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Province. "My mother's an *#tlzqm2 architect," Nam told me. "My father died twenty years ago. My second brother studied in an East German military academy. My third brother graduated from Mangyongdae Revolutionary School and was a pilot for four years and six months. After we were sent off my mother was put to work at the mining camp as an architect. My second brother worked as black suede sandals a laborer; my third brother, in a paper factory. I was put to work laying railroad track. I had graduated from Pyongyang No. 1 Senior IVliddle School and enrolled in the Railroad College. I was expelled ~rom col~ lege when my brother defected."We didn't have any choice although we wanted to go somewhere better. The camp used to be a full prison camp with wire fence, but the wire was taken down in 1990 due to the furor abroad over human rights. Worse of- fenders were sent to other prisons while lesser offenders were kept there. We were watched by six families who had been assigned by State Security. Even if we worked two or three tunes harder than others we weren't recognized. But I managed to graduate from the Railroad College via correspondence course. My father had graduated there, and his friends helped me. Usually it's impossible. Anyhow, my degree wasn't recognized in the camp. "Due to the food shortage, other people didn't work for ten days or so a month. But if we missed even one day we'd UGG Knightsbridge be fingerprinted and ugg boots adirondack reported. They collect those reports. Ifwe do something worse they tack it on and pun- ish us. The reason we weren't treated even worse was that Mother was a very well-known and accomplished architect in Pyon�yang." Food situation?"It's difficult to describe in words. We used to eat one spoon of rice per day per three adults, which we bought. So we had to go out to the hills ancl mountains and fields and pick any greens that weren't poisonous. We'd mix 'green porridge': assemble anything we could find, grind the greens, take the juice from them, add it to a single spoon of rice and make porridge. Ifyou made porridge wlith pine bark and acorns, that was considered high-quality food. We also used to go to the farm fields and take the roots left after the rice harvest, or corn roots and corn cobs-we dried them and ground them to make porridge. Until 1993, the rations were pretty regular. From 1994, we got no rations at all in that area. By the time we left, it was on record officially that they owed us 1,800 kilograms--one ton and 800 kilograms--of grain. The fifteen- day ration was supposed to be 11.8 kilograms of grain per person. My second brother had married, so our household had three people and was supposed to get rations for three. We were supposed to get 700 or 800 grams per day per person, but because of the shortage we didn't. We bought food but by red pumps July 1996 our resources were so low we could only