Changchun, China — In Daehongdan and Samjiyeon, agricultural regions of Yangkang Province which the North Korean authorities have laid claim to as the “Utopia of the Military-first Period,” the number of discharged soldiers living a sorrowful single life because their wives have left them is increasing.
The North Korean authorities dispatched around one thousand discharged soldiers each to Daehongdan and Samjiyeon between 1998 and 2000 to build a “potato kingdom utopia.”
Indeed, Chosun (North Korea) Central TV aired a special program from December 18 to 23, 2008, called, “Daehongdan Citizens Building Utopia in the Military-first Period.”
As part of the propaganda, the authorities encouraged city girls from across the nation to get married to the former soldiers, proclaiming it a great act of patriotism.
Thereupon, women workers belonging to the Kim Il Sung Socialist Youth League in Kaesong Silk Factory volunteered to go and get married to them. Workers from textile factories in Pyongyang also came forward. As a result, in 1999, the authorities held joint wedding ceremonies for a few hundred couples.
There is a well-known anecdote in North Korea from the time. Kim Jong Il apparently paid a visit to a discharged soldier’s home and named his new-born baby “Hongdan” after the county.
However, contrary to government propaganda, if not good sense, working on a potato farm all day long, living in a house without electricity and eating little besides potatoes was extremely difficult for both the discharged soldiers and their wives from the city.
Although Kim Jong Il pointed out that in foreign countries potato is a staple food, getting by on just potatoes for a full year is a different proposition entirely.
As time went by, the wives started complaining about their dire lives, but one could not easily leave because the whole thing began with a decree from Kim Jong Il himself. Some women requested a divorce, since the discharged soldiers certainly could not go anywhere, but only a small number accepted. A large number of wives simply ran away from their families instead.
Consequently, there are many discharged soldiers living alone on the Daehongdan Potato Farm and the Potae Potato Farm in Samjiyeon, according to the Daily NK’s source.
These days a folk song for a missed wife, “Arirang Ridge,” is very popular among the listless former soldiers, according to another source who spoke with Daily NK on Sunday. The song started to be sung back in early 2000. While husbands work or while they are drinking, they sing “Arirang Ridge” and pine for their wives living far away, he explained.
It is the sad story of a discharged soldier who marries a girl and brings her to live on a potato farm. She comes to the farm with a dream, but eventually leaves her family due to the hardships of life, and the husband left behind commits suicide because he misses her so.
Appropriately then, in the supposed “Utopia of the Military-first Period,” many lonely former soldiers console themselves at the sheer emptiness of Kim Jong Il’s potato farming revolution and their lonely existences by singing the tragic folk song, “Arirang Ridge.”
