North Korea: Like Nowhere Else E-Book

Lindsey Miller

• Herausgeber: September Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The first photographic exploration of North Korea, from a Westerner who lived in Pyongyang and explored the country beyond for nearly two years. What happens when you travel to a place where even basic truths are ambiguous? Where sometimes you can't trust your own eyes or feelings? Where the divide between real and imagined is never clear? For two years, Lindsey Miller lived in North Korea, long regarded as one of the most closed societies on earth. As one of Pyongyang's small community of resident foreigners, Lindsey was granted remarkable freedoms to experience the country without government minders. She had a front row seat as North Korea shot into the headlines during an unprecedented period of military tension with the US and the subsequent historic Singapore Summit. However, it was the connection with individuals and their families, and the day-to-day reality of control and repression, that delivered the real revelations of North Korean life, and which left Lindsey utterly changed from the woman who had nervously disembarked from her plane onto an empty runway just two years before. This is her extraordinary photographic account, a testament to the hidden humanity of North Korea. 'There was much of the North Koreans and their way of life that I liked and admired, and Lindsey Miller's book brought back those positive feelings. And if we don't acknowledge those we will never begin to understand the country.' Michael Palin Please note this is a fixed-format ebook with colour images and may not be well-suited for older e-readers.

Leseprobe

NORTH KOREA

To the North Korean people I know and to

those I have never met. I will never forget you.

First published in 2021 by September Publishing

Copyright © Lindsey Miller 2021

The right of Lindsey Miller to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted

by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

cover images:

(

front

) 70th anniversary of the founding of the country parade. — Pyongyang, September 2018

(

back

) Upstairs and downstairs. — Pyongyang, September 2018

endpaper images:

(

front

) The 2018 Mass Games. — Pyongyang, October 2018

(

back

) The 2019 Mass Games. — Pyongyang, August 2019

Design and sequence by Friederike Huber

Printed in Poland on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources

by Hussar Books

ISBN 9781912836529

September Publishing

www.septemberpublishing.org

TWO YEARS OF LIVING IN THE

WORLD’S MOST SECRETIVE STATE

NORTH KOREA

LINDSEY MILLER

10

‘We must envelop our environment

in a dense fog, to prevent our enemies

from learning anything about us.’

Kim Jong Il

11

(

previous pages

)

A wooden bridge leads to a pier. — Wonsan, October 2018

A bridge takes hikers over a trickling stream. — Mount Myohyang, October 2018

The Chungsong Bridge. — Pyongyang, August 2019

INTRODUCTION

How much can you really know a place?

Many of us try to learn about foreign countries and people by trusting

what we see in front of us. We learn from our experiences, what we can sense,

what we feel: our most basic instincts. We also consider the opinions of others,

using them to inform our own. From something unknown we feel like we start

to understand.

But what happens when you go somewhere where even basic truths are

ambiguous; where sometimes you can’t trust your own eyes or even what you

feel; where the divide between real and imagined is never clear? Are some

places simply condemned to be beyond our understanding?

I found myself tormented by these questions for two years when I moved

to North Korea in 2017 to accompany my husband on a diplomatic posting to

the British Embassy in Pyongyang. Before I arrived I knew that North Korea was

a place where foreigners were routinely arrested for relatively minor crimes,

occasionally with dire consequences. I knew that a pervasive cult of personality

subsisted on air-lifted lobster and caviar, while most of the population was

condemned to beggary and misery. Depending on who I asked, there were

100,000 to 250,000 people languishing in prison camps. And, yes, I’d seen

the footage of goose-stepping soldiers, Cold War-style military parades, ballistic

missile and nuclear tests, and the almost comedic, profound yet ultimately

inconsequential, otherworldliness of the place. But I had no idea what to expect,

and no sense of how North Korea would change my life forever. Moving to

North Korea turned out to be the biggest leap I’d ever taken. If I live for a

hundred years, it’s unlikely anything will surpass it.

Four months after I had decided to go, I stepped into North Korea’s hot and

muggy summer air for the first time. I stood at the top of the small and rickety

airplane stairs and breathed in my surroundings, accented with the smell of

pine trees, plane fuel and the cigarette smoke emanating from the cockpit. As

I took in the desolate concrete runway and listened to several soldiers berating

12

the baggage handlers for something I couldn’t understand, I had no idea that,

over the next two years, what I’d always considered to be the clear line between

truth and fiction would disintegrate entirely.

We lived in a compound in eastern Pyongyang’s Munsu Dong district,

where most of Pyongyang’s tiny foreign community lived and worked. Within the

larger Munsu Dong international compound, smaller compounds housed the

accommodation blocks, embassies and offices that lined several streets. There

were a couple of hard-currency shops, a handful of bars and a school attended

by the children of foreign residents. We lived in the old German Democratic

Republic compound, home to a mini-community of German, British, French and

Swedish diplomats. The streets of the international compound were overlooked

on all sides by the crumbling high-rise apartment buildings of East Pyongyang.

At the entrance to the compound was an armed soldier who stood on the

corner watching every car coming in and out. Beside him was a conspicuous

red telephone. Beyond, manned roadside guard posts appeared every hundred

metres and around every corner. Whenever a car left the compound, in one

sweeping wave, each guard picked up their phone to call the soldier. Upon a

car’s return, the same would happen, the phones following the car back to its

destination. A camera pointed straight at the exit to our compound. I had the

constant feeling of being watched.

There were several rules foreigners had to adhere to, and some

restrictions were easier to endure than others. We were allowed to walk and

cycle around the city by ourselves as we pleased, but with Munsu Dong being a

twenty-minute walk from the city centre, and with so many leisure facilities,

shops and restaurants being spread across the city, driving was much more

convenient. After sitting a North Korean driving test, we could freely drive

around the city. Taxis and the metro, however, could only be used if they were

booked in advance and if we were accompanied by an authorised Korean,

usually our interpreter. Buses were supposedly off-limits, although some

foreigners did manage to sneak on board. Trains could only be taken to certain

places. It wasn’t impossible to chat with Koreans on these trips, but they would

often clam up when the conductors walked by.

North Korean won is a virtually worthless currency only used at local

markets and in a few shops and restaurants. Hard currency was preferred. In

most circumstances it was possible to pay in a combination of euros, Chinese

RMB and US dollars. When a shop had no foreign currency to give back as

change, won was always offered with an apology and a look of embarrassment.

13

We were free to travel to Nampo, Mount Myohyang and other locations

without a minder. The military checkpoints at Pyongyang’s fringes were simple

to pass through and required no handing over of papers or stepping out of the

car. However, for locations where a North Korean guide was required, such as

Sinuiju, Wonsan, Kumgang or Kaesong, a little more liaising and exchanging of

papers was needed. Anecdotes circulated about foreigners who had been able

to flout these requirements, but I never believed them, especially regarding the

far south of the country, where the checkpoints became more and more

menacing the closer you got to the demilitarised zone.

There were other challenges and restrictions on day-to-day living, such as

the lack of cash machines, reliable healthcare or a decent internet connection.

Our Korean mobile phones would only connect to other foreigners’ phones and

our designated North Korean interpreter. Calls to a random Korean mobile

number wouldn’t work, and the signal from our usual mobile phone networks

was completely blocked.

Every day Koreans would film me on their phones, or take photographs.

Sometimes this was harmless and born out of simple curiosity, but usually a

phone pointed at me (or a man in a suit showing up) was enough to shut down

any meaningful interaction with other local people. I let it get to me too often.

But as suffocating as it sometimes felt, some instances were so ridiculous

they simply made me laugh.

One particular freezing afternoon I was out hiking with a friend. It was

minus 15 degrees and we were dressed from head to toe in winter walking

gear. Stopping to admire the view, we looked behind us to see two men in suits

and leather gloves following us up the ice-sheened road. The men spent the

next hour sliding around in their shiny black shoes, sometimes gripping on to

each other to keep their balance, one falling over and probably gaining a

spectacular bruise in the process. My friend even went over to help one of

them back to his feet.

On another occasion, while eating in a restaurant, a friend and I heard

a loud ringtone blasting from the windowsill next to us. We were the only

people there apart from the waitress. The melody sounded like it was coming

from a display of plastic flowers that was arranged along the sill. I ran my hand

under the flowers and lifted them to see a bright blue phone lying there. The

waitress hurried over to our table looking very embarrassed and picked it up,

answered it and talked for a few seconds,

before pressing a couple of buttons

and setting the phone back down under the flowers. She went back to polishing

14

glasses as if nothing had happened. It didn’t matter if some measures to keep

an eye on foreigners came across as hapless. What mattered was that we

felt watched and under control.

The effects of the isolation imposed on us in that environment were hard

to deal with, but the more subtle restrictions, mostly regarding our interactions

with Koreans themselves, was what had the most impact on me. Opportunities

to develop anything beyond superficial relationships were scarce. The Koreans

I interacted with were mostly those who worked in and around Munsu Dong:

interpreters, cleaners, drivers, gardeners and other local staff, who were

assigned to every organisation and could often speak at least a little English.

Then there were the waitresses and shop girls who worked nearby, whose

smiles and giggles gradually became a normal part of my day. Jobs that involved

working around foreigners were coveted, so I assumed they were given only to

Koreans whose families were regarded as most loyal to the Workers’ Party and

therefore of a sufficiently high social status.

As for having meaningful interactions with random Koreans around the

city, this was next to impossible. It was clear that people were fearful of their

exchanges with foreigners being misunderstood by whoever was watching.

Many would ignore questions, keeping conversation to a minimum. Some would

even ask us to leave. But even with the Koreans we saw every day on the

compound, it was still hard to know where the line was between asking someone

ordinary things about their life and prying; or whether a relationship with a

North Korean was built on true friendship or a managed arrangement of control

and surveillance.

I struggled with the loneliness that resulted from lack of truthful, human

connection with local people. I think a lot of foreigners are able to glide through

the experience of living in Pyongyang and come through emotionally unscathed.

Indeed, it would have been possible simply to take Pyongyang at face value. It

probably would have made for an easier life. But after a while, I couldn’t

dismiss the questions or the effect North Korea was having on me. Yet my

annoyances paled compared to what was going on around us. Life became

about reading between the lines, discerning what Koreans really meant, and

watching them skilfully sidestep the rules and walls that defined every aspect of

their existence.

North Korea’s national history and present-day character is a story of survival

at all costs. Whatever ideology or national narratives used to uphold the

15

A man watches the tour group from behind a copy of the

Rodong Sinmun

in one of

Pyongyang's metro stations. Koreans living in Pyongyang are the most exposed to

foreigners; however, for many, it was still a new experience. I found Korean people to be

very friendly, but spontaneous interactions were rare. As I found so often, a little longer

of holding a gaze resulted in a smile and a friendly nod of the head. What often started

as a look of confusion usually melted into a look of kindness. — Pyongyang, October 2018

16

legitimacy of the ruling family, it is presently held together by fear and control.

Even in its most fraught moments, a flexible relationship with truth has ensured

its survival.

The first example of this is the Korean War. Following the end of Japanese

colonial rule at the end of World War II, the US and Soviet Russia were unable

to reach an agreement on how the Korean Peninsula would be reunified. In

1948, two separate governments were created – the Republic of Korea (South

Korea) supported by the US, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

(North Korea) supported by Soviet Russia. Kim Il Sung, a young Korean Red

Army captain who had spent many years fighting the Japanese in China, became

the Soviet-designated premier, going on to become party chairman of the

Workers’ Party of Korea and leader of North Korea.

In 1950, his Korean People’s Army (KPA) marched into South Korea in a

bid to reunify the country under communist rule. The invasion resulted in years

of devastating war for both sides. Fighting ended in 1953 with the signing of

the Korean Armistice Agreement at Panmunjom. A formal peace treaty has

never been signed, and the two countries technically still remain at war today.

This is not the version of history taught to North Korean children,

however. To ensure the survival of North Korea, its leader and therefore its

system, a new history had to be crafted. The war was renamed the ‘Fatherland

Liberation War’. Kim Il Sung was re-imagined as a mighty military leader

campaigning to defend the peaceful Korean Peninsula from invasion by the US

and South Korea. Through struggle and inspired leadership, Kim Il Sung brought

victory – not near-defeat and stalemate – to his countrymen. That the US, and

not Kim himself, had started the war underlined the national narrative that

North Korea as a nation faced perennial destruction by its enemies, and only

the Kim family could protect it.

A second example is that of the catastrophic famine endured by North

Korea in the 1990s. Following the dissolution of Soviet aid in 1991, and combined

with a horribly unbalanced allocation of national resources towards the armed

forces, North Korea teetered on the edge of economic collapse. The public

distribution system, a hallmark of the communist command economy, dried up.

An estimated 3.5 million North Koreans were left to die of starvation.

1

Kim

Jong Il, who took power in 1994, drew on his long career in propaganda and

1

Natsios, A. (2001),

The Great North Korean Famine: Famine, Politics and Foreign

Policy

, United States Institute of Peace Press; illustrated edition

.

17

narrative to rebrand the famine (which continued until 1998) as the ‘Arduous

March’: just another bump on the road towards a perfect society.

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, it was possible to argue

that the famine had been caused by North Korea’s foreign enemies, still intent

on disrupting and imperialising their peaceful and humble land. I met plenty of

North Korean people who would look me in the eye and blame South Korea and

the West for the famine. Interestingly, even more would stress that its causes

were ‘complicated’.

Thirdly, North Korea’s nuclear and defence programme, decried abroad

as aggressive and reactionary, fits neatly into the regime’s narrative that North

Korean people should trust only themselves, and must be prepared for attack

from its long-standing enemies. Under the current ‘Supreme Leader’, Kim Jong

Un, North Korea has tested nearly three times the number of missiles than in

the time of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung.

2

I recall plenty of conversations with

North Korean people able to explain the geopolitical realities of East Asia and

why the nuclear programme was justified; I found it hard to imagine holders of

the same professions in the UK able to do so. It was clear that the party’s

version of North Korea’s place in the world, and its security dilemma, was well-

learned from a young age by North Koreans who might be expected to encounter

foreigners, or not. Some might think developing a nuclear programme is an

awfully big risk to take just to provide anchorage for a national narrative. This is

to misunderstand North Korea.

In each of these core examples, the Kim system uses myth as a powerful

tool of survival. Its inevitable collision with reality made for the most fascinating

moments of my time there, and I witnessed the effects of the country’s strange

dance between fiction and reality for myself many times. Although the machinery

of government is completely closed to foreigners (and the vast majority of its

own people), even the most mundane aspects of daily life required you moulding

yourself to the alternative reality of a world held together by fear.

A Korean with whom I spent a lot of time over those two years was Min Jeong.

She worked at a local bar called The Myohyang Beer House. Like many such

places in Pyongyang, the Beer House wasn’t just a bar: it had two restaurants,

2

Missile Defense Project, ‘North Korean Missile Launches & Nuclear Tests: 1984–

Present’,

Missile Threat

, Center for Strategic and International Studies, April 20, 2017, last

modified July 30, 2020, https://missilethreat.csis.org/north-korea-missile-launches-1984-

present/.

18

two karaoke rooms, three bars, a gym and a hairdresser. Most foreigners

drank in the downstairs room, which was essentially a makeshift bar in the

lobby, next to a pool table. The entire building appeared to be run exclusively by

a team of young, pretty North Korean girls who all spoke excellent English.

Some also spoke Chinese or Russian. Most bars and restaurants in Pyongyang

were staffed by females, which seemed odd in a system that trusted very few

women to run anything. But here, the total absence of men did not mean that

they weren’t there: I found the long, heavy curtains covering many of the interior

walls intriguing. No foreigner was allowed to go near them. My imagination ran

wild about secret rooms full of men smoking and playing cards, idly perusing

dozens of CCTV monitors. The notion sounds silly, of course. But had I found

out this was true, it wouldn’t have surprised me.

Min Jeong was one of several girls who worked and lived on-site, sleeping

in dormitories in an area out of bounds to foreigners. They worked six days a

week, with Sundays off to visit their families. What drew me immediately to her

was her dry, sarcastic humour and droll nature. It didn’t always go down well

with customers and she was the butt of many jokes. Her tired expression

contrasted grittily with the painted smiles worn by her colleagues: she’d had a

lot of experience around foreigners and it showed.

The first time I met Min Jeong, she stared at me coldly as if she was

trying to figure me out, slightly closed her eyes and grunted. She served my

drink without a word, walked away and sat down on a little stool in the kitchen

opposite the bar, took out her phone and started to scroll. She was in her own

world. There was so much surface-level presentation of manners and politeness

in this culture, especially in the presence of foreigners, that I found her rejection

of this oddly magnetic. It was honest.

Over time we became careful friends and our conversations deepened.

Min Jeong was always unexpectedly candid about how bored or fed up she was,

how tired she was of being set up on dates by her parents or being told by her

friends that she had to lose weight. She even went so far as to complain to me

about some of the restrictions she endured. When I ran in the Pyongyang 10K

she came to cheer me on, but at a distance from our mutual foreign friends.

When I asked her why she didn’t let them know she was there, she just looked

at me, widened her eyes and shook her head. ‘I couldn’t,’ she whispered. ‘Too

much security. Didn’t you see all the security?’

On another occasion she told me not to trust the military guards manning

the Munsu Dong guard posts because ‘they lie all the time’. And I saw the

19

impact of local security on her for myself one evening, when I was walking to

the bar and we passed each other outside on the street. I waved to her and

shouted her name. She dug her hands into her pockets, looked at the ground

and said nothing. The soldier assigned to stand on the corner opposite the bar

watched as we passed each other in silence.

I generally found North Korean people to be very direct, in as far as their

situation allowed, and it spanned the generations. Mr Ryu, an older friend of

mine, never held back about his views on retirement. He had no interest in

fishing or chess (typical pastimes of male retirees in North Korea) and loved

working and ‘feeling useful’. He didn’t like Pyongyang much, either. He wasn’t a

city man and spent much of his time talking about his love of the countryside

and his dream of living with his wife in a little house in the mountains surrounded

by greenery and fresh air, not cars, people and pollution. Another friend, Mrs

Hyeong, regularly updated me on the grumpy nature of her husband and her

dwindling energy for her job, which she didn’t enjoy much. A keen athlete when

she was younger, she had felt dismayed at having no time to dedicate to her

sport since she had decided to get married and have a family. She always asked

to see photos of wherever I had been travelling and would spend minutes staring

at every picture, zooming in to examine as much detail as possible. Hong Kong

was a particular favourite.

My Korean friends were usually very forthright in asking me about my

personal views on a range of topics, from British politics to which wife of Henry

VIII I most admired. I usually avoided asking them about North Korean politics,

but having conversations about complex issues wasn’t totally impossible; it just

took more careful consideration. I had several conversations with Korean

friends about defectors living in London and British values of ethnic diversity,

religious tolerance and the validity of same-sex relationships. Most of these

subjects were usually met with looks of total confusion, but some things I’d

imagined would be confusing in a closed country, like the borderless world of

international consumerism, were quite straightforward.

These conversations fuelled my enduring belief that North Korean people

know much more about the outside world than we might think. It’s therefore

likely that they have much more complex views on their own country than we

might realise as well.

I always wondered if what we spoke about stayed with them after our

conversations had ended. And while I was extremely fortunate to experience

relationships with Koreans, the key question of how authentic our friendship

20

was always remained. I knew these interactions only happened because the

system allowed it to be that way; that these relationships, while precious, were,

ultimately, controlled. Was my friend Eun Mi asking me for my blood type to add

to some sinister file the system was compiling on me, or was the question to

do with – in South Korea particularly – blood type being a common way of

determining someone’s personality traits or working out if people are romantically

compatible, like star signs are to some of us in the West? And when Mr Ryu,

for example, told me about his life, was he building up my empathy for him so

he could exploit it at some point? (This had happened to me before, when on

the train from Dandong to Pyongyang. Three North Korean train conductors

had made my acquaintance with tea and noodles before stowing countless

packages in my cabin to avoid Customs.) How much could I really trust these

people? This question would haunt me for the entire time I was there. I struggled

to separate the human being in front of me from their environment.

In the end, I quickly learned that acceptance was far more sustainable

than frustration. The only way I could feel at peace with my relationships was by

dismissing what I thought I knew about the place and relying on my instincts.

Most of the time, my instincts told me these interactions were genuine. And if

the entire thing was completely false, that was fine too. It wasn't like it was their

fault. They were just doing what they needed to survive.

While most of my Korean friends would probably never experience life abroad

and could only get close to the outside world through foreigners, I met many

Koreans who had had the opportunity to travel. I had been under the impression

that North Korea was a prison where no one knew what was going on in the

outside world, let alone travelled there, but that was far from the truth. The

Koreans who had spent time overseas were easy to spot; they had a common

curiosity and appetite for information. Still, it was only members of the elite, the

privileged families of wealthy and powerful party officials, who had the confidence

to ask questions and really engage. I encountered several groups of North

Koreans travelling in and out of China for a multitude of reasons (some picking

up a few bags of Starbucks coffee on the way). Others I met running businesses

in Dandong, generating wads of foreign currency for the regime. Some had

spent years studying in Russia, others in China, Poland or elsewhere. They

were among the lucky few who were approved by the state each year to leave

North Korea in an official capacity. Most of them were explicit about their

longing to return abroad in the future.