PYONGYANG – Patches of snow flash upon the brown fields that line the runway as my plane slows to a stop in front of the open smile of Kim Il Sung, an imposing image upon the front of the airport. We’ve arrived in Pyongyang, North Korea. I collect my thin edition of the Pyongyang Times and descend from the sleek Soviet Ilyushin 62, now posed against the rest of the Air Koryo fleet, the sometimes-blacklisted state airline. Inside at immigration, the dimly lit airport is smaller than a high-school gymnasium. An officer directs me to wait for processing behind a cluster of Chinese businessmen. I nod in acknowledgement and take in the considerable size of his hat, which supports my long-held suspicion that the scale and ubiquity of military accessories in a given nation are inversely related to its civil liberties. A second guard offers confirmation by ensuring that I’m not attempting to enter with foreign literature, a cell phone, or other communications device. Although the check is not a surprising condition of entry considering I am about to cross the threshold into one of the world’s most controlled societies, I wonder whether the rumours of equally stringent yet more bizarre laws will prove to be true or will be revealed as Western fictions. For instance, is it true that Korean men are forbidden from wearing their hair as high as the notorious style of their leader?
The conservative, short hair of the two guides who greet my two German travelling companions and me at the exit turnstile does little to alleviate my curiosity, but their professional attire suggests I should instead attribute their coifs to modest taste. Their suits and manners are those of carefully selected party members. Lee and Chun (names changed for their protection) introduce themselves, and they announce they will escort us through our stay as arranged prior to our departure. North Korea does not permit indpendent travel—although we will see both the north and south of the country, we will see only the parts they have selected for us. It is November, the end of the tourist season. Our guides tell us that we three are the last Western tourists to be admitted to the country until April. As we drive to Pyongyang’s only tourist hotel, Lee provides an overview of the sites on our itinerary, a list consisting almost entirely of monuments to Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and the “People’s victory,” which the billboards lining the road have made sure to bring to my attention. Beneath these signs, the broad, empty road is sparsely lined with cyclists and chatting walkers. Tall, grey apartment buildings rise on both sides of the boulevard, suggesting a degree of familiar urban life until I notice that many building windows are without glass. In front of one apartment, women draw water from a well, while another washes clothes in a nearby rocky stream that has yet to freeze. In the distance, a red, torch-like monument with a brilliant glass-enclosed flame stands out against the city. Lee, the shorter of our guides, explains that this is the Juche flame, the symbol of Kim Il Sungism, which can be roughly explained as expressing the principle of self-sufficiency. I wonder briefly if the Juche ideal illuminates in part why in 2005 the government decided to decline international food aid, despite an impending famine.
En route to the hotel, we stop at the foreign-language bookstore, which is surely open today specifically for our visit. From a shelf full of nicely packaged propaganda, I buy volumes on North Korean civil and family law, as well as a book called The US Imperialists Started the Korean War, and I flip through Human Rights Violations in South Korea, which features the image of a crouching, shackled figure on the cover. The books’ prominence on the shelves among the biographies and writings of the Kims reveals the role that a discourse of justice has to play in the national-identity narrative, even in a human-rights-violating dictatorship.
After arriving at the tourist hotel, a giggling waitress serves our dinner in a clinical white restaurant. Although we are the only patrons, we are directed to sit at a certain corner table. Above the bar, a TV monitor plays a loop of marching troops and rally music. Despite the slightly eerie ambiance, the food is decent and includes traditional Korean dishes (kimchee), the local beer is surprisingly tasty, and we’re able loosen up with some light dinner conversation when Lee and Chun join us for a drink. Our chat with them is remarkably smooth, given that as the North Korean regime blocks essentially all access to outside information, we don’t have recourse to common small-talk subjects like current events, sports teams, and pop culture. I begin to think that maybe we don’t need to be so uptight here after all, until a tiny object catches my eye among the leaves of the plastic peach tree behind my friend’s head: it is unmistakably a small microphone. From that point on, their paranoia begins to infect me as well.
Over the course of our four-day visit to North Korea, we see every major monument in the country built in honour of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il—from a marble museum inside a mountain in the north to giant billboards in the demilitarized zone on the border with South Korea—but are carefully denied a glimpse into the real lives of North Koreans. Over the years, the Kims (first Il Sung, then Jong Il) have maintained the country’s isolation through the fall of the USSR and the opening-up of China. In almost every way, the ruling party has blocked the truth from public dialogue with its Orwellian rhetoric of justice, the “People’s” power, and success: dissent has no entry point into the social discourse or civil society. The pages of my North Korean civil law book and the country’s constitution freely grant rights and remedies that have no real meaning. To tourist law students, they are of interest only as a curiosity. The real law, the real social code, is unwritten, but its dictates are performed before us everywhere we go; the illusion of a peaceful civil society must be maintained.
We are led down orderly streets criss-crossed by well-dressed men to buildings where lights turn on and staff appear upon our arrival as if by magic. A flower girl fortuitously appears in the rain with the single bouquet of flowers we are required to place at the base of a monument (the Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il flower species we are told, although they bear a suspect resemblance to garden-variety magnolias and orchids). In this way, people weave the national fiction before our eyes, while only blocks away I know the scene is markedly different. For the most part, the people play their parts well, but they betray themselves in their attempts to inhibit the natural impulse to notice the novelty of the fair-haired outsiders in their midst. The locals are forbidden from speaking to foreigners, but we can see them watch us from the corners of their eyes. As a self-styled ambassador from the outside determined to make contact, I smile at a group of young women my age, and they reciprocate with delighted smiles and furtive waves.
Since there is no possibility of our going out at night in the city, at the end of our last day of paying our respects to national sites Lee and Chun join us for a long game of pool and singing karaoke in the basement of our huge, empty hotel. The fluorescent bulb flickers in underground karaoke room number three as we sing “Jingle Bells,” the Bee Gees’ “Massachusetts,” and “Every Breath You Take” by the Police, which concludes fittingly with the line “I’ll be watchin’ you,” endlessly repeated. As a finale, Lee, the more outgoing of my guides, and one of the waitresses sing a soft rendition of a North Korean song expressing hope for reunification with the South.
The sun is already low in the sky as our westbound train pulls out of Pyongyang station, rolling by bundled travellers who meet at the corners of low buildings, and walk along the tracks. The loud nationalist billboards of the city streets that shout of the people’s glorious victory become scarce, perhaps reluctant to face the harsh indictment of the barren countryside. Through my compartment window, the dull brown of winter fields is varied by the glare of white geese, picking at the nubby fields and hard earth. Farther along, a lone figure wades through a flooded field with a small net and a bucket. As the red sun drops down, a hill rises in front of a row of houses, revealing four small boys propped against a bank of earth sloping to the tracks. As the train cars beat past, the boys howl together and push down their pants, flashing the passenger cars. I can’t help but smile and secretly cheer—a small victory for innocent mischievousness in a country so hostile to the independent impulse.
Hours later, at dusk, we roll into the border, where flashlights bounce as guards inspect the length of the train. Inside our compartment, a border officer inspects my friend’s wallet to collect a personal “tax.” As we pull onto the bridge spanning the 300 metres of water dividing the Korean peninsula from the mainland border, the neon lights of the Chinese coast shine like the Las Vegas strip out of the desert. Against the darkness of the “pariah nation,” the Chinese shore becomes a glowing path of promise just out of reach to the people I’ve left behind.
Sarah Polcz is a student-at-law with Baker & McKenzie in Toronto.