Having water did not necessarily mean we had hot water either, so I got used to cold showers. I felt more healthy and fit, particularly in winter. Cold showers not only activated my immune system, according to folklore, but led to a life free from colds, flu, and a runny nose. Average Koreans, however, were not as lucky as me. My home, unlike theirs, was almost always heated. This sad reality came back to me in a very direct way. I realized there was a reason behind the soaring winter sales of cold, flu, and respiratory tract infection medicine produced by my pharmaceutical company, PyongSu.
Neighborhood units called inminban dominate every apartment block, guarded by volunteers who are usually elderly women or men sitting at the entrance. Their duty is to greet and keep an eye on every visitor to “prevent undesirable elements from gaining a foothold,” as described by local media. Such “undesirable elements” include people with a potential political agenda, vendors, and burglars. The citizens, called dong mu (a comrade at the same level or below the speaker) and dong jie (a comrade at a higher rank than the speaker), are from time to time reminded in newspapers and through propaganda posters to, according to one poster I saw, “heighten revolutionary vigilance.”
Whenever I passed by and saw the old guards, one of the most famous claims I came across in foreign media came to my mind. Pyongyang, some newspapers alleged, had been “cleansed” of old people—along with the handicapped as well as pregnant women—who were relocated to the countryside to gentrify the city. If this were really the case, the rules must have been relaxed after I arrived in Pyongyang. The city was home to more diversity than the mass media claimed.
The residents were also responsible for keeping their neighborhoods clean. Indeed, the order and cleanliness of Pyongyang is exemplary. On my walks around the capital, I observed locals, mostly women of various ages, cutting and yanking out the grass sprawling chaotically on streets and pavement. Since the city authorities didn’t have lawnmowers, the same manual procedures were applied at parks. Hedges were always neatly trimmed. Not only were streets and pavements spotless, but the pavement edges and trees were painted a very pure and clean white and surrounded by small stones. The rivers running through the city did not have rubbish floating around, and unlike other poor Asian cities such as Manila and New Delhi, I never came across garbage dumps.
Because of the difficulty of nonfunctioning elevators, the elderly lived in apartments on the first few floors of the buildings, while stronger, younger people were expected to live on higher floors. Those who were rich by North Korean standards and who owned a bicycle carried it up and down the stairs, which was no easy task for residents in buildings with twenty or thirty floors. While bicycles were safe in the apartments, thieves took them quickly on the ground floor.
This does not mean that violent crime is rampant, although petty wallet and bike thefts do happen. To give one example of the atmosphere, North Koreans never left shoes in front of their doorways. A Korean joked to me that if they did, the shoes would “walk away all by themselves.” Over the years, I observed iron bars being erected outside windows and balconies of lower-story apartments, a sign that either thefts were on the rise or people were becoming less trustful of each other. Or both.
The view of Pyongyang from the top of the television tower, which is home to a bar and a restaurant. At a distance the capital looks impressive with its high-rise buildings.
In the “backyards” of the best buildings in Pyongyang, small buildings in poor shape line the streets.
The best buildings in Pyongyang and other cities are built along main streets. In the “backyards,” small buildings in poor shape line the streets. Shoddy buildings in the “backstreet areas” are surrounded by walls, and the streets in these areas are mostly unpaved (please see illustration on following page). The Pyongyang People’s Committee, the official name for the city government, is trying hard to replace these, although it has few resources to do so. New four- and five-story buildings that emerge in these areas are usually constructed by hand, the impact of which is clearly visible because the quality standards aren’t consistent.
Around the time I arrived, the North Korean government had set the year 2012 to be a milestone for the development of Pyongyang. Mr. Pak, who was vice director of the country’s leading design institute and who helped construct the building for one of my cofounded companies, explained the rationale to me: “Our great founding leader and president, comrade Kim Il Sung, will then be one hundred years old,” he proclaimed. “In his honor, we will make a huge effort to modernize our capital and build new buildings.” The plan was a partial success, but did not reach its full potential thanks to the scarcity of resources.
The shoddy buildings in the backstreet areas of Pyongyang are surrounded by walls.
He explained to me that 100,000 apartments in high-rise buildings should be built by 2012, and that each flat should be at least 1,075 square feet (100 square meters) with what sounded like Western-style kitchens and bathrooms. On the balconies, the units would even have storage areas for kimchi jars.
I thought this was an excessively bold plan, taking into account the country’s dearth of resources like steel, cement, and scaffolding. I followed the developments with interest from a distance; by the time they were to be completed, I would not be living in Pyongyang anymore, but I would surely see any results on my future visits.
Despite resource scarcities, it turned out that, in true North Korean fashion, thousands of able-bodied workers were “mass mobilized.” Universities, for instance, were shut down in 2011 so students could work on construction sites until April 2012.
It was truly a remarkable spectacle of the ability of this government, and its people, to so swiftly get things done. The government called it the “New Pyongyang Speed Battle,” in a reference to the massive reconstruction campaign after the Korean War. The state cleared out land with short notice and evicted residents to their relatives’ and other apartments. With hundreds of laborers putting efforts into each edifice on rotating shifts, a new floor popped up every two days.
On the other hand, the facelift had an underbelly. The number of fatalities among untrained workers had probably not been small, although the exact numbers go unreported. And the quality of new buildings has sometimes visibly suffered from the hasty construction. I occasionally noticed cracks on walls and ceilings or paint dripping down onto window glass. Then there’s the very visible strain on the capital’s aging infrastructure, which has created regular interruptions of the supply of power, water, and heating.
But for the government, this revolutionary project gets the job done. Visitors are often taken aback at the city’s modern façade, belying the common description of this capital being stuck in a terrible Stalinist age.
My walks through Pyongyang during the day and night gave me glimpses into apartments, and therefore clues about daily life. Whether affluent or poor, North Koreans seemed to live simply and with few possessions. Although the size and quality of the predominantly state-owned houses varied according to the social status of the dwellers, a typical apartment had two cozy rooms plus a small kitchen not exceeding 325 square feet (30 square meters).
In smaller cities and in the countryside, where there were more one-story houses for families, the living rooms were slightly larger. As four to five family members often lived together, the living room was also used for sleeping. In less luxurious apartment blocks, dwellers shared toilets and showers, which were usually one each per floor.
Most homes do not yet have a telephone. According to 2011 statistics, there were 1.1 million fixed-line phones installed in this country of 24 million inhabitants. They are predominantly used in government offices, state-owned enterprises, and collective farms. The country has been considered a technology backwater, and I have come across hand-cranked phones for communications