Nothing to Envy Page 18

  The vast majority of the vendors were women. Koreans accorded a low status to markets, so traditionally they were frequented only by women. This remained the case in the 1990s even as the markets expanded. Men had to stay with their work units, around which all life in North Korea revolved, but women were sufficiently expendable that they could wriggle out of their day jobs. Joo Sung-ha, a North Korean defector from Chongjin who became a journalist in Seoul, told me he believed that Kim Jong-il had tacitly agreed to let women work privately to relieve the pressure on families. “If the ajummas [married women] hadn’t been allowed to work, there would have been a revolution,” he said.

  The result was that the face of the new economy was increasingly female. The men were stuck in the unpaying state jobs; women were making the money. “Men aren’t worth as much as the dog that guards the house,” some of the ajummas would whisper among themselves. Women’s superior earnings couldn’t trump thousands of years of patriarchal culture, but they did confer a certain independence.

  From the outside, Chongjin looked unchanged. The same gray facades of the Stalinist office buildings stared out at empty stretches of asphalt. The roads were still marked by the faded red propaganda signs extolling the achievements of Kim Jong-il and the Workers’ Party. Indeed, the place looked frozen in time, as if the clocks of world history had stopped in 1970. But Mrs. Song knew better. It was a topsy-turvy world in which she was living. Up was down, wrong was right. The women had the money instead of the men. The markets were bursting with food, more food than most North Koreans had seen in their lifetime, and yet people were still dying from hunger. Workers’ Party members had starved to death; those who never gave a damn about the fatherland were making money.

  “Donbulrae,” Mrs. Song muttered under her breath. Money insects.

  In the past, she took comfort in knowing that she and everyone else she knew were more or less equally poor. Now she saw the rich getting richer; the poor getting poorer. People who would have been branded economic criminals a decade earlier strutted around in leather shoes and new clothes. Others were starving even though they were working full-time. Inflation was out of control. The black-market price of rice would hit 200 won per kilo by the end of 1998. Even after salaries were restored, an ordinary office worker or teacher couldn’t afford to buy his family even two or three days’ worth of food each month. The children scrounged through the dirt on their hands and knees, picking out grains of rice or corn that spilled from the split seams of the burlap sacks.

  She knew a boy, Song-chol, nine years old. He used to come to the market with his father, a gruff man the other vendors nicknamed “Uncle Pear” because that was what he sold. But the pear business wasn’t so good, and Uncle Pear had difficulty feeding his family.

  “Why don’t you go and snatch yourself something to eat like the other boys?” Uncle Pear told his son one day at the market.

  Song-chol was an obedient boy. He marched off to a stand where men were drinking alcohol and eating crab. Back by his father’s side, he complained of a stomachache. He had picked up fish entrails from the ground that had spoiled. He died of acute food poisoning, before Uncle Pear could spend his last won to pay a porter to take him to the hospital.

  Hardly a day went by that Mrs. Song didn’t stumble across the dead and dying. For all she had been through with her own family, she could not get used to the constant presence of death. Late one day on her way home from the market, she took a detour to the train station, hoping to find customers for some unsold cookies. Workers were sweeping up the station’s plaza. A couple of men walked by, pulling a heavy wooden cart. Mrs. Song looked to see what they were transporting. It was a heap of bodies, maybe six of them, people who had died at the station overnight. A few bony limbs flopped out of the cart. A head lolled as the cart jostled over the pavement. Mrs. Song stared; the head belonged to a man about forty years old. His eyes blinked faintly, Not quite dead yet, but close enough to be carted away.

  Mrs. Song couldn’t help thinking of her own dear husband and son. How fortunate she was that at least they died at home in their beds, and she was able to give them a proper burial.

  CHAPTER 11

  WANDERING SWALLOWS

  Boys at a North Korean market.

  IN HER FREQUENT VISITS TO THE CHONGJIN TRAIN STATION, Mrs. Song probably crossed paths with a boy wearing an indigo factory uniform so big that the crotch hung down to his knees. His matted hair was crawling with lice. He wore vinyl bags on his feet instead of shoes. His age was indeterminate; at fourteen, he was barely the size of an American eight-year-old.

  If Mrs. Song had a leftover cookie, she might give him one. Otherwise she would have walked by without paying much attention. There was nothing about the boy to distinguish him from hundreds of other children hanging around the train station. North Koreans called them kochebi, “wandering swallows”—children whose parents had died or gone off to find food. Left to fend for themselves, they tended to flock like pigeons scavenging for crumbs at the train station. They were a strange migratory phenomenon in a country that previously had never heard of homelessness.

  Kim Hyuck was tiny, but strong and wily. If you bought a snack to eat at the station, he could snatch it from your hand before it reached your mouth and swallow it in a single gulp. Vendors covered buckets of food with tightly woven nets to keep out sticky fingers, but at the precise moment that the net was lifted, he could topple the bucket and grab something from the pavement. These were skills acquired at an early age and perfected over the course of a childhood marked by food deprivation. Without them, he wouldn’t have survived for very long.

  How Hyuck ended up homeless at the train station is a case study in the decline of North Korea’s core class. Hyuck was a child of privilege, born in 1982 into a family with solid Communist bona fides. His father had served in an elite military unit that was trained to infiltrate South Korea. He was later rewarded with membership in the Workers’ Party and a job in a military-run company that raised foreign currency by exporting fish and pine mushrooms. Hyuck’s family lived in Sunam near the Chemical Textile factory, where his mother worked. Hyuck was sent at the age of two months to the factory’s day-care center along with the children of other working mothers.

  Hyuck’s life began to derail when his mother died suddenly of a heart attack when he was three years old. He was left with only the dimmest recollection of her face—the earliest memory he could recount was the smell of incense burning at her funeral. Hyuck’s father remarried soon after. Hyuck and his brother, Cheol, who was three years older, clashed with their stepmother, often about food.

  The boys were mischievous, wild—and constantly hungry. They believed that their stepmother was giving more food to her own daughter, their stepsister. They stole corncobs from their kitchen and traded them for cooked noodles at the market. When their stepmother locked up the food, they swiped her blanket to barter for food.

  The first time Hyuck stole from a stranger he was ten years old. He took a sticky rice cake with red bean filling from a vendor’s cart and ran for it. His little legs pumped faster than the vendor’s and he should have gotten away with it. His undoing was that the rice cake was so sweet and delicious that he came back for a second helping.

  Hyuck’s father picked him up at the police station. Hyuck kept his head bowed in shame as the tears welled in his eyes. At home, his father whipped him with a leather belt, raising red welts on his calves.

  “No boy of mine will be a thief,” his father raged. “Better to starve than to steal.”

  Hyuck didn’t agree. He kept stealing, each time ranging farther from home in search of food. Just south of Chongjin, in Kyongsong county, were the coal mines. Beyond the coal mines were the orchards. Hyuck and his friends used to hitch themselves to the back bumpers of buses to get there. By the 1990s, he was making the trip regularly. When the pears ran out, they started stealing corn. Once he got caught, but he was young enough that the guards let him off with only a warning
. Hyuck was shameless in his thievery. Even in the mourning period after Kim Il-sung’s death, he tried to swipe extra rice cakes that had been put out for people paying their respects at the big bronze statue.

  Hyuck’s father was outraged by his sons’ conduct, but he had nothing to offer as a deterrent. The family had so little food at home that Hyuck’s stepmother had taken his stepsister and moved back to live with her parents. Hyuck’s father had switched jobs, becoming party secretary at a nursing home for the mentally ill. He installed his sons in a room where the caretaker had previously lived. Hyuck enjoyed living at the nursing home and talking to the patients. They were lonely like he was and they made conversation with him as though he was a real person, not just a kid. But the nursing home was also short of food. Although his father’s position as party secretary was more powerful than the director’s, it didn’t earn him extra rations. What it did get him were connections to get his sons into an orphanage.

  As in many Communist countries, North Korea’s orphanages weren’t strictly for orphans, but for children whose parents could no longer care for them. Like boarding schools, the orphanages were supposed to provide education, room, and board. It was a privilege to be accepted.

  The Donsong No. 24 orphanage was in Onsong, a county seat in the northernmost reaches of the province, near the Chinese border. Their father took his boys by train the first week of September, so that they could be enrolled in time for the start of the school year. Hyuck was eleven years old and about to begin his last year of primary school; his brother fourteen and in middle school. The ride took six hours and was so crowded that the boys and their father had no seats. They stood in glum silence the whole way.

  “You two are brothers. You’ll have each other. Don’t let anybody push you around,” their father said just after signing the papers that relinquished them to the care of the orphanage.

  When his father turned to walk away, Hyuck noticed for the first time how much his father had aged. The man who once appeared so tall and handsome was now gaunt, his posture stooped, his hair streaked with gray.

  AT LEAST INITIALLY, the orphanage’s cafeteria kept the boys’ hunger at bay. It was autumn, the harvest season, and food was abundant. The boys were delighted to get a daily bowl of rice. Even though it was mixed with corn, barley, and cheaper grains, it was the best food they had had in years. In the spring, they discovered that the wooded grounds of the orphanage were planted with apricot trees. They could pick and eat their fill.

  But by winter, their rations were cut. Instead of rice, the children got corn noodles floating in a bowl of salted soup. In the first three months of 1996, twenty-seven children died at the orphanage. Hyuck and his brother cut classes and walked to town to look for food. They discovered the situation wasn’t much better there. Hyuck met a boy his own age who was living with his six-year-old sister because their parents had died. Neighbors came in periodically with bowls of porridge, but otherwise the children were fending for themselves.

  Hyuck and his brother, along with their new friend, went out together to forage for food. Hyuck was a good climber, with long, muscular arms that compensated for his short, stubby legs. He could scale pine trees and with a sharp knife peel away the outer bark to get to the tender bark underneath. It was yellow, chewy, and sweet, and sometimes he would eat it while clinging to the tree. Others were trying to do the same, but Hyuck could get higher, where the bark was untouched.

  “You’re a little monkey,” his friend told him with admiration.

  Hyuck became a hunter. He killed rats, mice, and frogs and tadpoles. When the frogs disappeared, he went for grasshoppers and cicadas. As a small boy in Chongjin, he used to watch his friends catch and eat cicadas at the Sunam River, but he’d always found it disgusting. Now he was not so fussy. He took some netting and devised traps for sparrows, dangling a kernel of corn on a string as bait. They plucked the birds’ feathers and barbecued them on a spit. He also tried to catch pigeons with a basin and string, but discovered the pigeons were too smart.

  Not so the dogs. Hyuck found a small and friendly stray, wagging its tail as it followed him into his friend’s yard. Hyuck shut the gate behind them. He and his friend grabbed the animal and shoved it into a bucket of water, holding down the lid. The drowning dog struggled for ten minutes before dying. They skinned it and barbecued it. Dog meat was part of the traditional Korean diet, but Hyuck liked animals and felt bad, though not so bad that he didn’t try it again—although by mid-1996 dogs too were scarce.

  Hyuck continued to steal. He and his brother climbed walls and dug up clay kimchi pots that had been buried in private gardens. They shoveled the kimchi straight out of the pots into their mouths.

  All the while, Hyuck remembered his father’s admonition: “It’s better to starve than to steal.”

  In the imaginary dialogue that Hyuck kept up with his father, he retorted, “You’re no hero if you’re dead.”

  HYUCK WAS HOMESICK. He missed his father as well as Cheol, who had been discharged from the orphanage when he turned sixteen, the legal age of adulthood. Hyuck had always relied on his brother to be his bodyguard, protecting him during the many scrapes of his wild and unruly childhood. Cheol had inherited their father’s imposing height. Without him, Hyuck was regularly beaten up. One day he was out chopping wood when he encountered a gang of boys from Onsong who were doing the same. The town kids often picked fights with the orphanage kids, whom they accused (rightfully) of stealing their food. At first, Hyuck thought the boys had thrown a bucket of water at him. Then he realized his feet were drenched in blood. They had gashed his thigh with an ax. As soon as his wound healed, he decided to sneak onto a train heading back to Chongjin.

  When he arrived Hyuck barely recognized his hometown. Chongjin looked like a dead city. Everything was dilapidated, broken, cheerless. Stores were closed. There were no trolleys near the train station. He walked home along Road No. 1 parallel to the ocean. As he crossed the Sunam River, he could see clear out to the smokestacks along the waterfront. Not a puff of smoke was in the air. After the bridge, he turned off the main road toward the Chemical Textile factory, where his mother had worked. The front gate was padlocked shut, the building itself gutted. Thieves had looted all the machinery inside. It was growing dark, and by the time Hyuck reached his own neighborhood he was beginning to lose his bearings. He felt as though he was standing in the middle of a field on a moonless night. The landmarks of his childhood had rearranged themselves in his absence and disappeared in the shadows.

  Hyuck finally located his own apartment building. Pushing open the unlocked front door, he walked into a dark stairwell and groped his way up the steps, counting floor by floor. It was so quiet it seemed that the building was abandoned except for the sound of a crying baby that grew louder as he climbed. He was beginning to wonder if he had made a mistake. His apartment was on the eighth floor—second from the top. When he got upstairs, he saw a crack of light from under the door—an oil lamp, perhaps—and his heart raced with hope.

  He knocked. A young, pretty woman opened the door with a baby in her arms. She invited Hyuck inside and explained that she and her husband had bought the apartment almost a year earlier from Hyuck’s father. He hadn’t left a forwarding address, but he did leave a message: “If my sons come home, tell them to look for me at the train station.”

  CHONGJIN STATION. That was where people went when they had nothing left and no place else to go. It wasn’t quite like giving up and lying down by the side of the road. The movement of the trains created an illusion of purpose that kept hope alive against all odds. It allowed one to fantasize that a train would pull into the station with something to eat or that a train might be going someplace better and you could hop aboard. Chongjin is a major terminus in the railroad network—the north-south lines that run up the coast connect with the lines running west to the Chinese border. People showed up in Chongjin hoping to find food because other cities—Hamhung, Kilju, Kimchaek—had it even worse. Peop
le kept moving. They hadn’t given up yet.

  The station was an enormous granite building with a row of tall, narrow windows, two stories high. Up high was an oversized portrait of Kim Il-sung, the dimensions commensurate with the size of the building. Below the portrait was a stone-faced clock that occasionally told the correct time. Inside, the air was thick with the exhaust of the trains and cigarette smoke.

  People sat on their haunches, waiting. If they were too weak, they sprawled on the floor of the waiting room and lined the dim corridors. Hyuck wandered among the crowds looking for a man with his father’s loping, long-limbed gait. He bent down to stare into the faces, hoping to make eye contact with somebody familiar. Many of his former neighbors were living in squalor in the station, but nobody could provide Hyuck with information about his father or brother. With nowhere else to go, Hyuck found a slot into which a heavy iron gate was meant to retract. He sucked in his chest, slipped into the alcove, curled up, and fell into a fitful sleep. In the morning, he found a working faucet, so he could splash water on his face, but he couldn’t get rid of the lice on his scalp.

  It is worth noting here how extraordinary it was for anyone to be homeless in North Korea. This was, after all, the country that had developed the most painstaking systems to keep track of its citizens. Everybody had a fixed address and a work unit and both were tied to food rations—if you left home, you couldn’t get fed. People didn’t dare visit a relative in the next town without a travel permit. Even overnight visitors were supposed to be registered with the inminban, which in turn had to report to the police the name, gender, registration number, travel permit number, and the purpose of the visit. Police conducted regular spot checks around midnight to make sure nobody had unauthorized visitors. One had to carry at all times a “citizen’s certificate,” a twelve-page passport-size booklet that contained a wealth of information about the bearer. It was modeled on the old Soviet ID.