The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom

by Ralph Hassig

  Local security officials begin tracking males when they reach the age of fourteen, and when they graduate from middle school at age seventeen, they receive a draft notice. In addition to those with educational exemptions, men who come from families with unfavorable political backgrounds (one member has a criminal record or the family is registered in a low rank of the “hostile” class) or who fail to meet the minimum height requirements (148 centimeters or 4 feet, 10 inches) and weight requirements (43 kilograms or 95 pounds) are passed over. Since the famine of the 1990s, the North Korean soldier has been “downsized.” The robust soldiers that tourists see at the Panmunjom truce line are the best of the best. In photographs surreptitiously taken by tourists traveling in other parts of the country, soldiers look like scraggly Boy Scouts in baggy clothes and cheap sneakers. Those North Korean youth who do not meet the minimum physical, mental, or political requirements for enlistment are sent directly into the workforce, and their failure to serve in the KPA will be a black mark against them.

  During their long years of service, soldiers are granted only one or two home leaves, for example, to attend family funerals. Training can be brutal, and afterward life in the barracks is tedious, with the added burdens of having to undergo political indoctrination and struggling constantly to find enough to eat. Ironically, this struggle takes place in peacetime—for, to its credit, the North Korean army has not engaged in large-scale combat since the Korean War.

  The daily life of a soldier is not much different from the regimented life of the civilian population. After morning exercises, soldiers sit through a newspaper-reading session and a talk delivered by their political officer. Then there follows breakfast, morning duties, lunch, afternoon duties, and dinner. After dinner, soldiers attend political-criticism sessions, followed by “cultural” activities, often with a political purpose. Saturday mornings are filled with military duties, and the afternoons with camp-cleaning chores. Sundays are free, but soldiers are rarely permitted to leave camp.

  The KPA takes the lead in many of North Korea’s major construction projects, building dams, tunnels, roads, bridges, buildings, and the thousands of monuments honoring the Kim family. Most of this work is manual labor done without the aid of heavy machinery. Like civilians, soldiers are drafted to help out on farms during planting and harvesting seasons.

  For soldiers, the greatest sources of stress are lack of food and lack of female companionship. Beginning in the 1990s, the government shifted much of the burden of feeding the troops onto the individual military units, so an important part of a soldier’s duties includes provisioning the camp by working on farms attached to it. Even so, enlisted men rarely get enough to eat. Except on special occasions, meals consist of rice or some other grain, with side dishes of vegetables, peppers, and radishes. Bean paste is sometimes available, and occasionally there is fish. A small piece of low-quality pork is served once or twice a year. Soldiers constantly seek means to supplement their diet. A sample of food-related article titles in military magazines includes “Raising Rabbits in Summertime,” “Smoke-Drying of Catfish,” “Growing Bean Sprouts in Caves,” “Pickling Mountain Garlic,” “Ways of Cooking Cabbage,” and “Beans Are Multiple Vitamins.” Soldiers who become too malnourished to perform their duties are housed in a special barracks where they can rest, although they still do not receive sufficient food. Those who become seriously ill are returned to their homes for a few months of recovery. Officers get more food than enlisted men because they are able to siphon off the best of the rations and accept bribes from soldiers in return for special assignments, promotions, and leaves.

  Under the “military-first” slogan, soldiers sometimes go into the markets and demand food. Acting alone or with the connivance of their officers, they also erect checkpoints to rob traders and travelers and raid farms for food—sometimes the very farms they are supposed to be guarding. In an internal document smuggled out of the country in 2003, Kim Jong-il issues the following instructions to his soldiers: “Never lay hands on the people’s belongings; do not commit acts of violence against the people; do not engage in inappropriate relationships with women.”26 Another internal document from 2003 warns, “Officers must not commit such un-party-member-like crimes as organizing soldiers to steal farm produce under various pretexts.”27

  Soldiers posted along the border with China are subject to particularly severe temptations, with a land of relative plenty just across the river. Notes for lectures to be delivered by officers to border guards complain that “[soldiers] peek over at the splendid facade of the neighboring country [China] and thoughtlessly belittle the things of their own country.”28 The lecture document accuses guards of holding border crossers for ransom, overlooking smuggling and human trafficking, and engaging in illegal activities by selling government property. Reference is made to the raids that North Korean soldiers occasionally stage across the border into China: “Because of the improper behavior of some soldiers, citizens of the neighboring country have scorn for the People’s Army and even swear at them with abandon.”

  The second major stress on soldiers is their limited social life. During their initial ten years of service, they are not permitted to marry, which means that they are supposed to postpone all sexual activity until their late twenties. According to a military lecture, “Once soldiers become infatuated with women and start to have inappropriate relations with them, the soldiers lose interest in their military duties and in their army lives. They do not hesitate to go absent without leave or even desert from the army. In order to win the hearts of women, they steal property of the army and government and even of civilians.”29 Predictably, the celibacy policy promotes clandestine sexual relationships and hidden marriages. Female soldiers, local women, and even the wives of officers are potential girlfriends for the lonely soldiers.

  Low morale and lax discipline are combated by motivational lectures that caution soldiers never to relax their vigilance, no matter what news they hear about the outside world. Soldiers are told that their government is conducting a two-track foreign policy: “The KPA troops must never let themselves get distracted by dialogues the party holds or by whatever the party does. They must use their heads only in completing preparations for a war.”30 “When the gun barrel is strong, the enemies will be forced to come to the dialogue venue holding a white flag.”31 Other military study materials use similarly harsh rhetoric: “Just because the enemies kneel before us and visit us with smiles on their faces, it does not mean at all that their true nature has changed.” “Illusions about the enemy amount to death.” “Let us further accelerate fighting preparations without regard to North-South dialogue, cooperation, and exchanges.” “For the fatherland’s reunification, there exists only one method: the force of arms.”32

  Finding Food

  A Rice Culture

  Putting food on the table is the first concern of most North Koreans, who vividly remember the dark days of the Arduous March. By Western standards, North Korean cuisine is limited. Polished sticky white rice, the center of every meal when people can get it, is eaten with fresh vegetables or with pickled vegetables in the form of kimchi, the national dish. On special occasions, fish or small pieces of chicken or pork may be added to the meal, although many North Koreans get the chance to eat meat and eggs only once or twice a year. Corn, barley, wheat, and potatoes are considered second-class foods but have largely replaced rice in the diets of poor people.

  Kim Jong-il has tried to shift the people’s diet away from rice, which is difficult to grow in North Korea’s relatively cool climate, to other grains and to potatoes. Indeed, Kim has been a champion of the potato, just as his father put faith in growing corn. Kim himself, it should be noted, is such a connoisseur that, according to his former chef, every grain of rice destined for his dinner table is inspected for quality and shape. The party has called on the people to obtain good-quality potato seeds that “require low amounts of fertilizer, have high productivity, [are not] infected by viruses, an
d [are] resistant to pests.”33 Potatoes can be difficult to cultivate, especially in North Korea’s overfarmed acidic soil. They require large amounts of scarce fertilizer and are vulnerable to numerous diseases and insects, which North Korean farmers are unable to combat in the absence of chemical controls, and with their high moisture content, potatoes are difficult to store. One North Korean farmer complained that the number of potatoes he harvested was less than the number of seed potatoes he started with, so instead of planting seed potatoes the following year, he planned to preserve them carefully and submit them in the fall as his required contribution to the harvest!34

  Meat is a luxury in North Korea. Beef cattle and oxen are state property, and a person can receive the death sentence for slaughtering a cow.35 Given the severe shortage of farm tractors, cows are used as farm animals until they are too old to work. Pigs can legally be raised as private property, and even people living in the city may raise a pig in their apartment or on a veranda. Fresh pork is supposed to be sold to the state in return for payment in grain, but people often try to sell their pigs in the market, where they will fetch a much higher price. Dog meat, a popular health food in North Korea, South Korea, and China, is especially valued for making a person healthy and virile, but North Korean dogs are understandably in short supply.

  The party has frequently sponsored campaigns to raise rabbits and goats as another source of meat. A front-page article in Nodong Sinmun in early 1999 says,

  Rabbit raising is something that is worth a try for anyone, and is a work to be carried out by the entire masses. Each person has had experience in raising rabbits. Therefore, rabbit raising can be carried out in schools, homes, work sites or any other places. People often think that rabbit raising is a work for children. However, this is not true. It is an important policy-level issue for implementing the party’s policy.… Thus, we should bring about a new turning point in the work of upgrading people’s living standards by raising more rabbits in response to the party’s intention.36

  A few months later, the vice minister of agriculture weighed in with some advice on raising rabbits, noting that rabbit raising was “vigorously under way according to the firm determination of the respected and beloved general.”37 On closer inspection, it seems that raising rabbits is not entirely trouble free. The vice minister advises that superior rabbit breeds be secured (a batch was flown in from Switzerland), special breeding stations set up, grass fields created, and rabbit diseases prevented. Presumably the Kim regime finds rabbit farming so attractive because people can do it without government assistance.

  One indication that North Korea is not about to be overrun with rabbits is that seven years after the above articles appeared, Nodong Sinmun published another front-page article titled “Let Us Raise Many Rabbits As a Mass Campaign.”38 The article covers the same ground as earlier articles, emphasizing that organizations and individuals should “push forward the work of raising rabbits through to the end without abandoning it halfway.” For breeding stock, the North Koreans this time went to Germany. A retired chauffeur was mentioned in a German paper in connection with the “German giant grays” he raised, each almost the size of a beagle. In late 2006, the North Korean embassy in Berlin contacted him, and he agreed to sell six of his rabbits (or twelve, depending on the source of the story).39 The rabbits were shipped to North Korea in dog carriers, and a couple of months later the German rabbit breeder was again in the news, this time complaining that the North Koreans had not invited him to their country so he could show them how to raise the rabbits. Suspecting that his rabbits were already dead, he said, “I will never sell to North Korea again.”40 He may well have been correct about the fate of the rabbits. According to the chairman of Germany’s State Association of Rabbit Breeders, the giant grays are not particularly profitable to raise for food because they require “wheelbarrow-loads of hay, vegetables, and rabbit chow to bring them to maturity.”41 In late 2007, a report out of China said that the North Koreans had recently purchased one hundred “AAA-level fine-breed otter rabbits” along with various rabbit-farming materials and medicines and that four hundred bunnies had subsequently been bred from the original batch.42

  Army posts, collective farms, and schools are often assigned quotas of rabbits, goats, and chickens to raise, and in the run-up to an inspection, members of the organization must buy or steal animals to fill their animal pens. Duck and ostrich farms “equipped with modern facilities and based on the latest technology” have also been mentioned in the press, as have turtle farms and catfish breeding ponds.43

  Most of the pork, beef, and chicken produced by farms goes to feed the cadres and their foreign guests. Ironically, despite the increasing prevalence of obesity in South Korea—in 2005 the government prepared to set up a National Obesity Control Committee—a South Korean company called Porky Trading Korea said it had obtained Republic of Korea (ROK) government approval to import forty tons of North Korean chicken and hoped to import a total of two thousand tons by the end of 2005.44 If the hard currency North Korea obtained from the sale of chicken were used to purchase less expensive, but equally nutritious, food to feed the people, such a deal would make sense, but in recent years the Kim regime has spent very little on food imports, preferring to spend hard currency on monuments, military equipment, and luxuries for the elite class. Today, South Koreans throw away more food (an estimated four million tons annually) than North Koreans are able to produce, and 30 percent of the wasted food is fish and meat—foods that North Koreans rarely get to eat.45

  The diet of the Pyongyang elites, who receive special rations or can afford to pay high prices for food at the markets, is far more varied than is the diet of the twenty million ordinary North Koreans. One of the strange food stories in the North Korean press is about that Western favorite, hamburgers. In a long December 2003 article, Nodong Sinmun called readers’ attention to “the silvery white vehicles running busily through the intersections of the socialist capital every morning.”46 The destination of these vehicles was said to be the country’s premier universities, and the purpose was to deliver hamburgers (whether just the beef or already prepared burgers the article does not say). “Loaded to capacity on these vehicles are hamburgers to be supplied to university students. The hamburgers [are] filled with the ardent benevolence of the great general!” According to the article, in September 2000, Kim had ordered that hamburgers and fried potatoes “in our own way” (french fries?) be provided “even though the country was still in a difficult situation.”47

  The End of the Ration System

  The effective end of public food distribution in the mid-1990s dramatically changed the lives of the North Korean people, who had depended on the system since Kim Il-sung abolished private enterprise in the late 1950s. Every two weeks, at their workplace, workers were issued ration coupons (yanggwon, also known as “food tickets,” or yangpyo), which they took to their designated PDS center where they were entitled to purchase food and staples for a nominal fee—as long as the items were in stock. Ration coupons could also be used to purchase food at restaurants, except those that accepted only foreign currency. Travelers needed a special kind of ration coupon to purchase food. The amount of food that could be purchased with the ration coupons depended on occupation, age, and political status, and the coupons were issued in denominations of grams, where 200 grams of rice equal about a cup of uncooked rice (3 cups when cooked), and the daily requirement for a working adult is between 500 and 600 grams (2,000 to 2,500 calories, the equivalent of 9 cups of cooked rice). Workers in nationally strategic and difficult occupations such as mining and heavy industries received the most generous rations—as much as 900 grams a day. High-ranking military officers received 850 grams, officers with special qualifications, such as pilots, 800 grams, and party members 700 grams. At the other end of the scale, women over 55 and men over 61 received 400 grams worth of coupons and children 200 to 300 grams, which is how much food many prisoners received. To complicate matters, party m
embers and military officers would receive most of their grain ration in white rice, whereas ordinary workers would receive only 30 percent rice and the least fortunate 10 to 20 percent rice, with the remainder usually being corn. Beginning in the early 1970s, two days of rations were deducted from every fifteen-day ration period as a contribution to “wartime reserves,” and other deductions were often made for one campaign or another.

  Party and government officials could supplement their rations with money or food obtained by bribery, so they were never as reliant on the PDS as the workers were, and farmworkers were paid in grain produced on the farms. In the 1980s, PDS distribution centers began running out of rations, rendering the coupons of dubious value. By the mid-1990s, distribution centers could provide only a few days’ rations every month.

  On special occasions, such as the birthdays of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jongil, people received special rations, and those “gifts of the leader” have continued. For example, in 2006, households received ration coupons authorizing the purchase of one kilogram each of rice, corn, soy sauce, and bean paste, a bottle of domestically made liquor, and one hundred grams of seasoning. An extra six hours of electricity was supplied for three nights so people could watch television. Children received two hundred grams (about one cup) of snacks, two hundred grams of candy, one hundred grams of popped rice, and five pieces of chewing gum. The latter delicacy was long denounced as a capitalist product but is now manufactured by the Pyongyang Chewing Gum Factory under the brand name of Unbangul (“silver bell”).

  After the PDS collapsed, most North Koreans had to work to eat and eat to live. Kim Il-sung famously said, “Rice means socialism,” and when rice was no longer forthcoming, people turned their backs on socialism. The betrayal was very real. North Koreans vividly remember the 1990s famine, when even some members of the elite political class died of starvation. In those days it was common outside of Pyongyang to come across dead and dying people in the streets. A video smuggled out of North Korea shows dirty, shoeless children scrounging in the marketplace for scraps of food, even picking single grains of rice out of the mud. Ten years later, millions of North Koreans still suffer from malnutrition, and some continue to die of starvation. No one can be sure how good the next harvest will be or how much of the annual food shortage will be covered by foreign food donations.