Last year, while I was in Asia, my friend Hanna suggested we go to Korea for a week. I had never been particularly interested in Korea (China's my jam, for whatever reason), but I like Hanna and I like travel, so I agreed to go. We had a grand old time, and it sparked a fiery interest in me, in regards to North Korea. Over the trip, it crept up on me, until it developed into a minor obsession. I couldn't believe this country had been around for so long and only now did I take the time to learn about it. It was like having a platonic friend that you fall in love with. "You've been here the whole time and I never realized how amazing you are!" Except for North Korea, replace "amazing" with "completely twisted and utterly insane."
Since returning to the States, I've read two books on the subject and watched this documentary. One book is called UNDER THE LOVING CARE OF THE FATHERLY LEADER by Bradley K. Martin. It's 718 pages and it took me about five months to read. That being said, it's a fantastic book and probably invaluable if you're doing any sort of serious study on North Korea.
Martin is a good writer with a sense of humor, as well as an unfortunately noticeable case of yellow fever. For example, on page 355: "[Kim Jong-Il] had encouraged girls and young women to fix themselves, wear makeup, and look nicer. North Korean women - among the most beautiful in the world to begin with - obviously were taking far more care with their appearance than a decade earlier." Emphasis mine. Also, ew.
Martin is a good writer with a sense of humor, as well as an unfortunately noticeable case of yellow fever. For example, on page 355: "[Kim Jong-Il] had encouraged girls and young women to fix themselves, wear makeup, and look nicer. North Korean women - among the most beautiful in the world to begin with - obviously were taking far more care with their appearance than a decade earlier." Emphasis mine. Also, ew.
The other book is called NOTHING TO ENVY by Barbara Demick. It's 296 pages and you can probably glean the same amount of information as "Under the Loving Care..." Because it follows the lives of ordinary North Koreans and tells their stories in a novelistic way, it's gripping in a way that Martin's book, although extremely interesting, often isn't.
Demick's book can be painful and graphic. She tells of the famine that struck in the 1990's: "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... 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 rooftops to dry so that they could collect from it tiny grains of uncooked rice and other edibles."
Demick's book can be painful and graphic. She tells of the famine that struck in the 1990's: "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... 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 rooftops to dry so that they could collect from it tiny grains of uncooked rice and other edibles."
Demick also follows love stories, defection, family ties, medicine, and a plethora of other storylines. Even if you're not particularly interested in North Korea, I can't recommend it highly enough. And in case you don't feel like reading either book, here are some things that I learned in my studies:
WE CREATED THE NORTH AND THE SOUTH
For about 1,300 years, Korea was a unified country. In 1910, Japan "annexed" Korea and began an oppressive and cruel regime over the country. The occupation only ended when Japan lost World War II in 1945. At that point, it would make sense to let Koreans rule Korea, right? WRONG! What happened instead was that two American army officers drew an arbitrary line on a map and split the country into North and South. The North went to the USSR; the South went to the United States. As one could probably predict, a war broke out. At the end of the war, the border was pretty much back to where it was in 1945. So like most things in the world, a great deal of the conflict in Korea was generated by Western control and hubris and Domino Theory paranoia.
NORTH KOREA OPERATES ON A POLICY KNOWN AS JUCHE
Kim Il-Sung, the founder/leader of the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea, created the phrase juche, which roughly translates to "national self-reliance" and permeates many aspects of domestic and international policy. This, despite the fact that the country has often depended on aid and other assistance. One North Korean defector, Dong, tells Martin in his book: "There's an amusing story about Kim Il-Sung and foreign cars. In the mid-1970s, he met with foreign reporters. Someone asked him, 'You hate the United States so much, how can you ride in an American car?' He replied, 'I'm not riding in it. I'm driving it.' Just seeing it made me proud. [However], now that I have come to South Korea, I'm used to free thinking. I feel a discrepancy between juche and his riding in a foreign car."
KIM IL-SUNG WASN'T TOTALLY THE WORST
Like most Communist leaders, the beginning of Kim Il-Sung's rule was pretty positive. After the Japanese occupation and the horrors of war, people were grateful to have food, electricity, water, free education, and a perceived end to the hierarchy and patriarchal traditions of old Korean society. That's when Communism is super exciting and I honestly wonder what it must be like to be in the throes of that kind of ideology and devotion.
Although later, Kim Il-Sung would greatly exaggerate his role in the fall of Japan, he was a guerilla fighter as a young man and did fight to help free Korea from Japanese rule. He did some reprehensible things later on, wasted tons of money on personal luxuries, and brewed up a bizarre and looming personality cult - yet, there was still a great deal of reverence for him as a "savior" of the country and restorer of national pride.
KIM JONG-IL IS PRETTY MUCH THE WORST
Unlike his father, Kim Jong-Il had no reasonable claim to leadership. He was born to the Great Leader and thus did not earn the respect and adoration of the people in the way that Kim Il-Sung did. "Under The Loving Care..." includes many reported stories of Kim Jong-Il's extreme cruelty and complete lack of regard for human life. On a less tragic but equally interesting note, he's also a huge movie fan. So while his citizens are subject to Communist propaganda films, he has a collection of upwards of 20,000 DVDs. He also kidnapped South Korean filmmakers to force them to make films for North Korea. No joke.
INSTEAD OF FEEDING THE PEOPLE, THEY MOSTLY FOCUSED ON SEX...
From "Under the Loving Care...":
From "Under the Loving Care...":
From mere philandering, Kim Il-Sung had advanced to presiding over something not far removed from a harem. The "volunteer" corps was a small-scale operation at first, said a former elite official, but "the extravagance built up year after year." As a birthday present for Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-Il greatly expanded the operation. Female companions had been organized into three corps. Members of the "Happy Corps" were actresses and singers who entertained at parties and might have slept with Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il. The "Satisfaction Corps" was more explicitly focused on sexual services. So, too, was the "Felicity Corps" - whose members were recruited from the Workers' Party organization and from female bodyguards.
About two thousand girls were selected each year and given a year of training. Some five to six hundred who were expected to be available for sex would be assigned to the lodges and villas. Others were given secretarial and other jobs where, officially, they were not expected to provide sexual services.AND MANSIONS...
For his sixtieth birthay, Kim got the most expensive mansion up to that point, costing the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars. The funds came from gold mining. "North Korea can mine up to 50 tons of gold a year, so they can afford that sort of thing."AND GIFT-GIVING...
"Party rules prohibit gift-giving among members," a former elite official told me. "But Kim Jong-Il gave gifts to try to buy people off from forming factions against him." Besides cars, Kim Jong-Il's gifts included television sets, radios, and watches - all foreign-made, of course. The overall scale of his gift-giving soon grew so enormous as to affect the economy seriously. Various sources confirm that a special unit in the party, dubbed Room 39 on account of its office location, was given the mission of bringing in foreign exchange to pay for Kim's purchases. Because of Room 39 activities, the government had no bank reserves and became nearly broke.
...AND OF COURSE, THE MASS GAMES, WHICH ARE CRAZY.
(They wouldn't let me embed it, but please, click on it. Flip cards.)
