Nothing to Envy

by Barbara Demick

  He gestured for her to sit by his side. He couldn’t raise his voice beyond a whisper.

  “These are our relatives in China. They will help you,” he said.

  It was a family tree. Dr. Kim was shocked. Could it be that her father was telling her to leave the fatherland for China? Her loyal father who had fled China himself and then schooled her at his knee in the love of Kim Il-sung? Could he be a traitor? Dr. Kim’s first instinct was to tear it up, but she couldn’t destroy her father’s last words. So she took out a small metal keepsake box with a lock and key, one of the last vestiges of her girlhood.

  She folded up her father’s chart and locked it in the box.

  KIM IL-SUNG WAS LAID to rest in an underground mausoleum, his body embalmed and put on display according to the Communist tradition that began with the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924. The North Korean government staged an elaborate funeral that took place over two days, July 19 and 20. Radio Pyongyang reported that two million people attended the procession as Kim Il-sung’s coffin cruised through the city on the roof of a Cadillac, followed by goose-stepping soldiers, brass bands, and a fleet of limousines carrying huge portraits of the leader and sprays of flowers. The hundred-vehicle procession started at Kim Il-sung Square, passed through Kim Il-sung University and past the city center’s hundred-foot-tall statue of Kim Il-sung, the largest in the country, and ended at the Revolutionary Arch, a replica of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, only bigger. The following day, there was a memorial service. At the stroke of noon, around the country, sirens wailed, trains and ships blew their horns, and people stood at attention for three minutes. The mourning period had come to an end. It was time for the nation to get back to work.

  Dr. Kim had plenty of opportunity to bury her misery in her job. Her father died just a week after Kim Il-sung’s funeral, so she had little desire to go home at night and worked even longer hours. The heat wave had not broken and the typhoid outbreak that had begun earlier in the summer had turned into a full-fledged epidemic. Chongjin was always prone to epidemics because its sewage system, hastily rebuilt after the Korean War, spilled untreated feces into the streams where women often did the laundry. With the electricity blinking on and off, running water became unreliable. Usually electricity and water worked for one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening. People stored water in big vats at home (few had bathtubs), which turned into breeding grounds for bacteria. Nobody had soap. Typhoid is easily treated by antibiotics, which by 1994 were almost entirely unavailable.

  After the hot summer of 1994 came an unusually cold winter, with temperatures in the mountains plunging to 35 degrees below zero. That was followed by torrential rains the following summer, flooding the rice paddies. This gave the North Korean government a face-saving excuse to admit publicly for the first time that it did indeed have a food shortage. A U.N. relief team that was permitted to visit in September 1995 was told that the floods had caused $15 billion worth of damage that affected 5.2 million people; that 96,348 homes had been damaged, displacing 500,000 people; and 1.9 million tons of crops had been lost.

  In the pediatric ward, Dr. Kim noticed that her patients were exhibiting peculiar symptoms. The children she treated, born in the late 1980s and early 1990s, were surprisingly smaller, even smaller than she’d been as the tiniest kid in her elementary school class. Now their upper arms were so skinny she could encircle them with her thumb and forefinger. Their muscle tone was weak. It was a syndrome known as wasting, where the starved body eats away at its own muscle tissue. Children came in for constipation that was so acute they were doubled over in pain, screaming.

  The problem was with the food. Housewives had started to pick weeds and wild grasses to add to their soups to create the illusion of vegetables. Corn was increasingly the staple again instead of rice, but people were adding leaves, husks, stems, and cobs to make it go further. That was okay for adults, but it couldn’t be digested by the tender stomachs of children. In the hospital the doctors discussed this problem among themselves, and gave the mothers what amounted to cooking advice. “If you use grass or bark, you have to grind it up very fine, then cook it a very long time so it is soft and easy to eat,” Dr. Kim told them.

  Among older children and adults, there was another strange new affliction. The patients had shiny rashes on their hands, around their collarbones as though they were wearing necklaces, or around their eyes so that it looked like they had glasses. It was sometimes called the “eyeglass disease.” In fact, it was pellagra, which is caused by a lack of niacin in the diet and often is seen in people who eat only corn.

  Often children came in with minor colds or coughs or diarrhea and then suddenly, they were dead. The poor diet lowered their resistance. Even if the hospital had antibiotics, their bodies were too weak. The babies were in the worst shape. Their mothers, themselves undernourished, didn’t produce enough breast milk. Baby formula was nonexistent and milk rare. In the past, mothers who couldn’t produce enough breast milk would feed their babies a watered-down congee made from cooked rice; now most of them couldn’t afford the rice either.

  Then there were children who had no diagnosable symptoms at all, just a vague malaise. They would appear pale or slightly bluish, their skin papery and lacking in elasticity. Sometimes they had swollen bellies, but sometimes nothing at all.

  “I can’t figure out what it is. I just can’t get my child to stop crying,” the mothers would tell Dr. Kim.

  She nodded sympathetically because she recognized the condition, but she was at a loss for words. How do you tell a mother her child needs more food when there is nothing more to give?

  Dr. Kim would write out a slip admitting the child to the hospital, knowing she had no cure for this condition. The hospital didn’t have any food either. As she did her rounds, walking through the pediatric ward, the children would follow her with their eyes. Even when her back was turned, she could feel their eyes staring at her white gown, wondering if she could relieve their pain and soon realizing that she could not.

  “They would look at me with accusing eyes. Even four-year-olds knew they were dying and that I wasn’t doing anything to help them,” Dr. Kim told me years later. “All I was capable of doing was to cry with their mothers over their bodies afterward.”

  Dr. Kim hadn’t been a doctor long enough to have erected the protective wall that would insulate her from the suffering around her. The children’s pain was her pain. Years later, when I asked her if she remembered any of the children who had died on her watch, she answered sharply, “I remember all of them.”

  Over the years the hospital provided less and less. The furnace in the basement went out after it ran out of coal, so the hospital had no heat. When the running water went off, nobody could properly mop the floors. Even during the day it was so dark in the interior of the building that doctors had to stand by windows to write up their reports. Patients brought their own food, their own blankets. Since bandages were scarce, they would cut up bedding to make them. The hospital was still able to manufacture intravenous fluid, but they didn’t have bottles for it. The patients had to bring their own, which were often empty bottles of Chongjin’s most popular beer, Rakwon, or “Paradise.”

  “If they brought in one beer bottle, they’d get one IV. If they brought in two bottles, they would get two IVs,” Dr. Kim said. “It sounds too embarrassing to admit, but that’s just the way it is.”

  Eventually the hospital emptied out. People stopped bringing their sick loved ones. Why bother?

  KIM IL-SUNG’S DEATH had, in fact, not changed much in the country. Kim Jong-il had gradually been assuming power over the decade preceding his father’s death. The economy’s inevitable collapse had been set in motion years before under the weight of its own inefficiencies. But North Korea’s Great Leader picked a convenient time to die, one that would prevent his legacy from being tarnished by the catastrophic events of the coming years. Had he lived a moment longer, North Koreans today would not be able to look back wit
h nostalgia at the relative plenty they had enjoyed during his lifetime. His passing coincided with the last gasps of his Communist dream.

  By 1995, North Korea’s economy was as stone-cold dead as the Great Leader’s body. Per capita income was plummeting, from $2,460 in 1991 to $719 in 1995. North Korea’s merchandise exports dropped from $2 billion to about $800 million. The collapse of the economy had an organic quality to it, as though a living being were slowly shutting down and dying.

  In Chongjin, the hulking factories along the waterfront looked like a wall of rust, their smokestacks lined up like the bars of a prison. The smokestacks were the most reliable indicators. On most days, only a few spat out smoke from their furnaces. You could count the distinct puffs of smoke—one, two, at most three—and see that the heartbeat of the city was fading. The main gates of the factories were now coiled shut with chains and padlocks—that is, if the locks hadn’t been spirited away by the thieves who had already dismantled and removed the machinery.

  Just north of the industrial district the waves lapped quietly against the empty piers of the port. The Japanese and Soviet freighters that used to make regular calls to pick up steel plates from the mills were gone. Now there was only North Korea’s fleet of rusting fishing vessels. Perched on a cliff above the port, giant letters proclaimed KIM JONG-IL, SUN OF THE 21ST CENTURY, but even they appeared to be crumbling into the landscape. The red lettering on the propaganda signs along the road hadn’t been repainted for years and had faded to a dull pink.

  One of the most polluted cities in North Korea, Chongjin now took on a new beauty, stark and quiet. In autumn and winter, the dry seasons in northeast Asia, the sky was crisp and blue. The sharp odor of sulfur from the steelworks had lifted, allowing people once more to smell the sea. In summer, hollyhocks crept up the sides of concrete walls. Even the garbage was gone. Not that North Korea ever had much litter—there was never enough of anything to go to waste—but with economic life at a standstill, the detritus of civilization was disappearing. There were no plastic bags or candy wrappers wafting in the breeze, no soda cans floating in the harbor. If somebody stamped out a cigarette on the pavement, somebody else would pick it up to extract a few flecks of tobacco to roll again with newspaper.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE ACCORDION AND

  THE BLACKBOARD

  Accordion lessons in Pyongyang, 2005.

  KIM IL-SUNG’S DEATH CAUSED MI-RAN’S FINAL EXAM IN MUSIC to be postponed, so she was not able to graduate until the fall of 1994. It was an inauspicious time to be launching a teaching career—or anything else, for that matter. Mi-ran was eager to move back home with her parents, as food distribution in Chongjin had stopped entirely. She requested a teaching assignment close to home and was fortunate to be sent to a kindergarten near the Saenggiryong mines, where her father had worked. The mines were carved into hills the color of milky coffee two miles north of Kyongsong on the main road to Chongjin. Mi-ran’s parents were relieved to have her back home where they could make sure she ate properly. It was common in Korea for unmarried adults, especially girls, to live with their parents. She could help around the house and keep her father company, since he hardly went to work these days. The two rooms of their harmonica house felt empty now that her two older sisters had married, and her brother was in teachers’ college.

  The kindergarten was about a forty-five-minute walk from home and looked almost identical to the one in Chongjin where she had apprenticed. It was housed in a single-story concrete building that might have looked grim if not for the iron fence with colorfully painted sunflowers that encircled it and formed an archway over the entrance with the slogan “We are happy.” In the courtyard out front were a few old pieces of playground equipment—a swing set with broken wooden seats, a slide, and monkey bars. The classrooms were standard issue with matching father-and-son portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il presiding above the blackboard. The squat double desks were made of worn wooden planks on metal frames. On one side of the room under the windows were folded stacks of mats to be used at nap time. The other side had a large bookcase with only a few books, now barely legible because they’d been photocopied long ago from the originals and were now in varying shades of gray. Books and paper were always scarce, and ambitious mothers had to hand-copy textbooks if they wanted their children to study at home.

  The difference between the schools was evident in the pupils themselves. The village children were visibly poorer than their city counterparts. Kindergartners did not yet wear uniforms, so they came to school in a motley assortment of hand-me-downs, often swathed in many layers since there was little heating in the school. Mi-ran was surprised by how ragged the children looked. As she helped them off with their outerwear, she peeled layer after layer until the tiny body inside was revealed. When she held their hands in her own, their baby fingers squeezed into fists as tiny as walnuts. These children, five-and six-year-olds, looked to her no bigger than three-and four-year-olds. In Chongjin, her pupils had been the children of factory workers and bureaucrats; these were the children of miners. Mi-ran realized that for all the problems with the food supply in the city, it was even worse for the miners. In the past, miners got extra rations—900 grams daily as opposed to the 700 grams for the average worker—to reward them for their hard physical labor. Now that both the kaolin and coal mines around Saenggiryong were closed most of the year, food rations for the miners had been cut. Mi-ran wondered if some of the children were coming to school mainly for the free lunch the cafeteria served, a thin soup made of salt and dry leaves like she’d had in the college dorm.

  Still, Mi-ran approached her new job with enthusiasm. To be a teacher, a member of the educated and respectable class, was a big step up for the daughter of a miner, not to mention one from a family from the lowest rungs of society. She couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and put on the crisp white blouse that she kept pressed under her bed mat at night.

  The school day started at 8:00 A.M. Mi-ran put on her perkiest smile to greet the children as they filed into the classroom. As soon as she got them into their assigned seats, she brought out her accordion. All teachers were required to play the accordion—it had been her final test before graduation. It was often called the “people’s instrument” since it was portable enough to carry along on a march to a construction site or for a day of voluntary hard labor in the fields—nothing like a rousing march played on accordion to motivate workers in the field or on the construction site. In the classroom teachers often sang “We Have Nothing to Envy in the World,” which had a singsongy tune as familiar to North Korean children as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

  Mi-ran had sung it as a schoolgirl and knew the words by heart:

  Our father, we have nothing to envy in the world.

  Our house is within the embrace of the Workers’ Party.

  We are all brothers and sisters.

  Even if a sea of fire comes toward us, sweet children do not need to be afraid,

  Our father is here.

  We have nothing to envy in this world.

  Mi-ran wasn’t blessed with her sister Mi-hee’s musical talent—as smitten as Jun-sang was with her, he would wince whenever she sang. Her little students were less fussy. Their faces tilted up at her, bright with animation, when she sang. They adored her and responded to her enthusiasm in kind. Mi-ran always regretted that her brother was so close to her in age that he was a rival rather than a little brother she could instruct and boss around. She loved her job. As far as the content of what she was teaching, she didn’t pause to contemplate whether it was right or wrong. She didn’t know education could be any different.

  In his 1977 Theses on Socialist Education, Kim Il-sung wrote, “Only on the basis of sound political and ideological education will the people’s scientific and technological education and physical culture be successful.” Since Mi-ran’s pupils could not yet read from the Great Leader’s copious works (his name was affixed to more than a dozen books, Kim Jong-i
l’s to another dozen), she would read excerpts aloud. The children were encouraged to repeat key phrases after her in unison. A cute little girl or boy reciting the sayings of Kim Il-sung in a childish, high-pitched voice would always inspire a chuckle and a broad smile from the adults. After the ideological training, the lessons moved on to more familiar subjects, but the Great Leader was never far from the children’s minds. Whether they were studying math, science, reading, music, or art, the children were taught to revere the leadership and hate the enemy. For example, a first-grade math book contained the following questions:

  “Eight boys and nine girls are singing anthems in praise of Kim Il-sung. How many children are singing in total?”

  “A girl is acting as a messenger to our patriotic troops during the war against the Japanese occupation. She carries messages in a basket containing five apples, but is stopped by a Japanese soldier at a checkpoint. He steals two of her apples. How many are left?”

  “Three soldiers from the Korean People’s Army killed thirty American soldiers. How many American soldiers were killed by each of them if they all killed an equal number of enemy soldiers?”

  A first-grade reading primer published in 2003 included the following poem, entitled “Where Are We Going?”:

  Where have we gone?

  We have gone to the forest.

  Where are we going?

  We are going over the hills.

  What are we going to do?

  We are going to kill the Japanese soldiers.