I started out as an Australian boy in Hobart, who was well below the poverty line. As time went on, I became an electronics student, found a wife, and was making a stable but rapidly wavering income. I managed to sneak into North Korea, with my wife, at age 26 and become an electronic gear operator. I bought out some land from corrupt officials, and was soon on the way to being a powerful man. I dodged the draft with well placed bribes while I established myself, and lived off of my earnings. My net worth was now five hundred thousand Won. But there were kinks in the road:
Things were not looking good for me. A land deal went wrong, and I was drafted into the military, despite my bribes. A few years on, and it had taken a severe toll on my cash and health. My wife and I got into a huge fight, and I nearly beat her to death. The next year, she died under suspicious circumstances, in a car crash, and my political activist past had caught up with me. I lost my job, and was paid a visit by the secret police. I was severely tortured, nearly to the point of death, but I refused to sign the confession. They eventually let me go, perhaps after bribes. I was released to a trashed house with tens thousands of Won stolen from me. Without a job, I lost my house and became a beggar on the streets of Pyongyang. I was soon a heroin addict with a net worth a mere fraction of what once was.
I invested the little I had left in some deals and jewels; an emergency fund to escape to the south if need be. After a few years, I met a woman who worked in local offices, and started a relationship with her. It was not long before I became an entertainer to the state, on tens of thousands of Won a year, and I also managed to shake the addiction for good. For the first time in my life, in my late 30s, I was able to avoid malnourishment. I sold off the jewellery with a large profit, and invested it in more land. Over time, my net worth soared -- it went from miserly to six figures in the space of a few years.
My marriage was stable, and our combined income allowed us to control more and more of North Korea. We were constantly climbing up the corrupt social ladder, but for some reason I was getting sicker and sicker. At age 56, I died from cancer of the esophagus (a simple condition that North Korea did not have the medical technology to detect), but not before being a North Korean millionaire.
Real Lives 2007
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Topic: How did you last *own*? (Read 1332336 times)