“Have you been waiting long?” Mi-ran said, rolling down the window of her car.
Jun-sang was still susceptible to Hollywood imagery. For years he had anticipated their reunion and hadn’t quite let go of the scene of the couple running toward each other on a foggy train platform. He’d imagined all kinds of scenarios but they never involved a car—certainly not a car with Mi-ran behind the steering wheel.
She was stopped in the bus lane and leaned over to push open the passenger-side door, beckoning for him to climb in. She spoke rapidly, apologizing for her lateness, the traffic, how she couldn’t find a parking space. She kept her eyes on the road, while his darted over her. Her features were the same—he couldn’t believe he ever thought he might not recognize her. Maybe, though, she wasn’t as radiant as he remembered, or maybe her beauty had been magnified by the years of longing. Her complexion betrayed the strain of mothering a one-year-old; a sprinkling of acne around her chin was barely concealed by makeup. He could see the touch of the ajumma about her. She wore a flouncy apricot-colored skirt and a baggy short-sleeved blouse. The clothing was complicated, like her life; the simplicity of girlhood had vanished long ago.
“You’re so calm,” he broke the silence.
“No, no, I’m nervous inside,” she responded.
They drove to a quiet restaurant on the outskirts of the city. They began with polite inquiries about family, but there was no subject that didn’t lead to tragedy. Jun-sang didn’t dare ask about her sisters. He’d heard that they’d been taken away. And she couldn’t ask him about his parents, whom he might never see again. They quickly wound their way to the subject of Mi-ran’s abrupt departure. As they spoke, he felt the anger swelling up.
“You might have tried to send me a clue,” he told her.
She protested that she wasn’t sure at the time she was defecting—that it could have just been an excursion to China to see relatives—and even though he didn’t quite believe her, he felt better hearing her say it.
She learned that he had not been in Chongjin in October 1998 when she’d left—the glimpse she thought she had of him from across the street was just a product of her imagination.
“If you were going to come to South Korea, why didn’t you come sooner?” she asked.
Jun-sang was at a loss to answer. At this point in the conversation, Mi-ran was crying and the implications of her words were clear. She was married and had a baby. It was too late.
AS THE MONTHS dragged on, the novelty of having rediscovered each other wore off. When we spoke, one often sounded exasperated with the other. Jun-sang complained rather peevishly that Mi-ran wasn’t as beautiful as she used to be. Mi-ran had promised to introduce him to some women but never did. When they communicated, it was by e-mail or text message. The instant gratification of modern communication killed some of the magic between them. Their relationship was one that thrived in the adverse conditions of North Korea. Emotions somehow meant more when they were handwritten on precious scraps of paper and conveyed on slow trains running out of fuel.
“Now that I can call him on the phone whenever I want or send him a text, I’m not so interested,” Mi-ran admitted. “It’s hard for me to understand now why I spent so many years obsessing about this guy.”
The reversal in their social status didn’t help. In North Korea, Jun-sang had the better class background, the money, the fancy Japanese sweaters, and the Pyongyang education. Now he was fresh off the boat with no money and no connections. His North Korean education was useless in South Korea. Everything he’d learned about science and technology was obsolete. He had no immediate prospects of a good career and was stuck doing odd jobs such as delivering food on a motorbike. On his rounds one day, he was knocked over by a taxicab. He picked himself up off the pavement and, finding no damage to himself or the bike, rode off. When he got back to the restaurant and recounted what had happened, his boss roared with laughter. If Jun-sang hadn’t been such a clueless greenhorn, he would have collected some settlement money from the driver.
Jun-sang shrugged it off. He didn’t let little jabs from South Koreans bug him. His confidence ran deep, to the core. He was never self-pitying and never expressed regrets about defecting, although he worried about not seeing his parents again. He took enormous satisfaction in the tiniest freedoms in his new life. He dressed in denim precisely because he’d been unable to in North Korea. He grew his hair down to his shoulders. (“It was always my dream to grow my hair long. I figured I’d have to do it before I turn forty so I don’t look like a loser,” he told me.) He read voraciously. In North Korea, he’d managed to get something of a liberal arts education, but there were gaps. I often gave him books to read. His favorite was a translation of 1984. He marveled that George Orwell could have so understood the North Korean brand of totalitarianism.
The last time I saw him, we met at Lotte World, a huge shopping and entertainment complex in the southern part of Seoul. It was a Sunday afternoon just before the lunar New Year and the place was jammed. We pushed our way through the crowds, looking for a place to talk, until we found seats at a revolving sushi bar, the latest rage in South Korea. Plucking our sushi from the conveyor belt, Jun-sang told me he had gone back to school to get a pharmacist’s license. During school vacations, he installed ventilation systems on a construction site in the suburbs. These seemed like odd choices for somebody of his background. I suspected he would be doing something different by the next time we met.
North Korean defectors often find it hard to settle down. It is not easy for somebody who’s escaped a totalitarian country to live in the free world. Defectors have to rediscover who they are in a world that offers endless possibilities. Choosing where to live, what to do, even which clothes to put on in the morning is tough enough for those of us accustomed to making choices; it can be utterly paralyzing for people who’ve had decisions made for them by the state their entire lives.
Defectors are also nagged by the impermanence of their situation. Many, if not most, wish to return to North Korea. Most of them fled with the conviction that Kim Jong-il’s regime was on the verge of collapse and that they would return within a few years to a free North Korea. It was a reasonable assumption. In the mid-1990s, in the aftermath of Kim Il-sung’s death and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it was a matter of virtual consensus in the foreign-policy establishment that the end was imminent. Those who visit Pyongyang and snap photos of the towering monuments, the goose-stepping soldiers, and the kitschy socialist billboards are invariably astounded that the place has survived into the twenty-first century. “See it while it lasts” is how one travel agency advertises its tours to North Korea.
While the persistence of North Korea is a curiosity for the rest of the world, it is a tragedy for North Koreans, even those who have managed to escape. Jun-sang has little chance of seeing his parents again unless the regime collapses in their lifetime. Mi-ran’s best hope for her sisters is that they can survive until the day the gates to the labor camps are opened and the long-term political prisoners are set free.
This is where I leave the story. North Korea remains the last bastion of undiluted communism in the world. Mrs. Song has just retired. Oak-hee runs her karaoke business in Suwon. Dr. Kim is in her last year of medical school and Jun-sang in his first year of pharmacy school. Mi-ran gave birth to her second child, a daughter, in December 2007. I can only excuse myself for leaving the story incomplete because the people in it, like Korea itself, remain works in progress.
EPILOGUE
WAITING
A bus stop on Chongjin’s main street, 2008.
DURING THE FIVE YEARS THAT I SPENT IN SEOUL REPORTING for the Los Angeles Times, I attended numerous dinners with fellow journalists, diplomats, and academics. Invariably the conversation would turn to North Korea, with the participant speculating about when Kim Jong-il’s regime might collapse.
In fact, the longevity of the North Korean regime is something of a mystery to many professional North Kore
a watchers. During the 1990s, imminent collapse was the virtually unchallenged consensus. (“The Coming Collapse of North Korea” was the title of an oped essay by the noted North Korea scholar Nicholas Eberstadt, published in June 1990.) Against all odds, North Korea survived the breaching of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the market reforms in China, the death of Kim Il-sung, the famine of the 1990s, and two terms of George W. Bush’s presidency. Bush famously lumped North Korea into the “axis of evil” along with Iran and Iraq, and insinuated that he would send Kim Jong-il packing as he did Saddam Hussein.
Yet in 2009, Bush is gone and Kim Jong-il is still in power, albeit in poor health. He is the last of the twentieth-century dictators, a living anachronism. Kim runs his country as though it were the thick of the Cold War, churning out bombastic propaganda, banning most foreigners from visiting, threatening real and imagined enemies with nuclear weapons and missiles. On May 25, North Korea conducted its second nuclear test, detonating a bomb assessed by U.S. intelligence to be several kilotons at an underground site in North Hamgyong Province, fifty miles southwest of Chongjin. As of this writing, sixteen years’ worth of diplomacy on the part of successive U.S. administrations has failed to produce an agreement under which North Korea would give up its weapons programs in return for diplomatic recognition by the United States and a permanent settlement to the Korean War. The regime’s defiant stance was displayed just weeks later in the harsh sentencing, to twelve years’ hard labor, of two U.S. journalists captured while reporting too close to the Tumen River border. They were pardoned only after the personal intervention of former president Bill Clinton, who visited Pyongyang in August to secure their release.
At sixty-seven, Kim Jong-il is graying and gaunt. Over the summer of 2008 he was reported to have suffered a stroke, and recent photographs show him with one arm hanging limp, as though partially paralyzed.
Despite his infirmities, it is by no means a foregone conclusion that the end is near or even that Kim’s death would bring about the demise of the regime. At the meeting of the People’s Assembly, Kim’s brother-in-law, Jang Song-taek, was named to the National Defense Commission. The move was widely read as a signal that Jang could serve as North Korea’s nominal leader in the event of Kim’s passing, perhaps merely as a caretaker until Kim’s favored youngest son, Kim Jong-un, now twenty-six, is old enough to take charge.
North Korea watchers spend a lot of time debating whether conditions inside the country are getting better or worse or changing at all. Like other occasional visitors to Pyongyang, I am reluctant to make pronouncements about the state of the nation based on my observations because the government goes to such extraordinary lengths to choreograph what foreigners see of their country. I made two trips to North Korea in 2008, as well as two trips to the border in early 2009, and came away with mixed impressions. In Pyongyang I was surprised to see half a dozen new buildings under construction in the capital and others covered with scaffolding in the middle of renovations. The sounds of chain saws and jackhammers filled the air. It was nothing compared with other Asian capitals, where the cityscapes are in a perpetual state of reinvention, but nonetheless remarkable for Pyongyang, a city so stagnant that it seems stuck in a time capsule of the 1960s. Other than a few more monuments to the leadership, virtually nothing new had been built in Pyongyang in decades. Now 100,000 new units of housing are under construction, with the goal of completion in time for the 2012 festivities marking the centennial of Kim Il-sung’s birth, my North Korean guides told me. North Korea watchers believe some of the funding is coming from the Middle East. Pyongyang’s most notorious clunker, the 105-story pyramid-shaped Ryugyong Hotel, is getting a facelift, too, as part of a $400 million deal with the Egyptian conglomerate Orascom, which is a mobile telephone network.
Other glimpses of progress? The Rakwon Department Store, which is largely reserved for foreign diplomats and the elite, had a nicely stocked basement supermarket with frozen Australian beef and American breakfast cereal. People on the streets of Pyongyang looked to be better and more colorfully dressed than I’d seen on previous visits. My most recent trip was during a warm week in September, and several women were wearing slinky high-heeled sandals. I also saw for the first time a middle-aged woman who was slightly overweight—not close to achieving an American standard of obesity, but odd enough in Pyongyang that I pulled out my camera and tried to catch a shot before she turned a corner.
Pyongyang is often said to be a Potemkin village, an elaborate artifice for the benefit of foreigners. Wherever we go, we stumble over suspiciously well-dressed people posing in various improbable situations—for example, young women with brightly rouged cheeks in traditional dresses sitting on concrete benches under the main statue of Kim Il-sung, pretending to read books. It takes a while before you notice what’s wrong with the picture. During my last visit, I watched a delegation of soldiers in their crisp uniforms approach the statue with a bouquet of flowers. When they bowed down low to show their respect, their pants hitched up just enough to reveal that they didn’t have socks. Socks for the military have been in chronically short supply.
When the New York Philharmonic went to Pyongyang last year, the city was lit up as if it were Christmas—floodlights bathed Kim Il-sung Square and garlands of tiny white lights were draped over the main streets. The delegation of more than three hundred people, including musicians and journalists, stayed in the Yanggakdo Hotel (often nicknamed “Alcatraz” for its location on an island in the river that prevents tourists from wandering off). It had been outfitted for the occasion with broadband Internet access for journalists filing reports on the concert. When we checked in, the rooms were so overheated that many of us stripped down to T-shirts. At each meal, we were feted to excess. Dinner was a multicourse banquet of salmon, crab gratin, lamb, sliced pheasant, and Viennese-style chocolate cakes. Our breakfast buffet table was decorated with ice sculptures and carved melons and filled with a generous array of foods. Still, it was a great show. Even the most cynical journalists among us got the impression that North Korea was on its way up, steadily recovering from the Arduous March of the 1990s.
Of course, we’d been had. It was a blip, a brief interlude of light in the grim, dysfunctional country that North Korea really is. The Internet access disappeared. The lights went out. The week after the concert, I spoke by telephone to the U.N. World Food Programme’s representative in Pyongyang at the time, Jean-Pierre de Margerie, who told me, “As soon as you guys left, it was pitch-dark again.”
The World Food Programme, which has the largest presence in North Korea of the various aid agencies, has a grim assessment of the economic situation. A survey of 250 North Korean households conducted in the summer of 2008 found that two thirds were still supplementing their diets by picking grass and weeds in the countryside. Most adults didn’t eat lunch for lack of food. When questioned about where they would get their next meal, those surveyed replied that they didn’t know or offered vague answers such as “I’m hoping my relatives who live on a cooperative farm will deliver some potatoes tonight,” according to de Margerie. Some of the interviewees cried as they were being questioned.
The U.N. agencies don’t envision another famine like the one in the 1990s; instead they describe a population that has been chronically undernourished for years. “Teachers report that children lack energy and are lagging in social and cognitive development. Workers are unable to put in full days and take longer to complete tasks,” a group of U.S. aid agencies wrote in another report last summer. Hospital staff told the agencies they were seeing 20 to 40 percent increases in digestive disorders caused by poor nutrition.
As soon as you leave Pyongyang, the real North Korea comes into view, albeit through the windows of buses or fast-moving cars. Even aid officials stationed in Pyongyang are not allowed into the countryside without an escort. On an excursion through Nampo (the west-coast city where Mi-ran saw her first dead body) in September 2008, I saw people who appeared to be homeless
sleeping on the grass along the main street. Others squatted on their haunches, heads down, apparently having nothing better to do at ten o’clock on a weekday morning. Walking barefoot along the sidewalk was a boy about nine years old wearing a mud-stained uniform that hung below his knees. That was the first time I’d seen one of the notorious wandering swallows, the kochebi.
There was evidence all along the twenty-five-mile drive between Pyongyang and Nampo of the extent to which North Korea’s able-bodied population was enlisted in the production of food. Middle-aged office ladies were marched out to the countryside, carrying pocketbooks and shovels slung over their shoulders. On the side of the road, older people sifted through the grass on their hands and knees in search of edible weeds. The countryside reeked of the night soil that is still used instead of chemical fertilizer. Donations of fertilizer from South Korea dropped precipitously last year due to political tensions. There were few motorized vehicles in the fields. Trucks belching smoke looked as if they had been retrofitted to burn wood and corncobs instead of gasoline. People carried huge sacks on their backs, hunched over as they walked along rusted railroad tracks that clearly hadn’t been used in years.
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