Nothing to Envy

Life in Chongjin Under State Control

In Seoul, Barbara Demick found that minders use staged parades to mask a reality that only surfaces by listening to defectors. By focusing on the industrial city of Chongjin, these accounts of the 1990s famine turn propaganda figures into real people. Tucked between a granite mountain range and the Sea of Japan, Chongjin sits far from the political heart of Pyongyang. Historically a place of exile, it was transformed by Japanese occupiers into a massive port and steel-producing hub. After the Korean War, the North Korean regime reclaimed these factories, rebranding the "city of iron" as a monument to socialist achievement.

In this landscape of smoke and steel, the state required a population of "true believers." Song Hee-suk, known as Mrs. Song, was the perfect embodiment of this ideal. Born to a war martyr, she possessed impeccable social standing, or song-bun, and for decades, she played her part with unwavering sincerity. Her life was a cycle of exhaustion and devotion: fourteen-hour days at a factory day-care, followed by ideological training and "self-criticism" meetings where she would confess her fear of not working hard enough for the fatherland. The regime’s power rested on juche, or self-reliance, a philosophy blending extreme nationalism with a god-like cult of personality around Kim Il-sung. For Mrs. Song, this was a fundamental reality; she cleaned the mandatory portraits of the leaders each morning and taught her children to bow to them in gratitude.

While Mrs. Song’s loyalty was rewarded with perks like an apartment with indoor plumbing, the rigid structure of her life began to fray. Her rebellious daughter, Oak-hee, resented the "volunteer" labor and the absurdity of collecting human waste for fertilizer quotas. More significantly, her husband Chang-bo, a journalist with access to uncensored reports, saw the gap between the "economic triumphs" he wrote about and the growing shortages at home. A brief, cynical laugh about a news report on a surplus of rubber boots led to a three-day interrogation by the political police. Though his status saved him, the incident shattered the family’s security and created a secret rift. Chang-bo began sharing his dissent with Oak-hee, whispering about the wealth of South Korea while ensuring Mrs. Song, the true believer, remained in the dark.

This system of control was reinforced by inherited guilt. The song-bun caste system meticulously ranks every citizen based on the political loyalty of their ancestors. Those at the bottom, like Mi-ran’s father, Tae-woo, are placed in the "hostile" class, a label that marks them and their children as enemies of the state. Tae-woo carried a secret that could destroy his family: he was a former South Korean soldier captured during the Korean War and forced into the North's mines. Mi-ran and her siblings grew up unaware of this "tainted blood" until their ambitions were crushed. Her gifted singer sister was rejected from a performing arts school, and her brother was denied a place in a teaching college despite a perfect exam score. The truth emerged, revealing that their father’s past was their own prison.

Jun-sang, the boy Mi-ran would fall in love with, faced a similar trap. His family had moved from Japan, bringing luxuries like refrigerators that made them the envy of their neighbors. However, their history in a capitalist land meant they were also viewed with deep suspicion and placed in the hostile class. In a society where the state never forgets, the lives of both Jun-sang and Mi-ran were shaped by choices made by their fathers long before they were born.