Post on 26-Feb-2018
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Sandra FahySandra Fahy is Sejong
Society Postdoctoral Fellow
at the University of Southern
Californias Korean Studies
Institute. Her work isforthcoming in Food, Culture
and Societyand the Journal
of Korean Studies. Her
first monograph, based on
ethnographic research into
North Koreas 1990s famine,
is currently under review. She
can be reached at smfahy@
gmail.com.
Fig. 1. Children in North
Korea. An image from the UN
World Food Programme.
Like two pieces of the skySeeing North Korea through accounts of the famine
Any information about North Korea that surfaces in the
public domain appears like a curiosity. North Koreas inac-cessibility is legendary, and fieldwork and other first-hand
research is very difficult, if not impossible. As a result,
the public image perpetuated of this country, its leadership
and its people tends to emphasize occlusion and secrecy.
Titles of books, for instance, feature words like paranoid,
hidden and illusive (French 2005; Hassig & Oh 2009;
Kim 2010).
In respect of North Korea, it is certain kinds of events
and concerns that make the headlines. In recent years, the
Norths sinking of South Koreas Cheonan warship, its
artillery attack on the Souths Yeonpyeong Island (both
in 2010), and speculation about the Norths leadership
succession have had many in Western policy circles pre-
dicting a gloomy future for the peninsula. The 2009 mis-adventures of US journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee1
illustrate the risks associated with entering the country,
while the dark disclosures of American soldier Charles
Jenkins, who defected to the North in 1965, added both
information and confusion to existing knowledge (Jenkins
2008). Refugee autobiographies have offered insights into
the countrys web of political prison camps (Kang 2001;
Kim 2011; Kim & Kim 2009; Shin 2007). Meanwhile,
South Korea and many other governments focus heavily
on the Norths nuclear capabilities.
Built up around information of this kind, many repre-
sentations of this country and its people are rather sim-
plistic, leaving us without a grasp of the nuances of North
Koreans personal experiences of their country. Refugeeflows out of North Korea are understood simply as indi-
cating the likelihood of a future mass exodus in the event
of war, unification or regime collapse, while the diversity
of personal experiences that prompt North Koreans to
escape their country is rarely probed.
Complicating these bleak and one-dimensional rep-
resentations of North Korean life, anthropologists arehelping to bring to the public domain a more nuanced
understanding of North Koreans experiences of their
homeland. For example, Sonia Ryang (1996; 2009; forth-
coming) has helped diversify the image with her ethno-
graphic research on the linguistic life of North Korean
children in Japan: she reveals how the childrens use of
the Korean language acts as a capsule containing their
political relationship to the North.
The data I collected from refugee famine survivors
during ethnographic fieldwork in Seoul and Tokyo in 2006
similarly offers insights into life in the North of a kind
difficult to glean through other methods. The daily task
of coping with undernutrition affects nearly every facet
of life for the vast majority of North Koreas population.Even before the famine, food insecurity had been present
for several decades, to the extent that deep-seated cultural
values showed signs of change as a result (Pak et al. 2011:
156; Schwekendiek 2010). Listening to personal narra-
tives of the famine enabled me to learn about the specific
challenges faced by individuals, and how they interpreted
their situations.
The famine
For decades, undernutrition was an ongoing problem in
the cities, including the capital, of North Korea, and in the
countrys far northeastern regions. Then, in 1995, major
floods washed away crops and a succession of cold snaps
destroyed seedlings. Failed agricultural reforms and a gov-ernment distribution system that lacked the infrastructural
resilience necessary to take such shocks, combined with
a newfound isolation following the collapse of the Soviet
bloc, pitched the country from food shortage into famine.
North Korea appealed for international aid.
I am grateful for the
anonymous reviewers who
made valuable suggestions on
how to improve this article,
and to Leonid Petrov for the
illustrations.
1. Ling and Lee were
arrested at the border in
March 2009. They were tried
for illegal entry and sentenced
to 12 years imprisonment
with hard labour. After an
unannounced visit to the
North by former US President
Bill Clinton, Kim Jong-il
granted the two an official
pardon in August 2009.
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CASIER
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When the death of Supreme Leader Kim Il-sung in 1994
was swiftly followed by famine, some observers predicted
regime collapse (Hassig & Oh 1999). Indeed, food short-
ages are commonly associated with rebellion and social
unrest. In the two states that most resembled North Korea
at this juncture, China 1958-62 and the Soviet Union
1931-32, worsening food situations did result in unrest
(Lautze 1997). But despite press rumours about people
openly criticizing food shortages, both in the 1990s and
now (Rafferty 1993; Chosun Ilbo2011), hunger in North
Korea has not prompted any significant agitation orpolitical change. Instead, North Koreans tend to correlate
people speaking openly about the hunger with their subse-
quent disappearance (Fahy forthcoming).
During the 1990s crisis, the regime made strenuous
efforts to contain the problem, using international aid
to shore up dwindling food stocks while the state-run
media increased its output of ideological messages
about solidarity and endurance (Oh & Hassig 2000: 32).
Editorials in the leading Party newspaperRodong Sinmun
acknowledged the food shortage, but placed responsi-
bility for overcoming it on the people, calling on North
Koreans to take revolutionary and collective respon-
sibility (Gabroussenko 2009). Local councils advised
about alternative foods and cooking methods. The famine
was officially named the Konan i haenggun, or March
of Suffering, a reference to Kim Il-sungs 1938 historic
march to Manchuria with his anti-Japanese guerrilla troops
in 1938-39 (Chosn Ensiklipedia2 1995: 179-181).
International predictions of regime collapse proved
wrong, the regime survived at the cost of several million
deaths from starvation (Natsios 2001).
The ethnography of hunger
In 2005, fresh off the plane from the UK, I began vol-
unteering in Seoul with an all-North Korean run NGO,
using the organization as a platform for meeting as many
refugees as I could. Initially, I feared that the traumaticand possibly embarrassing nature of the topic of famine
would make finding willing informants a difficult task. I
couldnt have been more wrong. My interview requests
were readily accepted by nearly everyone I asked.
Most North Koreans usually speak to the outside world
through South Korean interpreters translating into English.
However, the ideological differences between the North
and the South mean that this interaction is often expe-
rienced as humiliating by Northern refugees. Having
learned Korean, I was able to speak with refugees without
an intermediary; they valued my attempt to learn their lan-
guage and we bonded we were all foreign, after all.
The degree to which people felt able to share their sto-
ries with an outsider varied sometimes the memorieswere simply too painful to speak easily. For example,
Mr Yoon was eager to share his experience, but he grew
quiet and spoke with great difficulty on the subject of his
sons death from starvation. Mr Kim and his wife had pre-
pared a banquet of food when I arrived at their house, and
our words were exchanged over ample bowls of rice and
plates of kimchi and seaweed. They described thesoundof
famine: like frogs or mosquitoes in the night, the children
crying with hunger. Other informants spoke more tensely:
Mr Lee, a former government official, went into a rage
when I momentarily misunderstood a metaphor he used.
Listening to famine survivors, I soon became aware
that many refugees were tired of explaining to outsiders
what the experience of hunger meant to them. Ratherthan focusing on the impact of the famine on their lives,
I became increasingly interested in the role played by the
political climate under which they had lived most of their
lives in helping to form their understandings of the famine.
Their accounts showed me how closely interwoven the
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Bak C. & Bak S. 2000.
Kulmchulim poda
musun ksn himangl
ilhplinn ilimnida
[Worse than hunger is
the loss of hope]. Seoul:
Shidae Chongshin.
Chosn Ensiklipedia
21995. Pyongyang:
Paekhwasachn PublishingHouse.
Chosun Ilbo2011. N. Korean
protesters demand food
and electricity. Chosun
Ilbo, 23 February.
Devereux, S. 1993. Theories
of famine: From Malthus
to Sen.Hemel Hempstead:
Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Fahy, S. (forthcoming).
Speaking and
remembering: North
Korean famine talk.Food,
Culture and Society.
French, P. 2005.North Korea:
The paranoid peninsula.Zed Books.
Gabroussenko, T. 2009. North
Korean rural fiction from
the late 1990s to the mid
2000s: Permanence and
change.Korean Studies
33: 69-100.
Fig. 1.Ice-cream kiosk in
the Pyongyang underground,
2007. The sign says high-
quality fast food.
Fig. 2. Sign posted on the
door of a North Korean
restaurant closed after
the unexpected currency
revaluation of November
2009.
Fig. 3.Food being prepared
in Changgwang Street,
Pyongyang, 2007.
Fig. 4. Shop sign inChanggwang Street,
Pyongyang, 2007. The sign
says fast food.
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3/420 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 27 NO 5, OCTOBER 2011
concepts of national leadership, national survival and
individual sacrifice were with the famine. The complex
relationship of refugee North Koreans with their homeland
and the political structures that shaped their lives clearly
emerged from these personal stories. Common threads
soon became evident, particularly in how people under-
stood the causes of the famine.
Nuanced portraits of individuals relationships with their
homeland of the kind that I gleaned from these interviews
are difficult to detect in the majority of research on North
Korean refugees, with survey methods the preferred toolfor analysis (see Haggard & Noland 2009; 2010). Many
surveys require the subject to select one option from sev-
eral choices, in a multiple-choice format in which ques-
tion and answer are written by the researcher, thus denying
the informant the linguistic power to express contradic-
tions. In so doing, these surveys preordain causal connec-
tions and associations. In contrast, open and unstructured
accounts of the famine offer access to sometimes unex-
pected political views and interpretations, offering the
researcher insight into certain imagined realities.
The memory of a better leader
Although many themes emerged from the oral accounts I
collected, in the interests of space I will focus primarily on
the tendency I observed for people to nostalgically roman-
ticize Kim Il-sungs leadership, often in explicit contrast
to the ineptitude of his son, Kim Jong-il. Though political
and agricultural decisions were made under Kim Il-sung
that made North Korea vulnerable to famine, it was his
son, who came to power after his death in 1994, who was
the main target of these refugees attacks.
Then in 1994, Kim Il-sung died. Up to that time things had been
okay. We had enough to eat. Even if it was just cornmeal, we
had enough, three meals a day, it was okay. After 1994, when
Kim Il-sung died, thats the point when it got bad in our house.
(Miss Lee, August 2006)
Kim Il-sung did quite well. When Kim Il-sung was around he
would say, I intend to see this entire country. I will see it all.
Where they are living well and where they are not living well,
I want to see it all. Then he went and did that. He saw where
they werent living well and he fixed it. He would say Where
is it? I need to go. Then he would say, Prepare the car and go
there. With Kim Il-sung there was no starvation, we all lived.
We were given lots of rice, lots of meat, we even received many
pollack as well. When Kim Jong-il came, everyone starved.
(Mr m, April 2006)
There have been periods of food rationing in North
Korea since 1955. In the 1970s, rationing was accompa-
nied by grain seizures (Schwekendiek 2010: 3). Research
shows how chronic shortages and inadequate nutrition
over the years has manifested in fragile bone structures
among the population (Pak et al. 2011). However, whileinformants acknowledged that there were inadequacies
in food resources prior to Kim Il-sungs death, in none
of the accounts I heard was the older leader ever identi-
fied as contributing to their personal difficulties. Never
quite challenging the overall government structure or the
decisions made by Kim Il-sung, people laid the bulk of
responsibility for the ills of the last decade and a half at
the younger Kims door.
In 1994 when Kim Il-sung passed away, there was a shortage
of foodKim Il-sung passed away in July and distribution
stopped completely after his death. While the general public
who had higher rank in society, like security policeand
people involved in trade, still received some food, commoners
couldnt get any. That has been the situation ever since thedeath of Kim Il-sung in July of 1994. (Mrs Bak, September
2006)
Thus the food shortages that preceded Kim Il-sungs
demise are acknowledged, but minimized in comparison
to the greater troubles that occurred afterwards. Famine
is best thought of as a process, the culmination of long-
term vulnerability and a product of multiple causal factors
(Devereux 1993; Pottier 1999). But for ordinary North
Koreans, the most immediate signs of disaster came with
the floods of 1995, which coincides in memory with the
death of the older leader and his sons succession. In addi-
tion, the regime worked at the time to establish the floods
and the sanctions of the international community as the
causes of the famine.
This is what they taught the people: America and the interna-
tional community, along with the puppet South Korea thatsthe way they explained it are ceaselessly preparing for war.
We have to tighten our belts to build up the national defence,
to build up the economy. So lets build up the economy.
And for that, the citizens suffer through hell, not antici-
pating the rain and snow storms that came and destroyed the
farms. Lets tighten our belts and forward march! (Mr Shin,
January 2006)
Those officers praising Kim Jong-il are all well-off. The food
Kim Jong-il eats is foreign food and the menu changes every
day. But then when you think about it, people wouldnt care if
he ate that famous food from different countries or if he wore
fancy clothes, as long as he gave out food to common people
and the general public. But he doesnt. He doesnt care if
people are starving or not, and thats why people are so against
him. (Mrs Park, August 2006)
Mrs Park explains that people would have been indif-
ferent to Kim Jong-ils enjoyment of abundant comfort
as long as he gave out food to common people. In her
comments echoed by many of my informants we see
an unwillingness to reject wholesale all aspects of the
regime and the country, such as the lifestyle of its leaders.
Indications of conflicted feelings also emerge from other
accounts. In a rare publication by famine survivors, Bak
Chun-shik and Bak Sn-hi write:
We didnt escape from North Korea because we hated it. That
is the country in which we were born and raised. I have so
many memories that upon reflection bring tears flowing from
my eyes. If I had been able, I would have lived in North Korea.
It is regrettable, but right now North Korea has no means by
which to give us life. (Bak & Bak 2000: 141)
Oral accounts show that decisions to defect are often
made in the context of powerful ambivalence, with loy-
alty to the countrys leadership and its tropes of national
survival and individual self-sacrifice enduring alongside
more negative feelings. Mr Yoon, whose son died of star-
vation in the mid 1990s and who expressed strong hatred
for the country and its leadership, nevertheless said of his
decision to defect:
The words of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il are like two pieces
of the sky, it was like that for me. That was all I knew. So in that
context, the issue of defecting is a very difficult one indeed.
That person who defects has reached the point where his verybeing is dead. (Mr Yoon, January 2006)
For the anguished Mr Yoon, the death of the self is a
prerequisite for defection.
The North Koreans I spoke to were well aware that they
had long lived with nutritional inadequacies before the
1990s, but they felt they had more or less adjusted to these.
The real horror, for them, came under Kim Jong-il. The fact
that many North Koreans appear to recall Kim Il-sungs
leadership with nostalgia suggests the possibility that the
next leadership succession will be favourably received
within the country, as North Koreans feel themselves to
be finally in the words of my informants throwing off
the famine long associated with Kim Jong-il. 2012 will
see the centenary of Kim Il-sungs birth, and the regimehas announced a goal of realizing the national motto of a
strong and prosperous state by then. It may be that popular
support for the regime and its goals revives somewhat in
the event of a leadership succession that appears to make a
break with the horrors of the past two decades.
Haggard, S. & M. Noland
2009. Reform from
below: Behavioral and
institutional change in
North Korea. Peterson
Institute for International
Economics Working
Paper Series, WP 09-8,
September.
2010. Political attitudesunder repression:
Evidence from North
Korean refugees. East-
West Center Working
Papers: Politics,
Governance, and Security
Series no. 21, March.
Hassig, R. & K. Oh 2009.
The hidden people of
North Korea: Everyday
life in the hermit
kingdom. Plymouth:
Rowman & Littlefield.
1999. North Korea
between collapse and
reform.Asian Survey
39(2): 287-309.Jenkins, C. with J. Frederick
2008. The reluctant
communist: My desertion,
court martial, and forty-
year imprisonment in
North Korea. Berkeley:
University of California
Press.
Jeon, W.-T. et al. 2005.
Correlation between
traumatic events and
post-traumatic stress
disorder among North
Korean refugees in
South Korea.Journal
of Traumatic Stress
18(2):147-154.
Kang C.-H. with P. Rigoulot2001. The aquariums of
Pyongyang: Ten years
in a North Korean gulag
(trans.) Y. Reiner. New
York: Basic Books.
Kaplan, R.D. 2006. When
North Korea falls.
Atlantic Magazine,
October.
Kim, S.-Y. 2010.Illusive
utopia: Theater, film and
everyday performance in
North Korea. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan
Press.
Kim Y. with Kim S.-Y.
2009.Long road home:Testimony of a North
Korean camp survivor.
New York: Columbia
University Press.
Kornai, J. 1992. The
socialist system: The
political economy of
communism.Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Lautze, S. 1997. The
famine in North Korea:
Humanitarian responses
in communist nations.
Issue paper, Feinstein
International Famine
Center, School of
Nutrition Science and
Policy, Tufts University,June.
Lomsky-Feder, E. 2004.
Life stories, war, and
veterans: On the social
distribution of memories.
Ethos32(1): 82-109.
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4/4ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 27 NO 5, OCTOBER 2011 21
Conclusion
It wasnt a famine, most survivors explain, but a food
downturn, a March of Suffering. These euphemisms
reveal how the North Korean regime like regimes
elsewhere uses language to shape and direct peoples
thinking, penetrating the discourse through which famine
victims articulate to themselves the events they and their
fellow citizens have endured. Most famine refugees are
emotionally primed to speak about their former lives with
some hesitation, fearing their accounts will be misunder-
stood. Their education in the North, the profound difficul-ties of migration out, the re-education they receive in
South Korea and, for many, a sense of humiliation, all play
into refugees feelings of uncertainty and trauma. Some
scholars have linked the latent trauma they have observed
among North Korean refugees to the experience of wit-
nessing the failure of socialism (Jeon et al. 2005: 151).
Kim Il-sungs death and the 1995 floods, and the
cumulative impact of the older leaders agro-political
choices, left the famine problem squarely with Kim
Jong-il. This is not to say that Kim Jong-il himself was
not culpable for the political failings that exacerbated
the famine; certainly he could have taken decisions that
would have assisted in the survival of millions. But such
choices, in compromising the rigid stance on national
self-sufficiency, were felt to pose a risk to regime sta-
bility and national sovereignty.
Such political calculations are absent from the oral
accounts of survivors, for whom the multiple horrors of
the famine the abandoned children, theft, public execu-
tions, the rumoured incidences of cannibalism, and so on
were consequences of the weakening of peoples character
under the weakening of socialism. As they understood it at
the time, my informants explained, these desperate events
were caused by people giving in to hunger, by the general
incompetence of Kim Jong-il, and by the encroachment of
unfriendly imperial powers.
It is perhaps unsurprising that Kim Il-sung, who ledNorth Korea from its creation in 1948 up to the eve of
the famine, hardly received any blame from these refu-
gees, and that no wholesale criticism of the North Korean
system emerged from the accounts I heard. Having grown
up and been educated in North Korea, and then arriving in
an environment in which North Korean refugees are the
victims of prejudice, it is very difficult for these refugees
to develop a perspective on their past distanced from the
indoctrinations of their homeland. Thus, peoples under-
standings of the past are founded on interpretations of the
famine that are uncritical of the fundamental political fac-
tors that produced it.
Lomsky-Feder has shown that the remembering subject
is not liberated to choose any interpretation [of the past,but rather her choices are] guided by social-cultural cri-
teria that distribute accessibility to the different models
of memory (traumatized, normalizing, heroic) according
to social entitlement (2004: 104). Interpretations of the
North Korean famine are not freely made, but are managed
by the regime in order to prevent threats to the political
structure. In the South, refugee North Koreans demon-
strate a model of memory that positions their homeland
as not entirely bad, somewhere where food shortage was a
problem, but nevertheless a place of which they have good
memories too. As they compete for a living in a society
that mostly rejects them and their past, they may more
readily call up positive memories of their former lives as
sources of comfort and national pride.These oral accounts of famine can tell us about more
than simply the experience of survival. They reveal peo-
ples conflicted allegiances to home and, in so doing, they
preclude the possibility of arriving at any monolithic nar-
ratives about life in the hidden North. l
Martin, B.K. 2004. Under the
loving care of the fatherly
leader: North Korea and
the Kim dynasty. New
York: Thomas Dunne.
Natsios, A.S. 2001. The
great North Korean
famine: Famine, politics,
and foreign policy.
Washington, D.C.: United
States Institute of Peace.
Noland, M. 2004.Korea
after Kim Jong-il. Policy
Analyses in International
Economics no. 71,
January. Washington D.C.:
Institute for International
Economics.
Oh, K. & R.C. Hassig 2000.
North Korea: Through the
looking glass.Washington,
D.C.: Brookings
Institution.
Pak, S.-Y., D. Schwekendiek
& H.-K. Kim 2011. Height
and living standards in
North Korea, 1930s-1980s.
Economic History Review
64(S1):142-158.
Pottier, J. 1999.Anthropologyof food: The social
dynamics of food security.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Rafferty, K. 1993. N. Korean
defector tells of food
riots: Stalinist regime
continuing nuclear arms
programme. Guardian, 23
August.
Ryang, S. 1996. Do words
stand for faith? Linguistic
life of North Korean
children in Japan. Critique
of Anthropology16(3):
281-301.
2009.North Korea: Toward
a better understanding.
Lanham: Lexington/Rowman & Littlefield.
forthcoming.Reading
North Korea: An
ethnological inquiry.
Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Asia
Center.
Schwekendiek, D. 2010.
Regional variations in
living conditions during
the North Korean food
crisis of the 1990s.Asia-
Pacific Journal of Public
Health22(4): 460-476.
Shin T.H. 2007.
Chngchipp suyongso
wanchn tongche kuyk
sesange paklo naoda
pukhan inkwn chngpu
sen t[Out into the
world: The North Korean
Complete Control Zone].
Seoul: Chonshin Sidae
Chulpansa.
Fig. 5.Preparing to make a
barbecue using car petrol. In
North Korea, firewood is a
luxury, so this method is the
most popular way to prepare
a picnic.
Fig. 6.Lighting the fuel for
the barbecue.
Fig. 7.Inside the Tongil
farmers market in
Pyongyang, 2005.
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