ut I was going to the ninth floor, to a classroom that looked exactly like your standard high-school geometry room, where Rev. Kwang Il-park was passing out leather-bound hymnals to a roomful of twitchy refugees. I sat down in the back, and a teenage girl got up, went to a closet in the front of the room, and returned with a hymnal in English. It was photocopied on green paper and comb-bound with a plastic cover. Standing at a podium in front of a couple of dry-erase boards, Rev. Il-park gave the word. A 60-year-old Korean lady to his left began to play an electric keyboard. He began to sing into a microphone. The others came in, and my heart broke. Afterward, the reverend called me to the front of the room along with my interpreter, and in probably the most ridiculous moment in my life, I held up a copy of
Vice magazine and introduced myself, saying I’d like to talk to anyone who wanted to talk to me.
Three people did. Here are their stories:
I was born in Hamheung, one of the biggest industrial cities in North Korea. I was a very rich boy, so I practiced gymnastics from when I was five years old until I was ten. My house was about 15 feet wide, with two rooms. It was divided in the middle. I shared a room with my parents. This was not because my family was poor, but because in North Korea the government controls the housing. We couldn’t buy a different house—we had what the government gave us. Later, the government had to borrow money from my family to complete a housing development. In return for the favor, they gave us five units in the building.
Hamheung is much like an industrial city in the West, except because there is very little electricity in North Korea and very few raw materials and money, there are big factories but they do not run. In the West, if there is a factory, it is always open and workers are working there all the time. But in North Korea, the facility is there, but there are no materials and there is no electricity, so the factories are closed. Since there is no work at the factory, the workers don’t come in or get paid. Every now and then, the factories get raw materials from the government, and they make a product, and the government buys it. But often the process doesn’t work, no products go to the government and no money goes to the factories. The factories sit quiet and dark, empty except for the maintenance people and guards.
North Korean society has four groups of people. The highest level of society is made up of government officers. The second is the middle class, the third is the normal, average people, and at the bottom are people who don’t have proper thoughts—the anti-Communist people. The higher two groups have rice and vegetables, but the bottom two groups don’t have enough rice. They eat grass and trees. When spring comes, people pick at the edible trees and grasses and boil and eat them.
AS TOLD TO AMIE BARRODALE
TO BE CONTINUED:
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