Clearly, North Korea was a place where important things happened, I thought with a chuckle. And misguided foreigners like me still hadn’t learned of the worldwide significance of the Dear Leader’s grand inspections. Other news items of great excitement to any rational individual ranged from “Pyongyang to host Kimjongilia [a flower species named after Kim Jong Il] festival,” to “Young builders at power station construction site” and “Fodder additive developed” to “Company increases food output.” Other pieces raised hackles about the dangers of a militant Japan and the ghastly human rights records of the American government.
I closed the newspaper. I had no more doubts about where I was heading.
To its credit, Air Koryo was generous, and even Western airlines came off as stingier. The stewardesses served a full free meal with a beverage. The lunch was not exactly a feast, but it was edible. The fried fish, although cold, was tasty. It came in a dark salty sauce with rice, canned fruit, kimchi, and sponge cake. Years later, in the mid-2000s, when at long last fast food became popular in North Korea, Air Koryo gave me a sandwich that resembled a hamburger and, to Korean customers, minced meat bread. The burger joints that later emerged in Pyongyang used the same expression, “minced meat bread,” on their menus in lieu of our Western “hamburger.”
All the flight attendants were young and attractive females. When I tried to engage in some conversation, I noticed that they got shy. Their vocabulary was limited to a few essential sentences that a North Korean flight attendant was supposed to know, and the airline probably didn’t want them to converse with outsiders beyond the politically correct lexicon they were given. After all, they could never be sure about who was sitting in the airplane and what intentions they harbored.
In business class, flight attendants wore the bright red chosŏn-ot, the traditional Korean dress known more popularly in South Korea as a hanbok. Other flight attendants were dressed in bright red jackets. Red had a strong meaning for North Koreans, since it was on their national flag. Their hair was pulled tightly back and they were all wearing white gloves. Their faces were powdered to make the skin appear white, a look that is considered pristine and proper all over East Asia.
When the airplane crossed over the Yalu River—the geographic boundary that separates China from North Korea—a proud flight attendant joyously proclaimed that we were officially in the pure and revolutionary country. “Fifty-seven years ago, our president, Kim Il Sung, came across the river with great ambition for his country and to liberate his country from Japanese imperialism,” she said over the loudspeaker. Over the coming years I would hear that sentence spoken in North Korean airplanes so often that I learned it by heart.
Pyongyang Sunan International Airport was moderately busy with, on average, one to two international flights per day—a number that seems small but is impressive given the political isolation of North Korea.
An hour and a half after takeoff, we arrived at the Pyongyang Sunan International Airport. The government always had the same routine. First, uniformed officers led the passengers to the bus that brought us to the airport hall. Immigration officers were sitting in three closed cabins, equipped with curtains, looking down on the person whose passport details they were checking. Years later, perhaps in a public relations move, these cabins were replaced by friendlier, transparent cabins without roofs, allowing the officers better eye contact with their “customers.”
After giving up my mobile phone and slogging through customs, I was welcomed by three North Koreans with winsome smiles. Two of them were my new staff members, and the other man was the director of the foreign relations department of the then-Ministry of Machinery and Metal-Working Industries (the organization that sponsored my visa). That role carried a heavy burden because if I behaved poorly, he would be held responsible.
The weight of my actions didn’t seem to bother them. The gleeful employees whisked me away in a minibus to Pyongyang. An exciting journey in this very special country was just beginning.
On the road downtown, I was greeted with a banner that read, “Independence, Peace, Friendship.” These slogans were commonplace, but they give the impression to most foreign visitors that North Koreans are brainwashed. I knew all the clichés spread by the media, and arrived with healthy skepticism toward claims that North Koreans are mindless henchmen.
WAKING UP TO KIMCHI
I will never forget my first breakfast, bright and early at 7 A.M. in Pyongyang. I munched on the staple of the Korean diet, kimchi, which is usually a pickled China cabbage mixed with chili, ginger, garlic, and sugar. It came with rice, eggs, and soup and tasted raw, sweet, and spicy. Like many Westerners, I found the kimchi unbearably hot and ordered another coffee to wash the chili down.
Nevertheless, the taste grew on me, leading me to become something of a kimchi aficionado. My Vietnamese wife, Huong, also enjoyed the dish and learned to make it in all sorts of ways, both spicy and not spicy, from our North Korean maid, Ms. O.
Ms. O was highly educated, and as a medical doctor by training she spoke English and had many talents, such as fixing toilets and calming down fussy children. Even though she was a doctor, working for a foreigner brought in a better income and working conditions. One perk was a daily warm shower in the employer’s house, which wasn’t available in most other workplaces. She kept our house in good order and was a lovely nanny to our child.
After Huong learned to make kimchi, my family returned the favor to Ms. O by offering her, along with my other staff, some excellent (though foreigner-made) kimchi. They were surprised and delighted, claiming the taste was as good as theirs.
THE PYONGYANG PRIVILEGED
Pyongyang is considered by its residents, known as “Pyongyangites,” to be the capital of the Korean revolution against the Japanese occupiers of the first half of the twentieth century. Among North Korean cities, it’s the more privileged hometown inhabited by former anti-Japanese guerilla fighters, soldiers, and other Koreans who locals will tell you performed great deeds in the struggle against the Japanese colonial rule and the revolution. The Korean Workers’ Party calls this clique of former revolutionaries the “core class.” This honorific distinguishes them from the so-called “hostile class,” a bedeviled group that includes male ancestors who were landowners, entrepreneurs, and administrative staff working for the Japanese colonial regime (or as the party would say, “pro-Japanese collaborators”).
The third social group in this class society is the “wavering class,” a sort of middle ground between the first two. This one isn’t quite loyal enough to the people’s government, making it highly suspect. When the new class system was introduced in 1970 at the Fifth Party Congress, they were officially banned from staying in Pyongyang as well.
Living in Pyongyang, then, is a privilege for the core class of North Koreans. The city itself is a symbol of revolutionary struggle, having been flattened during a fire-bombing campaign by some 1,400 American aircraft during the Korean War. In the 1950s, the capital was rebuilt from scratch with a massive, almost inhumane effort that sacrificed countless lives. The North Korean people were lucky in one way, though, when they began receiving generous economic and technical help from Soviet Russia and other fraternal socialist states. This legacy would continue through the cold war: the DPRK was the biggest recipient of aid from socialist countries until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Unlike most foreigners living in Pyongyang, I traveled through large parts of the country and realized that the Koreans living in the capital, who accounted for 10 percent of the country’s total population, were by comparison very lucky. Food, housing, and infrastructure were substantially better than what I came across throughout the rest of the country. The gap between Pyongyang and other cities was not huge, but