Nothing to Envy (46 page)

On the South Korean constitution and how it applies to the status of North Korean refugees, see Haggard and Noland,
The North Korean Refugee Crisis
. They write in their conclusion (p.
75)
, “If China’s stance has been unconstructive, South Korea’s could be described as ambivalent, even shamefully so.”

The figures on the number of North Korean defectors settled in South Korea come from the South Korean Ministry of Unification and
are quoted as well in the above report, p. 54. There was a notable increase in the number of defectors received in 2008, which might be the result of a more conservative government in Seoul. The two preceding governments, under Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, took great pains to avoid giving offense to Pyongyang.

The sociologist Yoon In-jin was originally interviewed for my story “Fleeing to Culture Shock,”
Los Angeles Times
, March 2, 2002.

On the Hanawon reeducation program, see Norimitsu Onishi, “North Korean Defectors Take a Crash Course in Coping,”
New York Times
, June 25, 2006.

The figures on the German economies come from Werner Smolny and Matthias Kirback, “Wage Differentials Between East and West Germany,” University of Ulm and Centre for European Economic Research, Mannheim, March 17, 2004.

The most readable book about postwar South Korea is Michael Breen’s
The Koreans
(New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 1998).

On the role of Christian activists in bringing out North Korean refugees:

On the role of religion in North Korea, see David Hawk,
Thank You, Father Kim Il-sung
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2005).

On the subject of height, see Sunyoung Pak, “The Biological Standard of Living in the Two Koreas,”
Economics and Human Biology
2:3 (2004), pp. 511-18.

I wrote a long piece on the subject of stunting,
“A
Small Problem Growing: Chronic Malnutrition Has Stunted a Generation of North Koreans,”
Los Angeles Times
, February 12, 2004.

The height difference plays a major role in North Koreans’ difficulty in adjusting to life in South Korea. Don Oberdorfer writes of an incident in which two diminutive North Korean soldiers, aged nineteen and twenty-three, accidentally drifted into South Korean waters. They were overheard saying in a military hospital that they would never marry a South Korean woman because “they’re too big for us.” The soldiers were sent back to North Korea at their own request.
(The Two Koreas
, p. 314.)

Mi-ran’s cousin was arrested and briefly served time in jail for fraud for falsifying passports. But the South Korean government ended up red-faced when the news reached South Korea that many former POWs and their families had escaped North Korea, only to be turned away by South Korean diplomats in China. South Korean veterans were outraged and the South Korean Ministry of Defense apologized. I wrote about one of these cases: “Fifty Years After Korean War’s End, Ex-POW Returns Home,”
Los Angeles Times
, December 25, 2003.

As of 2005, sixty-two former South Korean POWs had escaped North Korea across the Tumen River. Several hundred were believed to still be alive in North Korea.

Translation of the Sandor Petofi poem “Szabadság, Szerelem” by G. F. Cushing from the Corvinius Library of Hungarian History,
http://www.hungarian-history.hu/lib/timeless/chapter23.htm
.

Eberstadt lays out the reasons he was wrong about North Korea’s imminent collapse in “The Persistence of North Korea,”
Policy Review
, October/November 2004.

Economic statistics are from the Bank of Korea, Seoul.

Information about the current state of the North Korean economy also came from the following:

On U.S. aid agencies, see “Rapid Food Security Assessment. North Pyongan and Chagang Provinces, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” Mercy Corps, World Vision, Global Resource Services, Samaritan’s Purse, June 2008.

On tensions at the markets in Chongjin: Good Friends: Center for Peace, Human Rights and Refugees,
North Korea Today
, no. 275, May 2009; “City of Chungjin Declares, ‘Do Not Sell Any Items Other Than Agricultural Products,’” “Mass Protest Against Control over Commercial Activities at Chungjin,”
North Korea Today
, no. 206, April 2008.

Also on market activity, see Kyungnam University, Institute for Far Eastern Studies, “New Restrictions on DPRK Market Trading,”
NK Brief
, November 15, 2007. The institute quotes from an internal Workers’ Party document it obtained, explaining the need for “a crackdown on markets that have degraded into hotbeds of anti-socialism.”

photograph courtesy of NASA.

U.S. Army photograph courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library.

photograph courtesy of the U.S. Naval Historical Center.

photographs courtesy of Eckart Dege.

photograph courtesy of Gerald Bourke and the World Food Programme.

photograph courtesy of Lee Jun and ASIAPRESS.

photograph courtesy of Ahn Chol.

photograph courtesy of Eric Lafforgue.

photograph courtesy of Jonathan Watts.

photograph courtesy of Anna Fifield.

photograph courtesy of the World Food Programme.

photograph courtesy of Chung Sung-Jun and Getty Images.

photograph courtesy of Jean Chung.

B
ARBARA
D
EMICK
is the Beijing bureau chief of the
Los Angeles Times
. Her reporting on North Korea won the Overseas Press Club’s award for human rights reporting as well as awards from the Asia Society and the American Academy of Diplomacy. Her coverage of Sarajevo for
The Philadelphia Inquirer
won the George Polk Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. Her previous book is
Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood
.

Copyright © 2010 by Barbara Demick
Map copyright © 2010
by Mapping Specialists, Ltd.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Demick, Barbara.
Nothing to envy : ordinary lives in North Korea /
Barbara Demick.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-385-52961-7
1. Koreans—Korea (North)—Social conditions—21st century—Case studies. 2. Koreans—Korea (North)—Economic conditions—21st century—Case studies. 3. Korea (North)—Social conditions—21st century. 4. Korea (North)—Economic conditions—21st century. I. Title.
HN730.6.A8D46 2009
306.095193′090511—dc22        2009022420

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