Barbara Demick

The night sky in North Korea is a sight to behold. It might be the most brilliant in Northeast Asia, the only place spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand, and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent

“Loyalty and filial devotion are the supreme qualities of a revolutionary” was a particularly handy quote for taming a rebellious child.

Oak-hee had to write up reports about work teams that were exceeding their quotas and the remarkable progress that the company was making building roads. The company had its own sound truck, actually a broken-down army van with slogans plastered on its side (“Let us model the whole society on the juche idea”). As the truck cruised by construction sites, Oak-hee would take the microphone and read her reports, broadcasting the achievements of the company through screechy loudspeakers. It was a fun job that didn’t require any heavy lifting and, like any position in the propaganda department, carried some prestige

largely apocryphal fable from 1938-39 in which Kim Il-sung commanded a small band of anti-Japanese guerrillas “fighting against thousands of enemies in 20 degrees below zero, braving through a heavy snowfall and starvation, the red flag fluttering in front of the rank.” The Arduous March, as they called it, would later become a metaphor for the famine.

Kim Il-sung also discouraged early marriages, giving a “special instruction” in 1971 that men should marry at twenty and women should marry at twenty-eight.

When the Great Marshal died, thousands of cranes descended from heaven to fetch him. The birds couldn’t take him because they saw that North Koreans cried and screamed and pummeled their chests, pulled their hair and pounded the ground

How was he to have known that women menstruated? It explained a lot

There were long delays because the trains would break down trying to make the steep climb into the mountains north of Pyongyang. Jun-sang was once stuck for two days in a broken-down train in midwinter with an arctic wind gusting through the windowless car. He befriended other passengers—a woman with a twenty-day-old baby and a young man who was late for his own wedding.

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

North Korean women had a certain mystique to the Chinese. Despite the toll taken by the famine on their bodies and complexions, North Korean women were thought to be among the most beautiful in Asia. South Korean men talked about buk nyeo, nam nam— northern women, southern men—which allegedly was the most desirable genetic combination. Chinese men found North Korean women more modest and obedient than their Chinese counterparts