Barbara Demick

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Ramona Koval: Nothing to Envy is a wonderful example of the best narrative non-fiction, in which we follow the lives of a woman doctor, that pair of star-crossed lovers, a loyal factory worker, an orphan. And in telling their stories, Barbara Demick tells the larger political and economic story, which reads like Orwell and the most gut-wrenching thriller.

Here's Barbara Demick at the Sydney Writers' Festival.

Barbara Demick: [Applause] Thanks so much.

Ramona Koval: There's nothing like a boy meets girl story to capture the interest and the minds of your readers and to humanise a people. Is that what you wanted to do?

Barbara Demick: Yes, exactly. When I started out writing about North Korea, I really knew nothing about these people. I had only seen the images of the blank soldiers goosestepping, the mass acrobatics—you know, all the stereotypes of North Koreans. I'd look at these photographs and I'd think, 'What are these people thinking? Who are they?' And everybody loves Romeo and Juliet, and this is... the main couple in this book are Romeo and Juliet, they're... it's a very innocent story. The girl is just past her 12th birthday; the boy is 15. They see each other in a movie theatre—his is in a very remote town in North Korea, it's in the last period that there's regular electricity—they fall in love and they can't be together because in North Korea, there is class, everybody is rated by their loyalty to the leadership. And this girl was part of the hostile, wavering class, she was one of the undesirables—they call it 'tainted blood' in Korean. The boy was from a better family, and to be seen together would ruin his career. So a lot of the book follows the tension of their romance.

And, you know, I will say they are real people. I met her first, in South Korea. I was based in Seoul for Los Angeles Times to cover the whole Korean Peninsula and I'm an America, US citizen, no other passport. It was very difficult to go to North Korea, so I started interviewing defectors. And she was somebody I'd met. She had been a kindergarten teacher and I was interviewing her about the situation in the schools and the children who died of starvation and I kind of became friendly with her.

And I asked her at one point, 'So, like, what did you do for fun in North Korea? Were you ever happy in North Korea?' I often ask this question when I'm interviewing people as a journalist, you know, 'What's your happiest memory?' And she told me about her boyfriend (and 'her boyfriend', this was a very chaste relationship). And as the story evolved about this young man she met when she was a child, and her first love, it slowly became the centrepiece of my book. I don't know... should I spoil the plot by telling more?

Ramona Koval: Well, I don't think it's going to spoil the plot, because as soon as you begin to read it, you're just entranced by the way it's written. So I don't think you're going to spoil the plot, but what we see is the development of this relationship over years—years and years and years—as they grow up, they get separated, and they have to rely on letters. It's sort of a nineteenth-century epistolary relationship, you describe it as, in a country where the postal system is completely unreliable.

Barbara Demick: That's right. So this couple meets... you know, this is going to sound like it's the 1920s, but it's actually the 1990s when this is happening. North Korea is still this way, there's no real telephone system. A few people can make telephone calls within the same city; most people do not have telephones. The postal service doesn't really function, there's no email—this is the northern part of the peninsula, the southern part is famously the most wired country in the world—there's no email.

So this couple were dating through the mid-1990s and he was going to university in the capital, Pyongyang. She was back... my book takes place in a very remote town in the far northeast. And they would send each other letters, which was a horrible chore, because there was no paper, you couldn't get a piece of paper—it's still that way, there's still no paper in North Korea—you couldn't get a pencil. So she would struggle to find paper to write to him and they would send these letters back and forth. Sometimes the letters would take months—it's about 300 miles apart, Pyongyang and Chongjin—and so this was this very slow, Victorian romance.

Ramona Koval: Let's then just take a step back. You didn't go to this town, in the north of the north where they lived. You haven't been to North Korea that often. Tell me about creating a book and creating a story of the lives of people who live in a place where you have no access to it. So, as a journalist, what is your method of finding the story and finding it reliably and confirming that that's actually what happened?

Barbara Demick: Yeah. I mean, let me back up a bit. As I said, I was assigned to cover all of Korea and North Korea is probably the hardest place in the world to go, the hardest place to get a visa. And, this is a little bit embarrassing to say, but as a journalist, if you tell us we can't go some place, we go nuts, we get completely obsessed. And I think if North Korea was a place that anybody could go, you'd think, 'You know, this is like cold, it's boring, it's ugly, the food sucks, you don't want to go.' But because I couldn't go to North Korea, I became very obsessed with it and this was a work of obsession. The first few years that I was covering the Koreas I could not get a visa for North Korea. So I decided that I wanted to recreate everyday life. And what I could get access to were North Koreans. There sort of is a steady I wouldn't say flow, maybe a trickle, of North Koreans who have defected through China into South Korea.

Ramona Koval: How did you get access to them? Do they have a club?

Barbara Demick: You know, there are various associations. They tend not to be very public, because they're, I think justifiably, a bit paranoid that there might be infiltrators. If you're North Korean and you defect, they will retaliate against your family. But one person knows another, and because I became very obsessive about North Koreans, I started interviewing just about anybody who came in, any fresh arrival. And I was really trying to understand their mindset, like what it means to be a North Korean. They were so mysterious and foreign.

And I was always, as a girl, fascinated by this dystopian literature—1984, Brave New World, The Handmaid's Tale, all this stuff—and North Korea was like the real thing. It is 1984. So I was just fascinated by their stories about the various levels of spies; and the way they had to march in step; and the North Koreans, they don't celebrate their own birthday, they celebrate Kim Il-sung's. I was obsessed with all the little details of their lives.

So I started interviewing everybody, and then I decided I would maybe write a profile of one city. And at this point it was getting easier to get into North Korea—political relations were slightly better with the US—but I wanted a place that was sort of off the tourist trail. If you get to North Korea—I don't know, has anybody here been to North Korea?—anyway, if you get there you're taken on this, like, very well groomed trail of monuments to the leadership and everything looks very nice. But I wanted to really go off the beaten track. So I picked this city in the far northeast, Chongjin, to focus on and I started interviewing everybody from this city, including the young woman who's in the book. She's called Miran in the book, my favourite person, because when I met her I guess she was about 32, she was kind of lively and fun and funny and loved to chat about her love life and sex—not that she had any when she was in North Korea—but you know, I could ask her anything.

So she told me this story about the boy who she met at the movie theatre in the '80s and how they had dated secretly for all those years. And she told me, 'It was dark, so we would go out walking in the dark, and after some years we held hands, and many years later there was a very quick kiss'—this was again very chaste. She left North Korea when she was 26 and although she was a kindergarten teacher, she said she didn't know what sex was at that time, she didn't know where babies came from—she knew where they came from, she didn't know how they got there. This is North Korea. And this boy, who was a few years older and who was a brilliant student was also her best friend. I mean, they had a really nice relationship. They told each other everything...

Ramona Koval: Except?

Barbara Demick: Except, what she didn't know, what he didn't know... both of them were fairly disgusted with the regime. She, after she graduated from college, became a kindergarten teacher—this was the '90s—and she was watching, one-by-one, as the pupils in her class suffered the symptoms of starvation. They would get skinny, the sunken eyes, their hair would turn to straw, and eventually they would stop coming to school. And she was disgusted by what she saw. She was teaching them propaganda songs in their kindergarten. One of them is the title of the book...

Ramona Koval: Like 'Nothing to Envy'.

Barbara Demick: 'We have nothing to envy in this world'. And she also had a very difficult life. Her father was born in South Korea and had in fact come to North Korea. He fought in the Korean War on the South Korean side; he had been taken prisoner-of-war; and like thousands of other South Korean soldiers, he was never repatriated to South Korea, he was...

Ramona Koval: And this is the source of her 'tainted blood'?

Barbara Demick: Yep. This is the source of the 'tainted blood'. He was kept after the war because North Korea was short of labour. And so she was again part of this, like, very low class, because of her father's background.

And her family was thinking about defecting—again, this was the late '90s, terrible times. It was possible, it was becoming possible, to slip across the 800 mile border into China. They left one night, in the middle of the night, it was very spontaneous. Her father died, just of old age, and before he died, he told them, 'My last wish is that you contact my family in South Korea. They probably think I died during the war. And just tell them I lived, I had a family. That's my last wish.'

And she and her mother and siblings decided they were going to try to go to China: it was a pretty quick decision. Her boyfriend was at university in Pyongyang and could she tell him, her best friend? No, she couldn't really tell him, because she trusted him but it would compromise him. And this was the most important thing in her life, but she couldn't tell him she was leaving. And before she left, she burned all their letters, she left behind the gifts he'd given her, she didn't want him implicated. And they disappeared in the middle of the night.

When I met her in Seoul, years later, I asked her about this and she was still really racked with guilt about leaving him in this way. She said, 'This man was my best friend, he wasn't just my boyfriend, he was really a friend.' He had helped her; he had really given her the courage to go to teacher's college, even though she came from this bad family...

Ramona Koval: But then she finds out that he was trying to leave as well?

Barbara Demick: Wait, wait, wait... [Laughter]

Ramona Koval: There's so many good stories in this book...

Barbara Demick: So, anyway, she was very always broken up and she would have dreams about him. When I met her she had just gotten married, but she had these dreams about the ex-boyfriend she left behind. And I once said, 'What do you think he thinks of you?' And she thought, 'Well, maybe he hates me, because I betrayed our motherland and I left him, but somehow I think he'd understand.' We had this conversation, I think this was fall of 2005, and about two weeks later she called me at my office and said, 'You're not going to believe this—he's here in Seoul! He's come. Do you want to meet him?' [Gasps]

So I met him. He, it turned out, what she didn't know is that he also hated the North Korean regime, he loathed them. He had been at this elite university in Pyongyang and he had begun reading banned literature. You know, nothing very subversive, but like Dale Carnegie self-help books he read. And he thought, 'Wow, it says, like, in a capitalist society you have to be like a good person and tell the truth. I didn't know that.' He read Gone with the Wind--North Koreans love Gone with the Wind, and it was like the north-south plot. Somebody brought him a brochure the Soviet embassy had released about opening up the economy, and he was like, 'Wow! Look what is happening in Russia.' He read a...

Ramona Koval: But they were thought of [as] being bad communists, those ones in Russia?

Barbara Demick: Bad communists. They were bad communists now. He read...

Ramona Koval: And the Chinese weren't so good either?

Barbara Demick: Yeah but he read Chinese literature and some of the Chinese literature was beginning to say, 'Mao was 70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong.' This was incredible—you could never say anything like that. And so he was slowly, slowly changing, and he was thinking about defecting. But it was just a germ of an idea, and then he came back to his hometown Chongjin—he used to come back two or three times a year for vacations—came back and found out she was gone. He was just, 'Shit! She did it before me!' He was three years older, he was the educated one, and he's a very deliberative, intellectual, 'should I do it, should I not', kind of person. And he had a good career for himself from a North Korean standard. He was, in Pyongyang he was at an elite university, he was a scientist, he would have lived as good a life as you could possibly live in North Korea. He would have become a member of the worker's party, which is like their communist party.

But he had actually run out of things to read, he's a reader (since we're at a writers' festival), he's a reader and he wanted freedom, he wanted to be able to read. And he came out several years later.

Ramona Koval: Can I have a little parenthesis here by saying, books weren't so important for them growing up I guess, but films were, and films were regarded as a really important propaganda system. Tell us, the film that they both would have met at when she was 12 and he was 15, what sort of a film was that going to be?

Barbara Demick: Yeah they met... you know, there's a huge North Korean film industry—not so much now, because they don't have any money—but Kim Jong-il, the current leader, himself, when he was a young man, ran the film studios, and it was an important piece of the propaganda system. The film, it was called I think Birth of the Nation and it was about Kim Il-sung and people fighting the Japanese, and going back to the 1930s and 1940s about Korea's struggle to get out from under the Japanese occupation. You know, complete propaganda, but they still, there were always love stories in the films, and they both loved films, and that's how they met, was at the movie theatre.

Ramona Koval: Barbara Demick with me, Ramona Koval, at the Sydney Writers' Festival. Barbara Demick's book is called Nothing to Envy: Love, Life and Death in North Korea. Stories, including those of the star-crossed lovers—and Mrs Song.

Barbara Demick: Mrs Song I call 'the true believer'. She's a woman now in her 60s who actually was born the last day of World War II. She was born in 1945. She was a factory worker. She believed in the system. She believed that Kim Il-sung was the true heir of the communist dream and that North Korea was the greatest country there was, that they had nothing to envy in the world. And she raised her children, tried to raise them as loyal North Koreans. They would have to say every morning, 'Thank you, father, Kim Il-sung'. In North Korean homes, still today, there are two portraits on the wall: Kim Il-sung, the founder; Kim Jong-il, the current leader.

Ramona Koval: That's God and the Son of God.

Barbara Demick: Yeah, yeah. They plagiarised a little bit from the New Testament. It's a good story, it's a convincing yarn, and they... You know, the Bible is completely banned in North Korea—it's worse than pornography, literally, in terms of what's banned—but they've taken some of the Christian imagery. But those... you have these two portraits on your wall and the wall where you have your portraits, you're not allowed to put any family photos, nothing else. It's a bare wall. And you're required to dust those portraits every day and people have a special cloth that can't be used for anything else.

Ramona Koval: And a box underneath?

Barbara Demick: And a box underneath. And they inspect to see that you dust, but she didn't need an inspection.

Ramona Koval: What sort of organisation, what sort of a country inspects the dusting of the portraits? I mean, that is so mad, isn't it?

Barbara Demick: Well, it is 1984 without the technology, because they don't have enough electricity to have spy cameras everywhere. But it is, it is, and it's all done by human beings. I mean, people of North Korea are organised into people's groups—they're called [imenban?]—and there's a leader of the [imenban?]. Mrs Song in my book actually was her neighbourhood leader.

And in the 1990s, when the food supply started to run out, the national security people used to say to her, 'What are the people in your building saying? Are they complaining that there's no food?' And she'd say, 'Well, they're not saying anything.' 'Well, try to see what they're saying. Are they complaining?' You know, this was when you were starving; you weren't even allowed to say you were hungry. This is the way this regime is. Anyway, Mrs Song (I'll spoil a little bit of the plot here), she lost in rapid succession, she lost her job in the factory first of all—she was working in a garment factory and she continued to work at the factory way beyond the point that they were getting no salaries, they were getting no food, there was no electricity, there was no fabric. The factory wasn't working, but people would still come in every day because they had to, and she was loyal, she kept on working until really the bitter end.

Ramona Koval: And blaming herself.

Barbara Demick: Blaming herself.

Ramona Koval: For not being able to get food or not being a good enough citizen, or...

Barbara Demick: Yeah, when things went down, in rapid succession she lost... her mother-in-law died of starvation, her husband died of starvation, her son died of starvation, and she was on the verge of starvation herself. She should have died, but somehow she didn't. She pulled herself out of this hole and ended up starting a business, she made cookies, actually.

Ramona Koval: And what did she make them out of? What about the recipe for what she made them out of?

Barbara Demick: Well, she made them out of flour and water and a little bit of milk, but she made an oven herself out of steel that had been left behind from the closed steel factory. And she sort of spied on other people to get the recipe, 'cos these women, these older women, in North Korea (this is still true) began out of nothing—out of no training whatsoever, no business skills—began figuring out how to support the family. Theoretically, the men and the younger women are the most important part of the population; these older women are dispensable, so they're allowed to work in the markets. And these women actually are the ones who are running the economy.

What can I say? She's a survivor. She believed until the bitter end, she believed that it was her fault that members of her family died of starvation. And it was only at the very end... When I met her she said, 'It was the good and loyal people who believed and who did what the party had told them, those were the ones who died first of starvation.'

Ramona Koval: I wanted you to read a little bit from the middle of the book, 'cos you cover a young child, really, an orphan, and this is at one of the most horrible times, when food was very, very scarce.

Barbara Demick: Yeah, and let me give a little bit of context to this. Well, it's in the passage, but in North Korea everybody had been assigned a place to live and you couldn't leave that place. And this is when the system starts breaking down and people go homeless, and the place they go.

[Barbara Demick reads excerpt from Nothing to Envy: Love, Life and Death in North Korea: from 'Chongjin station: this is where people went when they had nothing left and no place else to go...' to '....as they sprinted off with the angry vendors in hot pursuit, the little kids would scoop up the food,' pausing in the middle to say: Let me just interrupt, Hyuck is this boy who had been in an orphanage and he's come back to Chongjin to look for his father. That's why he's at the train station.]

Ramona Koval: So, I can see the station, I think we can all see the station, we can all see the scene there. But you've never been there. How did you describe it like that?

Barbara Demick: This was really the obsessive part of reporting on this book. This book is entirely non-fiction and Chongjin was tough, because this is like the most restricted city in North Korea. There were a handful of photographs. In the 1980s there were Japanese tourists who were allowed into Chongjin and I had an assistant, or a friend of an assistant, in Tokyo who started tracking down photographs from Japanese tour groups. There was and there still is a human rights group that sometimes sends cameras into North Korea and gives them to North Koreans themselves and then smuggles out the pictures—I got those photographs. And then frankly half way through this project Google Earth really got going, and so I took the descriptions of these places and, again, I had seen North Korean train stations, but not in Chongjin and I didn't want to give a generic one. This particular train station, I saw a picture from a Japanese tourist, I blew it up, I saw how high it was and I was able to walk the people through Google Earth: 'OK, this is 100 metres, then you turn towards the sea.' So we reconstructed it. And they often drew me pictures, and one of the things that was fortunate is I had a good relationship with these people. I picked out of hundreds of North Koreans I'd met, people who I could go back to and who I could call and see...

Ramona Koval: 'Cos was that your criteria for putting them in the book, or was it something about that story, or something you can corroborate? I mean, why these people out of so many people?

Barbara Demick: Well, both. And a lot of my reporting on North Korea, I would go to the Chinese border, where people were freshly out. And these were people who might have been in North Korea two weeks before, but they were on the move and hiding and I couldn't get back to them. I picked people who I could find again and who again I had a strong enough relationship with. Under our ethics rules, we're not allowed to pay for interviews; I never paid them anything. And this had to be understood. I didn't want them to feel that I was taking advantage of them.

Ramona Koval: Why did they talk to you?

Barbara Demick: They honestly, they wanted their stories told. When North Koreans first came out to South Korea, they were kind of like rock stars, like, 'Oh my!' But by the time I got there, there were about 6000 of them and the South Koreans were not that interested in them at that stage. And they had... they were living in this modern, wealthy country and had experienced horrific things and I think they wanted to tell their stories.

Ramona Koval: It's interesting, I didn't realise this, I mean, South Korea regards itself as the government of the whole Korean Peninsula, so that if you actually are making your way, if you get to South Korea you can claim citizenship.

Barbara Demick: That's right.

Ramona Koval: That's not hard. But the South Koreans don't make it easy for their citizens who happen to be in the north to actually get to the south.

Barbara Demick: That's right. That's right and this is a very key thing. Because of the diplomatic sensitivities with China, a North Korean who gets across... they come across the border into China, but they can't just like go to the South Korean embassy in Beijing and say, 'Here I am.' The South Koreans really can't accept them because of China. So they go off to a third country—sometimes Mongolia, sometimes Thailand—it's very, very difficult. And they have to get themselves to South Korea. Once they set foot there, they're allowed in.

In the case of Mrs Song, I won't say exactly how she got there, but... well, I'll tell a little bit, I won't say exactly how she got out, but once she made it to China, somebody gave her a false passport, a false South Korean passport, and a plane ticket, and she got on a plane from China into Incheon airport—it's the main airport in South Korea. She gave back the passport to her handler and she just showed up and said, 'Hi, I'm here. I'm a North Korean. I'm seeking freedom and asylum.'

Ramona Koval: All this story in a country that is apparently capable of making nuclear warheads, but can't turn the light on during the evening. Explain that.

Barbara Demick: I don't know. This is so weird. If you ever go to North Korea and you get a North Korean business card, it crumbles in your hands, the paper is so poor. I mean, they can't make a pencil. The soldiers don't have socks. But they have devoted what little they have, and they in a way bankrupted the country, putting all the money into both the nuclear technology and the missile technology. One of their few exports is weapons. It's both economic and in their case political. I think they feel that without nuclear weapons they wouldn't be on the map, nobody would pay attention to them, nobody would give them aid.

Ramona Koval: Barbara Demick, thank you so much. It was great.

Beijing-based writer and bureau chief of the LA Times, Barbara Demick, on what drives the North Korean regime, now being warned by the US to stop what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says is 'provocative behaviour', after the sinking of a South Korean warship.

Barbara Demick's book on the regime and some of its people is called Nothing to Envy: Love, Life and Death in North Korea. It's published by Fourth Estate.

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Title: Nothing to Envy: Love, Life and Death in North Korea

Author: Barbara Demick

Description: Fourth Estate