college, a foreign languages college, a medical school, three teachers’ colleges, a dozen theaters, and a museum of revolutionary history devoted to the life of Kim Il-sung. Across from the east port is the Chonmasan Hotel for foreign visitors and near that a Russian consulate. The streets and squares in the city center were designed in the ostentatiously oversized style favored in Moscow and other Communist cities that conveys the power of the regime over the individual.
The main thoroughfare known simply as Road No. 1 running the width of the city is so broad it could easily accommodate six lanes of traffic if there were that many cars in Chongjin. On both sides, spaced at regular intervals like sentries on guard duty, are large plane and acacia trees, the lower part of the trunks painted white. The white paint is variously said to keep away insects, protect the tree against harsh temperatures, or to assert that the tree is government property and cannot be chopped for firewood. The curbs are also painted white. Interspersed between the trees are the familiar red signposts with propaganda slogans and behind them soaring street lamps that are seldom switched on. The sidewalks are as broad as the Champs-Élysées—this is supposed to be a grand boulevard, after all—although many pedestrians choose to walk in the road since there is little traffic. There are no traffic lights, instead uniformed traffic police who perform robotic calisthenics with their arms to direct the few cars. The main road comes to a T-stop in front of the North Hamgyong Province Theater, a grand building topped by a twelve-foot-high portrait of Kim Il-sung. Behind the theater, the city comes to an abrupt end where it is hemmed in by Mount Naka to the northeast. These days, the mountainside is dotted with graves and most of the trees have been chopped for firewood, but it stillmakes for a pleasant setting. In fact, Chongjin’s downtown, even today, makes a positive first impression, but a closer inspection reveals that chunks of concrete have fallen off the buildings, the streetlights all tilt precariously in different directions, and the trams are cratered with dents, but the few visitors to Chongjin whiz by so quickly that these sights are easily missed.
Mrs. Song’s apartment was on the second floor of an eight-story building that had no elevators. When she first saw it Mrs. Song was amazed to learn that the building had indoor plumbing—regular people like her had never seen anything so modern in the 1960s. Heating radiated up from under the floor as in a traditional Korean house, but it came from water heated by a hydroelectric plant and piped through the building. The young couple didn’t have much in the way of furniture, but they had two separate rooms, one for themselves and another for their growing number of children. Their first daughter, Oak-hee, was born in 1966, followed two years later by another daughter and then another. North Korean medicine was sufficiently developed by this time that most urban women gave birth in the hospital, but Mrs. Song, despite her soft appearance, was built of strong stuff. She delivered all her children by herself without even the help of a midwife. One was born on the side of the road—Mrs. Song had been walking home with a basket of laundry. With the first birth, her mother-in-law cooked her a soup with slimy ribbons of seaweed, a traditional Korean recipe to help a new mother recover her iron. The next time her mother-in-law—disappointed by the birth of another girl—threw the seaweed at Mrs. Song to make the soup herself. After the third girl, she stopped speaking to her.
“You’re doomed to have nothing but girls,” she snapped as her parting shot.
Mrs. Song persevered. The fourth child arrived one afternoon when she was home alone in the apartment. She had left work early that day because her belly was hurting, but she hated to be idle, so she began to scrub the floors. A sharp pain
The main thoroughfare known simply as Road No. 1 running the width of the city is so broad it could easily accommodate six lanes of traffic if there were that many cars in Chongjin. On both sides, spaced at regular intervals like sentries on guard duty, are large plane and acacia trees, the lower part of the trunks painted white. The white paint is variously said to keep away insects, protect the tree against harsh temperatures, or to assert that the tree is government property and cannot be chopped for firewood. The curbs are also painted white. Interspersed between the trees are the familiar red signposts with propaganda slogans and behind them soaring street lamps that are seldom switched on. The sidewalks are as broad as the Champs-Élysées—this is supposed to be a grand boulevard, after all—although many pedestrians choose to walk in the road since there is little traffic. There are no traffic lights, instead uniformed traffic police who perform robotic calisthenics with their arms to direct the few cars. The main road comes to a T-stop in front of the North Hamgyong Province Theater, a grand building topped by a twelve-foot-high portrait of Kim Il-sung. Behind the theater, the city comes to an abrupt end where it is hemmed in by Mount Naka to the northeast. These days, the mountainside is dotted with graves and most of the trees have been chopped for firewood, but it stillmakes for a pleasant setting. In fact, Chongjin’s downtown, even today, makes a positive first impression, but a closer inspection reveals that chunks of concrete have fallen off the buildings, the streetlights all tilt precariously in different directions, and the trams are cratered with dents, but the few visitors to Chongjin whiz by so quickly that these sights are easily missed.
Mrs. Song’s apartment was on the second floor of an eight-story building that had no elevators. When she first saw it Mrs. Song was amazed to learn that the building had indoor plumbing—regular people like her had never seen anything so modern in the 1960s. Heating radiated up from under the floor as in a traditional Korean house, but it came from water heated by a hydroelectric plant and piped through the building. The young couple didn’t have much in the way of furniture, but they had two separate rooms, one for themselves and another for their growing number of children. Their first daughter, Oak-hee, was born in 1966, followed two years later by another daughter and then another. North Korean medicine was sufficiently developed by this time that most urban women gave birth in the hospital, but Mrs. Song, despite her soft appearance, was built of strong stuff. She delivered all her children by herself without even the help of a midwife. One was born on the side of the road—Mrs. Song had been walking home with a basket of laundry. With the first birth, her mother-in-law cooked her a soup with slimy ribbons of seaweed, a traditional Korean recipe to help a new mother recover her iron. The next time her mother-in-law—disappointed by the birth of another girl—threw the seaweed at Mrs. Song to make the soup herself. After the third girl, she stopped speaking to her.
“You’re doomed to have nothing but girls,” she snapped as her parting shot.
Mrs. Song persevered. The fourth child arrived one afternoon when she was home alone in the apartment. She had left work early that day because her belly was hurting, but she hated to be idle, so she began to scrub the floors. A sharp pain
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