Life is not lived alone. Our relations with others support our lives through mutual help but also burden us through duty and attachment. In times of extreme stress, social relations grow strained. “Everything is annoying, isn’t it, when you’re hungry?” Sun-hi Bak (53) asked rhetorically when I turned our conversation to how social relations changed in North Korea. This chapter explores aspects of social cohesion in North Korea. Collective coping methods and ways of viewing life helped bind people in a strong social unit, but this binding was also restrictive. Social cohesion is not something new to North Koreans, but during the famine years it took on a more earnest and determined visage. It is natural to adapt to difficulties through preexisting networks of relationships, such as within a community or through the guidance of the leadership, which had material consequences. Mutual suffering sometimes results in a stronger bond, and the years of the famine were marked by the endurance of suffering and working to overcome suffering. The proper response was not depression or melancholia but action. Rather than focusing on what was lost and what was lacking, people turned their attention to getting by. Part of this meant making sense of the difficulties in a way that generated hope in saving the collective.
The phrase irokke saratta has no object or subject of address (lit., this way lived) but was a common phrase used by interviewees to describe the pattern of daily life in North Korea. A collective way of living is identified through context. In social relations the same collective is suggested. The expression “my” husband would be a cultural and grammatical oddity in Korean. Pronouns are expressed through social relations that are inclusive and open but always relational. In the Korean language, expressions such as “our country” and “our language” are ubiquitous in reference to nation and language, and they do not smack of jingoistic chauvinism as they would in English. In Korean, subjective relations are constructed through contexts of who is speaking or writing as well as the addressee to whom one speaks. The expression “our” husband is correct. It assumes a unit of relation that surrounds the pronoun. When the subject does appear in language, the plural subject always already accommodates a web of social relations. The subject is situated—in fact, it is identified—via the world of relations. A friend’s mother is not “Mrs. Kim” but rather “Jungeun’s mother” and so on. Social and filial relations shape what kind of speech is possible, which in turn shapes what kinds of relations are possible. Language maps existing relations and networks of relation, establishing relations of exchange, whether in speech or behavior, that are acceptable or possible. Language shapes and reflects social dynamics. This web of relations is clearly demarcated in language, from the most direct and intimate relations within the family unit to the leadership of the country. So the expression irokke saratta, the way that was lived, without overtly saying it bound the collective in one way of life.
In North Korea the leadership figures in daily life, profoundly ritualized through statues, plaques, historical sites, gifts, walls adorned with portraits, and, of course, text media where the names of the leader ship sometimes even appear in larger-sized font. The constellation of the leadership is so complete as to be referred to as pieces of the sky, meaning that there is nothing greater but also nothing else that can be seen or known beyond the leadership. The leadership is framed within popular discourse as the father, or as Suk-young Kim smartly observes as the mother of the nation.1 The timing of Kim Il-Sung’s death, the weakening of agricultural capability, and the floods marked a distinct before-and-after for many North Koreans, who consequently placed recollections of pre-1994 as “not that bad,” while the Kim Jong-Il years were identified as harsh. Kim Jong-Il’s rise to power was mentioned as the historical turning point for the downturn in economic and food security. Not all but many interviewees mentioned that there were few problems with access to adequate food before the death of Kim Il-Sung in 1994. In the oral accounts, people made connections between the failed food situation and the change in government leader ship. The combination of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the floods, and other weather problems were often eclipsed in importance by the death of Kim Il-Sung. Kim Jong-Il was inevitably inadequate in comparison with his father.
However, none of the oral accounts indicated a critical understanding of how choices made by Kim Il-Sung, many years prior to the famine, primed the country for intense vulnerability to natural disasters and political isolation. Geographically, the country was already on precarious footing regarding self-reliance. The terrain of North Korea is 80 percent mountainous and roughly 18 percent arable land. Prior to the partition of the Korean peninsula, the northern portion had always imported rice from the southern portion. Coarse grain from northeastern China was also imported.2 In this geographic situation, self-reliance is a recipe for disaster.3 In the oral accounts, negative events were correlated: Kim Jong-Il’s taking power, the natural disasters, and the visual spectacle of societal changes, behavior formerly unknown in North Korea.
Young-chul Kim (58) lived fifty years of his life in the country. He remarked that when Kim Jong-Il came to power, he saw the emergence of beggars. “Socialism is a society without beggars,” he said, perhaps echoing what he had learned about capitalist South Korean society, a place supposedly overrun with beggars. “With the death of Kim Il-Sung, as the Kim Jong-Il era came in, the food problems, the famine and, along with it, the many starvation deaths . . . there were lots of beggars, and we saw many who died.” The emergence of things deemed nonsocialist, which he had been educated to believe were archetypical of capitalist society and evidence of its inherent corruption, was incongruous with both received ideology and lived experience. North Koreans lacked information about international issues, and they lacked the necessary mechanisms for adequately knowing or judging their government’s response to international events. These limitations meant that local information, rumors, and misinformation were used to make sense of emerging problems, which were linked only with the inabilities of Kim Jong-Il and not also to the unrealistic aspirations of Juche ideology.
For Chung-su Om (69) and Sun-ja Om (67), there was a strong connection between the rise of the famine and Kim Jong-Il’s rise to power. They saw the famine as starting from 1995, shortly after Kim Il-Sung died. “There were no people—none—who died of hunger before the death of Kim Il-Sung,” Chung-su Om explained. Some of these stories about Kim Il-Sung are reminiscent of North Korean propaganda narratives in that almost superhuman powers are attributed to him. Perhaps the severity of difficulties that Chung-su Om and Sun-ja Om faced when Kim Jong-Il came to power threw the strengths of Kim Il-Sung into sharp relief. To quote Chung-su Om more fully:
Kim Il-Sung did quite well. When Kim Il-Sung was around, he would say, “I intend to see this entire country. I will see it all. Where they are living well and where they are not living well, I want to see it all.” Then he went and did that. He saw where they weren’t living well, and he fixed it. He would say, “Where is it I need to go?” Then he would say, “Prepare the car” and go there. He went to Yanggangdo, and there he went into one particular house. What I’m saying is that Kim Il-Sung went right into that house. There was an old lady in that house, with a child of about five years old. Kim Il-Sung went into that house and asked the child where his mother and father had gone. He asked the grandmother where they had gone. The tiny child, who had no idea who Kim Il-Sung was, began to talk. He had no idea who Kim Il-Sung was. The child said, “My mother has gone to look for rice with my father. We are hungry, so they went to find some rice.” The child had no idea that it was Kim Il-Sung, and he said that his mother was hungry and went to find some rice. That’s how it was. Kim Il-Sung went back later and the child was gone too, and he asked the grandmother, and she too replied that they had all gone to find something to eat. (Chung-su Om, 69)
Chung-su Om (69) repeatedly emphasized the child’s ignorance of Kim Il-Sung. His words carry a blush of shocked embarrassment at the child’s seeming irreverence to speak so directly and without care to Kim Il-Sung. The directness of the child’s speech is unusual in the daily experiences of life under Kim Jong-Il. Chung-su Om saw the child’s direct speech as ungracious and unorthodox but sweetly truthful. Certainly there are issues of age at stake here, but above that is also the fact that the child spoke directly to Kim Il-Sung without knowing the grave importance ascribed to him, or the gravity of what he said since he was indirectly criticizing Kim Il-Sung’s leadership.
Chung-su Om repeatedly stresses two things: the child didn’t know Kim Il-Sung, and the speaker was a child. This effect is achieved through repetition and then through elaboration when the grandmother speaks directly, just as the child had done. The juxtaposition of these statements creates a tension between our awareness through an unspoken moral code, that the child should not speak to Kim Il-Sung as much as anyone, and yet the child continues to do so directly. With the unstated moral code in place, Kim Il-Sung’s response to the child is highlighted as even more gracious and benevolent in the face of the child’s inappropriate behavior. It is through the child’s speech that the problem is exposed. Kim Il-Sung is presented as quick to see where needs are unmet and unflinching in the face of struggle: “I want to see where they live well and where they do not live well.” He resolves to ameliorate the suffering of people with humility and haste. The account continues:
Then Kim Il-Sung said, “I had no idea it was like this!” He had gone and seen how things were. He knew how things were. “If I hadn’t gone, how might things be? How much worse might things have become? I had no idea about this.” So, with Kim Il-Sung there was no starvation, we all lived. We were given lots of rice, lots of meat. We even received many frozen pollack [fish] as well. When Kim Jong-Il came, everyone starved. (Chung-su Om, 69)
This section of Chung-su Om’s account relies heavily on anecdotes of what was seen, said, and done. The narrative emphasizes the confluence of hearing and seeing the suffering of others in order to reach a solution. Later, in the time of Kim Jong-Il, this structured contingency between what is seen and what is said gets inverted. It is through not seeing, not speaking, not telling that the problems of living are resolved. Here, Chung-su Om shares his recollections of Kim Il-Sung’s concern, care, and benevolence. His account mimics the abundance of care attributed to Kim Il-Sung. The speech and actions of Kim Il-Sung and Chung-su Om’s detailed description given to the theme of concern is startlingly asymmetric to that attributed to Kim Jong-Il. Only the final sentence of his narrative brings in Kim Jong-Il, and yet the entire contrast is achieved through this small insertion. The attention and even the amount of words allotted to the two men are starkly disproportionate, almost mirroring the perceived benevolence of Kim Il-Sung and malevolence of Kim Jong-Il. Kim Il-Sung is active, agentive, he is with the people. His speech and behavior are powerful. He listens. Kim Il-Sung is immoveable; he can accept and absorb the direct, critical speech of the child and grandmother. The last few sentences of this account reveals the attribution of the difficult times, “So, with Kim Il-Sung there was no starvation, we all lived. We were given . . . We even received. . . .” But this is startling because the previous sentences depict hunger, and a hunger that gets worse, not better, after his visit. In fact, Kim Il-Sung’s grace and benevolence can be depicted only because he stands ready to ameliorate the hunger and suffering of the people. Kim Il-Sung’s curiosity and awareness seem to have removed his culpability, as if his compassion alone was the panacea. The narrative only indirectly suggests a nutritional resolution to the crises, and certainly not a structural one. In the account, Kim Il-Sung actually does nothing but ask, listen, and talk. It is Chung-su Om who attributes benevolence to him. We then arrive at the coda: “When Kim Jong-Il came [took up leadership], every one starved.” The deep contrast between the two men is clarified.
Another interviewee told of how neighborhoods were temporarily supplied with materials to host a visit from Kim Jong-Il. It would all be arranged beforehand, Sun-hi Bak (53) told me. Rice and other foods would be put into the houses so that he could look and remark on how well people were living. “But when that was over they would take all the provisions back with them,” she explained. “Kim Jong-Il is dishonest to the people, but also to himself.” It is difficult to estimate to what extent the positive recollections of Kim Il-Sung and the negative recollections of Kim Jong-Il are representative of how people thought while still inside North Korea. However, the extent to which Kim Il-Sung is lauded in the accounts certainly identifies a shift toward the negative with the loss of Kim Il-Sung; the three-year period of mourning may have been in earnest, and since the narratives of Kim Il-Sung place him at such a height, Kim Jong-Il was set to disappoint. So how was the great difference in the two leaders reconciled, particularly during this period of extreme deprivation?
There is some anecdotal evidence that the internal reception of Kim Jong-Il was indeed deeply fraught. In 1996 a coup d’état was planned by No. 6 Corps based in North Hamgyong Province, Cheongjin. The group was planning an uprising in North Hamgyong Province first, before taking Pyongyang. Before the revolt could be implemented it was picked up by the Defense Security Command, and the entire corp was dismantled. Around forty people were executed and three hundred severely punished. The coup was foiled by North Korea’s triangular monitoring system where political committee members, military commanders, and national security agents mutually crosscheck each other. The whole system is monitored via wire taps. According to Monique Macias, a student in Pyongyang in 1989, around the time of the Tiananmen Square protests, rumors circulated about a student protest at Kim Il-Sung University.4 In 2005 the group Free Youth Comrades or the Young People’s League for Freedom posted antiregime declarations in the 1.17 Factory in the town of Hoeryong and under a bridge on the way to Daeduk middle school, both in North Hamgyong Province.5 The failed coup of 1996 had a ripple effect through North Korea. It was a substantial effort, demonstrated by the number of dissidents executed and the number of related individuals punished. It might be that these executions and punishments severely discouraged any aggregate numbers of people who would have called for overthrow of the regime, yet there have been reports of antagonism between ordinary people and police.6
There were other social factors at work that encouraged people to endure the dreary leadership of Kim Jong-Il. Symbolic conceptualizations of power, duty, and obligation likely facilitated the acceptance of the fallible Kim Jong-Il as part of the Kim dynasty. Charles Armstrong observed that the development of symbols, language, and rituals in North Korea’s ideology had by this time largely moved from a Marxist-Leninist style to a distinctly Korean familial style centered on the Kim family.7 This symbolic material produced a nationalism inherently rooted in blood and land, which, unlike the abstract language of socialism, used a discourse of familial connection, love, and obligation. In interviewees’ recollections of Kim Il-Sung, the “family scene” is apparent. Kim Il-Sung cares for the family as if he were a grandfather. Kim Jong-Il was part of this greater family unit; he had a connection to the benevolence, if not in his actions at least in his lineage. Armstrong attributes the survival of the North Korean regime to this network of familial symbols. Emotional and physical adaption during the famine years reflected this quasi-family rhetoric. As Suk-young Kim observed, North Korea remains deeply rooted in Confucian tradition, where the collective is held above the individual, and where family operates as one organic body that is the basis of a universal structure.8 This is not only a feature of cultural history that predates the existence of North Korea. Even after its formation, the postcolonial nationalism of North Korea situated itself within terms of family kinship. This literalness was strongly routinized, and from these the paternal leader emerges. This family union was prioritized over other socialist values.9
Alongside these symbolic bonds of filial piety, the material expression of the leadership’s promise to society identified through food, wages, and other material needs was supplied through the Public Distribution System (PDS). This system of distribution was struggling to distribute sufficiently, and the existing triage of goods grew more extreme as resources dwindled. Resources had to be siphoned off to prepare for war. Although in 1995 Kim Jong-Il appealed to the international community for aid, interviewees reported only learning that North Korea had requested aid once they crossed into China. For them, there was no sign of aid as far as they knew. Those who said they received aid explained that they were expected to receive and then return it. They had visits from the United Nations and received relief, but it was taken back once inspectors had left. Interviewees who had been in military service during the famine years also described intense hunger and no signs of aid.
There were aspects of life that could not be assessed by international aid agencies because of their enforced dependence on the North Korean government for operations and information within the country. The elaborate smokescreen that obfuscated their access to the real situation could not be assessed, understood, or challenged. Restrictions were placed on these agencies because foreign relief efforts in the country were viewed as potential imperialist weapons waiting to strike.10 International food relief was not mentioned once in interviews as a means by which individuals survived the famine. A high percentage of North Koreans believe they did not receive aid while in North Korea.11 It was understood then that food came from the leadership or the efforts of the people but not the international community, and this is significant.
Pitirim A. Sorokin, a sociologist who survived the 1921–22 famine in Russia, observed that people’s political loyalty transformed according to their source of food. He wrote, “They bowed to Kolchak, Denikin and the Tsar, and they kissed the hands of the princess and the countesses; but when their food supply began to come from the international sources and communism they then became ardent ‘internationalists’ or ‘national internationalists.’”12 North Korea’s strict control over how relief was distributed within their country was guided by the perception that sources of food supply alter worldviews and change political loyalty. This is logical when food gifts are received from the leadership, given the connotations of exchange and duty with which such gifts were typically framed. Donor countries and agencies naturally wanted to see how their relief was being used. They were sometimes placated.
So Canada, America, and other countries, when they send their relief, they want to see how it is being used, they want to see those people who have received it. They are curious to see if those people for whom the relief was sent have received it. So because they want to know, they send someone to come and take a look. To show how it was all being used, I was given a ration, I was given money, and I was given a particular task to perform, in order to show them how the relief was used. They showed the agencies Pyongyang. They couldn’t show them where the farmers were hungry with nothing to eat, that would be an embarrassment to the country, so they couldn’t show them that, they showed them Pyongyang. (Sun-ja Om, 67)
Hyun-woo Kim (42) discussed how the United Nations came to his neighborhood (in Yŏdŏk District, Hamgyong) to do an inspection. The food was given and then taken away.
The area where they came, that area was given rice and meat. It was beef from America given in preparation for the inspection. Then we were all told what to say and so on. They ensured that the people would know what to say. When the UN came they thought we had everything. But we hadn’t been given anything. It was just talk, lies. That’s it. So the relief that the UN and ROK are giving isn’t getting to those who need it. (Hyun-woo Kim, 42)
I have not heard of rice, let alone meat, being part of food aid operations, so mention of this in the account is intriguing. Rice and meat are too easily sold on the black market for a high price, so aid agencies never provide such items for relief; it is likely that the government officials provided these items to show the inspectors how regions outside of Pyongyang were faring. Andrew Natsios documented the triage of food shipments from the World Food Program in the mid-1990s. Although 33 percent of the population lived along the eastern ports, and they should have received the bulk of shipments, only 18 percent of food aid reached them. North Korea had shut off food aid shipments, ensuring the area was chronically food insecure.13 The function of power relations is clearly delineated in Hyun-woo Kim’s account. Not only did the government triage relief but individuals were encouraged to deceive the international community. An atmosphere of fear pervaded discussions of relief activities, particularly due to the lack of information provided to the population. The government’s geographic restrictions on aid caused one level of trouble for the population, but the lack of accurate communication between the population and those international workers delivering aid placed North Koreans in a perplexing situation. Suk-ja Park (84) described the type of food they were permitted to keep:
We got corn. But the corn would be mashed up and smell rotten. We would get that. But if we didn’t eat that, then there was nothing else to eat. So we would wash it over and over, cook it over and over. Finally we’d just eat smelly, mold-infested corn. It was really too much. When we ate it, we wondered how China could send us this rubbish. But it wasn’t so. North Korea gave it to us. (Suk-ja Park, 84)
North Koreans had to maintain practices and actions that demonstrated belief in the government. Otherwise they risked severe criticism, imprisonment, torture, or execution, depending on the severity of their crime. Therefore, the ideology represented in the North is not a system of “real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live.”14 Reality is made material through the actions and practices of those who live within that imaginary relationship to truth. As Suk-young Kim identified, the embodiment of North Korea’s elaborate and obsessive theatrical presentations, though in stark contrast to economic reality, is a sociopolitical necessity.15 It is a mode of entertainment and a means to mobilize the masses to the point of distraction.16 The continued material manifestation of ideology is enforced through the punishment of those who transgress and through imaginary relations maintained between real relations. This serves the ideological apparatus because, as some people engage in a seeming belief relationship to Juche ideology in order to avoid punishment, it is difficult to discern who does and does not genuinely believe.
Having a connection to friends or family in China made the difference between life and death for North Koreans. Sometimes, however, the exchange of foreign items and information did not have the expected response in North Korea.
Since we heard from our relatives in China a lot, we knew how China was and how South Korea was all from stories. In our country, they put out propaganda that “because the U.S. put on an economic blockade, our country is like this” and say things like that because the U.S. and our country are enemies and South Korea is also an enemy, so “they continue to pressure our country.” They say, “That’s why our country is like this.” Because North Korea connects it like that, whenever they report something, they say something similar to that.
It’s not that we don’t know the U.S. is rich. Relatives in South Korea, China, and other places know all that too. In Chosun [North Korea], people who know, know. If you go to America you live well, and in fact we see all these foreign products. What is there that comes from our country? Chinese Koreans come out to sell things, from toothbrushes to toothpaste. It’s all Chinese products or foreign products. And when we go to Wonsan, there are Japanese ships too at the harbor. When you go to Wonsan when the Japanese ships come, from soap to everything, people use all Japanese products—soap, shoes, TVs, refrigerators, washers, and especially a lot of bicycles come to Wonsan. You see a lot of Japanese products in Wonsan, and they are so cool. “Wow, there are things like these!” But why is our country so poor? About that people say, because the U.S. keeps placing heavy pressure, and since there is only one socialist country left, they try to destroy us. That’s what the propaganda says. So we don’t know much about the U.S. or international politics. Whatever the country says, we believe as they say. The country tells us about international politics, but they polish some little bit of whatever is good for North Korea by changing the basic point. They change the stories like, “We’re not doing anything, but other countries do this.” So for us, that makes us think that the Americans are bad, makes us hostile toward them.
We believe that. But even if people don’t believe that and know the reality, whether they know or not, whether the U.S. was like that or not, life is difficult. People say “good president” if they’re fed well. But because life is difficult they think badly about Kim Jong-Il. Inside we think, “Damn this country. Something has to happen,” they curse and all that too. But what could they do? Are they going to start an uprising or what? If they can’t do anything really, they just live on quietly and maybe another time. They just live like that. (Jung-ok Choi, 21)
Although the foreign products might be good, and although they indicated a higher standard of living, a Manichean worldview emerged as a means to make sense of the unintelligible: our country cannot produce products like this because of our enemies. So the very items that might have planted the seed of doubt about socialism’s superiority, as it did in East Germany, for example, in the case of North Korea fostered feelings of hostility, inequality, and injustice: the moral economy attached to foreign goods. The control of information, particularly information concerning nonsocialist countries, is highly regulated. Thus materials from outside, into North Korea, were described according to these imagined relations. Material goods from other countries, via China for instance, are interpreted according to what was ideologically acceptable. Or, to echo the words of Tzvetan Todorov, the fact of the foreign product did not come with its meaning attached.17 A nice bicycle made in Japan can be bought and sold in North Korea, but the fact of the bicycle (that it is well manufactured) does not arrive with the meaning intact (that it is well manufactured because it competes in a market economy). Since the fact of the object, but not the meaning, transfers it is easy to attribute a local meaning; the foreign products are better because those countries are not sanctioned as we are sanctioned.
The late Hwang Jang-Yop, former member of the Politburo, and the highest-ranking defector in South Korea, reported that the government increased propaganda efforts during the worst years of the famine; new slogans included messages about having more to die for than to live for, as well as making sacrifices for the next generation.18 One of the clearest indications of the intersection between Juche ideology and the body in North Korea is manifested in the high numbers of people who, according to the oral accounts, starved to death waiting for distribution to arrive. Each interviewee witnessed someone reach that stage. North Korea attempted to engage another level of loyalty to the nation through increased propaganda messages that incorporated welcoming death as a sign of loyalty for the nation. Death is not too high a price to pay; in fact, it is not a price at all but an honor. As a demonstration of loyalty, death is not new to nations, religions, or ideologies as is historically evidenced by the kamikaze, the soldier, and the suicide bomber. On December 29, 1998, in the high-profile North Korean newspaper the Rodong Shinmun, Chŏnghŭi Kim, a Party official, wrote a piece about the “New Sprit for Suicidal Explosion” that shares similarities with the thinking behind suicide bombing.19 Dying from starvation was not a problem for North Korea, but individual acts of self-preservation involving border crossing, theft, and illicit trade were a problem because they threatened to corrupt the North Korean way of life and possibly erode government order.
Opposition did exist in North Korea, but it was designed by the state. Its type and target were manufactured in a way consistent with the nationalist discourse—we must oppose the outside enemy—so it strengthened national sovereignty but created greater vulnerability for the population. The North Korean government’s response to both the famine and to the manifestation of famine coping strategies in the lives of its population demonstrates not only a negligence to uphold the basic human right to food through acts of omission and commission, but also the willful deception of its population so as to reduce the likelihood of uprisings.20
The government remained consistent in its message of dutiful loyalty although the conditions of many North Koreans differed. Young-chul Kim (58), who worked at a light industrial factory, demonstrated an awareness of the extent of the problem and the government’s indifference. When I asked how he figured the number of famine dead in the population, he answered with reference to the factory’s production of shoes.
They know. The government knows how many died. It is the government, so they keep statistics on their population numbers. The government doesn’t publicize these figures, so other people don’t have any idea how many have died of starvation. When I was in North Korea, because I studied economics, I was working in light industries where they make shoes, T-shirts, hats, the things that people use in daily life. We made those things, and for that amount of production we need to plan according to how many people there are. In North Korea each person is allotted four pairs of shoes per year. So I could tell how much the population was going down when the country’s plan for the number of items came out. “Ah! The population is dropping, the population is dropping.” You could know that, couldn’t you? From 1995 the population continued to decrease. How could I know? Before that we used to make one million or more pairs of shoes, and then it declined steeply. . . . People were disappearing. So if you looked at it carefully you could see how many were dying. So we knew, but if you let on that you knew you’d be snatched away. (Young-chul Kim, 58)
In an effort to get a grip on its population numbers during the confusion of the famine years, North Korea issued new identification cards to the people.21 Aid received, siphoned off, or never seen was not something North Koreans depended on for survival during the famine years. Having some kind of connection with extended family, particularly in China, was often the lifeline. Having a “China connection” helped ease the transition from famine to somewhat sustainable existence. Market selling was a means of survival, and those who didn’t try it were most vulnerable. Interviewees reported that large numbers of the intellectual class died during the famine. Loyalty to the government motivated a sense of certainty that the Public Distribution System would resume delivery of food again. A failure to moonlight through capitalist-like coping strategies was not unusual within this group. Other people began to fend for themselves, unable or unwilling to rely on the government. Most North Koreans’ understanding of the famine was scripted according to what they were told caused it, and initial responses were particularly informed by the social need to maintain familiar lifestyles.
The accounts reveal that the government explained the famine as caused by nature, namely the flooding which came in 1995, but also from activities of Western and Japanese imperialist interference. The government’s recourse to mythology is not usual; as Claude Lévi-Strauss pointed out, the use of a binary, opposition, or mythology is useful for understanding the world.22 It is common to all peoples throughout history. But how did North Korea populate this narrative? Who were the main actors? The famine problem was a result of imperialism, and the solution would come from Juche ideology. These two stood as combatants within an already familiar narrative of national identity developed and repeatedly delivered through education and the state media: the triumph of good over evil. The social behavior generated by this narrative was not unusual because it was in keeping with nationalist narratives of war readiness. It tapped into the sense of solidarity and collective persecution within the country. It classified behaviors that were unacceptable. The social atmosphere created by this helped to keep chaos at bay during the famine. It was understandable that this narrative involved suffering, sacrifice, and endurance. The political body represented by Kim Il-Sung that took shape in the 1960s emphasized the suffering nation and the suffering of Kim Il-Sung himself in exile in 1938.23 So within this narrative it was without question that the people of North Korea would also suffer and endure their grief for the sake of the common effort, duty, and collective survival.
The response of intellectuals and the vast majority of the ordinary population was prescribed by the government, but many would likely have tried these methods without the government’s advice—namely, the procurement of famine foods from the mountains, the restriction of the diet to two meals a day, and the nutritional supplement that came in the ideological message that this famine was an arduous march against imperialism. Interviewees explained that local government officials taught this message of coping strategies to the community. Famine foods were collected from nearby mountains. The roots, grasses, and weeds were mixed with cornmeal, flour, and other items to make a palatable meal. Hye-jin Lee (23) hated eating the roots and grasses.
When the food downturn came, it wasn’t possible to have a full meal even once a day. I almost died. Weeds were mixed with the corn, like porridge. I wouldn’t have it. My mother made porridge from the corn and weeds. I had one spoon of it. There was only one spoon each, no kidding. Other people were in exactly the same situation. One spoon of weed porridge, that’s what we all ate. The porridge was made from seven spoons of the greens taken from the mountains. I hated to eat that. Really I did. For days we had to eat it. There was no seasoning, there was no soy sauce, and even salt was precious. There were plenty of houses that had no salt at all. There were many people who died. (Hye-jin Lee, 23)
Interviewees went into great detail about the daily effort to find material for their meals and the elaborate process by which they tried to make them edible. Nicer food items such as tofu and liquor were for selling rather than eating; the dregs left over from making such items were eaten instead. Soon things became so bad that the only weeds available were those deep underground.
We pulled those out, cleaned them well, dried them and [by pounding] made a flour of them. Then there are bean husks, you take the bean out and you have the husk. We dried those and made flour out of them and ate that. Then we also had the bark of trees such as pine trees, we’d mix that with the flour made from corn. People began to wonder whether they would die of starvation if the ability to farm secretly in the mountains were taken from them. There were people in charge of controlling the mountains. “If they take this away from us, we’ll starve to death” and they would say this and again go out to farm the plot in spite of it. People were without clothes, starving, no shoes, no clothes. They are just crying out, “Give me something to eat,” crying for rice, the children crying for food at night, like the sound of mosquitoes buzzing, like that sound. Even if you’re dying there is nothing you can do. Absolutely nothing. And the house, the house belongs to the country, doesn’t it? Since it’s given to you by the country you can’t sell it to get enough to eat. So you are hungry, you are starving, you are hungry, there’s nothing that can be done. You go out and catch some frogs, you eat those and survive. (Sun-ja Om, 67)
In the village where I lived there was a lot of liquor selling. When you make liquor, after you take the liquor out there are the dregs left behind. We ate that. And with tofu, tofu soup, we’d mix a bit of flour with the dregs of that and eat it. The tofu we sold at the market. We only had a little to eat. Just the dregs left over after making the liquor, it was like makkŏlli [a raw rice wine]. What’s left behind is a bit solid. We’d buy some saccharine and mix it together. I ate acorns the most, and the dregs from raw rice wine and the dregs left from tofu. Then in 1996 things really got bad. There were many days when I went with absolutely nothing to eat. (Hye-jin Lee, 23)
Swindling also occurred and, while this ensured individual survival, it often made things more difficult and undermined the collective. In his autobiographical novel This Is Paradise, Hyok Kang writes that “in everything they produced for the collective, the farmers had got used to slipping in incredible quantities of stone to keep to the quotas, which were measured by weight.”24 In the markets, “American” cigarettes that were just rolled-up paper were sold instead of tobacco, and colored sawdust was substituted for chili powder, and nails were put in mushrooms to increase the weight.25 Farmers and sellers in the markets were not the only ones swindling buyers. Gangs of starving soldiers are said to have looted houses and stolen chickens and other domestic animals at night.
I had lots of friends who died from hunger. Because we worked on the farm cultivating, though things were bad, we could manage to eat and survive at a minimum. Members of the farm collective could also manage. But those in the mines, if they went hungry there was nothing for them to eat. They didn’t have the strength to go out and pull weeds to eat. They would just lie down, waiting only for the day of their death. While at the very same time there were people eating tofu soup, liquor, and acorns. Then there were those who had close family in China, who would send things from China, those people lived well. (Chul-su Kim, 23)
Indeed, thieving was a growing feature of society. Where there was commerce and trade, people were drawn to opportunities to satisfy needs that couldn’t be met elsewhere. Shipments of food from China, according to Sun-hi Bak (53), were accompanied by thieves and beggars, which lead to the perception that society was growing more corrupt as a result of outside stresses.
In the border town where I lived there was a lot of commerce going on. That was in Hyesan. We provided logs [to China] and in exchange we got food. There were many beggars, especially in Hyesan. Those beggars, about thirty of them would go to the food truck entering from China. When food trucks had rice and corn, beggars would stab the bags of food with knives. The bags would open and the food would flow out while other beggars got ready to catch the food. The image of thirty beggars climbing on the trucks and stabbing the bags, and putting the food in their bags . . . I saw that so many times in Hyesan. (Sun-hi Bak, 53)
Changes to ordinary social life were interpreted as signifying the depth of degradation reached by the people. Divorce, prostitution, and the abandonment of children were cited as examples. Efforts to maintain a proper North Korean lifestyle are sign-posted throughout the accounts. There was a strong reluctance to change former ways of living or engage in behavior antithetical to the norm. And yet, during famines, wherever they occur, most of the population will be involved with some kind of crime connected with nutrition.26
The country is filled with thieves. At night they would come into the markets and steal what they wanted. Continuously the thieves were thieving. How was it possible to live? It wasn’t possible. (Hye-jin Lee, 23)
Human compassion comes from the rice bowl. If there is an abundance to eat, there is harmony, if there is nothing to eat and only a little work, there will be quarreling. It’s incomprehensible. As times got more and more difficult for people, trust broke down; this is obvious, no matter the country, the story would be the same. (Chun-ho Choi, 43)
Interviewees reported a general hardheartedness that emerged in their local areas toward people who had died of hunger. The experience seems to have had a particularly strong impact on younger North Koreans coming of age during the famine and on those who witnessed the deaths.
At the beginning, when we saw a dead person, or a beggar, our hearts would thump with compassion for them. “What’s this going on? What in the world?” After that there were so many dead to see that it was like it wasn’t real but like a dream. Just like it wasn’t real, and then, “Well, if even Kim Jong-Il can’t do anything about it, in what way can I do anything about it? I, too, have to really think about how I’m to survive.” That’s what I thought. Yes, they were so hungry they died. The sound of the children crying out for something to eat in the evening, they were like frogs croaking, crying. (Young-mi Park, 65)
In our family, well my grandfather died before I was born so I didn’t know [anything about] death. Because of the famine, fear grasped me. I remember there was one family, they all died of starvation. Father, mother, two daughters, a son, and one of the daughters had children, and they died of hunger too. At any rate, there were eight of them and they all died of hunger. They lived in the house behind us. This was in the Onsŏng region, an area mostly mountainous, but this was the part that was flatlands, all open fields; it was not possible to farm there, mostly rock. (Hyejin Lee, 23)
A frequent comment from interviewees was that upon waking in the morning they would wonder who had died, and would go around and check to see who had died the previous evening. According to Chung-su Om (69) and Sun-ja Om (67), 1996 was the worst period for them, every time they went to bed and woke up the next morning someone had died in the night. Many interviewees reported changes that occurred within themselves as the famine progressed.
When this famine problem reached its most extreme state, men and women took flight in all directions. You had to move to live. You had to move to live, and so families were broken apart, orphans started appearing, and you started seeing instances of the elderly starving to death in their homes. (Jae-young Yoon, 45)
People were on the move in order to survive. Catching a ride on the trains meant saving time and energy in walking, but this could be a dubious form of travel. The trains were dangerous not necessarily because of the guards but because of how people had to ride them to avoid the guards who asked for travel permits or bribes. People climbed onto the outside of the trains in order to ride them without a ticket. At the train stations people climbed under the trains, grabbed on and held themselves up against the tracks that passed beneath once the train got going. “There is a high tension wire under the train, and yet people would crawl under the train to catch a ride on it and then bang! they were dead, because they had touched the wire; there were lots who died that way. I heard a lot of those stories.” In-sook Lee continued:
Because I had relatives, and relatives from here and there came to our house looking for food, since they didn’t have any, I knew the problem was throughout the country, but I didn’t think that it was a worldwide problem. Because I was young, I didn’t know that it was a worldwide problem, or why that was so. I just thought, “Oh it’s difficult to live.” People go on trains, go to places, with no particular plans, go on and sell things out of their bags, carrying their bags from bamboo sticks. When they get on a bad train with strict screening, it’s hard for them to get a travel ticket, so it becomes very difficult.
Our trains, you can’t even imagine. It’s like trains from 8.15 [Korea’s independence era]. People get on the top of the trains even. My sister was on a train with her family in Cheongjin. Holding a small a baby in her hands, they got on the train, but the space between the connecting cars was wide, and while the cars rattled out of Cheongjin the guards were screening the permits. You must have a permit. If not, you are sent to the labor education department and forced into compulsory work at a labor camp. My sister was asked for her permit. As she put her hands in her pocket, to take out the permit, the car rattled and the baby fell from her hands through the gap in the cars. There were train conductors, safety guards, and even police, but they didn’t stop the car. The train kept going. Because it had just begun to depart the speed was slow. As the baby fell, she dropped to grab it. My sister fell underneath the train and just before the baby’s head was about to get broken by the wheels she grabbed him and threw him out from under the train.
People watched as the train carriages just went on. They were saying, “Oh what do we do, the baby and the mother? Did that mom and baby survive? Aigo [gosh], no probably died, couldn’t have survived. When we get to the next station, let’s follow the tracks and clean up the bodies.” (In-sook Lee, 51)
Trying to get around the countryside to find a way to make ends meet, Sun-ja Om (67) used to ride the train, but she rode without a ticket, which she accomplished by pretending she was mentally disabled.
They were sure to rough you up, drag you off the train, and ask, “Why are you riding without a ticket?” they would tell you to go. I would ride the train and when they came to me I would act as if I were mute. I wouldn’t talk. Just mumble. Then two security officers came and roughed me up, so I pulled at my clothes. (Sun-ja Om, 67)
Some interviewees stated that North Korea deals harshly with its disabled population. Sun-ja Om explained how she would talk incoherently and rend her clothes. She would pull off her clothes because the guards would look through the travelers’ clothing to find tickets. However, a partially undressed woman proved a formidable traveler. While there is no clear evidence that there were gendered aspects to the consumption of food, there are indications that the selling and purchase of food, particularly in the black market, was dominated by women. Sun-ja Om explained a coping strategy she used, which many others had also mentioned in their narrative: “I too went out into the streets to find any way to live; I even went as far as selling my blood. I sold my blood several times.” Interviewees, both men and women, reported that women were less embarrassed to take more extreme measures to survive. Selling in the markets was an activity dominated by women. “The men easily lost face,” she told me, but also the women were less likely to be bothered by the soldiers, less likely to be asked why they were not at the factory working, less likely to be viewed as a threat to the social order.
Sun-hi Bak (53) explained how factories became defunct, operating only as check-in places where workers were turned away and told to find money for food elsewhere. Some people in her community learned to trade safely and ensure their livelihoods through different means. Searching out other opportunities, she described how she and many other women managed to trade across the Amrok River.
Since the government stopped giving out distributions [PDS], we no longer got the distribution tickets, and there was nothing to produce at work. Everything was paralyzed, so you just get a stamp on your time clock card at work, then you would go to the marketplace to see if there’s any daily jobs available. Hyesan had the Amrok River. We had things like jewelry and other precious metals such as gold, silver, and bronze. Those items were traded secretly through the river [items wrapped in cloth and tossed across].
So after giving the items to China, you get the money and buy food. People from Hyesan referred to men who wouldn’t smuggle as stupid. People who are stupid didn’t smuggle, and everyone else did. Even girls did it. So the strategy was that men imported through secret channels via the river route while girls did laundry at the Amrok River. “Doing the laundry” was a way to send goods across. We would put stuff under the clothes in a big bowl.
[We traded things like] metals, like gold and bronze. We put them under our laundry, already wrapped. We wrap them and label them with their weight. Since it’s shallow people would cross the river from the other side. We’d hide it before they’d come. We would pretend like we were just doing laundry and the people from China would take it from where we hide it. They’d just take it without saying anything, but then afterward, they would be like, “Okay this has the person’s name on it and the weight. . . .” They would pay us after checking the weight in China. They don’t hand us the money with the rock or anything, but throw it to us saying, “There you go!” When they say they’re going to give us the money at 12, it’s not just one person getting their money, but a crowd. So around 12 o’clock, a lot of people would come out and gather. Then they’d call us and throw each person a rock. Then we’d go back home with the money.
Different portions of society and different geographic regions coped in ways acceptable to their position. Sun-hi Bak explained that the security police in the region were “pitiful” enough to be bribed by the traders at the river. Since the police were only given food twice a day and were expected to find a third meal on their own, they were susceptible to accepting bribes. “That’s probably why they watched out for us,” she explained.
After a period of what North Koreans referred to as needing “patience” (ch’am ta) and “endurance” (ch’amŭlsŏng), coping strategies emerged and developed along with greater evidence of government inefficiency. This provided opportunities for ordinary North Koreans to witness a disjuncture between what their lives had been like before the famine, the indoctrination and ideological education about life in North Korea, and the reality they saw around them. These opportunities ran the gamut of black market activities to public executions for the crime of grain theft. People identified disappearances as directly linked to the discussion of starvation-related deaths. Furthermore, although they could not speak directly about the starvation deaths they witnessed and heard about, these deaths and their causes were clear. No amount of ideology could nourish a starving body, and if it did manage to nourish their patient endurance, it could not bring them back to life if they died waiting.
Relationships between people began to change on a local level as well as on a state level. Children were newly required to bring rabbit hides to school, as Sung-min Noh (19) explained, and would suffer self-criticism sessions if they fell short of the quota. Relations between students changed too. Children with more to eat ate alone. There was less talk of play or schoolwork and more talk of what to eat.
Because of the March of Suffering the school had a regulation. It was the rabbit regulation. We had to catch rabbits and bring their hides to school. We had to bring at least five in one year. The rabbit hides were used for the soldiers. They were sent off to be used for belts. It was very hard for people to do this during the economic difficulties. The students would come to school and have to self-criticize that they were not successful. “I will have it by tomorrow, I will do it by next week,” they would say. Then they wouldn’t have managed and again they would have to self-criticize. It was really horrible. I got it too. Because of that I hated attending school.
More than study, we would talk about being hungry at school. “How are you managing?” we’d ask. “What are you eating?” We were worried about that, so we talked about it. “What are you eating?” “Have you eaten?” Then we would go out after class hours and get grasses and weeds. We didn’t talk about studies, we talked about what we would eat; outside of that there was no talk. Playing was not pleasurable. Before the food shortage came, we would play with pleasure. Just like here in South Korea. Skipping rope, drawing straws, kicking a ball. After the food shortage came kids didn’t have any energy to play. They would just sleep, and when they weren’t sleeping they would talk about food. They never talked about studying, and even though there wasn’t anything to eat they would go to the agricultural station all the time [where in ordinary times food was given out].
Those who had something to eat had family or friends in China. People with rank were eating. The soldiers in our area, their families, were eating. Those who lived well stayed to themselves, and those who didn’t live well stayed to themselves. Most of the well-off students had lunchboxes. In the past, they would sit together and share out the food and eat. But after [the famine started] they would sit together but they would eat alone, they wouldn’t share out their food. They couldn’t do that. You have your pride, no? North Koreans have a strong sense of pride. (Sung-min Noh, 19)
Because of the famine, relations between people became difficult. Hye-jin Lee (23) said that those who were in positions of leadership had trouble adjusting to ordinary people with new money and new power. “There were some ordinary people who were good at selling in the markets. They would get the boss to give them easier jobs through bribes; they wouldn’t get stuck with the difficult jobs. In that way, things changed. Those with power managed, and those without power were in an even harder position.”
Sung-min Noh (19) talked about the changes that occurred after he left school. He had not seen his teacher since he graduated, and one day he saw her in the market selling Korean vodka and cigarettes. “We were all just people in that situation.” But he said that he most regretted seeing his respected teacher making ends meet like that. Interviewees shared information about family breakdown in North Korea. There was mention in the oral accounts of increased separation of husbands and wives and a rise in prostitution.27 Changes that were contrary to former ways of living were occurring, showing that the hardships shifted from the maintenance of former ways of life to efforts to sustain life. Although North Korea does not now have an official Confucian ethic (there was a history of Confucianism in the past), North Koreans reported behaving in ways contrary to such unofficial ethics. In his autobiography, Chol-Hwan Kang expressed his conflicting feelings about the hunger he experienced, and filial piety:
Ceding to hunger, acting like an animal; these are things anyone is capable of, professor, worker and peasant alike. I saw for myself how little these distinctions mattered, how thoroughly hunger alters one’s reason. A person dying of hunger will grab a rat and eat it without hesitation. Yet as soon as he begins to regain his strength, his dignity returns, and he thinks to himself, I’m a human being. How could I have descended so low? This high-mindedness never lasts long. The hunger inevitably comes back to gnaw at him again, and he’s off to set another trap. Even when my grandmother was suffering from pellagra, the thought of bringing her soup only crossed my mind after I devoured a few rabbit heads. What leftovers I did bring her she pounced on with avidity, searching furiously for any remaining strands of meat. Only after she had eaten her fill did she stop to ask whether I had eaten.28
Some families grew stronger under the strain, as Hye-jin Lee (23) mentions, but others gave in to the pressure.
There was the food ration downturn, but despite that our family didn’t suffer collapse—there were other homes where there was lots of fighting. Well, because you have a downturn in food rations . . . Who’s to blame? That kind of thing, that’s the way they fought. I didn’t have that experience of fighting in our house. My mother and father really brought me up . . . since the time I was born in North Korea I never once saw my mother and father fight. Arguing, fighting, I never saw that. The famine, the food downturn, even then . . . together they worked hard, they tried very hard. They collected weeds and greens from the mountains. My mother would go out and get what she could, and we took care of each other. Even if my parents didn’t have something to eat they always ensured that my siblings and I had something. (Hye-jin Lee, 23)
Although abandoning children was unlikely to be an early response to famine, many survivors reported seeing orphans as a defining symbol of the famine and social collapse. Kyung-hee Kim (45) also saw the orphan children in her town of Danchon:
From the 1990s I saw these kids starving to death in front of Danchon station. Parents abandoned their children, even on New Year’s Day. They would clean them good and do everything a parent could do for the last time and put them out there. They’d be really clean. Sometime later if you go out to see, the kids would be crying, you see tear marks and snot on their faces. Then, next time, they are lying down. And the next time, they’re dead.
People who passed them here and there may have given them something to eat. So they live like that, but even if they take what’s given, it’s not enough to live on, and they die. At that time, I had to live. It hurt to see that. I am a mother, I have two children. Even if I took one of those kids, could I feed him? Clothe him? No, I couldn’t. People who left their children, they did that to survive. How could you take on someone else’s kids in addition to your own? Maybe I could take on one kid once in a while, but not thousands. Who do you take on, who do you care for?
If I had this kind of mentality back then, maybe I could have taken on one or two kids. But back then I wasn’t like that. So I didn’t feel anything. I thought: “I should be calm. I shouldn’t be moved.” Over there, people live like that, and here people live like this.
Grandmas and grandpas, dying is just dying. But to see kids die is awful. Don’t you think? At an old age, people have lived long enough. So the first thing I thought when I came out of North Korea after crossing the Tumen River was to set up an orphanage. (Kyung-hee Kim, 45)
Sun-young Kim (43) also saw the kids,
I went to Cheongjin Market because I was hungry. I went, but I was crying inside. The merchants sat in the market next to the railroad tracks, the noodle merchants. There was a kid. His face was dark, no shoes and dirty clothes, his hands and feet were black, his hair was dry. “I can’t just die sitting here, if I come here and do something to lift the mood, maybe I can get some soup or something left by the customers.” Must have thought like that. And after the customers eat noodles there is some soup left and the kid says, “Please give it to me, don’t throw it away,” and he got it. When I saw that, I thought, “Yes, do whatever it takes to live. You must do whatever it takes to live. Even if you have to steal. Live. Good job, good job.”
You know how we carry our kids on our back? I saw this little kid on his mom’s back and gave him a snack. Then I saw this elderly senior take the snack from the baby because he was so hungry. How dire is that? The starvation situation. I got snacks and gave them to kids near the train station. I gave some to a child and the older kids took it off him. They stole it and ran away. I thought to myself, “Yeah even if you have to be like that, eat and live on.” Even old women were saying it, “Good job, good job.” So eating like that to live is good. They are better than dead kids. (Sun-young Kim, 43)
Sun-hi Bak (53) gave this account:
People here in Seoul don’t even know their neighbors, but not in North Korea. Those of us in the inminban, local authority leaders, live harmoniously with plenty of interaction. When we make rice cake for holidays, we would share them and talk amongst ourselves even if it’s trivial, but it doesn’t happen here [in South Korea]. But then, because we didn’t get food anymore from the country, none of us were free to do whatever we’d been doing in the past. We couldn’t talk since we were too busy earning money only to use it all up in a day. So everyone started to grow apart and lost laughter. Before in North Korea, when people are building, they delegated us into federations. Then ladies from inminban would go work, have a good time, and come back, but by the time we left, it wasn’t like that anymore. People no longer smiled. They are all deep in thought, and no one just wanders around aimlessly like here, but all have bags on their backs and have their destinations. The changes in relationships occurred since no more food was distributed and it was so hard to live, for everyone. We were all hungry so we couldn’t afford to take care of relationships on top of the burden we carried.
In North Korea, everybody knows what is going on with everyone else. There was a sharing of things. Even when the food was given out, it would be shared. If we had a piece of rice cake, even if it was the one piece, it was divided and shared between us; the relations between people were good. You could talk and discuss what was on your mind. And then when the food wasn’t given out, when the food shortage came, people were. . . . When could they sit around chatting with each other? They couldn’t. So the relations between people grew further apart. Laughter and that kind of thing also disappeared. Along the roads you could see all the doors shut tight. There wasn’t anyone who didn’t lock their door. Everything was so difficult at that time. There wasn’t any more getting together between people . . . the laughter just vanished from the roads. From the time the food distribution didn’t come, the relations between people became quite strained. So it was that everything just. . . . When you’re hungry everything is annoying isn’t it? It was all like that. (Sun-hi Bak, 53)
What happens when national narratives engender a sense of alienation and reflect back an entirely unmatched experience that discounts personal experience? What does this mean on a collective scale? As Nancy Scheper-Hughes observed of Brazil, the hungry body is a truthful body; it does not maintain the gap between reality and experience.29 Worse, it threatens the dominant discourse doled out by the government. The gap that emerges between lived experience and ideology has been observed elsewhere. There have always been efforts to eliminate the appearance of the gap though camouflage, seen most clearly in language. To live within the truth is dealt with harshly. Havel, writing about communist Czechoslovakia, explains that living within the truth is dealt with harshly not because it has power but because it has potential to ignite a trend of living in the truth, and thus the potential to transform social consciousness.30
I saw a lot of difficult situations. Since I was little I went to many places on the train. I went to Gangwon Province, Pyongyang a lot, by the train. Going to relatives too . . . my sister also got married and moved there, so I visited my sister a lot too, especially Gangwon Province. When I go to the market at Wonsan, there are corpses in the corner. Beggars and bums died on the streets. There are these places near the entrances of apartments. If you look underneath those places, there are corpses like that. At least it wasn’t that bad in Cheongjin. But when I went further in [into North Korea, away from the coast], it was even worse. The corpses were out in the open, with no one to claim them. Even now, it’s so appalling and scary. They didn’t die because it was cold. It was summer, so they died because they couldn’t eat and starved. They wandered around with no home, lived like that and starved to death. (In-sook Lee, 51)
The life people saw around them increasingly contrasted with ideological messages of the utopian future that was to come for North Korea. How people communicated about these incongruities is crucial; the next chapter explores this in detail.