Apart from the business side of things, I had a pleasant family life. My wife and my young daughter stayed for some time with me in Pyongyang, moving back and forth between there and our other home of Vietnam. We enjoyed ourselves despite the lack of running water and electricity, and managed to live with the absence of dairy products in the summertime. (The lack of refrigeration in hot summer months cut back the supply of these items.)
Still, with my long working hours, I very much regret not always spending enough time with my family. I therefore dedicate this book to my wife and daughter.
North Korea gave them great life experiences too. For some time, my Vietnamese spouse worked as a Swiss government-sponsored consultant to the Ministry of Light Industries. She led a project aimed at building up the small leather industry, using as its basis the valuable skins of the two million goats that were left unprocessed after being slaughtered. Unfortunately, the project did not materialize. Our toddler, who learned to walk in Pyongyang, spent about three hours every day at the kindergarten of the Korea International School. While there, foreign children were surprised to learn from their North Korean teachers that Kim Il Sung, the founding father of the nation, is also the symbolic father of all children in Korea.
Even with that propaganda, I realized that North Koreans are first and foremost human beings, not robots who follow the dictates of the Dear Leader. They experience the same sorrows and worries, happy and sad moments, and hopes and aspirations of humans all over the world.
In this book I will share with you my unforgettable experience. For some readers, my story will be an entertaining plunge into this strange, alien world, while for those of a scholarly bent, it could reveal much about the inner workings of this remote nation.
Regardless of what you take from this memoir, I hope you’ll be inspired to put aside the perceptions you may have about North Korea. Life in the hermit state is difficult, but it is not as outlandish as they say. The nation, unknown to many, is full of opportunities for curious foreigners, like business, tourism, teaching English, and even training sports teams in Pyongyang.
In the end, this “useful idiot” earned a comfortable living and happily shared his knowledge and skills for the good of regular North Koreans. He tried to be a sort of cultural translator, clearing up misunderstandings and building bridges between the state and the outside world. He was happy bringing good-quality but inexpensive medicine to this impoverished country and teaching North Koreans to do business in an ever globalizing world. And as the young Kim ascends to power, that globalization is taking a greater toll on a nation many think is stuck in the cold war. As with Deng Xiaoping before him, business is the way forward for Kim’s country; with that, we begin my story.
Felix Abt
Nha Trang, Vietnam
December 2012
Chapter 1
Into the Heart of Darkness
After the rain, good weather.
In the wink of an eye,
the universe throws off its muddy clothes.
—Ho Chi Minh
Sitting in the Beijing airport, I felt an eager and exciting tingle while awaiting my first flight with the North Korean national carrier, Air Koryo. In an introduction to the country’s superstition, I waited at terminal 2, gate 16, an area reserved specifically for North Korean airplanes. The number, 2.16, is sacred in the so-called hermit kingdom. It signifies February 16, a national holiday and the official 1942 birthday of the late supreme leader Kim Jong Il.
It was July 2002, the beginning of a seven-year journey into what the Western press has painted as Joseph Conrad’s “heart of darkness.” The experience would become the most fascinating period of my life. But it was a bittersweet time. I met all sorts of friendly North Koreans. They included laborers and mining engineers, the staff of food-processing factories, farmers in food cooperatives, and elites such as academics and top officials. The distance between them and me—the foreign “capitalist”—was wide. My approach of making a profit was something new to them. They had become so accustomed to meeting foreign donors from the fraternal socialist countries and Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), like the World Food Program and United Nations.
I sat down, and the diversity of passengers immediately struck me. About a third of the people waiting were North Koreans; half were Korean-Americans, South Koreans, Chinese, and other Asians; and the rest were Caucasians like myself. The North Koreans stood out from all the other groups. Their ethnicity was obvious based on the pins they wore on their jackets, tiny portraits of the country’s founding father, Kim Il Sung. He’s the eternal president who, under the Constitution, rules North Korea from his grave—making North Korea the world’s only necrocracy.
I also realized the sad fact that foreign companies would treat my presence in North Korea as a crippling risk. Air Koryo was blacklisted from operating in the European Union because of its safety record, a measure partially lifted in 2010. But I didn’t worry about the safety of the airplane itself. Rather, I feared my health insurance provider could have used this flight as a reason to deny me coverage in case of an accident.
My trepidation was partly realized. Years later, my life insurance company suddenly dropped my plan, arguing that my North Korean residency wasn’t appropriate and couldn’t be covered. Then, after I opened a profile with a North Korean address on LinkedIn, the account was cancelled. A fellow expatriate, I should add, had his credit card revoked once he disclosed his Pyongyang address.
Those companies weren’t seeing the entire picture; my first impression was that the country and its people, and even its airplanes, seemed quite “normal,” for lack of a better word, like when I was greeted by a warm smile.
The airplane was one of several Ilyushin Il-62s that were bought in the Soviet Union in 1982. The seats were larger than those of other Asian airlines, which greatly added to the comfort of the tall and overweight Westerner that I was. The cabin looked clean and well maintained. Though the model itself was the oldest aircraft I’ve ever flown, invented in 1963, it had a solid safety record compared to its later generations. Pilots today even note that it flies smoothly and is famous for steady mechanics alongside scarce electronics.
The standards were indeed what would be expected with any global airline. When I opened my laptop aboard another flight, a nervous hostess immediately rushed over and ordered me to shut it down. She apparently feared the equipment would interfere with sensitive electronics that the airplane did not even have! Precaution was the name of the game here. I was also impressed by the flight skills of the pilots, especially in spring, when they dealt with enormous high winds and dust storms from China. When the airplane was shaking in a storm that, at times, was quite a frightening experience, I always knew in the back of my mind that the pilots were highly professional in their work.
Before takeoff, revolutionary and patriotic music whistled over the loudspeakers. Instead of the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times, or Time magazine, I was given a copy of the English-language government mouthpiece, the Pyongyang Times.
I wasn’t surprised at the stories that were splashed all over the newspaper. The front page boldly carried a portrait