Still, few people can make that claim in a country where, according to the United Nations, much of the population suffers from malnutrition. Unable to earn enough to buy food, many of Hoeryong's residents have fled to China or South Korea. Others are forced to go into the mountains to grow their own food on small, illegal farms, according to refugees and foreign aid workers. And many of the populace can't afford to buy rice in the market—it hit 56¢ a kilo in some areas last summer, up by a factor of nearly 20 from two years earlier, traders say. That's more than half of a teacher's monthly salary. Song, who started selling shoes in the central market last year, clears $14 a month after taxes and other expenses. More than two-thirds of her income goes to buying rice for her family of three. "With the leftover, you need soap, clothes for the kids," says Song. "One person working in a family is not enough to survive." Her husband smuggled TVs and frogs used in Chinese medicine until he was caught by state security last year. He wants to work in China for a few months but has had no luck so far.

Most of the men in Hoeryong are worse off, forced to show up for work at factories that are barely operating. Many men spend their days playing cards, occasionally receiving paid salaries that are shriveled by inflation. Some bosses have allowed more enterprising workers to punch in and then go off to work at side businesses, as long as they give some of their earnings to the factory. Many managers have simply quit. "Why bother to be a manager when you can just cut out and make lots of money on your own?" asks Kim, who left Hoeryong and made his way to Seoul last year.

It's doubtful that Kim Jong Il intended his reforms to burnish an entrepreneurial spirit. More likely, he wished to allow citizens only the most basic of tools to feed themselves, hoping that would shut down any willingness to defect or revolt. Kim Jong Il hasn't proclaimed that getting rich is glorious, the exhortation used by the Chinese government to kick-start its own economy in the 1980s. And recently it appears that Pyongyang may be trying to put the lid on economic activity that it thinks is moving too far, too fast. Under a criminal code revision last year, according to South Korean media and North Korea experts, Pyongyang banned "individual commercial activities" and declared it a crime to participate in real estate brokering, money lending and private hooch production. In a statement last week announcing its pullout from talks that were aimed at getting North Korea to scrap its nuclear program, Pyongyang included a gibe at American support for reform: "We advise the U.S. to negotiate with dealers in peasant markets it claims are to its liking."

That's a reminder that, for all the signs of reform, the North Korean regime remains one of the most brutal in the world. Last month, a South Korean human-rights group released a video it claimed was shot in Hoeryong, showing posters urging North Koreans to "rise up and drive out the dictatorship." Authorities in the city later confiscated videotapes; they also rounded up entire families of North Koreans who have defected and sent them to prison camps, according to refugees living in Seoul who have contacts with the North. Says Lee Suk, an expert on the North Korean economy at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul: "North Korea wants to revive the system, not change it."

But Pyongyang's control over events in the provinces is weakening, say defectors and human-rights activists with North Korean contacts. Citizens with new access to radios and DVD players are learning their wretched status is not inevitable—that capitalistic, democratic South Korea is a modern economy and one of the wealthier places on earth. "Now, people's minds are more open," says Park, the trader. "They are all demanding better living standards." Says Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at the Australian National University: "Reforms are very dangerous. The problem for Kim [Jong Il] is they are happening anyway." Dragging a color TV from China to sell in a North Korean market may not be the way that revolutions normally start. But in the North's miserable conditions, such flickers of enterprise could yet light a fire that would consume the regime.

With reporting by Kim Yooseung/Seoul

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