The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [42]
Kim’s reply:
“More difficult, eh … It’s possible. But … I think that instead of becoming more difficult, the situation will gradually resolve, just as the spring melts the snow. This faith comes from what I have felt while traveling around the past year. Of course the country’s economy is now in a very difficult state. But in the new year reform must take place in every part of the people’s economy. Can it be done? I think there is no end to what can be done. No matter how difficult the economic situation is now, it is completely different from the situation after the war, when socialist construction had to be launched on a pile of ashes. Now we have the foundation of a self-supporting economy that the Leader laid down for us.… I think it all depends on the workers themselves.16
So Kim believes things will improve, but maybe they won’t. Everything depends on the workers—he thinks. His father never sounded so uncertain. The reader is left wondering just what role the Dear Leader sees for himself on the economic front. The image of snow melting in springtime suggests that it is not a very active one. All the same, he offers a solution to the fertilizer shortage:
“Some cadres now think there can be no farming without fertilizer, but this is wrong. Did we ever complain about the lack of fertilizer after liberation? Even if you look at the international trend, it’s toward farming with less fertilizer.”
These words brought Kyŏng’u to his senses at once. Had he not been one of those cadres, complaining about fertilizer when he should have been looking for a way out of the difficulties?
“General, I thought wrongly.”17
Granted, Kim Il Sung expressed himself on a comparably trite level, but it is one thing to call rainbow trout a tasty fish, and another to suggest, as Kim Jong Il does here, that his country should surmount the lack of something by using less of it. This is clearly a personality cult for straitened times.
Our hero then proposes a drive into the countryside, with himself at the wheel. Soon he spots an elderly woman walking by the side of the road.
“Someone coming back from the market would not be out alone this late. Judging from the difficulty she’s having walking, it is clear that she has either come a very long way or is exhausted with hunger.”
Kim Jong Il felt a pang in his breast. He was seeing in the grandmother the pain being endured by the people.18
In the most explicit indication of the extent of the food shortage, the writer describes her as “gaunt from loss of weight.”19 The General stops the sedan and offers to take her to her destination. Tales of one or the other Kim giving average citizens a ride are common in the Text, and the story plays out here in familiar fashion: the woman improbably fails to recognize who has picked her up, the cadre wrings his hands over her irreverence, and the Leader chuckles indulgently. As it turns out, the old woman has left her son’s home to live with her daughter, so disgusted is she with him. A party secretary at a coal mine, he can think of no response to the mine’s recent collapse than to brood in his office. She recounts the angry speech she made:
Everyone talks about the Arduous March this, the Arduous March that, but how many people are really going through it? The only one is the General [Kim Jong Il] himself. Ask your conscience, am I talking hot air? You know from watching TV. Doesn’t our General go up and down steep mountain paths without a moment’s rest in order to visit with the People’s Army troops? He’s trying to keep watch over the Homeland, over all of us. And he always insists on eating just what the people are eating, maize rice and gruel.… Is it enough just to talk