7/25/2019 North Korea Famine Eys of the Sky

1/418 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 27 NO 5, OCTOBER 2011

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.

PETER

CASIER

/CC

BY-NC-ND

2.0

7/25/2019 North Korea Famine Eys of the Sky

2/4ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 27 NO 5, OCTOBER 2011 19

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

LEONID

PETROV

LEONID

PETROV

LEONID

PETROV

LEONID

PETROV

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.

7/25/2019 North Korea Famine Eys of the Sky

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.

7/25/2019 North Korea Famine Eys of the Sky

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.

LEONID

PETROV

LEONID

PETROV

LEONID

PETROV