Nothing to Envy (9 page)

“Hah. If there are so many boots, how come my children never got any?” Chang-bo laughed aloud. The words tumbled out of his mouth before he could consider the consequences.

Mrs. Song never figured out which neighbor blabbed. Her husband’s remark was quickly reported to the head of the
inminban
, the neighborhood watchdogs, who in turn passed on the information to the Ministry for the Protection of State Security. This ominously named agency is effectively North Korea’s political police. It runs an extensive network of informers. By the accounts of defectors, there
is at least one informer for every fifty people—more even than East Germany’s notorious Stasi, whose files were pried open after German reunification.

Spying on one’s countrymen is something of a national pastime. There were the young vigilantes from the Socialist Youth League like the one who stopped Mrs. Song for not wearing a badge. They also made sure people weren’t violating the dress code by wearing blue jeans or T-shirts with Roman writing—considered a capitalist indulgence—or wearing their hair too long. The party issued regular edicts saying that men shouldn’t allow the hair on top of their head to grow longer than five centimeters—though an exemption was granted for balding men, who were permitted seven centimeters. If a violation was severe, the offender could be arrested by the Public Standards Police. There were also
kyuch’aldae
, mobile police units who roamed the streets looking for offenders and had the right to barge into people’s houses without notice. They would look for people who used more than their quota of electricity, a lightbulb brighter than 40 watts, a hot plate, or a rice cooker. During one of the surprise inspections, one of the neighbors tried to hide their hot plate under a blanket and ended up setting their apartment on fire. The mobile police often dropped in after midnight to see if there were any overnight guests who might have come to visit without travel permits. It was a serious offense, even if it was just an out-of-town relative, and much worse if the guest happened to be a lover. But it wasn’t just the police and the volunteer leagues who did the snooping. Everybody was supposed to be vigilant for subversive behavior and transgressions of the rules. Since the country was too poor and the power supply too unreliable for electronic surveillance, state security relied on human intelligence—snitches. The newspapers would occasionally run feature stories about heroic children who ratted out their parents. To be denounced by a neighbor for bad-mouthing the regime was nothing extraordinary.

Chang-bo’s interrogation lasted three days. The agents yelled and cursed at him, although they never beat him—at least that’s what he told his wife. He claimed afterward that his gift with language helped him talk his way out of the bind. He cited the truth in his defense.

“I wasn’t insulting anybody. I was simply saying that I haven’t been able to buy those boots and I’d like to have some for my family,” Chang-bo protested indignantly.

He made a convincing case. He was a commanding figure with his potbelly and his stern expression. He looked like the epitome of a Workers’ Party official. The political police in the end decided not to push the case and released him without charges.

When he returned home, he got a tongue-lashing from his wife that was almost harsher than the interrogation. It was the worst fight of their marriage. For Mrs. Song, it was not merely that her husband had been disrespectful of the government; for the first time in her life, she felt the stirrings of fear. Her conduct had always been so impeccable and her devotion so genuine that it never occurred to her that she might be vulnerable.

“Why did you say such nonsense when there were neighbors in the apartment? Didn’t you realize you could have jeopardized everything we have?” she railed at him.

In fact, they both realized how lucky they were. If not for Chang-bo’s excellent class background and his party membership, he would not have been let off so lightly. It helped, too, that Mrs. Song had at various times been head of the
inminban
in the building and commanded some respect from the state security officers. Chang-bo’s offhand remark was precisely the kind of thing that could result in deportation to a prison camp in the mountains if the offender didn’t have a solid position in the community. They had heard of a man who cracked a joke about Kim Jong-il’s height and was sent away for life. Mrs. Song personally knew a woman from her factory who was taken away for something she wrote in her diary. At the time, Mrs. Song hadn’t felt any pity for the woman. “The traitor probably deserved what she got,” she’d said to herself. Now she felt embarrassed for having thought such a thing.

The incident seemed to blow over. Chastened by the experience, Chang-bo was more careful about what he said outside the family, but his thoughts were running wild. For many years, Chang-bo had been fighting off the doubts that would periodically creep into his consciousness. Now those doubts were gelling into outright disbelief.
As a journalist, Chang-bo had more access to information than ordinary people. At the North Hamgyong Provincial Broadcasting Company, where he worked, he and his colleagues heard uncensored news reports from the foreign media. It was their job to sanitize it for domestic consumption. Anything positive that happened in capitalist countries or especially South Korea, which in 1988 hosted the Summer Olympics, was downplayed. Strikes, disasters, riots, murders—elsewhere—got plenty of coverage.

Chang-bo’s job was to report business stories. He toured collective farms, shops, and factories with a notebook and tape recorder, interviewing the managers. Back in the newsroom, he would write his stories in fountain pen (there were no typewriters) about how well the economy was doing. He always put a positive spin on the facts, although he tried to keep them at least plausible. By the time they were edited by his superiors in Pyongyang, however, any glimmer of the truth was gone. Chang-bo knew better than anyone that the supposed triumphs of the North Korean economy were fabrications. He had good reason to scoff at the report about the rubber boots.

He had one trusted friend from the radio station who shared his increasing disdain for the regime. When the two of them got together, Chang-bo would open a bottle of Mrs. Song’s
neungju
and, after a few drinks, they would let rip their true feelings.

“What a bunch of liars!” Chang-bo would say in an emphatic tone, taking care just the same not to speak loudly enough for the sound to carry through the thin plaster walls between the apartments.

“Crooks, all of them.”

“The son is even worse than the father.”

Oak-hee eavesdropped on her father and his friend. She nodded quietly in agreement. When her father noticed, he at first tried to shoo her away. Eventually he gave up. Swearing her to secrecy, he took her into his confidence. He told her that Kim Il-sung was not the anti-Japanese resistance fighter he claimed to be so much as a puppet of the Soviet Union. He told her that South Korea was now among the richest countries in Asia; even ordinary working people owned their own cars. Communism, he reported, was proving a failure
as an economic system. China and the Soviet Union were now embracing capitalism. Father and daughter would talk for hours, always taking care to keep their voices at a whisper in case a neighbor was snooping around. And, at such times, they always made sure that Mrs. Song, the true believer, was not at home.

The industrial district of Chongjin
.

A
S THE YEAR 1990 OPENED, THE BERLIN WALL HAD BEEN
reduced to chunks of rubble hawked by souvenir vendors in a soon-to-be-reunited Germany. The Soviet Union was being wrenched apart at the seams. Mao Zedong’s face was an iconic image on kitschy watches that American tourists bought in Beijing. The former Communist dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu, not coincidentally a close personal friend of Kim Il-sung’s, had recently been executed by a firing squad. Statues of Lenin were being pulled off their pedestals and smashed to pieces. Communist Party cadres around the world were gobbling up Big Macs for lunch and washing them down with Coca-Cola. In the hermit kingdom of North Korea, however, life carried on as it always had.

To the extent that North Korea’s censors allowed in reports of communism’s demise, they were watered down and twisted with a
distinctive spin. As far as the
Rodong Sinmun
was concerned, the troubles elsewhere in the Communist bloc were due to the inherent weakness of the people. (The North Korean press always liked to allude to the genetic superiority of Koreans.) The Eastern Europeans and the Chinese weren’t as strong by nature or as disciplined. They had deviated from the true path of socialism. If they had a genius on the order of Kim Il-sung to guide them, their Communist systems would be intact and thriving. In keeping with his teachings about self-reliance, North Koreans had to ignore what other countries were doing and continue on their own path.

So Mrs. Song squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself blind to the unmistakable signs that something was amiss. At first the clues were small, barely noticeable. The lightbulb that blinked out for a few seconds, then minutes, then hours, then days. The electricity became increasingly sporadic until you could expect only a few hours, a few nights a week. The running water stopped. Mrs. Song quickly figured out that when the water came on she’d better fill up as many buckets and pots as she could. But it was never enough for washing because the water pumps in the building ran on electricity and the water ran out before the power came back on. She collected plastic jugs and took them down the block to a public pump. Fetching water became part of her morning routine. It went on the chore list after folding the bedding and dusting the portraits of Kim Il-sung. Although she no longer had small children in the house, she had to get up earlier than ever before. The electric tram that she took to work down Road No. 1 was operating infrequently and when it came it would be so overcrowded that people hung off a ladder on the back. Mrs. Song didn’t want to jostle with all the young men on the tram to get a place, so she usually walked. It took her one hour on foot.

Chongjin’s factories girded the coastline, stretching for nearly eight miles from Pohang in the north down to Nanam, the former Japanese military base, which was now headquarters for the 6th Army division of the Korean People’s Army. The biggest factories were Chongjin Steel and Kimchaek Iron and Steel, Chemical Textile, Second Metal Construction, May 10 Coal Mine Machinery, and the Majon Deer Company, which produced a medicine made from deer
antlers. Mrs. Song worked at the northern end of the industrial strip at the Chosun Clothing factory, part of the largest national clothing company. The Chongjin branch employed two thousand people, almost all women—the exception being the top managers and the truck drivers. North Koreans spend most of their lives in uniform, so that was what the factory churned out—standardized uniforms for students, shop clerks, train conductors, laborers, and of course uniforms for factory workers. They were made out of Vinalon, a stiff, shiny synthetic material unique to North Korea. The North Koreans were so proud of this material, invented by a Korean scientist in 1939, that they called it the
juche
fiber. Most of it was produced 1
75
miles down the coast in Hamhung.

Beginning in 1988, though, the shipments of fabric were delayed. Mrs. Song and the other workers were told the problem was in Hamhung. Either they had run out of the anthracite coal that was one of the raw materials in vinalon or they didn’t have enough electricity at the factory—Mrs. Song never got a clear answer. But without fabric, you couldn’t make uniforms.

The seamstresses spent their days sweeping the floors and polishing the equipment, waiting for the next delivery of fabric. The factory was uncannily quiet. Where once you heard the clattering of the sewing machines, now the only sound was the whisking of brooms.

To keep the women gainfully employed, the factory management launched what were euphemistically called “special projects.” In fact, they were scavenging for anything that could be sold or bartered for food. One day, the women would march in formation to the railroad track with bags and shovels to collect dog shit to be used for fertilizer. Other days it would be scrap metal. At first it was only the seamstresses who were sent, but soon Mrs. Song and the other women from the day-care center had to join in as well. They’d do it in shifts—half the women from the center would stay with the kids while the other half would be sent to scavenge.

“Even if the road is harsh, we’ll protect the party,” they had to sing as they went out on their excursions, the managers trying to prop up the group’s morale.

Some days they went to the beach to collect scrap metal from the
effluent that came gushing out of pipes under the shadow of the giant steelworks. Mrs. Song didn’t like getting her feet wet—not even at the beach next to the Chongjin Youth Park where they collected clams when her children were young. Like most North Koreans of her generation, she didn’t know how to swim. Even though the water was shallow, Mrs. Song shuddered. She had to roll up her pants to the knees, wading through the ocean waters with only canvas shoes on her feet and a basket for sifting the metal as though panning for gold. At the end of the day, the supervisors would weigh the metal to make sure each unit had gotten its quota.