Aug. 3, 2008
One of the things Kim Il Sung (and now Kim Jong Il) apparently loved to do is provide "on-the-spot guidance." This entails visiting some factory or other facility, inspecting it, and then imparting some morsel of wisdom that is superhumanly brilliant. Such visits often comprise the bulk of newspaper and TV reports in North Korea. From the Mansudae Monument (or, as I am coming to think of it, the BB-KIS -- Big Bronze Kim Il Sung), we can see the Chollima statue, a landmark commemorating one such on-the spot session.
As Mr. Ri related the episode, after the Korean War (which, by the way, North Koreans are taught was started by South Korea and/or the U.S.), Kim Il Sung visited the sole functioning steel factory. At the time, it was producing 60,000 tons of steel a year. Kim Il Sung met with the factory bosses and told them that increasing output by 30,000 tons a year would really help North Korea rebuild. But they said that they could only add 10,000 tons a year. Then Kim Il Sung met with the factory workers and told them of his request. The next year, the factory turned out 120,000 tons of steel! The statue of the Chollima, a mythical character akin to a Pegasus and said to be capable of running 400 km a day, was thus erected in honor of the workers.
Next, it was off to Kim Il Sung Square and the Korean Central History Museum, a musty collection tracing the evolution of man from apes up to the 1900s (I guess they believe in evolution here?). Our female, English-speaking guide ushered us through the rooms, diligently explaining how Korea was the "cradle of civilization" and noting that Korea had movable type 200 years before Gutenberg invented his printing (this, in fact, is true). It was a rather tedious tour of pottery and scrolls and whatnot, although one highlight was when our guide stopped to play the best-known Korean folk song, "Arirang," on a metal xylophone. If you've never heard the song, it is beautiful. Here's a YouTube version.
Twice during the tour, our guide stopped at special items designated with red placards. The items, she informed us, were put on view thanks to the "wise guidance" of Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il. Father and son must like the museum: According to the giant posters on display, Kim Il Sung had offered on-the-spot guidance 118 times and Kim Jong Il nearly 70 times. I really wanted to quiz our guide and she if she could recite by memory each date the leaders visited. But then I thought, what if she messed up and got punished? Later, we would visit a department store, which had received only three paltry visits from the dynamic duo.
En route back to the hotel for lunch, I saw something that gave me a bit of a shock: An honest-to-god billboard advertisement for a car. Walter, our American tour coordinator who has been to North Korea dozens of times, informs us that the billboard promotes a joint-venture car, the Pyonghwa, assembled in North Korea. The company is majority owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. (To read more about the cars, click here). I wondered: Could this be the hole in the Communist dike, the beginnings of a consumer culture, where products are actually marketed to people? (Even people who aren't allowed to buy them?) And should I feel happy, sad, ambivalent? One thing North Koreans can at least enjoy is a life without the visual clutter of advertising. Of course, this is probably something they will only be able to appreciate in the event they experience life in a capitalist culture.
After lunch in a restaurant in the hotel basement, we are told to pack our things for our overnight trip. But there are more weird rules: Don't turn in your keys, because when we come back tomorrow, you'll have the same room. But no, you can't leave anything in your room. (Not even my poster of Pyongyang, which I bought here.) Mr. Ri could not give me a good reason why I couldn't leave anything in my room. Then he ended up taking my poster and putting it in his room, where apparently it was fine to leave things. I wondered: do they think we'll leave something bad, and if so, what? Democratic propaganda? Messages to the maids? A bomb? Air fresheners in mass quantities? It's a mystery. Or, as Mr. Ri put it to me, "A different social system."
Indeed.
Comments