Nothing to Envy (17 page)

“He’s a convict. Let’s save the antibiotic for someone else,” he told Dr. Kim.

Dr. Kim was furious. “He’s been admitted to the hospital. A patient is a patient. We can save him. He will die without it,” she snapped back.

Her obsessive personality clicked in. Dr. Kim would not let the matter drop and she argued for days. The dying young man was discharged from the hospital untreated. Dr. Kim went to his home twice a day, but her patient grew sicker and more despondent, declaring, “I’m not fit to live.” He committed suicide soon after. Dr. Kim was convinced that she and the hospital were responsible for his death. The tension with her boss lingered and she asked for a transfer into pediatrics, where she thought things would be less political.

At the same time, Dr. Kim’s personal life was in tatters. Her love life had never kept pace with her professional success; her workaholic habits and perfectionism kept men at bay. A year after she started working full-time, a man she’d adored since college dumped her. She was devastated. She asked a friend to set her up with somebody else and got engaged to him on their second date. Her husband was the same age—twenty-six—but he was still in his freshman year of college because he had served in the military. Since she
was already working, she figured they would survive on her salary until he graduated.

“You’ll hurt his pride,” Dr. Kim’s mother warned. A female doctor marrying a college boy? “Men don’t like it when their women earn more money.”

On her wedding night, Dr. Kim knew she had made a terrible mistake, but she had gotten pregnant almost immediately and couldn’t leave. A few months after she gave birth, having waited so she could breast-feed her infant son, she moved out of her husband’s home and back in with her parents. The baby stayed with her in-laws in keeping with Korean tradition; custody goes to the father’s family in the case of divorce.

If it was in fact her higher earnings that strained the marriage, the final indignity was that her salary disappeared. She had been earning 186 won per month, the equivalent of about $80 at the official exchange rate, triple that of an ordinary laborer. With that money, she had supported her husband and her retired parents and had helped out a married sister. As the paychecks vanished so did the food rations. It was in that period that she found herself stealing pears from the collective orchards and scouring the countryside for food. She sometimes accepted gifts from patients—a bag of noodles or a few ears of corn—which made her feel embarrassed and uncomfortable. Dr. Kim knew of other doctors who took bribes for medical care that was supposed to be free; she was determined not to be one of them. But then again, she was hungry.

By age twenty-eight, the promise of her early life had turned to disappointment. She was divorced, living with her parents. She had lost custody of her child. She was working harder than ever and receiving less compensation for her efforts than ever before. She was hungry and exhausted, poor and loveless.

These were the unhappy circumstances in which Dr. Kim was living the year leading up to Kim Il-sung’s death.

LIKE MOST OTHER
North Koreans, Dr. Kim learned of Kim Il-sung’s death from the special broadcast at noon. She had just come back to the hospital after escorting a typhoid patient to a special
clinic. When she entered the hospital lobby, she saw doctors, staff, and patients crying before the hospital’s single television set.

She walked the forty minutes back to her apartment behind the city’s main sports stadium, her eyes so blurred with tears she could barely see her feet slapping the pavement. Her father was at home sleeping. He sat up at the sound of her footsteps.

“What is wrong? Did one of your patients die?” he asked with alarm. He knew how emotional his daughter could be about her patients.

Dr. Kim collapsed into her father’s arms. She had never cried so much, not when her boyfriend dumped her, not when her marriage broke up and her baby was taken away, not when her father had his stroke. Those were the setbacks that one had to expect in this life. Even though she was a doctor, educated in the frailties of the human body and only too aware of its mortality, Dr. Kim had never considered that such things could apply to Kim Il-sung himself.

Her colleagues felt similarly. As they worked through the night in the hospital’s dim corridors, they traded conspiracy theories. One theory had it that Kim Il-sung had been assassinated by the American warmongers who wanted to sabotage his upcoming summit with the South Korean president, Kim Young-sam—one of the perennials of North Korean propaganda being that the United States kept the Korean peninsula divided.

Those first days after Kim Il-sung’s death went by in a blur. Between the shock and the sleep deprivation, it took a while for Dr. Kim to notice the crisis brewing in her own home. Her father had been depressed ever since his illness had forced him to retire. The Great Leader’s death was more than he could handle. He stayed in bed and refused to eat.

“If a great man like Kim Il-sung can die, why should a good-for-nothing like me go on living and consume food?” he cried.

Dr. Kim tried reasoning. She cajoled, she screamed, she threatened.

“If you don’t eat, I won’t eat either. We’ll all die together,” she told him. Her mother also threatened a hunger strike. Dr. Kim brought the Workers’ Party, secretary in from the hospital to persuade him. She tried to keep up her father’s strength by administering intravenous nourishment.

Her father grew delirious. He alternately praised Kim Il-sung and railed against him. One day he would say his love for the marshal was such that he couldn’t live without him, the next he whispered that Kim Il-sung’s mortality was proof positive that the whole North Korean system had failed. He asked his daughter to bring paper home from the hospital. He mustered the strength to prop himself up and scribbled a note:

He gave the letter to Dr. Kim and asked her to take it to the hospital’s party secretary. Then he took another sheet of paper. On it he scrawled what looked like an intricate pyramid, the steps labeled with names and numbers. They appeared to be the scribblings of a madman. Dr. Kim thought her father had lost his mind.

He gestured for her to sit by his side. He couldn’t raise his voice beyond a whisper.

“These are our relatives in China. They will help you,” he said.

It was a family tree. Dr. Kim was shocked. Could it be that her father was telling her to leave the fatherland for China? Her loyal father who had fled China himself and then schooled her at his knee in the love of Kim Il-sung? Could he be a traitor? Dr. Kim’s first instinct was to tear it up, but she couldn’t destroy her father’s last words. So she took out a small metal keepsake box with a lock and key, one of the last vestiges of her girlhood.

She folded up her father’s chart and locked it in the box.

KIM IL-SUNG WAS LAID
to rest in an underground mausoleum, his body embalmed and put on display according to the Communist tradition that began with the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924. The North Korean government staged an elaborate funeral that took place over two days, July 19 and 20. Radio Pyongyang reported that two million people attended the procession as Kim Il-sung’s coffin cruised through the city on the roof of a Cadillac, followed by
goose-stepping soldiers, brass bands, and a fleet of limousines carrying huge portraits of the leader and sprays of flowers. The hundred-vehicle procession started at Kim Il-sung Square, passed through Kim Il-sung University and past the city center’s hundred-foot-tall statue of Kim Il-sung, the largest in the country, and ended at the Revolutionary Arch, a replica of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, only bigger. The following day, there was a memorial service. At the stroke of noon, around the country, sirens wailed, trains and ships blew their horns, and people stood at attention for three minutes. The mourning period had come to an end. It was time for the nation to get back to work.

Dr. Kim had plenty of opportunity to bury her misery in her job. Her father died just a week after Kim Il-sung’s funeral, so she had little desire to go home at night and worked even longer hours. The heat wave had not broken and the typhoid outbreak that had begun earlier in the summer had turned into a full-fledged epidemic. Chongjin was always prone to epidemics because its sewage system, hastily rebuilt after the Korean War, spilled untreated feces into the streams where women often did the laundry. With the electricity blinking on and off, running water became unreliable. Usually electricity and water worked for one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening. People stored water in big vats at home (few had bathtubs), which turned into breeding grounds for bacteria. Nobody had soap. Typhoid is easily treated by antibiotics, which by 1994 were almost entirely unavailable.

After the hot summer of 1994 came an unusually cold winter, with temperatures in the mountains plunging to 35 degrees below zero. That was followed by torrential rains the following summer, flooding the rice paddies. This gave the North Korean government a face-saving excuse to admit publicly for the first time that it did indeed have a food shortage. A U.N. relief team that was permitted to visit in September 1995 was told that the floods had caused $15 billion worth of damage that affected 5.2 million people; that 96,348 homes had been damaged, displacing 500,000 people; and 1.9 million tons of crops had been lost.

In the pediatric ward, Dr. Kim noticed that her patients were exhibiting peculiar symptoms. The children she treated, born in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, were surprisingly smaller, even smaller than she’d been as the tiniest kid in her elementary school class. Now their upper arms were so skinny she could encircle them with her thumb and forefinger. Their muscle tone was weak. It was a syndrome known as wasting, where the starved body eats away at its own muscle tissue. Children came in for constipation that was so acute they were doubled over in pain, screaming.

The problem was with the food. Housewives had started to pick weeds and wild grasses to add to their soups to create the illusion of vegetables. Corn was increasingly the staple again instead of rice, but people were adding leaves, husks, stems, and cobs to make it go further. That was okay for adults, but it couldn’t be digested by the tender stomachs of children. In the hospital the doctors discussed this problem among themselves, and gave the mothers what amounted to cooking advice. “If you use grass or bark, you have to grind it up very fine, then cook it a very long time so it is soft and easy to eat,” Dr. Kim told them.

Among older children and adults, there was another strange new affliction. The patients had shiny rashes on their hands, around their collarbones as though they were wearing necklaces, or around their eyes so that it looked like they had glasses. It was sometimes called the “eyeglass disease.” In fact, it was pellagra, which is caused by a lack of niacin in the diet and often is seen in people who eat only corn.

Often children came in with minor colds or coughs or diarrhea and then suddenly, they were dead. The poor diet lowered their resistance. Even if the hospital had antibiotics, their bodies were too weak. The babies were in the worst shape. Their mothers, themselves undernourished, didn’t produce enough breast milk. Baby formula was nonexistent and milk rare. In the past, mothers who couldn’t produce enough breast milk would feed their babies a watered-down congee made from cooked rice; now most of them couldn’t afford the rice either.

Then there were children who had no diagnosable symptoms at all, just a vague malaise. They would appear pale or slightly bluish, their skin papery and lacking in elasticity. Sometimes they had swollen bellies, but sometimes nothing at all.

“I can’t figure out what it is. I just can’t get my child to stop crying,” the mothers would tell Dr. Kim.

She nodded sympathetically because she recognized the condition, but she was at a loss for words. How do you tell a mother her child needs more food when there is nothing more to give?

Dr. Kim would write out a slip admitting the child to the hospital, knowing she had no cure for this condition. The hospital didn’t have any food either. As she did her rounds, walking through the pediatric ward, the children would follow her with their eyes. Even when her back was turned, she could feel their eyes staring at her white gown, wondering if she could relieve their pain and soon realizing that she could not.

“They would look at me with accusing eyes. Even four-year-olds knew they were dying and that I wasn’t doing anything to help them,” Dr. Kim told me years later. “All I was capable of doing was to cry with their mothers over their bodies afterward.”

Dr. Kim hadn’t been a doctor long enough to have erected the protective wall that would insulate her from the suffering around her. The children’s pain was her pain. Years later, when I asked her if she remembered any of the children who had died on her watch, she answered sharply, “I remember all of them.”

Over the years the hospital provided less and less. The furnace in the basement went out after it ran out of coal, so the hospital had no heat. When the running water went off, nobody could properly mop the floors. Even during the day it was so dark in the interior of the building that doctors had to stand by windows to write up their reports. Patients brought their own food, their own blankets. Since bandages were scarce, they would cut up bedding to make them. The hospital was still able to manufacture intravenous fluid, but they didn’t have bottles for it. The patients had to bring their own, which were often empty bottles of Chongjin’s most popular beer, Rakwon, or “Paradise.”

“If they brought in one beer bottle, they’d get one IV. If they brought in two bottles, they would get two IVs,” Dr. Kim said. “It sounds too embarrassing to admit, but that’s just the way it is.”

Eventually the hospital emptied out. People stopped bringing their sick loved ones. Why bother?