He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, North Korea’s Mundane Revolution: Socialist Living and the Rise of Kim Il Sung, 1953–1965, and reported the following:
Could Ford Maddox Ford have ever imagined that his Page 99 Test would apply to a book on a place like North Korea? Not likely, but it does – if only barely.Learn more about North Korea’s Mundane Revolution at the University of California Press website.
North Korea’s Mundane Revolution raises questions about the cartoon-like visions of North Korea – the military parades, the mass games, and the leaders with curious coiffures – so prominent in the media. The book argues North Korea has its own complex history, one which has enabled this one-time aspiring socialist country to survive longer than the Soviet Union. The book centers not on the Kim family and their personality cult but on how the population actively engaged in rebuilding their cities after the Korean War as part of a state and popular project to create what was called the “New Living” – a socialist-style living, in short.
Much of the book deals with the postwar turn to the family. It explores tension between how the consolidation of the Party-state came with the re-establishment of male social power – even as the regime celebrated passing the first gender equality laws in all of Asia. For many women, the gender equality laws eased the path into a wide array of wage work in realms previously dominated almost exclusively by men, everything from biologists to factory workers, architects to construction workers. And by the end of the Korean War in 1953, in which mass deaths and defections led to a 12 per cent population decline, the wage work of women was desperately needed in the centrally planned economy.
Yet participation rates of women, in the eyes of economists, remained stubbornly low, contributing to a dire labor shortage that interfered with economic growth – the key, it was believed, for transitioning to full socialism. While neither officials nor economists quite came out to say it explicitly, they blamed women who stayed at home – “playing and eating,” they accused – for holding the country back.
My page 99 deals with a number of top-down state initiatives to heighten participation rates. Model stories of the likes of Yi Poksil who, responding to the call, took up work in a tobacco plant, stand side by side with letters-to-the-editors from readers who took it upon themselves to complain about women and officials who did not do their part. So, too, does my page 99 recount the resistance of factory managers, who did not want to invest in daycare facilities to enable wider participation. The page gives a sense of the social richness of urban life and how for a state often seen as totalitarian, even the implementation of the simplest priority was not so straightforward. The story doesn’t stop there, however, and the rest of the book picks up on themes such as the growth of non-routinized women’s labor, which often enabled local officials to meet their goals and get the central plan to “work”; the lionization of mother-workers; and the various ways the Women’s Federation carefully within the authoritarian environment to legitimate domestic work under a regime that could not quite come around to see their efforts in the home as ‘labor.’ Page 99, in short, brings up one aspect of a bigger theme, while giving a good sense of the book’s methodology.
--Marshal Zeringue
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