DWIGHT GARNER ESSAY


Computers are rare in North Korea, and the Internet, for most of its citizens, is little more than a whispered rumor. It’s probable, in fact, that only one person surfs the Web in North Korea without someone monitoring every click: Kim Jong-il, that authoritarian regime’s supreme leader.

When he’s online, and not lurking on sites devoted to his obsessions (movies, fancy food, young women, nuclear weapons), Mr. Kim must sometimes see what his country looks like, to the rest of the world, in those haunting satellite photographs of the Far East at night.

You’ve probably seen them. The countries near North Korea - Japan, South Korea, China - are ablaze with splotches and pinpricks of light, with beaming civilization. But North Korea, home to some 23 million people, is a black hole, an ocean of dark. Barbara Demick, a foreign correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, begins her excellent new book, “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea,” by poring over these satellite images. She’s shocked by them, and moved. “North Korea is not an undeveloped country,” she observes. “It is a country that has fallen out of the developed world.”

“Nothing to Envy” is one of three provocative new books about North Korea . The others are “The Hidden People of North Korea,” by Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh, and “The Cleanest Race,” by B. R. Myers.

North Korea is not an easy country to observe. If we have trouble seeing North Koreans plainly, they cannot see us at all. Telephone use is severely restricted. Postal service is unreliable. There is essentially no e-mail. Television and radios receive only approved channels. The country’s citizens are force-fed a steady, numbing diet of state propaganda devoted to sustaining the personality cult of Kim Jong-il and savaging all things American.

Ms. Demick’s book follows the lives of six ordinary North Koreans, including a female doctor, a pair of conflicted lovers, a factory worker and an orphan.

The people Ms. Demick observes lived, before their defections, in northeastern North Korea, far from the country’s tidy capital, Pyongyang. The existences she describes sound brutal: there is often not enough food; citizens work long days that can be followed by hours of ideological training at night; spying on one’s neighbors is a national pastime; a nonpatriotic comment, especially an anti-Kim Jong-il joke, can have you sent to a gulag for life, if not executed.

Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh’s book, “The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom,” is based on more than 200 interviews with defectors, and it paints a picture of a restless populace, increasingly dubious about the official propaganda. “It would be a gross exaggeration to say that the people support Kim Jong-il,” they write. “Rather, it does not occur to them to oppose him.” North Koreans are too busy trying to survive to be able to think about much else.

Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh’s portrait of Mr. Kim’s indulgent lifestyle is detailed and devastating. He may look like a man of the people, they write, with his tan slacks, zippered jackets and stout build. But they chronicle his obsession with the latest electronics, the ”pleasure teams” of girls he keeps handy, the Bordeaux wine he has flown in.

While many of his people starve, they write, Mr. Kim “is such a connoisseur that, according to his former chef, every grain of rice destined for his dinner table is inspected for quality and shape.”

Mr. Myers, the author of “The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves - and Why It Matters,” is a contributing editor to The Atlantic magazine and directs the international studies department at Dongseo University in South Korea.

His often counterintuitive new book attempts a psychological profile of Kim Jong-il and his regime. He explains that North Korea’s dominant worldview is “far removed” from the Communism, Confucianism and official “show-window” ideologies that Westerners analyze.

Kim Jong-il reportedly suffered a stroke in 2008 and has looked frail during his recent, and increasingly rare, public appearances. While the world speculates about his successor, almost certainly to be one of his sons, one of the lessons of these books is not to remove our eyes from the blinkered lives of the average North Korean.

“The Kim regime essentially holds its people hostage,” Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh write, and they are dismayed to note that “the United States is much more interested in the hostage taker’s weapons of mass destruction than in the fate of his hostages.”




Examples of North Korean propaganda: a portrait of Kim Il-sung, his wife Kim Jong Suk and their son Kim Jong-il; a poster extols the country’s military. / PHOTOGRAPHS FROM “THE CLEANEST RACE’ BY B. R. MYERS