A short summary of this paper. Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Straight off, I need to say that this is not tragedy porn. Demiick mentions Chongjin prisons in Nothing to Envyincluding the political prison camp Kwan-li-so No. View all 3 comments. They were told that the rest of the world were evil capitalists whose ideas of individualism had them living in seclusion, hiding from each other enfy fear of being killed. She was luckier than other North Korean women who became indentured servants or slaves.
If the reading of a classic like the former is perhaps a more powerful reading experience, this nonfiction work proves a more empathetic one. Demick also offers a very insightful look at similarities between those who have escaped the nothinh and holocaust survivors, an apprehension of the qualities one must nurture in order to survive in extreme conditions, and she notes the collateral damage from defecting.
Career advancement is only possible with party membership. Demicm author is to be commended for her ability to get inside both the hearts and demicj of the people There are few books like this written today: The military who were themselves starving would sell humanitarian aid to the starving populace. I mean we all went to school, and one can always count on there being those who seek advantage by undercutting others. Those for minor offenses offer a tiny demixk of survival.
And until the late s, the North Korean economy looked to be much stronger. North Korean propaganda conjured up images of rosy-cheeked children playing in the elds and brand-new farm equipment hauling in abundant harvests in the miraculous new country that ourished under the wise leadership of Kim Il-sung. Today, the bright-colored posters of this genre are easy to dismiss as socialist kitsch, but back then, they proved, for many, convincing. His paternal grandfather was a member of the Japanese Communist Party and had even served time in a Japanese prison for his left-wing beliefs.
Too old and in rm himself to be of use to the new country, he instead sent his oldest son. Because he was an engineer, his skills were in great demand and he was assigned to a work unit at a factory near Chongjin. A few years later, he met an elegant young woman who had come with her parents from Japan around the same time.
His family would say he looked like a pirate, but spoke like a poet. With kindness and persistence, he managed to woo this delicate beauty until she accepted his proposal of marriage. They had wangled for themselves a freestanding house—a luxury that a orded them a garden in which to grow vegetables.
Inside the house were ve substantial wooden wardrobes stu ed with quality Japanese-made quilts and clothing. North Koreans sleep on mats on the oor in the traditional Asian style, rolling up their bedding during the day and stu ng it into cabinets. North Koreans tended to rank themselves by the number of wardrobes in their home, and ve meant that you were prosperous indeed. They had more appliances than any of their neighbors—an electric fan, a television, a sewing machine, an eight-track tape player, a camera, and even a refrigerator—a rarity in a country where hardly anybody had enough fresh food to keep cold.
Most unusual, though, was that Jun-sang had a pet—a Korean breed called the poongsan, a shaggy white-haired dog that resembles a spitz. Although some Koreans in the countryside kept dogs as farm animals, raising them in large part to eat in a spicy dog-meat stew called boshintang, it was unheard of to have a dog as a household pet.
Who could afford an extra mouth to feed? In fact, Japanese Koreans, who were known as kitachosenjin, after the Japanese term for North Korea, Kita Chosen, lived in a world apart. They had distinctive accents and tended to marry one another. Although they were far from rich by Japanese standards, they were wealthy compared with ordinary North Koreans.
They had arrived in the new country with leather shoes and nice woolen sweaters, while North Koreans wore canvas on their feet and shiny polyester. Their relatives regularly sent them Japanese yen, which could be used in special hard-currency shops to buy appliances. Some had even brought over automobiles, although soon enough they would break down for lack of spare parts and have to be donated to the North Korean government.
Years after they arrived, Japanese Koreans received regular visits from their relatives who would travel over on the Mangyongbong ferry with money and gifts. The ferry was operated by the pro-regime Chosen Soren and its visits to North Korea were encouraged as a way of bringing currency into the country.
The regime skimmed o a portion of the money sent by relatives. Yet for all their wealth, the Japanese Koreans occupied a lowly position in the North Korean hierarchy. No matter that they were avowed Communists who gave up comfortable lives in Japan, they were lumped in with the hostile class. They were among the few North Koreans permitted to have contact with the outside, and that in itself made them unreliable; the strength of the regime came from its ability to isolate its own citizens completely.
The new immigrants from Japan quickly shed their idealism. Some of the early immigrants who arrived in North Korea wrote letters home warning others not to come, but those letters were intercepted and destroyed. Many of the Japanese Koreans, including some prominent in Chosen Soren, ended up being purged in the early s, the leaders executed, their families sent to the gulag. Jun-sang had overheard his parents whispering these stories. When they came to take you away, there was no warning.
A truck would pull up outside your house late at night. He knew by instinct to watch what he said. He was also careful not to provoke envy. He wore thick woolen socks from Japan whereas most children had no socks at all, but he kept his feet tucked under long pants, hoping nobody would notice.
He would later describe himself as a sensitive animal with big twitching ears, always on the alert for predators. After the birth of her four children, she never recovered her health. So the unspoken hung over the household: the realization sank in deeper with each passing day that a terrible mistake had been made in going to North Korea. Returning to Japan was impossible, they knew, so they had to make the best of a bad situation.
The only way to redeem the family would be to play the system and try to climb the social ladder. The constant pressure left Jun-sang nervous and indecisive. The city of , is wedged between a granite which Koreans call the East Sea. The coastline has the rugged beauty of Maine, and its glistening waters run deep and cold, but shing is treacherous without a sturdy boat.
The wind-whipped mountains support few crops, and temperatures in the winter can plunge to 40 degrees below Fahrenheit. Only the land around the low-lying coast can grow rice, the staple food around which Korean culture revolves.
Historically, Koreans have measured their success in life by their proximity to power—part of a long Asian tradition of striving to get o the farm and close to the imperial palace. Chongjin is practically o the map of Korea, so far north that it is nearer to the Russian city of Vladivostok than to Pyongyang.
Even today, the drive between Chongjin and Pyongyang, just miles apart, can take three days over the unpaved mountain roads, with dangerous hairpin turns. During the Chosun dynasty, when the Korean capital was even farther away—on the site of present-day Seoul—o cials who incurred the wrath of the emperor were exiled to this outlying fringe of the realm.
Perhaps as a result of all these malcontents in the gene pool, what is now North Hamgyong province is thought to breed the toughest, hardest-to-subdue Koreans anywhere. Until the twentieth century, this northernmost province of Korea, extending all the way to the Tumen River, its border with China and Russia, was sparsely populated and of little economic signi cance.
Today, though, the animals themselves are long gone. All that changed when the Japanese set their sights on empire building. The Japanese also coveted the largely unexploited coal and iron-ore deposits around Musan and they would need to ship their booty from the occupied peninsula back home. Farther down the coast, they built virtually from scratch the city of Hamhung as the headquarters of massive chemical factories producing everything from gunpowder to fertilizer.
After the Communists came to power in the s, they rebuilt the factories that had been bombed in the successive wars and reclaimed them as their own. Kim Il-sung pointed to the industrial might of the northeast as a shining example of his economic achievements. The population is believed to have since slipped to about ,, making Chongjin the third-largest city, behind Hamhung. Its factories made watches, televisions, synthetic bers, pharmaceuticals, machine tools, tractors, plows, steel plates, and munitions.
Crabs, squid, and other marine products were shed for export. The port was taken over for shipbuilding. Up and down the coast, the North Koreans took over the Japanese military installations and built bases for missiles that would be aimed at Japan.
A city of this importance, however, could not be left to unreliable people. The regime needed loyal cadres from the core classes to make sure that Chongjin toed the party line. Chongjin had its own ruling elite. They lived in close proximity— although not side by side—with the outcasts. The interplay between these two populations at the extreme ends of North Korean society would give Chongjin a unique dynamic.
A factory worker and mother of four, she was a model citizen of North Korea. She was a stickler for rules. In her youth, she looked the part, too—the quintessential North Korean woman. Her button of a nose and bright, earnest eyes made her look trusting and sincere—and in fact she was. Well past the point when it should have been obvious that the system had failed her, she remained unwavering in her faith.
She grew up in Chongjin near the railroad station, where her father worked as a mechanic. When the Korean War broke out, the station became a major bombing target as the American-led U. Sometimes they ew so low Mrs. Song could see the pilots. During the daytime, Mrs. Song used to tremble under her thin blanket, snuggling next to her mother and siblings for protection.
One day her mother left the children alone to nd out how their father was doing. The night before there had been heavy bombing and one of the factories that made railroad parts had been demolished. She came back weeping, falling to her knees, lowering her head to the ground. And she certainly was poor enough to qualify as a member of the downtrodden underclass that Kim Il-sung claimed to represent.
It was only tting that a girl with such impeccable Communist credentials would make an excellent marriage. His father had a good war record as a member of the North Korean intelligence; his younger brother had already joined the North Korean Ministry of Public Security.
Chang-bo was a graduate of Kim Il-sung University and was headed for a career in journalism, a highly prestigious profession in North Korea since journalists were considered the mouthpieces of the regime.
Chang-bo was a strapping man, exceptionally tall for a North Korean of his generation. Song was barely ve feet and could nestle under his arm like a little bird. It was a good match. This handsome, politically correct young couple would have easily quali ed to live in Pyongyang. Because Pyongyang is the only North Korean city frequented by foreigners, the regime goes to great lengths to ensure that its inhabitants make a good impression with their appearance and are ideologically sound.
Instead, it was decided that the couple was needed to ll out the ranks of the stalwarts in Chongjin and so they were settled there with certain privileges in the best neighborhood in town. For all the supposed egalitarianism of North Korea, real estate is doled out according to the same hierarchical principles as the class- background registers.
The less-desirable neighborhoods are in the south near the coal and kaolin mines where the working sti s lived in squat whitewashed harmonica houses. Farther north, everything becomes more imposing. As the main road runs through Nanam, the buildings are taller, some up to eighteen stories, the height of modernity at the time they were built. The builders even left shafts for elevators, although they never got around to installing the elevator cabs themselves.
The architectural designs for many of the postwar apartments came from East Germany, with adaptations for Korean culture. Between the stories, extra space was provided for the Korean under oor heating system, and apartment buildings were equipped with loudspeakers in the individual units to broadcast community notices. Chongjin is far from the modernity of Pyongyang, but it has its own aura of power.
The bureaucratic center is laid out in an orderly grid. Across from the east port is the Chonmasan Hotel for foreign visitors and near that a Russian consulate. The streets and squares in the city center were designed in the ostentatiously oversized style favored in Moscow and other Communist cities that conveys the power of the regime over the individual.
The main thoroughfare known simply as Road No. On both sides, spaced at regular intervals like sentries on guard duty, are large plane and acacia trees, the lower part of the trunks painted white. The white paint is variously said to keep away insects, protect the tree against harsh temperatures, or to assert that the tree is government property and cannot be chopped for rewood.
The curbs are also painted white. Interspersed between the trees are the familiar red signposts with propaganda slogans and behind them soaring street lamps that are seldom switched on.
There are no tra c lights, instead uniformed tra c police who perform robotic calisthenics with their arms to direct the few cars. The main road comes to a T-stop in front of the North Hamgyong Province Theater, a grand building topped by a twelve-foot-high portrait of Kim Il-sung. Behind the theater, the city comes to an abrupt end where it is hemmed in by Mount Naka to the northeast.
These days, the mountainside is dotted with graves and most of the trees have been chopped for rewood, but it still makes for a pleasant setting. When she rst saw it Mrs. Song was amazed to learn that the building had indoor plumbing—regular people like her had never seen anything so modern in the s. Heating radiated up from under the oor as in a traditional Korean house, but it came from water heated by a hydroelectric plant and piped through the building.
Their rst daughter, Oak-hee, was born in , followed two years later by another daughter and then another. North Korean medicine was su ciently developed by this time that most urban women gave birth in the hospital, but Mrs. Song, despite her soft appearance, was built of strong stu. She delivered all her children by herself without even the help of a midwife. One was born on the side of the road—Mrs. Song had been walking home with a basket of laundry. With the rst birth, her mother-in-law cooked her a soup with slimy ribbons of seaweed, a traditional Korean recipe to help a new mother recover her iron.
The next time her mother-in-law—disappointed by the birth of another girl—threw the seaweed at Mrs. Song to make the soup herself.
After the third girl, she stopped speaking to her. Song persevered. The fourth child arrived one afternoon when she was home alone in the apartment. She had left work early that day because her belly was hurting, but she hated to be idle, so she began to scrub the oors.
A sharp pain surged through her body and she rushed toward the bathroom. A boy, at last. Song was redeemed in the eyes of her family. This time her mother-in-law cooked the seaweed soup. Chang-bo was on a business trip and received a message the next day. Despite having four children and keeping house, Mrs. Women were expected to keep the factories going, since North Korea was perpetually short of men—an estimated 20 percent of working-age men were in the armed services, the largest per capita military in the world.
Song usually went to work with one baby strapped to her back and one or two others dragging along behind her. Her children basically grew up at the day-care center. She was supposed to work eight hours with a lunch break and nap in the middle of her shift. One day the lecture might be about the struggle against U. By the time she got home, it would be P. She would do her housework and cooking, then get up before dawn to prepare herself and her family for the day ahead before leaving home at A.
She seldom slept more than ve hours. Some days were harder than others. Friday nights she stayed especially late for self-criticism.
In these sessions, members of her work unit—the department to which she was assigned—would stand up and reveal to the group anything they had done wrong. It was the Communist version of the Catholic confessional. Song believed what she said. All those years of sleep deprivation, all those lectures and self-criticisms—the very same tools used in brainwashing or interrogations—had wiped out any possibility of resistance. It similarly declared that man, not God, shaped his own fate.
But Kim Il-sung rejected traditional Communist teachings about universalism and internationalism. He was a Korean nationalist in the extreme.
He instructed Koreans that they were special—almost a chosen people—and that they no longer had to rely on their more powerful neighbors, China, Japan, or Russia. The South Koreans were a disgrace because of their dependence on the United States. This was seductive to a proud people whose dignity had been trampled by its neighbors for centuries. Once in power, Kim Il-sung retooled the ideas developed during his time as an anti-Japanese guerrilla ghter as instruments of social control.
He instructed North Koreans that their power as human beings came from subsuming their individual will to that of the collective. The people had to follow an absolute, supreme leader without question. That leader, of course, was Kim Il-sung himself. And still it was not enough; Kim Il-sung also wanted love.
Murals in vivid poster colors showed him surrounded by pink-cheeked children looking on with adoration as he bestowed on them a pearly-toothed, ear-to-ear grin. His dimpled cheeks made him appear more cuddly than other dictators. He was to be regarded as a father, in the Confucian sense of commanding respect and love. He wanted to ingratiate himself into North Korean families as their own esh and blood. This kind of Confucian communism bore greater resemblance to the culture of imperial Japan, where the emperor was the sun to which all subjects bowed, than to anything envisioned by Karl Marx.
To a certain extent, all dictatorships are alike. But Kim Il-sung took the cult of personality to a new level. Kim Il-sung understood the power of religion. Broadcasters would speak of Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il breathlessly, in the manner of Pentecostal preachers. North Korean newspapers carried tales of supernatural phenomena.
Stormy seas were said to be calmed when sailors clinging to a sinking ship sang songs in praise of Kim Il-sung. He caused trees to bloom and snow to melt. We laugh at the excesses of the propaganda and the gullibility of the people. Who could possibly resist? Before long, the entire population was required to wear them on the left breast, over the heart. In Mrs. People were not permitted to put anything else on that wall, not even pictures of their blood relatives.
Later came a third portrait, of the father and son together. It could be used only to clean the portraits. This was especially important during the rainy season, when specks of mold would creep under the corners of the glass frame. About once a month, inspectors from the Public Standards Police would drop by to check on the cleanliness of the portraits. Even in the mad scramble of the mornings, rolling up the bed mats, making lunches, hustling the children out the door, she would give the portraits a quick swab with the cloth.
Other women disliked wearing their Kim Il-sung pins because they often made holes and rust stains on their clothing, but not Mrs. These were Socialist Youth League vigilantes who made spot checks to see if people were wearing their badges.
First o enders were usually forced to attend extra ideological lectures and got a black mark on their record. But Mrs.
Even her everyday conversation was peppered with their aphorisms. The children were never to forget that they owed everything to the national leadership. These days were national holidays and they were often the only days people would get meat in their ration packages. Later, after the energy crisis began, these were the only days there was electricity. It was a truly impressive gift for kids, all kinds of cookies, jellies, chocolates, and chewing gums.
Song went by the book. When the time came, the children lined up in front of the portraits to express their gratitude. In unison, they would bend from the waist, bowing deeply, with feeling.
Years later, Mrs. Song looked back at this time with nostalgia. She considered herself lucky. Chang-bo proved to be a good husband.
Song or the children. He enjoyed his drink, but was a cheerful drunk, cracking jokes as the laughter rippled down his increasingly ample belly. They were a happy family full of love. Song loved her three daughters, her son, her husband, and, at times, even her mother-in-law.
And she loved Kim Il-sung. Song would take away from those years a few cherished memories. There was the very occasional Sunday when neither she nor Chang-bo reported to work, when the children were not in school and they could spend time together as a family.
Twice, in those years, they managed to go to the beach, which was only a few miles from their apartment. Nobody in the family could swim, but they walked on the sand, picking up clams, which they took home and steamed for dinner. It was a place she had visited on a school trip. Song never went back. The complications began when Mrs. The most di cult of the four was her oldest daughter. Oak- hee was the spitting image of Mrs. Song—she was built compact and round, buxom and pretty.
But on Oak-hee the same plump lips were xed in a petulant pout. Her personality was all sharp edges. She refused to do anything she thought pointless. Starting at the age of twelve, kids were mobilized in battalions and sent out to the countryside for rice planting and transplanting and weeding. She dreaded springtime, when she had to hoist buckets of soil and spray pesticides that stung her eyes. North Korea was chronically short of chemical fertilizer and needed to use human excrement since there were few farm animals.
Each family had to provide a bucketful each week, delivered to a warehouse miles away. This foul-smelling chore was usually assigned to the older children, so Oak-hee set her considerable imagination to nding a short cut. Actually, it turned out to be easy to cheat. The warehouse where the full buckets were submitted was not guarded after all, who wanted to steal a bucket of shit? Oak-hee gured out that she could sneak in, grab a full bucket, and then submit it as her own and collect her chit.
Oak-hee cheerfully boasted about the ruse when she got home. Song was furious over the deception. How was she to survive in a society where everybody was supposed to march in step? After Oak-hee nished high school, Mrs.
Oak-hee had to write up reports about work teams that were exceeding their quotas and the remarkable progress that the company was making building roads. As the truck cruised by construction sites, Oak-hee would take the microphone and read her reports, broadcasting the achievements of the company through screechy loudspeakers.
Song hoped to nd someone just like her own husband, so she instructed Chang-bo to look around for a younger version of himself. While he was taking a train to Musan on a business trip, he sat next to an engaging young man.
Choi Yong-su came from a good family in Rajin, a city just north of Chongjin. Anybody with a military position above the rank and file had some clout in North Korea and was sure to get into the party. Chang-bo thought the young man looked promising and invited him home to visit. Oak-hee and Yong-su got married in in the traditional North Korean style—in front of the statue of Kim Il-sung, who symbolically presided over all marriages in the absence of clergy.
They put on their best clothes—she a beige jacket and black trousers, and Yong-su a dark suit—and stood sti y side by side to pose for a photograph in front of the towering bronze statue.
They deposited a bouquet of owers and considered their union to have been blessed in spirit by the Great Leader. They went back to the family apartment to gorge themselves on a banquet prepared by Mrs. The tradition was to have two receptions, at the homes of the bride and groom, a bit of a competition for each family to show o.
It was the most lavish meal the family would ever eat together and it might have been the high point of the marriage. Yong-su turned out to have a taste for neungju, a cheap homebrewed corn liquor. The swagger that Oak-hee at rst found seductive now felt menacing. The young couple had moved into their own apartment near the railroad station, but Oak-hee often ran back home. One day she would show up with a black eye, the next with a split lip. Within six months of the marriage, Yong-su got into a ght with a co-worker and was expelled from the military band.
He was sent to work at the iron-ore mines at Musan. You had to apply for membership in your twenties and undergo review by your party secretary. Oak-hee, who was by then in a di cult pregnancy, had to give up her job. Her situation was more precarious than ever. Unlike Oak-hee, he had always been the model child. He rarely raised his voice or quarreled.
Whatever his parents or older sisters instructed, he would do without complaint. Oak-hee marveled that the same set of parents could have produced a child so unlike herself. Nam-oak was only a middling student, but he excelled at sports. He was happiest playing by himself, kicking a ball again and again against the concrete wall of the apartment building. At the age of eleven, a coach measured the length of his forearms and legs and tapped him for a special athletic school in Chongjin.
It was in keeping with the Communist approach to competitive sports that the regime—not the families— decided which children would be plucked out of regular schooling to be groomed for the national teams. Nam-oak did well enough that at fourteen he was sent to Pyongyang to train in boxing. For the next seven years, Nam-oak was permitted to come home only twice a year, each time for a twelve-day vacation.
Song barely saw him. He was never one to cry on her shoulder like her daughters, but now he seemed like a complete stranger. Then she got wind of a disturbing rumor. Nam-oak had a girlfriend in Chongjin, a woman ve years older than himself.
When he came home from Pyongyang, he would often stay in her apartment. As the only son, he carried the responsibility of making a good match and continuing the family line. Song and her husband tried to question him, but all they got was uncomfortable silence.
Nam-oak became increasingly alienated from his own family, sometimes not even bothering to visit on vacations. Next, Chang-bo had a brush with the law. One night he and Mrs. Song were home watching the television news with some neighbors. Song and her husband were among the few families in their apartment building to own their own television set. They were usually bestowed by the government in the name of Kim Il-sung as a reward for extraordinary ser vice. Chang-bo got theirs because his father had been an intelligence o cer who had in ltrated the south during the Korean War.
Still, the programming was relatively entertaining. On weekends, you might get a Russian movie as a special treat. Song and her husband were proud of their television.
They usually left the door open to their apartment when it was on so that neighbors could wander in and watch with them.
It was in keeping with the collective spirit of the times. The program that got Chang-bo in trouble was an innocuous business report about a shoe factory producing rubber boots for the rainy season.
The camera panned over crisply e cient workers on an assembly line where the boots were being produced by the thousands. The narrator raved about the superb quality of the boots and reeled off the impressive production statistics. If there are so many boots, how come my children never got any? The words tumbled out of his mouth before he could consider the consequences.
Song never gured out which neighbor blabbed. It runs an extensive network of informers. There were the young vigilantes from the Socialist Youth League like the one who stopped Mrs. Song for not wearing a badge. If a violation was severe, the o ender could be arrested by the Public Standards Police. They would look for people who used more than their quota of electricity, a lightbulb brighter than 40 watts, a hot plate, or a rice cooker.
During one of the surprise inspections, one of the neighbors tried to hide their hot plate under a blanket and ended up setting their apartment on re. The mobile police often dropped in after midnight to see if there were any overnight guests who might have come to visit without travel permits. It was a serious o ense, even if it was just an out-of-town relative, and much worse if the guest happened to be a lover.
Everybody was supposed to be vigilant for subversive behavior and transgressions of the rules. Since the country was too poor and the power supply too unreliable for electronic surveillance, state security relied on human intelligence—snitches.
The newspapers would occasionally run feature stories about heroic children who ratted out their parents. To be denounced by a neighbor for bad-mouthing the regime was nothing extraordinary. He claimed afterward that his gift with language helped him talk his way out of the bind.
He cited the truth in his defense. He made a convincing case. He was a commanding gure with his potbelly and his stern expression. The political police in the end decided not to push the case and released him without charges. When he returned home, he got a tongue-lashing from his wife that was almost harsher than the interrogation.
It was the worst ght of their marriage. For Mrs. Song, it was not merely that her husband had been disrespectful of the government; for the rst time in her life, she felt the stirrings of fear. Her conduct had always been so impeccable and her devotion so genuine that it never occurred to her that she might be vulnerable.
In fact, they both realized how lucky they were. It helped, too, that Mrs. Song had at various times been head of the inminban in the building and commanded some respect from the state security o cers. Song personally knew a woman from her factory who was taken away for something she wrote in her diary. At the time, Mrs. Now she felt embarrassed for having thought such a thing.
The incident seemed to blow over. Chastened by the experience, Chang-bo was more careful about what he said outside the family, but his thoughts were running wild. For many years, Chang-bo had been ghting o the doubts that would periodically creep into his consciousness.
Now those doubts were gelling into outright disbelief. As a journalist, Chang-bo had more access to information than ordinary people. At the North Hamgyong Provincial Broadcasting Company, where he worked, he and his colleagues heard uncensored news reports from the foreign media. It was their job to sanitize it for domestic consumption. Anything positive that happened in capitalist countries or especially South Korea, which in hosted the Summer Olympics, was downplayed.
Strikes, disasters, riots, murders—elsewhere—got plenty of coverage. He toured collective farms, shops, and factories with a notebook and tape recorder, interviewing the managers. Back in the newsroom, he would write his stories in fountain pen there were no typewriters about how well the economy was doing. He always put a positive spin on the facts, although he tried to keep them at least plausible.
By the time they were edited by his superiors in Pyongyang, however, any glimmer of the truth was gone. Chang-bo knew better than anyone that the supposed triumphs of the North Korean economy were fabrications. He had good reason to scoff at the report about the rubber boots.
He had one trusted friend from the radio station who shared his increasing disdain for the regime. When the two of them got together, Chang-bo would open a bottle of Mrs.
She nodded quietly in agreement. When her father noticed, he at rst tried to shoo her away. Care to learn a bit more about the history of the most mysterious country in the world?
Meaning: it is a nonfiction book, but it has numerous fictional elements, if not in terms of facts, certainly in terms of style. Which, we believe, makes the book appealing to both historians and fiction-lovers alike.
Well, the truth is that its rise was kind of peculiar to begin with. North Korea was nothing more but an unimportant Japanese colony for the most part of the first half of the twentieth century.
Then came the Second World War and, then, the actual creation of two separate countries on the Korean Peninsula. In order to appease the Soviet Union, two American officers Charles Bonesteel and Dean Rusk divided the Korean peninsula along the 38 th parallel for basically no reason whatsoever other than the fact that this parallel neatly divided the peninsula in half.
Three years later, both Koreas were allowed independence by the two superpowers, but neither of the two governments the communist one led by Kim Il-sung and the capitalist fronted by Syngman Rhee thought it just to control merely one part of the peninsula. So, incited and helped by the Soviets, North Korea tried to occupy South Korea just two years after these two became countries, which provoked a counter-reaction by the United States and 15 other nations.
After the war, Kim Il-sung divided the supposedly egalitarian communist society into three provisional categories : the selected loyal core, the indecisive few and the numerous and numerous hostiles. Every North Korean citizen had to go through eight background checks before being assigned a certain status — or songbun — according to which he or she would later receive adequate responsibilities or even amounts of food.
Just like most of the other communist countries, Kim Il-sung introduced the cult of personality and an elaborate system of persistent ideological training which lasts to this day:. North Korea invites parody.
We laugh at the excesses of the propaganda and the gullibility of the people.
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