Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (124 page)

“One couple were not all there in the head. They boiled their child and ate it, took the buttocks meat to sell it in the village. The man got caught. He was imprisoned but she was released.”

Q. What do you think of the reported estimate of two to three million dead of starvation?

A. “It’s probably true. Before I left, near Hamhung Station, I saw lots of people dead on the streets. On the train I would see dead bodies beside the tracks. Mostly those were city people, I think. Starving people would hang around the station because it’s warmer, but the guards didn’t want to deal with their bodies so they kicked them out of the station.”

Q. So it’s better to be banished to a rural village than to stay in the city?

A. “It was a little better in the farm village. But for families like ours, with money it would have been better to live in the city. Now all the material goods from the cities are going to the farm villages, traded for food. People from the city come to the farm villages to trade for food. In the past, after sundown the village people would let them spend the night in their houses, but the city people started stealing during the night and running away so the farmers stopped letting them in. People had to go into sheds or barns to sleep. I heard of one young man who had a bag of rice and slept in a barn. He froze to death, holding tightly to the rice.

“On the farm, if you’re hungry you don’t have the strength to work. So people recently started grinding corn cobs and mixing them with other stuff to make noodles. It comes out the color of cow dung and tastes horrible. It’s not really edible. People in my community started eating tree bark.”

Q. Did you ever see donated food?

A. “I never saw it in the village. But in Hamhung once I got a bit of South Korean rice rationed to me. Donated goods including rice are being sold in stores. You have to use foreign exchange to buy it. The government rations it to foreign currency stores, which sell it. Only people with foreign exchange could buy it. I didn’t buy that but I’ve been to those stores in Hamhung and heard the goods there were donated.”

Q. What sort of person is starving to death?

A. “In Hamhung, usually it’s people with no money, no goods to sell, no gumption or trading skill. So a lot of elderly people and children die first.”

Q. How do the authorities react to the hunger?

A. “What the central government tells each province is, ‘Take care of the food shortages locally’ But if the officials locally can maintain their posts they’re happy. They’re not sacrificing, or running around finding food for citizens.”

Q. How did you get out?

A. “The son who had defected got me out. He was responsible for getting relatives in China to put together our escape. The authorities in South Korea told me not to give details. I left North Korea February 16, 1997, and got to South Korea May 29.”

Q. Now?

A. “I didn’t know anything about South Korea. I had just heard rumors. I found that it’s free. But it’s not easy to live with all the freedom. I got a bounty from the government and opened a small shop selling North Korean–style sausage.”

***

The day after I had met Joo I interviewed her younger son, Hon Jin-myung. His freckled face resembled hers but at twenty-one he lacked her savvy. He was still a youth, speaking in a husky high-pitched voice. His haircut looked as if it had been done with a bowl, bangs combed forward in front as seemed to be the fashion. He wore a T-shirt with a collar, jeans and sneakers.

Q. Tell me about the place of banishment.

A. “Sangnam-ri is a well-known place where people with anti-regime thoughts including anti-communists were banished as early as the 1960s. Ex-landlords and their children were there when I got there. There were no cars. It was a mountainous rural area. We had no house at first, lived with a family that used to work for the local party. They reported every move we made. After a month we asked for a house and got to move into the shed full of mice at the same family’s house. We weren’t given work for three months. But then my mother went to work in a cornfield. I was in my last year of school. My sister was married but still she was forced to come with us. After a while she left to go back to her in-laws. Just my mother and I were left. The place had terraced plots but no flat land.

“After two months I wanted to join the military. But when they held the physical exam my name wasn’t on the list. That’s how I found out I couldn’t enlist. The local party people had been telling me, ‘We won’t look at your past. Everything depends on your behavior.’ I had believed them until then. I went to work in the cornfields like my mother. After giving up the idea of joining the military, I got to know the local people and found that nobody was allowed to leave, so we might as well come to terms with it. I talked with people in their forties and fifties who had been there since they were children. They couldn’t join the party or hold important posts.

“Mother felt sorry for me when I started working in the cornfield. That’s when she thought of marrying, as a way out. But they told us that even if she married, her husband would have to come live in that village. That’s when she started thinking of escaping. Trading in Hamhung, she knew lots of security people. She kept asking around whether there wasn’t some way out of the village. She was told there were certain people who could help get her out, people who used to be involved in the independence movement, pilots, train conductors, coal miners. She was advised to marry one of those and maybe she could get out. She wasn’t supposed to leave, but she left for Tanchong City for two months and found a suitable groom. They registered the marriage and she brought back the certificate, but the authorities told her she couldn’t leave even with that. The man she married had been a conductor since he was nineteen years old, back in colonial times. He had lost all his family during
the Korean War. They investigated him but couldn’t touch him so they stamped the certificate and we left the village.”

Q. Why do conductors have so much juice?

A. “I don’t know. But even when others didn’t get rations, they did. Pilots are the same, maybe because they could escape in a plane. It’s difficult to become a pilot. The train conductors deal with lives. Mostly they’re party members. I think a conductor can join the party automatically after one year.

“We went to the town. Before we left the village we prepared documents saying I was a train conductor. But once we got to town the town refused to register us at our home address. So I couldn’t work for four months. I never actually worked for the railroad.

“Mother had asked her husband-to-be for help, told him her story. He agreed to marry her for humane purposes. But he died in October 1996, after we had been there for four months. During those four months he argued with town officials about registering us to that address. After he died there was no one to take up the argument. We stayed for four months after her husband’s death and did the rituals for him.”

Q. Did you see people starve?

A. “Yes. It was pretty severe by the time I left. I saw three or four a day dying in Hamhung, where we stayed after the four months following the conductor’s death.”

Q. What sort of people died?

A. “Probably they were all laborers and farmers. Officials of a certain rank wouldn’t starve. Old people and children, dressed very badly, were dying. The authorities weren’t checking for passes because the food situation was so bad. People could travel to look for food.”

Q. In 1992, I saw some really bad-looking people, filthy, unwashed, in bad clothing, riding a train in the northeast. The windows were glassless.

A. “That’s what happens when you ride a train. From Seoul to Pusan takes only three or four hours. But from Hamhung to Chongjin, because of lack of fuel and electricity what’s supposed to be a seven-hour ride takes up to a week. There’s no food on the trains. At the stations you can buy food, but most people don’t have money. So they travel for a week without much food, without washing facilities. At home they look a little better. It’s probably just as bad in Pyongyang, but when I watched television they looked fed and relaxed. It’s better than any other city—they still get rations.”

Nam Chung was banished from Pyongyang along with his mother and two of his brothers after the eldest brother, a student in Russia, defected. In 1992, the family was sent to Tongpo mining camp in Onsong County, North Hamgyong
Province. “My mother’s an architect,” Nam told me. “My father died twenty years ago. My second brother studied in an East German military academy. My third brother graduated from Mangyongdae Revolutionary School and was a pilot for four years and six months. After we were sent off my mother was put to work at the mining camp as an architect. My second brother worked as a laborer; my third brother, in a paper factory. I was put to work laying railroad track. I had graduated from Pyongyang No. 1 Senior Middle School and enrolled in the Railroad College. I was expelled from college when my brother defected.

“We didn’t have any choice although we wanted to go somewhere better. The camp used to be a full prison camp with wire fence, but the wire was taken down in 1990 due to the furor abroad over human rights. Worse offenders were sent to other prisons while lesser offenders were kept there. We were watched by six families who had been assigned by State Security. Even if we worked two or three times harder than others we weren’t recognized. But I managed to graduate from the Railroad College via correspondence course. My father had graduated there, and his friends helped me. Usually it’s impossible. Anyhow, my degree wasn’t recognized in the camp.

“Due to the food shortage, other people didn’t work for ten days or so a month. But if we missed even one day we’d be fingerprinted and reported. They collect those reports. If-we do something worse they tack it on and punish us. The reason we weren’t treated even worse was that Mother was a very well-known and accomplished architect in Pyongyang.”

Q. Food situation?

A. “It’s difficult to describe in words. We used to eat one spoon of rice per day per three adults, which we bought. So we had to go out to the hills and mountains and fields and pick any greens that weren’t poisonous. We’d mix ‘green porridge’: assemble anything we could find, grind the greens, take the juice from them, add it to a single spoon of rice and make porridge. If you made porridge with pine bark and acorns, that was considered high-quality food. We also used to go to the farm fields and take the roots left after the rice harvest, or corn roots and corn cobs—-we dried them and ground them to make porridge. Until 1993, the rations were pretty regular. From 1994, we got no rations at all in that area. By the time we left, it was on record officially that they owed us 1,800 kilograms—one ton and 800 kilograms—of grain. The fifteen-day ration was supposed to be 11.8 kilograms of grain per person. My second brother had married, so our household had three people and was supposed to get rations for three. We were supposed to get 700 or 800 grams per day per person, but because of the shortage we didn’t. We bought food but by July 1996 our resources were so low we could only
buy 100 grams to divide among three people—33 grams a day per person.”

Q. Which areas were best and which worst for food, based on what you learned working for the railroad?

A. “The best places were Hwanghae Province’s Yonbaek Plain. In South Hamgyong it was generally OK south of Hamhung. I heard that the worst areas were in North Hamgyong, Chongjin City and Musan County.”

Q. What was your railroad job?

A. “Railroad guard.”

Q. They trusted you?

A. “I could never work alone. Three to five people were always together. When I was talking about rations, I wasn’t referring to rice but to corn. But we wanted to have a little rice to make the soup starchy. We didn’t receive anything as rations. We had to buy food. To pay for it, starting in 1994, we sold the TV, refrigerator, camera and tape recorders. Toward the end we had nothing to sell, and from July 1996 we were reduced to buying ony one spoon of rice a day, from having eaten a little better before that. We were starting to sell our blankets, blanket covers, anything we could. Some people sell everything. A family finally sells its house and becomes homeless. They go to try to find food any way they can. When it comes to the point when they can’t get food, they die.”

Q. Sell their homes?

A. “You do it illegally, secretly. And women sell their bodies. If you go to any big city train station like Chongjin, you see a lot of starving people, thieves, homeless people.

“My family’s worst time was the latter part of 1996, before my eldest brother sent money starting in December of that year. We heard about my brother from some Chinese people. He had met a lot of Chinese while studying in the Soviet Union, and he paid about twenty people to find out about the family. Eventually, one of them succeeded, and my brother sent us money. We couldn’t leave, but we weren’t in cells. Other people could get in to give messages and so on. The camp wasn’t completely closed to visitors. Chinese came in and gave us money directly. We were a little better off once we got money from my brother. But rations hadn’t resumed.”