Summary

Chapter 9 recounts Mrs. Song’s trials and tribulations as she struggled to survive the 1990s in North Korea with dwindling food supply and no money. Demick says Mrs. Song, like others around her, became entrepreneurial in an effort to fend off starvation, making and selling tofu, hunting frogs in the woods around Chongjin, and selling her old apartment with her husband to get some money and move into a smaller place. Sadly, her mother-in-law, who had been living with them for some time, passed away as a result of her hunger, and shortly thereafter Changpbo, Mrs. Song’s husband, also died of starvation. Then, their eldest son came to live with Mrs. Song in the tiny shack she had bought with what little money was left. He, too, died of hunger.

In Chapter 10, Demick explains that Mrs. Song grieved deeply and went to...