When Grace Jo’s grandmother caught six newborn mice near their home in North Korea, the whole family was overjoyed. Finally, one of them would have something to eat.
It was the year 1996, and little Grace was only 5 years old, and seriously malnourished. The famine in North Korea had been ravaging the country for half a decade, and the family of seven—mom, dad, grandma, and four siblings—sometimes spent up to 10 days with no food at all, surviving by just drinking water from a nearby stream.
So when the family found the mice, the adults had to make a big decision: Which child would get to eat them? Young Grace’s hair had turned yellow and dry, and she wasn’t able to walk properly due to being malnourished. So she was the chosen one to eat the mice, which were boiled and added to a soup with some grains of rice and corn. “We didn’t have salt, so it was a very plain flavor,” Ms. Jo, 33, recalled during an interview from her current home in Georgia.
After a harrowing journey through China, she, her sister, and her mother were able to escape to freedom in America in 2008. Ms. Jo is now an American citizen and human rights activist dedicated to telling youth about the horrors of living under a communist regime. “We don’t want that similar thing to happen in America,” she said.
A Family Lost to Hunger
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, North Korea lost its biggest economic supporter, and so the flow of critical imports into North Korea stopped. The communist regime was unable to adapt, and the state-controlled economy collapsed.
The little food available was distributed by the regime according to each individual’s political standing and loyalty to the state. Particularly in the northern part of the country where Ms. Jo’s family was from, many were left to fend for themselves.
The whole Jo family tried its best to procure food. Mom would handcraft different items to sell in the market. Grandma would make tofu, also for sale. Dad and the eldest daughter would travel for weeks in search of some provisions. Even the youngest ones, like little Grace, would help, foraging wild vegetables or holding up torches while the grownups worked at night—as they had no electricity in the house.
Like many other North Koreans who live near the border with China, one desperate day, Ms. Jo’s father decided to cross the Tumen River separating both countries to try to find some food on the other side. He didn’t have a passport, as he didn’t have the money to get one. Ms. Jo recalled, “In North Korea, everything is free. Education is free, healthcare is free … but it’s not free. The officers who have the authority to sign the paperwork ask for something. At the time, we didn’t have any food. How could he pay the bribe?”
So her father illegally crossed the shallow and unguarded Tumen and was able to return to North Korea with a few bags of rice. But he got caught at the street market by North Korean police, who then took him onto a train to be sent to a detention center. During the three-day trip, he wasn’t given any food or water, and he died before reaching the destination.
