By now, the poorest people had been reduced to eating boiled pepper leaves or bean leaves. The following year, the battle-cry was ‘Let us speed up the forced march towards the final victory.’ When the hunger had reaches its worst, another new slogan appeared: ‘Let us not live today for today, but let us live today for tomorrow’.
The term referred to the ‘forced march’ undertaken by Kim Il-Sung and his partisans during the war against the Japanese occupying forces. At the very beginning, in 1995, the cadres encouraged us o accept what was called a ‘forced march towards victory’. The official slogans changed as the famine ravaged the country. It is like reading Solzhenitsyn’s descriptions of scrabbling for nourishment in the gulag, except it’s not a gulag, it’s a whole town, a whole community - except of course for the party officials. Not that there is much sign of the state losing its iron grip on the population, but everyday life becomes completely dominated by the famine, which is apocalyptic in scale. Even a mad personality cult struggles to maintain its energy in the face of millions of deaths. All of which does feature, particularly at the start of the book, but because of the period it covers (Kang was born in 1986), it is overwhelmingly about the famine. Still, it wasn’t quite what I expected I thought it would mainly be about the political aspects of living in a communist personality cult: the parades, the synchronised gymnastics, the patriotic hymns, the giant floodlit statue of the Dear Leader, the propaganda. Normal in North Korea being batshit insane by the standards of anywhere else. I decided to read This is Paradise! because it is about a more normal childhood in rural North Korea. Reading the reviews, it sounds like the other book, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, is probably the better of the two, but it seems to be focussed on life inside the labour camps. I guess reading about North Korea just doesn’t seem as important as reading about the Soviet Bloc did back in the old days.
The DPRK is such a bizarre Cold War relic that you might think there would be more interest in it. When I was looking for books from North Korea for the Read The World challenge, I was quite surprised I could only find two actually by North Koreans. Nomber_key:000758Or to give it its full, bookshop-friendly title: This is Paradise! My North Korean Childhood, written by Hyok Kang with the French journalist Philippe Grangereau, and translated by Shaun Whiteside.
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