Ula Tardigrade

“From the outside, Chongjin looked unchanged. The same gray facades of the Stalinist office buildings stared out at empty stretches of asphalt. The roads were still marked by the faded red propaganda signs extolling the achievements of Kim Jong-il and the Workers’ Party. Indeed, the place looked frozen in time, as if the clocks of world history had stopped in 1970. But Mrs. Song knew better. It was a topsy-turvy world in which she was living. Up was down, wrong was right. The women had the money instead of the men. The markets were bursting with food, more food than most North Koreans had seen in their lifetime, and yet people were still dying from hunger. Workers’ Party members had starved to death; those who never gave a damn about the fatherland were making money.”
― Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea