Nothing to Envy (32 page)

When he arrived in Chongjin for his winter vacation he was preparing to ask his brother in his most nonchalant voice if he’d seen Mi-ran around. But his brother preempted his question, blurting out, “She’s gone!”

“Gone? Gone where?” Jun-sang couldn’t accept what he was hearing. He hadn’t had a hint that Mi-ran was planning a trip. She always told him everything she was doing, didn’t she? Though he’d thought that her letters were perhaps a little chilly over the summer, that maybe she was brooding over his reluctance to commit to marriage, he couldn’t believe she’d leave without a word. He squeezed his brother for information.

“They’re all gone. There’s a rumor they’ve gone to South Korea.” It was as much as his brother knew.

He went to her neighborhood to investigate. First he circled around as though he were conducting surveillance; he couldn’t bring himself to get any closer. His stomach was clenched; he could feel his pulse racing in his neck. A few days later he returned. He planted himself behind the wall where he used to wait for her to come out all those years they were dating secretly. He saw for himself: another family was living in her house.

Over the course of the vacation and in subsequent visits home, he kept returning to the house. It was not so much to gather information—nobody knew much beyond the rumors—but to do penance. What an idiot he had been. He hated himself; he had been every inch the indecisive intellectual, weighing every move until it was too late. It had taken him so long to ask her to marry him that she was gone. In truth, he had wanted to ask her to run away with him to South Korea, but didn’t have the courage. Throughout their relationship, he imagined himself as the one in charge. He was the man, he was two years older, he had a university degree. He brought her poems from Pyongyang and told her about books and movies she’d never heard of. But in the end she was the brave one and he was a coward. Nobody knew for sure, but he could feel it in his heart—she was in South Korea.

Shit, she did it before me
, he said to himself.

IN FACT, SHE DID
it before almost anybody.

In the nearly half a century that elapsed between the end of the Korean War and Mi-ran’s defection in October 1998, only 923 North Koreans had fled to South Korea. It was a minuscule number if you consider that while the Berlin Wall stood an average of 21,000 East Germans fled west every year.

Most of the North Koreans who defected were diplomats or officials traveling abroad. Hwang Jang-yop, a leading academic and official who had been one of Kim Jong-il’s professors, walked into the South Korean embassy in Beijing on his way home from a business trip. Occasionally a North Korean soldier would defy all odds and wriggle through the DMZ to defect. A handful of fishermen sailed to South Korea.

The North Korean regime took extraordinary measures to keep its population locked up. Fences were erected along the beaches in Chongjin and other coastal cities in the early 1990s to prevent people from sailing off to Japan. When North Koreans left the country on official business, they had to leave behind spouses and children who were effectively held hostage to assure their return. Defectors had to be able to live with the knowledge that their freedom came at the expense of loved ones who would likely spend the rest of their lives in a labor camp.

That changed in the late 1990s. The famine and the economic changes in China gave North Koreans new motivation to escape. From the border, they could see shiny new cars scooting along the wharf by the Tumen River. They could see with their own eyes that life in China looked good.

The same networks that had helped Mi-ran cross the river quickly expanded their operations. They charted new routes across the Tumen, locating the narrowest crossing points and bribing the border guards. If you couldn’t swim, you could pay somebody to carry you across. The numbers of defectors grew exponentially. By 2001, it was estimated that 100,000 North Koreans had sneaked into China, a small percentage of whom eventually defected to South Korea.

Traffic flowed both ways. North Koreans poured into China; Chinese goods poured into North Korea—not just food and clothing, but books, radios, magazines, even Bibles, which were illegal. DVDs stamped out by Chinese pirating factories were small and cheap. A smuggler could cram as many as a thousand DVDs into a single chest, with a layer of cigarettes on top as a bribe for the border guards. DVD players, too, were made in China and cost as little as twenty dollars, which was within the means of North Koreans earning money privately in the new economy. Big sellers were
Titanic, Con Air
, and
Witness
. Even more popular were South Korean movies and melodramatic and syrupy soap operas. South Korean situation comedies supposedly depicted the lives of working-class people, and North Korean viewers paid special attention to the kitchen appliances and the quality of the clothing of the characters. For the first time, ordinary North Koreans could watch, in their own language, dramas free of messages about Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il. They were offered a glimpse (albeit an idealized, commercial glimpse) of another way of life.

The North Korean government accused the United States and South Korea of sending in books and DVDs as part of a covert action to topple the regime. DVD salesmen were arrested and sometimes executed for treason. Members of the Workers’ Party delivered lectures warning people against the dangers of foreign culture:

Information in North Korea, however, wasn’t spread by books or newspapers or movies as much as it traveled by word of mouth. People who didn’t have the means to watch foreign DVDs would hear about them from others. Unbelievable tales spread about the wealth and technological development of neighboring countries. It
was said that the South Koreans had developed a car so sophisticated that it would start only if the driver blew into a breathalyzer to prove he was sober (untrue), and that ordinary Chinese peasants living across the border were so rich that they ate white rice three times a day (true).

A North Korean soldier would later recall a buddy who had been given an American-made nail clipper and was showing it off to his friends. The soldier clipped a few nails, admired the sharp, clean edges, and marveled at the mechanics of this simple item. Then he realized with a sinking heart: If North Korea couldn’t make such a fine nail clipper, how could it compete with American weapons?

For one North Korean student it was a photograph in the official media showing a South Korean on a picket line. The photograph was meant to illustrate the exploitation of the worker in capitalist society; instead the student noticed that the “oppressed” worker wore a jacket with a zipper and had a ballpoint pen in his pocket, both of which were luxuries at the time.

A North Korean maritime official was on a boat on the Yellow Sea in the mid-1990s when the radio accidentally picked up a South Korean broadcast. The program was a situation comedy that featured two young women fighting over a parking space at an apartment complex. He couldn’t grasp the concept of a place with so many cars that there was no room to park them. Although he was in his late thirties and fairly high-ranking, he had never known anyone who owned a private car—and certainly not young women. He assumed the radio program was a parody, but after a few days of mulling it over, it struck him that yes, there must be that many cars in South Korea.

He defected a few years later, as did the soldier who saw the nail clipper and the student who saw the photograph of the striker.

IN HER WILDEST DREAMS
Dr. Kim never imagined leaving North Korea. It was not that she was ignorant or lacking in curiosity about the world—she was an avid reader and loved tales of exotic faraway lands—but as far as she was concerned, North Korea was the very best country of all. Why go anywhere else?

Throughout her childhood, Dr. Kim had heard from her father about his miserable life in China before he fled to North Korea in the early 1960s. Dr. Kim felt fortunate to have been born in North Korea and was especially grateful that the government had allowed her, the daughter of a humble construction worker, to go to medical school for free. She felt that she owed her education and her life to her country. It was her greatest ambition to join the Workers’ Party and repay the debt she owed her nation.

“I would have donated my heart if the party told me. I was that patriotic,” she would later say.

Dr. Kim was working extra hours in her volunteer job—as an assistant in the party secretariat—when she learned that the party did not feel the same way about her.

The winter after Kim Il-sung’s death, Dr. Kim’s volunteer work required her to arrive at the hospital by 7:30
A.M.
, before any of the hospital’s other senior staff, so that she could tidy up the messy office of the party secretary, a female doctor in her fifties, a specialist in hepatitis, who was addressed as Comrade-Secretary Chung. The director’s office was a small room with the requisite portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il and walls lined with filing cabinets. The old wooden desk had drawers that didn’t quite close, so papers spilled out and were strewn across the floor. Newspapers, however, were meticulously arranged on the desk. They couldn’t be thrown on the floor lest somebody step on a photograph of Kim Jong-il or Kim Il-sung. Comrade-Secretary Chung wasn’t much of a reader or a writer; she was completely dependent on Dr. Kim to read the editorials in
Rodong Sinmun
and the local
Hambuk Sinmun
and prepare lectures for her. In return, Dr. Kim was confident the comrade-secretary would recommend her for party membership. She even dared to imagine that one day she might follow in the footsteps of her mentor and become the party secretary herself.

As she sorted through the mess, Dr. Kim noticed a wooden filing cabinet had been left open. Her curiosity got the better of her. A large envelope poked out of the files. She opened it and saw that it contained a list of names that she recognized as hospital employees, all of whom were to be placed under extra surveillance. Comments next to each name indicated what it was that made them suspect.
Mostly it had to do with class background—parents or grandparents who had been active churchgoers, children of former landowners, people whose families had emigrated from Japan, people with relatives in China.

Her own name was on the list.

Dr. Kim was incredulous. Her entire life, her behavior had been impeccable. She was a perfectionist by nature and held herself to an exacting standard. As a student, her grades were perfect. She was always the first to volunteer for extra work and to attend extra ideological sessions. Her father had come from China and still had relatives there, but Dr. Kim had never met or corresponded with them.

It had to be a mistake, she told herself.

Eventually the truth sank in. Comrade-Secretary Chung was stringing her along, exploiting her hard work and talent with absolutely no intention of letting her join the party. Even worse, Dr. Kim began to suspect that she was indeed under surveillance. She felt that the party officials at the hospital looked at her with interest.

Her suspicions were confirmed about two years later when she received a surprise visit at the hospital from a national security agent. The man worked for the Bowibu, the police unit that investigated political crimes. At first Dr. Kim thought he had come to inquire about a patient or co-workers, but he was asking questions only about her, her family, and her job, until finally he came to the point. His purpose in visiting was to find out if she was planning to defect.

“Leave North Korea?” Dr. Kim was indignant. She’d never considered such a thing. Of course, she had heard rumors of people who’d left, but she looked down on anyone who didn’t have the stamina to endure the Arduous March and would betray their country.

“Why would I want to leave?” she protested.

The agent enumerated the reasons. She had relatives in China. Her marriage had broken up. The hospital wasn’t paying salaries.

“You! We’re watching you. Don’t run!” he told her gruffly before he left.

Later, she replayed the conversation in her mind. The more she
thought about it, the more that the Bowibu man’s reasoning made sense. He had planted the idea and she found she couldn’t shake it.

Her life in North Korea was miserable. Her ex-husband had remarried soon after their divorce. Her six-year-old son lived with her former in-laws, as was typical in Korean divorces; by law and tradition, children belong to the father’s family and are listed only on the father’s family register. Dr. Kim could visit her son only on the occasional weekend, when she would fret about how small and skinny he was. Her ex-husband and in-laws didn’t have much food at home.