Nothing to Envy (20 page)

MI-RAN’S ELATION AFTER
the trip soon evaporated. As the adrenaline rush of the adventure left her, she felt drained and uneasy. The difficulty of getting to and from Pyongyang underscored the hopelessness of the romance. She didn’t know when she would see Jun-sang again. He was ensconced in university life, while she lived with her family back home. How was it that, in a country as small as North Korea, Pyongyang could feel as far away as the moon?

She was also nagged by some of what she’d seen on her journey. It had been the first time in years that she’d traveled outside
Chongjin, and even in her distracted state, she couldn’t help noticing how shabby everything looked along the way. She saw children barely older than her own pupils dressed in rags, begging food at the train stations.

Their last night in Nampo, after buying the glass, she and her companions were sleeping outside the train station since they didn’t have money for a hotel and the weather was mild. In front of the station, there was a small park, really more like a traffic rotary with a tree in the center and a grassy lawn on which people had spread out cardboard boxes and vinyl mats to sleep. Mi-ran had dropped into a fitful sleep, turning this way and that trying to get comfortable, when she saw that a group of people had stood up. They were talking quietly among themselves and pointing to one of the people near them, curled up under the tree, soundly asleep. Except he wasn’t. He was dead.

After a while, a wooden ox cart pulled up. The people who were standing around grabbed the body by the arms and ankles and hoisted it up. Just before the body dropped with a thud onto the wooden planks, Mi-ran caught a glimpse of it. The dead man looked young, maybe even a teenager, judging from the smooth skin around his chin. His shirt fell open as the legs were lifted, revealing the bare skin of his chest. The ridges of his ribs glowed luminescently out of the darkness. He was emaciated, skinnier than any human being she’d ever seen, but then again, she’d never seen a dead body before. She shuddered and drifted back off to sleep.

Afterward she wondered what had happened to the man. Could he have died of hunger? Despite the fact that nobody had quite enough food these days and even the government had acknowledged a food crisis after the floods of the previous summer, Mi-ran had never heard of anybody starving to death in North Korea. That happened in Africa or in China. Indeed, the older people talked of all the Chinese who died during the 1950s and 1960s because of Mao’s disastrous economic policies. “We’re so lucky to have Kim Il-sung,” they would say.

Mi-ran regretted that she hadn’t asked Jun-sang what was going on—she hadn’t mentioned it because she didn’t want to ruin their few hours together—but now, back at home, she started noticing
things she hadn’t before. She had remarked when she first came to the kindergarten on the small size of her pupils; now they looked like they were growing younger, time turning backward, like a movie reel run in reverse. Each child was supposed to bring from home a bundle of firewood for the furnace in the school basement but many had trouble carrying it. Their big heads lolled on top of scrawny necks; their delicate rib cages protruded over waists so small that she could encircle them with her hands. Some of them were starting to swell in the stomach. It was all becoming clear to her. Mi-ran remembered seeing a photograph of a famine victim in Somalia with a protruding stomach; although she didn’t know the medical terminology, she remembered from her teachers’ college course on nutrition that it was caused by severe protein deficiency. Mi-ran also noticed that the children’s black hair was getting lighter, more copper-toned.

The school cafeteria had closed for lack of food. The students were instructed to bring a lunch box from home, but many came empty-handed. When it was only one or two who didn’t have lunch, Mi-ran would take one spoon each from those with to give to those without. But soon the parents who sent lunch came in to complain.

“We don’t have enough at home to share,” pleaded one mother.

Mi-ran heard a rumor that the school might get some biscuits and powdered milk from a foreign humanitarian aid agency. A delegation was visiting another school in the area and the children with the best clothing were brought out, the road leading to the school repaired, the building and courtyards swept immaculately clean. But no foreign aid arrived. Instead, the teachers were given a small plot of land nearby on which they were ordered to grow corn. The corn was later scraped off the cob and boiled until it puffed up like popcorn. It was a snack to ease the children’s hunger pangs, but it didn’t provide enough calories to make a difference.

The teachers weren’t supposed to play favorites, but Mi-ran definitely had one. The girl was named Hye-ryung (Shining Benevolence), and even at the age of six she was the class beauty. She had the longest eyelashes Mi-ran had ever seen on a child and they surrounded bright round eyes. In the beginning, she was a lively, attentive student, one of the ones who delighted Mi-ran by the way she
stared adoringly at her teacher as though trying to capture every word. Now she was lethargic and sometimes fell asleep in class.

“Wake up. Wake up,” Mi-ran called out to her one day when she saw the girl slumped over her desk, her head turned so that her cheek pressed against the wooden desk.

Mi-ran cupped her hands under the girl’s chin and held up her face. Her eyes had narrowed to slits sunken beneath swollen lids. She was unfocused. The hair spilling out around Mi-ran’s hands was brittle and unpleasant to the touch.

A few days later, the girl stopped coming to school. Since Mi-ran knew her family from the neighborhood, she thought she should stop by the home to ask after her. But somehow she held back. What was the point? She knew exactly what was wrong with Hye-ryung. She had no way of fixing it.

Too many others in her class were in the same situation. They’d flop over their desks during lessons. At recess, when others went scampering out to the monkey bars and swings, they stayed put, either sleeping at their desks or stretched out on the nap-time mats.

Always the same progression: first, the family wouldn’t be able to send the quota of firewood; then the lunch bag would disappear; then the child would stop participating in class and would sleep through recess; then, without explanation, the child would stop coming to school. Over three years, enrollment in the kindergarten dropped from fifty students to fifteen.

What happened to those children? Mi-ran didn’t pry too deeply for fear of the answer she didn’t want to hear.

THE NEXT TIME MI-RAN
saw Jun-sang it was winter. It was his turn to surprise her. He had come home from school early for vacation. Rather than dropping by her house and risking an encounter with her parents, he came to the kindergarten. School had let out for the day, but she was still there, cleaning the classroom.

The classroom had no adult chairs, so Mi-ran folded herself into the little chair behind the wooden desk where her favorite pupil was so easily able to wedge her tiny body. She told Jun-sang what was happening to her students. He tried to reassure her.

“What can
you
do?” he said. “Even a king couldn’t help these people. Don’t take it all on your shoulders.”

The conversation was awkward, as they talked around the embarrassing truth. Neither was suffering for lack of food. What Jun-sang’s father couldn’t grow in his vegetable patch next to the house, they bought on the black market with their stash of Japanese yen. Oddly enough, Mi-ran was eating better than she had in years, a result of having left the college dormitory for her parents’ home. In the midst of the economic crisis, somehow the family’s poor class standing didn’t matter so much. Mi-ran’s gorgeous eldest sister had married surprisingly well, her good looks trumping the troubled family background. Her husband was in the military and used his connections to help the rest of the family. Mi-ran’s mother continued to find new ways to make money. After the electricity went out, she couldn’t operate the freezer she used for her soy-milk ice cream, but she started a few other businesses—raising pigs, making tofu, grinding corn.

A DECADE LATER
, when Mi-ran was a mother herself, trying to lose her postpregnancy weight through aerobics, this period of her life weighed like a stone on her conscience. She often felt sick over what she did and didn’t do to help her young students. How could she have eaten so well herself when they were starving?

It is axiomatic that one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. So it was for Mi-ran. What she didn’t realize is that her indifference was an acquired survival skill. In order to get through the 1990s alive, one had to suppress any impulse to share food. To avoid going insane, one had to learn to stop caring. In time, Mi-ran would learn how to walk around a dead body on the street without paying much notice. She could pass a five-year-old on the verge of death without feeling obliged to help. If she wasn’t going to share her food with her favorite pupil, she certainly wasn’t going to help a perfect stranger.

Propaganda poster for the Arduous March
.

I
T HAS BEEN SAID THAT PEOPLE REARED IN COMMUNIST COUNTRIES
cannot fend for themselves because they expect the government to take care of them. This was not true of many of the victims of the North Korean famine. People did not go passively to their deaths. When the public distribution system was cut off, they were forced to tap their deepest wells of creativity to feed themselves. They devised traps out of buckets and string to catch small animals in the field, draped nets over their balconies to snare sparrows. They educated themselves in the nutritive properties of plants. They reached back into their collective memory of famines past and recalled the survival tricks of their forefathers. They stripped the sweet inner bark of pine trees to grind into a fine powder that could
be used in place of flour. They pounded acorns into a gelatinous paste that could be molded into cubes that practically melted in your mouth.

North Koreans learned to swallow their pride and hold their noses. They picked kernels of undigested corn out of the excrement of farm animals. Shipyard workers developed a technique by which they scraped the bottoms of the cargo holds where food had been stored, then spread the foul-smelling gunk on the pavement to dry so that they could collect from it tiny grains of uncooked rice and other edibles.

On the beaches, people dug out shellfish from the sand and filled buckets with seaweed. When the authorities in 1995 erected fences along the beach (ostensibly to keep out spies, but more likely to prevent people from catching fish the state companies wanted to control), people went out to the unguarded cliffs over the sea and with long rakes tied together hoisted up seaweed.

Nobody told people what to do—the North Korean government didn’t want to admit to the extent of the food shortage—so they fended for themselves. Women exchanged recipe tips. When making cornmeal, don’t throw out the husk, cob, leaves, and stem of the corn—throw it all into the grinder. Even if it isn’t nutritious, it is filling. Boil noodles for at least an hour to make them appear bigger. Add a few leaves of grass to soup to make it look as if it contains vegetables. Powder pine bark to make cakes.

All ingenuity was devoted to the gathering and production of food. You woke up early to find your breakfast and as soon as it was finished, you thought about what to find for dinner. Lunch was a luxury of the past. You slept during what used to be lunchtime to preserve your calories.

Ultimately it was not enough.

AFTER THE GARMENT FACTORY CLOSED
, Mrs. Song floundered, wondering what to do with herself. She was still a good Communist with a natural dislike of anything that reeked of capitalism. Her beloved marshal, Kim Il-sung, had warned repeatedly that socialists
must “guard against the poisonous ideas of capitalism and revisionism.” She liked to quote that particular saying.

Then again, nobody in the family had gotten paid since the Great Leader’s death—not even her husband, with his party membership and prestigious job at the radio station. Chang-bo wasn’t even getting the free wine and tobacco that were the customary perks of a journalist. Mrs. Song knew it was time to put aside her scruples and make money. But how?

She was about as unlikely an entrepreneur as one could imagine. She was fifty years old and had no business skills other than the ability to tally numbers on the abacus. When she mulled this predicament with her family, however, they reminded her of her talents in the kitchen. Back in the days when you could get ingredients, Mrs. Song enjoyed cooking, and Chang-bo liked to eat. Her repertoire was naturally limited in that North Koreans had no exposure to foreign cuisines, but their own was surprisingly sophisticated for a country whose name is now synonymous with famine. (In fact, many restaurateurs in South Korea come from north of the border.) North Korean cooks are creative, using natural ingredients such as pine mushrooms and seaweed. Whatever happens to be fresh and seasonal is mixed with rice, barley, or corn, and seasoned with red bean paste or chilies. The signature dish is Pyongyang
naengmyon
, cold buckwheat noodles served in a vinegary broth with myriad regional variations, adding hard-boiled eggs, cucumbers, or pears. If she was busy, Mrs. Song bought noodles from a shop; if not, she made them from scratch. Using the limited range of ingredients from the public distribution system, she could make
twigim
, batter-fried vegetables that were light and crisp. For her husband’s birthday, she turned rice into a sweet glutinous cake called
deok
. She knew how to make her own corn liquor. Her daughters boasted that her kimchi was the best in the neighborhood.