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If you liked this, you might want to take a look at Andrew Holloway's "A Year in Pyongyang", available free online at the link below. It describes the experien

If you liked this, you might want to take a look at Andrew Holloway's "A Year in Pyongyang", available free online at the link below. It describes the experience of a translator in 1987-88, but not all that much has changed in the years that have passed since. http://www.aidanfc.net/a_year_in_pyongyang.html http://www.aidanfc.net/a_year_in_pyongyang.html

the_af 12y ago
That link is very interesting. It seems written from an unusual perspective. It doesn't seem outright dismissive, for example. Thanks for posting it!
brownbat 12y ago
It's an excellent book. He's admittedly sympathetic to socialist ideals, but there are obvious visible problems in that state. So he generally does a nice job of "on the one hand, on the other hand..." (ie, On the one hand, some North Koreans would beg for cigarettes and alcohol off of foreigners, on the other hand, they are incredibly nice people and most of them would only take gifts after much insistence.) His asides become steadily more bitter as the book (and his time in NK) goes on though. One of my favorite bits is after he's gotten pretty caustic, right after explaining how he saw a bunch of students using rocks to pulverize discarded pavement at a nearly futile pace: It would be wrong of me to give the impression that the great socialist construction was uniformly stranded, literally, in the Stone Age. It was around this time that brand-new push-button automatic gates were installed at the entrance to the factory next door. These caused a sensation for the first few days. All day long the people's guard dolls were inundated with requests from the workers to give a demonstration of this miraculous innovation. They had read in Rodong Sinmun and heard on television and radio about the mythical robotisation and computerisation of Juche industry. Now before their very eyes the myth was being translated into reality, in their own humble factory. One could imagine them as they watched the gates glide open and shut at the press of a button, saying to one another, "If only our compatriots in the South could see how advanced we are becoming. Then they would be astonished and rise up as one to oust the puppet clique and drive out the US imperialist aggressor in order to share in our prosperity. But Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo tell lies about us and keep the people in darkness."
- the_af 12y ago
  Without getting into politics or ideology, I find his initial comment from the second chapter tremendously insightful: that people see what they expect to see. So foreigners expecting North Korea to be rotting hell-hole full of unhappy people will see exactly that, and will express disbelief at any nicety they see: "surely they are hiding something horrible". This made me think... a while ago, I saw this website by a Western photographer who took some recent pictures of North Korea (it's worth looking at the pictures, they are fascinating: http://instagram.com/dguttenfelder http://instagram.com/dguttenfelder). The pictures allow comments, and predictably most people comment things like "how terrible this dictatorship must be, poor oppressed North Koreans!" When presented with pictures of workers commuting to work, they comment "look how unhappy everyone looks." And they comment the same for a picture showing a band of schoolchildren practicing music, presumably at school: "look how serious the children look, they must feel really unhappy." In my opinion, regardless of the realities of the harsh life in North Korea, these commenters are projecting their own preconceptions of the country. They see what they expect to see. But I don't think their perceptions are necessarily accurate, because if I took a picture of commuters going to work in my country, they'd see similar unhappy faces. Almost no-one looks happy while taking the train to work. And regarding the schoolchildren... what people see in those pictures doesn't mesh with what the author of the book says: that regardless of everything else, children are truly happy in North Korea. Maybe life is truly harsh in North Korea, their leaders lie to the population all the time, and it's a truly impoverished country, but still the people are happy, or at least not stereotypically depressed all the time?
  - ivanca 12y ago
    Kids are happy anywhere, that's the beauty of it, and commuters look unhappy anywhere too. None of that is the problem with North Korea, the problem is much deeper. If you want to understand why please watch the video from this wonderful lady, who at a very young age understood that her country wasn't a good one: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-feffer/an-injury-to-all_b_3512759.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-feffer/an-injury-to-all_b...
    - 12y ago

the_af 12y ago

That link is very interesting. It seems written from an unusual perspective. It doesn't seem outright dismissive, for example. Thanks for posting it!

brownbat 12y ago

It's an excellent book. He's admittedly sympathetic to socialist ideals, but there are obvious visible problems in that state. So he generally does a nice job of "on the one hand, on the other hand..." (ie, On the one hand, some North Koreans would beg for cigarettes and alcohol off of foreigners, on the other hand, they are incredibly nice people and most of them would only take gifts after much insistence.) His asides become steadily more bitter as the book (and his time in NK) goes on though. One of my favorite bits is after he's gotten pretty caustic, right after explaining how he saw a bunch of students using rocks to pulverize discarded pavement at a nearly futile pace: It would be wrong of me to give the impression that the great socialist construction was uniformly stranded, literally, in the Stone Age. It was around this time that brand-new push-button automatic gates were installed at the entrance to the factory next door. These caused a sensation for the first few days. All day long the people's guard dolls were inundated with requests from the workers to give a demonstration of this miraculous innovation. They had read in Rodong Sinmun and heard on television and radio about the mythical robotisation and computerisation of Juche industry. Now before their very eyes the myth was being translated into reality, in their own humble factory. One could imagine them as they watched the gates glide open and shut at the press of a button, saying to one another, "If only our compatriots in the South could see how advanced we are becoming. Then they would be astonished and rise up as one to oust the puppet clique and drive out the US imperialist aggressor in order to share in our prosperity. But Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo tell lies about us and keep the people in darkness."

the_af 12y ago
Without getting into politics or ideology, I find his initial comment from the second chapter tremendously insightful: that people see what they expect to see. So foreigners expecting North Korea to be rotting hell-hole full of unhappy people will see exactly that, and will express disbelief at any nicety they see: "surely they are hiding something horrible". This made me think... a while ago, I saw this website by a Western photographer who took some recent pictures of North Korea (it's worth looking at the pictures, they are fascinating: http://instagram.com/dguttenfelder http://instagram.com/dguttenfelder). The pictures allow comments, and predictably most people comment things like "how terrible this dictatorship must be, poor oppressed North Koreans!" When presented with pictures of workers commuting to work, they comment "look how unhappy everyone looks." And they comment the same for a picture showing a band of schoolchildren practicing music, presumably at school: "look how serious the children look, they must feel really unhappy." In my opinion, regardless of the realities of the harsh life in North Korea, these commenters are projecting their own preconceptions of the country. They see what they expect to see. But I don't think their perceptions are necessarily accurate, because if I took a picture of commuters going to work in my country, they'd see similar unhappy faces. Almost no-one looks happy while taking the train to work. And regarding the schoolchildren... what people see in those pictures doesn't mesh with what the author of the book says: that regardless of everything else, children are truly happy in North Korea. Maybe life is truly harsh in North Korea, their leaders lie to the population all the time, and it's a truly impoverished country, but still the people are happy, or at least not stereotypically depressed all the time?
- ivanca 12y ago
  Kids are happy anywhere, that's the beauty of it, and commuters look unhappy anywhere too. None of that is the problem with North Korea, the problem is much deeper. If you want to understand why please watch the video from this wonderful lady, who at a very young age understood that her country wasn't a good one: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-feffer/an-injury-to-all_b_3512759.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-feffer/an-injury-to-all_b...
  - 12y ago