The Hidden People of North Korea (3 page)

A First Glimpse of the Hidden People

The Kim regime has thrown up many barriers to prevent outsiders from understanding the North Korean state and its people. It has tried to stage-manage everything—an extreme case of the sort of news spinning that all governments engage in to some degree. Sometimes North Korean officials tell the truth, but most of the time they either exaggerate to make themselves look good or they simply lie. A book authored by French visitors to North Korea is aptly titled
In the Country of the Great Lie
(
Au pays du grand mensonge
).
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The bare-faced lies are easily exposed because the general condition of the country is quite evident. To take an example at random, when
Korea Today
, a North Korean propaganda magazine published in several languages, informs its readers that “a well-regulated medical care system is in operation both in urban and rural areas, supported by well-equipped, comprehensive medical care centers and special preventive cure establishments, with the latest facilities,” it does not take even a moment’s thought to realize the claim is an outright lie.
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However, it is harder to fathom the thoughts of the North Korean people. A German visitor to North Korea writes,

Besides my photos, I have memories of the encounters I had on this trip. They are contradictory. I do not have the feeling I was truly able to look behind the façade. Is there such a thing as a normal life, and what does it look like? I may have been granted a few glimpses, but what was honest: the open and friendly curiosity, which is a true pleasure, or the silent, sometimes even hostile rejection of the stranger that shocked me? Was I “protected” for my own sake or the sake of the state from everything that otherwise constitutes traveling?
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The Kim regime allows only a small number of its citizens to travel outside the country and also places severe restrictions on those who would like to visit North Korea. Yet, not all foreigners are kept out. Thousands of diplomats, businessmen, and foreign aid workers have spent time in North Korea, although they rarely have the opportunity to meet ordinary North Koreans. A South Korean who spent a week in Pyongyang in 2003 described the experience as like taking a time machine back fifty years, and indeed many South Korean visitors see similarities between present-day North Korea and the South Korea of the 1950s and 1960s.
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A Japanese tourist who joined a North Korean–Japanese bicycle tour from Pyongyang to Kaesong in 2002 likened the experience to cycling in a time warp and described the North Korean countryside as being “somewhere in the Middle Ages.”
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The cyclists were not permitted to take photographs of farmers or farm villages, and whenever they came to an area the North Koreans did not want them to see, they were loaded onto buses. Nicholas Bonner, who operates a tour agency in Beijing and has been arranging tours into North Korea since the early 1990s, explains, “To me, the difference is that North Korea went off on a tangent. It’s not that it stayed behind, it just went off on a totally obtuse angle.”
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Tourism is an important money earner for the Kim regime, which charges premium prices for ordinary accommodations. An estimated one hundred thousand tourists travel to North Korea each year, drawn largely by curiosity. By far the largest group of tourists includes the Chinese, with Japanese (including Japanese Koreans) in second place. Europeans can usually get visas, but on only a few occasions have American tourists been granted entry, for example, to view the summertime Arirang Festival. Individual tourists are rarely accepted. Visas are usually issued just before tourists board their flight or train for Pyongyang, and in cases where the visa is denied, the trip has to be cancelled at the last minute.

Foreigners are limited in where they can travel and what they can do. A Lonely Planet web page claiming, “You’ll soon be zipping around like a local, thanks to this map of North Korea,” is entirely off the mark: due to travel restrictions and ubiquitous checkpoints, not even locals “zip around” in North Korea. Cell phones are collected from foreign tourists at the border, and sometimes telephoto lenses are as well. Guides tell their charges what they can and cannot photograph, and it is forbidden to take pictures from the windows of moving vehicles, although some people sneak a few shots anyway. Guides have been known to scrutinize the digital photos in a tourist’s camera and decide which ones can be kept and which must be erased.

Before entering North Korea, tourists are briefed by their tour guide on what they should and should not do. One group of Chinese tourists received the following instructions:

While in the DPRK, do not move about as you please, nor ask questions or say things off the top of your head. You can joke about daily life, but never, never ask questions about how many wives Kim Il-sung had. Refer to the Republic of Korea as South Korea [the DPRK does not recognize the existence of a legitimate competing Korean government]. Don’t openly take pictures of the people. Don’t hand out food to children. Don’t try to bring in cell phones; they will be held at the border and might be disassembled by the police and returned to you in pieces.
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Upon entry into North Korea, each tour group is assigned one or more minders and translators. Even when foreigners are able to slip away from their official escorts, they discover that ordinary citizens are often wary of having anything to do with them. One foreigner tells of sneaking away from his hotel and traveling around the neighborhood on a pair of roller skates he had brought with him, without seemingly attracting any attention from the inhabitants, who must surely have considered a roller-skating foreigner to be an unusual sight (no doubt they were watching him out of the corner of their eyes). Visitors wandering around town without an escort are likely to be intercepted by a plainclothes policeman who will gently but firmly lead the wanderer back to his hotel “for his own safety,” with disagreeable consequences for whoever was assigned to watch over the visitor. Resident diplomats and staff members of foreign aid organizations also face restrictions on where they can travel and what they can do.

All tourists receive the same treatment and follow pretty much the same itinerary. They are typically taken first to the giant bronze statue of Kim Il-sung on Mansu Hill, where they are expected to bow and offer a bundle of flowers. Important foreign guests, including visiting government officials (among them, former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright), are taken to the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, where Kim Il-sung’s body lies in state. Other stops on the standard tour are Kim’s birthplace at Mangyongdae on the outskirts of Pyongyang, the International Friendship Exhibition at Mt. Myohyang to view the tens of thousands of gifts that have been presented to the two Kims by visiting foreign delegations, the Arch of Triumph (nine meters taller than the one in Paris), the Tower of the Juche Idea (one meter taller than the Washington Monument), and the Pyongyang Metro (said to be the world’s deepest). All these places represent North Korea’s official ideology but say nothing about the lives of ordinary citizens.

Most visitors receive the impression that Pyongyang and its environs (almost the only part of North Korea they are permitted to see) are exceptionally clean, seemingly uninhabited except during commuting hours and on weekends, filled with monuments to Kim Il-sung and posters lauding Kim Jong-il, and dark at night except for the lighted monuments. The wide and empty streets bordered by tall apartment buildings give visitors an eerie feeling. Behind the main streets are acres of small homes crowded together on narrow, winding streets such as would be found in most Asian cities, but these neighborhoods are off-limits to foreigners. There are no advertisements other than billboards and banners with political slogans. There are few stores or restaurants. The recently constructed public markets and the semiauthorized open-air markets are hidden from view and generally off-limits to tourists. Visitors who take bus tours to nearby cities comment on the scarcity of traffic except for the occasional black government Mercedes and open trucks loaded with freight and people. The roadsides, even after dark, are lined with people walking from one town to another carrying all manner of goods on their backs. The phrase
dubal-cha
(“two-legged car”) is used to refer to these people, who think nothing of walking twenty or thirty kilometers just to pick up a sack of potatoes.

A Russian visitor, frustrated at not being able to meet any ordinary North Koreans, satirically relates an incident that occurred one night as he looked out of his Pyongyang hotel window:

A filthy-drunk man was reeling in the deserted street and muttering under his breath. “You lush,” I shouted. The Korean looked up, said something in his own language that sounded like a “meow” [probably
mwuh
, meaning “what?”], and ran away. I was proud of myself. A colleague who lives here had complained to me that he had never had a chance to talk with a local resident. This required permission from the Foreign Ministry for a meeting with a specific individual. Sometimes the authorities even granted the request. Of course, the Korean would afterwards disappear. Forever. For this reason, all attempts at official communication (the [North] Koreans have not had any unofficial communication with foreigners for about 60 years now) were abandoned for humane reasons. Now, however, I had heard an unofficial “meow.” Even if it probably was a local obscenity, we had made contact!
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American tourists are rarely granted visas. This travel ban is not unreasonable in light of the fact that most Americans are probably hostile toward the Kim regime (although not toward the North Korean people) and in that sense represent a threat to it. Those Americans who have the best chance of receiving a visa include staff members of aid organizations (although if they speak Korean their chances are significantly reduced because they might learn too much about the country) and entertainers. Notably, the New York Philharmonic played a concert in Pyongyang in 2008, and the American Christian band Casting Crowns played there in 2007. A handful of Americans who function as unofficial interlocutors between the North Korean and American governments and who are relatively sympathetic to the Kim regime (and, by the same token, critical of U.S. policies toward North Korea) are also welcomed in Pyongyang. The authors of the present book are not included in this sympathetic group.

The one hundred thousand tourists do not include visitors to the Mt. Kumgang tourist reservation built and financed by one of South Korea’s Hyundai companies. By 2007, almost two million people, mostly South Koreans, had visited Kumgang by boat, train, and private car. Kumgang tourists hardly get to see the real North Korea. A German visitor speaks of a “hail of prohibitions upon entry” and characterizes the resort area as a zoo where foreigners are separated from North Koreans by a fence, and she wonders what goes on in the minds of the North Koreans standing along the roadside and watching the tour buses pass by.
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The only natives that most tourists come into contact with are tour guides and hotel staff. Many of the staff are actually Korean residents of China, and the authentic North Koreans are specially chosen members of the Korean Worker’s Party who know better than to say anything other than what they have been instructed to say.

An intriguing account of the life of foreigners in Pyongyang has been provided by Michael Harrold, a Brit who went to North Korea in 1986 to work as an English-language editor for seven years. Being young and adventuresome, he often went to places that foreigners were not supposed to go and struck up acquaintances outside his approved circle of workmates. Yet, according to his account, in all that time he was never able to gain a satisfactory understanding of his immediate social environment, much less the society as a whole:

For seven years I was shielded from North Korean reality. I learnt the language up to a point and I had friends, but still I barely scratched the surface of what North Korea was all about, what the people really thought. The explanation of how this could be achieved was simple enough. On the one hand, restrictions and surveillance were imposed, preventing me from meeting ordinary North Koreans. On the other hand, it was a privilege, one they were anxious not to jeopardize, for North Koreans to be in a position that brought them into contact with foreigners. . . . In a country where even living in the capital city was a privilege, everyone was careful about what they did and said, particularly around foreigners. The result was a population obsessed with casting themselves and their country in a faultless light. It was as if the propaganda became a part of their everyday life.
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Harrold made some good North Korean friends, or at least so he thought. But it sounds as though he could never be sure who was a friend and who was a spy (in many cases, they were probably one and the same). When he became involved in a brief physical altercation after a few drinks at one of the tourist hotels and was asked to leave the country (he declined a later invitation to return), he seemed to be in equal parts confused, ashamed, and angry as he replayed the fateful incident that ended his career in North Korea: “For once I felt grateful for the lies and deceit that were such a part of everyday life in North Korea. I’d learned the hard way not to believe or trust anyone, and now I could argue quite reasonably, to myself at least, that there was no particular reason why the Koreans should have been telling the truth in this any more than they had at any other time.”
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