Inside North Korea III

When we last saw Colum Graham, he was making nice with gun-wielding North Korean soldiers after surviving his first few hours in Kaesong. How will the rest of the trip go? Well: onward we go, deeper into the demilitarised zone where the rules get stricter, the people get dirtier - and everything starts to look the same. (Remember, read from the start!)


Mostly everyone who had decided to go along the path away from the Pakyeon waterfall had arrived at the mysterious location by the time I got there. It was an old Buddhist temple. Since almost all religious activity (aside from Kimist worship) has been banned in North Korea, I thought it was remarkable that the temple was still standing. Many people were praying, and so rather than gawk, I decided to return to the relative cool of the bus. Walking back along the path, the woman who had sold me some water offered me some piping hot tea that I rejected. She looked dejected and seemed to take it as a personal insult.

Upon returning to the bus, I spotted a KPA soldier at a guard post. The South Korean tour guides had told me that it was OK to take photos of soldiers if I asked them. Before I got the chance to ask, I was intercepted by a man in a white shirt. He quickly herded me away from the soldier and back onto the bus whilst telling me that I could not take any photos of “military persons or objects.” As I sat down I thought to myself that I could not leave North Korea without a photo of a soldier or statue of Kim Il-sung. Without obvious proof, I anxiously thought who would believe that it is possible to go on a day trip to North Korea?


 
After both sets of tour guides had checked the bus and its passengers, we departed and headed back along the same road we had come along. I saw a group of bikes and I kept looking at them. The way the hill curved allowed me to see the bikes lessees. The lessees, who presumably ‘pay’ for their use of the bikes with their labour, were along a small track, crouching behind a cornfield with a KPA soldier standing over them. I had seen Nepalese army soldiers on a bus searching for evidence that a passenger might be a Maoist insurgent before, but I felt immediately that this was a whole new level of oppression. I asked a South Korean tour guide why the KPA soldier was standing over them and she simply replied, “Because they are dirty.”

We arrived back in Kaesong for lunch at an un-occupied hotel. The food was served in brass crockery. For me, the brass resembled gold, and the variety of food made me feel that this was more a banquet than a lunch. Through the meal, the power went off for five minutes and the Columbia chumps became nervous until the lights came back on and they could again gaze into eyes tattooed with dollar signs.

 While the food immediately tasted good, after I swallowed it there was an ugly aftertaste. I couldn’t help but think about the people who were working in the cornfields under the watchful eye of the KPA soldier.

What would they be eating that night? I compare the confliction to a more acute sensation of what it’s like to consider eating meat unethical, but doing it anyway. Despite my utopian aspirations, I couldn’t very well waste the food that was in front of me, in the same way an animal is dead and it’s going to remain being dead even if I refuse to eat it.

After lunch, we set off Sunyang Hall where an apparently eminent Confucian poet once resided. Testament to Sunyang Hall’s cultural importance, unlike many other temples and palaces, it survives the Korean War intact. While interesting, compared to the Workers Party Library situated next door, Sunyang Hall was a blowfly like distraction. The Soviet styled architecture of the Library was very ominous. Its doors looked like they would not open for books of triviality. There were also Workers Party songs being played from the library on what must have been a gramophone. A tour guide told me that on the five times she had been passed the library, the same music had been playing on each occasion. As eerie as Kaesong was already, it became much more so while hearing songs used to maintain the “Kim Jong-il is the Sun” illusion.
At this stage, the illusion of the tour's itinerary had become too much for me. For the majority of my time in Kaesong, I had been  more concerned with being in a harrowing expedition to the 1950s as opposed paying attention superficially to Korean history on an ephemeral tour. I was impatient for the joke to end. 
 
The Sonjuk Bridge was another “I’ve been there” moment and so was the Students and Children’s Palace which was capped off by the success of vanity inspired determination to get a photo of some foliage incidentally containing a KPA soldier.
 
The joke’s punch line was  when I shook hands with the Vice President of Hyundai-Asan at the Kaesong Industrial Zone Information Centre where there was a scale model of Kaesong for the future. I was told all about how Kaesong was to have skyscrapers, three golf courses and be home to thirty thousand South Koreans by 2012. I’m sure Park Wang-ja would have been impressed.

It’s everyone else’s fault
 
Rather than discuss relative freedoms, the rawness of North Korea only being an hour away, the general confusion about the KIZ being a negative or a positive and the possibility of unification I will just summarize my experience in a suitable vogue. 

I went to North Korea and saw a big act. The show had backdrops including a waterfall, a temple, a lunch, a bridge and a palace. Away from the act, the pupils of the actors remain dilated, emotionally fixated on their show for the following day. Their life is being used fulfilling characters in a script without an ending. The director watches many movies from Hollywood and doesn’t want the same old story. The directors people occasionally meet five producers who want the same old story, however, the director is adamant that his artistic vision is his alone and not to be tampered with.

For $200, some of the actors met a blue-eyed simpleton from Australia briefly and he didn’t affirm or debunk any of the opinions they had about their audience. That they have an audience is what’s important, because otherwise the tragedy couldn’t be funded. Without funding they’d have to be starving artists who would only watch each other’s movies at dingy hovels in a liberal democracy whose politicians need reality checks. Made on tiny budgets scraped together from saving welfare payments, these movies would be full of inside jokes and friendships that are more important than politics or the outside world that has little relevance. An outsider who criticizes just doesn’t understand.
 
Maybe you didn’t get that impression from my review. Good, it is with great pleasure that I say go and see for yourself so it’s entirely up to you.

 

  
 

 

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Comments

Joshua's picture

Inside NK

Wed, 03/09/2008 - 08:47 — Joshua

The endless play, do you think Kim's read Shakespeare?

An amazing read in any case and what a fantastic photo of the KPA foliage!

Owen's picture

It's worth noting that since

Wed, 19/11/2008 - 13:02 — Owen

It's worth noting that since Colum went on the tour, Nth Korean officials have shut it down. Unfortunately this means you missed your chance to see a lot of despressed looking dirty, poor Korean people.