Читать книгу A Capitalist in North Korea - Felix Abt - Страница 9

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 of the then-leader Kim Jong Il, which is a daily ritual in the North Korean press. The papers themselves are pillars of national glory that foreigners were expected not to step on or throw away—or else they’d take the next flight home. Below Kim’s likeness, the paper boasted, “Kim Jong Il, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, chairman of the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] National Defense Commission, and supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army,” was inspecting army units.

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 distant rural areas had unpaved roads, no bridges, no cars, no railways, no power pylons, and no cell phone towers. Indeed, Pyongyang gave off a triumphant and stately air. It reminded me of the metropolises in Eastern Europe’s socialist nations in the 1960s. Like them, Pyongyang had wide alleyways and streets, blockish apartment buildings, and a welter of revolutionary monuments. Everywhere I looked, the stone faces of memorialized soldiers, workers, and farmers stared back at me, their faces etched with expressions that appeared self-confident about the future of their country. The atmosphere undoubtedly made people feel proud to be North Korean.

PYONGYANG’S BUILDINGS AND MONUMENTS

Pyongyang is a city of grandiosity, and the sheer ingenuity of the buildings and monuments overwhelmed me. The Grand Theater, with a surface area of 322,920 square feet (30,000 square meters)—an area larger than five American football fields—allows 700 artists to perform in front of 2,200 spectators. The Grand People’s Study House, one of the world’s largest libraries, extends across a space of 1,076,391 square feet (100,000 square meters) and can hold up to thirty million books.

North Korea is also known for its two circuses: one run by the military and another—and some would say even more impressive—troupe that performs on a surface area of 753,473 square feet (70,000 square meters), holding daily performances in front of up to 3,500 spectators. The Mansudae Assembly Hall, where North Korea’s parliament, known as the Supreme People’s Assembly, holds its sessions, has an area of 484,375 square feet (45,000 square meters). It’s a stretch equivalent to eight football fields. The Tower of the Juche Idea (Juche Tower), built on Kim Il Sung’s seventieth birthday, is covered with 25,550 pieces of granite, each representing a day in the life of the Great Leader.

The Mangyongdae Children’s Palace is a six-story building where youngsters can dabble in extracurricular activities like martial arts, music, and foreign languages. It’s at the Street of the Heroic Youth and contains hundreds of rooms that can accommodate 5,400 children. One iconic luxury building and the second-largest operating hotel in the country, the Koryo Hotel, sits in central Pyongyang with a total floor space of 904,170 square feet (84,000 square meters), comprising two 470-foot (143-meter)-high connected towers with revolving restaurants on top. Up to 1,000 guests can stay in 504 rooms on 45 floors—a height that some would consider an urban feat in Pyongyang.

The statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il stand before the mosaic of Paekdu Mountain. Kim Il Sung’s statue was built in 1972 in honor of his sixtieth birthday. According to Confucian tradition, the sixtieth birthday is a particularly celebrated event because it closes a cycle, at the end of which the names of the years are repeated in Chinese and Korean.

In addition to the behemoth buildings, I gasped at the surfeit of monuments. The most recognizable shrine—lined across foreign newspapers and photographs of this people’s republic—is the 60-foot (18-meter)-high bronze statue of the eternal president, Kim Il Sung. His figure stands triumphantly in front of a mosaic on a wall, a dense packing of stones that make up a panorama of Paekdu Mountain, known as the birthplace of the Korean people. That image also has a special meaning in North Korean culture because Kim Il Sung and his guerrillas fought the Japanese colonialists from this mountain. In April 2012, authorities revealed a second bronze figure of the late leader Kim Jong Il, positioned next to his father’s statue (please see illustration on previous page).

What strikes visitors here is the embellishment of the Kims’ features, making their statues look manlier and stronger—in a manner similar to how sculptors emphasized the rakish qualities of Roman emperors. North Korean publications call the Kims the “peerless leaders.” They are presented as benevolent rulers who, according to Confucian belief, have earned gratitude and loyalty. Confucianism was the dominant value system of the Chosun Dynasty from 1392 to 1910, before Korea was colonized by Japan until 1945.

Although the Korean Workers’ Party rejected the Confucian philosophy, which stemmed from feudal China, the authoritarian strain from Confucianism did not disappear. Rather, it was transformed by the wave of socialism and Juche, the ideology of self-reliance. In other words, the old Confucian tradition of repaying debts of gratitude with unquestioned devotion is firmly upheld today, as seen in the numerous visitors bowing in front of the statues.

Other effigies take on mythical qualities, drawing on the potency of Korean legend to uphold the glory of the state. The statue of the Chollima, the Korean equivalent of a winged horse or Pegasus and the largest of its kind in Pyongyang, is 50 feet (16 meters) high and stands on a 110-foot (34-meter)-tall granite footing in a 53,820 square foot (5,000-square meter) park. According to a Korean myth, this untamed horse could travel 245 miles (393 kilometers), about the equivalent of the north-south length of the entire Korean Peninsula, in a single day. On the back of the horse sits a worker with a message from the party Central Committee and a female farmer with rice, flying up to the skies to spread the party’s glorious message all over the country.

The Chollima symbol has also been used on other occasions, such as to promote rapid economic development with the slogan “Charge forward with the speed of the Chollima!” which is meant to inspire people to work hard. The Chollima movement in the 1960s was the Korean version of the Chinese Great Leap Forward movement in the late 1950s. But Kim Il Sung’s economic drive was more successful than the Chinese model. North Korea completed its 1957-61 five-year plan two years ahead of schedule, which it celebrated in 1961 by building the bronze Chollima statue.

A small section of the Pyongyang city map, marking just a handful of its many grand buildings.

Not every building in North Korea is a drab, Soviet-style block. The People’s Culture Palace and the People’s Grand Study House have impressive traditional Korean tiled roof designs. Parts of the city even have a slight European touch: Greek-style theaters, neoclassical congress halls, and an Arch of Triumph have been built, the final as a tribute to Korean resistance fighters against Japanese colonialism from 1925 to 1945. The arch is similar to Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, a testament of national power commissioned by Napoleon in the early nineteenth century.

The only minor difference is that it is 30 feet (10 meters) higher, but overall it gives an international flair to the narrative of North Korean glory. Other examples aren’t quite façades of antiquity, but give off a more contemporary chic vibe. Wavelike and cylindrical apartment blocks line the relatively affluent neighborhoods along Liberation Street (in Korean, Kwangbok Street), located about 5 miles (8 kilometers) west of the city center.

In 1991, Kim Jong Il coined the term “Juche architecture,” which he defined as the expression of “the harmony of national virtues and the modernity in the design.” It was meant to develop a distinctive national identity, separate from the rest of the world, although Soviet influence was imposed on North Korean edifices.

These projects also display a sort of North Korean craft-excellence, the ability of the efficient command government to pool together labor and resources and to impress their imagery on citizens. In most laissez-faire economies, scarce resources usually aren’t allocated so quickly and efficiently.

NEIGHBORHOOD LIFE

Apartment blocks could go somewhat high to forty floors, a minor feat that places Pyongyang ahead of poor but growing cities like Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and Yangon, Burma. Still, while many around the world enjoy the view of a penthouse flat up top, North Koreans preferred, for more practical reasons, modest rooms near the bottom. Elevators frequently broke down thanks to the regular power cuts, a nightmare because they’d instead have to take a dozen flights of stairs.

When there was no electricity to operate the water pumps, residents carried empty buckets and tubs to taps on the street, or they fetched their water from rivers for cooking and washing. In the countryside, where everyday life remains starkly different from that of the capital, people get water from simple old village wells. During the wintertime, people carry water upstairs as water pipes are bound to freeze, at least in the upper floors of unheated buildings.

Regardless of power supplies, I had to get used to the fact that we didn’t have running water all the time. I had to adjust to my new schedule, as a privileged foreigner, in which I could enjoy running water only three times a day in tandem with meals: between 7 and 8 A.M., at noontime for an hour, and from 6 to 8 P.M.

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 in a number of facilities. However, three years after the launch in 2008 of a telecom joint venture’s 3G cell phone network, it hit 1 million subscribers. According to a study of the U.S.-based Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, 60 percent of Pyongyang residents aged twenty to fifty now use cell phones. By 2013 the number of subscribers doubled to 2 million.

Overall, the quality of life improved during my seven-year stay. I eventually noticed more exhaust pipes from makeshift heating devices heating what would otherwise have been bitterly cold apartments in the winter. More balconies were used by families to cultivate animals to be sold for a profit or to generate meat for the family, a sign of the privatization of the socialist economy discussed in depth later.

Items as diverse as war memorabilia and Japanese Hello Kitty bags were scattered around the rooms. To cope with frequent power cuts after nightfall, flashlights, candles, and matches were common. When I was in charge of a pharmaceutical joint venture, we took advantage of that need by giving away small pocket flashlights as promotional gifts. They were quite a hit, a small gadget that solved a regular problem for North Koreans.

Blankets were another household item, providing warmth during the harsh winters. The walls were usually covered with rough wall-paper from recycled paper, and floors used to be covered by paper. They’re now more often covered with plastic-like vinyl, which is cheaper than hardwood, tiles, or carpets and more durable and easy to keep clean.

Like the country itself, apartments were kept meticulously clean. Until the 1990s a so-called sanitation month was proclaimed by the government twice a year, during which all homes had to be repaired and scrubbed down. Now campaigns are less frequently held and less followed, but homes are still amazingly tidy given the shortage of water and detergent.

Everything had a cover: a cover for the radio, the fan, the sewing machine, and the television, often beautifully embroidered, as many North Korean women learn to embroider during their childhood. A large number of dwellers used to embellish their homes not only with embroidery but also with potted houseplants and even aquariums with various kinds of fish. In a country better known for its food shortages than for its livability, there were popular specialized shops that sold aquariums and accessories. It was not the North Korea I saw on CNN. Nor was it the “heart of darkness” that I anxiously awaited ten years ago.