come with that. My dream was to make lots of money and be a high-ranking government official. Family background means so much in North Korea.” Another young adult decried the contradictions: “We were told in school that we could be anybody. But after graduation, I realized that this wasn’t true.”
It remains to be seen whether Kim Jong Un will be able to satisfy people’s aspirations more swiftly than the growing level of frustration, and whether repression can continue to sufficiently contain and shape hope in tandem with the regime rather than against it.
THE JANGMADANG GENERATION
While Kim Jong Un lived a frictionless life of ease, enjoying luxuries during the famine of the 1990s, eating his favorite foods, playing his favorite games, surrounded by servants and family members eager to please the son of the dictator, his fellow millennials—the jangmadang, or “market,” generation—eked out a living, depending on their status, by begging, stealing, smuggling, or engaging in microentrepreneurial activities. Kim Jong Un was populating the North Korean landscape with amusement parks, restaurants, and department stores carrying luxury items, and its people were walking around carrying lace parasols, in sharp contrast to his grandfather’s North Korea, which had been “as anticonsumerist a culture as could exist in the twentieth century,” according to the author Barbara Demick. Anticonsumerism made sense when the regime provided everything from food to employment, healthcare, and clothing (one set for summer and one for winter), and when North Korea could rely on its friends in the Soviet bloc and China for subsidized food, oil, military hardware, and industrial equipment. But after the Cold War ended, North Koreans could no longer depend on the state, as rations diminished or disappeared altogether, forcing even the true believers to turn to the black market to survive.
The inability of the government to feed its people and the all too real imminence of death by starvation gave birth to market activities, even though, being antithetical to Communism, they were technically illegal. In 2007, Kim Jong Il directly addressed the growth of market activity, decrying it as “eating away at the socialism of our own style…and a birthplace of all sorts of nonsocialist practices.” But this was a trend he could not stop, as a generation grew up watching their parents sell tofu and cookies, rent out rooms for romantic trysts or prostitution, or smuggle goods from South Korea and China, and they in turn engaged in these activities themselves.
Yeonmi Park wrote in her memoir that her father ran a smuggling business in Pyongyang, while she and the rest of the family lived far from there, and that he was not alone. “Capitalism was…alive and well,” she wrote, adding that “if you knew where to look, you could also find things like digital watches and DVD players from vendors who operated in the gray area between legal and illegal trade in the new North Korea.” Teenager Kim Hyuck, whose account Demick described in her award-winning book Nothing to Envy, made repeated trips across the Tumen River, which separates China from North Korea. He bought irons and other household goods in North Korea and would sell them in China wherever there was a demand. As Demick described, he would spend the proceeds on more goods from North Korea, buying them for a pittance from people desperate to help their families survive, and resell those goods in China for a big profit.
Ha-Young, a defector who came from Musan, on North Korea’s border with China, recounted how she helped her mother’s wholesale business thrive during and after the worst of the famine. According to Jieun Baek, who cataloged these defectors’ stories, Ha-Young’s mother would acquire around one thousand pounds of used clothing at a time from China, paying everyone involved in the transaction to ensure the safe transport of the items across the border, as well as to protect herself. Ha-Young would help her mother categorize the goods based on quality and then price them, after which the items would be fanned out to other women who sold them in their own businesses. She recalled that as a result of her mother’s success, her family had a refrigerator, a washing machine, a television, and plentiful and varied food. How did they manage to circumvent the laws? “Since her family was consistently profitable for the police, there was a patrol officer dedicated to protecting Ha-Young’s mother in case she got into any trouble,” Baek explained.
The regime tolerated these activities, turning a blind eye and even encouraging