Hannah sent us something this week. She's been reading defector memoirs for years, and she's noticed something — almost all of them describe North Korea from fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago. The famine period, the nineties, the early two-thousands. She wants to know what ordinary life actually looks like right now, after smartphones, after the domestic intranet, after the pandemic border closures. And she wants the texture of it — not the geopolitics, but what a normal day feels like for someone in their twenties or thirties, comparing someone relatively elite in Pyongyang with someone in a smaller city or a rural area. Work, food, housing, dating, technology, how much access people have to foreign media, whether defection is ticking back up after the COVID freeze. And how much the country has actually changed in the last couple of decades.
The short answer is — more than most outsiders think, and less than the regime wants you to believe. The country that defectors describe from the nineties and the country someone in their late twenties is living in today are not the same place. The famine reshaped everything, and then the market economy that emerged illegally in its aftermath has become the de facto economic reality for most people. The state still controls the narrative, but it doesn't control the kitchen table anymore.
So where do we start? Pyongyang versus everywhere else?
That's the right split, because the gap has widened enormously. Let's start with someone in their late twenties or early thirties in Pyongyang — a member of what outside analysts call the donju, the money masters. This is the urban middle class that emerged from the market economy. Their parents or grandparents might have been party loyalists, but they themselves probably built some wealth through trade, through connections to the security apparatus, through remittances from relatives who got out to China or South Korea and send money back through brokers.
How do you even define middle class in a country where the state officially owns everything?
By what you can buy and where you live. A donju household in Pyongyang today lives in an apartment that they've effectively purchased — the state assigns housing officially, but a secondary market in housing rights has existed for years. You pay a broker to take over someone else's assignment. In the nicer parts of Pyongyang, the Changjon Street apartments or the Mirae Scientists Street complexes, a decent unit might run you tens of thousands of dollars. The state built these towers to showcase modernity, and then the market moved in and started pricing them.
Tens of thousands of dollars in a country where the official per capita income is... what, a thousand dollars a year?
Something on that order, officially. But the official economy and the real economy have almost completely decoupled. Someone in Pyongyang working a state-assigned job might earn the equivalent of a few dollars a month in official wages. That's not what they live on. They live on what they make in the market — buying and selling goods, running a small restaurant or a repair shop, trading in imported Chinese products that come through the border and get distributed through networks that everyone knows about and nobody officially acknowledges.
So walk me through a day. This person wakes up in their Pyongyang apartment. What does that apartment actually look like?
If they're donju, it's probably a high-rise unit with electricity most of the day — not twenty-four hours, but enough that you can plan around it. They've got a television, probably a flat-screen these days. They've got a smartphone, almost certainly a domestic brand like Arirang or Pyongyang, though some people manage to get Chinese phones and re-register them on the domestic network. They've got running water, though the pressure might drop in the evenings. They've got a refrigerator, a washing machine. These are not luxury items in Pyongyang anymore — they're normal. What's not normal by outside standards is that you can't just walk into a store and buy whatever you want. Even the donju are working through networks.
The phone. Let's sit on that. What's actually on it?
This is one of the biggest changes. North Korea has a domestic intranet — it's not the global internet, but it's not nothing either. It's called Kwangmyong, and it's been around since the early two-thousands, but smartphone access has exploded in the last decade. There are estimated to be six to seven million mobile subscribers now, in a country of about twenty-six million. The phones run a domestic app store. You've got news apps that deliver Rodong Sinmun and state broadcasts. You've got e-reader apps with approved literature. You've got games — simple ones, but games. You've got a mapping app. You've got a messaging app called Pyolmyong that works like a domestic version of WhatsApp. People use it to coordinate market transactions, to gossip, to arrange dates.
And the state can read all of it.
The state can read all of it. The surveillance infrastructure is baked in. Every phone is registered to a verified identity. The Ministry of State Security has access to message content. But here's the thing — they don't have the capacity to actively monitor every conversation in real time. What they have is the capacity to search, to investigate after the fact, to make examples. So people develop a sense of what's safe to say and what isn't, and they talk around sensitive subjects rather than naming them directly. It's a learned literacy, and everyone acquires it.
What about foreign media? Hannah asked specifically about South Korean dramas and music.
This is where the gap between Pyongyang and the rest of the country becomes a chasm. In Pyongyang, among the donju and especially among younger people, South Korean content is everywhere. It's the worst-kept secret in the country. People watch K-dramas on USB drives and SD cards that get smuggled in from China. They're passed hand to hand, copied and recopied. The quality degrades with each copy, but nobody cares. K-pop is the same — tracks circulate on microSD cards, loaded onto phones and played through earbuds. The state periodically cracks down, especially on the border regions, and they make public examples of people caught distributing large quantities. But the enforcement is inconsistent, and in Pyongyang, among people with connections, it's treated almost casually. You don't talk about it in public, you don't keep large collections on your phone in case you get stopped at a checkpoint, but in private homes, behind closed doors, it's normal.
And outside Pyongyang?
Much harder. In a smaller city like Hamhung or Chongjin, the physical media still circulates, but the networks are thinner. You need a connection to someone who travels to the border or to Pyongyang. The risk is higher because local security apparatus is often more intrusive — fewer people to monitor, so each person gets more attention. In rural areas, it's rare. Not nonexistent, but rare. A farmer in South Hwanghae Province might go years without seeing a single piece of South Korean media. They know it exists — word travels — but access requires money and connections they don't have.
So the information divide is also a class divide.
And a geographic one. Pyongyang is the showcase. The regime pours resources into it because it's what foreign visitors see and it's where the elite live. The electricity is more reliable, the food supply is more stable, the apartments are nicer, the phones are more common, the foreign content is more accessible. Move a hundred kilometers outside the capital and all of that degrades. Move three hundred kilometers and you're in a different century.
Let's go there. Small city or rural area. What does a day look like for someone the same age?
Take someone in their late twenties in a provincial city — say, Sinuiju, on the Chinese border. They wake up in a smaller apartment or a traditional house. Electricity is intermittent — they might get it for a few hours in the morning and a few in the evening, and the schedule isn't always predictable. They don't have a smartphone. They might have a basic mobile phone for calls and texts, or they might not have a phone at all. Their state-assigned job — at a factory, a collective farm, a government office — pays almost nothing in real terms. So their real life happens in the market.
The jangmadang.
The jangmadang. These emerged during the famine when the public distribution system collapsed and people had to trade to survive. The state has alternately tolerated them and cracked down on them, but they've never gone away, and by now they're the backbone of the economy. In a place like Sinuiju, the market is where you buy food, clothes, household goods, fuel, building materials — everything. Most of the goods are Chinese imports that come across the border legally or semi-legally. The market is also where you earn money. You might sell vegetables you grew on a small private plot. You might buy goods from a wholesaler and resell them at a markup. You might cook food and sell it from a cart. You might repair electronics. The state job is a formality — something you show up for to maintain your official status, and then you spend the rest of your day doing the work that actually feeds your family.
And the state knows this.
The state knows this. It's an open pretense. The official ideology says the state provides, the market is a temporary concession, and everyone nods along while spending most of their waking hours in the market. The local officials are often taking cuts from the market traders. The security personnel are getting paid off. It's a parallel system that everyone participates in and nobody names.
What's the food situation actually like? I think the outside perception is still shaped by the famine images.
The famine ended in the late nineties. The acute starvation crisis is over. But chronic malnutrition and food insecurity are still widespread outside Pyongyang. The public distribution system provides a basic grain ration, but it's often delayed, reduced, or supplemented with inferior substitutes. People rely on the market for variety and for protein — meat, eggs, fish. In a provincial city, a typical diet is rice or corn, kimchi, soybean paste soup, and whatever vegetables are in season. Meat might be once or twice a week for a family that's doing reasonably well. In rural areas, it's leaner. The harvest determines everything. A bad growing season means a hard winter.
And the UN has been tracking this for years.
The World Food Programme and the FAO do regular surveys. The last few years have shown some improvement in agricultural output — the regime has allowed more de facto privatization of farming, where households get to keep a portion of what they grow beyond the state quota — but the gains are fragile. One flood, one drought, and the margins disappear. About forty percent of the population is still classified as food insecure by UN metrics. That's down from worse numbers in the nineties, but it's not good.
Let's talk about dating and family life. Hannah asked about that specifically.
This is an area where the changes are really visible, especially in Pyongyang. Among the donju, dating looks more like what you'd see in China or even South Korea than what defectors described from the nineties. Young people meet through friends, through work, through matchmakers. They go to coffee shops — Pyongyang has coffee shops now, actual ones with espresso machines, catering to the donju crowd. They go to restaurants. They go to the park. They text each other. Premarital relationships are officially frowned upon, but in practice they're common. The state promotes conservative social values, but the market economy has created private spaces that didn't exist before.
Coffee shops. In Pyongyang.
There's one called the Coffee Shop on Changjon Street that wouldn't look out of place in Seoul. Prices are in US dollars or Chinese yuan, which tells you who the clientele is. A latte costs more than most people's monthly official salary.
That sentence alone is the whole story.
It really is. The dual currency reality — dollars and yuan for the real economy, won for the official one — is the clearest signal of how disconnected the two systems are. But back to dating. Marriage is still nearly universal, and it usually happens in the mid-to-late twenties. The state has a say in who can marry whom — party background checks, security clearance — but for most ordinary people this is a formality. The bigger constraint is economic. A donju wedding in Pyongyang today can be elaborate — rented hall, catered food, a photographer, a wedding dress that mimics South Korean styles. In a rural area, it's a family gathering with whatever food can be assembled. The gap is visible in every life event.
Children?
The fertility rate has been declining, like in South Korea and much of East Asia. The official policy is pro-natalist — the state wants more children — but economic pressure pushes the other way. Raising a child is expensive, especially if you want to give them access to education and connections. In Pyongyang, among the donju, one or two children is the norm. In rural areas, families are slightly larger, but not dramatically. The days of five or six children are mostly over.
Education is the ladder, I assume.
Education is everything, and it's deeply unequal. In Pyongyang, the elite schools — the ones that feed into Kim Il-sung University and Kim Chaek University of Technology — are gateways to the best state positions and the best connections. Getting into them requires money, family background, and political reliability. Tutoring is widespread and expensive. Parents pay for extra English lessons, computer lessons, music lessons. It's an arms race that looks familiar to anyone who's seen the education competition in Seoul or Shanghai. Outside Pyongyang, the schools are worse, the teachers are less qualified, and the pathway to a good university is much narrower. A bright kid from a rural area can still rise — the state does identify and promote talent — but the odds are stacked.
What about defection? Hannah asked whether it's ticking back up after COVID.
This is one of the hardest numbers to pin down, because the data is fragmentary. What we know: during the COVID period, North Korea sealed its borders more completely than at any point since the Korean War. The border with China was essentially closed from early 2020 through mid-2023. Defection numbers dropped to near zero — not because people stopped wanting to leave, but because leaving became physically impossible. The routes through China that had been the primary defection pipeline for decades were shut. The brokers who arranged crossings were out of business. The river crossings on the Tumen and Yalu were heavily patrolled.
And since the borders reopened?
The numbers are climbing again, but they haven't returned to pre-COVID levels. South Korean government data shows defector arrivals in the low hundreds per year over the last couple of years, compared to over a thousand per year in the late twenty-tens. But that undercounts the reality, because not everyone who leaves North Korea goes to South Korea. Many go to China and stay there, undocumented, working in the gray economy. Some go to Southeast Asia. Some go to Russia. The total outflow is almost certainly higher than the South Korean arrival numbers suggest.
What's driving people to leave now, versus twenty years ago?
Twenty years ago, the dominant driver was famine and absolute desperation. People left because they were starving. Today, the drivers are more varied. Economic aspiration is a big one — people who've seen enough of the outside world through smuggled media to know that a different life is possible, and who don't see a path to that life inside the country. Political repression is still a factor, especially for people who've fallen afoul of the security apparatus or whose family background is tainted. And there's a network effect — people follow relatives and friends who left earlier. The Korean-Chinese community in China and the defector community in South Korea act as magnets.
But the risk is still enormous.
The risk is enormous. If you're caught trying to cross the border, you face detention, forced repatriation, and a political prison camp sentence. Your family can be punished collectively — sent to a rural area, stripped of party membership, blacklisted from education and employment. The border guards have shoot-to-kill orders in many sectors. And even if you make it to China, you're not safe — Chinese authorities routinely arrest and deport North Koreans under a bilateral agreement. Getting from China to a third country, and then to South Korea, is a months-long or years-long ordeal that costs thousands of dollars in broker fees and exposes you to exploitation, trafficking, and abuse at every stage.
So you don't leave unless staying is worse.
You don't leave unless staying is worse, or unless you have a combination of desperation, resources, and connections that makes the math work. The people who leave today are not the poorest of the poor — the poorest can't afford the brokers. They're people with some money, some education, some awareness of the outside world, and a calculation that the life they can build outside is worth the risk.
Let's go back to the texture Hannah asked for. What does social life actually feel like? What do people do for fun?
In Pyongyang, the donju social scene is surprisingly recognizable. People go out to eat. They go to karaoke rooms — noraebang, same word as in South Korea. They go to the Moranbong Park on weekends. They go to the roller skating rink. They go to the water park — Pyongyang has a water park, the Munsu Water Park, with slides and wave pools. They watch television at home — state broadcasts, but also whatever foreign content they've acquired. They play video games on their phones or on domestic consoles. They drink — soju and beer are widely available, and the domestic Taedonggang Beer is decent. They smoke — cigarettes are ubiquitous, and imported Chinese brands are a status marker.
And outside Pyongyang?
Smaller and more local. In a provincial city, social life revolves around the extended family, the neighborhood, the workplace. People gather at each other's homes. They drink and eat together. They watch state television together. They play cards or badminton or volleyball. Public entertainment is limited — there might be a cinema showing state-approved films, a park with basic facilities, a local market that doubles as a social hub. The rhythm is slower, the options are fewer, and the surveillance is more intimate — everyone knows everyone, and unusual behavior gets noticed.
That intimacy of surveillance is something outsiders miss, I think. It's not just the state watching. It's your neighbors.
It's your neighbors, your coworkers, your extended family. The state has cultivated an informant network that reaches into every apartment building, every workplace, every school. Some people inform willingly, out of ideological commitment or for advancement. Some do it under pressure. Some do it to protect themselves — if you don't report, and someone else does, you're implicated. The result is a society where trust is calibrated carefully. You know who you can talk to about what. You develop a sense for which conversations are safe and which aren't. It's exhausting, and it's something that defectors consistently describe as one of the hardest things to unlearn after they leave.
And yet people live full lives inside this. They fall in love, they raise children, they tell jokes, they have ambitions.
That's the thing that's hardest to convey from outside. The regime is monstrous, the surveillance is pervasive, the inequality is stark, and life goes on. People are not walking around in a state of constant terror. They're navigating, adapting, finding pockets of autonomy and pleasure where they can. The donju in Pyongyang who watches Crash Landing on You on a smuggled USB drive and then goes to a coffee shop and texts her friends — she knows the rules, she knows the risks, and she's built a life inside them. The farmer in South Hwanghae who spends his day in the fields and his evening with his family and has never seen a K-drama — he knows less about the outside world, but he's not living in a concentration camp. He's living in a poor, repressive, isolated country, and within those constraints, he's living.
The normalization of the abnormal.
And that's what makes it so durable. The regime doesn't need to terrorize everyone all the time. It just needs to maintain the boundaries, punish the transgressors visibly enough to remind everyone where the lines are, and let the market economy provide enough material improvement that the cost of rebellion feels higher than the cost of compliance. The system is awful, but it's stable, and for most people, most of the time, stability is enough.
I want to circle back to something you mentioned earlier — the travel insurance. What does it mean that North Korea is selling travel insurance to its citizens going overseas?
This is a small signal of a bigger shift. North Korea has been sending workers overseas for decades — to China, Russia, the Middle East, Africa — to earn foreign currency for the state. But until recently, those workers had no formal protections. The travel insurance product, which started being offered this year, is a recognition that overseas labor is now a structured part of the economy rather than an ad hoc arrangement. It's also a revenue play — the state charges for the insurance, and it's mandatory if you want to travel for work. But it also suggests that the number of people traveling overseas is large enough to support a formal insurance product. That's new.
And those workers come back with information.
They come back with information, with money, with goods, with habits and tastes acquired abroad. The state tries to control this — workers are sent in groups, monitored by minders, housed in compounds — but they still see things. They still talk to people. They still bring back USB drives and smartphones and stories. The overseas labor program is one of the biggest vectors for outside information entering the country, and the regime knows it and can't fully stop it because it needs the foreign currency too badly.
So the border is porous in ways the regime can't control, even when it's sealed.
The border is the regime's biggest vulnerability and its biggest preoccupation. The physical border with China is over fourteen hundred kilometers long, much of it river, much of it mountainous, much of it impossible to patrol completely. The information border is even harder to control. You can't build a wall high enough to block a microSD card. You can't stop people from talking. The regime has tried — the surveillance, the punishments, the propaganda — and it's slowed the flow but never stopped it. The question is whether the flow is fast enough to erode the system's legitimacy faster than the system can adapt.
And what's your read on that?
I think the system is adapting. The donju class is, in a strange way, a safety valve. People who might otherwise be frustrated and restive are given enough material comfort and enough personal freedom — within limits — that they don't rock the boat. The regime has learned from the collapse of other authoritarian states that a completely immiserated population is a threat. A population that's poor but improving, that has something to lose, is easier to manage. The question is whether that bargain holds over the long term, especially as the information environment continues to change. I'm not sure anyone knows the answer.
The misconception, I think, is that North Korea is frozen in time — the same country it was in the nineties, just with more missiles. The reality is that it's changed enormously, just not in the ways the regime advertises. The market economy has hollowed out the official one. The information controls have been breached in a thousand small ways. The donju have created a consumer culture that the state can't acknowledge and can't eliminate.
And the other misconception is that these changes mean the regime is about to collapse. They don't. The system is more resilient than it looks from outside, precisely because it's more flexible than its ideology admits. The gap between the official story and the lived reality is enormous, but that gap is itself a form of stability — everyone knows the rules of the game, and most people have found a way to play it.
Hilbert: I lost six hundred dollars on a North Korean trade deal in two thousand two.
Go on.
Hilbert: I was working for a shipping company out of Dalian. We were moving second-hand electronics — monitors, mostly, old CRTs — from China into North Korea through the Nampo port. The paperwork said they were for a state trading company. The actual buyer was a guy in Pyongyang who was going to sell them on the black market. I put up six hundred of my own money as a good-faith deposit with the broker on the Chinese side. Shipment went through, the North Korean buyer took delivery, and then the broker disappeared. Phone number disconnected. Office empty. Six hundred dollars.
That's a classic cross-border trade story from that era. The broker networks were completely unregulated, and enforcement across jurisdictions was nonexistent.
Hilbert: I knew the risk. The broker had been reliable for two years before that. I'd done four shipments through him, all of them fine. But that fifth one, something changed. Maybe the buyer didn't pay him. Maybe the security services in Nampo confiscated the shipment and he couldn't cover the loss. Maybe he just decided six hundred dollars was worth more than his reputation. I'll never know.
Did you keep trying after that?
Hilbert: No. Six hundred was enough. I moved to a company doing shipping between Qingdao and Busan. Less money, fewer headaches. But I still think about those monitors sometimes. Somebody in Pyongyang probably used them for years. CRT monitors last forever if nobody drops them.
The durability of old electronics is a real factor in the North Korean market. There's a whole repair economy built around keeping things running that would have been discarded elsewhere years ago.
Hilbert: We shipped a lot of things that were obsolete in China but perfectly useful in North Korea. Rice cookers, electric fans, bicycle parts, sewing machines. The margins were good because the Chinese sellers were happy to get anything for inventory they couldn't move domestically, and the North Korean buyers didn't have alternatives. The bottleneck was always the logistics on the North Korean side. You never knew if a shipment would clear customs or get stuck for weeks or just vanish.
The vanishing is what I keep coming back to. The whole economy is built on transactions that can disappear at any moment, and everyone prices that in.
Hilbert: You price it in and you spread it around. Never put all your money with one broker, never ship everything on one boat, never assume tomorrow will look like today. The North Koreans we worked with understood this better than we did. They'd been operating that way their whole lives.
That's the market literacy we were talking about earlier. It's not just about knowing what to buy and sell. It's about knowing who to trust, how much to trust them, and what to do when the trust breaks.
Hilbert: The guy who ran the Pyongyang side of our operation — I never met him, only talked to him on the phone twice — he once told our Chinese broker that business in North Korea was like farming on a floodplain. You plant, you harvest what you can, and you accept that sometimes the river takes everything. He said it like it was just a fact of nature.
And that's the texture Hannah was asking about. Not the geopolitics, not the ideology — the learned acceptance of uncertainty as the background condition of daily life.
Hilbert: I still have one of the shipping manifests somewhere. Framed it, actually. Reminder not to get comfortable.
That's a better souvenir than most people get from a failed trade deal.
Hilbert: It was a cheap frame.
The question I'm left with is whether the market economy eventually forces a political opening, or whether the regime has found a way to have markets without politics indefinitely. The Chinese model suggests it's possible — economic liberalization without political liberalization, for decades at least. But China started from a much stronger economic base, and it had the party infrastructure to manage the transition. North Korea is doing this backward — the market emerged illegally from below, and the state has been playing catch-up ever since.
The state has been playing catch-up, but it's also been learning. The donju are not an opposition class. They're invested in stability. They have property to protect, children to educate, status to maintain. They're not going to lead a revolution. The threat to the regime, if it comes, is more likely to come from the people the market economy has left behind — the rural poor, the provincial working class, the people who've seen the donju lifestyle on smuggled media and know they'll never have it. That's the pressure point, and it's harder to manage than the donju, because you can't buy them off with coffee shops.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Our producer is Hilbert Flumingtop. If you want to send us your own questions — about North Korea or anything else — email us at show at my weird prompts dot com. We'll be back soon.
