Around the World in 50 Years (36 page)

When I'd arrived in Beijing I'd received an e-mail from the foreign agency though which I'd arranged this tour. It was not your typical cheery predeparture best wishes, but a decree, a strict set of rules and regulations that provided a chilling foretaste of what I'd encounter in the Hermit Kingdom.

I would not be allowed to travel or walk around by myself without a guide. I would not be allowed to bring a laptop, bring a cell phone, carry a camera having more than a 150mm lens, take any photographs without permission of my guides or of any type of military installation. My camera flashcard would be checked, and all unauthorized photos deleted, which, the e-mail made it clear, would earn me the displeasure of my guides. I would not be allowed to refer to the country as North Korea, but only as the DPRK (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea), and, if I had to mention it at all, I could only refer to the occupant of the other part of the peninsula as “the south,” never the ROK. I was warned not to talk about history or politics or sensitive issues, because what I had been taught in my society might not conform to what my hosts knew to be the truth, and a respectful guest did not want to upset his hosts, right?…

I must never criticize the regime, or the DPRK, or Kim Il Sung, or Kim Jong Il. To the contrary, I would be required to pay my respects to Kim Il Sung at the Grand Monument and when viewing his body at the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, where I would have to bow to him, and where I would have to wear a collared shirt and a tie.

I was prepared for most of this nonsense, but the requirement of a tie and a collared shirt caught me off guard, and I was unwilling to buy them to honor the dead dictator. I e-mailed Dennis before he left home, and he promised to bring an extra tie for me, although I doubted it would accessorize well with my tropical shirt. My other wardrobe worry arose from the promise I'd made to my pals in the Gotham City Land Cruiser group to wear their club's T-shirt, which features, in large letters, their slogan,
GOT ROCKS?
, which, to the Koreans, looks like ROK, the name by which “the south” calls itself. A ROKy start, you might say. Or you might not.

The old Tupolev jet to Pyongyang had barely taken off before I was in much more serious trouble with the North Korean—oops, I mean the DPRK—authorities. Dear Dennis had, at the Beijing Airport, just before we took off, handed me a totally hideous, blue-and-purple striped tie from the early Eisenhower era that was not a sufficiently somber match with my red-green-and-white flowered Aloha shirt to placate my humorless hosts, even though I was technically compliant with their mausoleum dress code. But, far worse, Dennis had unthinkingly handed me a full-page article from a March issue of
The Wall Street Journal
to read on the plane. It was headlined
NORTH KOREAN DICTATORSHIP TO COLLAPSE SOON
, and featured a large photo at the top of Kim Il Sung, the DPRK's dearly departed Great Leader. I knew this article was too blatantly inflammatory to bring into the DPRK so, as soon as I sat down in the plane, I tore off the headline and the picture, folded them to conceal their content, and put them on the vacant middle seat next to mine, intending to dispose of them after the seat-belt sign went off.

I never got the chance. The guy at the window seat grabbed the papers in a paroxysm of rage, screaming at me. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt, a tie, and a large flag pin of the DPRK, the standard uniform for government functionaries, and the passport on his lap identified him as in the diplomatic service. He jabbed at the crease I'd made through the center of the Great Leader's face and did his best to uncrease it, while scolding at me in Korean as if I were a horrid barbarian imperialist. I then remembered one of the many rules of behavior in the DPRK: You never fold, crease, spindle, or mutilate a photo of the Great Leader. Never.

I apologized profusely, in my best stupid-heathen-idiot routine, tenderly retrieved the offending paper from him, smoothed out the crease as well as I could, and lovingly and respectfully tucked it into the pages of my book, while he nodded approvingly.

Later, 32,000 feet over the South China Sea, when the diplomat had fallen asleep, I made a quick trip to the toilet, where I put the Great Leader's photo to proper use.

I was not prepared for the modernity and wealth of Pyongyang. I'd expected a shabby, run-down town not much different than the capitals of many poor nations, so I was amazed to find instead a clean, modern, prosperous-looking, smoothly functioning, and livable city. It may be the world's largest Potemkin village, but it more than did its job of creating a favorable impression.

I saw thousands of trees bordering the streets, vast tracts of grassland, gardens, even vegetable farms, and was told that the city had more than 40 parks and the most green space per capita of any major city. The dozens of gleaming white 30-story apartment buildings I saw, home to the regime insiders, were unabashedly contemporary—cylindrical, curvilinear, or layered, most with terraces—each separated from its neighbor by a hundred yards of trees and carefully cultivated shrubs.

I was taken to three immense arches, more than ten impressively powerful monuments and commemorative towers, many over a hundred feet high, and saw at least 30 gigantic public buildings of shining marble and polished granite. Each subway station (300 feet down in case the West tries to nuke them) was spacious and attractive, with cheerful art and colored lights, and not a speck of trash anywhere.

And it was just as pristinely clean throughout the countryside that I was allowed to see. When we were driven two hours south of the capital and two hours north of it, all we saw along the new, treelined, eight-lane highway were tidy towns of neatly dressed people and peaceful cooperative farms, lushly green with ripening rice, corn, and beans. I knew that our hosts were not about to show us any poverty or shabbiness, and that their job was to make us disbelieve that this was a dictatorship in which famished citizens ate undigested corn kernels they dug out of cow manure and where more than half a million died of starvation in some years. We were never shown those skeletal people or DPRK's A-bomb plants or the factories where they made Rodong medium-range missiles for Iran, Syria, and Pakistan.

Only if we looked closely could we discern some implicit indications of poverty: Our bus drove for 30 minutes during which we did not see another car on the superhighway; half the people walked and the other half rode bikes, often two on a bike; every bit of land not used for buildings or green space in this 80 percent mountainous nation was given over to growing crops, as far up the hills as they could push it; everybody was quite thin; there were few streetlights, and other outdoor lights were kept low, except those illuminating the propaganda palaces; interior lights were frugally controlled by motion sensors, daylight sensors, and insert cards; in the hotel bowling alley, if I didn't roll my ball within a few seconds, the lights illuminating the pins went out; restaurants used miniature napkins and stainless steel chopsticks to conserve trees; and our guides wore the same clothes four or five days in a row without washing. Ironically, the harsh heel of their dictatorship has generated one of the smallest carbon footprints of any nation.

In six days I saw not a single dog or cat, because the people could not afford to feed them, or had eaten them long ago. In five hundred kilometers of travel through this meat-deprived land, I saw not one goat, sheep, or cow. In one residential park, I saw a man catch a squirrel, stomp it, cut off its tail, and proudly put it, still alive and quivering in its death throes, into his bag to eat for dinner, as he made clear from his joyful gesticulations. It was difficult to reconcile the gleaming apartment buildings with residents stomping squirrels for dinner, but such is the paradox of the DPRK.

The tour was heavy on anti-American propaganda and nationalism bordering on xenophobia. We were taken to, and proudly told in fervid detail about, the humble home where Kim Il Sung was born, and then shown his awesome, four-story mausoleum, fronted by a plaza of one million square feet, surrounded by a moat, and reached though a marble hallway 450 yards long that I was allowed to enter only after my shoes had been dusted, disinfected, and blown clean. We were driven to the Workers' Party monument, and the Martyrs' Cemetery, and the 150-room International Friendship Exhibition, a repository carved into Mount Myohyang for the 90,000 gifts the Great Leader had received from other nations (mostly expensive and ornate, with only one from the U.S., a Wilson basketball signed by Michael Jordan and presented by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright). We were taken on a long drive to the DMZ (the four-kilometer-wide and 240 km-long demilitarized zone between North and South Korea), to Panmunjom (where the armistice ending the fighting of the Korean War was negotiated and signed in 1953), and to the Concrete Fence (a wall 250 km long, built by the South from sea to sea across the peninsula, “to keep our nation forever divided,” we were told, and behind which the puppets of the South were planning a new invasion since their earlier one had failed). The next day to the museums—the three Museums of the Revolution, and the War Museum (filled with U.S. planes, tanks, and guns captured in the Korean War during America's “cowardly retreat”), and the Art Museum (featuring portraits of the Great Leader performing various heroic functions). Finally to the Juche Tower (commemorating the Great Leader's Socialist/Confucian philosophy of government), the captured US “pirate-spy” ship
USS Pueblo
; and, everywhere—and I do mean everywhere—portraits, murals, paintings, posters, billboards, and signs exhorting the populace to struggle and strive, and depicting the Great Leader encouraging farmers to grow more grain, workers to produce more machines, miners to dig more coal and iron, soldiers to be prepared to fight their imperialist foe, and children to zealously guard and defend the future of the nation.

Even the meals were part of the propaganda effort. Either because the North Koreans believe that all imperialists have ravenous appetites, or because they wanted to demonstrate that the claims of food shortages and starvation in their country were false, they sought to stuff us, at every meal, with three to four times more food than any human could possibly ingest at one sitting. Each meal, including breakfast, featured soup, at least five kinds of vegetables, a fish dish, a beef dish, a chicken dish, a pork or duck dish, plus a variety of other treats, from spicy squid to bean curd casserole, glassy noodles to scrambled eggs, frankfurters to potato pancakes, and on and on. This imperialist gained ten pounds in six days.

Even the amazing Arirang Festival (aka the Mass Games) had a propaganda function, but it was, nevertheless, the greatest show on earth. It featured 100,000 students, soldiers, dancers, singers, acrobats, gymnasts, martial artists, and cutely costumed children, all performing together in absolute split-second unison. Twenty thousand students seated on the far side of the stadium, having practiced for three months, used colored flash cards as they are used nowhere else with such precision. In two seconds, a wave rolled perfectly from one end of the stadium to the other while, down on the stadium floor, thousands of brilliantly costumed dancers and gymnasts flawlessly moved as if one, and then instantly disappeared into the darkness. The true purpose of the Games, aside from impressing the crowds and bringing in lots of foreign currency, is to teach the North Korean people the power of the collective, to demonstrate how the discipline and surrender to the collective required by the Great Leader's form of Communism can produce extraordinary results. It's a performance where one small misstep or mistiming by even one performer could spoil the entire effect. Such mistakes are not tolerated in the land of the Great Leader—and there were no mistakes.

A disturbing aspect of the trip was that Dennis and I and the other American tourists were treated as carriers of an infectious disease—a disease called information—and skillfully prevented from having
any
contact with ordinary citizens, lest we contaminate them with our Western ideas and knowledge of the outside world.

North Korea is the most closed society on the planet, ranked 196 out of 196 by the annual
Freedom of the Press
survey. All access to information from or about the lands beyond its borders is rigidly controlled by the government—no Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube, only Bright Star, which links to official documents and censored news. Of its 25 million citizens, only a few thousand, all members of the hardcore elite, are allowed access to the Internet. TV sets only receive the government stations, which feature slanted news and patriotic propaganda. Personal radios are illegal, but the government jams international broadcasts just in case. Incoming travelers are searched for subversive literature and CDs, and their cell phones are confiscated for the duration of their visits. Private ownership of fax machines is prohibited. Copiers and printers are closely guarded to prevent the dissemination of unauthorized information. Six months before we arrived, a factory worker was publicly executed by a firing squad because he'd spoken by phone to someone in South Korea about the price of rice.