Lyric and lament from North Korea

Jang Jin-sung is most accurately described as a former “court poet,” since North Korea’s secretive leader, Kim Jong Il, runs his government rather the same way European royalty hundreds of years ago ran theirs. Early Modern literati won grand favors for depicting the leader of the day as, say, anointed by God, worshipped by all, and blessed with a divine capacity for miracle-making. (Think Gloriana and The Faerie Queen. Think cherubim and seraphim continually crying “Holy, holy, holy.” That’s the idea.) Such was life in 1568 England. Fast-forward to 2008 North Korea, where government myth-makers use thoroughly modern media to achieve the same effect—and where Jang Jin-sung worked for years writing tributes in verse to the Dear Leader. Until, that is, he finally met the man in person.

“The first time I met Kim Jong Il, I felt overwhelmed with emotion,” Jang said in an interview with RFA’s Sookyung Lee. “But once I realized that he was the world’s richest king, ruling over the poorest country on the face of the Earth, that was a turning point.”

“To me, he was no longer a god, and I came to think that I could no longer live under that system. Preserving that regime while the people of North Korea are starving to death, that is an abomination,” Jang said.

Jang, who uses a pseudonym to avoid endangering relatives he left behind, met Kim twice—a great honor, but not his only accolade. In tightly closed North Korea, literature—like all the arts—remains under strict government control. All literature and publishing is dictated by the Workers’ Party Propaganda and Agitation Department, the General Federation of Korean Literature, and the Culture and Arts Department of the Party’s Central Committee. Jang was a member of the latter two and enjoyed the privileged life of North Korea’s elite.

But he fled that life and all its relative comforts to cross the Tumen river into China, and eventually settled in South Korea, where he has just published a volume of poetry titled For 100 Won, My Daughter I Sell. The title poem recounts the true story of a dying mother who sells her own daughter to a stranger for 100 won in a move she hopes will allow her child to survive—and then spends that small sum of money on a loaf of bread for the girl.

Jang’s poetry, published for the first time by the Internet news organization www.Chogabje.Com and broadcast by RFA’s Korean service, has topped the best-seller list in South Korea and made its author a media darling.

The poems evoke gruesome, haunting themes, such as the appalling famine that swept through North Korea in the 1990s and continues even now. The title poem, “For 100 won, my daughter I sell,” is perhaps the most disturbing of all—even more so when Jang explains that it’s based on an incident he witnessed.

“It happened at a market in the Tongdaemun district of Pyongyang. A lot of people witnessed that tragic scene and cried that day,” he said. “As they watched her, she tried to appear unaffected in the beginning, but after she gave her daughter that mother’s parting gift, one last piece of bread, and as she wailed, all the onlookers broke into tears. Even now, my eyes still tear up when I think of that instant.”

Grigore Scarlatoiu has translated the poem in full:

Exhausted, in the midst of the market she stood
“For 100 won, my daughter I sell”
Heavy medallion of sorrow
A cardboard around her neck she had hung
Next to her young daughter
Exhausted, in the midst of the market she stood
A deaf-mute the mother
She gazed down at the ground, just ignoring
The curses the people all threw

As they glared
At the mother who sold
Her motherhood, her own flesh and blood
Her tears dried up
Though her daughter, upon learning
Her mother would perish of a deadly disease
Had buried her face in the mother’s long skirt
And bellowed, and cried
But the mother stood still
And her lips only quivered

Unable she was to give thanks to the soldier
Who slipped a hundred won into her hand
As he uttered
“It is your motherhood,
And not the daughter I’m buying”
She took the money, and ran
A mother she was,

And the 100 won she had taken
She spent on a loaf of wheat bread
Toward her daughter she ran
As fast as she could
And pressed the bread on the child’s lips
“Forgive me, my child”

In the midst of the market she stood
And she wailed.

Jang Jin-sung believes that North Korea’s only hope is its people:

Tiny it is,
But the speckle of hope
Transcends
Darkness supreme
Through the power of life
Firefly of my soul
The glimmer is a firefly.

Burma: “They’re faking it everywhere”

They’re faking it everywhere. They fake it by video taping, and then leaving that area. They’re just looking for an opportunity to video tape when authorities come. People are suffering from the storm. They are building elaborate stages, with velvet backdrops, and writing things like who is donating what for the storm victims. They want to make it elaborate. They don’t actually look after the people who are suffering. The generals are on these stages, looking grand, with guns around their waists. — Resident of Pyapon, Irrawaddy delta

From a recent interview by RFA’s Burmese service:

Interviewee: Pyapon hasn’t got any aid yet. Social organizations, such as Rice Merchants Association, keep going from Rangoon, taking aid materials and food for their regions.

Sichuan: Video and interviews from Dujiangyan

RFA Mandarin service Hong Kong-based reporter Lin Di reports from Dujiangyan, Sichuan province:

These forces are specialists in getting people out from under collapsed building, this officer says. They are usually stationed in Yunnan. They have been in Dujiangyan for three days.  “There are forces here from Sichuan, Yunnan, and many other provinces,” he says. The bright lights are running off generators; they brought them along with them. There is no power at all in the city; only vehicle headlights.

In Dujiangyan, the stench of dead bodies fills the air. Most people here are wearing masks. I clamber over the rubble of a collapsed building that must have been four or five-storeys high. A rescue worker tells me that there are still more than a dozen bodies buried underneath the debris.  “We checked,” he says. “They are all dead.”

Chongqing: Many aftershocks reported from quake

Mandarin service reporter Lin Di arrived in Chongqing on Tuesday, the day after the earthquake. Even though the authorities said that the airport in Chengdu was supposed to be open, several flights going there were delayed and eventually cancelled. Lin Di had to rebook a flight for Chongqing instead. He arrived in Chongqing in the middle of the night on Tuesday. According to local authorities, as of 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday, May 13, in Chongqing, 11 people have died in the earthquake and 34 people sustained serious injuries, 118,000 people have been evacuated, and more than two million people in the city have been affected.

Sichuan: Parents wait outside collapsed high school

Video: Two students in a dormitory room at the University of Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, record their experience during the quake and post it to Tudou.com, a Chinese equivalent of YouTube. It is later reposted on YouTube.

A resident of Dujiangyan who helped to rescue people caught in the collapse of a secondary school building said. “The building is three storeys high, with 18 classrooms. All of the sudden the building collapsed. Many people have died. The People’s Liberation Army are rescuing those trapped under the rubble. Such a terrible tragedy. Many parents are having to wait here for news.”

China, Tibet: Tibetans cut off by quake

From Mandarin service reporter Qiao Long:

The Tibetan government-in-exile completely lost contact with Tibetans living in Ngaba, Gansu (in Chinese, Aba) after the earthquake, without any news emerging about the situation in local monasteries and nunneries. Ge Sang, an officer with the exiled government said: “We completely lost contact with them. As communications have been paralyzed, there isn’t any information coming from there.”

The earthquake has captured the attention of Tibetan monks in China. Monks at the Drepung monastery in Lhasa are planning a prayer ritual on Wednesday to pray for peace for people in the tremor-hit areas.

China: Quake aftermath in Sichuan

China’s official media now say the earthquake death toll in Sichuan province has topped 12,000 and could surge higher.

The vice governor of the southwestern province, Li Chengyun, said the death toll was based on incomplete figures as of Tuesday afternoon. He said 26,206 people were injured, up to 3.5 million homes destroyed, and more than 12,000 were had been killed. Tens of thousands remain unreachable and unaccounted for.

This report is from Yingxiu township in Sichuan, by RFA Mandarin service reporter Yan Xiu:

Burma: Refugees ‘told to leave shelters by May 14′

More recent interviews from RFA’s Burmese service:

Announcer: The storm victims, who lost their houses, are now facing severe starvation, but they cannot enjoy the help from the international community right away. Instead the families of the military are getting the help first. A person close to the military families in the airforce in Mingaladon, Rangoon told RFA this. The anonymous woman told RFA as follows that some of the families from the Mingaladon airforce lost their roofs in the storm, and the engineering troops from GE unit put up new zinc sheets and made roofing and walls, as well as distributed food:

Burma: Donated food ’sold at high prices’

The dried noodles that came from abroad, that we’ve never seen before, — you can now buy them at City Mart. Also, in Nyaung-bin-lay Market, I’ve seen cans of condensed milk that we’ve never seen before. These are the things donated by foreign countries. You can buy those packets of dried noodles. It’s 600 a packet. These dried-noodle packets were donated. I don’t know what happened that they didn’t get to the victims, but ended up in Nyaung-bin-lay Market and City Mart. — U Thuya

From a recent interview with RFA’s Burmese service:

Burma: Interview with Shari Villarosa in Rangoon

Photo by luisrene on Flickr.

Speaking as the United Nations announced it would cease aid flights into Burma until officials released two planeloads of emergency food supplies they were holding, the top U.S. diplomat in Burma has called on the military junta to allow the international community in.

“Take in good faith the desire of the international community to come in and help the millions of Burmese victims of this terrible storm,” Shari Villarosa, Chargé d’Affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon, said in an interview with RFA’s Burmese service.