Sometimes we received an official notice from the party, giving us permission to cultivate any vacant land we could find. So we’d grab our shovels and find a strip of land by the roadside or up against an apartment building. We’d hoe the soil and plant beans or Chinese cabbages. Others created plots on mountainsides and attempted to plant sweet corn and potatoes. But it was a waste of effort. It was almost impossible to find seeds, and even if you did manage to find some and get something to grow, it would be stolen before the harvest. The crops were pulled when they were no bigger than your thumb.
Children gave up going to school. I’d see them wandering the streets with the adults, desperately searching for food. Myong-hwa and Ho-son got thinner and thinner, their faces so sunken that their eyes looked huge, entirely out of proportion to their other features. I wanted to cry whenever I looked at their small bony bodies, but I lacked even the energy for that.
The situation grew more and more dire. Starving people wandered around hopelessly, while others simply lay in the street. Soon there were corpses too, lying out in the open, unclaimed and left to rot. Women. Old people. Kids.
The black market operated openly. Stalls sprang up right in front of the police station, and the authorities couldn’t do anything about it. Not the cops, not even the dreaded secret police. If they’d tried to intervene, all hell would have broken loose.
Not that the black market was any use to people who didn’t have hard currency. If you tried to buy something with local currency, the price went up a hundredfold unless you had a watch or some useful household items to barter.
Someone like me—with no hard currency and no goods to exchange—could only buy rice gruel from a shop that a cockroach would have fled from. That, or wander about the market in hopes of picking up some crumbs another unlucky bastard had inadvertently dropped.
The only other option was to steal. That was the quickest and easiest solution, and it grew increasingly common.
Another huge change that occurred around this time was that it suddenly became much easier to move around. In the past, you couldn’t get on a train without official travel documents. But now you were free to go anywhere if you had a ticket, which usually simply involved bribing someone.
Not that I could take advantage of these changing circumstances, as I had no money. Production at the factory I worked in had gradually ceased, so I had no goods to trade.
My family and I started to pick a plant called omode. We searched and picked till it got dark, by which time our hands were bleeding. Once we had a decent bag of it, we returned home and peeled off the skin. Mashed the flesh. Boiled the stuff. It tasted foul, but we’d eat anything to survive.
I sometimes felt ashamed of myself. I worried about Ho-chol; I had no idea where he was, but I thought about him all the time. I apologized to the kids and to my wife for our miserable life. My children were always kind, always hopeful. They knew I liked a smoke whenever I could get my hands on one, so they used to pick up cigarette butts and give them to me. We were on the verge of starvation, but the bonds of family love remained intact. Which was more than you could say for some people. I heard many stories of families falling out over food. I even heard a rumor of one man killing his wife and eating her. I’m sure it was true, and I’m equally sure he wasn’t the only one.
By the summer of 1995, we were truly terrified that we might die of hunger. Then in August, disaster struck. A devastating flood hit South Pyongan Province, an important grain-producing area. That meant the end of our grain ration. When autumn came, we started to collect acorns in desperation. With no grain, acorns were the only things that might see us through the coming winter. So we collected as many as we possibly could. We boiled them and ate them once a day, and to us, God help us, they tasted delicious. And yes, they did see us through.
By the spring of 1996, the land we’d cultivated next to our apartment building was useless. There were no young seedlings to plant, no seeds, and no fertilizer either. The factory had shut down. By this time, so many people had died that I saw hordes of orphans wandering around.
It got so bad that we eventually started eating any old weeds we could find. We boiled the wretched things for ages to try to get rid of their harshness. But it was hopeless. They still tasted rank. And they did the most appalling things to us. Our bodies grew swollen, our faces grew swollen, and our urine turned red or even blue. We all suffered from chronic diarrhea. We couldn’t even walk in that condition.
No one thought or talked about anything except food. When we could manage to get around, we spent all our time searching and searching for anything remotely edible. We were nothing but a bunch of ravenous ghosts. The barely living dead.
I don’t know how many people starved to death. You heard stories all the time.
“That woman whose husband died? Well, she’s dead too. Died alone.”
“I haven’t seen old so-and-so recently. Have you? I guess he didn’t make it.”
“I found this woman lying on the street. I checked, but she was cold already.”
I heard stories of cannibalism. Rumor had it that if those participating in such acts got caught, they were executed in public. I never witnessed a public execution myself, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Every day was like living in a nightmare. It sounds dreadful to say, but I grew immune to the horror of all the people lying in the streets. Sometimes, I couldn’t tell whether they were dying or already dead. And the awful thing was, I didn’t have the energy to care.
People started asking awkward questions in public. Like, when would they be able to eat white rice and meat soup? No one would have asked a question like that in the past, not even in private.
Some people complained about Kim Il-sung and what he’d gotten us into. But nobody spoke of changing the system. They were too scared of the police and the secret police. Did anyone even try to topple the leadership? No. They did what they were told to the bitter end. After all, they’d been brainwashed since they were schoolchildren. We were taught that the United States brutally slaughters our brothers and sisters in the south. That we must free the people of South Korea. That their country is occupied by the enemy, the United States.
I wasn’t sure how my family and I survived. We all had the same sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, bodies of skin and bone. When we sat or lay down, we were so bony, it hurt. Even when we were sleeping, it was so painful, we woke up constantly.
When I looked at my family, I thought, Dear God! Do we have to die like this?
I grew reluctant to pick weeds. We were dying anyway. What was the point? I became indifferent to death. If I could just stand the pain and lie down for a while, I could float away and never come back.
But it was always the same. Every time I closed my eyes, I heard my parents’ voices, their dying words. I was obsessed with them.
Somehow . . . somehow . . . get back to Japan! Tell our story! my father said.
Take my ashes back to Japan and put them in my parents’ grave, my mother’s sobbing voice echoed.
It was September, and the moon sometimes appeared between the clouds. The house in Hamju was dark because we had no electricity. There was no conversation between us. We were sitting slumped by the wall, staring out into the darkness. The moonlight was falling on my wife and children. Their bodies looked like trees in that chilly light. Dead trees.
When you’re starving to death, you lose all the fat from your lips and nose. Once your lips disappear, your teeth are bared all the time, like a snarling dog. Your nose is reduced to a pair of nostrils. I wish desperately that I didn’t know these things, but I do.
I finally spoke.
“We’ve been reduced to skeletons. If we don’t do anything about it, we’ll be dead soon. I have to get across the border. I want you to come with me, but I don’t think you have the strength . . .” The thought came to me just like that; I’d never even considered it before. But it suddenly occurred to me that if I was going to die anyway, I might as well die trying to get back to Japan. If by some miracle I succeeded, I could send money back to my family. I could save them.
Myong-hwa was silent for a while. “Father, you must decide,” she said. Then she burst into tears.