Kim Chaek Ironworks in the industrial city of Chongjin, the largest ironworks in North Korea
When I first met Song Hee-Suk, in 2004, she had been out of North Korea for two years. I was interviewing people from Chongjin—an industrial city in the far northeast of North Korea, near the Chinese border—for the Los Angeles Times. We arranged to meet at the paper’s office in Seoul. I opened the door to an immaculately dressed, tiny woman who exuded confidence. She wore a large jade ring and a pink polo shirt tucked into neatly pressed beige trousers. Everything from her cheery pastels to her perfectly coiffed hair suggested a woman in control of her life. At first glance, it was impossible to tell what kind of past she carried with her.
Mrs Song defected from North to South Korea in August 2002. In the first—and least hazardous—part of her escape she was driven the 50 miles from Chongjin to the border. There, clinging to the back of a guide, she forded the Tumen river and arrived in China. Some time after, using a forged passport and a false name, she took a flight from the city of Dalian in northeast China to Incheon in South Korea.
She knew only one other person on the plane—a young man sitting a few rows away, who had come to her hotel room at 6am to give her the passport. It had been stolen from a South Korean woman of about the same age, the original photos extracted with a razor blade. If questioned, Mrs Song would pretend to be a tourist who had spent a long weekend in Dalian, a popular seaside resort. To support her story, she was dressed in clothes that would have looked outlandish in North Korea—capri-style jeans and white sneakers. She carried a sporty backpack. Her handlers had pierced her ears (something women in North Korea didn’t do) and her hair had been done in a style favoured by South Korean women of a certain age. Mrs Song had spent two weeks being fattened up and groomed so that she wouldn’t look like a refugee. The one thing that might give her away was her guttural North Korean accent. She was advised not to make small talk.
Mrs Song sat perfectly still in the plane, her hands folded on her lap. She wasn’t particularly nervous. Her serenity came from the certainty that she was doing the right thing by defecting. Her eldest daughter, Oak-hee, had fled North Korea three years earlier, and she was going to join her. She wanted to see with her own eyes the world she had glimpsed on television.
The smugglers that Oak-hee had hired to bring her mother to South Korea were astounded that this sweet little grandmother could board an international flight carrying a doctored passport without breaking into a sweat. Had the Chinese immigration authorities detected her forged documents, she would have been arrested and sent back to North Korea to face prison camp. But her mind was made up.
Born on 15th August 1945, on Victory over Japan day, Mrs Song had been a true believer for most of her life: a factory worker and mother of four, a model citizen of North Korea. “I lived only for Marshal Kim Il-sung and for the fatherland. I never had a thought otherwise,” she told me. Now, though—after the deaths of her husband and her son from slow starvation, after the flight of her eldest daughter to South Korea, after the loss of even the meagre possessions she had gathered in half a century—she was leaving to seek a new life for herself with her daughter. There was nothing more to hide.
*** In article three of its constitution, South Korea states it is the rightful government of the entire Korean peninsula, which means that all of its people—including North Koreans—are automatically citizens. The right of North Koreans to citizenship was upheld by the supreme court in 1996. The reality, however, is more complicated. In order to exercise the right of citizenship, North Koreans must get to South Korea by their own volition. But even if a North Korean manages to enter China illegally, they cannot defect at the South Korean embassy in Beijing. Out of residual loyalty to its communist ally and to prevent millions of North Koreans from streaming across the border, China will not permit asylum seekers to present themselves at these diplomatic offices.
Mrs Song was disoriented the minute she stepped off the plane. The airport in China had been the first she had ever seen, and it was nothing like this one. South Korea’s $5.5bn Incheon airport had opened the year before, not far from the beach where General Douglas MacArthur’s troops landed in 1950. It is one of the largest airports in the world, a colossus of glass and steel. Sunlight streamed through the glass panels of the long arrivals corridor. Mrs Song didn’t know where to go, so she fell in step with the other passengers while keeping a safe distance from the man who had been her escort. When the other passengers queued up at the immigration counter, she ducked into the ladies’ room, which she found as confusing as the rest of the airport. She couldn’t figure out how to flush the toilet. The taps over the sinks turned on and off automatically. She poked her head out of the ladies’ room to see if the man had gone, but she spotted him from behind, waiting to go through immigration, so she stayed put. She arranged her newly permed hair and freshened her makeup, gazing into the mirror at the unfamiliar face staring back at her.
The next time she checked, the man was gone. Venturing out in search of a security official to approach, she practically collided with a very tall man whose badge and photo ID were at her eye level. She bowed low, as one does when beseeching an official, and spoke her rehearsed line: “I have come from North Korea. I am requesting asylum here.” The man was a janitor, but he knew what to do.
“How many of you are there?” he asked—most defectors arrived in groups. She told him she was alone. He took her to an office next to the immigration counter. Telephone calls were made and soon agents arrived from the National Intelligence Service (NIS), South Korea’s equivalent of the CIA.
Mrs Song was transferred from the airport to a dormitory set up for new defectors by the intelligence service. She wasn’t allowed to leave it, but her daughter could visit her. Her initial interrogation lasted for nearly a month. The NIS’s first task was to ascertain that Mrs Song was neither a spy nor a fraud. She was debriefed for two hours every morning, after which she had to write out notes of what had been discussed. She was asked to detail the location of landmarks in Chongjin—the offices of the Workers’ party, the security offices, the boundaries of the gu and dong, the districts and neighbourhoods into which all Korean cities are organised.
Mrs Song found that she enjoyed the debriefing sessions: they gave her a chance to reflect on her life. In the afternoon, she would nap and watch television. The smallest creature comforts delighted her—the refrigerator stocked with juice boxes, each individually wrapped with its own straw. She would later recall her stay as the first real holiday of her life.
*** A good deal of propaganda in both countries is devoted to how North and South Koreans are the same—han nar, one people, one nation. But after 60 years of separation, the differences are significant. South Korea is one of the world’s most technologically advanced countries. While most North Koreans are unaware that the internet exists, South Korea has a higher percentage of homes on broadband than the US and Japan. North Korea has been culturally and economically frozen for the last half century. Their languages are no longer the same; the South Korean version is now peppered with English words. Physically, too, the people have grown apart. The average South Korean 17-year-old male, fed on milkshakes and hamburgers, is five inches taller than his North Korean counterpart.
As the number of defectors increased in the 1990s, the South Korean government faced the task of integrating them into society. The nation’s think tanks assembled teams of psychologists, sociologists, historians and educators to come up with a plan. Although the number of defectors was small (as of late 2008, there were 15,057 in a country of 44m), there someday might be millions if Korea is ever reunified.
In 1999, South Korea opened Hanawon, a government resettlement centre, on a secluded campus 50 miles south of Seoul. Something of a cross between a trade school and a halfway house, the centre teaches North Koreans how to live on their own in South Korea. They are taught how to use an automatic teller machine and how to pay an electric bill. They are taught the Roman alphabet in order to read advertisements that use English. North Koreans also must unlearn much of what they were taught before—about the Korean war and the role of the Americans in the second world war. The defectors take classes on human rights and learn the mechanics of democracy.
Mrs Song was sent to Hanawon to learn these things. But while it all made sense in the classroom, once outside she would become confused. Her class was taken on a field trip to buy clothes. They went to a food court, where everybody was given money to buy their own lunch—but they all got noodles, as nobody could work out what the other foods were.
Mrs Song spent three months at Hanawon. At the end of her stay, there was a graduation ceremony. She was given a stipend of $20,000 to get started. And then she was on her own.
After she left, Mrs Song took a job as a housekeeper. She was used to working in North Korea and felt she would be depressed if she stayed idle. She decided not to live with her daughter, but to rent her own studio apartment in a high-rise building in Suwon, a city 20 miles to the south of Seoul, where the rents were cheaper. By working and living frugally, she could soon afford to travel—something once beyond the reach of her dreams. She joined tour groups that catered to older women and explored every corner of South Korea. She even went back to China—this time as a tourist. She travelled to Poland with a group of fellow North Korean defectors who were speaking at a human rights conference. She made friends. She even dated a little. She loved going to the market to try new foods—mango, kiwi, papaya. She and her daughter remained close, but fought over politics, the daughter taking a harder line on the “evil regime” to the north than her mother.
Every six months or so, Mrs Song and I would get together for a meal. I found her to be a reliable commentator on North Korea. She was by no means an apologist for the regime—“That rotten bastard,” she once said of Kim Jong-il, the only time I ever heard her use profanity—but she was not as embittered as most defectors I’d met. There were things she missed about North Korea: the camaraderie among neighbours; the free healthcare before the system broke down. She was nostalgic for her life as a young married woman.
“When I see a good meal like this, it makes me cry,” Mrs Song said one night as we sat around a steaming pot of shabu-shabu, thinly sliced beef cooked in broth and dipped in a sesame sauce. “I can’t helping thinking of my husband’s last words, ‘Let’s go to a good restaurant and order a nice bottle of wine.’” When it came to her son, she was unable to speak.
But that was the past, a place where Mrs Song mostly chose not to dwell. She relished her freedom and was determined to get the most out of her remaining years. “I feel much younger now and much bolder,” she told me. She asked me about the US and other places I’d travelled. She would show up for our appointments full of energy and enthusiasm, wearing a new, crisp and cheerful outfit. After so many years sacrificing for others, she now took care of herself. When she developed a paunch—much to her astonishment after years of deprivation—she went on a diet. She always wore makeup. One day, when I’d taken the train to meet her, we spotted each other from across the crowded waiting room. As soon as I was in earshot, she called out, unable to restrain her excitement a moment longer, “Look at me. I did my eyes.”
She’d had plastic surgery to add the extra little crease in her eyelids to make herself look more Caucasian. It was the ultimate South Korean experience. Mrs Song had arrived.
***
During my five years in Seoul, I attended numerous dinners with journalists, diplomats and academics. Invariably the conversation turned to North Korea, and when Kim Jong-il’s regime might collapse.
The longevity of the regime is a mystery to many North Korea watchers. Throughout the 1990s, the virtually unchallenged consensus was that it was facing imminent downfall. Yet North Korea survived the fall 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 George W Bush’s presidency. Bush famously lumped North Korea into his “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 2010, Bush is gone and Kim Jong-il is still in power. He is the last of the 20th-century dictators. Kim runs his country as though it were the thick of the cold war, churning out bombastic propaganda, banning most foreign visitors, threatening real and imagined enemies with nuclear weapons and missiles. Over the summer of 2008 he was reported to have suffered a stroke, and recent photographs show him with one arm hanging limp. But despite his infirmities, it is by no means clear that the end is near or that his death would bring about the demise of the regime. At the 2009 meeting of the People’s Assembly, Kim’s brother-in-law, Jang Song-taek, was named to the National Defence Commission. The move was widely read as a signal that Jang could serve as nominal leader in the event of Kim’s death, perhaps as a caretaker until Kim’s favoured son, Kim Jong-un, now 27, is old enough to take charge.
While I have visited the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, I am reluctant to draw any conclusions as the regime goes to such extraordinary lengths to choreograph what foreigners see. When the New York Philharmonic went to Pyongyang in 2008, 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 300 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. 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.
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. Afterwards, the internet access disappeared, the lights went out. The week after the concert, I spoke by telephone to Jean-Pierre de Margerie, the UN world food programme’s representative in Pyongyang at the time. He 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, surveyed 250 households in summer 2008. It found that two-thirds were supplementing their diets by picking grass and weeds in the countryside. Most adults didn’t eat lunch for lack of food. Some interviewees cried as they were being questioned.
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 a west coast city 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 10 o’clock on a weekday morning. Walking barefoot along the pavement was a boy about nine years old wearing a mudstained uniform that hung below his knees.
Several of the people whose lives I’ve followed over the last five years are able to contact their families occasionally through illegal telephones that pick up Chinese signals. “Things are so, so hard for people,” Mrs Song told me after speaking to one of her brothers in March 2009. “There is not much food on the market and the inflation is terrible. They are barely making ends meet.” Her siblings live better than most because of money she sends through China, but much of it is confiscated by officials.
Eckart Dege, a German geographer, visited Chongjin in September 2008. He saw little economic activity except for civilians rebuilding a road through manual labour. “There were thousands and thousands of people carrying dirt from the hills in shovels and laying it down in little heaps, as though they were building the pyramids,” Dege said. Inside the city, he noted the unusually large number of people squatting in a position that is almost emblematic of North Korea, knees bent up to the chest, balancing on the balls of the feet. “In other places in the world people are always doing something, but here they were just sitting.”
It is a North Korean phenomenon. Lacking chairs or benches, people sit for hours on their haunches, along the sides of roads, in parks, in markets. They stare ahead as though they are waiting—for a tram, maybe, or a passing car? A friend or relative? Maybe they are waiting for nothing in particular, just for something to change.
When I first met Song Hee-Suk, in 2004, she had been out of North Korea for two years. I was interviewing people from Chongjin—an industrial city in the far northeast of North Korea, near the Chinese border—for the Los Angeles Times. We arranged to meet at the paper’s office in Seoul. I opened the door to an immaculately dressed, tiny woman who exuded confidence. She wore a large jade ring and a pink polo shirt tucked into neatly pressed beige trousers. Everything from her cheery pastels to her perfectly coiffed hair suggested a woman in control of her life. At first glance, it was impossible to tell what kind of past she carried with her.
Mrs Song defected from North to South Korea in August 2002. In the first—and least hazardous—part of her escape she was driven the 50 miles from Chongjin to the border. There, clinging to the back of a guide, she forded the Tumen river and arrived in China. Some time after, using a forged passport and a false name, she took a flight from the city of Dalian in northeast China to Incheon in South Korea.
She knew only one other person on the plane—a young man sitting a few rows away, who had come to her hotel room at 6am to give her the passport. It had been stolen from a South Korean woman of about the same age, the original photos extracted with a razor blade. If questioned, Mrs Song would pretend to be a tourist who had spent a long weekend in Dalian, a popular seaside resort. To support her story, she was dressed in clothes that would have looked outlandish in North Korea—capri-style jeans and white sneakers. She carried a sporty backpack. Her handlers had pierced her ears (something women in North Korea didn’t do) and her hair had been done in a style favoured by South Korean women of a certain age. Mrs Song had spent two weeks being fattened up and groomed so that she wouldn’t look like a refugee. The one thing that might give her away was her guttural North Korean accent. She was advised not to make small talk.
Mrs Song sat perfectly still in the plane, her hands folded on her lap. She wasn’t particularly nervous. Her serenity came from the certainty that she was doing the right thing by defecting. Her eldest daughter, Oak-hee, had fled North Korea three years earlier, and she was going to join her. She wanted to see with her own eyes the world she had glimpsed on television.
The smugglers that Oak-hee had hired to bring her mother to South Korea were astounded that this sweet little grandmother could board an international flight carrying a doctored passport without breaking into a sweat. Had the Chinese immigration authorities detected her forged documents, she would have been arrested and sent back to North Korea to face prison camp. But her mind was made up.
Born on 15th August 1945, on Victory over Japan day, Mrs Song had been a true believer for most of her life: a factory worker and mother of four, a model citizen of North Korea. “I lived only for Marshal Kim Il-sung and for the fatherland. I never had a thought otherwise,” she told me. Now, though—after the deaths of her husband and her son from slow starvation, after the flight of her eldest daughter to South Korea, after the loss of even the meagre possessions she had gathered in half a century—she was leaving to seek a new life for herself with her daughter. There was nothing more to hide.
*** In article three of its constitution, South Korea states it is the rightful government of the entire Korean peninsula, which means that all of its people—including North Koreans—are automatically citizens. The right of North Koreans to citizenship was upheld by the supreme court in 1996. The reality, however, is more complicated. In order to exercise the right of citizenship, North Koreans must get to South Korea by their own volition. But even if a North Korean manages to enter China illegally, they cannot defect at the South Korean embassy in Beijing. Out of residual loyalty to its communist ally and to prevent millions of North Koreans from streaming across the border, China will not permit asylum seekers to present themselves at these diplomatic offices.
Mrs Song was disoriented the minute she stepped off the plane. The airport in China had been the first she had ever seen, and it was nothing like this one. South Korea’s $5.5bn Incheon airport had opened the year before, not far from the beach where General Douglas MacArthur’s troops landed in 1950. It is one of the largest airports in the world, a colossus of glass and steel. Sunlight streamed through the glass panels of the long arrivals corridor. Mrs Song didn’t know where to go, so she fell in step with the other passengers while keeping a safe distance from the man who had been her escort. When the other passengers queued up at the immigration counter, she ducked into the ladies’ room, which she found as confusing as the rest of the airport. She couldn’t figure out how to flush the toilet. The taps over the sinks turned on and off automatically. She poked her head out of the ladies’ room to see if the man had gone, but she spotted him from behind, waiting to go through immigration, so she stayed put. She arranged her newly permed hair and freshened her makeup, gazing into the mirror at the unfamiliar face staring back at her.
The next time she checked, the man was gone. Venturing out in search of a security official to approach, she practically collided with a very tall man whose badge and photo ID were at her eye level. She bowed low, as one does when beseeching an official, and spoke her rehearsed line: “I have come from North Korea. I am requesting asylum here.” The man was a janitor, but he knew what to do.
“How many of you are there?” he asked—most defectors arrived in groups. She told him she was alone. He took her to an office next to the immigration counter. Telephone calls were made and soon agents arrived from the National Intelligence Service (NIS), South Korea’s equivalent of the CIA.
Mrs Song was transferred from the airport to a dormitory set up for new defectors by the intelligence service. She wasn’t allowed to leave it, but her daughter could visit her. Her initial interrogation lasted for nearly a month. The NIS’s first task was to ascertain that Mrs Song was neither a spy nor a fraud. She was debriefed for two hours every morning, after which she had to write out notes of what had been discussed. She was asked to detail the location of landmarks in Chongjin—the offices of the Workers’ party, the security offices, the boundaries of the gu and dong, the districts and neighbourhoods into which all Korean cities are organised.
Mrs Song found that she enjoyed the debriefing sessions: they gave her a chance to reflect on her life. In the afternoon, she would nap and watch television. The smallest creature comforts delighted her—the refrigerator stocked with juice boxes, each individually wrapped with its own straw. She would later recall her stay as the first real holiday of her life.
*** A good deal of propaganda in both countries is devoted to how North and South Koreans are the same—han nar, one people, one nation. But after 60 years of separation, the differences are significant. South Korea is one of the world’s most technologically advanced countries. While most North Koreans are unaware that the internet exists, South Korea has a higher percentage of homes on broadband than the US and Japan. North Korea has been culturally and economically frozen for the last half century. Their languages are no longer the same; the South Korean version is now peppered with English words. Physically, too, the people have grown apart. The average South Korean 17-year-old male, fed on milkshakes and hamburgers, is five inches taller than his North Korean counterpart.
As the number of defectors increased in the 1990s, the South Korean government faced the task of integrating them into society. The nation’s think tanks assembled teams of psychologists, sociologists, historians and educators to come up with a plan. Although the number of defectors was small (as of late 2008, there were 15,057 in a country of 44m), there someday might be millions if Korea is ever reunified.
In 1999, South Korea opened Hanawon, a government resettlement centre, on a secluded campus 50 miles south of Seoul. Something of a cross between a trade school and a halfway house, the centre teaches North Koreans how to live on their own in South Korea. They are taught how to use an automatic teller machine and how to pay an electric bill. They are taught the Roman alphabet in order to read advertisements that use English. North Koreans also must unlearn much of what they were taught before—about the Korean war and the role of the Americans in the second world war. The defectors take classes on human rights and learn the mechanics of democracy.
Mrs Song was sent to Hanawon to learn these things. But while it all made sense in the classroom, once outside she would become confused. Her class was taken on a field trip to buy clothes. They went to a food court, where everybody was given money to buy their own lunch—but they all got noodles, as nobody could work out what the other foods were.
Mrs Song spent three months at Hanawon. At the end of her stay, there was a graduation ceremony. She was given a stipend of $20,000 to get started. And then she was on her own.
After she left, Mrs Song took a job as a housekeeper. She was used to working in North Korea and felt she would be depressed if she stayed idle. She decided not to live with her daughter, but to rent her own studio apartment in a high-rise building in Suwon, a city 20 miles to the south of Seoul, where the rents were cheaper. By working and living frugally, she could soon afford to travel—something once beyond the reach of her dreams. She joined tour groups that catered to older women and explored every corner of South Korea. She even went back to China—this time as a tourist. She travelled to Poland with a group of fellow North Korean defectors who were speaking at a human rights conference. She made friends. She even dated a little. She loved going to the market to try new foods—mango, kiwi, papaya. She and her daughter remained close, but fought over politics, the daughter taking a harder line on the “evil regime” to the north than her mother.
Every six months or so, Mrs Song and I would get together for a meal. I found her to be a reliable commentator on North Korea. She was by no means an apologist for the regime—“That rotten bastard,” she once said of Kim Jong-il, the only time I ever heard her use profanity—but she was not as embittered as most defectors I’d met. There were things she missed about North Korea: the camaraderie among neighbours; the free healthcare before the system broke down. She was nostalgic for her life as a young married woman.
“When I see a good meal like this, it makes me cry,” Mrs Song said one night as we sat around a steaming pot of shabu-shabu, thinly sliced beef cooked in broth and dipped in a sesame sauce. “I can’t helping thinking of my husband’s last words, ‘Let’s go to a good restaurant and order a nice bottle of wine.’” When it came to her son, she was unable to speak.
But that was the past, a place where Mrs Song mostly chose not to dwell. She relished her freedom and was determined to get the most out of her remaining years. “I feel much younger now and much bolder,” she told me. She asked me about the US and other places I’d travelled. She would show up for our appointments full of energy and enthusiasm, wearing a new, crisp and cheerful outfit. After so many years sacrificing for others, she now took care of herself. When she developed a paunch—much to her astonishment after years of deprivation—she went on a diet. She always wore makeup. One day, when I’d taken the train to meet her, we spotted each other from across the crowded waiting room. As soon as I was in earshot, she called out, unable to restrain her excitement a moment longer, “Look at me. I did my eyes.”
She’d had plastic surgery to add the extra little crease in her eyelids to make herself look more Caucasian. It was the ultimate South Korean experience. Mrs Song had arrived.
***
During my five years in Seoul, I attended numerous dinners with journalists, diplomats and academics. Invariably the conversation turned to North Korea, and when Kim Jong-il’s regime might collapse.
The longevity of the regime is a mystery to many North Korea watchers. Throughout the 1990s, the virtually unchallenged consensus was that it was facing imminent downfall. Yet North Korea survived the fall 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 George W Bush’s presidency. Bush famously lumped North Korea into his “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 2010, Bush is gone and Kim Jong-il is still in power. He is the last of the 20th-century dictators. Kim runs his country as though it were the thick of the cold war, churning out bombastic propaganda, banning most foreign visitors, threatening real and imagined enemies with nuclear weapons and missiles. Over the summer of 2008 he was reported to have suffered a stroke, and recent photographs show him with one arm hanging limp. But despite his infirmities, it is by no means clear that the end is near or that his death would bring about the demise of the regime. At the 2009 meeting of the People’s Assembly, Kim’s brother-in-law, Jang Song-taek, was named to the National Defence Commission. The move was widely read as a signal that Jang could serve as nominal leader in the event of Kim’s death, perhaps as a caretaker until Kim’s favoured son, Kim Jong-un, now 27, is old enough to take charge.
While I have visited the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, I am reluctant to draw any conclusions as the regime goes to such extraordinary lengths to choreograph what foreigners see. When the New York Philharmonic went to Pyongyang in 2008, 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 300 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. 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.
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. Afterwards, the internet access disappeared, the lights went out. The week after the concert, I spoke by telephone to Jean-Pierre de Margerie, the UN world food programme’s representative in Pyongyang at the time. He 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, surveyed 250 households in summer 2008. It found that two-thirds were supplementing their diets by picking grass and weeds in the countryside. Most adults didn’t eat lunch for lack of food. Some interviewees cried as they were being questioned.
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 a west coast city 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 10 o’clock on a weekday morning. Walking barefoot along the pavement was a boy about nine years old wearing a mudstained uniform that hung below his knees.
Several of the people whose lives I’ve followed over the last five years are able to contact their families occasionally through illegal telephones that pick up Chinese signals. “Things are so, so hard for people,” Mrs Song told me after speaking to one of her brothers in March 2009. “There is not much food on the market and the inflation is terrible. They are barely making ends meet.” Her siblings live better than most because of money she sends through China, but much of it is confiscated by officials.
Eckart Dege, a German geographer, visited Chongjin in September 2008. He saw little economic activity except for civilians rebuilding a road through manual labour. “There were thousands and thousands of people carrying dirt from the hills in shovels and laying it down in little heaps, as though they were building the pyramids,” Dege said. Inside the city, he noted the unusually large number of people squatting in a position that is almost emblematic of North Korea, knees bent up to the chest, balancing on the balls of the feet. “In other places in the world people are always doing something, but here they were just sitting.”
It is a North Korean phenomenon. Lacking chairs or benches, people sit for hours on their haunches, along the sides of roads, in parks, in markets. They stare ahead as though they are waiting—for a tram, maybe, or a passing car? A friend or relative? Maybe they are waiting for nothing in particular, just for something to change.
