The Reluctant Communist by Charles Robert Jenkins, Jim Frederick Page A

never easy for me there, and in most other countries, my existence would have qualified as the lowest of the low. But in North Korea, I and those I was with usually had enough food to eat and a roof over our heads, which in that twisted realm made me one of the fortunate few. We four who willingly walked across the DMZ were cold war trophies, which is why I think we were never held like POWs and why, I believe, we were kept mostly healthy. As the stars of several propaganda pamphlets—and later movies—we had to look like we were happy, or at least healthy. With permission and supervision, we were allowed to leave the house fairly regularly and shop in the Pyongyang Shop, a store that was reserved only for foreigners, or go fishing if we had passed our studies and finished whatever work detail was laid out for us.
    But still, I suffered from enough cold, hunger, beatings, and mental torture to frequently make me wish I was dead. To this day, I suffer from panic attacks, high blood pressure, and insomnia. It is hard to convey how hopeless we were during much of that time. Sometimes we took chances that seem unbelievable to me now—whether stealing government property, mouthing off to the cadres, or going on daredevil hikes, clinging to tiny ledges on the sides of canyons, “just for fun”—because in many ways we felt like we were already dead. Other times, when we participated in what seems like the worst forms of betrayal to the United States—whether acting in propaganda movies or teaching military cadets English—it is similarly difficult to express how futile we had come to believe resistance was, how impossible escape.
    Rationing is one of the primary ways of distributing goods in North Korea, and during our early years, our rations went something like this: Every month we got a tube of toothpaste, a bar of body soap, a bar of clothing soap, a pair of socks, two bottles of beer, and forty packs of cigarettes. That may sound like a lot of smokes, but these cigarettes were the worst quality I have ever seen. They must have been stuffed with corn husks rather than tobacco. You had to wet them, like they were roll-your-owns, because if you didn’t, when you lit one, it would burn up toward your fingers before your very eyes before you even took a puff. You were lucky if you got more than three drags off a single cigarette. Every Sunday we were taken into town for a bath and a haircut. At first we were also issued a straight razor once a month, until I told a leader I particularly disliked that a straight razor would come in handy during a fight. After that, we were issued safety razors. Starting out, we each got paid five won per month. A won at that time was worth about fifty U.S. cents. A pack of 555 brand Western cigarettes was about two won at the Pyongyang Shop, so I would usually buy two packs of those and try to make them last all month.
Our primary “job” at first was to study. They had lots of propaganda books in English. We were ordered to read all day about North Korean history, famous tales of the guerillas who battled the Japanese during World War II, and the teachings of Kim Ilsung. The books had names like The People’s Leader and Among the People. We were supposed to read them and then tell our leader what we had learned. It was like an oral book report from school. If you passed, you got to move on to another book. If you didn’t pass, you had to read the book again. Our other task was to teach English to the military officers who would come in and out of the house in packs of four or five for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks at a time. They weren’t really English lessons. They were more like conversation classes. We never really knew who they were, and we were never able to determine any pattern to their schedules.
    Until we all got married, we usually had a cook to make our meals. This sounds like we were living the high life, but having a cook was no luxury, I assure you. The cook