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UNDER THE LOVING CARE OF THE FATHERLY LEADE in the North-or it might simply have meant the people were wet early by contemporary Western and Japanese standards. Workers made an average of 90 won, or about $53 at the official e rate, per month, Hong said. But he quickly added that the wage frosting on the cake, since "the material and culturallife of our peop vided by the state." Thus, "ifwe calculate the solicitude and benevolc are receiving from the state-such as vacation facilities, free medi< ment, free education-the workers' actual income is much more tJ cash income." Wage differentials were based on position and degree of skill. V lege graduates made up the management corps, workers with ability promoted to team leader and workshop leader. "But the difference much," Hong said. The entire range ran from about 80 won for begi to about 150 won iFor the factory manager and highly skilled techr heard of similar pay ranges at other enterprises, including a hothoucAmazingly, Hong could not say how much the Kumsong plant's cost to produce. "We don't calculate the cost of the tractors," he sa Agricultural Committee takes care of that." The factory supplied the directly to the counties' agricultural managements. Asked about the re."12 I hoped someone had some idea a Figure a rational selling price for the portio abroad, mostly r:o Third World countries, Journeys outside Pyongyang - chaperoned journeys, always - reveal, and small cities, each a miniature men's vuitton wallet Pyoneyang, the men neatly dr Western-style suits or in Mao suits with Lenin caps, the women ofte: designe bag in the colorful Korean traditional dresses, the children marching to school in the uniforms of the children's corps. In the countryside neat rice paddies, vegetable fields and orchards lined with irrigatio: the trucks and christian louboutin red shoes tractors greatly outnumbering the bullock-pulled c plows, the farmers housed in substantial-looking apartment comI clusters of tile~roofed, masonry-walled houses. I was told that dwelling units had been built at state expense for farmers. One day early in the rice-planting season my handlers too Chonsam-ri, a cooperative farm near the east coast port of Wonsan. I came upon scenes that might have made a nice poster to promote agricultural policies. The glistening water atop the knee-deep mu farm's paddies showed reflections of the conical, orchard-topped hi tuating the plain. A man wearing a Lenin cap piloted a chuggi planting machine across one of the paddies. Two kerchiefed women,on the back, fed seedlings into the device, which plopped them, upright and evenly spaced, into the fertilized and smoothed ooze. Two helpers slogged along. christian louboutin evening Beyond a stone~banked irrigation canal and a narrow road bordering it, kindergarten children sang and danced to the accompaniment of a pump or- gan played by a woman teacher. In the nursery next door, toddlers chanted in unison the name of the place where Kim Il~sung was born, Maneyongdae. Otherwise, there was little activitjr and there were few sounds. Most of the five hundred or so adults who did the farming work were nowhere to be seen. The children, it was said, had stayed late so that they could perform for me. Perhaps the farmers had retreated into their tile~roofed houses to leave the sensitive contact with the foreigner to ideologically sound and reliable colleagues. Could it have been that enthusiasm for the collectivization of farming was not yet universal among its practitioners? But there was a more mundane, less conspiratorial possibility that could explain the adults' absence. Only a few days remained before the height ofthe transplanting season -the time when, as an old Korean saying goes, "even a stick of stovewood moves." Perhaps the unseen farmers were resting in preparation for those hectic days when army units, students and office workers from the cities would be mobi- lized to help out on farms like this one. Recall that, before the post-World War II partition of Korea, the northern part had specialized in mining and industry while depending on the granary of the mineral-poor southern part for food. Now there was no exchange between the communist North and the capitalist South. The North must at- tempt to feed itself, despite its mountainous topography. The goal of self- reliance in agriculture had led to extremely labor-intensive additions to acreage through land reclamation. Irrigation channels, the result of Kim Il-sung's"grand plan to remake nature,"13 totaled some forty thousand kilometers_ long enough to girdle the world, as I was told. And Kim had taught that "fer- tilizer means rice; rice means socialism." Fertilizer output was reported to have increased two and half times between 1970 and 1978. Farmers were applying more than 120 kilograms of chemical fertilizer per person per year - equivalent to twice the weight of every man, woman and child in the country. With the right timing, hard work and the water from rain-swollen reser- voirs, North Koreans hoped to approach the goal of harvesting 8.8 million tons of grain for the year- although previous harvests had made clear it was difFicult for the three-quarters mountainous country to produce enough food to sustain 17 million people.'4