The Cleanest Race (10 page)

Soviet narratives made much of the exertions and austerities of work life, the better to show “the new man” triumphing over his baser urges, but being inherently unselfish, Koreans take pleasure even in the hardest work. Kim Il Sung spoke of the nation’s workers as “laboring for the nation and society as well as for their own happiness, taking joy in their labor.”
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Collective farming is presented as the continuation and intensification of the (highly mythologized) Korean tradition of village labor pools.
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Whether baking in front of a smelting furnace or gripping shovels in the icy cold, workers are usually shown smiling or laughing.
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Obligatory in tales of work life are invocations of the campaign slogans of the day, but these tend to be extraneous to variations of the same morality tale about a model worker inspiring his or her comrades, surmounting this or that bureaucratic obstacle or material shortage, and perhaps shaming a mildly bad egg into reform. Since the latter half of the 1980s a whole genre of “hidden hero” narratives has arisen to celebrate those who toil in unglamorous jobs in remote locales. This propaganda is also meant to reconcile the provincial
populace to country life and to encourage city women to marry rural husbands. In
City Girl, Come and Get Married
(Tosi ch’ǒ’nyǒ sijip wayo, 1993), for example, a beauty from Pyongyang falls in love with a duck farmer.
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But the Text’s glorification of country life as the repository of pure ethnic values undoubtedly has much to do with the fact that Korea experienced urbanization at foreign hands; similar tendencies, are obvious in South Korean culture. In Soviet and Chinese narrative, in contrast, the countryside was often depicted as a place of ignorance and reaction.
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The explicit ideological content of North Korean narratives has always been much lower than foreigners have assumed. Though often praised in passing, Juche Thought is rarely espoused or explained; having been conceived primarily for the benefit of foreign audiences, its universal-humanist principles—“man is the master of all things,” etc—are too difficult to reconcile with the
de facto
ideology of paranoid nationalism. The personality cult is not always front and center either; some movies contain only one or two explicit references to the Leader. Much of the country’s visual art may appear completely apolitical to the foreign eye. The North Korean is trained to “read” these works differently.
Happiness
(Haengbok, 1978), for example, shows a girl asleep in bed, her well-groomed head resting on a lace-edged pillow as she clutches a present too precious to unwrap. While the average American may respond by thinking, “Isn’t she sweet?” the North Korean is meant to think, “Aren’t
our
children sweet?” and “Aren’t we lucky to live so well under the Leader?” (For the gift is of course from none other.)

Similarly, every act of kindness depicted is meant to demonstrate the unique goodness of the race. When a mother
in the historical film
Sea of Blood
(P’ibada, 1968) skips supper so that her child may eat, much as mothers around the world do every day, the North Korean viewer sheds a tear at the unique intensity of a
Korean
mother’s love.
^†
The celebration of the race’s selflessness routinely trumps the dictates of realism. In one popular movie a KPA soldier with a shattered leg goes under the knife. He worries that he will be crippled for life, but when he wakes up his leg is fine. Wait: the medical staff around him are hobbling! It turns out that they have donated parts of their own flesh and bone to reconstruct his limb.
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Happiness
, 1978

For decades romance was but the spoonful of sugar helping the propaganda message go down. Now that the party must compete with smuggled South Korean videos and DVD’s for public attention, the romantic element has come to the fore, but when one person falls for another, it is usually because the other is such a model citizen. In a television drama broadcast in 2001, an aging bachelor in Pyongyang shows little interest in the young beauty he encounters in a hardware store until he finds out that she has volunteered to work in the same collective potato farm. (Since the launch of the “potato revolution” in the late 1990s, the regime has glorified citizens who relocate to the remote northeastern region where most potatoes are farmed.) He proposes marriage to her that very day, she accepts, and they go off to celebrate with his mother and her aunt. Naturally, no fathers are in sight.
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Lovers are rarely shown even touching each other; the Text draws the line at encouraging
adult
instincts. Where the Soviet or Chinese hero’s celibacy reflects his total mastery of himself, the North Korean hero’s is the cheerful abstinence of the child race. Special pride is taken in the chastity of the peninsula’s womenfolk, who in historical narratives are shown
fending off lecherous foreigners. Even scenes of childbirth are evidently taboo. To be sure, the more “literary” kind of fiction hints at a sensual element:

And Hong Sŏk-chung’s novel
Hwang Jin’i
(2002), which deals with a famous sixteenth century courtesan of that name, is downright raunchy in parts, but then, more latitude has always been granted to those depicting the decadent, Chinese-influenced “feudal” past. (The book may also have been written with a view to the ROK market.)
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But judging from refugee testimony, North Koreans are no fonder of the solitary activity of reading than South Koreans are.
^†
Most get their romance from films and TV dramas, which still depict love in a twee and formulaic manner reminiscent of Bollywood, with girlfriends summoned by bird-call imitations, courtship conducted while bobbing around a tree, and so on.
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The childishness of the love exalts it. As the DPRK’s most influential writer once said of his characters, their “love is
permeated with Korean morality, in contrast to the greasy love of Western people.”
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What may look to outsiders like a simple love story is thus as much a part of the Text as everything else.

While the party does not explicitly deny the existence of conflict inside the republic, it contends that conflict is not “typical” of North Korean life and therefore unworthy of depiction. There are few of the harsh clashes between rural and urban values, older and younger generations, chauvinist husbands and progressive wives, etc, that were so common in Soviet propaganda. Though divorce and light spousal abuse have ceased to be taboo topics, they are attributed to such innocuous reasons as one partner’s excessive dedication to the workplace: “You only know about production, not about living,” complains the wife in the TV drama
Family
(Kajǒng, 2001).
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Mid-level bureaucrats are sometimes criticized as a social class, but individual North Koreans are never singled out as true villains. (The media, for their part, never report on crimes committed in the DPRK; since the 1960s, victims of political purges have simply become non-people.) There are, however, plenty of mildly flawed individuals to be found in narratives: girls who spend too much time on their appearance, say, or men who “abandon” their mountain village to chase dreams of life in the city. Being Korean and thus inherently virtuous, these characters are easily reformed. A soldier who fails to sweep the floor of his tent sees that a comrade has done the job for him—and bursts into tears of repentance. (This plot device is now so stale that even Kim Jong Il has complained about it.)
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As a result, a serene and idyllic quality attaches to most portrayals of contemporary life. Depictions of the food shortage treat it, as we shall see in a later chapter, as a period of dramatic belt-tightening that is now over and done
with. When storytellers want to criticize downright illegal or subversive activity they must resort to fables or cartoons with animal figures. (This is one reason why the North’s animation industry is so advanced.) A warning against fleeing to China, for example, is expressed as a tale of a squirrel who ventures too far abroad.
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The lack of conflict makes North Korean narratives seem dull even in comparison to Soviet fiction. Rather than try to stimulate curiosity about what will happen next, directors and writers try to make one wonder what has already happened. Films introduce characters in a certain situation (getting a medal, say), then go back and forth in time to explain how they got there.
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Nowhere in the world do writers make such heavy use of the flashback. But we should beware of assuming that people in the DPRK find these narratives as dull as we do. The Korean aesthetic has traditionally been very tolerant of convention and formula. (South Korean broadcasters rework the same few soap-opera plots every year.) According to refugee testimony, however, most North Koreans prefer stories set either in the “Yankee colony” or in pre-revolutionary times, with real villains and conflict.

The country’s favorite movie, by all accounts, is
The Flower Girl
(Kkot’ p’anǔn ch’ǒnyǒ, 1972), which was filmed a few years after the staging of a “revolutionary opera”—allegedly penned by Kim Il Sung in his youth—under the same title.
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The virginal heroine’s white-bloused form graces the republic’s currency, and she is routinely invoked by bachelors as the kind of woman they want to marry. (Some credit for the character’s appeal must go to the beautiful Hong Myŏng-hŭi, who acted the part while still a teenager.) Set in the colonial era and filmed in nightmarish Technicolor,
the film follows its flower-selling heroine as she weeps her way through one family crisis after the other: her brother is dragged away by the police, her little sister blinded by the landlady, her mother worked to death, etc. Everything from the heartbreak-laden plot to the flower-girl motif reflects the influence of the Japanese schmaltz (itself influenced by Victorian England) which dominated Korean theaters during the colonial period.
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From
The Flower Girl
, 1972.

At last the girl’s brother, having escaped from prison and joined Kim Il Sung’s partisans, returns to exact revenge on the landlord. Although the heroine pledges to join the revolutionary struggle, it is not her sudden access of fighting spirit but the purity and naivety that she displays throughout the film that have made her an ethnic icon. This, the movie says, is how hard it was to be Korean in this evil world—before the Leader set the race free.