Nothing to Envy (44 page)

THIS BOOK IS PRIMARILY AN ORAL HISTORY. I HAVE MADE BEST EFFORTS
to confirm the accounts of my subjects through other sources and have added information obtained through my own reporting on North Korea.

I made nine trips to North Korea between 2001 and 2008, three of them to Pyongyang and nearby areas; the others were to areas just north of the demilitarized zone, such as Mount Kumgang, when it was open to tourists. In the course of my reporting for this book and for the
Los Angeles Times
, I interviewed approximately one hundred North Korean defectors, most of them now living in South Korea or in China; about half were originally from Chongjin. I also reviewed hours of video footage taken secretly in Chongjin, some of it shot by the courageous North Koreans Ahn Myong-chol and Lee Jun, who carried concealed cameras in their bags. I am indebted to the Osaka-based organization Rescue the North Korean People for allowing me to screen the footage and to Asia Press for granting me rights to the still photography. In addition, an excellent series of photographs of both Chongjin and Kyongsong taken in 2008 by the German geographer Eckart Dege proved very helpful in corroborating the descriptions of my subjects and in bringing the landscape and vistas to life.

Credit for the term “Great Vituperator” belongs to the North Korea scholar Aidan Foster-Carter. “Great Vituperator: North Korea’s Insult Lexicon,”
Asia Times
, May 26, 2001.

Kim Jong-il’s ideas about film are spelled out in his book
On the Art of Cinema
(Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1973). His love of cinema was manifested in its most extreme form in 1978, when he arranged the kidnapping of his favorite South Korean actress, Choi Eun-hee, and her ex-husband, Shin Sang-ok. Choi and Shin had been recently divorced before their abduction—they remarried in
North Korea at Kim’s “suggestion.” They made films for North Korean studios until 1986, when they defected to Vienna. A memoir they wrote together in 1987 about their experiences is one of the few firsthand accounts of Kim Jong-il.

For more on cinema in North Korea, see Andrei Lankov, “The Reel Thing,” in
North of the DMZ: Essays on Daily Life in North Korea
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2007). Lankov quotes a 1987 report on Pyongyang radio stating that the average North Korean goes to the cinema 21 times per year. South Korean sociologists who surveyed defectors found they’d gone to the movies 15 to 18 times per year. The average South Korean visits the movie theater 2.3 times per year, according to Lankov.

I also wrote about North Korean cinema for the
Los Angeles Times
in 2008 when I attended the Pyongyang Film Festival. “No Stars, No Swag, but What a Crowd!”
Los Angeles Times
, October 11, 2008.

The accounts of Tae-woo’s childhood came from interviews I conducted on February 28, 2008, with two of his childhood friends still living near Seosan, South Korea.

Background about rural life in South Korea before the war comes from Cornelius Osgood,
The Koreans and Their Culture
(New York: Ronald Press, 1951).

Dean Rusk wrote of the fateful division of Korea in his memoir
As I Saw It
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).

For a South Korean perspective on the war, a helpful source was Bong Lee,
The Unfinished War: Korea
(New York: Algora Publishing, 2003).

The place where Tae-woo was captured is alternately known as Kumhwa or Kimhwa. Descriptions of the terrain come from a memoir by a former commander of U.N. forces in Korea: Matthew B. Ridgway,
The Korean War
(New York: Doubleday, 1967).

An invaluable source was a memoir by another POW, named Huh Jae-suk, who escaped North Korea in 2000. He was captured by Chinese troops in 1953, one week before Mi-ran’s father, at the same place, Kumhwa, and also worked in the mines: Huh Jae-suk,
Nae Ireumeun Ttonggannasaekki-yeotta
[My Name Was Dirt] (Seoul: Won Books, 2008).

Information and statistics about South Korean POWs come from
the U.S. House of Representatives, Asia and Pacific Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee, “Human Rights Update and International Abduction Issues,” April 27, 2006. The subcommittee heard extensive testimony from South Koreans who had been held as prisoners of war in North Korea.

Among many news reports on this issue, particularly helpful was “Hardly Known, Not Yet Forgotten, South Korean POWs Tell Their Story,” Radio Free Asia, January 25, 2007.

Among other books on the Korean War and on the division of the Koreas:

The categories assigned to the “hostile class” in North Korea come from “White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea,” pp. 103-12, published in 2005 by the Korea Institute for National Unification, a South Korean government-funded think tank. It was prepared by South Korean intelligence based on testimony by defectors. Kim Dok-hong, a party official who accompanied Hwang Jang-yop, the most prominent party official ever to have defected, told me in a 2006 interview that records were kept in a giant underground warehouse in Yanggang province.

Excellent accounts of the system are also found in the following:

The recruiting of young women to work at Kim Il-sung’s and Kim Jong-il’s mansions was done by the fifth division of the Central Workers’
Party. The most credible account of the recruitment of young women by the
okwa
comes from this exhaustively reported modern history of North Korea: Bradley Martin,
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty
(New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004), pp. 198-202.

About the migration from Japan to North Korea, statistics come from Yoshiko Nozaki, Hiromitsu Inokuchi, and Kim Tae-young, “Legal Categories, Demographic Change and Japan’s Korean Residents in the Long Twentieth Century,”
The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus
, September 10, 2006.

Jun-sang’s family background is not unlike that of Kang Cholhwan, a former prisoner of the North Korean gulag whose family came from Japan with similar dreams of building a new homeland. His memoir is one of the best-known recent books about North Korea: Kang Cholhwan and Pierre Rigoulot.
The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag
(New York: Basic Books, 2002).

Chongjin is a city with a largely fictional official history, because of the government’s desire to downplay the Japanese role in its development. I am grateful to Andrei Lankov for providing me with an unpublished essay, “The Colonial North,” about this remote area. Kim Du-seon, a former trade official from Chongjin who defected in 1998, has become the informal repository in South Korea of information about the city. He filled in some details of its history and topography.

The best published source I have found on Chongjin’s history is
Choson Hyangto Daebaekkwa
[Encyclopedia of North Korean Geography and Culture] (Seoul: Institute for Peace Affairs, 2003).

Accurate population figures are difficult to come by. The last North Korean census was conducted in 1993 and the population is believed to have declined since then because of deaths during the famine, defections, and a low birthrate. The U.N. Population Fund and the Central Bureau of Statistics are as of this writing conducting another census.

Information about the rise of Kim Il-sung comes from Dae-Sook Suh,
Kim Il-sung: The North Korean Leader
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

The cult of personality that developed around Kim Il-sung is eloquently described by the historian Charles Armstrong. He writes: “The
Kim cult combined images of Confucian familism with Stalinism, elements of Japanese emperor worship, and overtones of Christianity. Confucian familism, and particularly the virtue of filial piety (hyo), was perhaps the most distinctly Korean element of this ‘cult.’” Charles K. Armstrong,
The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 223-25.

Chongjin was
65
percent obliterated by aerial bombing during the Korean War, according to a bomb-damage assessment prepared by the U.S. Air Force at the time of the armistice. General William Dean, an American prisoner of war at the time, described the towns he saw as having been reduced to “rubble or snowy open spaces.” Conrad C. Crane,
American Airpower Strategy in Korea, 1950-1953
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), pp. 168-69.

As he did with cinema, theater, opera, and literature, Kim Jong-il fashioned himself as an expert on journalism. See
The Great Teacher of Journalists: Kim Jong-il
(Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1973).

On the various ways that North Koreans spy on one another, see Lankov’s
North of the DMZ
, “Big Brother Is Watching.”

On North Korea’s economy before 1990, Helen-Louise Hunter’s
Kim Il-sung’s North Korea
contains a wealth of information about the wages and benefits North Koreans received. Mrs. Song told me that the figures corresponded to those she remembered.

The historian Bruce Cumings writes: “An internal CIA study almost grudgingly acknowledged various achievements of this regime: compassionate care for children in general and war orphans in particular; ‘radical change’ in the position of women; genuinely free housing, free health care, and preventative medicine; and infant mortality and life expectancy rates comparable to the most advanced countries until the recent famine.” Bruce Cumings,
North Korea: Another Country
(New York: New Press, 2003), pp. ii-ix.

Bradley Martin in
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader
writes: “Outside analysts’ comparisons during that period bolstered Kim’s claim. One study shows North and South neck and neck at the time of the 1953 armistice, with gross national product per capita of
$56
and
$55
respectively. By 1960, the South at $60 had barely advanced—while
the North’s figure had nearly quadrupled to $208.… A Western academic’s 1965 article entitled ‘Korean Miracle’ referred not to the South Korean but to the
North
Korean economy” (pp. 104-5).

For more on the North Korean economy, see Nicholas Eberstadt,
The North Korean Economy: Between Crisis and Catastrophe
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2007).

The gifts to Kim Il-sung are on public display at the International Friendship Exhibition, a museum in Myohang, north of Pyongyang. When I visited in 2005, there were said to be 219,370 gifts to Kim Il-sung and another 53,419 to Kim Jong-il. See a piece written by my colleague, Mark Magnier,
Los Angeles Times
, COLUMN ONE; “No Gift Is Too Small for Them: At a Fortress Museum, North Korea Shows Off Every Present Sent to the Kims, from a Limo Given by Stalin to Plastic Tchotchkes,” November 25, 2005.

KCNA quote about food was carried by Reuters, September 26, 1992, “North Korea Angrily Denies Reports of Food Riots.”

North of the DMZ
by Andrei Lankov (Part 8: “Family Matters”) contains several essays about sex and dating in North Korea.

On Korean traditions, Isabella Bird Bishop’s book contains a wealth of information about attitudes toward women and family life. The original 1898 edition is fortunately still in print. Isabella Bird Bishop,
Korea and Her Neighbors: A Narrative of Travel with an Account of the Recent Vicissitudes and Present Position of the Country
(Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1970), pp. 37, 345.

See an excellent account of Kim Il-sung’s death in Oberdorfer,
The Two Koreas
, pp. 337-45.

For the description of the mourning period, I reviewed videotapes of North Korean television coverage that were made available by the South Korean Ministry of Unification’s library in Seoul. The most complete account in the U.S. press that I have found is T. R. Reid’s “Tumultuous Funeral for North Korean: Throngs Sob at Kim Il-sung’s Last Parade,”
Washington Post
, July 20, 1994.

The classic referenced here is Charles Mackay,
Extraordinary Delusions
and the Madness of Crowds
(1841; New York: Three Rivers Press, 1980).

A nutritional study conducted by U.N. agencies in 1998 found that 62 percent of children under the age of seven had stunted growth as a result of malnutrition. By 2004, that figure had dropped to 37 percent, in part due to humanitarian intervention.

A train explosion on April 22, 2004, in the town of Ryongchon caused so many injuries that North Korea allowed foreign aid agencies rare entry into its hospitals to help out. Several aid workers who took part in those efforts have shared their observations. Barbara Demick and Mark Magnier, “Train Victims’ Suffering Is Compounded,”
Los Angeles Times
, April 28, 2004.