If it wasn’t for the sheer misery of most of its luckless inhabitants, wouldn’t the world be a duller place without North Korea?
If it wasn’t for the sheer misery of most of its luckless inhabitants, wouldn’t the world be a duller place without North Korea? There really is no place quite like it, a surreal time capsule largely devoid of mobile phones, cars and electric light; a land presided over by the world’s first hereditary Communist, Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il, whose deceased father remains Eternal President of the place I like to call the ‘Land of Eternal Happiness’.
Less charitable types have described North Korea as like ‘Upper Volta with nuclear weapons’, but its strange fascination has drawn me there at least half a dozen times, even if on the first occasion I was arrested at Pyongyang railway station for being in possession of a camera.
That same fascination drew Los Angeles Times and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Barbara Demick to the weird and wonderful World of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — or more precisely to the life stories of six residents of the closed Northern city of Chongjin, who had finally managed to defect to South Korea.
I was prepared to be disappointed by her, and anxiously anticipated the inevitable errors and exaggerations, some of which were surely bound to come from the defectors. This was most certainly not because I doubted that the North’s ‘Arduous March’, Kim Jong-Il’s euphemism for the wave of slow starvation that eventually carried off millions of his fellow citizens that followed the collapse of Communism elsewhere and the ending of bartered trade, actually happened. I doubted that a journalist, who by her own estimation made only a couple of fleeting, heavily chaperoned trips to the North’s showpiece capital, could really tell us anything new.
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