North Korea Untold

The Party That Never Made the News Sometime in the spring of 2019 — a defector I'll call Jisun, a former resident of Pyongyang's Moranbong district, told me this story over instant coffee in a cramped Seoul apartment — there was a birthday party in a villa on the outskirts of the capital. Not a party by any standard we'd recognize. There were bottles of Hennessy Paradis. There was imported sushi, flown in through Dalian. A DJ had been brought up from somewhere, no one quite knew where, and the music went on until four in the morning. The host was the son of a senior official in the Organization and Guidance Department. He was twenty-six. And outside that villa, in the same city, families were rationing corn porridge. North Korea Untold That's North Korea's dirty secret that even most North Korea watchers underplay. Yes, everyone knows the Kim family lives in obscene luxury. But there's a second tier — a floating, semi-hidden class of the genuinely wealthy that e...