My Holiday in North Korea (9 page)

I am on an “Extended Ride on the Pyongyang Metro,” which meant I was allowed to visit four (no longer surprisingly) dimly lit stations—this, despite the large number of elaborate chandeliers and light fixtures housed in each. And like everywhere else in North Korea, each station had that familiar mix of rousing, communist-era music and urgent-sounding talk radio blasting out of loudspeakers. Each was adorned with heavy-handed propaganda (murals, mosaics, carvings, and statues) extolling the virtues of NoKo’s values and Great Leader love.

As we stood on one station’s platform, an old wooden train rattled into the station, and people who I guess were commuters opened the manual doors.

ME: So that guy over there who just opened the door…is he just like a normal guy, going to or from work?

OLDER HANDLER: Yes, work.

We step into the car, which is nearly dark, illuminated by a single

fluorescent bulb at the other end (and of course by the smiling portraits of the two Great dead Leaders), and stand right in front of the doors. A group of what must be at least a billion Young Pioneers (schoolchildren who are members of the Children’s Party, easily identified by their red kerchiefs), who I guess are taking a field trip, come running for our car but stop comically short at the door when they spot me. They stare at me, giggling, too afraid to board. Is it because I’m a MILF?

Oh right, I’m an American Imperialist.

One brave Pioneer finally breaks rank and boards our car, to the ceaseless laughs and jeers of his friends. The pressure too great, he alights seconds later, he and his troop choosing to forgo the ride rather than stand next to me. I feel like a pariah. He makes my “Shit I Think Might Be Real” list.

When the train stops at another station, I encounter yet another billion Young Pioneers, and a King-Kong-size, illuminated statue of a Dear dead Great Leader (a King Kim?) beckoning all of his children to exit the platform to his left.

The Pyongyang Metro has twenty-one (known) stations, configured in two bisecting lines that form a simple X.

ME: Why can’t we see any of the other stations?

OLDER HANDLER: I show you map.

ME: Yes, but why did you choose these four stations to show me?

OLDER HANDLER: To be honest, these are the stations our Great Leader has visit.

ME: Do all the other stations look the same as these? Do they have the same type of fancy lights and decorations?

OLDER HANDLER: Only under construction.

At yet another station, men and women were gathered around stands protruding from the floor that looked like flagpoles, but with newspapers instead of flags. Older Handler explained that they were reading the news (Party-issued propaganda intended to convince the people that their Great Dear Supreme Leader is great).

The train that ferried us to our last station was crowded. We actually had to push ourselves on and into the car, like normal people do on any normal subway, in any normal city, on any normal workday.

ME: I just don’t understand who all these people are. Like why would those three teenagers be on here alone instead of in sch---…. You know what, forget it. (I decided to sit this one out.)

Standing there, squeezed between real people—one of the rare times I encountered them during my entire trip—I make eye contact with an old woman. She grins and makes that universal half-nod, half-stand, wave gesture that means, “Please take my seat.” I decline, smiling, and nod silently to say, “No, no, you sit, please.”

But we’d both made our move at the same time (I’ll go left. No,
I’ll
go left.), and the millisecond of confusion was a crowd pleaser. The people surrounding us burst out in laughter! I mean three people giggled, and a couple of people covered their mouths and smiled. BAM! Pull out the “Shit I Think Might Be Real” list again.

And even though the metro is the first place in all of NoKo where I encounter what I consider to be free-roaming people (they’re weirdly dressed, yes, but they’re not walking in a veritable spreadsheet of persons, four people across by eight people down, like I’ve seen elsewhere/everywhere on my trip), and they appear to be taking normal rides, I can’t shake the feeling that something’s off.

The Party tries to control one hundred percent of what you see and do in NoKo, so most of what you see is at least
mostly
staged, and anything completely real
wasn’t supposed to happen
. So things that seem normal or should be normal, just aren’t. And normal-looking things are fucked up in the weirdest way, or weird in a really fucked-up way.

There’s what the powers that be want you to see in North Korea, and what they want you to think (or believe—and are these the same things?), and it’s all gray territory from there. So unless you’re taking it all at face value or dismissing everything out of hand, you spend an inordinate amount of time mentally navigating the gray areas.

And I was finding it exhausting. So exhausting, I thought to myself, I should have taken that old woman’s seat.

I think I should understand that better, Alice said very politely, if I had it written down: but I can’t quite follow it as you say it.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

CHAPTER 9

IT TAKES A HERO

W
eird-looking yet oddly beautiful trees caught my attention while we drove the length of the Youth Hero Highway from Pyongyang to Nampo. Both my handlers had dozed off, and I had my headphones plugged into my phone, which meant I could sneak a few photos through the window without making a sound.

The Youth Hero Highway, Older Handler had eagerly explained before dozing off, is so called because it was built by “youths”—that is, DPRK citizens under the age of 30—who had “heroically” built the highway in service to their Party and Great Leader. Sounded pretty good so far.

Then she added, almost as an afterthought, “and many, many youths went blind.”
Now
the story had taken that familiar NoKo turn.

Wait, what?

“Did you say
blind
?”

She smiled tightly, “Of course.” (
Read
: Clearly, Wendy is an idiot.)

Alarmed but undeterred, I pressed ahead with what I thought was a fairly logical rejoinder, “Why did so many youths go blind building the highway?”

“Because of the dynamite (you fucking moron),” she replied with her trademark tight smile.

Riiiight…my bad.

Actually by now this was my bad. Why
wouldn’t
the youths go blind from the dynamite while building the highway? It’s not like I’d seen any power tools or eighteen-wheelers or men wearing safety goggles, or whatever else we’ve come to expect in construction zones. Hell, even the men I saw building roads in the middle of Congo wore hard hats, and they lived in huts made of cow dung and straw.

She continued, “To be honest, our Dear Great Leader was so proud of the youths who sacrificed so much for the good of our country, he visited the highway and decided to make the men heroes and name the highway in their honor.”

But that’s not all!

“When our Leader make the youths heroes, all the women want to take care of them or marry them.”

Win! Win!

She beamed and said, “The Youth Hero Highway is Korea’s crowning achievement!”

From where I sat, I would say the Youth Hero Highway was definitely better than an unpaved road.

According to Older Handler, “The Youth Hero Highway was built from 2000 to 2002 and is 260
ri
long.” It was intentionally built that length because “2/60 is the birth of our Great Leader,” she explained, adding that 260
ri
“is being equal to 88 kilometers.”

According to Wikipedia the Youth Hero Highway was built from 1998 to 2000 and is just 46.3 kilometers long.

No sense quibbling over facts, given the reliability of both sources.

Here is what I observed: the Youth Hero Highway is ten to twelve lanes wide and is an unmarked, uneven, pothole-ridden asphalt blacktop (reminiscent of elementary-school playgrounds circa 1974–1979) that has, of course, no vehicles.

Well, there were
a few
other vehicles, but from what I could see, they were either filled with other tourists or with people in uniform who I assume were military or important enough to be on the road. Otherwise the highway was empty on both “sides” and on our drives both to and from Nampo.

When I asked why there were no cars on the highway, Older Handler smiled tightly and said nothing.

Maybeeeee…abject lack of freedom of movement, and checkpoints at either end of the highway (and one in between) to enforce said lack of freedom of movement (at each checkpoint, guards scrutinized credentials that my handlers and driver were asked to provide, which Older Handler told me proved they were allowed to travel). And—for the win—no one is allowed to own cars. 

And that’s not even the weirdest part.

All along the 46.3 kilometers (I’m going with Wiki) were thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of men on both sides of the highway, dressed in either military uniforms or clothing styles from the 1940s and ’50s, cutting down trees
by hand
. By that I mean they were using things like small saws and axes, and saws where one guy holds one end and another guy holds the other end, and picks that look like the mallets doctors use to test your reflexes…cutting down trees. No electric saws or large machines—because they don’t have any.

So there are thousands and thousands of men using their might to cut down 46.3 kilometers’ (times two) worth of trees that are just flopping into the middle of the highway. Because it doesn’t matter, because there are no cars. And it’s a football field wide.

And as many men as there were cutting down trees, there were two to three times as many napping on the fallen trees and surrounding grass. Maybe the Dear Great Leader had come for one of his famous on-the-spot-guidance visits and declared that more naps on the job would make it suck less. Or maybe they knew that no matter how hard they worked or how much they accomplished, their low position in North Korea’s rigid and unforgiving Songbun caste system had banished them to tree-cutter status for life…so, why not take a little nap?