The New Yorker has a brief audio slide show narrated by Barbara Demick on the 90s North Korean famine and its effect on Song Hee-suk, a woman who subsequently defected to South Korea in 2002 (via).
Here's a review of Demick's new book, Nothing to Envy:
Much of the book takes place in Chongjin, a city in the north of the country that was a center of manufacturing and trade in the 1960s and '70s. Ms. Demick depicts the swift collapse of the local economy after the end of the Cold War as North Korea's former East bloc trading partners stop exchanging equipment and energy for substandard North Korean goods.
Chongjin's factories stop operating as the supply of electricity and raw materials dries up; factory workers sweep the floors and polish the equipment until managers finally tell them they need to find some other way to provide for their families.
That proves to be an unsurmountable challenge for many of the characters in this book as well as millions of other North Koreans. Ms. Demick writes with great empathy about once-dutiful members of the ruling Korean Workers' Party as well as children of the nonelite, all caught up in the famine.
She describes how even true believers lost their faith in the system as the government failed to meet its part of a once dependable if distasteful bargain: adequate food and shelter in return for unquestioning loyalty to Kim Il-sung and his son and successor, Kim Jong-il.
One of the most moving chapters describes the daughter of a Chinese Korean who, ironically, fled to North Korea during China's "Great Leap Forward," when 30 million people died of starvation because of Mao Zedong's mad agricultural and industrial policies. The daughter, a Ms. Kim, becomes a doctor in North Korea and thinks of herself as a loyal citizen and success until she finds a police surveillance report about her that describes her as suspect because of her father's foreign origin.
After her father's death, she flees to China in search of relatives and sees a bowl of rice and meat on the ground outside a modest farmhouse. "She couldn't deny what was staring her plainly in the face," Ms. Demick writes. "Dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea."
Ms. Demick describes the gradual transformation of the North Korean economy as desperate people become "reluctant capitalists" to survive. A Mrs. Song, a former clothing factory worker, bakes and sells ersatz cookies in a quasi-legal private market after her factory shuts down and her mother-in-law, husband and only son die of starvation. She realizes, Ms. Demick writes, that "the simple and kindhearted people who did what they were told ... were the first to die."
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