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on October 11, 2016
This book has a different format compared to many North Korea books. In this book, the author starts with telling the story of the lives of several North Koreans in various walks of life. Of course, we know from the beginning, that regardless of how unlikely it seems, at some point all of these people are going to escape North Korea in order to be able to tell their story. We learn the story of how these individuals grew up and lived in North Korea, their thoughts about their government and now Eternal Leader Kim, how they lived through the starvation years of the 90's, and the long road leading to why they decided to defect (or in 1 case, was tricked by a family member into defection, and how they finally were able to defect to South Korea. We learn what happened to some of their family members left behind, about their attempts to rescue family members trapped in North Korea (some successful and some not), and the sometimes harsh adjustment to the freedom and capitalism of South Korea. The author details the difficulty and perils involved for North Koreans to defect and safely make it sanctity in South Korea. We learn about a young man left an orphan whose father had been Party member, a pediatrician whose greatest dream was to be allowed to join the Party, a housewife with 2 young children and an abusive husband, a young woman and her "forbidden" boyfriend, a factory worker who had absolute loyalty to the regime, and several more. The stories are poignant and heartwarming, showing vividly the humanity of people trapped in North Korea. This book also covers the operation of the government and its regimentation over people's lives from a historical viewpoint, how this all changed (slightly for the better) during the starvation years of the 90's, and the newer changes (for the worse) under Kim Jong-un. Also covered are the issues and problems involved as former North Koreans adjust to a life of capitalism and freedom in South Korea. I recommend this book for anyone who wants to go beyond the history of and current living situation in North Korea, to hear the stories of real people surviving in and then escaping from North Korea.
on December 12, 2016
I too was intensely curious about what lies behind the eyes of North Koreans I see in documentaries. I study their expressions and feel a strong human connection but I find them unreadable. I devoured this book in two sittings; it's captivating. I sympathized with young Zin-mi in Mansky's film "Under the Sun" (also highly recommended) and this book was excellent in relating what life is really like for a few North Koreans. We hear a lot about the political side of things, but if you're curious to know how those big picture issues affect the lives of actual citizens, this is a must read. The author does this beautifully. Thank you, Barbara.
I wish nothing but the best for our North Korean cousins - whether in and out of their homeland. You've stolen this American's heart.
I wish nothing but the best for our North Korean cousins - whether in and out of their homeland. You've stolen this American's heart.
on January 25, 2016
This is a true masterpiece. I consider myself an educated person but I was shocked to read about the events that take place every day in North Korea and the oppressive regime they are forced to live under. Oppressive really doesn't describe how they live--they live in squalid conditions, after being promised by their "savior" Kim Jung Sun/Kim Jun Ill/Kim Jun Un (whoever is in power at the time) that they will be well taken care of and are convinced that all other "capitalist" countries, especially the US are "evil". North Korea gives propaganda, brain washing and terrorizing a new name. While people work without being paid, are forced to live in isolation from the events of the rest of the world and scavenge for food with the fear of being caught by the government, approximately 25% of the country's resources are being spend towards the development of a stronger military. Anyone thought to believe contrary to the government would be sent away to labor camps.
The author in this book devoted 8 years of her life working with defectors. She spent the first half of her book devoted to what their life was like before they defected, then how and why they defected, and finally, how they adjusted to a new life. This book combined the personal accounts of the defectors with the historical and political situations coinciding simultaneously, which made it much more easy to put into context. Her dedication to her work and the defectors is evident as all readers will notice. I've read many books regarding genocide, oppressive regimes, etc and this book I could not put down. I recommend it to anyone who not only wants to learn about North Korea, but anyone who wants to learn what it's like to live under an oppressive regime or to realize how lucky he/she is that they do NOT live in this environment. I honestly can't say enough good things about this book.
The author in this book devoted 8 years of her life working with defectors. She spent the first half of her book devoted to what their life was like before they defected, then how and why they defected, and finally, how they adjusted to a new life. This book combined the personal accounts of the defectors with the historical and political situations coinciding simultaneously, which made it much more easy to put into context. Her dedication to her work and the defectors is evident as all readers will notice. I've read many books regarding genocide, oppressive regimes, etc and this book I could not put down. I recommend it to anyone who not only wants to learn about North Korea, but anyone who wants to learn what it's like to live under an oppressive regime or to realize how lucky he/she is that they do NOT live in this environment. I honestly can't say enough good things about this book.
on June 30, 2017
North Korea has been in the news a lot of late, or so it seems with Kim Jong-un’s continual efforts at upping the crazy quotient and the recent death of Otto Warmbier. This book was an in-depth look at what it’s really like north of the 38th parallel and a good reminder that real lives are at stake when we laugh at memes and shake our heads at the over-the-top press releases issued by the North Korean government.
Demick has compiled a series of stories based on interviews with North Korean defectors all from the same city in the north not far from the border with China. The result is a book that reads like a novel, as Demick follows the individuals from their earliest memories in North Korea up until they find new lives in South Korea. The individual angle makes the book very compelling, Demick makes the reader care very much that things work out for these people. All of the stories are interesting and touching for their very ordinariness, but this was especially true for those individuals who whole-heartedly believed in the regime and came to realize the lie after a lifetime of dedication.
My thirteen-year-old son devoured this book after me and I was glad he did. I was glad that he took such an interest in the plight of people on the other side of the world who live in a regime we know very little about day-to-day. Teens are notoriously self-centered, so if he was glad for even a nano-second that he doesn’t live in North Korea and he appreciates his life that’s a good thing. On a larger scale I am glad it made him think about the transmission of information to the citizenry of a country. North Korea is regarded as Crazy Town on the international playing field, and so it is easy to dismiss what goes on there as so outside the realm of possibility for the rest of the world that it’s funny. But the fact is we are all told what to think every single day. Often we seek out information that affirms our world view and we are comforted by that in an echo chamber of our choosing. But if we really want to live in the free society we believe we are living in, we need to view and read and think about a range of information from a range of sources and the free exchange of that information needs to be encouraged so that an inherent suspiciousness is maintained by citizens. Think it can’t happen here? That’s just wrong. I read an opinion piece just today on NPR where the author refused to link to an article she was objecting to because she didn’t think it needed any more traffic. She did suggest googling it, but the failure to link to the piece on which her article was based was at best childish and at worst in service of a larger agenda to discredit any other opinion but her own. This is a small example, but the age of trigger-warnings, characterizing things as “fake news” by both sides, and opinion pieces dressed up as news makes us much closer than we would like to North Korea. Read this book and remind yourself we don’t want to end up there.
Demick has compiled a series of stories based on interviews with North Korean defectors all from the same city in the north not far from the border with China. The result is a book that reads like a novel, as Demick follows the individuals from their earliest memories in North Korea up until they find new lives in South Korea. The individual angle makes the book very compelling, Demick makes the reader care very much that things work out for these people. All of the stories are interesting and touching for their very ordinariness, but this was especially true for those individuals who whole-heartedly believed in the regime and came to realize the lie after a lifetime of dedication.
My thirteen-year-old son devoured this book after me and I was glad he did. I was glad that he took such an interest in the plight of people on the other side of the world who live in a regime we know very little about day-to-day. Teens are notoriously self-centered, so if he was glad for even a nano-second that he doesn’t live in North Korea and he appreciates his life that’s a good thing. On a larger scale I am glad it made him think about the transmission of information to the citizenry of a country. North Korea is regarded as Crazy Town on the international playing field, and so it is easy to dismiss what goes on there as so outside the realm of possibility for the rest of the world that it’s funny. But the fact is we are all told what to think every single day. Often we seek out information that affirms our world view and we are comforted by that in an echo chamber of our choosing. But if we really want to live in the free society we believe we are living in, we need to view and read and think about a range of information from a range of sources and the free exchange of that information needs to be encouraged so that an inherent suspiciousness is maintained by citizens. Think it can’t happen here? That’s just wrong. I read an opinion piece just today on NPR where the author refused to link to an article she was objecting to because she didn’t think it needed any more traffic. She did suggest googling it, but the failure to link to the piece on which her article was based was at best childish and at worst in service of a larger agenda to discredit any other opinion but her own. This is a small example, but the age of trigger-warnings, characterizing things as “fake news” by both sides, and opinion pieces dressed up as news makes us much closer than we would like to North Korea. Read this book and remind yourself we don’t want to end up there.
on January 13, 2016
Oh wow this book was a bit boring in the beginning and it seemed to jump around. However around 40% of the way in it started to make sense that eventhough she was telling 3 stories she was doing it in a time sequence. The writing is fabulous, very clear and straight to the point.
This is a book about three or four different people and their life in N.Korea through the 90's famine and what made them decide to defect. I had a lot of questions about the black market in Korea and how it started and this book explained that and much more. I really felt connected to these people and their stories.
I am not really into these types of books. I prefer sci-fi books but this is the type of book which will grab anyone's interest. You really can't loose with this book. It's great for people like me who knew very little about N.Korea.
This is a book about three or four different people and their life in N.Korea through the 90's famine and what made them decide to defect. I had a lot of questions about the black market in Korea and how it started and this book explained that and much more. I really felt connected to these people and their stories.
I am not really into these types of books. I prefer sci-fi books but this is the type of book which will grab anyone's interest. You really can't loose with this book. It's great for people like me who knew very little about N.Korea.
on March 17, 2017
This book is easy read yet does a great job of covering the subject of life in North Korea. The author, Barbara Demick, takes the real stories of six North Koreans, and weaves their histories together novel style.
She does an excellent job of showing the facts of day to day life in North Korea in the 1990s and early 2000s. She also recounts their journeys of defection and adjustment to life in South Korea.
Demick gives insight into the cult-like devotion some North Koreans had for Kim Il-Sung, and, to a lesser extent, his son and grandson. In a 1984-Orwellian style society, they had no choice but to follow the regime (or at least pretend). Neighbors would report the slightest behavioral deviations and there are a couple of accounts of people arrested for violations.
It's emotional at times, especially as main characters die (particularly from the famine). Demick conducted extensive interviews with the subjects, lived in South Korea, and traveled to North Korea. If you have any interest in understanding the culture and challenges of life in North Korea, this is a must read.
She does an excellent job of showing the facts of day to day life in North Korea in the 1990s and early 2000s. She also recounts their journeys of defection and adjustment to life in South Korea.
Demick gives insight into the cult-like devotion some North Koreans had for Kim Il-Sung, and, to a lesser extent, his son and grandson. In a 1984-Orwellian style society, they had no choice but to follow the regime (or at least pretend). Neighbors would report the slightest behavioral deviations and there are a couple of accounts of people arrested for violations.
It's emotional at times, especially as main characters die (particularly from the famine). Demick conducted extensive interviews with the subjects, lived in South Korea, and traveled to North Korea. If you have any interest in understanding the culture and challenges of life in North Korea, this is a must read.
on June 27, 2017
I can claim little knowledge regarding North Korea, and a point made late in the book is worth attention: Those who defect are likely misfits and they may well be misfits regardless of the regime under which they live. But it's hard to be a 'fit' when the regime under which you live imposes starvation upon its 'citizens' (read 'slaves'; if you wish to claim otherwise, I'll ask for evidence). Ms. Demick's research and follow-up seem top-notch; if someone wishes to claim conditions were other that what she states, they are going to have to lay it on the line and prove Ms. Demick wrong.
I want to make this clear: North Korea's slaves (the population) were purposely starved by North Korean commie dictators. It is amazing that some still defend North Korea (and to some degree Stalin, Mao, Lenin) in the face of such evidence. But then the left has probably more than a hundred million of deaths to justify under the claim of 'helping the common man'; the irrational distaste for the profit motive remains strong.
The book lost a star only in missing an editor. It is a compilation of reporting, but an editor should have caught the repetitions, some only separated by a paragraph.
I want to make this clear: North Korea's slaves (the population) were purposely starved by North Korean commie dictators. It is amazing that some still defend North Korea (and to some degree Stalin, Mao, Lenin) in the face of such evidence. But then the left has probably more than a hundred million of deaths to justify under the claim of 'helping the common man'; the irrational distaste for the profit motive remains strong.
The book lost a star only in missing an editor. It is a compilation of reporting, but an editor should have caught the repetitions, some only separated by a paragraph.
on May 6, 2015
This non-fiction work takes a look at the repressive and dysfunctional North Korean regime of Kim Il-sung and his successor Kim Jong-il through the stories of individual North Korean citizens who ultimately defected to China and South Korea. The stories told by those that survived the economic collapse and subsequent famine are chilling.
I’ve read several works focusing on North Korea, and all face the same hurdle of getting reliable information from such a tightly controlled, xenophobic culture. Indoctrinated at a very young age, citizens literally starve to death while continuing to idolize and worship the very people responsible for the barbaric conditions in which they try to survive. It is the individual stories that help to bring an understanding of how such a thing can happen and provide the most reliable account of what life in North Korea is actually like.
The time frame of these accounts spans approximately 15 years, including the period encompassing the death of Kim il-Sung, the ascension of his son and the disastrous famine that ensued. It ends in about 2009, prior to the death of Kim Jong-il and the current regime.
I’ve read several works focusing on North Korea, and all face the same hurdle of getting reliable information from such a tightly controlled, xenophobic culture. Indoctrinated at a very young age, citizens literally starve to death while continuing to idolize and worship the very people responsible for the barbaric conditions in which they try to survive. It is the individual stories that help to bring an understanding of how such a thing can happen and provide the most reliable account of what life in North Korea is actually like.
The time frame of these accounts spans approximately 15 years, including the period encompassing the death of Kim il-Sung, the ascension of his son and the disastrous famine that ensued. It ends in about 2009, prior to the death of Kim Jong-il and the current regime.
on April 11, 2014
North Korea and Cuba were the first countries to lose oil, the lifeblood of civilization. Since we will all share that fate, it's interesting to see what happened, though keep in mind that how severe the consequences are will depend on the carrying capacity of the region you're in (1), how much civil order can be maintained, and the effectiveness of the leaders in power (i.e. see "Lessons Learned from How Cuba Survived Peak Oil" that compares California to Cuba).
There are enormous differences between the fates of Cuba and North Korea. Cuba had many advantages -- a benign climate with year-round rainfall where three crops a year could be grown, a culture of helping one another out, and Castro prevented middlemen and speculators from charging astronomical amounts for food. For a detailed understanding of what happened in Cuba read the Oxfam analysis "Cuba: Going Against the Grain"
North Korea couldn't be more opposite - a cold mountainous nation with only 15% of its land arable, and dictators so crazy and cruel they're almost unmatched in history. North Korea might be the only nation with more prisoners per capita than America. There are many kinds of prisons, from detention centers to hard-labor camps, to gulags where your children, cousins, brothers, sisters, and parents would also be sent to for a crime you committed for generations to come. About 1% of the population- 200,000 people -permanently work in labor camps. The threat of these prisons has made it impossible for organized resistance to happen.
It's hard to escape, and if you do, then your relatives end up labor camps. Other nations aren't keen on refugees - South Korea fears a collapse of North Korea and being overrun by 23 million people seeking food and shelter, and China has their own problems with 1.2 billion poor people.
The consequences of peak energy in North Korea are worse than what's likely to happen initially in America, though some regions of the United States are likely to suffer more than others. On the other hand, when times get hard, group-oriented cultures that depend on a large network of people tend to do better than highly individualist cultures, which is as you can learn more about in Dmitry Orlov's Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century (2).
The only good aspect I could find about North Korea was that the women there are less repressed than in the past. A century ago Korean women were so completely covered in clothing that the Taliban would find no faults. In one village north of Pyongyang women wore 7 foot long, 5 feet broad and 3 feet deep wicker hat constructions that kept women hidden from head to toe. Perhaps even more than Muslim women Korean women were imprisoned in family compounds and could only leave at special times when the streets were cleared of men. One historian said that Korean women were "very rigidly secluded, perhaps more absolutely than women of any other nation".
After the Korean War ended, North Korea lost most of its infrastructure and 70% of its housing. It was amazing that Kim Il-sung managed to create a Spartan economy where most were sheltered and clothed, had electricity, and few were illiterate. Grain and other foods were distributed as well. In autumn each family got about 150 pounds of cabbage per person to make kimchi, which was stored in tall earthen jars buried the garden so they would stay cold but not freeze and hidden from thieves.
North Korea became utterly dependent on the kindness of other countries for oil, food, fertilizer, vehicles, and so on.
What happens when the oil stops flowing?
In the early 1990s North Korea suffered a double blow at a time when they were $10 billion in debt. China wanted cash up front for fuel and food while at the same time the Soviet Union demanded the much higher price of what oil was selling for on world markets
The nation spun into a crash. Without oil and raw materials the factories shut down. With no exports, there was no money to buy fuel and food with. Electric plants shut, irrigation systems stopped running, and coal couldn't be mined. The results were:
Power stations and the electric grid rusted beyond fixing
The lights went out.
Running water stopped so most went to a public pump to get water
Electric trams operated infrequently
People climbed utility poles to steal pieces of copper wire to barter for food
There were few motor vehicles
And few tractors, farming was done with oxen dragging plows
Hunger struck, which made people too exhausted to work long at the few factories and farms that were still surviving.
Oil is liquid muscle. One barrel of crude oil (42-gallons) has 1,700 kilowatts of energy. It would take a fit human adult laboring more than 10 years to equal one barrel of oil.
Perhaps this is why many nations have had no choice but to rely on muscle power after an economic crash or during a war, which means putting many people to work on farms. After the energy crisis, North Koreans over 11 were sent out to the country to plant rice, haul soil, spray pesticides, and weed. This was called "volunteer work". Now that they couldn't afford to buy fertilizer, every family was expected to provide a human bucketful of excrement to a warehouse miles away. The bucket was exchanged for a chit that could be traded for food.
Like Mao's crazy schemes (3), North Korea's dictators lurched from one mad idea to another -- one day it was goat breeding, the next ostrich farms, or switching from rice to potatoes.
Food staples were grown on collective farms, and the state took the harvest and redistributed it. The farmers weren't given enough to survive on, so they slacked on their collective fields to grow food to survive on, making the food crisis even worse. In the end, it was people in cities with no land to grow their own food on who ended up starving first. Every year, rationed amounts of food went down.
People were told the United States was at fault, and propaganda campaigns encouraged Koreans to think of themselves as tough, and that enduring hunger without complaint was a patriotic duty, and kept everyone's hopes up by promising bumper crops in the coming harvest. The Koreans deceived themselves like the German Jews in the 1930s, and told themselves it couldn't get any worse, things would get better. But they didn't.
Worse yet, instead of spending money on agriculture, the defense budget sucked up a quarter of the GNP. One million men out of 23 million people were kept in arms - the 4th largest military in the world.
The only place to get food became the illegal black market, where prices were terribly high, sometimes 250 times higher than what the state used to sell food for.
Natural disasters made harvests even worse - in 1994 and 1995 Korea was struck with an extremely cold winter and torrential rains in the summer that destroyed the homes of 500,000 people and rice crops for 5.2 million people.
People began picking weeds and wild grasses to stretch out meals, as well as leaves, husks, stems, and the cobs of corn. Children can't digest food this rough and could end up in a hospital, where doctors advised the rough material be ground up fine and cooked a long time. It wasn't long before malnutrition led to increasing numbers of people with pellagra and other diseases. Hospitals soon ran out drugs and other supplies.
Who died?
Children under five. Mothers couldn't produce enough breast milk, nor was there baby formula, regular milk, or even ground up rice. Children were the most vulnerable from poor diets. A minor cold would turn into pneumonia, diarrhea into dysentery.
Then the elderly. First those over 70, then people in their 60s and 50s.
Even men and women in the prime of their lives began to die. Men first because they have less body fat. Also, the strongest and most athletic because their metabolisms burn more calories.
The most innocent. People who wouldn't steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend. The simple and kind-hearted who did what they were told. It's said that the survivors of Auschwitz didn't want to see each other again because they'd all done things they were ashamed of.
Death was certain for people who didn't have the initiative to do something.
Chronic malnutrition makes it hard to fight infections, and people grow more susceptible to tuberculosis and typhoid. Once starved enough, antibiotics stop working, so curable illnesses become fatal. Hunger changes body chemistry to wildly fluctuate resulting in strokes and heart attacks.
The city of Chongjin had always suffered epidemics because its sewage system let untreated feces into streams. Once electricity stopped working, running water became so unreliable that people stored water in large vats which bred typhoid bacteria. Between a lack of soap and antibiotics it wasn't long before typhoid epidemics broke out.
By 1998 about 10% of the population had died from famine, and in some areas 20%, up to 2 million people. The numbers would have been much higher if North Korea hadn't received $2.4 billion in food aid between 1996 and 2005.
The North Korean government began to execut people for just about anything: stealing copper wire, goat, corn, or cattle theft, anyone stealing or hoarding or selling grains on the black market, adultery, prostitution, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, and so on. Thousands of people were thrown into prisons and many didn't survive.
Who survived?
People did not passively die. When the public food distribution ended they did whatever they could figure out to feed themselves. Some made bucket and string traps to catch small field animals, used nets to catch sparrows, stripped the sweet inner bark of pine trees and ground it into a powder to replace flour. Acorns were mashed into a paste. Kernels of undigested corn were pulled out of the feces of farm animals. Shipyard workers scraped the slime off the bottom where food had been stored and dried the foul-smelling goop on roofs to get tiny grains of uncooked rice out. Others dug shellfish out and ate seaweed. When making cornmeal, the husk, cob, leaves and stem were thrown into the grinder. Grass was added to make stews look like they had vegetables.
People rested instead of moving around to preserve their calories.
To stay alive, you had to suppress any impulse to share food.
You had to stop caring, to be able to see a dead body on the street and walk on by, and not stop to help a beloved neighbor's 5-year-old on the verge of death. Indifference was a survival skill.
At this point, just about everyone looked at what they owned and could sell to get food. Usually within 5 years most people had run out of possessions to sell, and even sold goods that helped them survive like bicycles for transport or sewing machines to make clothes to sell.
One of the most valuable items a person could own was a hand mill to grind corn, because there was no electricity for electric grinders. People would come for miles to have their corn ground manually.
Some walked around the edges of their city looking for shellfish, birds, or berries, but most cities were concrete jungles, and people needed to go much further in their search for food. In the city of Chongjin families hiked 3 miles to a collective orchard to look for fruit that had fallen and rolled under the fence surrounding the orchard. As food dwindled, children cut school to go to the orchard and squeezed through the wire fence to get fruit. When there was no more fruit to be scavenged, people went further out from the cities looking not just for food, but for firewood. Farms began to hire armed guards.
Children climbed walls and dug up vegetables and kimchi pots buried in private gardens. As the famine worsened, hungry soldiers began raiding people's gardens as well.
In smaller towns and villages, people crammed the narrow spaces between homes with peppers, radishes, and cabbages, those with flat roofs put pots of vegetables on top.
Some raised pigs or made tofu. Many women made cookies because they only took 10 minutes to bake, a lot less time than bread, at a time when firewood and anything else that would burn was hard to find. Cookies made a quick meal for hungry people on the move. When many made the same goods, having the best personality counted.
As coal and wood ran out, and electricity very rare, many foods people had made to trade for rice couldn't be done anymore.
Even dandelions and weeds grew scarce. Hot pepper, salt, and other flavorings that might have made weeds, ground sawdust, and inner bark flour palatable were expensive. Oil was unavailable at any price, making cooking even more difficult. It wasn't long before North Korea's frog population was wiped out by over-hunting. People ate grasshoppers, tadpoles, cicadas, and dogs.
Many hung out at train stations, hoping to go somewhere better. The homeless began to live at the train stations, most of them children or teenagers, often because the parents and grandparents had starved themselves to death first to keep the children alive. Many orphans roamed fearing others would steal from them, or even eat them, as rumors of cannibalism spread. Train stations were a place many dead bodies could be found.
Train stations also were full of prostitutes, often young married women desperate to feed their children. The only payment they asked for was food. Those with apartments nearby could get money or food letting prostitutes briefly rent out a room.
Cities that relied on the falling apart roads and rail lines had to pay the most for food, especially rice, the main staple.
Those with keys to abandoned factories dismantled them and made everything from the machinery to the wood doors into other sell-able products.
Women made sneakers from discarded rubber, built carts from old tires and doors.
Some found books on Oriental medicine and picked mountain herbs. Doctors performed abortions because families couldn't afford babies.
Food aid agencies did a survey in the summer of 2008 and found that two-thirds of people were still picking grass and weeds to survive on.
Despite all the crackdowns on the black market, by 2009 there were some who'd made so much money they were becoming almost middle class. Kim Jong-il solved that problem by invalidating the currency in circulation and issuing new bills as a to confiscate the cash people had saved. The new currency was so worthless that the most money you could convert was $30, instantly throwing anyone who'd done well back into poverty. The economy crashed even lower, and starvation became common again.
Supply chains broke down
Just about anything you could think of grew scarce - there were no bricks, cement, glass, or lumber. When windows broke they were covered with boards or plastic. Supply chains were broken. One school, desperate for glass, devised a scheme to sell the famous pottery of their town for salt in Nampo, sell the salt at a profit, and use that money to buy glass from the only factory in North Korea that still made glass.
A clothing factory that made uniforms started to have trouble in 1988 when shipments of fabric were delayed. Sometimes this was because there was no anthracite coal which was a raw material used to make the fabric (vinalon), or there wasn't electricity at the factory. Management tried to keep the women busy by sending them out along railroad tracks to collect dog s*** for fertilizer. Other days they'd look for scrap metal along the tracks or in the effluent coming out of the pipes at the steelworks.
How to be a Dictator
If you want to be a dictator this book is a good how-to manual. Kim Il-sung went further than most dictators by fostering a cult of personality that made him into a God so he could harness the power of faith by invoking religious sentiments in the people. He took the cult of personality to an extreme - everyone had to have a photo of him on a blank wall with nothing else, and use a white cloth that could be used for nothing else to keep the photo clean. Surprise visits of the Public Standards Police ensured this was the case.
He also terrified everyone with the threat of going to prison.
Children didn't celebrate their own birthdays, only Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il's, whose birthdays were national holidays and often the only time people got meat. After the energy crisis, these would were the only days when there was electricity, and children got about two pounds of sweets. Children were expected to stand in front of the portrait while enjoying their treats.
Korean teachers are required to play the accordion to motivate children, or "voluntary hard labor" in the fields or a construction site.
Further Reading
Inside North Korea's Environmental Collapse. Phil McKenna 06 Mar 2013. pbs.org
Pfeiffer, Dale Allen. 17 Nov 2003. Drawing Lessons from Experience; The Agricultural Crises in North Korea and Cuba. From the Wilderness.
References
(1) energyskeptic Sustainability and place: How emerging mega-trends of the 21st century will affect humans and nature at the landscape level
(2) energyskeptic Dmitry Orlov: How Russians survived the collapse of the Soviet Union
(3) energyskeptic Mao's War Against Nature
There are enormous differences between the fates of Cuba and North Korea. Cuba had many advantages -- a benign climate with year-round rainfall where three crops a year could be grown, a culture of helping one another out, and Castro prevented middlemen and speculators from charging astronomical amounts for food. For a detailed understanding of what happened in Cuba read the Oxfam analysis "Cuba: Going Against the Grain"
North Korea couldn't be more opposite - a cold mountainous nation with only 15% of its land arable, and dictators so crazy and cruel they're almost unmatched in history. North Korea might be the only nation with more prisoners per capita than America. There are many kinds of prisons, from detention centers to hard-labor camps, to gulags where your children, cousins, brothers, sisters, and parents would also be sent to for a crime you committed for generations to come. About 1% of the population- 200,000 people -permanently work in labor camps. The threat of these prisons has made it impossible for organized resistance to happen.
It's hard to escape, and if you do, then your relatives end up labor camps. Other nations aren't keen on refugees - South Korea fears a collapse of North Korea and being overrun by 23 million people seeking food and shelter, and China has their own problems with 1.2 billion poor people.
The consequences of peak energy in North Korea are worse than what's likely to happen initially in America, though some regions of the United States are likely to suffer more than others. On the other hand, when times get hard, group-oriented cultures that depend on a large network of people tend to do better than highly individualist cultures, which is as you can learn more about in Dmitry Orlov's Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century (2).
The only good aspect I could find about North Korea was that the women there are less repressed than in the past. A century ago Korean women were so completely covered in clothing that the Taliban would find no faults. In one village north of Pyongyang women wore 7 foot long, 5 feet broad and 3 feet deep wicker hat constructions that kept women hidden from head to toe. Perhaps even more than Muslim women Korean women were imprisoned in family compounds and could only leave at special times when the streets were cleared of men. One historian said that Korean women were "very rigidly secluded, perhaps more absolutely than women of any other nation".
After the Korean War ended, North Korea lost most of its infrastructure and 70% of its housing. It was amazing that Kim Il-sung managed to create a Spartan economy where most were sheltered and clothed, had electricity, and few were illiterate. Grain and other foods were distributed as well. In autumn each family got about 150 pounds of cabbage per person to make kimchi, which was stored in tall earthen jars buried the garden so they would stay cold but not freeze and hidden from thieves.
North Korea became utterly dependent on the kindness of other countries for oil, food, fertilizer, vehicles, and so on.
What happens when the oil stops flowing?
In the early 1990s North Korea suffered a double blow at a time when they were $10 billion in debt. China wanted cash up front for fuel and food while at the same time the Soviet Union demanded the much higher price of what oil was selling for on world markets
The nation spun into a crash. Without oil and raw materials the factories shut down. With no exports, there was no money to buy fuel and food with. Electric plants shut, irrigation systems stopped running, and coal couldn't be mined. The results were:
Power stations and the electric grid rusted beyond fixing
The lights went out.
Running water stopped so most went to a public pump to get water
Electric trams operated infrequently
People climbed utility poles to steal pieces of copper wire to barter for food
There were few motor vehicles
And few tractors, farming was done with oxen dragging plows
Hunger struck, which made people too exhausted to work long at the few factories and farms that were still surviving.
Oil is liquid muscle. One barrel of crude oil (42-gallons) has 1,700 kilowatts of energy. It would take a fit human adult laboring more than 10 years to equal one barrel of oil.
Perhaps this is why many nations have had no choice but to rely on muscle power after an economic crash or during a war, which means putting many people to work on farms. After the energy crisis, North Koreans over 11 were sent out to the country to plant rice, haul soil, spray pesticides, and weed. This was called "volunteer work". Now that they couldn't afford to buy fertilizer, every family was expected to provide a human bucketful of excrement to a warehouse miles away. The bucket was exchanged for a chit that could be traded for food.
Like Mao's crazy schemes (3), North Korea's dictators lurched from one mad idea to another -- one day it was goat breeding, the next ostrich farms, or switching from rice to potatoes.
Food staples were grown on collective farms, and the state took the harvest and redistributed it. The farmers weren't given enough to survive on, so they slacked on their collective fields to grow food to survive on, making the food crisis even worse. In the end, it was people in cities with no land to grow their own food on who ended up starving first. Every year, rationed amounts of food went down.
People were told the United States was at fault, and propaganda campaigns encouraged Koreans to think of themselves as tough, and that enduring hunger without complaint was a patriotic duty, and kept everyone's hopes up by promising bumper crops in the coming harvest. The Koreans deceived themselves like the German Jews in the 1930s, and told themselves it couldn't get any worse, things would get better. But they didn't.
Worse yet, instead of spending money on agriculture, the defense budget sucked up a quarter of the GNP. One million men out of 23 million people were kept in arms - the 4th largest military in the world.
The only place to get food became the illegal black market, where prices were terribly high, sometimes 250 times higher than what the state used to sell food for.
Natural disasters made harvests even worse - in 1994 and 1995 Korea was struck with an extremely cold winter and torrential rains in the summer that destroyed the homes of 500,000 people and rice crops for 5.2 million people.
People began picking weeds and wild grasses to stretch out meals, as well as leaves, husks, stems, and the cobs of corn. Children can't digest food this rough and could end up in a hospital, where doctors advised the rough material be ground up fine and cooked a long time. It wasn't long before malnutrition led to increasing numbers of people with pellagra and other diseases. Hospitals soon ran out drugs and other supplies.
Who died?
Children under five. Mothers couldn't produce enough breast milk, nor was there baby formula, regular milk, or even ground up rice. Children were the most vulnerable from poor diets. A minor cold would turn into pneumonia, diarrhea into dysentery.
Then the elderly. First those over 70, then people in their 60s and 50s.
Even men and women in the prime of their lives began to die. Men first because they have less body fat. Also, the strongest and most athletic because their metabolisms burn more calories.
The most innocent. People who wouldn't steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend. The simple and kind-hearted who did what they were told. It's said that the survivors of Auschwitz didn't want to see each other again because they'd all done things they were ashamed of.
Death was certain for people who didn't have the initiative to do something.
Chronic malnutrition makes it hard to fight infections, and people grow more susceptible to tuberculosis and typhoid. Once starved enough, antibiotics stop working, so curable illnesses become fatal. Hunger changes body chemistry to wildly fluctuate resulting in strokes and heart attacks.
The city of Chongjin had always suffered epidemics because its sewage system let untreated feces into streams. Once electricity stopped working, running water became so unreliable that people stored water in large vats which bred typhoid bacteria. Between a lack of soap and antibiotics it wasn't long before typhoid epidemics broke out.
By 1998 about 10% of the population had died from famine, and in some areas 20%, up to 2 million people. The numbers would have been much higher if North Korea hadn't received $2.4 billion in food aid between 1996 and 2005.
The North Korean government began to execut people for just about anything: stealing copper wire, goat, corn, or cattle theft, anyone stealing or hoarding or selling grains on the black market, adultery, prostitution, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, and so on. Thousands of people were thrown into prisons and many didn't survive.
Who survived?
People did not passively die. When the public food distribution ended they did whatever they could figure out to feed themselves. Some made bucket and string traps to catch small field animals, used nets to catch sparrows, stripped the sweet inner bark of pine trees and ground it into a powder to replace flour. Acorns were mashed into a paste. Kernels of undigested corn were pulled out of the feces of farm animals. Shipyard workers scraped the slime off the bottom where food had been stored and dried the foul-smelling goop on roofs to get tiny grains of uncooked rice out. Others dug shellfish out and ate seaweed. When making cornmeal, the husk, cob, leaves and stem were thrown into the grinder. Grass was added to make stews look like they had vegetables.
People rested instead of moving around to preserve their calories.
To stay alive, you had to suppress any impulse to share food.
You had to stop caring, to be able to see a dead body on the street and walk on by, and not stop to help a beloved neighbor's 5-year-old on the verge of death. Indifference was a survival skill.
At this point, just about everyone looked at what they owned and could sell to get food. Usually within 5 years most people had run out of possessions to sell, and even sold goods that helped them survive like bicycles for transport or sewing machines to make clothes to sell.
One of the most valuable items a person could own was a hand mill to grind corn, because there was no electricity for electric grinders. People would come for miles to have their corn ground manually.
Some walked around the edges of their city looking for shellfish, birds, or berries, but most cities were concrete jungles, and people needed to go much further in their search for food. In the city of Chongjin families hiked 3 miles to a collective orchard to look for fruit that had fallen and rolled under the fence surrounding the orchard. As food dwindled, children cut school to go to the orchard and squeezed through the wire fence to get fruit. When there was no more fruit to be scavenged, people went further out from the cities looking not just for food, but for firewood. Farms began to hire armed guards.
Children climbed walls and dug up vegetables and kimchi pots buried in private gardens. As the famine worsened, hungry soldiers began raiding people's gardens as well.
In smaller towns and villages, people crammed the narrow spaces between homes with peppers, radishes, and cabbages, those with flat roofs put pots of vegetables on top.
Some raised pigs or made tofu. Many women made cookies because they only took 10 minutes to bake, a lot less time than bread, at a time when firewood and anything else that would burn was hard to find. Cookies made a quick meal for hungry people on the move. When many made the same goods, having the best personality counted.
As coal and wood ran out, and electricity very rare, many foods people had made to trade for rice couldn't be done anymore.
Even dandelions and weeds grew scarce. Hot pepper, salt, and other flavorings that might have made weeds, ground sawdust, and inner bark flour palatable were expensive. Oil was unavailable at any price, making cooking even more difficult. It wasn't long before North Korea's frog population was wiped out by over-hunting. People ate grasshoppers, tadpoles, cicadas, and dogs.
Many hung out at train stations, hoping to go somewhere better. The homeless began to live at the train stations, most of them children or teenagers, often because the parents and grandparents had starved themselves to death first to keep the children alive. Many orphans roamed fearing others would steal from them, or even eat them, as rumors of cannibalism spread. Train stations were a place many dead bodies could be found.
Train stations also were full of prostitutes, often young married women desperate to feed their children. The only payment they asked for was food. Those with apartments nearby could get money or food letting prostitutes briefly rent out a room.
Cities that relied on the falling apart roads and rail lines had to pay the most for food, especially rice, the main staple.
Those with keys to abandoned factories dismantled them and made everything from the machinery to the wood doors into other sell-able products.
Women made sneakers from discarded rubber, built carts from old tires and doors.
Some found books on Oriental medicine and picked mountain herbs. Doctors performed abortions because families couldn't afford babies.
Food aid agencies did a survey in the summer of 2008 and found that two-thirds of people were still picking grass and weeds to survive on.
Despite all the crackdowns on the black market, by 2009 there were some who'd made so much money they were becoming almost middle class. Kim Jong-il solved that problem by invalidating the currency in circulation and issuing new bills as a to confiscate the cash people had saved. The new currency was so worthless that the most money you could convert was $30, instantly throwing anyone who'd done well back into poverty. The economy crashed even lower, and starvation became common again.
Supply chains broke down
Just about anything you could think of grew scarce - there were no bricks, cement, glass, or lumber. When windows broke they were covered with boards or plastic. Supply chains were broken. One school, desperate for glass, devised a scheme to sell the famous pottery of their town for salt in Nampo, sell the salt at a profit, and use that money to buy glass from the only factory in North Korea that still made glass.
A clothing factory that made uniforms started to have trouble in 1988 when shipments of fabric were delayed. Sometimes this was because there was no anthracite coal which was a raw material used to make the fabric (vinalon), or there wasn't electricity at the factory. Management tried to keep the women busy by sending them out along railroad tracks to collect dog s*** for fertilizer. Other days they'd look for scrap metal along the tracks or in the effluent coming out of the pipes at the steelworks.
How to be a Dictator
If you want to be a dictator this book is a good how-to manual. Kim Il-sung went further than most dictators by fostering a cult of personality that made him into a God so he could harness the power of faith by invoking religious sentiments in the people. He took the cult of personality to an extreme - everyone had to have a photo of him on a blank wall with nothing else, and use a white cloth that could be used for nothing else to keep the photo clean. Surprise visits of the Public Standards Police ensured this was the case.
He also terrified everyone with the threat of going to prison.
Children didn't celebrate their own birthdays, only Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il's, whose birthdays were national holidays and often the only time people got meat. After the energy crisis, these would were the only days when there was electricity, and children got about two pounds of sweets. Children were expected to stand in front of the portrait while enjoying their treats.
Korean teachers are required to play the accordion to motivate children, or "voluntary hard labor" in the fields or a construction site.
Further Reading
Inside North Korea's Environmental Collapse. Phil McKenna 06 Mar 2013. pbs.org
Pfeiffer, Dale Allen. 17 Nov 2003. Drawing Lessons from Experience; The Agricultural Crises in North Korea and Cuba. From the Wilderness.
References
(1) energyskeptic Sustainability and place: How emerging mega-trends of the 21st century will affect humans and nature at the landscape level
(2) energyskeptic Dmitry Orlov: How Russians survived the collapse of the Soviet Union
(3) energyskeptic Mao's War Against Nature
