songbun

The Japanese defeat in World War II left 2.4 million Koreans stranded in Japan. They belonged to neither the winning nor the losing side, and they had no place to go. Once freed, they were simply thrown onto the streets. Desperate and impoverished, with no way to make a living, they attacked the trucks containing food intended for members of the

I became obsessed with all the things I had taken for granted before, and all the hardships that marked my life now. But that didn’t last long. I soon learned that thought was not free in North Korea. A free thought could get you killed if it slipped out. If you were lucky, you might get sent to some remote mountainous region to do hard labor.

The Yalu River separates China and North Korea. A lot of people cross over it, and even more try to. Bizarrely, some thirty years earlier, many Chinese Koreans and Chinese had tried to escape to North Korea during China’s “Great Leap Forward” and Cultural Revolution, that country’s own attempt at mass starvation. Now the whole migration had been

It was strictly forbidden for us to leave the reception center. So there we were—the beneficiaries of smug humanitarianism—prisoners in paradise on earth.

It didn’t matter how much effort you put into your independent plot or how much food you actually produced, because the party simply took it. No matter how carefully you’d tended your crop, your overall annual allocation remained the same. What kind of motivation does that provide?

Ever since setting foot in North Korea more than thirty years before, I’d known nothing but hunger. Everyone had been halfway to starvation for decades. But things had taken a turn for the worse starting in 1991. From 1991 until Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994, extremely cold weather wreaked havoc on the fragile food supply.

After Kim Il-sung’s statement, the General Association of Korean Residents started a mass repatriation campaign in the guise of humanitarianism. The following year, 1959, the Japanese Red Cross Society and the Korean Red Cross Society secretly negotiated a “Return Agreement” in Calcutta. Four months later, the first shipload of returnees left the

I’d known that North Korea was no “paradise on earth” ever since I set foot in the place. But I’d thought that going to university was my one chance to better my position. After all, back in Japan, that had been one of the enticements to move to North Korea. They’d promised that we would get a good education for free. It was a huge incentive. But