Nothing to Envy (16 page)

What had started as a spontaneous outpouring of grief became a patriotic obligation. Women weren’t supposed to wear makeup or do their hair during a ten-day mourning period. Drinking, dancing, and music were banned. The
inminban
kept track of how often people went to the statue to show their respect. Everybody was being watched. They not only scrutinized actions, but facial expressions and tone of voice, gauging them for sincerity.

Mi-ran had to go twice a day for the ten-day mourning period, once with the children from the kindergarten and once just with her work unit of teachers. She began to dread it, not just the grief but the responsibility of making sure the fragile children didn’t get trampled or work themselves into hysteria. There was one five-year-old girl in her class who cried so loudly and was so demonstrative in her grief that Mi-ran worried she would collapse. But then she noticed the girl was spitting in her hand to dampen her face with saliva. There were no actual tears.

“My mother told me if I don’t cry, I’m a bad person,” the girl confessed.

A well-known actress from Chongjin found herself in the uncomfortable position of being unable to force out her tears. This not only put her politically at risk, but professionally. “It’s my job. I’m supposed to cry on demand,” the actress, Kim Hye-young, recalled years later in Seoul.

Hyuck and his school friends went to the statue frequently because there were sticky rice cakes handed out after you bowed. They would pay their respects then get back in line for another rice cake.

Among the millions of North Koreans who took part in the mass display of grief for Kim Il-sung, how many were faking? Were they crying for the death of the Great Leader or for themselves? Or were they crying because everybody else was? If there is one lesson taught by scholars of mass behavior, from the historians of the
Salem witch hunts to Charles Mackay, author of the classic
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
, hysteria is infectious. In the middle of a crowd of crying people, the only natural human reaction is to cry oneself.

No doubt many people were sincerely overcome with grief at his passing. Whether it was due to shock or suffering, many older North Koreans suffered heart attacks and strokes during this period of mourning—so much so that there was a marked increase in the death rate in the immediate aftermath. Many others showed their distress by killing themselves. They jumped from the tops of buildings, a favorite method of suicide in North Korea since nobody had sleeping pills and only soldiers had guns with bullets. Others just starved themselves. One of these was the father of Dr. Kim Ji-eun, a pediatrician at the municipal hospital in Chongjin.

Boy in Hamhung hospital
.

A
T THE TIME OF KIM IL-SUNG’S DEATH THERE WAS NO GASOLINE
for the few ambulances in Chongjin so patients had to be carried piggyback or wheeled on wooden carts to the hospital. Kim Ji-eun worked at a small district hospital, but it was the closest to Pohang Square—only a fifteen-minute walk away—so it received a disproportionate share of the people who were injured or who collapsed in the commotions in front of the statue. Patients filled the
metal beds that were crammed five into small rooms while more waited their turn on wooden benches or sprawled on the floors of the dim corridors. Lights were rarely switched on during the day because the electrical supply was diverted to keep the Kim Il-sung statue illuminated around the clock. It had already been a busy summer because of an outbreak of typhoid. In pediatrics, parents carried in limp children who’d become dangerously dehydrated from crying in the hot sun. Some had even suffered convulsions. Dr. Kim’s normal shift ran from 7:30
A.M.
to 8:00
P.M.
, but these days she stayed at the hospital almost around the clock, except for the few times she ventured out to pay her respects at the statue. She never complained about the long hours, though. Dr. Kim took her medical oath seriously. Besides, hard work distracted her from the warning signs that her own life was falling apart.

At twenty-eight, Dr. Kim was one of the youngest doctors in the hospital and certainly the smallest. She was four foot eleven in heels, barely taller than some of her juvenile patients, and weighed less than a hundred pounds. Her pursed red-bow lips and heart-shaped face gave her a deceptively delicate appearance. Perhaps to compensate she adopted a no-nonsense personality and her colleagues, particularly the men, quickly learned not to patronize her. If they found her prickly, they also admired her dedication. She was always the first to volunteer for unpaid extra shifts. After hours, she worked in the secretariat of the Workers’ Party. The hospital, like every North Korean institution, had a party secretary whose job it was to ensure the ideological health of the workplace and to choose the workers who would become party members. Though only one in four doctors at the hospital would be admitted to the party, Dr. Kim was certain she would be among the chosen. For one thing, women were often favored as party members because most didn’t drink alcohol and were thought to be more rule-abiding. Then there was Dr. Kim’s disciplined and somewhat unforgiving personality, which suited her profile as a committed future party member. No doubt her dedication to the North Korean system of government was sincere, having been nurtured by her father since childhood.

Manchuria has a large ethnic Korean population, the result of
centuries of migration back and forth across the Tumen and Yalu Rivers, which form the boundary separating Korea from China. Dr. Kim’s father was born in a Korean-speaking village just across the border. He moved to North Korea as a young man in the early 1960s to escape Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward, which had resulted in millions of famine deaths. Dr. Kim’s father viewed Kim Il-sung, not Mao, as the true inheritor of the Communist dream, the one who would be able to fulfill the promises of equality and justice made to workingmen like himself. He was a simple construction worker who had been schooled only through sixth grade, but his intelligence and devotion were recognized in North Korea and he had been admitted to the Workers’ Party. He’d served as party secretary for his own construction team until a mild stroke a few years earlier had forced him to retire. Since he had no sons, it was his ambition that his daughter would continue his work for the party and contribute to the fatherland he embraced unreservedly.

The future Dr. Kim obliged with enthusiasm. She was thrilled when, at seven, she became a member of the Young Pioneers and tied around her neck their signature bright red scarf. At thirteen she graduated to the Socialist Youth League and wore her Kim Il-sung pin proudly. Admittance to the league is a standard rite of passage for North Koreans, but when a child is admitted—at thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen—depends upon conduct and grades. From her earliest days in elementary school, it was evident that Kim Ji-eun was a precocious student. She was the girl with the impeccable handwriting, the one who always raised her hand first to answer the teacher’s questions, the student with the best grades. By midway through school, she had been plucked out of her class to attend medical school. No matter that she had dreamed of being a teacher or a journalist; it was an honor for the daughter of a construction worker to be chosen to become a doctor.

She entered Chongjin University Medical School at sixteen, two years younger than her peers, two thirds of whom were female. She still looked like a teenager when she finished the seven-year program and started her apprenticeship at Provincial People’s Hospital No. 2, which was affiliated with the medical school and was the most prestigious hospital in North Hamgyong province. Locals
called it the “Czech Hospital” because back in the 1960s, when it still meant something to be in the Communist family of nations, a team of doctors came from Czechoslovakia with X-ray machines and baby incubators. The hospital still enjoyed its European cachet though the Czechs were long gone and most of the equipment was held together with plastic tape. After her internship, Dr. Kim was sent out to be a general practitioner at one of the smaller hospitals, serving the Pohang district, where she lived.

Dr. Kim had to report to work by 7:30
A.M.
Regulations required that she work a twelve-hour day and treat at least thirty-two patients. She usually spent the morning in the hospital, then was sent out in a team for the afternoons. She wore a white coat and a white cap that covered her hair and made her look a little like a short-order cook. She lugged with her a heavy bag that contained a stethoscope and syringes, bandages, digestive pills, and antibiotics. As part of a three-doctor team, she would visit schools and apartment compounds. Each block of homes had its own hygiene unit, which worked together with the
inminban
.

“The doctors are here! The doctors are here,” the shouts would echo across the courtyards. People would start queuing up by the hygiene office, pushing crying toddlers forward in the line, ready to show off a sore hand or a rash they had been nursing for weeks in anticipation of the doctors’ visit.

North Korean doctors are expected to serve the people selflessly. Because of a shortage of X-ray machines, they often must use crude fluoroscopy machines that expose them to high levels of radiation; many older North Korean doctors now suffer from cataracts as a result. They not only donate their own blood, but also small bits of skin to provide grafts for burn victims. Dr. Kim was excused from this last obligation only because her height and weight were far below average, but it didn’t exempt her from the obligation of trekking out to the mountains to gather medicinal herbs.

Making one’s own medicine is an integral part of being a doctor in North Korea. Those living in warmer climates often grow cotton as well to make their own bandages. Doctors are all required to collect the herbs themselves; Dr. Kim’s work unit took off as much as a month in spring and autumn to gather herbs, during which time the
doctors slept out in the open and washed only every few days. Each had a quota to fill. They had to bring their haul back to the hospital pharmacy, where it would be weighed, and if the amount was insufficient, they would be sent out again. Often, the doctors had to hike far into the mountains because the more accessible areas had already been scoured by ordinary citizens who sought to sell the herbs or use them for themselves. The most coveted was peony root, which was used as a muscle relaxant and to treat nervous disorders. Wild yam was thought to regulate menstrual cycles. Dandelion was used to stimulate digestion and ginger to prevent nausea.
Atractylodes
, which is also popular in Chinese medicine to strengthen immunity, was used when it was impossible to get antibiotics.

For years, North Korean hospitals had been using herbal remedies in combination with Western medicine. Instead of painkillers, the doctors used cupping, a technique in which a suction cup is applied to stimulate circulation to parts of the body. Another technique borrowed from the Chinese involved lighting sticks of mug-wort next to the afflicted area. With anesthesia in short supply, acupuncture would be used for simpler surgeries, such as appendectomies.

“When it works, it works very well,” Dr. Kim told me years later. And when it didn’t? Patients would be strapped to the operating table to prevent them from flailing about. For the most part, North Koreans were stoical about enduring pain during medical treatment. “They weren’t like South Koreans, who scream and holler about the slightest little thing,” Dr. Kim said.

For all its shortcomings, North Korea’s public health system provided the public with better care than they’d had in pre-Communist times. The right to “universal free medical service … to improve working people’s health” was in fact written into the North Korean constitution. Dr. Kim was proud to be a part of the health-care system and gratified by the service she provided her patients. But by the early 1990s, the deficiencies in the system became more pronounced. Much of the medical equipment was obsolete and broken down, with spare parts impossible to obtain since the factories in the Communist-bloc countries where they were manufactured were by now privatized. The pharmaceutical factory in Chongjin curtailed
its production due to a lack of supplies and electricity. There was little money to import pharmaceuticals from abroad. The bag that Dr. Kim carried on her rounds had gotten progressively lighter until she had nothing inside but her stethoscope. All she could do for patients was write prescriptions and hope that they had a connection in China or Japan, or a stash of money to buy the drugs on the black market.

Dr. Kim’s frustration spilled out into the open in 1993 when she had her first serious clash with hospital management. She had been asked to treat a twenty-seven-year-old man who had been convicted of an economic crime—meaning he’d been engaged in private business. He had served three years of a seven-year term before he was transferred from prison to the hospital. He was bruised and badly malnourished, his ribs protruding. He suffered from acute bronchitis. She wanted to give him an antibiotic. Her boss overruled her.