Pyongyang Diaries: The People

(Kaesong city) The socialist market economy in action.

I was the last of the tour group to board the train to Pyongyang at Sinuiju, and all the cabins were full, except for a cabin of mostly middle-aged Chinese men. Across from my seat was my Chinese roommate for the tour, a college student from Anhui. As I sat down, my fellow passengers were pointing at one of the guides, the fair lady in a yellow hanbok who never smiled. 朝鲜美女 (trans. Joseon beauty), they laughed, come and join us. If she had heard them, she pretended not to.

As the train rolled its way through North Pyong’an, I noticed ragged children sleeping in a shady spot by the train tracks. Even the cows in the fields looked skinny.

(Yanggakdo hotel lobby, Pyongyang) For a country that has officially banned hanja, I guess they know where the credit comes from…

One morning, while my roommate was in the shower, I turned on the television in our hotel room, reminded of Orwell’s telescreen. The morning news show I saw was just like the novel’s description of perpetual war news. Big, black bold comic-book-style headlines superimposed over scenes of crisis and famine. It was as if the world outside was all gloom and doom. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

As I waited in the hotel lobby for the tour group to gather from breakfast, I saw a group of catholic nuns in traditional habits. Among them was an old man in a grey robe with a long, white beard. For some reason, he reminded me of Uncle Ho.

(Kaesong city)

We stopped for lunch in Kaesong city on our way back to Pyongyang from the DMZ. It was a restaurant for tourists, and they had souvenirs and gifts for sale with prices listed in euros. I saw bottles of Ryongtongsul soju across the counter, and asked about them. 8 RMB each. I tried to buy more than two bottles, as gifts for my friends in Beijing, but they wouldn’t sell them to me. Some kind of socialist rationing system, perhaps.

The other tourists were attempting to bargain down the prices of some kind of medicinal herb tonic, which took a long while as our guides translated the back and forth of negotiations. So much for central planner set prices. I stepped outside for some air, onto the wide streets of Kaesong city. It was eerily quiet, without the typical hum of urban activity. As I looked up into the nearby apartments, trying to see how the inhabitants lived, I heard the soft tones of piano keys playing an unfamiliar melody, and wondered if there was Chopin here, or Rachmaninov.

On the remaining drive, the guides sang karaoke for us. We passed by an old woman, her back bent under a bundle of sticks. She looked like she had carried these loads of firewood for a lifetime.

(Pyongyang) They must subscribe to the broken window fallacy here. Except the windows don’t get replaced.

One of our early stops was at the ‘international friendship’ museum at Mohyangsan, where gifts to either elder or younger Kim from around the world were displayed, some of which were quite strange, like an alligator holding a serving tray (Nicaragua). Apart from the Soviet bloc countries, there were some unexpected names there: Billy Graham, various US-based groups I had never heard of before, like the ‘World Council of Democratic Youth’. Gifts from chaebols, and companies based in Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

At the start of the route was a board listing each country from which gifts had been sent, and how many gifts there were. What interested me the most were 2 gifts originating from Singapore, and although I kept my eyes peeled for them, I could only found one. It was from a ‘Sunko company’. Having seen a gift from Suharto, right next to another from Sukarno earlier, I wondered if the second gift had been from one of our heads of government. After all, they are not so dissimilar.

On our route, we crossed the paths of local tours several times, and they seemed just as curious about us as we were about them. They looked like ordinary people from the rural provinces, wearing plain grey or navy shirts adorned only by little red pins. Very few of the men were taller than I am, and I’m pretty small. Men and women alike had faces weathered and tanned, like they spent all their days toiling in the fields under the hot sun. Not at all like the tall, fair-skinned folk of soap operas.

Ginseng wine loosens lips that could sink ships.

Our, or rather my English-language guide, not being a Chinese speaker, could only talk to two of the tour participants. Myself, and roommate. Armed with my prepared list of ‘safe’ questions and conversation topics, I started with a question about the guide. (People usually love to talk about themselves) Did he have a wife or a girlfriend? He laughed and said that he did not. I then asked when men and women typically marry. Around 30 for men, 25 for women, which I suspected was an urban number. The age of consent is 18, though kids typically start dating secretly while in school at 14 or 15. I replied that it was about the same as Singapore. And then my Chinese roommate asked about whether a hypothetical foreigner (i.e. himself) could marry a local girl.

That was the point the cultural sensitivity alarm bells went off in my head, about the historical relationship between the Korean kingdoms and imperial China, modern issues of cross-border bride trafficking and stories of forced abortions of pregnant repatriates. I hadn’t read Brian Myers’ The Cleanest Race at the time, but I already had some idea about the xenophobic racial purity ideology. And here was a dude from a ‘lesser’ race, asking an elite university student thoroughly steeped in regime propaganda, about stealing away a pure Joseon maiden. This could not end well.

The guide’s eyebrows narrowed. His smile disappeared. No. It is not allowed. I quickly changed the subject to sports and movies. Apparently ‘Titanic’ is popular.

A brief aside: At Myers’ book talk at Columbia a few weeks ago, I asked how the racial purity ideology could be reconciled with an overwhelming economic reliance on China. His answer: It cannot, which is why that reliance is downplayed. I didn’t find this answer satisfactory – how effectively is it downplayed? What happens when it can’t?

(Juche tower, Pyongyang) Salarymen and OLs are Workers too!

We arrived at the Juche tower near sunset. In front of the statue of the worker, peasant, and ‘socialist intellectual’, hundreds of people marched in formation, raising metal rods in the air as they said 만세 (manse, equivalent to banzai 萬歳 or wansui 万岁). I use the term ‘march’ loosely, as they seemed less than enthusiastic about whatever it was they were supposed to be celebrating. Probably something related to Juche.

The only people that were really into it were the ones in front of the formations shouting into megaphones. The rest of them looked like regular people who, after a long day at work, had to spend their evenings on Workers Party duties. One of the tourists, a middle-aged teacher from Shanghai, walked up to the back of the line and joined in. She probably had more fun than any of the real participants. I would have joined in too, had I not been busy snapping pictures, until one of the megaphone-wielding comrade commissars spotted me and cried foul. Fortunately, the guides intervened, and I was spared and survived to write this diary entry.

(Juche tower, Pyongyang) Sunset of the Workers Party?

Previously on Pyongyang Diaries: The Guides