A man in the back row of a small public lecture hall threw up his hand and asked, “Don’t these people have any common sense?” It was the Q & A portion of a talk I was delivering to an audience in Los Angeles. North Koreans are not without sense. Whether their thinking would be comparable with that of Americans is up for debate, but the thought life of North Koreans is far from the static automaton, deeply victimized psyche typically attributed to them. What was deemed sensible in North Korea was to maintain the status quo, not to self-identify as a troublemaker, and get by as best you can. The components of a life must be understood but equally so the context of those components. As Mi-young Ahn (45) explained,
The people are not stupid. They know the politics shouldn’t be that way. They just cannot say it. When the time comes, I think something will definitely happen. They had communism, but who likes it? Of course the Party members do. The Party members praise Kim Jong-Il’s leadership and say “Long live Kim Jong-Il,” but the moment they turn away, they don’t think like that. They are too busy living their own lives to care about Kim’s policies and say whether it is good or bad. So unless one is stupid, one can see by looking at the way the country is going. Lots of people think that this isn’t the way it should be. Now, the problem is that they can’t talk about it.
Mi-young Ahn identifies the component in the lives of North Koreans that she saw as holding the people back from living the lives they wanted to create. In the last few decades we have seen dramatic changes in the economic features of North Korea. Bribes, clandestine border crossing, and market selling have meant that formerly impossible things have become possible. The market may indeed set North Korea “free,” but in this new life of economic exchange one thing remains at an absolute premium: No one, from the most elite to the most dehumanized prison camp detainee, can enjoy the ability to speak openly with impunity. This loss of the ability to speak openly emerged in the oral accounts in previous chapters in the form of jokes and other humor but also in careful phrases, metaphors, and repetitions that show an interpellation of the state and daily social life. Just as the absence of food and other resources found a new presence in the form of ersatz food and makeshift resources, the use of speech in North Korea seems to have long adapted to limitations.
When I met my interviewees in Seoul and Tokyo, the past was another country where things were done differently, and yet some of those differences were cherished. While volunteering at a nongovernmental organization (NGO) run by resettled North Koreans in Seoul, I had the opportunity to sit in on a discussion about our funding and how it should best be used. The discussion became heated. Our funder was a large well-known American organization represented by an American man who spoke no Korean. He sat at the table while our North Korean representative fumed. The issue was about the NGO using funds to facilitate the movement of North Koreans out of China to South Korea. The money had been given with the stipulation that it would be used solely for work in South Korea, but my co-workers interpreted the stipulation as mutable. During the course of the discussion, one of the key representatives of our group spoke up, and in Korean he said, “The difference is this. With us North Koreans, if our brother falls in the river we jump in to get him. But the South Koreans, they’ll telephone the ambulance.” We all laughed. The funding representative smiled curiously and inquired about the joke. After confirming it was okay to do so, I translated. He thought the analogy funny but insisted we abide by the rules. Otherwise the funding would be cut off. It occurs to me now that this micro-exchange embodies the American–DPRK and ROK–DPRK relations. The North Koreans didn’t think the rules applied to them, and perhaps they did know better; time is of the essence for the drowning. South Korea was sympathetic to the North but was phoning in the help. The funders, the Americans, were very much in the dark, driving the ambulance.
Interestingly, at least in my experience, this did not stir up the anti-Americanisms my colleagues had learned in North Korea, though much of that discourse had been linked to the food shortages and nationwide suffering. In my experience, I sensed that the NGO really wanted to rely on North Korean solutions to North Korean problems. They were happy to accept funding and temporary housing in Seoul to conduct their work. But North Korea was a problem for North Koreans to solve. This could be symptomatic of the NGO that I worked with; other NGOs in Korea are a blend of both South Koreans and North Korean defectors. However, interviewees expressed something interesting during their personal narratives that reflect a retreat into culturally rooted North Korean ways of knowing. What I wish to highlight here is how interviewees returned to their collective North Korean experience that directly or otherwise locked out the listener. Jae-young Yoon told me:
You haven’t had this lived experience; this is my lived experience. Speaking from experience I can say no matter how I may appeal to you, you won’t ever realize it completely. Rather, when reunification happens, when people go to see that place, “Oh, so in this country in the 1990s it was really perilous living,” they’ll say, convinced. Until then, all we can do is appeal to you and say irokke saratta, “this is how we lived.” The situation is such that I too lack the gift of eloquent speech, I can’t imagine any expression for it; just “that’s how we lived” is all I can say to appeal to you. (Jae-young Yoon, 45)
The starkness of that expression, irokke saratta, shows how some experiences strip down the finery of language. The suggestion is almost that any expression would be euphemistic; one must only go and see the land, as Jae-young Yoon suggests, when reunification happens. The silence that surrounds the phrase, the starkness of expression in the phrase “this is how we lived,” calls out for evidence for proof of what the words do not provide. This may be a result of the heavy silence that was placed on the population around speaking about their experiences. Yoon’s expression provides a space for the listener to drift into an imagined North Korea, to drift ahead in time to a reunified Korea when the details of life there might be known more fully.
It must be noted that Yoon and others may have struggled with articulation because of the trauma involved with their experiences. Interviewees spoke of ch’unggyok, a term that can be translated as shock or surprise. Psychologists working with North Koreans in Seoul observed occurrences of posttraumatic stress disorder. In the first large-scale study of posttraumatic stress among North Koreans in South Korea, Woo Taek Jeon and his colleagues found that 29.5 percent of the two hundred North Koreans assessed had the disorder.1 There were twenty-five traumatic events listed in their research in order of highest frequency. Among these events, witnessing public execution ranked first, followed by witnessing a family member, relative, or close neighbor die of starvation. The types of trauma were divided into four factors: physical (receiving a beating), political (witnessing public executions), ideological (such as “agony over family background”), and family related (witnessing someone starving to death). Traumatic experience and its explicability have been the topic of research within the social sciences for some time.2 Arthur Kleinman and Robert Desjarlais observed that trauma systematically silences.3 Other elements can silence a speaker. The location where one speaks, to whom, and what one speaks about all contribute to the shape a story takes and what portions get told and how. It is not just the story that is told. Signposts appear, indicating whole portions that are cut off, not for sharing. Who could claim to have a perfect account of all that happened in North Korea during the famine years? Even North Koreans themselves repeatedly say that North Korea is a society that cannot be known, certainly not from the outside, but also not from within. As Judith Butler explains, “When the ‘I’ seeks to give an account of itself, it can start with itself, but it will find that this self is already implicated in a social temporality that exceeds its own capacities for narration; indeed . . . the ‘I’ has no story of its own that is not at once the story of a relation—or a set of relations to—a set of norms.”4 These oral accounts of life in North Korea were not so much autobiography but the biography of social life. And who could possibly tell all of that? The implication of the other, including those who remain, may be the variable that generates truncated, closed-off narratives. So while the act of eliciting and receiving speech may initially appear as a liberating inversion of North Korea’s censorship, the rhetorical structure is not entirely liberated because it bears traces of discourse from the North and it acts and is acted upon by the interlocutory scene of the incomplete geopolitical conflict in both North and South Korea.
What a North Korean says about North Korea enters into the political realm of the South not only because of where she is from, but because of the incomplete nature of conflict between the Koreas. Her discourse about the North enters this conflict, however marginally or overtly. Speaking about North Korea does not occur in a geopolitical “state of conclusion” where the causes of the Cold War and the Korean War have achieved resolution. It is a conclusion neither on the individual nor on the international level but a scene where the conflicts have yet to find peace and where transfers of information, people, and loyalty are slotted into competing sides. This is evidenced most glaringly in the use of the South Korean talbukja (lit., escaped Northern person; defector) and the North Korean paeshinja (lit., traitor) to refer to those who leave the North. The relationship of North and South Korea permits only a singular and uncomplicated narrative for North Koreans who cross the border. I have demonstrated that the narrative models available to North Koreans back home are highly limited; equally restricted—although different—narrative models meet them in the South. The narrative models in South Korea, intentionally or otherwise, make available a preponderance of North Korean defector narratives that focus almost exclusively on the most horrific aspects of life in the North. While there certainly are grievous atrocities in the North, such singular representations do not provide insights into factors other than violence that keep people in the North.
The tendency I observed among North Koreans to withdraw—not only during their oral accounts but also in terms of social engagement—may indicate a desire to return emotionally to the ch’ung (deep loyalty) and hyo (filial piety) they had with friends and family in the North. Deep loyalty and filial piety have been identified on a national level as two of the preeminent human ethical characteristics in Confucianism. When I consider this retreat in personal narratives as connected with loyalty and piety, it reminds me of Adriana Cavarero’s paradoxical observation that “No matter how much you are similar and consonant . . . your story is never my story. . . . I still do not recognize myself in you and, even less, in the collective we.”5 This identifies the dissonance many North Koreans might encounter in the South, regardless of who listens. It is in such context that Jae-young Yoon’s words—“that’s how we lived is all I can say to appeal to you”—is at once an appeal for connection and an affirmation of our distinctness and our disconnection. It is an act of keeping the narrative to oneself.
Although famine is usually seen rather than heard or listened too, North Korea frustrated this tendency to visually sensationalize starvation. Because international access was limited, a paradigmatic shift was necessary in approaching North Korea generally but also in the study of those famine years in particular. The movement is from looking and seeing to listening and hearing. In this respect the distance between us is somewhat dissolved since listening is about participation, sharing, and permitting absorption.6 This book shifts the typical approach to North Korea by identifying North Korean people as agentive. In the same spirit, the paradigmatic shift approaches the North not as a visual spectacle but as a discursive space.
The relevance of speech—its accuracy and its weight—is a complex political matter that is always at stake not only when North Koreans speak at home in the North but wherever they speak, to whom, and about what. Whatever gets done with that speech is political, but the way it is politicized may be determined by its emergence in differing geopolitical contexts. This is also true of written accounts, particularly of North Koreans who survived and escaped political prison camps of the North. These memoirs are in transit on a political landscape, used to convey different messages sometimes unintended by their authors, co-opted by national agendas.7 Given this, Foucault’s observation that the “verbalization of conflicts and domination is perilous” seems understated to say the least.8 Speech is indeed, and writing too, an object, a site, of conflict.
This book is also unavoidably cast into that web of sociopolitical complexity. As the author, I perform an abstraction in transforming these oral accounts into written transcripts that are then transformed again in translation, and again through selecting and incorporating portions into the analysis. Intertextuality is inevitable, and this book in turn generates intertextuality. Indeed, even before we sat down for the interviews, the speakers engaged in countless exchanges, between us and among others. Rather than trying to organize the disorder inherent in the articulation of personal experience, I acknowledge the uncontrollable, imperfect aspects of research with human subjects, with memory, and with suffering. The book draws upon the information-rich sections of the oral accounts that provide inductive insights into the broader experience of life in North Korea.
Despite its intangibility, speech has the power to make and unmake the world.9 Discourse is “controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers . . . not just anyone, finally, may speak of just anything.”10 North Korea exercises a detailed control of the population, both in terms of physical bodies and in terms of what people produce—their labor or the product of their words. In the North the feeding, clothing, and housing of bodies is a state operation. The nonmaterial aspects of life are also the concern of the state: learning, training, and self-criticism, for instance. The state is interested in the management of physical bodies toward national service, and the minds of individuals must also be put to national work. As existing scholarship has shown, the North Korean government uses language in a particular fashion to achieve a particular result.11 The reader will note that the national appropriation of discourse is not unique to North Korea. However, throughout the North’s education and self-criticism sessions, standard nationalist narratives are ritualized and the “appropriateness of rearticulation is exercised between individuals.”12
How can a researcher bypass habituated norms of discourse? What are the complications of using spoken discourse, once so controlled in the North, as a means of getting information? When North Koreans shared their experiences with me, the individual act of speaking was unlike the sociopolitical site of their original experience in the North. Previously, they had to choose from within their lived experiences those things that were acceptable to convey in language and those that they could not express at risk of death or other punishments, like the mundane social punishments that emerge from departing from custom and norm. They had learned to avoid wrong speech and action by witnessing what happened to others: threats, disappearances, public executions, or imprisonment. The privileges of correct speech were also learned. Aspects of speech, though perhaps state-controlled, were likely to have been so ordinary as to have gone unobserved and to have been absorbed into habit without significant duress.
In oral accounts, individuals recall experiences that at the time of their formation were typically voiced through coded and clandestine means, if at all. The very things forbidden to articulate in North Korea, things they had grown practiced at overlooking, camouflaging, or suppressing, are the very things the researcher in Seoul and Tokyo may call upon the interviewee to voice. The method involves bearing in mind that making use of oral accounts does not mean the natural inversion of sociopolitical contexts to which the survivor is accustomed. The initial experience occurred within a sociopolitical frame that necessitated ambiguous articulation because of social norms on one end and because of the threat of death on the other. It would be foolish for the researcher to seek unobstructed articulation or hope that the interviewee will speak “the truth” of her experience so that it can be captured and analyzed. Her survival once hinged on selective use of speech and silence. The interviewee that confirms experience is the same person who once could not give voice to those experiences she now confirms. This paradox is most troublesome: the researcher seeks articulation of experience when survival of the initial experience necessitated inaccurate, bungled, and altered articulation. These are the limits we must work within. Language raises the question of its own limits.13
When I elicit an account from an interviewee, if she speaks with words molded by the context that created her suffering, that language may also reveal how suffering was conceptualized, justified, and allocated in North Korea. The limits of her language are the limits of her world. Her words may show how she negotiated suffering within the limits of that context. This is quite expected, for in order to come into being, the initial site of suffering, atrocity, uses discourse to conceptualize, justify, and allocate suffering within a given population. When interviewees emerge from the context of rights violations, when they emerge from this discourse into a so-called neutral space, what sort of speech emerges? Let us recall that she experienced her suffering in a context that severely restricted how that suffering was communicated. Can we expect the former context of censorship to be inverted when she moves to a more neutral space? Imagine an open box containing objects that, once the box is upturned, will all fall out. If we invert the context, will the once unspoken words, the words she so desired to speak, will they emerge? Indeed, we run aground if we imagine an inevitable, pent-up desire to verbally “live within the truth.”14
Though the survivor emerges from the famine with the language of that context, language operates as a linguistic package, providing insights into the structures that sustained and generated the famine. Another type of history is produced through the oral history of subordinate groups and their written testimonies because the narrative home is different.15 (Within the field of psychology, the articulation of traumatic pain through narrative therapy is said to be an effective means of overcoming and resolving trauma.16) However, accounts from North Korea demonstrate the complex nature of oral accounts, the variety of positions from which a speaker speaks. Language, particularly spoken discourse, gives us a glimpse of the distillation of the state apparatus of propaganda, self-criticism, and social management: whether absorbed, how people conceived of themselves and others, and what they thought of the state.17 The spoken word changes over time and reveals cultural habits, humor, and figures of speech more readily than the state’s written discourse; its evolution is time and place specific.
The context into which an individual speaks has the power to implicate him. That space has a set of conditioning moral norms that he cannot stand apart from; the speaker is directly vulnerable to these norms. When he speaks, it is not his own story that is told but rather the story of a set of relations. Not only is his relationship to his family and friends evoked but also—and more dangerously—his relationship to the leadership, the state, and to socialism. In North Korea, the relevance of speech is always at stake. In this sense, all speech in North Korea risks politicization, the correct or incorrect type of politicization. Because of this ever-present risk, making sense of the world with speech requires careful skill.
The interviewee speaks of her own experience, and that experience of those who remain back home in the North. This speaking-about-others distinguishes one of the painful features of oral accounts from North Koreans precisely because of the continuance of suffering, and the inaccessibility of home. Suffering could be sparked by those who departed if they speak too directly or specifically. The control of language moves from North Korea to South Korea to where I sit in Tokyo writing this. I am compelled to change names, hometowns, ages, and occupations, to eliminate traces that could spark violence in the lives of others. This fragile involvement of those who remain in the North is inevitable. Fear of reprisals linger when giving an account. Ambiguous oral accounts may indicate a desire to ensure that friends and family back home are protected from potential danger. Because of the opposing natures of these two worlds—that of enforced silence and ambiguous speech in North Korea and that of encouraged speech in South Korea and Japan—the interviewee may not easily transition between them. The researcher may not fully appreciate the difficulty either.
In contemporary global discourse, leaving North Korea is typically framed as the achievement of ultimate freedom, the triumph of good over evil, the strength of the human spirit against all odds, but this framing is incomplete and not wholly accurate. Such framing situates life in North Korea as a monolith, the country as a veritable prison, and the mentality of the people as uncomplicated and oppressed: they hold their breath until one day they can breathe the fresh air of freedom. It sets up the international community as the savior and North Koreans as those waiting to be saved. The framing situates those who stay behind as incapable of escape or unwilling because of their false consciousness. From this very limited perspective it is inconceivable that some may have opted to stay or may have weighed the option of leaving and chosen to stay because they see remaining as the best way to resolve the difficulties of the country. As previously mentioned, some saw the solution as an inside job. It is clear from the accounts I recorded that North Korean thought life is complex and nuanced and not pathological, as it is sometimes represented in the media. Certainly the population lacks information that could help contextualize and critique the political failures of their government. The day-to-day lives of people, as indicated by these accounts, demonstrate a negotiation of economic and social difficulties. If a small counterculture emerges that allows sociopolitical discourse, there will be a chance for change.
Historically there was an assumption that as famines and similar socioeconomic difficulties worsened, the population would rise up. As Sue Lautze noted, this was thought to be the case for the Chinese and Soviet famines.18 Lautze explains that these views seem to be informed by Western models of democracy, where suffering would lead to the collapse of government. History and personal accounts of trauma have shown that increased suffering does not lead to increased likelihood of the opposition.19 Furthermore, the idea that revolt is inevitable as situations worsen is historically unfounded. Rather, the opposite is true. As situations liberalize, people are more likely to have the ability to rise up. The French Revolution, the Russian October Revolution, the Hungarian revolution of 1956, and the Iranian revolution all demonstrate that it is not when oppression is at its most severe that violent revolutions occur but when the oppression is loosened and the system of control becomes slightly liberalized.20 Similarly, the severity of suffering is less significant than the ability to conceive of another way of being, and being able to see other possibilities can motivate change.21 We might have expected popular uprisings from North Koreans, given the presence of variables such as an easing up on suffering in the postfamine years. There was a let-up on the extent of suffering, a relaxation of social control of coping strategies such as selling in markets. One might have conceived of a different state of affairs by witnessing military personnel taking advantage of their position. Evidence that North Koreans were gaining increased access to foreign goods, particularly from China and South Korea, indicates that there may have been an awakening of what in democratic states we think of as oppositional consciousness and what Sartre calls “another state of affairs.” But these variables were complicated by the presence of greater deterrents. Aggregate numbers of dissidents couldn’t form because rebellious groups were crushed before their numbers could grow. The inflow of foreign goods did not necessarily arrive untainted by the orthodoxy of North Korea’s ideology. In this nation where the collective is promoted, distinctly individual acts of survival were waged against the difficulties of the famine years.
Stories of pain and suffering involve complex relations of power in the telling because the pain and suffering came into being as a result of complex relations of power. How pain is experienced and the emotional attachment that emerges from it involves the attribution of meaning as well as associations between different kinds of negative or aversive feelings. It seems counterintuitive how repressive regimes get incorporated into the attitudes and behavior of people, with the consequence that citizens behave in ways that place the polity above individual interests.22 Perhaps in North Korea, as in the Soviet government era, people lost faith not with the Party, but with particular leaders, with people in general, or with themselves. The death of Kim Jong-Il in 2011 sparked discussion in the international community: Does this signal the end of the regime or will the young leader Kim Jung-Un ignite a renewed faith that the North Korean government will fulfill its promise to build a prosperous nation?23 But we have heard these questions before, when Kim Il-Sung died. North Korea continues to grapple with shortages of many sorts, and yet amidst these struggles to maintain its way of life there are signs that the people have long subtly managed despite the failings of the state.