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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Popular North Korean slogan belies real hardship, suffering

Reviewed by: Joseph Hnatiuk

Posted: 02/13/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

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Nothing to Envy

Ordinary Lives in North Korea

By Barbara Demick

Spiegal & Grau, 314 pages, $32

The title of this disturbing look at the last bastion of ultra-conservative Communism is taken from a sentence in a popular children's song in North Korea.

The entire sentence, "We have nothing to envy in the world," also appears on that Asian nation's ubiquitous statues and posters extolling the virtues of its founding ruler, Kim Il-sung, and those of his son, the aging but still supreme ruler, Kim Jong-il.

The title belies the hardship and suffering endured by a population socially engineered into a political caste system and, by most standards, living very unordinary lives.

A small minority who demonstrate loyalty to the regime live quite comfortably.

An even smaller minority escape into China and South Korea.

The vast majority are coerced into believing they are living in a worker's paradise, even when widespread famine in the 1990s was killing an estimated two million people.

Barbara Demick, currently the Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times following a stint as bureau chief in Seoul, South Korea, bases her book on several years of conversations with North Korean defectors beginning in 2001.

Author of the 1997 title Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood, she was one of the few western journalists allowed to enter North Korea under the watchful eye of "minders" strictly controlling her itinerary.

Recognizing that comments from refugees and defectors are often unreliable and difficult to confirm, Demick concentrates on testimonies from six former residents of a small geographic area in northeast North Korea.

She correlates these with accounts from more than 50 refugees and defectors from the industrial city of Chongjin, creating a portrait of everyday life in this isolated society.

Each resident's story is heart-wrenching, taken individually or intertwined, as are those of two prudish but obviously star-crossed lovers named Jun-sang and Mi-ran.

Other testimonies come from a devoted factory worker and her disillusioned daughter, a former street-smart orphan, and a doctor who performs her duties with minimal medical supplies.

While the ruling elite and its massive military flaunt their nuclear potential, Demick reports that in hospitals "patients brought their own food [and] blankets," and in the countryside starving people "picked undigested corn out of the excrement of farm animals."

Kim's 1984-like control over the population is achieved through closed borders, strict and ongoing political indoctrination, secret police and neighbourhood informants. Being caught by the kyuch aldae (mobile police units) while plotting defections often means sentencing to one of the infamous gulags, or execution.

The testimonies are personal and too often rife with hyperbole, but they present horrifying pictures, especially of what occurred when the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the modernization of China left North Korea practically friendless.

In a chapter titled Tainted Blood, Demick describes the three broad classes or castes of North Korean patriarchal society: the core class (loyal Communists), the wavering class, and the hostile class.

She writes that class mobility can only be downward, and "once in the hostile class, you remained there for life" because "the sins of the father were the sins of the children and the grandchildren."

Written in a laconic style reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway, her exposé is both attention-grabbing and scholarly. It includes 16 pages of notes, documentation and photograph credits.

The book leaves one lasting impression of the country, a satellite picture taken at night of southeast Asia and the Korean peninsula.

Bright lights in South Korea, China and Japan surround an area "curiously lacking in light" and signifying the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, where scarce energy resources aren't wasted upon nighttime lighting.

Joseph Hnatiuk is a retired teacher in Winnipeg.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 13, 2010 H9

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