Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives In North Korea Quotes
"It is baffling how a nation of 23 million people can appear as vacant as the oceans."
"In the middle of this black hole, in this bleak, dark country where millions have died of starvation, there is also love."
"Establishing juche means, in a nutshell, being the master of revolution and reconstruction in one’s own country."
"The only way to redeem the family would be to play the system and try to climb the social ladder."
"The strength of the regime came from its ability to isolate its own citizens completely."
"Loyalty and filial devotion are the supreme qualities of a revolutionary."
"How are we going to live? What are we going to do without our marshal?"
"Let’s catch more spies to protect the fatherland."
"Everyone in the room was in tears—everyone, that is, except for Oak-hee. She felt utterly blank inside, not sad, not happy, maybe just a little irritated."
"Kim Il-sung might be dead, but I’m not and I need to eat."
"The victory of our revolution is assured as long as our dear comrade Kim Jong-il, the only successor to the Great Leader, is with us."
"My mother told me if I don’t cry, I’m a bad person."
"It sounds too embarrassing to admit, but that’s just the way it is."
"People did not go passively to their deaths."
"The strong and athletic are especially vulnerable because their metabolisms burn more calories."
"It was the simple and kindhearted people who did what they were told—they were the first to die."
"I can’t figure out what it is. I just can’t get my child to stop crying."
"All I was capable of doing was to cry with their mothers over their bodies afterward."
"He’s been admitted to the hospital. A patient is a patient."
"If they brought in one beer bottle, they’d get one IV. If they brought in two bottles, they would get two IVs."
"By the middle of 1995, Mrs. Song and her husband had sold most of their valuable possessions for food."
"The killer targets the most innocent, the people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend."
"She had the sensation that she was already dead, floating above the empty receptacle of what once had been her body."
"He complained of blurry eyesight. He couldn’t lift the fountain pen he used for writing."
"He talked incessantly about food. He spoke of the tofu soups his mother made him as a child."
"She was determined to steal, beg—whatever it took—to get some food for her husband."
""Come, darling. Let’s go to a good restaurant and order a nice bottle of wine," he told his wife one morning."
""I’ll pay you back," Mrs. Song promised as she ran back home, the adrenaline pumping her legs."
"Between 1996 and 2005, North Korea would receive $2.4 billion worth of food aid."
""Everybody who was going to die was already dead.""
"She refused to eat. She wandered the streets until she collapsed."
"After fifteen days of consuming proper food, Mrs. Song was coherent enough to remember exactly what had happened."
"Three deaths in three years—her mother-in-law in 1996, her husband in 1997, and her son in 1998."
"This was a strange side effect of the famine: Just when things were hitting bottom, a new spirit of enterprise was born."
"A human being needs at least 500 calories per day on average to survive."
"Doctors, too, found other ways of making money."
"If you owned a ladder, you could collect copper wire from the electric lines."
"The markets were magnets for all sorts of other businesses."
"The result was that the face of the new economy was increasingly female."
"In the past, she took comfort in knowing that she and everyone else she knew were more or less equally poor."
""Donbulrae," Mrs. Song muttered under her breath. Money insects."
"It was organized much like markets elsewhere in Asia."
"Hardly a day went by that Mrs. Song didn’t stumble across the dead and dying."
"His age was indeterminate; at fourteen, he was barely the size of an American eight-year-old."
"Kim Jong-il couldn’t let North Korea’s third-largest city deviate from the hard line of the Workers’ Party."
"The North Koreans joked that they were like "frogs in the well.""
"To get around the seal without damaging it, Jun-sang used a long, thin sewing needle to push the buttons."
"He listened to television more than he watched it."
"A few doors down, a neighbor had dogs. If he heard them barking at night, Jun-sang would switch the television back to the central broadcasting channel and rush outside to take down the antenna."
"Jun-sang should have been more careful after his close call, but he could not contain his curiosity."
"He had an insatiable appetite for information, current information in real time."
"The television brought Jun-sang not only news of the outside world, but more information than he’d ever heard before about his own country."
"Jun-sang learned astonishing things that he had suspected but never knew."
"During the summit, South Korean television broadcast Kim Jong-il’s voice as he chatted with the South Korean president."
"Listening to South Korean television was like looking in the mirror for the first time in your life and realizing you were unattractive."
"North Koreans were always told theirs was the proudest country in the world, but the rest of the world considered it a pathetic, bankrupt regime."
"JUN-SANG’S TRAIN rides home in particular reminded him of a description of living hell he had read in Buddhist scripture."
"Homeless children would run alongside the slow-moving trains begging, sometimes screaming for food."
"He realized suddenly he wore the same vacant expression on his face."
"They know! They all know!" he nearly screamed, he was so certain.
"North Korean students and intellectuals didn’t dare to stage protests as their counterparts in other Communist countries did."
"Under a system that sought to stamp out tainted blood for three generations, the punishment would extend to parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins."
"The other matter left unspoken was personal."
"The obvious question of their future went unanswered."
"It was as though none of this had ever happened."
"Mrs. Song was not surprised to learn that Oak-hee was at Nongpo."
"Open your eyes. You’ll see our whole country is a prison. We’re pitiful. You don’t know the reality of the rest of the world."
"She wanted to put her fingers in her ears. If this was capitalism, she didn’t like it. Too noisy."
"We will do as the party tells us. We will die for the general. We have nothing to envy. We will go our own way."
"Was it really over? She was fifty-seven years old, still in good health."
"This was her wake-up call. She was ready to go."
"Her serenity came from the certainty that she was doing the right thing."
"To avoid striking up a conversation with a fellow passenger, she was told to remain in her seat for the duration of the eighty-minute flight."
"She wasn’t nearly as nervous as one might expect under the circumstances."
"She wanted to see with her own eyes the world she had glimpsed on television."
"The smugglers that Oak-hee had hired to bring her to South Korea were astounded."
"Her passport wouldn’t be convincing enough to fool the South Koreans."
"She was Song Hee-suk, fifty-seven years old, from Chongjin."
"The South Korean government, too, is content to keep the number of refugees down to manageable levels."
"Only a small fraction of the 100,000 or more North Koreans in China are able to make it to South Korea."
"By the time Mrs. Song arrived, South Korean officials were accustomed to North Koreans showing up unannounced."
"The average South Korean seventeen-year-old male is five inches taller than his North Korean counterpart."
"The nation’s think tanks assigned teams of psychologists and sociologists, historians and educators to come up with a plan."
"She was given a stipend of $20,000 to get started."
"I had a dream the other night about my children."
"I’m holding my son’s hand. I’m carrying my daughter on my back. We are all running, trying to escape from North Korea."
"Kim Hyuck, when he arrived in South Korea at the age of nineteen, was the same as he had always been—poor, short, homeless, and without family or connections to help him make his way."
"The qualities most prized in South Korea—height, fair skin, affluence, prestigious degrees, designer clothes, English-language fluency—are precisely those that the newly arrived defector lacks."
"For all the support provided by the government, defectors can sense the pity and fear and guilt and embarrassment with which the South Koreans view them."
"The persistence of the North Korean regime is something of a mystery."
"Kim Jong-il is trying to run the economy the same way his father did in the 1950s."
"Pyongyang is often said to be a Potemkin village, an elaborate artifice for the benefit of outsiders."
"It takes a moment before you spot what's wrong with the picture."
"Their pants hitched up just enough to reveal that they weren't wearing socks."
"It was a blip, a brief interlude of light in the grim, dysfunctional country that is North Korea."
"As soon as you guys left, it was pitch dark again."
"Most adults didn't eat lunch for lack of food."
"Teachers report that children lack energy and are lagging in social and cognitive development."
"The countryside reeked of the night soil that is still used instead of chemical fertilizer."
"Chongjin looks like a city moving backward in time."