Saturday 27 December 2014

North Korea, the dead land


North Korean leader Kim Jong-il (L) visits the Pyongyang Grand Theater, which was renovated, in this undated picture released by the North's official news agency KCNA early April 5, 2009


Executions were a frequent occurrence in our small city, but the inhabitants never tired of them. Primary and secondary school pupils skipped classes to join the audience, which always consisted of hundreds, even thousands, of people. Posters went up in the city several days before. When the time came, the condemned man was displayed in the streets before being led to the place of execution, where he was made to sit on the ground, head bowed, so everyone could get a good look at him. He was dressed in a garment designed by army scientists for public executions, a greyish one-piece suit made of very thick, fleece-lined cotton. That way, when the bullets are fired, the blood doesn't spurt out but is absorbed by this fabric, which turns red. The body is thrown on a cart and then abandoned in the mountains for the dogs to eat.

I was born on April 20 1986 in a village not far from Onsong, a city of 300,000 inhabitants in the north-east of the People's Democratic Republic of Korea, close to the Chinese border and Siberia. The city is divided into ku (districts) and ban (classifications) of 20 families. My parents lived in ban number three, in a semi-rural zone. The house was like dozens of others built on the same model and lined up in rows. There was a door, a single window, and a roof of curved orange tiles. The walls were white, but they had been painted blue to a height that I must have passed about the age of eight or nine. Each time the district officials came to check the hygiene of the houses, as they regularly did, they ordered us to change the colour of this lower part: to green, now blue, now light brown, but all the houses in our ban had to be the same colour; perhaps because dwellings, like everything else in North Korea, are the property of the people. That means that nothing belongs to anyone.

Inside were two rooms separated by a sliding door. The floors were covered with pale brown varnished floor-paper, and in the main room hung portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. That was compulsory. You had to call the father: "Dear respected comrade head of state Great Leader Kim Il-sung", or, more simply, "Comrade Great Leader". For his son, the formula was "Dear Leader Kim Jong-il", until Kim Il-sung's death in 1994; then we had to call him "Great Leader Kim Jong-il".

Our district stood at the foot of some mountains, which were riddled with coal mines. Everyone lived off the mines. The good side was that you didn't die of cold in winter, as you might have done elsewhere, because our fuel supplies were always guaranteed. My father was a miner. It was a dangerous place: there were hundreds of galleries underground, and collapses were frequent because the wooden struts propping them up were often stolen by people who sold them for food. The mine was plunged into mourning around once a month.

My grandparents' house, five rows away, was at least three times as big. The land was at least ten times as big as everyone else's, and they grew cucumbers, melons, cabbages, aubergines, courgettes, maize, beans, turnips.

The reason the authorities treated my grandparents so benevolently was simple. Previously they had lived in Japan, like many Koreans. When the Korean peninsula was a Japanese colony between 1910 and 1945, hundreds of thousands of Koreans had been deported to Japan as forced labourers. Later, thousands more Koreans, fleeing the Korean War, joined them. Then, in the late 1950s, following the example of tens of thousands of other pro-Communist Koreans, my family chose to return, and handed their goods over to the regime. Life was hard and everyone expressed their regrets about leaving Japan almost immediately. From a very young age, my father heard his parents complaining about the wretched conditions. "When we lived so well in Japan..." grandfather would say.

To thank "patriotic families" like ours Kim Il-Sung had, none the less granted them certain privileges. For my grandparents that came in the form of a fine house. The Great Leader also sent gifts from time to time: bottles of taepyeung sul, a very expensive rice spirit that most people can't afford, or sweets.









The landscape changed a lot as the famine increased from 1995. There was no more rice, no more potatoes, even in small quantities. We moved on to noodles made of maize flour, boiled them up in lots of water and served them in soup. Later, our village started eating weeds like wormwood and dandelion, which were boiled up into a form of soup. It was so bitter that we could barely keep it down. As the soup wasn't very nourishing, we ate it in large quantities and ended up with hugely distended stomachs.

At school, as time passed, there were fewer and fewer of us at our desks. The teachers sat shapelessly in their chairs, cane in hand, while we repeated by heart lessons we had already learned about the childhoods of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Yet work in the fields was still compulsory despite the fact that the remaining pupils and teachers were extremely weak. We actually went there not to work, but to glean anything we could find to keep from starving to death.

In the end, just before I escaped to China with my family in 1998, there were only eight or nine of us in class. The rest were too weak even to walk.

Party cadres said that floods had caused the famine, wreaking havoc through the whole country. In Onsong, this wasn't the case, but I thought that elsewhere nature must have been less kind. Since it was practically impossible to travel across the country, no one could verify this.

The authorities also told us that the United States and South Korea bore some responsibility for the shortages, because it was they who had started the Korean War. It was only many years later, once I had reached South Korea, that I discovered to my great confusion that the Korean War had been started not by the "Southern puppets" but by Kim Il-sung himself.

  • This Is Paradise!: My North Korean Childhood by Hyok Kang, is available from Telegraph Books from £7.99 + 99p P&P. To order, call 0844 871 1516 or visit
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