My Holiday in North Korea (13 page)

Reeling and writhing, of course, to begin with, the Mock Turtle replied: and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

CHAPTER 12

THE GRAND PEOPLE’S STUDY HOUSE

W
e are standing around a boom box circa early 1990s, listening to a bootleg Madonna cover of “American Pie” that she sang for the movie
The Next Best Thing
, in which she starred as a yoga teacher who has an out-of-wedlock baby with her gay best friend, played by Rupert Everett. That’s some racy stuff for North Korea.

I’m in the audio/video room of the Grand People’s Study House. The local guide, who is also our DJ, has, in consultation with the local guide in charge of this particular room, chosen the “Madonna CD” as proof that the Study House is in possession of all music from every country in the world.

While we listen to all four minutes and thirty-three seconds of the scratchy song play, I fruitlessly try to explain who Don McLean is and why one pirated song burned onto a blank CD that’s placed inside a plastic jewel case with a crappy, worn-out copy of a random black-and-white Madonna photo (that’s not even the right size) in place of actual authentic liner notes doesn’t really constitute adequate proof that they own all music from every country in the world, or at least not as far as America goes. If true, couldn’t they have chosen
Holiday
, or
Like a Virgin
, or one of her other hits? I mean the woman has had a lot of number ones.

There are thirty or forty more of the exact same boom boxes sitting atop as many matching desks, but we’re the only ones using any. Just beyond the boom-box ghetto are more rows of matching desks, with a hodgepodge of old cathode-ray TVs atop. Clustered together are four Koreans with headphones on, each watching something different on their TVs. But once Madonna starts complaining about “taking her Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry,” all eyes are on me. Maybe they don’t like this song either, or maybe it’s just because the music is super loud, and they blame me.

The Grand People’s Study House is North Korea’s massive 600-room national library and center for adult learning that dominates the center of Pyongyang. It’s also a monument to the first Dear Great dead Leader in honor of his seventieth birthday. The local guide (the one in charge of the overall building, not the audio/video room) has informed us that under the Dear Great One’s expert on-the-spot guidance, the 100,000-square-meter edifice (which equates to approximately 1,076,391 square feet) took a year and nine months to build. For comparison’s sake, the 104-story, three-million-square-foot, One World Trade Center (formerly known as the Freedom Tower)—presently the tallest skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere and fourth tallest in the world—took workers roughly fourteen years to build. And they had lots of power tools.

As has been the case so many times during my stay in North Korea, I’m feeling a difficult mix of emotions. On the one hand, this couldn’t be any funnier. I’m in the audio/video room of the national library, one of the most important and learned buildings in town, listening to a fake, bargain-basement CD on a boom box as big as their TVs are ancient.

On the other hand I feel bewildered and sad because I’m standing in the audio/video room of their national library, listening to a fake, bargain-basement CD, on a boom box as big as one of their ancient TVs.

If this is what they’re showcasing as excellence,
how bad must things be
?

In a reading room that is twice as big as the audio/video room are two or three students sitting at individual desks, which—the local guide in charge of the reading room tells the local guide in charge of the building, who tells Fresh Handler, who then translates for me—are new desks replacing the long, communal tables people used to have to sit at when studying or reading in the room. Local-local guide goes on to say that when their Dear Great Leader visited the room for an on-the-spot-guidance visit and saw his fellow Koreans uncomfortably bent over the tables, “he wisely and kindly decide height of tables need to be adjustable to make more comfortable to study because our father love us.” So he invented adjustable desks.

If only he could harness his powers for good.

Purportedly, the Grand People’s Study House can house up to thirty million books. I’m not sure whether it actually
has
thirty million books, because by the time the local-local guide in charge of the you’re-not-allowed-to-see-the-library-library told the local guide in charge of the building, who told Fresh Handler, who told me, something may have been lost in translation.

The local-local guide is on the other side of the marble counter we’re standing in front of, seated at a small, unadorned desk. Like most buildings we visit in NoKo, this one is built with a quarry’s worth of marble. Next to her is a tiny book-size conveyor belt, sticking out a few feet from a tiny, square, book-size hole cut through the wall behind her.

Through our now well-established game of telephone, Fresh Handler invites me to name a book I’d like retrieved. “Any book?” I ask, astonished that this might actually be real! But it seems that Fresh Handler—being fresh and all—has misspoken ever so slightly, a teensy mistake she realizes she’s made when I request
The Little Prince
(a classic, and one of the best-selling books ever that’s been translated into a billion languages) and the buzzer says
no way
.

DIS-CUSSIONS!

“I mean
Huckleberry Finn
,” she tells me I told her.

And whoosh! Out rolls a copy of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
in a mini bin on the track. One look at the timeworn book, and I’m starting to think that the majority of the “millions” of books are out there in the ether with all the music.

We step into a smaller room, this one crowded with maybe eighty or ninety people (four of whom are women, the rest men), seated at rows of tables poring over computer screens. They seem to be learning some kind of CAD application, but I’m not sure because all of their screens look different, and no one is moving a muscle or talking—not even the person I’m guessing is the teacher, who’s sort of half-slumped over at the head of the room (under, of course, large, smiling portraits of the Great Leaders), and particularly not the three men who have their heads on a table and appear to be sleeping.

I joke with Fresh Handler that I don’t think the sleeping guys are going to be passing their exams any time soon, and that if those Great Leader portraits could see, there’d be trouble. She giggles. I ask Fresh Handler to ask the local building guide what the conscious students are studying, but she doesn’t know. That’s the local-local room guide’s domain, but he/she is either missing or is the one not teaching up front. In any case, time was up for the computer room, so we moved along.

I don’t recall the order of things, but I do remember that all of the hallways were poorly lit, and we did not visit a single room that had more than a quarter of its available lights on. In the gift shop, it was lights out altogether.