| Submit your comments on this article |
| China-Japan-Koreas |
| Effects of famine: Short stature evident in North Korean generation |
| 2004-03-05 |
| By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times. EFL Hat tip: Damian Penny, the sage of Corner Brook, Newfoundland. At 16, Myung Bok is old enough to join the North Korean army. But you wouldn’t believe it from his appearance. The teenager stands 4-feet-7, the height of an American fifth- or sixth-grader. Myung Bok escaped the communist North last summer to join his mother and younger sisters, who had fled to China earlier. When he arrived, 14-year-old sister Eun Hang did not recognize the scrawny little kid walking up the dirt path to their cottage in a village near the North Korean border, whom she hadn’t seen for four years. . . . The World Food Program and UNICEF reported last year that chronic malnutrition had left 42 percent of North Korean children stunted — meaning their growth was seriously impaired, most likely permanently. An earlier report by the U.N. agencies warned that there was strong evidence that physical stunting could be accompanied by intellectual impairment. South Korean anthropologists who measured North Korean refugees here in Yanji, a city 15 miles from the North Korean border, found that most of the teenage boys stood less than 5 feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds. In contrast, the average 17-year-old South Korean boy is 5-feet-8, slightly shorter than an American boy of the same age. The height disparities are stunning because Koreans were more or less the same size — if anything, people in the North were slightly taller — until the abrupt partitioning of the country after World War II. South Koreans, feasting on an increasingly Western-influenced diet, have been growing taller as their estranged countrymen have been shrinking through successive famines. . . Foreigners who get the chance to visit North Korea — perhaps the most isolated country in the world — are often confused about the age of children. Nine-year-olds are mistaken for kindergartners and soldiers for Boy Scouts. "They all looked like dwarfs," said Kim Dong Kyu, a South Korean academic who has made two trips to North Korea. "When I saw those soldiers, they looked like middle-school students. I thought if they had to sling an M-1 rifle over their shoulders, it would drag to the ground." . . . The North Koreans appear to be sensitive about their stature. In dealings with the outside world, the country likes to present a tall image by sending statuesque (by North Korean standards) athletes to joint sporting events in South Korea and elsewhere and assigning the tallest soldiers to patrol at the demilitarized zone that divides the two countries. Starting in the mid-1990s, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il (who reportedly wears elevator shoes to enhance his 5-foot-3 height) ordered people to do special exercises designed to make them taller. As a result, it is not uncommon to see students hanging from rings or parallel bars for as long as 30 minutes. Basketball is also promoted as a national sport to instill the yearning for height. "Grow taller!" instruct banners hung in some schoolyards, defectors and aid workers say. The totalitarian mindset on display: if you decree it, it will happen as if by magic. Height, however, is only the outward manifestation of the problem. The more troublesome aspect of stunting is the effect on health, stamina and intelligence. "There is a difference between being naturally small because your parents are small. That’s not a problem," Seok said. "But if you’re small because you weren’t able to eat as a child, you are bound to be less intelligent." The issue of IQ is sufficiently sensitive that the South Korean anthropologists studying refugee children in China have almost entirely avoided mentioning it in their published work. But they say it is a major unspoken worry for South Koreans, who fear that they could inherit the burden of a seriously impaired generation if Korea is reunified. Yet another reason--one nobody is ever going to say out loud--why the South may be in no great hurry to see regime change in the North. "This is our nightmare," anthropologist Chung said. "We don’t want to get into racial stereotyping or stigmatize North Koreans in any way. But we also worry about what happens if we are living together and we have this generation that was not well-fed and well-educated." . . . From an anthropological standpoint, the North Korea situation has attracted considerable interest because it is, Pak said, the first documented case in which a homogeneous group of people have become so distinct because of nutrition and lifestyle. Because North Korea is so secretive about statistics, it is difficult to quantify the height disparity between North and South. The anthropologists who worked in China caution that the 55 refugee children they measured are probably smaller than the children of elite party cadres in the capital, Pyongyang, who are better fed. There is virtually no height difference among adults older than 40, who came of age at a time when the North’s economy was on a par with that of the South. The trouble is most acute with those younger than 20, who were in peak growth years during the mid-1990s, when North Korea experienced a famine that is believed to have killed 2 million people — 10 percent of the population. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #2 Anyone noticed the size of the first generation born of the Americans from Vietnam? They tower over their parents at age 16. Beef. It's what American's are made of. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-3-5 7:59:02 PM |
| #1 YANJI, China — At 16, Myung Bok is old enough to join the North Korean army. But you wouldn’t believe it from his appearance. The teenager stands 4-feet-7, the height of an American fifth- or sixth-grader. No one is allowed to be taller than The Dear Leader. No one! |
| Posted by: eLarson 2004-3-5 12:19:17 PM |