Signs of Normal City Life Missing : N. Korea’s Capital Seems Like Hollywood Back Lot

Kim Chan Bok, a 39-year-old homemaker, tailor and mother of three, lives with her family in a tiny tile-roofed home, painted white with blue trim, in the satellite town of Ryongsong, about 10 miles outside of central Pyongyang.

Kim’s husband and father both are construction workers. Their brawn and that of tens of thousands like them, combined with the orders and the vision--some might say the ego--of North Korean President Kim Il Sung, have built Pyongyang into what it is today: a unique city that feels like one vast government civic center of monumental buildings, parks and broad, tree-lined boulevards, with high-rise apartment buildings but few other signs of normal urban life.

A standard tourist map of Pyongyang shows about 90 massive structures, including government buildings, monuments, sports stadiums, theaters, museums, educational institutions, hospitals and hotels. Many of these buildings are architecturally quite attractive--or at least interesting. They are spaced amid much greenery.

The government says it has spent the equivalent of $4.7 billion building sports and residential facilities being used for the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students, a leftist international athletic cultural and political event that opened here Saturday. The opening ceremony, with precision marching and Korean folk dances, was held in the May Day Stadium, a spectacular structure that seats 150,000.

In central Pyongyang, the city that visitors usually see, shops and department stores seem too few in number, their goods attractively displayed but customers in short supply. One cannot easily determine where the 1.1 million people said to live in urban Pyongyang buy their vegetables, where they get their consumer goods, how they spend their time. What is visible seems to be for show. Visitors get the eerie feeling that even residents are simply players placed to populate the theme.

From the feel of the streets in the central city, one would think there can be no more than perhaps a few hundred thousand people left in the main urban area. The official explanation is that people live near their work places, so there is no need for larger numbers of people to be passing through the streets.

There is not a bicycle to be seen in Pyongyang. The official explanation, delivered to many foreigners on many occasion--most recently at a Thursday press conference given by city officials--is that in fact there are bicycles. The foreigners just have not noticed them. The unofficial explanation is that bicycles increase personal mobility, personal freedom--therefore they are banned.

Central Pyongyang is a showcase. It is not unreal. It’s just that the show is the reality. The purpose of all this is not entirely clear, but one reasonable explanation is that President Kim decided many years ago to focus his nation’s resources on building an entire capital city to serve as a monument to his rule.

This is possible partly because North Korea has strict control on the movement of people. Central Pyongyang is a city of the young, the elite, the powerful. Everyone has been approved as politically acceptable. Almost nobody is old.

“We have followed the line of limiting the number of residents in the center of the city and building satellite towns around it,” Choe Dok Sun, chairman of the Pyongyang City Construction Committee, said at a press conference last week.

In these satellite towns like Ryongsong, the Pyongyang suburb where Kim the homemaker lives, one can catch a glimpse of something closer to what this long-isolated and rigidly controlled society is really like. Ryongsong, and more than a dozen other towns, along with hundreds of villages, are officially part of Pyongyang City. The city thus incorporates vast stretches of rice fields dotted with green houses, and parks stretch as much as 30 miles east of downtown. Nearly 1 million more people, according to official figures, live in these areas.

A foreign visitor, accompanied by two Ryongsong officials and a translator, visited Kim’s neighborhood last week, walking past cottages and one-story apartments scattered amid tiny plots of corn interplanted with green beans, lettuce and hot red peppers. The foreign guest showed a door to knock on. Kim answered.

The startled woman quickly recovered her poise, and when the foreigner sought to invite himself in, she first apologized that her house was in a mess but then cheerfully obliged. The translator and city officials came along, everyone taking their shoes off at the door.

Kim’s family lives an extremely simple life. Their home consists of a 3-by-8-foot kitchen, a main room about 8 feet by 10 feet, which serves for living, dining and sleeping for the family of five, and a tiny 6-foot-by-5-foot sewing room with a sloped ceiling about 4 feet above the floor. The neighbor’s corn grows only inches from the blue-trimmed window of the sewing room. A dresser holds mattresses that are set on the floor at night for sleeping. Portraits of President Kim and his son, Kim Jong Il, hang on the wall.

Kim works at home as a tailor, using a foot-pedal sewing machine.

“Mainly, I’m making clothes to sell,” she said. “Sometimes, I make clothes for the family.”

That evening, she said, the family would eat a kind of cold noodle called kooksoo, together with kimchi--spicy pickled vegetables.

“It’s very hot nowadays,” she said. “We like to eat cold noodles. Adults like to add lots of spice, but children don’t use so much.”

People like the Kims form the backbone of North Korea’s urban society.

“This is the first time for our country to have the greatest festival, so many workers were mobilized to build the monumental buildings,” Kim explained. “My father helped build the Pyongyang Circuit Building. My husband helped build the Students’ and Children’s Palace.

Kim, like most mothers, dreams of great things for her children. And for her, there is no greater dream than building Pyongyang. Asked whether her 14-year-old eldest son has expressed any ideas of what work he wants to do when he grows up, Kim replied:

“First of all, I want to send him to a construction university and have him follow his father. I want him to help construct our Pyongyang and make it better and better. I want my son to become a famous city designer.”

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