'The woman who stole the sun'

Merchants selling wares at a private market at the northeastern border city of Rason in North Korea. Photo by Seol Song-ah

Seol Song-ah still remembers the first time that she read "Gone with The Wind'' in North Korea in 2007. The book, one of a few American titles officially translated in the North, was one of the most popular titles available for loan at a street book vendor — so much so that its rental fee was triple other books,' its cover was torn out, and its worn, dog-eared pages were full of patched-up holes. Out of curiosity, Seol, then a 38-year-old state-run company worker, borrowed the novel and, in the following days, stayed up all night to devour it, thinking — “this is my story.”

North Korea — one of the world’s most impoverished and isolated countries — may appear to have little in common with 19th-century society in the American South. But in the character of Scarlett O'Hara — a flawed yet strong-willed woman who fought her way through the hardships of the American Civil War, often by challenging old traditions — Seol saw herself and many other women around her in North Korea.

“Like the Old South back then, the North Korean society we had known was crumbling down. And like Scarlett, we had to do whatever it took to survive and provide for our family during this chaotic time — often defying the old values we had been taught before,” Seol told me. “Many of my girlfriends also read the book and said the same thing — 'this is our story.'”

In the North's society ruled by a regime with little tolerance for dissent, none of the women could publicly voice the sense of frustration they felt. But 16 years later, Seol, having fled the North, settled in Seoul and established herself as a journalist, then wrote a novel that captured the hopes and struggles of many North Korean women during these tumultuous years — a story that, to a degree, mirrored the iconic heroine of the U.S. novel.

“The Woman Who Stole the Sun” — Seol’s first, Korean-language novel published last year — centers on an ordinary housewife whose life is turned upside down after the catastrophic collapse of the North’s centrally planned economy in the late 1990s. Bom-soon endures enormous hardships like famine, starvation, imprisonment, deaths in the family, violence by state officials as well as an abusive husband and everyday oppression under the totalitarian regime. But she manages to survive and even thrive by learning the rules of the harsh and opportunistic new world — like many women who abandoned the traditional ideal of an obedient housewife and eventually led North Korea's transformation to a nascent, quasi-market economy.

Despite being fiction, the novel also offers a glimpse into how women in North Korea emerged from the ashes of the old system to become a driving force for many economic, social and cultural changes in the country today.

A photo taken at the entrance to the Sunam wholesale market in North Korea's northeastern city of Chongjin, where Chinese goods imported through the nearby border city of Rason are sold to retailers across the country. Photo by Seol Song-ah

A majority of merchants in the hundreds of private markets that have popped across North Korea for the past two decades — one of the key parts of the country's economy today — are women, while men are often bound to state-assigned, relatively low-paying jobs. A majority of North Koreans who flee the country and settle elsewhere in search of better lives are also women (in South Korea alone, over 70 percent of North Korean defectors who have settled there are women). They are key consumers of foreign pop culture brought across the border — including smuggled South Korean TV dramas — and the new lifestyles featured in those pop culture products. And as women gain greater financial independence, more of them defy the traditional expectation to be mothers, sending the country’s birthrates plummeting in recent years.

While the North rarely discloses data on its demographics, official estimates by South Korea showed that women in the North marry later, have fewer babies and even divorce more than before. The North’s total fertility rate — the number of babies an average woman is expected to have during her lifetime — also dropped from 2.69 in the 1980s to 1.59 in the 2000s to 1.38 for the 2010-2019 period, according to estimates by Seoul’s central bank. And more North Koreans are opting for divorce “in response to gender inequality or violence in families, which had been taken for granted (as normal) in the past,” Seoul’s unification ministry said in a recent report based on interviews with over 6,300 North Korean defectors. It said women’s growing financial clout has triggered many changes in the North’s gender dynamics for the past decades, although North Korea, in general, remains deeply patriarchal, with its political and official economic systems dominated by men. For instance, over 75 percent of respondents said women’s status in families had been elevated, in some cases to equal with or even above their husbands’, as more women earned money, often more than their husbands.

The cover of “The Woman Who Stole the Sun," written by North Korean defector Seol Song-ah / Courtesy of Seol Song-ah

Such demographic and cultural shifts raised the alarm within the North’s regime. Pyongyang launched desperate campaigns to stress women’s traditional role, with the North’s leader Kim Jong-un calling for “mothers’ power” to prevent a decline in birthrates in a tearful speech last year. The campaigns also signal the North’s wariness over “working women who play modern, active roles in society, instead of traditional ones like in the past,” Seoul’s unification ministry said in the report.

“Women wouldn’t explicitly defy Kim Jong-un’s regime, considering doing so can literally mean death in a place like North Korea,” Seol said. “But in the eyes of the regime, women challenging their husbands is tantamount to challenging the broader social and political systems based on patriarchal family units, and this can be seen as just unsettling and dangerous to the state authorities in the long run.”

But women in North Korea have changed as more of them got a “taste of money” and what it’s like to be financially empowered, Seol said, adding she had often questioned herself, “Why should I wash my husband’s dirty socks and do all the chores at home, when I work just as hard as him outside the home, often making even more money than him?”

“And now, women are even more eager to make money in the North’s market system than before…no amount of preaching and pressure by the regime will convince them to change their minds and stay at home,” said the 55-year-old.

Seol’s book, partly based on her personal experiences as well as her family's, portrays this changing reality through the life of its lead character. It describes in great detail how Bom-soon survives in the dog-eat-dog world of the fledgling market economy and builds a fortune through various trades: she moves from hawking vegetables on the street to selling fuel and home-produced medicines and to eventually building apartments. In this process, she also navigates the corruption-laden bureaucracy, including the country’s notoriously brutal prison system, and fights off rivals while winning — and losing — allies and lovers along the way.

Bom-soon’s journey also features many real-life events, including the disastrous 2009 currency reform and chronic energy and medicine shortages, as well as women's frustration over the deeply patriarchal culture at home and in broader society. And even her romantic life evolves to reflect what Seol described as women’s changing views on desirable masculinity: she moves from her idealistic but weak-minded boyfriend to a well-connected but patriarchal husband to a street-savvy and pragmatic lover who respects her and supports her throughout her ordeals and increasingly lucrative business ventures.

"Many women in North Korea feel conflicted between the traditional feminine ideals forced upon them by the government and the new femininity they have discovered while working in the private economy — which is more ambitious, enterprising and calculating,” Seol said. “Through the novel, I wanted to reflect those changing attitudes of women who are stuck between yesterday’s ideals and today’s reality in North Korea.”

Seol, who settled in South Korea in 2011 and earned a Ph.D. with a thesis on the North Korean economy, currently reports on the North Korean economy as a journalist for Radio Free Asia (her real name is Choi Sol, but she writes fiction under the pen name of Seol Song- ah). But she has also written essays and short fiction stories describing the lesser-known aspects of the lives of North Korean women — sexual desires, sexual abuse in the workplace, abortion, changing gender dynamics within the family and frustrations with the politically repressive and male-dominated society.

Seol Song-ah, who works now as a reporter for Radio Free Asia, poses among the reeds at the Sangam World Cup, Mapo District, Seoul, South Korea. Photo by Seol Song-ah

“These new female characters, who emerged out of the North’s shift to a market economy, are perpetually exposed to violence but also …shatter gender-related customs and sexual norms,” Kim Sung-kyung, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies, wrote in a book about the lives of North Korean women, describing Seol’s characters as “revolutionary.”

Although the women's voices remain limited under the North's authoritarian regime, and their desire for change falls short of explicitly challenging the political status quo, they have been constantly challenging — and changing — many old ways of life on the ground in North Korea, Seol said.

“Bom-soon symbolizes the tenacity and strength of all the North Korean women who rose above many challenges with sheer determination to survive and thrive,” she said. “In that sense, maybe you can call her North Korea's Scarlett O'Hara.”

Jung Ha-won is a journalist and author of "Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide."