Sightseeing with Dear Leader

When I boarded the Air Koryo flight from Beijing to Pyongyang, I felt as though I had stepped into one of those magical time machines that turn chronology backward. The plane was a Soviet-era Ilyushin-62, the cabin walls and ceiling papered with yellowing vinyl. The flight attendants wore their hair yanked back in glossy chignons in the style of Audrey Hepburn. The magazine the attendants handed out was 21st century, though barely, showing Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s “Dear Leader,” greeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2001.

The flight was only the first step backward, to the days before globalization brought a Starbucks to every corner. From what I saw through the window as the plane descended, I was entering some spooky period in history in which there were grand asphalt boulevards but no motor vehicles.

A voice came over a crackly loudspeaker, announcing our imminent arrival in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. I couldn’t quite make out the Korean, but I could tell it was something about the Dear Leader’s father, Kim Il Sung, because the voice began to warble, rising and falling in an excited tone.

In the terminal, we waited in line to pass through an X-ray detector. At most airports customs officials look for illicit drugs or insect-infested fruit. In Pyongyang, they screen for foreign newspapers, transistor radios, mobile telephones, anything that could be used to bring in news of the outside world.

I was the outside world, a U.S. citizen and, worse, a member of the media. But the country was celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the North Korean Workers’ Party, and so, after years of trying to win permission to visit, I finally had been granted a visa. Relatively speaking, Pyongyang was awash in foreigners. People around the world know that North Korea is an anachronism and want to see it while it lasts.

For their part, the North Koreans have nothing to sell for hard currency but their weirdness, and they go along, pretending that they’re being taken seriously.

So there I was in the airport, with no North Korean money, no hotel reservation and no itinerary, though I shouldn’t have been anxious. The woman at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing who had arranged our trip--my traveling companion was a colleague based in Beijing--had assured us that someone would be there to greet us.

“Don’t worry,” she’d said. “They’ll recognize you.”

Sure enough, there’s no chance for a foreigner to get lost in Pyongyang. As we exited customs, we were approached by a man who introduced himself as Mr. Park. He was a skinny guy in his 40s with a small, turned-up nose that gave him the look of Dennis the Menace in a gangster suit. His sidekick--in North Korea, minders always come in pairs to watch each other--also was a Mr. Park. He was a tall, rather dashing fellow with a high-bridged nose that he said made him look like an American. “Big nose” is slang here for Caucasian.

Once our bags were stashed in the back of their Nissan van, the indoctrination began. Mr. Park sounded like somebody on Dexedrine reading from a guidebook as he rattled off anodyne statistics: North Korea’s population, square kilometers, weather ... Spring is in the months March, April, May. Summer is June, July, August ... Our country is built on three revolutions, ideological, technical, cultural ... Juche, the ideology ascribed to the Great Leader, Kim II Sung, is the first philosophy that says man has decided everything. Everything is up to man.

The van traveled along a broad, empty boulevard. We pulled over at something that looked suspiciously like the Arc de Triomphe. In fact, it was the Arc de Triomphe, a duplicate of the original, but better.

“Bigger than Paris,” Mr. Park informed us.

It was a tour of what must be one of the world’s largest cases of edifice complex. And I noticed a peculiar kind of numerology in the building of North Korean monuments. Take the Juche tower, a 492-foot-tall pillar topped with a gold flame that flickers at night that was made from 25,550--70 times 365--blocks of stone to celebrate each day of Kim Il Sung’s life on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

At each tourist trap, we were urged to buy books and pamphlets from souvenir kiosks and to take pictures of the monuments. I pulled out my camera at the Juche tower to photograph children playing with a ball and jacks, but Mr. Park shooed me away.

In Beijing, a North Korean official had complained that the Western press portrayed his people as heartless automatons. He urged me to look for the human side of his country. “People are just trying to live a normal life,” he said.

But normal life wasn’t what the Messrs Park showed us. One reason foreigners were being admitted to the country was to witness an extravaganza of mass gymnastics, a spectacle that shows off North Koreans at their most robotic. We were ushered to foreigner-only seats near the field at Kim II Sung Stadium. It holds 100,000, and one half was filled with teenagers holding books of colored cards that they flashed to create various backdrops. They were human beings reduced to pixels, and so good at their tasks that they loaded their images faster than the Photoshop program on my laptop.

Flash. The cards showed a scene with a bright moon over a mountain and a flickering star heralding the birth of Kim Jong Il as children on the field executed perfect handstands and flips. Next up was a celebration of the miracles of North Korean agriculture (despite the famine in the ‘90s that killed 2 million) and flash, the cards switched to depict a tractor as children dressed as pumpkins danced on the field.

Then came women in purple tutus, twirling batons. They were replaced by formations of soldiers marching with legs swinging straight up from their hips.

It went on like this for some 90 minutes. Most of the people in the audience were North Korean, and from time to time, I glanced over at a section where locals were sitting. They had been bused in for the occasion--In North Korea you don’t just say, “Honey, think this might be a good night to take the kids to the mass games?”--and they looked bored, though they dutifully clapped.

We foreigners, on the other hand, were watching with jaws dropping and digital cameras whirring. We could tell our guides with all sincerity that we had seen nothing like it. The North Koreans have been staging these sorts of displays since the 1950s and are very proud of them. “Such a wonder cannot be produced unless the people are united in mind and purpose,” one visitor is quoted as saying in a government pamphlet.

As I watched the children on the field, I thought of my 5-year-old flopping on the floor in giggles when he finishes a somersault. The North Koreans would consider him a typical product of a spoiled imperialist culture.

I found their children terrifying. Some observers have compared North Korea’s mass gymnastics to an intricate Busby Berkeley musical, but to me it was more like “Triumph of the Will,” Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 cinematic paean to Hitler.

Are the North Koreans so naive that they don’t realize goose-stepping went out of fashion in the 1940s? Are they oblivious to the way foreigners are likely to perceive them?

At dinner after the show, we finally relaxed, or relaxed as much as is possible in North Korea, eating a delicious dish of thin-sliced beef and vegetables cooked in a boiling broth at the table. Our guides were drinking copious amounts of soju, a distilled spirit with a high alcohol content. We inquired whether it was possible to buy one of the Kim Il Sung pins that all North Koreans wear on their lapels.

“Sometimes foreigners do want to buy them,” responded the first Mr. Park. Then he said in all seriousness: “If they are really believers, it might be permitted.”

*

Our hotel was a cavernous place called the Kanggakdo, on an island in the middle of the Taedong River that cuts through Pyongyang. It was a little like Alcatraz, but with better amenities. There was a bowling alley, a swimming pool, a casino, a golf course and half a dozen places to eat. We were directed to Restaurant No. 2 for breakfast. We were the only customers. The North Korean technique seems to be to divide and conquer. Even if there were tourists on the same trip, we always dined in on our own and rode in our own van with our own driver and the Messrs Park.

By 7:30 a.m., we were moving briskly south on the six-lane Unification Highway, heading to the demilitarized zone that severs the peninsula, and to Panmunjom, where the truce ending the Korean War was signed in 1953. I saw fewer than a dozen vehicles on the 100-mile drive. There were rice paddies and fields of vegetables, all cooperative farms, we were told. The only private farming allowed takes place on tiny lots in front of apartment houses.

“We don’t promote private ownership,” one of the Mr. Park says. He opened his dark suit jacket to show off his clothing, which was given to him by his employer. “This is a socialist country. They should take care of me.”

I had been to Panmunjom before--on the South Korean side, where curious tourists use binoculars to peer at the North Koreans--but now it was like seeing a mirror image. Politically, everything was an exact opposite too. Despite abundant evidence that North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, the North Koreans accuse the Americans of starting the war.

Mr. Park had warned us gently in advance. “We love the American people,” he said. “This is government to government. You won’t be offended if the people talk about American imperialism?”

A severe-looking lieutenant colonel, Kim Kyong Kil, delivered a lecture, blaming the U.S. for many ills, including the continuing separation of the Korean peninsula, North Korea’s lack of electricity and its food shortages. In a museum of war-era photographs, one showed freshly severed heads propped up on bricks. An American atrocity, we were told.

“Now how do you feel as Americans?” the lieutenant colonel demanded of my colleague. (Luckily, as a woman, I was less often asked my opinion.) My colleague suggested that although governments might clash, people can work things out, preferably over a few drinks.

“What the world needs is more soju,” he said, deadpan.

The lieutenant colonel, until now dour-faced, erupted with laughter.

We were escorted to the Pueblo, the U.S. Navy spy ship that was captured along with its crew by the North Koreans in 1968. It’s now moored on the Taedong River. The 65-year-old guide, Kim Jung Rok, was a young naval officer who was there for the capture. He seemed thrilled to meet actual Americans.

We climbed down a steep ladder to go below deck for a look at the bunks of the U.S. sailors, where the North Koreans had been shocked to find girlie magazines. (North Korea was then and remains incredibly prudish.) Our guide recalled that none of the Koreans spoke English, so when they first interrogated the Pueblo’s captain they drew a picture of a large nose, an equal sign and a question mark to ask how many American crew members were on the ship.

Then everybody cheerfully posed for photographs.

*

Pyongyang is a model city of 2.5 million. Only certain people, selected for their loyalty and presentability, are permitted to live or even visit here. I know from North Korean defectors that a transgression almost certainly means deportation to a remote part of the country with far less food and electricity.

It looked a little like a European city, with shops on the ground floors of mid-rise apartments, but it was eerily uncrowded except at rush hour, when the electric streetcars were so jammed that people hung off the backs or out the open doors.

The sidewalks were wide. Evenly spaced willow trees dipped over the walkways along the Taedong River. There were some kiosks selling sweet potatoes and a sugary punch. And many apartments had fresh coats of paint, because South Korea recently had donated some unwanted colors--a pale wintergreen and a dusty Austro-Hungarian pink. It seems the regime had grown tired of hearing visitors remark that North Korea is monochromatic.

Pyongyang women have started to wear pink as well, not a Ralph Lauren preppie pink, but the garish hues that come from Chinese markets. I noticed that wedged heels are popular for both men and women, as North Koreans are sensitive about their height.

Our tour of the capital began at the 60-foot-tall bronze statue of Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader who died in 1994. Visitors are asked to buy flowers at 3 euros a bunch and to lay them at the Great Leader’s feet. My colleague and I passed the flowers back and forth, neither one of us wanting to do it, until he gallantly submitted and hastily plunked the bouquet at the base of the statue.

We rode the subway, from a station colorfully painted with socialist realist murals. It doubles as a bomb shelter, built so deep underground that people sit on the escalators and read on their way down. We were permitted to travel between two stations--the same two that all foreign tourists see.

As we boarded a train, swarms of teenagers in school uniforms rushed to catch it. Our car had empty seats, but the minute the kids noticed us, they looked horrified and dashed to another car. After a few minutes, our guides, embarrassed, ordered some boys to sit in our car. They muttered an apology for the children’s shyness.

By the end of the day, I was tired of being an ugly American. The Messrs Park never bothered to introduce us by anything other than our nationality. Meeguk--American-- they would call out of the van window as we pulled up to the tourist attractions.

I was relieved when darkness fell, providing a welcome cover for our glaring American-ness. The street lights weren’t on, and we could lurk in the shadows as we took a walk with our guides. People on their way home from work streamed past us, talking animatedly among themselves. I peered into the chockablock apartments, dimly lit by low-wattage bulbs and with identical portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il hung side by side on the otherwise bare walls.

We strolled past a state-run hairdresser’s. It was very orderly, with 10 chairs for women on one side, 10 for men on the other. We looked into the department store that we were told we couldn’t enter. There were bicycles. Televisions. Baby strollers. It wasn’t Macy’s, but the shelves weren’t bare either--at least not the shelves I could see.

I wondered what was it that the North Korean government didn’t want us to see? And it occurred to me that the government didn’t want ordinary North Koreans to see us. The day before I had snapped a picture of three little girls I had seen on the street. Decently dressed and cute, they were nothing to be embarrassed about, but the guides flinched when I flipped around my digital camera to show the girls their image.

For the rest of their lives, would they remember that the first time they saw a digital camera it was in the hands of an American?

I thought of a North Korean defector I had met a few years back in Seoul, a man who in the 1980s had seen a photograph of a striking South Korean worker. It was supposed to demonstrate the oppression of South Koreans, but what this North Korean noticed was that the oppressed worker had a jacket with a zipper and a ballpoint pen in its pocket. Unimaginable luxuries at the time.

The littlest thing can plant the seeds of doubt.

*

On our last day we went to the International Friendship Exhibition, which displays nearly 300,000 gifts to Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. The place is treated like the holy of the holies; you must cover your shoes with cloth slippers to enter. Flashing red lights on a big map of the world pinpoint the locations of the gift-givers, underscoring how many friends North Korea has.

We padded through the vast corridors, taking in such wonders as a life-size waxwork of Kim Il Sung donated by the Chinese, a bulletproof car from Stalin, embroidered stuffed kittens and ugly vases. I suspected--and my suspicions were confirmed when I spoke with other foreigners--that the tourists who really appreciate the museum are big devotees of kitsch. They can barely control their laugher when they talk about it.

North Korea would indeed be high comedy, if it weren’t for the 22 million people who have to live there.

That night, we went to a watering hole billed as the only one for expatriates in Pyongyang. It was on the ground floor of a United Nations compound housing the World Food Program, and it was packed, noisy and drunken. Three European businessmen danced on the bar.

Despite the conviviality, the conversation was grim. The place probably will close shortly, because the WFP is expected to be kicked out of the country. Pyongyang doesn’t want U.N. monitors poking around. The government is rolling back its economic reforms and banning the sale of grains and beans at markets. Kiosks that were opened over the summer have been closed. Among foreigners who visit Pyongyang, there is endless debate about whether the country is moving forward or backward. Relief officials, who first came here at the height of famine in the ‘90s, speak glowingly about new restaurants, better lighting, kiosks. People who were here before the economy went into a freefall say it is exactly the same, save for a few fresh coats of paint.

In fact, the skyline is dominated by the monstrous shell of a 105-story hotel that has been untouched since the early 1990s, when construction stopped. It’s as though somebody pressed the freeze-frame button on a whole country.

And the people? They don’t say much to foreigners, though the few we met did ask revealing questions. How did China get to be so rich? Are Russians happier now than they were in the old Soviet Union?

North Korea is like a car that suddenly stopped short, but its people are passengers hurtling forward into the great unknown.