Barbara Demick Quotes

North Korea remains the last bastion of undiluted communism in the world.

Even in parts of the showcase capital of Pyongyang, you can stroll down the middle of a main street at night without being able to see the buildings on either side.

Never mind Communist solidarity, China and the Soviet Union wanted to do business with the likes of Hyundai and Samsung, not with state-owned enterprises in the North that didn't pay their bills on time.

It's frightening to think about more sanctions. When I've met North Koreans in China, they've said to me, 'You have no idea how difficult our lives are. We live like dogs.' They wake up in the morning wondering what they're going to eat for dinner.

The Uighurs are a Turkic people more closely related to Uzbeks and Kazakhs than to Chinese.

A North Korean soldier would later recall a buddy who had been given an American-made nail clipper and was showing it off to his friends. The soldier clipped a few nails, admired the sharp, clean edges, and marveled at the mechanics of this simple item. Then he realized with a sinking heart: If North Korea couldn't make such a fine nail clipper, how could it compete with American weapons?

North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world.

The East Turkestan Islamic Movement, named for an old Uighur name for Xinjiang, is a shadowy group that operates largely out of Afghanistan and Pakistan and is devoted to expelling the Chinese Communist Party from northwestern China.

Kim Il-sung understood the power of religion. His maternal uncle was a Protestant minister back in the pre-Communist days when Pyongyang had such a vibrant Christian community that it was called the "Jerusalem of the East." Once in power, Kim Il-sung closed the churches, banned the Bible, deported believers to the hinterlands, and appropriated Christian imagery and dogma for the purpose of self-promotion.

Broadcasters would speak of Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il breathlessly, in the manner of Pentecostal preachers. North Korean newspapers carried tales of supernatural phenomena. Stormy seas were said to be calmed when sailors clinging to a sinking ship sang songs in praise of Kim Il-sung. When Kim Jong-il went to the DMZ, a mysterious fog descended to protect him from lurking South Korean snipers. He caused trees to bloom and snow to melt. If Kim Il-sung was God, then Kim Jong-il was the son of God. Like Jesus Christ, Kim Jong-il's birth was said to have been heralded by a radiant star in the sky and the appearance of a beautiful double rainbow. A swallow descended from heaven to sing of the birth of a "general who will rule the world.

...travel permits to Pyongyang were notoriously hard to get. In order to keep Pyongyang as a showcase city, the North Korean government restricted visitors.

We see North Koreans as automatons, goose-steeping at parades, doing mass gymnastics with fixed smiles on their faces - but beneath all that, real life goes on with the same complexity of human emotion as anywhere else.

In 1991, few North Koreans had ever used a telephone. You had to go to a post office to make a phone call.

North Korean students and intellectuals didn't dare to stage protests as their counterparts in other Communist countries did. There was no Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. The level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take root.

The anti-Japanese resistance was as familiar a theme in North Korean cinema as cowboys and Indians was in early Hollywood.

The cadence of life is slower in North Korea.

Anybody with a functioning brain cannot not know that something is wrong.

North Korea's whole idea is to create a crisis to solve a crisis. They're so poor and they're so desperate that they realize that this bombastic rhetoric can drive the South Korean stock market down and get the U.S. in a tizzy. And it's a game they've been playing for many, many years.

If you look at satellite photographs of the Far East by night, you'll see a large splotch curiously lacking in light. This area of darkness is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Listening to South Korean television was like looking in the mirror for the first time in your life and realizing you were unattractive.

North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea's creakily inefficient economy collapsed. Power stations rusted into ruin.

Since 2009, 140 Tibetans have immolated themselves to protest Chinese policies that limit their freedom of movement, speech and religion, especially their right to venerate the Dalai Lama.

When North Koreans cross the border into China, they are stunned to learn that the Chinese can afford to eat rice daily, sometimes for three meals daily.

In the 1990s, the United States offered to help North Korea with its energy needs if it gave up its nuclear weapons programme.

In fact, Japanese Koreans, who were known as kitachosenjin, after the Japanese term for North Korea, Kita Chosen, lived in a world apart. They had distinctive accents and tended to marry one another. Although they were far from rich by Japanese standards, they were wealthy compared with ordinary North Koreans.

People have crossed the Himalayas in flip-flops seeking a blessing from the Dalai Lama.

But now she couldn't deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.

Gonpo Tso was born a princess. As a young woman, she dressed in fur-trimmed robes with fat ropes of coral beads strung around her neck. She lived in an adobe castle on the edge of the Tibetan plateau with a reception room large enough to accommodate the thousand Buddhist monks who once paid tribute to her father.

The city of 500,000 is wedged between a granite spine of mountains zigzagging up and down the coast and the Sea of Japan, which Koreans call the East Sea.

When she first arrived, Mi-ran was impressed. The dormitories were modern and each of the four girls who would share one room had her own bed rather than use the Korean bed mats laid out on a heated floor, the traditional way of keeping warm at night while expending little fuel. But as winter temperatures plunged Chongjin into a deep freeze, she realized why it was that the school had been able to give her a place in its freshman class. The dormitories had no heating. Mi-ran went to sleep each night in her coat, heavy socks, and mitten with a towel draped over her head. When she woke up, the towel would be crusted with frost from the moisture of her breath. In the bathroom, where the girls washed their menstrual rags (nobody had sanitary napkins, so the more affluent girls used gauze bandages while the poor girls used cheap synthetic cloths), it was so cold that the rags would freeze solid within minutes of being hung up to dry. Mi-ran hated the mornings. Just as in Jun-sang's school, they were roused by a military-style roll call at 6:00 A.M., but instead of marching off like proud soldiers, they shivered into the bathroom and splashed icy water on their faces, under a grotesque canopy of frozen menstrual rags.

As her students were dying, she was supposed to teach them that they were blessed to be North Korean.

One of the ways the North Korea regime has kept power is by keeping its people ignorant of the living standards in the outside world. That's the underlying lie that supports the regime - not that their country is 'normal' but that they are better off.

North Korea was (and remains as of this writing in 2009) the last place on earth where virtually everything is grown on collective farms. The state confiscates the entire harvest and then gives a portion back to the farmer.

A coal miner from Chongjin whom I met in 2004 in China told me, People are not stupid. Everybody thinks our own government is to blame for our terrible situation. We all know we think that and we all know that everybody else thinks that. We don't need to talk about it.

Walking down the street with a portrait of the Dalai Lama will get one immediately arrested in most parts of China. Tiny medallions are routinely confiscated and destroyed.

This is not the sort of thing that shows up in satellite photographs. Whether in CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, or in the East Asian studies department of a university, people usually analyze North Korea from afar. They don't stop to think that in the middle of this black hole, in this bleak, dark country where millions have died of starvation, there is also love.

He was desperately lonely. He had a hard time connecting with new people. If South Koreans were sympathetic toward him, he found them condescending. Even though he hated the North Korean regime, he found he'd get defensive when South Koreans criticized it. This was a common predicament for defectors.

In 1949, Mao Tse-tung's Communists established the People's Republic of China, and the following year, his People's Liberation Army invaded central Tibet.

It is axiomatic that one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. So it was for Mi-ran. What she didn't realize is that her indifference was an acquired survival skill. In order to get through the 1990s alive, one had to suppress any impulse to share food. To avoid going insane, one had to learn to stop caring.

Chang-bo took to his bed, or rather to the quilts on the floor that was all they had left. His legs swelled up like balloons with 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 made him as a child and an unusually delicious meal of steamed crab with ginger that Mrs. Song had cooked for him when they were newlyweds. He had an uncanny ability to remember details of dishes she had cooked decades earlier. He was sweetly sentimental, even romantic, when he spoke about their meals together. He would take her hand in his own, his eyes wet and cloudy with the mist of his memories.
"Come, darling. Let's go to a good restaurant and order a nice bottle of wine," he told his wife one morning when they were stirring on the blankets. They hadn't eaten in three days. Mrs. Song looked at her husband with alarm, worried that he was hallucinating.
She ran out the door to the market, moving fast and forgetting all about the pain in her back. She was determined to steal, beg - whatever it took - to get some food for her husband. She spotted her older sister selling noodles. Her sister wasn't faring well - her skin was flaked just like Chang-bo's from malnutrition - so Mrs. Song had resisted asking her for help, but now she was desperate, and of course, her sister couldn't refuse.
"I'll pay you back," Mrs. Song promised as she ran back home, the adrenaline pu

North Korea is probably the only country in the world deliberately kept out of the Internet.

In 1984, George Orwell wrote of a world where the only colour to be found was in the propaganda posters. Such is the case in North Korea. Images of Kim Il-sung are depicted in vivid colours. Rays of yellow and orange emanate from his face: he is the sun.

By the end of 1998, the worst of the famine was over, not necessarily because anything had improved but, as Mrs. Song later surmised, because there were fewer mouths to feed.

WITHIN A FEW HOURS of the noon announcement, people all around North Korea began converging on statues of Kim Il-sung to pay their respects. By one frequently cited figure there are 34,000 statues of the Great Leader in the country and at each of them loyal subjects prostrated themselves with grief. People didn't want to be alone with their grief. They burst out of their homes and ran toward the statues, which were in fact the spiritual centers of each city.

Chongjin is home to some 500,000 people, but has only one twenty-five-foot bronze statue, at Pohang Square. People filled the vast square, and spilled over into the front lawn of the Revolutionary History Museum directly to the east. The crowds extended down the wide Road No. 1 all the way to the Provincial Theater and radiated out into the surrounding streets like spokes from a wheel. From above, the people looked like a line of ants streaming toward a common goal.

Hysteria and crowds make for a lethal combination. People started to surge forward, knocking down those in line, trampling people already prostrate on the ground, flattening the carefully trimmed hedges. From blocks away, the noise from the square carried through the humid air and sounded like the roar of a riot. The weather alternated between violent downpours and searing heat. No one was allowed to wear a hat or carry a parasol. The sun beat down on the bare heads and the wet sidewalks turned the streets into a roiling steambath. Peop

Afterward she wondered what had happened to the man. Could he have died of hunger? Despite the fact that nobody had quite enough food these days and even the government had acknowledged a food crisis after the floods of the previous summer, Mi-ran had never heard of anybody starving to death in North Korea. That happened in Africa or in China. Indeed, the older people talked of all the Chinese who died during the 1950s and 1960s because of Mao's disastrous economic policies. "We're so lucky to have Kim Il-sung," they would say.

Supervisors routinely fabricated statistics on agricultural production and industrial output because they were so fearful of telling their own bosses the truth. Lies were built upon lies, all the way to the top, so it is in fact conceivable that Kim Il-sung himself didn't know when the economy crashed

There was the natural human survival instinct to be optimistic.

In North Korea, you don't own your own home; you are merely awarded the right to live there.

China's one-child policy was born in 1980, after years of less severe measures to discourage births. The Communist Party promised that the policy would be temporary.

The scene that has raised the most objections in 'The Interview' is at the very end, when Kim's head dissolves into flames. To me, it feels gratuitous.

By 2022, China is expected to cede the dubious distinction of being the world's most populous nation to India, according to the population division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

As a reader, I've always been interested in dystopian novels like 'Nineteen Eighty-four'.

A South Korean teenager, 18-year-old male, is about five inches taller than his North Korean counterpart. And there are many soldiers who are only about 4'6". The height requirement is supposed to be 4'9". That's the size of my 12-year-old son.

If sitting still meant you starved to death, no threat the regime levied could keep people home. For the first time, North Koreans were wandering around their own country with impunity.

Tens of thousands of North Korean women have been sold to Chinese men. By some estimates, three quarters of the roughly 100,000 North Korean refugees living in China are women and more than half of them live in arranged unions with Chinese men.

In 1995, the Chinese government picked a 6-year-old child to succeed the Panchen Lama, the second highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism.

At first, they would walk in silence, then their voices

Because Pyongyang is the only North Korean city frequented by foreigners, the regime goes to great lengths to ensure that its inhabitants make a good impression with their appearance and are ideologically sound.

Kim Jong-un's style is more suggestive of Saddam Hussein or his murderous son, Uday Hussein.

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. A lot of people felt if you had one life to give, you would give it to get rid of this terrible regime, but then you're not the only one getting punished. Your family would go through hell.

punishment was withholding food. Starvation was the way the regime preferred to eliminate its opponents. It

He would wait hours for her, maybe two or three. It didn't matter. The cadence of life is slower in North Korea. Nobody owned a watch.

Tech-savvy types had figured out how to get around the system. With radios it was easy - open up the set, cut the conveyor belt attached to the dial, and replace it with a rubber band that could turn the dial wherever you liked. Television required a little more expertise.

At least initially, the relationship took on a nineteenth-century epistolatory quality. The only way they could stay in touch was by letter. In 1991, while South Korea was becoming the world's largest exporter of mobile telephones, few North Koreans had ever used a telephone. You had to go to a post office to make a phone call. But even writing a letter was not a simple undertaking. Writing paper was scarce. People would write in the margins of newspapers. The paper in the state stores was made of corn husk and would crumble easily if you scratched too hard. Mi-ran had to beg her mother for the money to buy a few sheets of imported paper. Rough drafts were out of the question; paper was too precious. The distance from Pyongyang to Chongjin was only 250 miles, but letters took up to a month to be delivered.

Her younger son, twenty, was assigned to a factory that made railroad equipment, but since it provided no salary he was actually paying his workplace three dollars per month so he could stay home to help his mother with the pigs and moonshine.

(The North Korean army had to lower its height requirement from five feet three in the early 1990s because of the stunting of the younger generation.)

On her first day in Musan, a policeman picked her out of the crowd. "Hey, you," he yelled at her. After more than two years of living in China, Oak-hee was pale and plump. She used scented shampoo and soap. She looked and smelled different from everyone else. Furthermore, she was also carrying a transistor radio she had purchased in China that picked up South Korean programs. The police officer confiscated the radio and (after asking her to show him the frequencies for South Korean radio and demanding her earphones) turned her over to the Bowibu.

By the mid-1990s, nearly everything in North Korea was worn out, broken, malfunctioning. The country had seen better days.

The North Korean landscape is strikingly beautiful in places. It could be said to resemble America's Pacific Northwest - but substantially drained of color.