There’s more than meets the ear behind the jokes and the gossip of those who’ve escaped from Kim Jong-un’s regime.

Rumor and humor from North Korea

by SANDRA FAHY

GIVEN THE BOMBASTIC STYLE of its official pronouncements, North Korea has long been low hanging fruit for comedians looking for a quick nibble. On the other hand, anyone attempting serious analysis faces the huge barrier of the country’s inaccessibility. But while few pundits tend to place stock in rumor as a measure of conditions in the country, or imagine life on the ground there to be funny, if you ask defectors about gallows humor in their homeland or listen closely as they recall popular rumors, their words offer deep insight into North Korean life.

In 2005, I began recording the oral accounts of dozens of North Korean defectors who had survived the 1990s famine. I had moved to South Korea in order to learn Korean and compile their testimonies in the original language. I was curious to know how they interpreted their experience of suffering: who the North Koreans saw as being responsible, what they saw as the solution to the problem and how they had discussed the hardship they were undergoing at the time in a place that controls everything, including speech.

The hundreds of hours of testimonies are a formidable testament to the complex situation during and after the 1990s famine. There are long blanks in the recordings where I was simply watching tears fall. Expletive laden shouting revealed their frustrations regarding the leadership’s culpability for murder by neglect.

Those were expected. But in letting the talk run a little longer, in asking unexpected questions about rumor and humor, my interviewees began to recall the agile word play shared between their fellows and the whispered rumors that drifted among them: a new metric for political violence.

Their jokes played on syllabic twists; tiny linguistic windows of breathing room. Always dark, they obliquely critiqued social inequalities and government directed absurdities. “Pap mŏgŏsŏyo?” (“Have you eaten rice?”) is the traditional greeting on both sides of the DMZ. But after the North Korean government “recommended” that people eat what it called “substitute foods” such as bark, grass and roots, the expression changed to “Taeyoung mŏgŏsŏyo?” or “Have you eaten the substitute?”

One young woman recalled a common phrase that captured the absurd and unequal access to food: “The secret police eat secretly, and the security police eat securely,” she told me. In Korean, this quip has an unmistakable poetic rhythm bearing the caustic sarcasm refreshingly along, showing the sharp eyes (and ears) of North Koreans.

As with famines throughout history, the relations between men and women grew tense. Defunct factories turned the men out and many, depressed and embarrassed, took to drink. Women were forced to bring household items to the black market to make ends meet, while security police, seeing the women as benign, turned a blind eye. The wives did all the work, I was told, and they became the lifeline for the family. “We called the men ‘daytime light bulbs,’” one told me. Thinking my Korean had failed me, I asked her for clarification and she said, “You have no use for a light bulb during the day, do you?” Then she added, “We also called them bow wow, because they were always barking for something.”

During times of socio economic stress, rumors also take on a frequency and a currency of their own. Stories about disappearances and cannibalism became part of daily talk. Trying to determine the veracity of such stories is impossible, but they are clearly a measure of the severity of the suffering. They indicate what was possible to conceive because the situation was so dire. “I heard that someone saw a finger tip floating in the soup at a black market stall,” said one defector, a middle age woman with a raspy voice and strong North Hamgyong accent.

But speaking directly about being hungry in North Korea, I learned, was more dangerous than starvation itself. Using the word “hunger” was forbidden; the word “pain” was used instead. If you didn’t make this linguistic adjustment, bad things could happen. “My neighbor went around complaining she was hungry,” said another middle aged woman from Chongjin, “The next day she disappeared, taken off somewhere.”

Is it true that people were “disappeared” simply for complaining of hunger in North Korea? It is impossible to know for sure, just from this exchange. But again, the fact of the rumor’s existence points to what the people saw as “conceivable.”

It is easy to write off North Korea as either a place that is fodder for late night TV hosts and Hollywood parodies or a closed kingdom behind an opaque curtain. But carefully listening to North Koreans, and asking provocative questions about seemingly banal daily chatter, can offer us new methods to define the lives of the country’s citizens and measure the difficulty of daily existence.

Sandra Fahy is assistant professor of anthropology at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan. She is the author of Marching through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea (New York: Columbia University Press 2015), the subject of her FCCJ Book Break on Jan. 18.