December 1997
Although my body was as thin as a twig, I still felt like I weighed a ton; my body felt too heavy to move. I slumped onto the hard, frozen ground as the darkness of the night started to swallow me. I no longer had the strength to continue on. My mom had left me. My body remained completely still as I heard footsteps echoing from the staircase. On that cold December night in 1997, when I was eleven years old, I knew that I was going to die before even reaching adolescence.
Suddenly, a muffled sound reached my ears. Was I dreaming? Or was I having a nightmare? I half opened one of my eyes. A dark silhouette appeared before me, its shadow growing larger and larger. Frightened, I lifted myself up, only to see that this shadowy figure looked familiar. Suddenly, I realized it was my mother, along with Keumsun right behind her! I felt a rush of adrenaline jolt through my body and my anguish started to dissipate. I didn’t know it was possible to be as happy as I felt in that instant.
Just a few hours ago, I had written my will and testament, and now, here was my family. It was a miracle. I felt a little ashamed for having written the will, especially because my mother and Keumsun were probably already on their way back as I was writing it. I felt like a coward. Worse, I knew I had written some very harsh things to my mom. She found the note, which I had left on the coffee table. I held my breath as she silently read from the page. Her face revealed no emotion, and I will never know what she was thinking in that particular moment. As she read, I could feel my joy slowly fading away.
And then it vanished completely when I realized, much to my dismay, that they had come back empty-handed. Their trip to Rajin-Sonbong had been unsuccessful. They weren’t able to bring back any food, and I was starving. I hadn’t put anything edible in my mouth since the tasteless concoction of water and dried turnip leaves ran out two days ago. I was terribly disappointed, but did not dare show it.
Mom looked exhausted and distraught after her long, unproductive journey, and reading the note I had left on the table certainly didn’t help. There was no food in the apartment, so she just drank a glass of water as her eyes swept around the dark and empty room.
“The only thing left for us to do here is die,” she said in a soft, defeated voice. We were all going to die.
Silently, she laid herself down on the patched-up sleeping bag along the wall of the kitchen; it was the least cold place in the apartment. My sister and I huddled next to her. Darkness surrounded us as I started to fall asleep. We were famished and helpless, but at least I wasn’t going to die alone.
In the morning, we were awoken by noise from the street, but we didn’t move a muscle. Mom was as still as a statue. The burden resting on her shoulders was too much for her to bear. She knew that she was our last hope against the malady that had struck our country and was growing worse each day: the famine. Since 1995, my family members had been slowly dying one after the other, and the three of us were next on the list. Within a span of two years, my mother had lost my grandmother and then my grandfather shortly afterward. Just one month ago, it had been my father’s turn to go. Behind her closed eyes, my mom must have been watching this seemingly endless nightmare replay over and over again in her mind.
* * *
I had not eaten the cold noodles that I liked so much in over a year. Right up until 1994, I had always had enough to eat because, as I mentioned before, my mother would bring leftovers home from the cafeteria at the hospital. Thanks to her, we ate rice with kimchi, a spicy fermented cabbage, on a regular basis. Kimchi, a Korean specialty, stings your tongue a little when you eat it but packs a lot of flavor. Once you’re accustmed to it, you cannot have a meal without it. But, starting when I was nine years old, we no longer had rice every day. At the hospital, foodstuffs were becoming scarcer. Instead of rice, Mom made us a mushy porridge of corn that I never liked very much.
“I don’t want it,” I would grumble whenever she put a bowl of the mushy porridge in front of me.
But ultimately, I knew that if I didn’t eat that porridge, there was nothing else I could use to fill my stomach.
About the same time that the hospital started running out of food, the state-owned store near our apartment became utterly useless. It was a tiny cement shop with steel bars over its two windows, and it looked more like a prison than a store. All provisions in the town had to pass through this store, because in North Korea, everything belonged to the state, according to traditional socialist dogma. From school uniforms to oil and rice, you were, in principle, supposed to be able to find everything you needed there. But most of the time, it was completely empty. For about two years, the store was nearly always closed due to a lack of supplies. Little by little, the rations distributed to the factory became more and more irregular, until they stopped entirely. As a result, everyone learned to get by in the black market, buying or selling whatever they could at the jangmadang, the market tacitly tolerated by the authorities. People sometimes even sold goods on the streets. Everyone put on display in front of their houses what few possessions they had left, which they would sell in order to buy food, whose prices were soaring.
* * *
Since escaping North Korea, I have learned that we were victims of the “Great Famine” that devastated my country in the middle of the 1990s. To this day, no one knows exactly how many people perished in this tragedy, which the government denies ever happened. At least five hundred thousand lost their lives. Perhaps the real figure is more than a million, according to some NGOs. In Seoul, I’ve learned that my province, North Hamgyong, was the most affected by the national disaster.
The causes of this famine are complex. First, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 destabilized the North Korean economy; factories, lacking electricity, stopped functioning, fertilizer disappeared from the fields, and food rations became reduced. In 1994, huge floods were the final coup de grâce to the moribund agriculture of my province. The little produce that remained was reserved for military personnel and those of the elite class, while the rest of the population suffered in silence. Young children were the first to succumb to the famine, followed by the elderly and, finally, women. The quality of rations had not stopped deteriorating since I was born during the mid-1980s but, starting from 1994, the quantities also declined drastically, and deliveries were regularly canceled. Officially, the managers of our neighborhood store told us there were just delays. However, sometimes we didn’t receive anything for up to six months at a time.
In 1995, in Chongjin, my grandmother was the first to lose the battle against the famine. The next year, my grandfather, a retired military man, also died as a result of the food deprivation. His poor health could not withstand the end of the government rations. My mother learned about what happened via a letter that arrived months after their funerals had already taken place. Due to the inefficiency of the postal service, my mom was never able to say good-bye to her father.
With her eyes closed, lying on the kitchen floor that terrible night in December 1997, she must have been playing all of this back and forth in her head.
Ironically, my family paid dearly as a result of our “privileged” status and our blind loyalty to the state system. We would never have imagined that the regime would allow us to die of hunger. We depended entirely upon government rations to feed us, and thus succumbed more quickly than others who had learned to develop alternative methods of survival. Only those who had developed black-market sources of money had the means to buy food, and only the highest-ranking officials and military personnel had access to government provisions. Alas, it was the middle-ranked officials, like my grandfather, who suffered the most when the rations ended. He also had had no business sense, and had shown himself incapable of undertaking alternate methods of ensuring his survival.
And then, during the summer of 1997, my father couldn’t take the hunger anymore. His feeble body had already weakened visibly since the factories stopped handing out food rations. I still remember his face sinking more and more into his skull. One night when he was bringing home a load of coal for us to reheat, he collapsed from fatigue right before my mother’s eyes.
“People do strange things right before they die,” or so goes an old North Korean adage. In his last days, my father began to fall apart. He would do things that drove my mother crazy. Once, when she came back from work, my mom found the apartment completely empty. She was frantic; she thought we had been robbed. In fact, what had happened was that our neighbors had convinced my dad to give them our possessions to sell in the market. Furious, my mother went straight to the jangmadang to retrieve our most valuable items, like the beautiful quilts she had received as wedding gifts. Unfortunately, it was too late; they had already been sold.
One day later, my dad collapsed once again, and this time, he never recovered. We didn’t even have enough money to pay for a proper burial. His tomb was just a hole dug in the mud, and all we could do was leave a plank of wood with his name written on it, so that his death wouldn’t go unremarked, so that he wouldn’t be forgotten, at least not too quickly. A few weeks later, someone stole the wooden plank. Most likely they wanted to use it as firewood—people were ready to do just about anything to ensure their survival.
After my father passed away, our life became a veritable hell, with survival as our sole aim. Even the hospital had nothing left to feed its patients, and no one was receiving any provisions from the government anymore. As I said earlier, Keumsun and I had stopped going to school, because we were no longer presentable. Moreover, we didn’t have much time to devote to studying; our days were dedicated entirely to finding something to eat.
The three of us—my mom, Keumsun, and I—lived secluded in the apartment, hidden from public view. Every night, we snuck out to the fields to steal rice and corn. We would sneak out armfuls of crops and then go farther up the mountains, away from the eyes of military or government officials, to separate the grains. We also looked for roots and mushrooms. Sometimes, we went to chop wood, which was getting harder and harder to find, to sell as firewood in order to buy sustenance.
Mom took care of chopping down the trees with an ax, while Keumsun and I kept ourselves occupied with thinner branches to make little bundles of sticks. It was extremely hard work, especially given the weak state of our bodies. Fortunately, we were never caught in the act.
* * *
That terrible night in December 1997, Mom, with her eyes closed, lay motionless on the makeshift sleeping bag. All of these memories were undoubtedly playing back and forth in her head.
The trip to Rajin-Sonbong had been our last hope. As she was leaving through the doors of our apartment, my mom had thought that she would be able to bring us back food, or at least a way to make money and save us all. But this last attempt had failed.
By morning, my mom still hadn’t budged, but, strangely, I felt like she was silently devising a plan in her head. Outside, the sun was already shining brightly. Suddenly, she stood up, a determined look in her eyes. She had decided to take action. Her will to survive had just kicked in.