishes. The mother told me that her children always had diarrhea after visiting, but it was because they weren’t used to eating foods with oil or fat. (Young-mi Park, 65)
The greatest number of defectors in South Korea left provinces such as North Hamgyong, South Hamgyong, Ryanggang, and North Pyongan. These regions, in addition to Namp’o, were some of the worst-affected areas during the famine years. Leading the way in numbers of defectors is North Hamgyong with over 65 percent. In terms of occupations, a great number of defectors are farmers, miners, or factory laborers, followed by office workers and professionals.
Each individual family experienced these earliest stages of the famine as shortage, but there were sometimes wide variations and contradictions among them. The North Korean government made decisions based on political classification, which meant that certain portions of the population were relocated to the northernmost provinces of North Hamgyong and Yanggang-do. In 1957–1960 North Korea engaged in purges similar to those under Stalin (1936–1938). Political classification determined not only employment but also geographic location. These classifications should not be understood as accurate for assessing genuine political loyalty as many individuals who were staunchly loyal to the state were classified as wavering and relegated to marginalized positions in society, both geographically and socially.
The northernmost provinces of North Hamgyong and Yanggang-do are where the largest number of defectors comes from. These are also the two provinces most harshly affected by the famine of the 1990s, and they continue to experience consistent food shortages. The preexisting inequalities in society mapped the greatest impact of the famine in terms of the decline of food availability and extreme difficulty in altering one’s access to food. Some households did not belong to collectives, while others did. People were able to benefit if their jobs provided an opportunity to do so. The type of work individuals did was determined according to their degree of reliability and loyalty to the government. Those working in the mines, for instance, were some of the least trusted classes in North Korea, and of course the prison camps were full of so-called hostile class individuals and their family members.6
There is evidence of regional variations in biological living standards in North Korea throughout the 1990s, revealing that children living in triaged areas of reduced food distribution, the northeastern provinces, fared worse, and there is evidence that as early as the 1970s North Koreans were living with nutritional stress.7 According to Schwekendiek, children born in Pyongyang are healthier, providing evidence that elites residing in the capital seemingly possess comparative advantages in food supply.8 When controlling for further variables, Schwekendiek found that boys and older children suffered more during the crisis, although cohorts born before the onset of the famine were significantly better off.
Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, is home to those deemed most politically trustworthy. Entry into the capital is strictly controlled. Although movement within North Korea is tightly regulated, Sung-hoon Kang (36) traveled from Pyongyang to his hometown during his military service.
We first knew of it when, for instance, we went to school and people would fall asleep. You know, so hungry you fall asleep. Or people had symptoms of illness, that kind of thing. When I was in North Korea I was in my military service during the time of the starvation deaths. I was working on a construction site in Pyongyang. We were sent to our hometowns later and that’s when I knew all of North Korea was starving. In the military we were hungry too. There was always very little. No side dishes, no rice, so we couldn’t eat. So how could things remain ordinary? What shall I say? Was there no rice from early times? When I was little, we got the food distribution and it was shared out. But from 1992, it collapsed. When I went into the military, I was very hungry.
People were hungry so they cut down the trees to grow corn in their place. There was corn, barley, millet, potato. Because the farmers couldn’t farm—the farms couldn’t be farmed in the condition they were in and so there was no food distribution given. So what was the connection with the trees? People couldn’t cultivate, because there is no private land. It is all collective. The mountains were set on fire and the trees went up in flames. Some people just went up into the mountains and died of starvation. People went to plant corn. So at the very start the country tried to regulate it. They couldn’t stop the famine. From the time it started the mountains were taken over for farming. The people who got there first had the lower parts and those who got there last were way up at the top. So for that reason, none of the mountains had trees. There were some regions that were given over to tobacco farming, but not all. They were called tobacco farms. There were tobacco farmers in Onsang, in the village. (Sung-hoon Kang, 36)
A government decision to allot large sections of northern land to tobacco production, when farm land was already scarce and depleted of nutrients, demonstrates a distinct lack of foresight for the needs of the population. Chi-hye Kim (25) left North Korea in 1999, but she recalled a time when the farms in her village, Dongkwon, with around three hundred families, were converted over to tobacco production. She correlated the agricultural conversion with the military. Preposterous as it may sound by contemporary global standards of health, interviewees told me that North Korean soldiers were encouraged to smoke, perhaps because tobacco is a stimulant and appetite suppressant. However, North Korea’s illicit economic activities may indicate another explanation for the transition to tobacco production. In 1995, twenty forty-foot shipping containers were seized in Taiwan. The contents: counterfeit wrappers of a major Japanese cigarette brand, bound for North Korea.9
Up until 1989 we had farmed corn, but at the end of the 1980s that changed and we were instructed to plant tobacco. I can’t recall the exact year, but there was some story about the change. Something related to how soldiers who lack tobacco did not fight as well. We were growing tobacco for the soldiers. Kim Il-Sung gave a directive that the entire area should farm tobacco for the soldiers. The entire area was changed over to farm that crop instead of corn. When people are in school, until they graduate, until they are 17–18 years old, they do not smoke, but when they join the army they are told to smoke. I remember from an early age, my mother was farming tobacco. Because the entire area, pretty much, was growing tobacco, it was very difficult to get food. If we were growing corn or rice, we could eat it. But you can’t eat tobacco. (Chi-hye Kim, 25)
In the past, she said,
houses stood at the foot of the mountains, and just beyond the houses were fruit trees such as peaches, apricots, and pears. In the spring, the apricot trees would blossom and the peach trees would blossom in pink. In April, azaleas covered the hills. That is the way it was in the past, but around 1993 and 1994 all the trees were cut down for fuel. We had neither electricity nor oil. In the end you could not see a single tree. People had no more trees for firewood. The town was beautiful. Though political undesirables were sent to the region, the mountains acted as a natural means to fence them in. In addition to this, there was a training center for the secret police.
By 1994 there was complete collapse of the PDS in the northeast regions. That same year Kim Il-Sung died. The following year the country experienced unseasonal cold snaps in winter and floods that destroyed crops. The government then made official appeals for food aid. Hye-jin Lee’s description illustrates the stratification of society.
We got the food downturn from around 1994. Up until that time, the miners got the food ration tickets from the country, didn’t they, so we would get food. We would get a monthly wage too. They give a wage to those working in the mines. Then in July of 1994 Kim Il-Sung died, didn’t he. Up until then we were okay. We had enough food to live, even if it was cornmeal. Even if it was only cornmeal, we still had three meals a day of it. Then after Kim Il-Sung died in 1994, in our house after that time we got the food downturn. The food ration was in short supply, and they didn’t give any wages. The miners were not given any food rations or wages. There was no way to live like that. In that situation we ate two meals a day. My mom worked on a farm and the food rations came there for them, so by virtue of that we were able to live a bit. My family was in “level 2” of society. That meant that we were given dangerous work to do. Sometimes level 2 people were given outdoor work to do, carrying coal, that kind of work. If people have some sort of health problem they are in level 3 or 4, like disabled people, that’s how it is. My father was in a higher up level, beneath him there were many levels, down to level 5. We were in level 2 so we got about 800 grams of food relief a day [prior to the death of Kim Il-Sung]. I do not know how much the level 5s got. That system was around before I was born. We had become used to that. (Hye-jin Lee, 23)
People had grown accustomed to the style of distribution, which was politically stratified according to social level. Now they grew to know it also as infrequent, delayed, and unreliable. Inside the country, low-grade fluctuations in access to food were in operation for several decades. When the floods came in 1995, there was little chance—short of a massive appeal for international aid and opening the country to help, direction, and investment from foreign and South Korean donors—for the country to have avoided the deaths and extreme hardships that were sure to come.
The system of food distribution in North Korea was an inbuilt system of social and political control that allotted food according to factors such as gender and age but also according to perceived political loyalty and occupation. You could only access your allotment of distribution by appearing at the distribution center in your housing area, which controlled the movement of people within the country. Persons deemed of questionable loyalty, along with those in lowly occupations such as mining, were given less distribution. This preexisting social inequality identified the groups that were first and worst affected by the famine. Kyung-hee Kim (45) grew up in a family of six, her mother a widow, in the northern town of Danchon.
We lived far from the coast, so it was really difficult for us to live. Everything has to be brought by train. Our village can only survive if things are carried on the train. If the trains came carrying food, we got it. Even though we were surrounded by mountains. Mountains all around. Women who came to our area used to say they look up and can only see three stars, the mountains were that high. Because it was in the mountains, even if you wanted to sell something you couldn’t; if you wanted to sell, you had to come down into town and sell.
My father died when I was eleven, in 1971. My mother had a hard life, rearing five children. With no father, we had no choice. Unavoidably we congregated near the mines. No matter how capable we might have been, we had to work the mine. It was a wretched life. Even with no modern facilities or equipment useful for health and safety, we were told to work. We had to. If you see mines here in South Korea, people go when safety is guaranteed, but there is no such thing in the North. When they set dynamite they don’t wait until all the risk is clear. One day dozens of people died that way in a rockslide weighing many tons. There were people underneath it. They had been smoking, taking a break. Those kinds of things happened, multiple times. (Kyung-hee Kim, 45)
Kyung-hee’s friend, Sun-young Kim (43), also grew up in a mining family.
We could commute down into the mine by an elevator, down 800 meters. At first it was deafening, and then sweaty. We worked together pushing a two-ton tram car, after they set off the dynamite. We put the metal inside and pushed it with all our human strength.
It’s different for everyone. Work is such that if they say, “Go to the mines,” then you go. But if they say, “Go fish” then those people go fishing. If they say, “Go farm,” then they farm. We absolutely had to do it. We absolutely had to say yes. No excuses. No justifications. Those mining natives, those whose family was there since before their parent’s generation, they are used to the difficulty of the situation so they would use the land or the mountains to make a living. (Sun-young Kim, 43)
Those habituated to some of the most difficult work in North Korea, beyond that which takes place in the political prison camps, are the miners. Miners in North Korea often inherit their occupations through being born into a mining village and family. Such individuals were first relocated to these regions because their political loyalty was deemed questionable. While some miners might have secured small secret plots of land for themselves, the majority lacked access to land such as farmers had, so miners were in a more precarious position than others within the society during the famine years. Jung-ho Park (65) graduated from high school and, like her father, went to work in the mines near Najin. She shared the following insights about her employment and access to food in the years leading up to the famine.
After graduating from high school I worked in the coal mines. I was a charger. A charger goes into the coal mines and sets up lights made from the factory, attaching lights so you can see where you are going. Putting minus and plus together to charge the electricity. I did that until I was 22 years old. Then I married. After I married I worked for a year and then left that work. The Party in North Korea is the best organization for work, so I joined the publicity department. My husband had political dreams, and I reared the kids and worked a lot. I worked in the farms and then made snacks and candies in the night factory, I made bean paste. I did many things like that.
Back then they usually didn’t give all 700 grams to the family, they gave roots in addition to the distribution [PDS]. Maybe they would add 300 grams of roots, and the distribution center decides that that makes it up to 700 grams.
Even though war broke out in the 1950s, by the 1960s North Korea lived pretty well. In the stores there was plenty of snacks and candies; there was lots of taffy, for instance. Back then they refined the corn, put in sugar and some other stuff, to see the taffy melting and dripping. There was plenty enough. There was honey, sea cucumbers, meat. All these things were on display. There was plenty, like South Korean markets today. And the 1970s were good too. The 1980s were okay, but from the late 80s things started to become tight. At that time, distribution for one person of 700 grams was expected to last about two days; each time you receive, say, 15 days’ worth of distribution, there would actually be 13 days and so on. (Jung-ho Park, 65)
Hye-jin Lee (23) arrived in her mining village after her father was instructed to move there following his military duty.
I grew up in a small town in Hamgyong Province, which was mostly a coal-mining town for social outcasts. We grew tobacco, corn, soybeans, the usual agricultural products. What was unique about that place was that we were all outcasts there, people who were sent there for being undesirable. People who had some sort of political problem from Pyongyang or those kinds of places were sent there. Most of the people were sent to do mining. My father’s home town was Sinuiju. My mother was from Kangwondo Onsan. My father was sent to live in the mining town after his military service. Most people do not want to go to the mines, so they are discharged there from the military. So the village where I grew up was a mining town. You don’t have a choice about going there. You don’t go alone, you are sent there in groups. People who were politically unfavorable were sent to what was called the Ahoje coal mine.
North Koreans had lived with rations and long-term undernutrition since the division of the Korean peninsula. People were often so habituated to this that only at times when rations dropped off completely did they feel the difficulty. Jung-ho Park provided further insights of the earliest onset.
It started getting worse gradually. Life got more difficult from how it was before. Distribution rations were not their full percentages. A person who is supposed to receive 700 grams would only get 576 grams, for instance. People who worked in the coal mines used to get 1 kilogram 300 grams, but they started reducing and reducing it until it was only 900 grams for those in the mines. Then the average office workers and laborers got their regular distribution taken away, and things got very complicated. In North Korea at that time there was no market at all, so even if you wanted to go somewhere and buy food, you couldn’t. We wanted to eat and be satisfied with the distribution. Some went up the mountains to pluck up grasses and roots to supplement distribution. By 1993 we didn’t even receive 1 kilogram, so what happened? From then on, North Koreans went to the mountains to dig herbs. (Jung-ho Park, 65)
Preexisting social and political factors predisposed geographic regions and occupations to have increased vulnerability to food shortages. These inequalities were more complex than we might imagine and didn’t always fall along predictable lines. Soldiers released from military duty were often transferred to mining towns because there was too much work and too few hands.
Zinc is used a lot by the military. What was special about the zinc mine in Danchon is that there were not enough people to work the mines, so they brought soldiers who had been serving for eleven or twelve years from all over the country. Some kind of policy was set saying “you guys, just go to the mines.” You might not want to go, but if it’s a policy then you absolutely have to go. If I don’t go then they capture me and send me; they will certainly catch you and ask why you would disobey the policy. They force you, politically. The soldiers are powerless. The soldiers would have lived apart from their parents for maybe twelve or thirteen years, from the age of seventeen. In North Korea, military service is long. So after they finish it would be nice if they could go back home to their parents, but they are not sent back. The government sets out policies to send them to mines, farm villages, and coal mines. If they wind up working there they have to stay through the generations. (Kyung-hee Kim, 45)
Life for those newly arrived soldier-miners was not easy during the earliest signs of famine, as Sun-young Kim (43) explained: “The soldiers who came after their military service came from all over the country. In the military they know only how to be soldiers, they don’t know how to be in society. They didn’t know how to live in society and couldn’t adjust, so even more people died. So many people died. So many.”
The oral accounts show a lengthy period of confusion and hope that things would turn around. Reliance on ritual, tradition, or custom is common to all peoples in times of crisis. It was so in North Korea too. Ritual increases at the beginning of the onset of famine.10 In North Korea, there is an absence of open religious ritual, but there are certainly social and cultural rituals, such as self-criticism sessions and regular readings of literature on Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il as well as the daily ritual propagating Juche ideology, resilience, and resistance to Western imperialism through the media. Hwang Jang-Yop reported that the media strengthened ideological messages about solidarity and endurance during the famine.11 The government maintained and enforced former lifestyles at the level of life and death by promoting certain types of farming and the foraging of certain alternative food items. If people engaged in activities deemed “capitalist” (buying, selling, or trading in black markets) or “treasonous” (defecting, stealing), the consequences were various: disappearance, imprisonment, and public execution. At the earliest stages, North Koreans did not want to act in ways that strongly differed from traditional ways of living.
At its earliest stage, interpretations of the famine followed existing social norms. Existing social narratives of problem-solution were relied upon to make sense and give meaning to the famine. It is useful to step back for a moment and consider what it was like to have the main source of food distribution in the country become gradually and then totally unreliable. While sharing their experience of the famine with me, many interviewees explained their conviction that the government would, surely and at some point, come to the relief of the people. By this they meant that the government would eventually uphold its promise of delivering food through the PDS. And yet the PDS had been unreliable for several years. In the face of an already proven unreliable system, even well into the 1990s, people continued to hope food would be delivered. For some this belief was rewarded, as the government did at some times and in some places deliver food, though never with consistency or dependability.
Outside of Pyongyang, the capital and privileged center of North Korea, in rural and urban areas alike, people went hungry as a result of food shortages. Their suffering was sometimes assuaged by food distribution from the government, however erratic or uncertain, along with mountain foraging. It may be that this dynamic worked to recreate or establish the North Korean government, paradoxically, as the guardian of suffering people. This is not inconceivable, as the government has been at pains to present this image—of Kim Il-Sung as savior of the Korean people and the Korean land—since its formation.12 The dominant narrative North Korea created about itself and the outside world, with a simultaneous severing of access to knowledge, helped to further entrench the belief that the government knew best and should be trusted. Although Party members in good standing in Pyongyang have extensive knowledge about the outside world, only a few of my interviewees could be classified in this social group. The message of reciprocal loyalty between the population and the government is strong. Concomitant with this message is that no other government can be trusted. The on-again/off-again cycle of PDS delivery meant that the population could never be sure when the food would come. Whether or not they were loyal to the government in their hearts, this precarious position regarding food placed people in a state of uncertainty and confused dependence.
The PDS was the major source of food for most North Koreans, and with the famine this was disrupted even though the PDS was also the main conduit for food aid. The PDS was implicitly a “central pillar of political control.”13 Food shortages and famines frequently result in increased ritual, tradition, and adherence to former ways of life. Often preservation of self is not the aim but rather preservation of “ways of life.” A controversial starvation experiment in the 1960s known as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment showed that victims of protracted hunger adhered more to authority and sought support from authority figures to punish those victims around them who broke the rules. Because so much social change occurs, as people witness these changes, they may long for former ways of living as a way to rebalance social behavior.
In North Korea, ritual as it is typically understood in the religious context must be expanded to encompass a nonreligious society that ritualizes loyalty to the government, self-criticism, and dominant narratives of national persecution. As for the cause of the famine, the United States and other foreign countries were said to be responsible. Therefore, preparing for conflict with enemy countries was seen as a necessary step. A focus on the future even while suffering through the present was the best approach.
They didn’t tell us anything about the food situation. So we came to realize there was a problem when we went to pick up food at the supply station where they hand it out. They of course gave out the tickets to get the food, but not the food. You could go to the supply station, but you wouldn’t get anything. Outside the supply station there was a big line of people waiting to get the food. That’s how we knew there was something wrong. We naturally knew.
It was the day to collect the food from the supply station. On a particular day they give out the food, and then on that day you went, but they weren’t giving out anything. They weren’t giving out wages either then. It wasn’t just us who didn’t get it either, but everyone.
You couldn’t get angry. You couldn’t be angry, not in North Korean society. I thought there would be food next month. North Korea is a country that lives well, other countries don’t eat as well as we do, that’s the way I thought. There wasn’t a lot of dissatisfaction. I thought we had nothing to be envious about with others, we even sang that song. That is truly how I thought. Truly, North Korean society will get better, it might take a long time but we would get there.
To see that, how people had given up . . . I too had thought of giving up; just the same as they had, but I didn’t give up though things were very difficult. At that time I just thought I must have some foresight. Like it won’t be like it’s been. “In the future I won’t live in this poverty absolutely by whichever means. Though I am in pain, in the future it will be better, it will be better . . .” I told myself. (Sung-ho Lee, 29)
When the food shortages turned into sustained famine, the social behavior of many North Koreans still adhered to these earlier responses to shortage. As in other countries where tradition, ritual, religion, or adherence to authority figures increases, so too in North Korea there was a phase of increased belief that the government would eventually provide. Interpretations of the famine, projections about what the future would hold, even the way they spoke about the situation suggested this. Lack of accurate information, assured by the physical and intellectual isolation of the population, meant there were few alternative interpretations. These oral accounts, and a report by Human Rights Watch, indicate that another characteristic of the North Korean famine was endurance, trust, and loyalty to the government, with the result that some people died waiting for food distribution.14
Significantly, the famine was called the March of Suffering [Konanŭi haenggun] and the Red Banner Spirit, two historical periods that are characterized by national usurpation of foreign powers, and the messages carried in the media were intended to bolster the economy.15 There were not just references to the famine as resistance to destructive outside forces, but often the language used to describe the famine experience was what could be called the rhetoric of warlike struggle. War was used as a point of comparison to establish the severity of the effects of the famine on the people and community around them. Interviewees metaphorically calculated that “more people died than in the war” or that “many died as had in the war” and so on. Throughout the oral accounts of interviewees, the Korean War was cited as a historical referent against which to measure the degree of suffering witnessed around them. This suggests that war stood as a proper or comparable reference for the damage brought by the famine. The blackened faces of starving people were likened to those during the Korean War, but worse.16 What is of concern is not the accuracy of these statements but rather the links established between famine and war and the influence of this relation on people’s experience of famine.
Framing the crisis as the people’s own March of Suffering—just as Kim Il-Sung suffered, so too they suffered—unified the masses and discouraged alternative coping strategies. It also provided an atmosphere of justification for the harsh treatment of those people who did not manage their hunger according to acceptable means. It has been said that “hunger poisons the well of human kindness, sets brother against brother, and tears at the bounds between mother and child, destroying the fiber of any society,” but strategic framing can establish an object of resistance that unites behavior.17 Rhetoric is a mechanism well known to unite a nation; it can have a unifying effect on people. When rhetoric is part of a larger social complex, such as that found in military settings, it can prove even more effective. A study for the U.S. armed forces in the 1960s found that starving soldiers did not dissolve into chaos; rather, they maintained mutual respect and congeniality despite mounting difficulties with food.18 This suggests that a higher ordering of power and shared ideology found in military settings may strengthen the expectation of mutual respect and honor that otherwise dissolves in stress situations. It may be possible to extrapolate from these findings to the collective militaristic mind-set of North Korea. Even though interviewees reported starvation deaths within the military, this does not necessarily imply dissolution of camaraderie, particularly since a soldier’s death is always a service to the nation. In addition, a certain amount of unfortunate side effects can occur without disrupting the entire power structure. Jae-young Yoon, discharged from the military in the early 1990s, explained:
This is what they taught the people: “America and the international community, along with the puppet South Korea,” that’s the way they explained it. “America, the international community, and the puppet South Korea are ceaselessly preparing for war. We have to tighten our belts to build up the national defense, to build up the economy. So let’s build up the economy.” And for that, the citizens suffered through hell, not anticipating the rain and snow storms that came and destroyed the farms. “Let’s tighten our belts and forward march!” That is the way they propagandized it. (Jae-young Yoon, 45)
A common reaction to major and painful life changes is to draw on cultural beliefs and create new mental worlds, perhaps in an effort to justify events and maintain a sense of security. Interpretations of suffering are contingent on collective and cultural ways of coping.19 The causes of the famine were attributed to natural disasters as well as to nonsocialist enemy nations. Collective action and solidarity were called upon to resist the effects of the famine. Thus, the North Korean way of life was under attack by the enemy, and efforts needed to be taken to ensure its survival. The population was united against a common enemy even though it was objectively living in peacetime. In instances such as this, the very valid ideas regarding famine and the reaction of victims in famine times are reconstituted as something entirely different; opposition to hunger is mobilized and cast as support for the regime against a collective enemy that is the cause of the problem.
Put forward in the ideology as natural, war appears inevitable. This may have created the sense that the famine was also inevitable. War is often phrased impersonally, and by implication so is famine. The Konanŭi haenggun is done as a collective against a collective enemy, and none are alone in this struggle. It distances the subject from self-perception as being in charge of her own destiny, so she is part of a plurality where there is mutual responsibility, thereby furthering the notion that the March of Suffering is as necessary as war and that one is duty bound. Individual or counterhegemonic views of how to better engage the problem are preemptively squashed. Violence and, of course, war create difference, but they are also a means by which ideas of identity and belonging are reinforced.20 Violence, then, is a mysterious creature because it divides as it unifies. In the metaphoric conversion established by the March of Suffering, and reinforced throughout Juche Ideology, outside countries are established as distinct and at war with North Korea while the population of North Korea is a unified collective working together to overcome. Jin-ho Moon (41) explained:
Kim Jong-Il promoted to the general population, to farmers, that America and other countries were to blame. The blockade started from the 1990s, after the collapse of Western [sic] Europe in the 1990s, America kept blocking to prevent economic trade. With such prevention, we could only trade with Russia and China. And Kim Jong-Il makes weapons thinking that the U.S. is going to attack his country. This is the only way for the country to survive. Because he uses the military as a method to attack America, rice and oil all go to the army. That’s why it doesn’t go to the people. So that’s why the situation in the country is as it is and all the blame goes to America. That’s what Kim Jong-Il emphasizes, because the country is in conflict with South Korea and the U.S. army in the South, so they need to keep investing in military forces. A country can improve through the military, that’s what Kim Jong-Il emphasized.
Famine theorist Alex de Waal observed that the “concept of a right to be free from famine can be a mobilizing principle.”21 In the case of North Korea, the local interpretation of the food shortage was that it was caused by a national enemy, so mobilization to be free from famine takes the expression not of individual or even collective freedom from hunger but of national defense. Alliances will be necessary, de Waal continues, in order for leadership to flourish and for there to be cohesion among those vulnerable to famine. In the case of North Korea, the government gave cohesion to the population, managed and mobilized the population, encouraged them to overcome difficulties, and promised a better life to come. However, the object of resistance was not the state but the international community.
Some of the earliest responses can be categorized as denial and doubt combined with patient endurance, faith, hope, and trust that things would pull together eventually. The accounts show that some individuals struggled to adapt to the makeshift food options, holding on until the bitter end, revealing that they thought the food supply would turn around in time and that they could avoid eating things they detested. Those who were young children at the start of the famine recollected how school life began to change. A young man named Sung-min Noh (19), who was ten years old when the famine appeared, told me: “You just did what you had to do.” This echoes what David Turton was told by the Mursi of Southwest Ethiopia, a people long accustomed to undernutrition, “Hunger is something you just have to put up with: one just binds one’s stomach tightly and waits till it passes.”22 Loyalty to the government manifested itself in repeated deferral of one’s needs:
I went to this guy’s funeral. I went, and I asked them what he died of, and they said he had starved. He died in his house. “Why did he die of starvation? Wasn’t there anything he could find to eat? Even if he had managed by eating weeds?” But then, was it as easy as that? That man was a loyal follower of Kim Jong-Il, that’s the kind of character he was. He did his military service for thirteen years then he joined the Party, was a secretary there and then [died]. (Chun-ho Choi, 43)
This notion of deferral, the hope for reprieve, has arisen in other contexts. Suffering has the sometimes unexpected result of entrenching in one who suffers even more loyalty or dependence on the source of suffering. Klaus Mühlhahn has written about the use of postponement or “states of deferral” as a prominent feature in the People’s Republic of China in the period 1949–1979.23 This idea is similar to an idea put forward by the psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who calls it the delusion of reprieve. He explains: “The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last moment. We, too, clung to shreds of hope and believed to the last moment that it would not be so bad.”24 Judith Herman, writing on the near-death trauma and recovery of oppressed subjects, explains: “After several cycles of reprieve from certain death, the victim may come to perceive the perpetrator, paradoxically, as her saviour.”25 These characteristics of suffering are somewhat similar to a syndrome that arises under hostile duress called Stockholm syndrome, the condition in which prisoners become bound to their captors, trust them, and protect them, or at least recognize that mercy is determined by them.26 Additionally, it is not without possibility that some chose death, a sacrifice for the next generation, rather than devious behavior.
Which people starve to death is really ironic. Who do you think would die first? People who worked the hardest in North Korea and who were devoted to the Worker’s Party. The workers were the ones with good hearts and were diligent, but they died of hunger. Why? Because the Worker’s Party didn’t distribute food. These good people who trusted the government still went to work hungry thinking, “Eventually the Worker’s Party will distribute.” We can say that they are ignorant in some sense. They are brainwashed and almost became slaves of the ministry. They had lost their independent and creative thoughts under the control of the Worker’s Party propaganda. I guess they can be considered as religious fanatics. . . . Some reckless and blinded people would say, “We still follow the Worker’s Party and Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il,” when they are not getting distribution. Do you know what they say starving to death? They say, “We don’t care if we starve to death! Just take care of the great dear Kim Il-Sung and general Kim Jong-Il.” I was one of the main officers in the Worker’s Party. I saw it happen with my own eyes. (Chun-ho Choi, 43)
Of course, in this instance it is worth noting that many North Koreans do not view the government as oppressive but rather as their protector. The paternalistic nature is typical for classical socialism, as János Kornai observed, where the “bureaucracy stands in loco parentis: all other strata, groups or individuals in society are children, wards whose minds must be made up for them by their adult guardians. . . . So long as the citizens do as they are told they will not have a care in the world; because the party and state will see to everything.”27 Perhaps more than for other subjects in near-death situations, the degree of trust within this group must have been great. In this context, it is not surprising that there were increased numbers of famine deaths in that part of the population characterized as more loyal to the regime.
“After calling it the March of Suffering, when it got harder, they referred to the famine as the Rigorous March of Suffering. They’d say it’s temporary, so if we endured this period and survive, it’d be only temporary” (Jung-ok Choi, 21). But as the food shortages progressed into famine, increased difficulties led people to feel that the food situation was no longer ilshichŏk (ordinary), and there were other indications that in some areas there was a growing awareness that the promised miracle would not arrive. “In the town where I used to live, they are starting to say it looks like a day of good living will not come,” Chun-ho Choi (43) told me. “People began to think it wasn’t temporary. They said they had gone too far, reached the end. It is hard to get back on your feet on your own. It was too difficult to get back on our feet from there” (Jung-ok Choi, 21). Rather than subvert the ideological apparatus, as some might presume, knowledge of these registers of reality kept North Koreans operating in ways that kept them alive and, inadvertently, kept the system that delivered their suffering in place. With highly limited options for coping strategies available to North Koreans and with famine stresses growing more complicated and complicating their legitimate loyalty to the country, many were deeply conflicted.
Well, whether we liked the government or not, if you were to live in North Korea, you just had to always think about what others had on their minds. There were terrible people who worked for Kim Jong-Il, but there were also good people. Some gave people good jobs that would feed them. There were people who trusted each other extremely well. In a small town you see certain relationships can form, especially after being there for thirty years. So a kind of club forms, for those who are established, and it became easier for them to live. (Jin-ho Moon, 41)
In the 1960s there were virtually no markets in North Korea. Even in Pyongyang in the late 1980s, markets were incongruous with representations of the capital as a socialist paradise.28 After ten years of military service, Jae-young Yoon was discharged. It was October 1989. He shared what it was like when he returned to his hometown:
At that time I kept hearing about how my younger brother and my older sister weren’t receiving the rations. Then I went to work on a farm, and I had exactly the same experience. So because of this the people went to the black markets or the farmer’s markets, and they would be selling the clothes they wore, selling liquor they made, selling tofu they made, noodles, I witnessed all kinds of things being sold in the markets. I was a member of the Korean Worker’s Party and had learned that we weren’t meant to do this. So why were these people doing what the Party and the government were telling us not to do and selling like capitalists in the market? I thought that, but then after working on the farm I realized there was no other way for the people to live. (Jae-young Yoon, 45)
“As damage came from the cold and storms, we were able to get by a bit from selling the household items. In 1994 we had a TV, which we sold. We did needlework after that” (Hye-jin Lee, 23). Hye-jin Lee’s father worked in the mines. She explained the means by which her father, though exhausted, tried to secure enough for them to eat. Her father’s social rank, or class, was two, she explained, and those who were ranked “class two” were given the hard labor of working in the mines. As the food problem progressed, her father planted his own field, an act forbidden for miners. She explains,
In North Korea, if you plant your own field they’ll stop you. My father worked in the mines, but there was some flat land nearby and my father planted some beans and some tomato plants for the family. But it was illegal for my father to do that for the family. Before we escaped, when I was in high school, at some point all the plants were pulled up from the field, the country [military] pulled them all out. So those kinds of farms were not allowed. We went to the mountains and tried to find an empty spot. We pulled out the trees and planted some corn plants and we were deprived of those, as we had been the others.
So you cannot use your own energy. Look at my father’s situation. He was working in the mines and heading out at the break of dawn to plant in the fields. In the morning, at lunchtime, dinnertime, that’s when he worked on it. Without fail, every morning my father worked on the field he had cultivated, and in the evening he would go out again. Seriously, my father worked so hard. He didn’t even have any fertilizer. In North Korea they use human waste for that. My father worked really hard. The beans he planted came up well. I saw them. There were big differences between the fields that people were planting personally, and those they were planting for the government. The individual fields were worked on with such earnestness, and the corn grew tall and strong, and their numbers were high (Hye-jin Lee, 23).
Private plots of land were also extremely rare. Up until the late 1980s the government only permitted small kitchen gardens where farmers could cultivate between twenty to thirty square meters.29 The size of the gardens meant that farmers could not subsist on them alone; this ensured that their farming efforts would not be divided between state and personal farms. The labor of the farmer could be entirely given over to the state farms and the wages and rations earned accordingly. It is unclear how much of the harvest farmers were permitted to keep.
There were instructions given in some areas as to what alternative foods, such as items in a botany textbook, were available during the famine and how to procure them. Because the “food shortfall” had already been attributed to foreign countries, perseverance and sacrifice (ch’amuŭlsŏng) were championed as the moral characteristics needed to survive. The population was educated about how to get by through official lectures delivered in the villages.
They didn’t tell us about it on television, or in the newspapers; rather, it was the material of a lecture they gave called taeyong shingnyop’um [substitute food product]. The idea was that instead of food, we ate weeds and the leaves of trees, the bark of trees and so on. This was explained officially through a lecture as “taeyong shingnyop’um.” (Jae-young Yoon, 56).
The government supplied the population with alternative methods of survival and managed how people understood their coping strategies as a vital act of national preservation. These new foods were substitutes, necessary for a short period of time, and were fully endorsed by the government. But government-directed coping strategies failed to work: there were not enough of these substitute items, and they could not supply all the nutrition people needed. Strict social control ensured those loyal to the government and those fearing persecution were overly dependent on these meager resources. Also, as with other famines in history, some people did not want to eat what was so unfamiliar and tasteless, or they had grown so sick and tired of eating tasteless nonfood items that they gave up. Sun-ja Om (67) said, “I was starving. I hadn’t had anything in three days, and because of that I had no energy, no pulse even. So I went out and caught three pockmarked frogs and ate them. I didn’t want to have to eat like that.” Jung-ok Choi (21) explained,
There was certainly less for us to eat. So when the food downturn came we were eating lots of what would usually be garbage, weeds and things. That I wouldn’t eat. No matter how many meals I missed, I wouldn’t eat them. Well, if they were mixed with porridge then. . . . I really tested my mother. Now I am very sorry for that, for what I put on her. Really. I had five siblings. There were seven of us in total. Having to take care of that many.
Perception of the food crisis influenced the way people responded. Because Jung-ok Choi believed the famine would end soon, her willingness to avoid foods she didn’t like was strong. Some came to know about the famine in their area because people started getting sick. One interviewee’s mother was sick. She was brought to the hospital, and there they saw many people who were dying.
I asked Sung-min Noh (19) what the first sign was that something was wrong. “My friends stopped attending school,” he explained. “Or if they came, we’d all be so starved we’d sleep at our desks.”
Even if you just went to school to sleep, you had to attend. If you didn’t your friends would get the punishment. If you didn’t go, your friends would suffer. So we would push each other to go. The teacher would hit the students. You’d be called up to the board and hit until you were red. Girls or boys, no difference. Well, you went because you didn’t want your friends to suffer, even if it was just to sleep at the desk, you went. Well, and during class time the teachers too. Because of the economic difficulties the teachers were also affected. The teachers would read books and fall asleep. They had no strength. If you want to study you have to eat. During school hours we slept a lot. I too was so hungry that I would just go to school to sleep. You didn’t go to study, you went to sleep. Of course, still once a week we would do the self-criticism. So during those times, people who hadn’t attended school would explain during the self-criticism why they hadn’t attended and that they would remedy that in the future.
Sung-min Noh’s parents were civil servants. He had an older brother and sister. They wanted to do market selling together after graduating from high school. After the famine began, independent trade started, although the town worked in steel. Kim Jong-Il visited the area and declared it a great spot. So other people began looking at the area as a place where they could be successful. The town is located on the coast, so there is a lot of fishing and boat making. His friends and school mates were involved with that kind of labor. Because it was a port town, there were lots of things coming in from China, Russia, and Japan, as he remembers it. He lived in an apartment. The majority of apartment houses were six or seven stories tall, with no heat. There were no trees on the mountains, he said, because they had been cut down for firewood. There was mandatory agricultural service in the spring planting season, and they all had to take part.
His home was all right at first, he told me. As civil servants, his parents were better off than many others. His mother passed away before the famine, and his father stopped working during the famine and started selling on the black market because there was nothing to eat. The people were told by their bosses not to come to work but to go and trade in the markets. There was a period of a few days where no one in the family had food to eat. They went to other houses to see about something to eat. His family sold their furniture; his brother and sister worked in the market to sell the furniture. They did well at this, he reported, especially in relation to avoiding having to pay bribes. I asked another young North Korean, Chul-su Kim (23), how the famine was made public in his area. He explained:
It was not reported. It didn’t need to be, you could go onto the street and you could see; wherever you went you could see the kkotchaebi [lit., flower-swallows, a term used to signify orphan children]. Their hair and skin was the color of dirt. There was talk, too, rumors, talk, among the people in the towns: they are just eating vegetables in that house, there is no rice in that house, talk like that. We began to see kkotchaebi on the streets. Then rumors began to spread about where to get food and money in this or that area, including China.
Life is not lived alone. The subject that narrated the oral accounts was always a “we.” The subject was always in relation to others, real or imagined, and always in relation to the nation. The busy years were about getting through things together, survival of the nation and, with that, the survival of the society.