The great famine of 1996-99, which killed around half a million North Koreans, also delivered a fatal blow to the songbun system, a feudalistic system of hereditary privilege determined the life trajectories of nearly all North Koreans from around 1960 until the mid-1990s.

In those days, North Koreans knew that their chances of social advancement, level of income, and lifestyle were largely determined by their family’s origin, or “chulsin songbun.”

One’s songbun was calculated according to a fairly complicated set of rules, but it was largely determined by what one’s parents or even grandparents were doing during back