Food and Spring

How our lives could be if the single most important thing that we need to do very best every day is to ensure ourselves are fed and the best thing that we can hope for is that we have something to eat for the next meal. Not like the developed countries in which people intentionally skip their meals to keep the shapes of their bodies or simply too busy for works, skipping a meal here could literally mean death. Since you don’t have the idea whether the next meal or tomorrow’s meal would be there for you. The food taste is the last thing that you want to care about if you are given a choice between quality and quantity. There is no such thing called eating with pleasure and one  just eat only with an animal instinct to survive and at the same time unconsciously calculating how much longer each bite of food can keep the body going.

Spring is perhaps one of the important seasons in East Asia. For the rich, they tend to celebrate the coming of lunar New Year with abundance of food but in some parts of the region, things are totally different. Spring is the season of death as during this period of time when the stores of food are gone, but the farms produce nothing to eat because new crops are just being planted. And because of all these,  spring is the season most people died of starvation. Normally starts from the sick and the weak, followed by the old and the young. At one point of time, you see abandoned bodies in the trash heaps and there are so many desperate people on the streets crying for help that you have to stop helping anyone of them for your own survival and opt to shut off your heart or the pain would be too much. After a while you are used to the scenes and that is what hell is like.  Instead of starving to death, people in deep desperation would risk their lives to do anything for the promise of a bowl of rice or a way to get out of these hell-like places.

Until today, I still cannot imagine how the life would be if I cannot openly show my feeling, be it anger, disappointment, sadness or happiness. Instead, I need to hide all the feelings that may be considered as something sensitive by others that trying to scrutinize and control me through my emotion by destroying my individuality and ability to react to situations based on my own experience of the world. There are many ways that can be used to control and manipulate others, just like the Big brother in George Orwell’s 1984. I can think of a few ways, like limiting the access of information from outside world and filling the books with all sorts of propagandas that aim to brainwash the readers that they are live in the greatest country in the world, even though most of them are chronically malnourished and live in extreme poverty. Second, nurturing the loyalty among the public by glorifying the leaders and also cultivating the awareness of the public to fight and treasure the country more than their own lives…A single thought on all these make me realize the freedom that I really enjoy in the country that I am living now even though lots of people sometime complaint about the limited freedom they are granted in certain things..

(579 words)

***With information from In Order To Live : A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom by Yeonmi Park