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Reviewed by:
  • Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea by Sandra Fahy
  • David Hawk (bio)
Sandra Fahy, Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea (Columbia University Press, New York, 2015), ISBN 9780231538947, 252 pages.

Sandra Fahy’s, Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea, makes an original contribution to the literature on the 1990s famine in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea). Based on interviews with North Korea refugees now living in South Korea, Sandra Fahy, a Korean-speaking anthropologist and ethnographer currently teaching at Sophia University in Tokyo, provides an in-depth subjective or internalized history of the “Great Famine” through the eyes of those who suffered through it.

There is a substantial body of reporting and analysis on the 1990s North Korean famine. Books by authors as varied in their viewpoints and perspectives as Stephan Haggard and Markus Noland,1 Andrew Nastios,2 Hazel Smith,3 Gordon Flake and Scott Snyder,4 and a variety of Korea scholars and specialists5 have examined the causes and consequences of the breakdown of the North Korean economy beginning in the late 1980s and the concomitant chronic food [End Page 522] shortages beginning in the early 1990s. These books, and others including virtually all of the recent surveys of the Korean peninsula, chart the causes and course of the famine, and examine the food-aid responses from the viewpoint of UN humanitarian food agencies, the US government (the largest food aid contributor), and nongovernmental humanitarian food aid groups. The UN agencies themselves provide extensive reports on their programs, and a bevy of data-rich nutritional and food crop production reports. Another Haggard and Noland monograph also surveys North Korea refugees living outside North Korea on their famine experience.6 But their survey seeks to gather quantitative data: when did they and others first experience prolonged hunger? If, or when, did they receive food aid from the famine relief operations? And so on.

Fahy’s account is different. She asks her refugee interviewees what they themselves thought as the twice-monthly state-run public distribution system cut back on food deliveries, and then, in some cases stopped altogether.7 She asks the former North Koreans how they talked to each other about the reality that their relatives and neighbors were dying of malnutrition-related diseases and outright starvation. Their responses enable Fahy’s “internal” or “subjective” account of the famine: the discursive strategies employed by North Koreans to rationalize and cope with the severe hardships in their lives.

The objective or external history of the famine goes roughly like this. North Korea, like South Korea and Japan, is a mountainous country with only small areas of arable land along the coastlines or in the narrow valleys between the mountains. South Korea and Japan deal with this basic reality by exporting manufactured goods and importing food (while subsidizing rice production for historic cultural reasons). North Korea had few licit manufactures to export, outside of selling coal to China, and this continues today. North Korea had substantially mechanized agricultural production, using gas-fueled pumps to irrigate plots carved into mountainsides and to power tractors, along with heavy use of petroleum-based fertilizer. The petroleum came from Russia and China as foreign aid or at “friendship” prices. When the Soviet Union collapsed and China adopted capitalist practices and started to charge the market price for oil, the free and artificially cheap oil deliveries stopped. North Korean agricultural (and industrial) production declined precipitously and the centrally-planned state-socialist economy substantially collapsed.

Agricultural production had been thoroughly collectivized, the crops belonged to the state. Since “markets” were a largely prohibited remnant of capitalism in a relatively “cashless” economy, residents got their food (and clothing and appliances) from the Public Distribution System that delivered (or didn’t, as it turned out) food rations twice-a-month based on age, occupation, and a rigorously delineated calculus of political loyalty to the regime. In a thoroughly totalitarian social system, the state assigned jobs and housing to the citizenry, and forbade internal (or external) travel without the permission of local party-state authorities. [End Page 523] This latter practice...

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