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:
Blair, Clay, The Forgotten War: America in Korea, 1950-1953 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1987).
Hastings, Max, The Korean War (New York: Simon & Schuster), 1987.
Oberdorfer, Donald, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (Basic Books, 1997).
Stueck, William, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995).
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:
Hunter, Helen-Louise, Kim Il-song’s North Korea (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999).
Oh, Kongdan, and Ralph C. Hassig, North Korea Through the Looking Glass (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000).
Scalapino, Robert A., and Chong-sik Lee, Communism in Korea, Part II: The Society (University of California Press, 1972).
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).
CHAPTER 3: THE TRUE BELIEVER
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.”
CHAPTER 4: FADE TO BLACK
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 Plast
ic Tchotchkes,” November 25, 2005.
KCNA quote about food was carried by Reuters, September 26, 1992, “North Korea Angrily Denies Reports of Food Riots.”
CHAPTER 5: VICTORIAN ROMANCE
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.
CHAPTER 6: TWILIGHT OF THE GOD
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).
CHAPTER 7: TWO BEER BOTTLES FOR YOUR IV
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.
On North Korea’s admission in 2005 of a food shortage: Kevin Sullivan, “North Korea Makes Rare Pleas After Floods Devastate Country,” Washington Post, September 22, 1995.
The statistics here come from Nicholas Eberstadt’s The North Korean Economy, p. 31. North Korea’s economic data is notoriously unreliable, as Eberstadt notes in the chapter “Our Own Style of Statistics.” In a submission to the United Nations in 1997, North Korea listed its own GNP per capita as $239. The export figures are also supplied by Eberstadt in “The Persistence of North Korea,” Policy Review, October/November 2004.
For more on the effects of poor nutrition on children and the medical system in North Korea:
Central Bureau of Statistics, Institute of Child Nutrition, in collaboration with UNICEF and World Food Programme, DPRK 2004 Nutrition Assessment: Report of Survey Results.
“Medical Doctors in North Korea.” Chosun Ilbo North Korea Report, October 30, 2000.
CHAPTER 8: THE ACCORDION AND THE BLACKBOARD
On North Korean propaganda in the school system, see Andrei Lankov, “The Official Propaganda in the DPRK: Ideas and Methods” (available at http://north-korea.narod.ru/propaganda_lankov.htm).
A recently published memoir by a North Korean defector has good descriptions of North Korean elementary schools. Hyok Kang, This Is Paradise! My North Korean Childhood (London: Abacus, 2007), pp. 64-65.
The examples used in North Korean school textbooks come from used books I bought in Tumen, China, at a shop near the border where North Korean defectors often sell their personal possessions. I’ve also reviewed the collection of textbooks at the library in Seoul run by the Ministry of Unification. The reading primer with the poem about killing Japanese soldiers was featured on Japanese television in 2007.
The Korean language uses name suffixes to indicate respect, or lack thereof. The ending -nim is polite; -nom is extremely rude. Thus North Korean propaganda often refers to Americans as miguknom, basically “American bastards.”
The demand that Mi-ran’s school finance the Kim Jong-il Research Institute was in keeping with a requirement imposed by the central government in the 1990s that institutions raise their own money. Even overseas missions were responsible for their own funding, which led to a number of embarrassing incidents in which North Korean diplomats were caught smuggling drugs, counterfeit money, and in one case ivory in an effort to raise money.
In Pyongyang, there are dozens of biographies of Kim Jong-il available, each more glowing than the next. For a more realistic treatment, see Michael Breen, Kim Jong-il: North Korea’s Dear Leader (Singapore: John Wiley & Sons, 2004).
CHAPTER 9: THE GOOD DIE FIRST
There are several excellent studies of the North Korean famine that provided useful data.
Becker, Jasper, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (1996; New York: Henry Holt, 1998). Becker was one of the first Western journalists to write about the famine in North Korea. The postscript of his book contains a chapter dedicated to the country.
Flake, L. Gordon, and Scott Snyder (eds.), Paved with Good Intentions: The NGO Experience in North Korea (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003). This collection focuses on humanitarian intervention in North Korea.
Haggard, Stephan, and Marcus Noland, Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). The authors of this authoritative study made the most sophisticated attempt to date to quantify the number of deaths caused by the famine and put the number at between 600,000 and 1 million. Hwang Jang-yop, the highest-ranking official ever to defect from North Korea, said that internal estimates put the number between 1 million and 2.5 million.
Natsios, Andrew S., The Great North Korean Famine (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001).
Smith, Hazel, Hungry for Peace: International Security, Humanitarian Assistance, and Social Change in North Korea (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2005).
Andrew Natsios, who was vice president of the NGO World Vision during the famine, writes, “The bulk of food shipments did not arrive until after deaths had begun to subside,” p. 186. Jasper Becker also deals extensively with the withdrawal of the aid agencies, in Jasper Becker, Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 213-17.
Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate in economics, in his famous Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981) pointed out the linkage between famine and totalitarian regimes. He observed that famines are caused not only by a shortage of food but also by inequalities in distribution that would not be possible in a democratic society because the hungry would vote out their leadership.
The propaganda claims that Kim Jong-il ate simple food are absurd. Throughout the famine Kim spent huge sums of his nation’s wealth on regal meals. His epicurean tastes were made famous by a former sushi chef who, under the pseudonym Kenji Fujimoto, wrote a memoir in which he described going around the world to buy ingredients for Kim. When Kim traveled through Russia in 2001, consignments of live lobster and French wine were flown in for the leader, according to a book by a Russian official, Konstantin Pulikovsky. I wrote at some length about Kim’s eating habits, “Rich Taste in a Poor Country: North Korea’s Enigmatic Leader Kim Jong-il Demands the Finest Food and Drink,” Los Angeles Times, June 26, 2004.
CHAPTER 10: MOTHERS OF INVENTION
The Kim Jong-il speech of December 1996, delivered at Kim Il-sung University, was originally reported by Wolgun Chosun (Monthly Chosun) in Seoul. It is quoted at some length in Natsios, The Great North Korean Famine, p. 99.
The World Food Programme also thinks biscuits were a convenient and nutritious way of supplementing the diet. As part of its aid effort in Chongjin, the U.N. agency used factories there to make micronutrient-enriched biscuits that were distributed to schoolchildren.
North Korea’s markets are kept out of sight of foreign visitors. A North Korean with a hidden camera took a lengthy video of Chongjin�
�s Sunam Market in 2004. The video, provided to me by Lee Hwa-young of Rescue the North Korean People, shows food in humanitarian-aid sacks being offered for sale. World Food Programme officials say it is possible that the sacks were merely being reused.
The market prices quoted in this chapter come in large part from the work of Good Friends: Center for Peace, Human Rights and Refugees, based in Seoul. The Buddhist-inspired organization has excellent sources inside North Korea and publishes regular reports under the title North Korea Today, available on the Internet at http://goodfriends.or.kr/eng/.
The coal miner was one of the subjects of a lengthy series of articles I wrote about Chongjin, “Glimpses of a Hermit Nation,” Los Angeles Times, July 3, 2005, and “Trading Ideals for Sustenance,” Los Angeles Times, July 4, 2005.
CHAPTER 11: WANDERING SWALLOWS
Andrei Lankov writes that the North Korean identification cards were designed to act somewhat like passports, restricting travel within the country (North of the DMZ, pp. 179-80).
The references to cannibalism come from Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts, pp. 211-19.
The description of the funeral comes from Andrew Natsios’s Great North Korean Famine, p. 76.
CHAPTER 12: SWEET DISORDER
Information about the North Korean criminal code comes from Yoon Dae-kyu, “Analysis of Changes in the DPRK Criminal Code,” Institute for Far Eastern Studies, Kyungnam University, January 31, 2005. Portions of the code are also translated in Korea Institute for National Unification, White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea (Seoul, 2006).
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