by Hyeonseo Lee
In early 1996, not long after my sixteenth birthday, I saw a crowd gathered around a middle-aged man at a market outside the city. He was giving a speech, speaking with a Korean-Chinese accent. He had a pot belly and a good-quality padded coat. He looked well off. I guessed he had come from China for the day to visit relatives.
‘Why has this suffering fallen upon our people?’ he said. Tears were rolling down his plump cheeks. ‘People are starving and dying. How could this happen to our country?’
He reached into his breast pocket and took out a wad of blue Chinese ten-yuan notes. An instant tension ran through the crowd. He began handing the notes out to everyone and anyone. As if summoned by a whistle, beggars in rags materialized from everywhere, holding out their hands. The man was surrounded in every direction by outstretched arms. He gave away all his notes.
His question stuck in my mind.
What exactly was happening? There had been no war. In fact everyone had forgotten all about the nuclear strike for which we’d spent so much time digging and practising air-raid drills. Famine had appeared out of nowhere like a plague.
The official explanation for the ‘arduous march’, as the propaganda obliquely called the famine, was the Yankee-backed UN economic sanctions, coupled with crop failures and freak flooding that had made the situation worse. When I heard this I believed that Kim Jong-il was doing his very best for us in terrible circumstances. What would the people do without him? The true reason, which I did not learn until years later, and which was known to very few people in North Korea, had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the refusal of the new Russian government to continue subsidizing us with fuel and food.
Kim Jong-il was now in charge of the country. We listened to a television news anchor quavering with emotion as she described how our Dear Leader was eating only simple meals of rice balls and potatoes in sympathy with the people’s suffering. But on the screen he looked as portly and well fed as ever. As a distraction from the economy, which seemed not to be functioning at all, news reports showed him endlessly inspecting the nation’s defences and army bases. A war for unification with the South would solve everything, people were saying.
I could tell from their accents that a lot of the beggars in the city were not from Hyesan – they had come from North Hamgyong and South Hamgyong provinces. We’d heard that the situation there was very bad. I did not realize how bad until I made a visit to Aunt Pretty in Hamhung that spring of 1996.
It was a journey through the landscape of hell.
Spring is the leanest season in North Korea, when food stocks from the previous harvest are exhausted and the year’s crops have not yet grown. The land was bare and brown. It looked blighted, cursed. On every hill, trees had been felled, and for miles around individual people dotted the open countryside, roaming listlessly like living dead, foraging for food, aimless; or they sat on their haunches along the side of the track, doing nothing, waiting for nothing.
Before the famine, no one could make a journey without a travel permit stamped in their ID passbook, which was scanned by inspectors at the train station. Now there were no controls. Order was breaking down everywhere. Soldiers turned thieves. Police became muggers. The trains ran to no timetable. At each stop there were hundreds more passengers than seats, and the journey became terrifying. At one stop I narrowly avoided being hit by shards of smashed glass as people broke a carriage window to climb straight in and avoid the bottleneck at the doors. The carriage was dangerously packed. Workless, hungry people were travelling in the hope of selling something for food. The crowds became so thick and tight that when we finally reached Hamhung I had to climb over people to get to the door.
On the platform, I looked back and saw there were hundreds of people on the roof of the carriage. People smuggling goods to sell chose to sit on the roof. No official would risk his life going up there to inspect.
At around this time, my mother, on a journey of her own to Wonsan to visit Uncle Cinema, saw a policeman order an old woman down. Her clothing was bulging with some contraband she was hoping to sell. The police were always alert for smuggled goods that they could confiscate for themselves and sell.
‘Please don’t search me.’ She was begging him from the top of the train. ‘It’s all I have.’
‘Get down right now, you old bitch,’ the policeman yelled.
The woman asked to be helped down.
The policeman reached up to her. As she took his hand, her free arm shot up and her fist closed over the electrified wire above the train. Both were killed instantly. She must have thought, If I’m going, I’m taking this bastard with me.
As I entered the city I thought my memory was playing tricks. The Hamhung where I’d lived as a girl was a buzzing industrial hub, with so many factory chimneys gushing smoke that the air sometimes choked us, but now it was fresh and clear. That great polluting monster, the Hungnam ammonium fertilizer plant, was no longer turning the sky yellow with chemicals. There were almost no trolley buses or cars, no bustle on the sidewalks, just people wandering lethargically, or talking to themselves, hallucinating from hunger.
Aunt Pretty had been making money importing Chinese clothes from Hyesan to Hamhung, and sending back seafood from the coast, but now she was casting about for a new venture as the transport situation became dire. She thought the authorities had taken the decision to cut off the Public Distribution System altogether in North Hamgyong Province, in order to save the rest of the country. I asked why that province.
‘Because it has so many people of the lowest songbun,’ she said.
People were falling dead in the streets. Starvation and necessity, however, were forcing a radical change of mindset. I saw it for myself in Hamhung. People were unlearning lifetimes of ideology, and reverting to what humans have practised for thousands of years – trade.
Black markets, where food was on sale at high, free-market prices, were springing up everywhere – at roadsides, in train stations, in mothballed industrial plants – and the new rising class of entrepreneurs was overwhelmingly female, and of low songbun. Very soon a person’s songbun became far less important than their ability to make money and obtain food. Many women laid their wares on mats along the sidewalk, keeping alert for thieves and kotchebi, but some markets had already developed into more permanent-looking sites, with stalls, and awnings fashioned from blue burlap rice sacks of the UN World Food Program. Incredible as it seemed for a city in the grip of a deathly famine, there were opportunities for social advancement and business success for those who had an eye for a chance. During this visit I heard someone say: ‘There are those who starve, those who beg, and those who trade.’ Coming from Hyesan, I knew many commercially minded people, but in Hamhung, North Korea’s second-biggest city, such attitudes seemed new.
The journey back to Hyesan was as nightmarish as the journey out. Many people were riding in the undercarriage, or clinging to the outside of the train, or sitting on the roof beneath the electrified wires. When I arrived at Hyesan Station a man was lying on the platform with the top of his head so badly smashed that part of his brain was exposed. He was still alive, asking in a quavering voice whether he was going to be all right. He died a few moments later. He had been riding in the undercarriage and had been hit by the edge of the platform as the train came into the station. During the famine, such accidents became common.
That year, 1996, the culture of our country changed noticeably. In the past, when visiting someone’s home, I’d be welcomed by the greeting: ‘Have you had rice?’ This was a gesture of hospitality, meaning: ‘Have you eaten? Join us.’ But with the food shortages, how could anyone give the old greeting with sincerity? It wasn’t long before it was replaced by: ‘You’ve eaten, haven’t you?’ Many were too embarrassed or proud to admit they were starving and wouldn’t take food even when it was offered. When Min-ho’s young accordion teacher starting coming to the house, my mother would ask if he’d like lunch. She could afford to maintain the
old etiquette.
‘I’ve eaten, thank you,’ he would say, politely bowing his head, ‘but a bowl of water with some doenjang would be nice.’
My mother obliged, but thought this odd. Nobody drank water with the soybean paste used to flavour soup. Each time, the teacher gulped it down in seconds. After a month of lessons, he stopped coming. My mother heard he had starved to death. She was stunned. Why hadn’t he accepted her offers of food? He’d valued his dignity more than his own life.
One afternoon that summer Min-ho and I came home after school to find a thief in the house. He was a scrawny soldier with pitted skin, no older than about nineteen. He was trying to carry the Toshiba television set, but his arms weren’t strong enough. Soldiers had been robbing houses all over Hyesan, and they were usually turned over to the police. But my mother just gave him some money and told him to buy food.
As the famine deepened, rumours of cannibalism spread throughout the province. The government issued stark warnings about it. We heard that an elderly man had killed a child and put the cooked meat into soup. He sold it at a market canteen, where it was eaten by eager diners. The crime was discovered when police found the bones. I thought these killers must have been psychopaths, and that ordinary people would never resort to such crimes. Now I am not so sure. Having spoken to many who came close to death during that time I realize that starvation can drive people to insanity. It can cause parents to take food from their own children, people to eat the corpses of the dead, and the gentlest neighbour to commit murder.
Across the country the travel permit system had collapsed, but entry into Pyongyang was still tightly controlled. That summer I received permission to visit Uncle Money and his wife. It was my second long train journey in the worst imaginable year to travel.
I was nervous about the visit. In fact I was braced for scenes similar to those I’d seen in Hamhung. But to my great surprise, all was normal in the Capital of the Revolution: well-fed people were going about their business; the vast boulevards had electrified streetcars, and traffic; I saw no beggars or hordes of vagrant children. The power stations were puffing smoke. The loyal class who lived here seemed insulated from what was happening in the rest of the country.
After I’d laid flowers and bowed at the feet of the bronze colossus of Kim Il-sung on Mansu Hill, so large it made me feel like an ant, my uncle and aunt took me out to Ok-liu-gwon, the most famous noodle restaurant in the country. The place was packed out, with people waiting for a table. Clearly, no one was going hungry. My uncle had power and influence. We went straight to the front of the line and were admitted without having to wait.
Uncle Money was a large man with a large personality, which seemed fitting to his position as the wealthiest member of the family. His house had its own sauna. I’d never seen such a luxury in my life. I counted five televisions. Some were still in the boxes, to give as bribes. At dinner in his dining room one evening I was served Western food for the first time – some kind of pasta dish.
It didn’t look like real food.
Uncle Money laughed at the expression on my face. ‘Most people will never have a chance to eat this in their lives. If you don’t try it now maybe you never will.’
Uncle Money’s wife wore such fashionable clothes she did not look North Korean. She was a manager at Department Store Number One in Pyongyang, which was regularly featured on the television news, showing shelves laden with colourful produce. But when I visited her there she told me that the goods on the shelves were for display only, to impress foreign visitors. The store had no stock to replace what was sold.
I told her I’d hoped to buy a present for my mother, like the small makeup set I’d seen beneath a glass counter.
My aunt winked at the shop assistant, who took it out and gave it to me.
As I travelled back to Hyesan, I thought the whole visit had seemed like a strange dream. I could not believe Pyongyang was in the same country where people were dying on the sidewalks in Hamhung, and vagrant children swarmed in the markets of Hyesan. In the end, though, not even Pyongyang stayed immune. The regime could not prevent famine coming to the heart of its own power base.
Chapter 17
The lights of Changbai
The boy shouted his answer. ‘I want to be a tank driver.’
Our teacher beamed approvingly. ‘And why do you want to be a tank driver?’
‘To defend our country from the Yankee bastards.’
The boy sat back down. It was my final year at secondary school, and we were each being asked about our careers.
Like all obedient Socialist Youth we were telling the teacher what she wanted to hear. When we’d been taught for as long as we could remember how the Respected Father Leader had dedicated his entire life to the people’s cause, and how great a burden he had shouldered to keep our country safe from its enemies, even a kindergarten kid would have known it would not have pleased the teacher if I’d put my hand up and said: ‘I want to be a pop star.’
You would expect between school friends a more honest conversation about our hopes for the future, and what we wanted to do with our lives, and that did happen, to an extent. But by the time we were ready to graduate, we had learned to trim our expectations in line with our songbun. Our choices fell within a certain range. In my class, the few of us with good songbun either took the university entrance exam or, if they were boys, went straight to military service. A few were able, through family connections, to land good jobs with the police or the Bowibu. More than half the students in my class were in the songbun ‘hostile’ category. A list of their names was sent to a government office in Hyesan, where officials assigned them to mines and farms. One girl from this group took the test to enter university, and passed, but was not permitted to go.
My good songbun meant I could plan. My dreams were private and modest. I wanted to be an accordionist. It’s a popular instrument in North Korea and a woman who could play it well had no difficulty making a living. That would be my official career, but, like my mother, I also wanted to trade, start an illicit business, and make money. I thought this would be exciting. I also knew that it would be the only way to ensure that my own family, when one day I had children of my own, would have enough to eat.
My mother fully supported the accordion career choice, and found a musician from the theatre in Hyesan to give me tuition. She said my father would have been pleased, as he’d always enjoyed accordion music. This made me cry.
I was seventeen years old. In just a few months, in January 1998, I would turn eighteen. This thought weighed heavy. At eighteen, we were adult citizens and received our official ID passbooks. The pranks and misdemeanours that children could get away with became serious crimes once we turned eighteen. And there was one prank I was increasingly tempted to commit, before it was too late.
In the winter of 1997, a school friend who lived near our house asked if I’d like to slip across the river with her to the border county of Changbai, in China. Her mother, like mine, had trading contacts there. She had already crossed a few times, so she knew what she was doing.
The idea thrilled me. My plan after the winter vacation was to try for a place at Hyesan Economics School, which ran two-year courses. It was harder to get into than a four-year university course. Graduates were expected to work for state-run companies, of course, not in illegal private trade. Grades didn’t matter much. Money and influence were what counted. I wanted to study there and start a business trading in imported goods. So why not take a sneak look at Changbai? Changbai, to me, represented business.
By then, Min-ho had crossed illegally many times. Young boys often did. He wanted to play with the Chinese boys on the other side. Sometimes, when the guards weren’t looking, he’d slip across to visit Mr Ahn and his wife, or Mr Chang, my mother’s trading contacts, whose homes were nearby. If he could do it, why couldn’t I?
From my house I marvelled at the halogen lights and neon signs of Changbai across the river, which never suffered pow
er cuts. At school, the teachers had always told us that the Chinese were envious of us and worse off than we were. I had believed this for years, even though evidence to the contrary was everywhere before my eyes, from the abundant Chinese products on sale in our market to the fashionable Chinese business people walking about Hyesan. In the end it was something Aunt Pretty said that made a light come on in my head. She told me that hungry people headed to Hyesan because there was always more food at border towns.
Food from China? Did the Chinese have more food?
During the famine Hyesan was in darkness every evening, but the clouds over Changbai glowed sodium amber from so many city lights. I started noticing that not one of the Chinese people I saw – not the border guards on the other side, who looked awesome in their green uniforms, or the children playing in the river – looked thin or hungry. They were clearly doing better – much better – than we were. This realization began to dislodge one of my longest-held core beliefs – that our country was the best in the world.
I had no spoken Mandarin at all, but I knew enough Chinese characters to make sense of some of the subtitles when television programmes had them. I had been watching illegal Chinese programmes for a few years now. But even when I couldn’t understand, I was still fascinated.
South Korean pop stars regularly appeared on Chinese TV. Acts like Seo Taeji and the Boys and H.O.T., a hugely popular boy band, performed before audiences of screaming girls. I’d never seen anything like them. I could understand the Korean but I didn’t know what on earth they were singing or rapping about. Their fashion, hair and dance moves made them seem like aliens to me, too weird to be interesting. I was more intrigued by the Chinese TV dramas. Every character seemed to live in a beautifully furnished home, complete with housekeepers and drivers, and kitchens filled with such luxuries as microwaves and washing machines. My mother washed our clothes in the river. Do the Chinese really live like this? I became more and more curious.