One of the best books written about North Korea is Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick. In it, she brilliantly reconstructs the lives of ordinary people living in Chongjin in the remote northeast of the country. I say “reconstruct” because her narrative is pieced together almost entirely from talking to exiles who managed to flee the country. Demick visited North Korea several times, but learnt little of value. “Visitors hewed to a carefully selected itinerary of monuments,” she wrote. They were assigned “minders” who ensured “there was no contact permitted with ordinary citizens”.
Until last week, I had never been to North Korea. I always felt faintly queasy opining about a country I had never set foot in. This month, finally, I managed to get there as part of a small delegation with the EU-Asia Centre, a think-tank dedicated to promoting better ties between Europe and Asia. Our five-day trip took us to Pyongyang, to the demilitarised zone on the tense border with South Korea and to Mangyongdae, a mountainous region that is the birthplace of Kim Il Sung, the nation’s founder. So what, if anything, did I learn?
The first is that Pyongyang – or at least what I was able to see of it – looks slightly less grim than I had imagined. True, many of the austere buildings have all the charm of a Soviet housing estate. True, too, there are few shops to be seen. The city, designed to project power and prestige, is built on a decidedly inhuman scale. Yet there is more bustle than you might expect. There are more cars than just a few years ago, many of them new. It is a development that has necessitated the installation of traffic lights. Many women wear high heels in a variety of fashions, imported from China and evidently not manufactured in Pyongyang Shoe Factory Number 1. There’s an ice rink and a bowling alley and some pleasantly manicured parks.