Nothing to Envy (10 page)

All the women were trying to figure out how to wriggle out of these unpleasant excursions. They didn’t dare quit their jobs, even though they were getting almost no pay. In North Korea, if you skipped work, you wouldn’t get the coupons you needed to trade in for food. And if you stayed out a whole week without good reason, you could get sent to a detention center.

Some of the women concocted family emergencies. Or they got notes from their doctor saying they couldn’t come in to work. It was all done with a wink and a nod. The supervisors didn’t inspect the notes too closely because they knew the women had nothing to do. Mrs. Song, on the other hand, wouldn’t dream of bringing in one of the fake notes. It felt wrong to her. She showed up for work punctually as before. Since the seamstresses weren’t coming in, there were no children in the day-care center. The bosses tried to fill the day by scheduling extra lectures on Kim Il-sung, but with blackouts occurring more frequently, the light was often too dim inside the factory. After years of working fifteen-hour days, Mrs. Song finally got a chance to rest. She took long naps at her desk, resting her cheek against the wood, wondering how much longer it could go on like this.

One day, the manager called Mrs. Song and her co-workers in for a chat. The manager was a man Mrs. Song respected, a party member and devout Communist, a true believer like herself. In the past, he’d always reassured the workers that the shipment of fabric was expected any day from Hamhung. Now he cleared his throat awkwardly and spoke with embarrassment. The situation was not likely to improve in the near future. These women, the die-hards like Mrs.
Song who were still coming to work, well, maybe they shouldn’t bother anymore.

“You
ajumma,”
he said, using a Korean word for “auntie,” commonly used for married women, “should think about finding some other way to bring food home for your families.”

Mrs. Song was horrified. The manager wasn’t referring to prostitution, though he might as well have been. He was suggesting she work on the black market.

LIKE EVERY OTHER
Communist country, North Korea had black markets. Although it was technically illegal to buy and sell most commodities privately, the rules changed frequently and were often ignored. Kim Il-sung had given dispensation for people to grow vegetables in their gardens and sell them, so people set up a makeshift market in an empty lot behind Mrs. Song’s apartment complex. It wasn’t much more than a collection of tarpaulins laid out in the dirt with meager offerings of radishes and cabbage. Occasionally people would sell old clothes, chipped pottery, used books. Anything newly manufactured couldn’t be sold at the market. Those products were restricted to state stores. Grain sales were prohibited, too, and anybody caught selling rice would receive a prison sentence.

Mrs. Song thought the whole atmosphere of the black market was sleazy. The vendors were mostly older women, some grandmothers. Mrs. Song would see them squatting on their haunches over their grubby vegetables, yelling out prices to customers in a most undignified fashion. Some of the women even smoked pipes, despite taboos in North Korea against women smoking. Mrs. Song was disgusted by these old
halmoni
, these grandmothers. The very idea of selling at a market was repugnant. This was no place for a proper Communist!

In fact, proper Communists didn’t shop, period. Kim Il-sung had created about as anticonsumerist a culture as could exist in the twentieth century. Elsewhere in Asia, markets teeming with humanity and merchandise abounded. Not in North Korea. The most famous stores in the country were Pyongyang’s two department stores—Department Store No. 1 and Department Store No. 2, they
were called—and their merchandise was about as exciting as their names. When I saw the stores on a visit to Pyongyang in 2005, I could see Chinese-made bicycles on the first floor, but it was unclear whether the merchandise was really for sale or just on display to impress foreigners. Visitors to Pyongyang in the 1990s reported that the stores sometimes put plastic fruit and vegetables on display for foreign window-shoppers.

North Koreans were not supposed to shop because in theory everything they needed was supplied by the government in the name of Kim Il-sung’s benevolence. They were supposed to get two sets of clothing each year—one for summer and one for winter. New clothes were dispensed by your work unit or school, often on Kim Il-sung’s birthday, reinforcing his image as the source of all good things. Everything was pretty much standard issue. Only vinyl or canvas shoes were provided, as leather ones were a tremendous luxury and only people with some outside source of income could afford them. The clothes came out of garment factories like Mrs. Song’s. The favored fabric was Vinalon, which didn’t hold dye very well, so there was a limited palette: drab indigo for factory workers uniforms, black or gray for office workers. Red was reserved for the scarves that children wore around their necks until the age of thirteen as part of their obligatory membership in the Young Pioneers.

Not only was there no shopping, there was virtually no money. North Korean jobs paid salaries so nominal they were more like allowances. Mrs. Song’s monthly salary amounted to 64 North Korean won, which at the official exchange rate amounted to $28, but in reality wasn’t even enough to buy a single nylon sweater. You could pay only for incidentals, such as movies, haircuts, bus tickets, and newspapers. For men, cigarettes. For women, makeup—which, surprisingly, they wore in ample quantity. Red lipstick gave the women a retro look like 1940s movie stars and pink blush gave a healthy glow to skin made sallow by the long winters. Each neighborhood of Chongjin had its own cluster of state-run shops that were identical to the cluster in the next neighborhood. North Korean women paid attention to their appearance: Mrs. Song would skip breakfast rather than go to work without makeup. Her hair was naturally curly, but other women her age got their hair permed at a
hair salon that looked like an assembly line, with a row of barber chairs on one side for men and another on the other side for women. Hairdressers were all state employees who worked for an agency called the Convenience Bureau. It was also responsible for bicycle and shoe repairmen.

There was a food shop, a stationery shop, a clothing shop. Unlike in the Soviet Union, you seldom saw long lines in North Korea. If you wanted to make a major purchase—say, to buy a watch or a record player—you had to apply to your work unit for permission. It wasn’t just a matter of having the money.

The crowning achievement of the North Korean system was subsidized food. Like the campaign pledge of a chicken in every pot often attributed to Herbert Hoover, Kim Il-sung had promised North Koreans three bowls of rice every day. Rice, especially white rice, was a luxury in North Korea. It was a magnanimous promise that was impossible to fulfill for all but the elite. However, the public distribution system did supply the population with a mixture of grains in amounts that were carefully calibrated in accordance with rank and work. Coal miners doing hard labor were to get 900 grams of grain daily, while factory workers like Mrs. Song got 700 grams. The system also dispensed other staples in the Korean diet, such as soy sauce, cooking oil, and a thick red bean paste called
gochujang
. On national holidays, such as the Kim family birthdays, there might be pork or dried fish.

The best part was the cabbage, distributed in the autumn for making kimchi. The spicy preserved cabbage is the Korean national dish, the only vegetable product in the traditional diet during the long winters and as integral to the culture as rice. The North Korean regime understood you couldn’t keep Koreans happy without kimchi. Each family got 70 kilograms (154 pounds) per adult and 50 kilos (110 pounds) per child, which for Mrs. Song came to 410 kilos after her mother-in-law came to live with her. The cabbage was pickled with salt, spiced with lots of red pepper, sometimes bean paste or baby shrimp. Mrs. Song also made radish and turnip kimchi. She would spend weeks preparing it, and would store it in tall earthen jars. Chang-bo had to help her carry them down to the basement, where each family had a storage bin. The tradition was to bury kimchi pots in the garden, so that they would stay cold but not frozen.
In the apartment building, they improvised by packing dirt around the urns. When they were done, they closed up the bin with their strongest padlock. Kimchi thieves were common in Chongjin. Even in a society as collectivist as North Korea, no one wanted to share their kimchi with a stranger.

TO BE SURE
, North Korea wasn’t the workers’ paradise that the propaganda claimed, but Kim Il-sung’s achievements were not insignificant. In the first two decades after the 1945 partition of the peninsula, the north was richer than the capitalist south. Indeed, in the 1960s, when Korean scholars bandied about the term “economic miracle,” they meant North Korea. Merely to feed the population in a region with a long history of famine was an accomplishment, all the more so given that the crude partition of the peninsula had left all the better farmland on the other side of the divide. Out of the wreckage of a country that had lost almost all of its infrastructure and 70 percent of its housing stock in the war, Kim Il-sung created what appeared to be a viable, if Spartan, economy. Everybody had shelter and clothing. In 1949, North Korea claimed to be the first Asian country to have nearly eliminated illiteracy. Foreign dignitaries who visited in the 1960s, often arriving by train across the Chinese border, gushed over the obviously superior living standards of the North Koreans. In fact, thousands of ethnic Koreans in China fled the famine caused by Mao Zedong’s disastrous “Great Leap Forward” to return to North Korea. North Korea put tile roofs on the houses, and every village was wired for electricity by 1970. Even a hard-bitten CIA analyst, Helen-Louise Hunter, whose reports on North Korea from the 1970s were later declassified and published, grudgingly admitted she was impressed by Kim Il-sung’s North Korea.

As Communist countries went, it seemed more like Yugoslavia than Angola. It was a point of pride within the Communist bloc. People pointed to North Korea’s gains—especially relative to South Korea—as proof that communism was
actually
working.

Or was it? So much of the supposed North Korean miracle was illusory, based on propaganda claims that couldn’t be substantiated.
The North Korean regime didn’t publish economic statistics, at least none that could be trusted, and took great pains to deceive visitors and even themselves. Supervisors routinely fabricated statistics on agricultural production and industrial output because they were so fearful of telling their own bosses the truth. Lies were built upon lies, all the way to the top, so it is in fact conceivable that Kim Il-sung himself didn’t know when the economy crashed.

For all its arrogant rhetoric about
juche
and self-sufficiency, North Korea was utterly dependent on the kindness of its neighbors. The country got subsidized oil, rice, fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, industrial equipment, trucks, and cars. X-ray machines and incubators came from Czechoslovakia; architects from East Germany. Kim Il-sung skillfully played the Soviet Union and China against each other, using their rivalry to extract as much aid as possible. Like an old-style emperor, he commanded tribute from neighboring realms: Stalin personally sent an armored limousine, Mao sent a complete train carriage.

By the 1980s, Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il, who was increasingly assuming his father’s duties, offered “on-the-spot guidance” to address the country’s woes. Father and son were experts in absolutely everything, be it geology or farming. “Kim Jong-il’s on-site instructions and his warm benevolence are bringing about a great advance in goat breeding and output of dairy products,” the Korean Central News Agency opined after Kim Jong-il visited a goat farm near Chongjin. One day he would decree that the country should switch from rice to potatoes for its staple food; the next he would decide that raising ostriches was the cure for North Korea’s food shortage. The country lurched from one harebrained scheme to another.

An enormous share of the country’s wealth was squandered on the military. North Korea’s defense budget eats up 25 percent of its gross national product—as opposed to an average of less than 5 percent for industrialized countries. Although there had been no fighting in Korea since 1953, the country kept one million men under arms, giving this tiny country, no bigger than Pennsylvania, the fourth-largest military in the world. The North Korean propaganda machine kept hysteria at a high level, ginning up incessant reports of imminent invasion by the imperialist warmongers.

Kim Jong-il, who had been rapidly rising through the Politburo as he was being groomed for the succession, was named supreme commander of the North Korean armed forces in 1991. A few years later, billboards would go up around the country next to the
juche
monuments, introducing a new catchword,
songun
, or “military first,” and stating that the Korean People’s Army was at the center of all policy decisions. The younger Kim had long since outgrown his dabblings in cinema and turned his attention to bigger toys—nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.

Ever since the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II, Kim Il-sung had dreamed of making his country a nuclear power, and research had been under way since the 1960s at a Soviet-designed nuclear compound at Yongbyon, in the mountains north of Pyongyang. But it was Kim Jong-il who put the nuclear program on the fast track, apparently believing it would boost North Korea’s standing and his own at a time when its international prestige was flagging. Instead of rebuilding aging factories and infrastructure, North Korea put its money into expensive secret weapons projects, claiming the need for a “nuclear deterrent” against American aggression. By 1989, North Korea was developing a reprocessing plant at Yongbyon to produce weapons-grade plutonium from the fuel rods of its nuclear reactors, and by the early 1990s the CIA was assessing that it had enough for one or two nuclear bombs. “Kim Jong-il didn’t care if he bankrupted the rest of the country. He saw the missiles and nuclear weapons as the only way to maintain power,” Kim Dok-hong, a high-ranking defector from Pyongyang, told me in an interview in Seoul in 2006.