The Good Cook

Song Hee-suk was a model citizen of North Korea. "I lived only for Marshal Kim Il-sung and for the fatherland," she said not long ago. "I never had a thought otherwise." Her enthusiasm for the regime made her sound like the heroine of a propaganda film, and she looked the part, too. She had a face as plump as a dumpling, which made her appear well fed even when she wasn’t, and a bow-shaped mouth, which made her seem happy even when she was sad.

Mrs. Song raised four children while working ten-hour shifts, six days a week, at the day-care center of the Chosun Clothing Factory, in the coastal city of Chongjin, in North Hamgyong Province. An estimated twenty per cent of North Korean men were in the armed services, and women were needed to keep the factories going. Mrs. Song often went to work with a baby strapped to her back and with one or two other children dragging along behind her. The children spent their days in the day-care center. After work, Mrs. Song was required to participate in several hours of ideological training in the factory’s auditorium. On Friday nights, she stayed late for self-criticism. In these sessions, members of her work unit would stand up and reveal to their colleagues anything that they had done wrong. Mrs. Song usually said that she feared she wasn’t working hard enough. Mrs. Song was the head of her neighborhood group, and, when she wasn’t at the factory, she was responsible for assigning communal chores and reporting activity that was inconsistent with North Korean doctrine.

I first met Mrs. Song (whose name has been changed here) in 2004. She was fifty-nine years old and had been living in Seoul, South Korea, for two years. She had been brought out of North Korea by her oldest daughter, Oak-hee, who had for years expressed open dislike for the regime and had, in March, 2002, managed to defect to South Korea. Mrs. Song told me that she had left North Korea only for her daughter and that she remained a true believer until the day she left. Even after three members of her family died of starvation—her husband, her mother-in-law, and her twenty-five-year-old son—Mrs. Song believed that North Korea was the greatest nation on earth. "I thought it was my fault that I couldn’t provide for them," she said. "It never occurred to me that the government was at fault." Only later did she realize that it was "the kind and good-hearted people who did what they were told—they were the first to die.’’

Mrs. Song used to go twice a month to a food-distribution center near her apartment. With two plastic shopping bags, she stood in line outside an unmarked storefront until a big metal gate swung open at 10 A.M. Everybody had assigned days—Mrs. Song’s were the third and the eighteenth—but there was often a wait of several hours to get to the door. Inside was a small, unheated room with white concrete walls and a cheerless woman sitting behind a table covered with ledger books. Mrs. Song would hand over her ration book, a small sum of money, and tickets from the garment factory certifying that she had fulfilled her work duty. The clerk would calculate her entitlements: seven hundred grams each per day for her and her husband, Chang-bo, a journalist working for the North Hamgyong radio station; three hundred grams for her mother-in-law (retired people got less); and four hundred for each school-age child living at home. If anybody in the family was away from home, Mrs. Song would tell the clerk, and the corresponding amount of rations was deducted. The clerk would then stamp receipts in triplicate, one of which she’d give to Mrs. Song. At the back of the warehouse, where vats of rice, corn, barley, and flour were stored, another clerk weighed out the rations and put them in Mrs. Song’s plastic bags.

Cabbage for making kimchi was distributed in the autumn. Kimchi, spicy preserved cabbage, is the Korean national dish, and is made to last all winter. Mrs. Song says that each family got seventy kilograms (a hundred and fifty-four pounds) of cabbage per adult and fifty kilograms (a hundred and ten pounds) per child, which for her family came to four hundred and ten kilos. She would spend up to a week preparing kimchi. The cabbage was pickled with salt, spiced with red pepper, or sometimes with bean paste or baby shrimp, and then stored in tall earthenware jars. Chang-bo helped her carry the jars down to the basement of a warehouse next to their apartment building, where each family had a storage bin. The tradition was to bury kimchi pots in the garden, so that they would stay cold but would not freeze. But in the warehouse basement Mrs. Song and her husband simply packed dirt around the jars and put them in the storage bin, which they padlocked. Kimchi thieves were common in Chongjin.

Mrs. Song had three daughters, who used to boast that her kimchi was the best in the neighborhood. She enjoyed cooking almost as much as her husband enjoyed eating, and both of them fancied themselves gourmets. Her repertoire was naturally limited—North Koreans had no exposure to foreign cuisines—but North Korean cooks are creative. Whatever happens to be fresh and seasonal is mixed with rice, barley, or corn and spiced with red bean paste or chilies. The signature dish is naengmyeon, cold buckwheat noodles served in a broth with myriad regional variations that include hard-boiled eggs, cucumbers, or pears. If she was busy, Mrs. Song bought noodles from a shop; if not, she made them herself. During the holidays, using the limited ingredients from the public-distribution system, she would make twigim, batter-fried vegetables that were light and crisp. For her husband’s birthday, she turned rice into a sweet glutinous cake called deok. She also made her own corn liquor.

Looking back years later, Mrs. Song couldn’t pinpoint when her rations faded away—1989, 1990, 1991. She started waiting in line earlier, sometimes as early as 1 A.M. When the clerks handed her shopping bags back to her, they were lighter than they used to be, and she didn’t need to peek inside to confirm her disappointment. Rice disappeared first. Cooking oil had always been only sporadically available, but now it was never in the bag. The state-supplied cabbage was no longer delivered, because there was no fuel for the trucks. Mrs. Song had to walk to a nearby farm, pick the cabbage, and cart it home in a wheelbarrow. She didn’t complain. "If I made a fuss, they would have just come and taken me away," she told me later.

Subsidized food was supposed to be a crowning achievement of the North Korean system. Echoing the Republican Party’s mantra during Herbert Hoover’s 1928 Presidential campaign of "a chicken in every pot," North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, promised to feed the North Korean population with rice, coining the slogan "Rice Is Socialism" in the nineteen-fifties. Rice, especially white rice, had always been the favored food of Koreans, but North Korea is too cold and too mountainous to produce enough of it to sustain the population, and it remained a luxury. However, the public-distribution system, which was introduced in the Communist North shortly after the Korean peninsula was divided, in 1945, did supply a mixture of grains in amounts that were carefully allotted in accordance with rank and work status. On national holidays, such as the Kim-family birthdays, pork or dried fish might be distributed.

Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il, who by the nineteen-eighties was increasingly assuming his father’s duties, offered "on-the-spot guidance" to address the country’s problems. Father and son were experts in everything from geology to farming. One day, Kim Jong-il would decree that the country should switch from rice to potatoes as its primary staple food ("We have started to see the potato revolution as an ideological revolution," Rodong Shinmun, the official newspaper, reported); the next day, he would decide that the country should build ostrich farms.

Despite its rhetoric about self-sufficiency, North Korea was dependent on the generosity of its neighbors. Communist-bloc countries sold goods at preferential prices. The country got subsidized fuel oil, rice, fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, industrial equipment, trucks, and cars. Hospital equipment came from Czechoslovakia; subway carriages arrived from East Germany. Kim Il-sung skillfully played the Soviet Union and China against each other, using their rivalry to extract as much aid as possible. Like an old-style emperor, he received tribute from neighboring realms: Stalin sent an armored limousine; Mao sent a train carriage.

But by the early nineteen-nineties the Russians had grown impatient with North Korea’s failure to repay its creditors an estimated ten billion dollars in loans. Moscow decided that North Korea would have to pay prevailing world prices for Soviet imports rather than the lower "friendship" prices. In the past, the Chinese, who provided three-quarters of North Korea’s fuel and two-thirds of its food imports, used to say that the two countries were as close as "lips and teeth"; now they wanted cash up front.

Soon, a feedback loop of diminishing productivity was set in motion. Without cheap fuel oil and raw materials, North Korea couldn’t keep the factories running, which meant that it had nothing to export. With no exports, there was no hard currency, and without hard currency fuel imports fell even further and the electricity supply dwindled. The coal mines couldn’t operate, because they required electric pumps to siphon water. The shortage of coal further worsened the electricity shortage.

North Korea is the last place on earth where virtually all staple foods are grown on collective farms. The state confiscates the entire harvest and then gives a portion back to the farmers. It had never been easy to eke out enough from North Korea’s hardscrabble terrain to feed a population of up to twenty-four million. The agricultural techniques developed to boost production relied on electrically powered irrigation systems and on chemical fertilizers and pesticides produced at factories that had been closed owing to a lack of fuel and raw materials. North Korea started running out of food, and as people went hungry they didn’t have the energy to work.

As harvests withered in the early nineteen-nineties, the farmers, going hungry, began hoarding some of the crops. There were stories from the countryside of roofs that collapsed under the weight of grain hidden in the eaves. The farmers also neglected the collective fields for private "kitchen gardens," next to their houses, or small plots that they carved out of the side of uncultivated mountain slopes. Driving through the North Korean countryside, you could clearly see the contrast between the private gardens, bursting with vegetables—beanpoles soaring skyward, vines drooping with pumpkins—next to the collective fields with haphazard rows of stunted corn that had been planted by so-called "volunteers."

Enduring hunger became part of one’s patriotic duty. Posters went up in the capital, Pyongyang, touting a new slogan, "Let’s Eat Two Meals a Day." The North Korean government offered a variety of explanations. People were told that the government was stockpiling food to feed the starving South Korean masses on the blessed day of reunification, or that the United States had instituted a blockade against North Korea. North Korean television ran a documentary about a man whose stomach burst, it was claimed, from eating too much rice. In any case, the food shortage was temporary—agricultural officials quoted in the newspapers claimed that bumper crops of rice were expected in the next harvest.

The foreign press began reporting on North Korea’s food shortages in the early nineteen-nineties, and in 1992 the country’s news service issued an indignant reply:

All people live a happy life without any worries about food in our land. The state supplies the people with food at a cheap price next to nothing so that people do not know how much rice costs. This is the reality of the northern half of Korea.

It has been said that people raised in Communist countries cannot fend for themselves, because they expect the government to take care of them. This was not true of many of the victims of the North Korean famine. When the public-distribution system was cut off, people tapped their deepest wells of creativity to feed themselves. They devised traps out of buckets and string to catch small animals in fields, and draped nets over their balconies to snare sparrows. They educated themselves in the nutritive properties of plants.

Women exchanged recipe tips: When making cornmeal, don’t throw out the husk, cob, leaves, and stem of the corn—throw everything into the grinder. Even if it isn’t nutritious, it is filling. Boil noodles for at least an hour, to make them appear bigger. Add a few leaves of grass to soup to make it look as if it contained vegetables. Women would strip the sweet inner bark of pine trees to grind into a fine powder that could be used in place of flour.

North Koreans picked kernels of undigested corn out of the excrement of farm animals. Shipyard workers developed a technique by which they scraped the bottoms of the cargo holds where food had been stored, then spread the foul-smelling gunk on the roof to dry so that they could collect from it tiny grains of uncooked rice and other edibles.

The gathering and production of food was the focus of all enterprise. You woke up early to find your breakfast, and as soon as it was finished you thought about what to find for dinner. You slept during lunchtime because you were exhausted.

By 1990, Mrs. Song’s garment factory had run out of fabric. The workers spent their days cleaning, attending lectures, or participating in what their manager called "special projects." One day, they went to the railroad tracks to collect dog excrement to use as fertilizer; another day, they were marched to a beach next to a steel factory to look for bits of scrap metal. Finally, the manager summoned some of the employees.

Using a Korean word for "auntie,’’ a common term for middle-aged married women, she said, "You ajummas should think about finding some other way to bring food home for your families.’’

Mrs. Song was an unlikely entrepreneur. She was forty-five years old, and had no business skills other than the ability to tally numbers on an abacus. Her family urged her to start a business in the kitchen and told her that the best product would be tofu, a good source of protein in difficult times. Tofu is widely used in Korean cooking, in soups and stews, fried crispy or fermented. In order to raise the money to buy soybeans at the market, the family started selling their possessions. The first to go was their prized television—a Japanese model they’d got thanks to Chang-bo’s father, who had served in intelligence during the Korean War.

Making tofu is relatively easy, if labor-intensive. Soybeans are ground, then boiled, and a coagulating agent is added. Then, like cheese, the mixture is squeezed through a cloth. Afterward, you are left with a watery milk and the husks of the soybeans. Mrs. Song thought it might be a good idea to complement her tofu business by raising pigs, which she could feed with the residue from the tofu. Behind the apartment building was a row of sheds used for storage. Mrs. Song bought a litter of piglets at the market and installed them in one of the sheds, securing the door with a padlock.

For a few months, the business plan was a success. Mrs. Song converted her tiny kitchen into a tofu factory, boiling big vats of soybeans on the stove, which was built into the floor, in the traditional Korean style. She sold the tofu at the neighborhood market. The piglets grew fat on the bean husks and soy milk and whatever grass Mrs. Song could clip for them each morning. But it became increasingly difficult to get wood and coal to fuel the stove. The electricity worked only a few hours a week, and even then its use was restricted to a single sixty-watt light bulb, a television, or a radio. Without fuel to cook the soybeans, Mrs. Song couldn’t make tofu. Without the tofu, she had nothing to feed the pigs. It took hours for her to pick enough grass to satisfy them.

"Listen, we might as well eat the grass ourselves," she joked to Chang-bo. Then she added, "If it doesn’t poison the pigs, it won’t poison us." Eventually, they ate all the pigs, and Mrs. Song gave up the business.

The family began a grim new regimen. Every day, Mrs. Song would hike north and west from the city center, carrying a kitchen knife and a basket to collect edible weeds and grass. If you got out to the mountains, you could find dandelions or other weeds that people ate even in good times. Occasionally, Mrs. Song also collected rotten cabbage leaves that had been discarded by a farmer. She took the day’s pickings home and mixed them with whatever food she had enough money to buy. Usually, it was ground cornmeal—the cheap kind, made from the husks and cobs. If she couldn’t afford that, she would buy pine-bark powder, sometimes extended with sawdust.

She chopped and pounded the grasses and the bark into a pulp that was soft enough to digest. The mixture didn’t have enough substance to be molded into a noodle or a cake. All she could make was a textureless porridge. The only seasoning she had was salt. A little garlic or red pepper might have disguised the terrible taste, but those spices were too expensive. Oils had become unavailable at any price by the mid-nineteen-nineties, and their absence made cooking difficult. Once, while visiting a relative for lunch, Mrs. Song was served a porridge made of bean stalks and corncobs. As hungry as she was, she couldn’t swallow it. The bitter, dry stalks stuck in her throat like the twigs of a bird’s nest.

One year, the only animal product Mrs. Song consumed was frog. Her brothers had caught some in the countryside. Mrs. Song’s sister-in-law stir-fried the frogs in soy sauce, chopped them into small pieces, and served them over noodles. Frog wasn’t typically part of Korean cuisine, and Mrs. Song had never tried it before. She pronounced it delicious. She had only a few chances to eat it again, though. Soon afterward, the frog population of North Korea was decimated by overhunting.

By the middle of 1995, Mrs. Song and her husband had sold most of their valuable possessions for food. After the television went the used Japanese bicycle that was their main means of transportation, and then the sewing machine with which Mrs. Song had made their clothes. They sold most of their clothes and then the wooden wardrobe in which they stored them. The two-room apartment was now empty, except for portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, which hung on the wall as they always had. The only thing left to sell was the apartment itself. North Koreans don’t own their own homes; they are merely awarded the right to live there. But an illegal real-estate market had cropped up as people quietly swapped homes, paying off bureaucrats to look the other way. The apartment "sold" for ten thousand won—about a hundred dollars at the black-market rate. Mrs. Song, her husband, and her mother-in-law moved to a single room nearby. (The three daughters had married and their son had moved out.) Mrs. Song decided that she would use the money for another business venture: trading rice.

Rice is the preferred staple of the Korean diet; the word bap means rice or "a meal." After 1995, Chongjin residents could get rice only if they had cash to buy it on the black market, and even then it was expensive—about fifty won per kilo, six hundred times what rice had cost through the public-distribution system, when it was available. Almost all the rice consumed in the city arrived by train or by truck, further elevating the price, since the roads and the rail lines had fallen into disrepair. Mrs. Song figured that she could buy rice down the coast, where it was cheaper, and carry it up by train. Trading rice or any staple grain was illegal but widespread, and Mrs. Song decided that it was worth the risk. She’d make a small profit and keep some rice for her family. They hadn’t had a proper bowl of rice since 1994.

In November, 1995, Mrs. Song recalls, she set out with ten thousand won hidden in her underwear, disguised by layers of winter clothing. She took a train to South Pyongyang Province and bought two hundred kilos of rice. She put the rice into four large backpacks, which porters helped her load onto the train and stuff under her seat. On the morning of November 25th, she was less than a day’s journey away from home. Chang-bo’s connections as a journalist had allowed her to get a choice sleeping berth in the third car of the train—the first two being for Workers’ Party officials and military officers. The train was long, and each time it rounded a curve the rear cars would come into view just long enough for her to see that people were standing in them. Still more people sat on the roof. The train stopped and started throughout the night and was lurching so violently when Mrs. Song woke up in the morning that she couldn’t eat her breakfast. Suddenly, a jolt lifted her out of her seat. The next moment, she was lying on her side, her left cheek pressed against the metal frame of the window. The carriage was on its side.

The train had derailed, and the crowded back carriages had been almost entirely destroyed. Most of their passengers were killed. The front cars had somehow been spared. The death toll from the accident, Mrs. Song heard, was in the hundreds, although, as with most North Korean disasters, it was not reported.

Mrs. Song emerged from the wreckage with a gash in her cheek, the skin ripped off her right leg, and a sprained back. The wooden partition that separated her sleeper compartment from the aisle had fallen on top of her. After three days in an emergency clinic near the scene of the accident, she returned to Chongjin. She was in such pain that she had to be carried off the train, but she felt lucky when she glimpsed Chang-bo on the platform.

After the accident, Mrs. Song was no longer able to hike into the mountains to forage for food She picked whatever grasses and weeds she could find near her house, and threw them into a porridge made from the cheapest grain. It was difficult for the elderly to digest. In May, 1996, her mother-in-law fell ill with dysentery. Within a few days, she was dead.

Chang-bo’s health was also deteriorating. In his prime, he had been uncommonly large for a North Korean, weighing nearly two hundred pounds. He was so heavy that in the early nineteen-eighties his doctor advised him to take up smoking as a way to lose weight. But now the protuberant belly of which he had been so proud—fat being a status symbol in North Korea—had turned into a hollow pouch. His skin was flaky, as though he were suffering from eczema. His jowls sagged, and his speech was slurred. He had suffered a mild stroke in 1995; by 1997, he had become too weak to work and took to his bed. His legs swelled up like balloons, the effect of what Mrs. Song had come to recognize as edema—fluid retention brought on by starvation. He talked incessantly about food. He spoke of the tofu soups his mother had made him as a child and a delicious meal of fish porridge that Mrs. Song had cooked for him when they were newlyweds.

"Come, darling. Let’s go to a good restaurant and order a nice meal," he told his wife one morning in 1997. They hadn’t eaten in three days.

Mrs. Song ran to the market, forgetting all about the pain in her back. She spotted her older sister, selling noodles. Her sister’s skin was flaked like Chang-bo’s from malnutrition, and Mrs. Song had resisted asking her for help, but now she was desperate.

"I’ll pay you back," Mrs. Song promised as she ran home with a container of noodles.

Chang-bo was curled up on his side under the blanket. Mrs. Song called his name. When he didn’t respond, she went to turn him over—it wasn’t difficult now that he had lost so much weight, but his legs and arms were stiff and got in the way. Mrs. Song pounded on his chest, screaming for help even though she knew it was too late.

Between six hundred thousand and 2.5 million North Koreans died as a result of the famine—up to about ten per cent of the population. In Chongjin, where food supplies disappeared earlier and more precipitately than in other parts of North Korea, the death rates were likely much greater. Exact figures are impossible to tally, since North Korean hospitals were prohibited from reporting starvation as a cause of death.

Kim Jong-il, who assumed control of the government after his father’s death, in 1994, took a much harder line against individual enterprise than his father had. "In a socialist society, even the food problem should be solved in a socialist way," he said in a December, 1996, speech, one of the few in which he is known to have acknowledged the food crisis. "Telling people to solve the food problem on their own . . . creates egoism among people." Any private endeavor could be classified as an "economic crime," and the penalties included deportation to a labor camp and, if corruption was alleged, execution. But death was a virtual certainty for people who didn’t show some private initiative.

Most business took place at the old farmers’ markets. Even in the glory days of Communism, Kim Il-sung had grudgingly tolerated some markets, with the restriction that they could sell only supplementary foods that people raised in their kitchen gardens. Almost all the venders were women. This remained the case in the nineteen-nineties. Joo Sung-ha, a North Korean defector from North Hamgyong Province who became a journalist in Seoul, told me he believed that Kim Jong-il had tacitly agreed to let women work privately, to relieve the pressure on families. "If the ajummas hadn’t been allowed to work, there would have been a revolution," he said. Some of the ajummas would whisper among themselves, "Men aren’t worth as much as the dog that guards the house."

During this period, even as the famine worsened in Chongjin, more food appeared at the markets. Cabbages, radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, scallions, and potatoes were for sale. There was suddenly white rice, in forty-kilo burlap sacks imprinted with the interlocking olive branches of the United Nations symbol or with the U.S. flag, which every North Korean recognized from propaganda posters, where it was often shown dripping with blood or pierced with bayonets.

One day, Mrs. Song spotted a convoy of trucks driving from the port with similar burlap sacks stacked in the back. Although the trucks had civilian license plates, she figured that they belonged to the military—nobody else had gasoline, as far as she knew—and that this was humanitarian aid that somebody in the Army was selling for profit at the market. No matter where it was from, people in Chongjin were happy to see white rice, which hadn’t been available at the public-distribution center for years, although few could afford to buy it.

Every time she went to the market, Mrs. Song saw something that astonished her. Peaches. Grapes. Bananas. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen bananas—maybe twenty years ago, when Chang-bo brought some home as a treat for the children. One day, she saw oranges. Mrs. Song had never tasted an orange, but she recognized it from pictures. Another day, she saw a mottled yellow-brown fruit with green spikes growing from the top. It was only years later, when she had moved to Seoul and saw the fruit again, that she learned it was a pineapple.

After Chang-bo’s death, Mrs. Song decided that her future lay in cookies. They needed only ten minutes in the oven; a modest amount of charcoal, which was growing ever more scarce, could bake four or five batches. They were easier to bake than bread, and they made a quick meal for hungry people on the move.

Mrs. Song was joined in the cookie business by her youngest daughter, Yong-hee, who was twenty-nine. Yong-hee borrowed four hundred won to buy scrap metal and found an unemployed welder from a local steel mill to make it into an oven. It was a square box, divided in two, so that charcoal could burn in the lower compartment while cookies baked in the upper one. He also made a cookie sheet. Many women had come up with the same idea, and for a while Mrs. Song took a job with one of them, to watch and learn. She bought samples from other venders to taste and compare. When she found one she liked, she tried to replicate the recipe out of flour, sugar, water, and yeast.

The first trial batches were not suitable to sell to the public. Mrs. Song and her daughter ate their failures rather than waste the precious ingredients. Eventually, Mrs. Song figured out that she had to use more sugar and leavening. She added milk to the recipe and cut the dough into different shapes.

Mrs. Song got up at 5 A.M. to do the baking. The competition was stiff, and her cookies needed to be fresh. She didn’t have a cart or even a crate from which to sell her product, so she packed the cookies into a basin, which she carried in a homemade backpack until she got to a main street near the market with many pedestrians and few competitors. With her back aching, she’d sit cross-legged on the ground and put the basin of cookies on her knees.

Mrs. Song sold about a thousand cookies every day to people who had no time or money for a proper meal. At the end of a fourteen-hour workday, she had about a hundred won in her pocket, and a few bags of other goods, sometimes red peppers or a few lumps of coal, that she took in exchange for cookies. It was just enough for her to buy food for dinner and the ingredients for the next batch of cookies.

Mrs. Song often stumbled across the dead and the dying. Late one afternoon, on her way home from the market, she took a detour to the train station, hoping to find customers to buy some unsold cookies. Workers were sweeping the station’s plaza. A couple of men walked by, pulling a heavy wooden cart. It was filled with half a dozen bodies, people who had died at the station overnight. A head lolled as the cart jostled over the pavement. It belonged to a man about forty years old. His eyes blinked faintly. Not quite dead yet, but close enough to be carted away.

From the outside, Chongjin looked unchanged. The same gray façades of the Stalinist office buildings stared out at empty stretches of asphalt. The roads were still marked by the faded red propaganda signs extolling the achievements of the regime. The place looked as if the clocks of world history had stopped in 1970. But Mrs. Song knew that she was living in a topsy-turvy world. The men were stuck in unpaying state jobs; women were making the money. The markets were stocked with food—more food than most North Koreans had seen in their lifetime—yet people were dying from hunger. Workers’ Party members had starved to death; those who never gave a damn about the fatherland were making money. The future belonged to those who broke the rules.

Every six months or so after our first meeting, Mrs. Song and I got together for a meal in Seoul. She enjoyed eating out. Although she never developed a taste for pizza or hamburgers, she came to love the South Korean style of barbecuing beef and pork at the table. Whenever I saw her, she was wearing a new outfit. Everything from the cheery pastels of her clothing to her perfectly coiffed hair suggested a woman in control of her life.

Mrs. Song had adapted quickly to South Korea. She got a job as a housekeeper, and by living frugally she was able to travel. She joined tour groups of older women and explored South Korea. She even indulged in cosmetic surgery to add an extra fold to her upper eyelid—a popular procedure. After so many years of sacrificing for others, she took care of herself. When she developed a paunch—to her astonishment, after so many years of deprivation—she started watching her weight.

Mrs. Song was by no means an apologist for the North Korean regime—"That rotten bastard!" she once said of Kim Jong-il, the only time I ever heard her use profanity—but she was not as embittered as most defectors I had met. She even professed a certain nostalgia for the idealism that used to propel her out of bed early to dust the portrait of Kim Il-sung.

One evening, we were sitting around a steaming pot of shabu-shabu, thinly sliced beef cooked in a broth and dipped in sesame sauce. "When I see a good meal like this, it makes me cry," Mrs. Song said, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. "I can’t helping thinking of Chang-bo’s last words, ‘Let’s go to a good restaurant and order a nice meal.’ " ♦