“One North Korean soldier recalled 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?”
For one North Korean student it was a photograph in the official media showing a South Korean on a picket line.
The photograph was meant to illustrate the exploitation of the worker in capitalist society; instead the student noticed that the “oppressed” worker wore a jacket with a zipper and had a ballpoint pen in his pocket, both of which were luxuries at the time.Why it’s forbidden to listen to South Korean radio:
A North Korean maritime official accidentally picked up a South Korean radio broadcast--a situation comedy featuring two young women fighting over a parking space at an apartment complex.
He couldn’t grasp the concept of a place with so many cars that there was no room to park them. He had never known anyone, certainly not young women, who owned a private car.During the famine, a young North Korean man found himself near enough to the border to see the Chinese countryside. He noticed that in China, the cornfields weren’t guarded by armed men, and the trees still had bark.
A North Korean pediatrician, still loyal to the regime but desperate for food, swam across the river to China. She went up to the first farmhouse she saw to ask for help finding a job. As she peeked through the gate, she saw a heaping bowl of rice on the floor of the courtyard. Back home, rice had long been unavailable at any price, and people were eating flour made from ground bark and corn stalks. Why would so much precious food be left out in the courtyard? Then she heard the barking. Dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.
Examples are taken from Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.
