A high school sophomore in Hyesan, Ryanggang province, recently finished mandatory military training. The training is run by the Red Youth Guard, a paramilitary youth organization in North Korea. What happened afterward has moved people across the province to tears, a source there told Daily NK recently.
According to the source, the student entered training camp earlier this month. He spent a week living at the camp for group military training.
Every second-year student at senior middle school, the North Korean equivalent of high school, must complete this training. The program runs intensively each summer. By custom, students finish with a live-fire shooting exercise. Afterward, parents arrive with food to share with their children.
“When the final shooting exercise wraps up and parents show up with food, the training camp takes on the mood of a holiday,” the source said. Not every parent comes, though. Students whose parents stay home watch their classmates eat happily with visiting family. Some instead share a lunch box with their homeroom teacher.
A family’s finances become impossible to hide
The gathering ends up revealing which families are well-off. It shows just as clearly which ones are struggling, according to the source. For many students, the biggest source of anxiety before the big day is not the training itself. It’s whether their parents will show up, and what food they might bring.
Parents understand this pressure well. Many try to prepare food no matter how difficult their circumstances, so their children won’t feel embarrassed in front of friends. According to the source, some parents even take on predatory loans to do it. They borrow one kilogram of rice in the spring and promise to repay two kilograms by fall.
The student at the center of this story comes from a family with little money. He assumed his mother would not be able to bring food on the day of the live-fire exercise. But his mother worried he would feel deflated in front of his friends. She borrowed rice from neighbors and prepared rice and side dishes to bring to the training camp.
The moment caught the student off guard. He told his mother he had worried throughout the training. “I saw there was no rice at home before I left for training,” he said. “I kept worrying the whole time that if you couldn’t come, I’d feel ashamed in front of my friends.”
Then he added something that brought his mother to tears. “When I get home, I’ll catch leeches, or gather firewood to sell, to help support the family,” he told her. In Ryanggang province, many people catch leeches for extra income. Leeches are used in traditional medicine, and people sell them across the border in China. The remark reflected a son’s devotion, an attempt to ease the burden his parents carry.
The student’s mother reportedly went quiet for a while. She held back tears once she realized how much her son had worried during his week at the camp. She later shared the exchange with neighbors.
As the story spread by word of mouth, people in the area responded with sympathy. Some wondered aloud how much emotional strain the boy must have carried. Others reflected on how painful it must have been for his mother to witness.
“It would be a mistake to think students are simply happy eating the food their parents bring,” the source said. “The sad truth is that students worry about their family’s circumstances too. They worry about making ends meet, just as much as their parents do.”
Reporting from inside North Korea
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July 22, 2026 at 02:08AM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)