‘In North Korea even arithmetic is a propaganda tool. A typical problem would go like this: ‘If you kill one American Bastard and your comrade kills two, how many dead American Bastards do you have?’.
‘We could never just say American, that would be too respectful. It had to be ‘American Bastard’, ‘Yankee Devil’ or ‘big-nosed Yankee’. If you didn’t say it you would be criticised for being soft on our enemies’.
Seeing Titanic for the first time on black market DVD smuggled in from China, Yeonmi thought that even in 1912 they had better technology than in modern North Korea. But mostly she couldn’t believe that someone could make a movie out of ‘such a shameful love story’.
To the rest of the world spring is the symbol of rebirth and new life, but to North Koreans ‘spring is the season of death’. This is when their food stores are low and no new food has grown yet.
As children, Yeonmi and her sister would walk in to the mountains around their town and eat anything they could lay their hands on, including dragonflies if they were quick enough.
On Saturdays everyone would be expected to meet in groups for propaganda meetings and self-criticism sessions. In which people will typically criticise themselves for not being more grateful of Kim’s love and that they will try to be more worthy.
In North Korea children are part of an en masse unpaid labour force, Children will take work clothes to school either to clean the streets, scrub statues, rid fields of stones or pick up the missed grains of rice or corn from the fields.
When the USSR collapsed in 1991 subsidised fertiliser was no longer available and there was a mass drive to use human fertiliser to cover the fields. This was controlled to the extent that people had a daily quota to fill and people even become competitive to the point of ‘stealing’ from other’s outhouses or following dogs around!
‘Hanawon is like a boot camp for time travellers from the Korea of the 1950s and 60s’. Which is exactly what South Korea has approved an entire department for so that when the two countries can reunite that there will be a modernisation program in place for all North Koreans.
The first few defectors who made it to South Korea were treated ‘like heroes’ and given subsidies, grants and scholarships. But after the famine of the 1990s so many poured south that the resettlement program became strained and now ‘defectors’ are not met with the same opportunities or welcome.
In the past the majority of defectors were highly skilled men, but since the 2000s nearly all refugees are vulnerable women from Northern provinces.
‘Sometimes I wondered how there could be som many lights in this place, when just thirty-five miles north of here a whole country was shrouded in darkness.’
Now on my Way is a popular South Korean show interviewing female defectors and challenging the negative stereotype of North Koreans.
