Islander tells what it’s really like in North Korea

Kenneth Walker has been to the ends of the earth in his travels.

The Dering Harbor resident, an architectural historian, has spent time in the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, two of the most out-of-the-way and exotic places in the world. But nothing was remotely like the week of “total immersion” Mr. Walker said he spent last month in North Korea, or, to give the country its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). 

When asked for his immediate impressions of the country when he stopped by the Reporter’s office recently, Mr. Walker said, “No one can really explain North Korea.”

But he tried, noting that the ancient description of Korea as “the hermit kingdom” describes perfectly the northern part of the Korean peninsula.

The DPRK has been partioned from the West-leaning South Korea since 1953 in a deal cut to suspend hostilities in the Korean War. (It’s interesting to note, Mr. Walker said, that a treaty between the two countries was never signed, only an armistice, so both counties are technically still at war.)

Mr. Walker found multiple examples of an authoritarian regime dedicated to controlling every aspect of its citizens’ lives, a country where not only is Big Brother watching, but everyone else has an eye on you.

He also re-discovered a universal truth: People, no matter their nationality, are not so different from each other. “Like everywhere,” he said, “the people are better than their governments.”

Getting there took some doing. A member of the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) — an international business group that sponsors travel for educational and networking opportunities — Mr. Walker signed on to the group’s tour in mid-October.

After a 15-hour flight from JFK to Beijing, Mr. Walker met his fellow YPO travellers for another flight into Pyongyang, the capital. First impression? “A normal, up-to-date airport,” Mr. Walker said, but soon he entered into a capital city of three million people that was far from up-to-date and the direct opposite of “normal.”

He described a city where it was almost impossible to find a supermarket, but each apartment house had a market on the first floor where the food, although rationed, was free. How was the food? “Basic road kill,” Mr. Walker said. “Something called ‘beef’ that I didn’t recognize. Everything is loaded with kimchi [fermented Korean vegetables]. It’s like eating disinfectant.”

But, surprisingly, or maybe not, Mr. Walker added that no one on the tour got sick.

Not everyone is allowed to live in the capital. “The people in Pyongyang are the elite, or our middle-class version of elite,” Mr. Walker said. “You need a certain status to live there, like being in the military or some kind of manufacturing.”

His group was assigned “minders” who were with them constantly. The minders, he noted also had minders to watch them. No laptops were allowed and cellphones could only be used as cameras.

“There were lots of rules about cameras,” Mr. Walker said “For example, no pictures were allowed of anyone in uniform.”

That restricted a lot of photo ops, since the capital was swarming with uniformed people. The DPRK boasts the fourth largest land army in the world, with about 9.5 million people under arms, or close to 40 percent of the population.

There was not a single trace of advertising in the city, but billboards everywhere with faces from the Kim dynasty; grandfather, father and now son, which have ruled the DPRK for nearly seven decades.

The totalitarian regime has held power through a kind of civic religion called juche, Mr. Walker explained. It’s an ideology that puts a distinctly Korean spin on Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist belief and a cult of personality associated with the Kim family.

The YPO’s excursions included trips to the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas and some rides on Pyongyang’s subway. Here Mr. Walker was able to experience Koreans as simply people and not automatons. He recalled standing in the subway next to a woman holding an infant. When he patted the baby’s head, the mother gave him a brilliant smile.

On bus trips the group was minded by an attractive young woman who spoke English (she had a man who minded her and travelled with them). At one point she sang a Korean folk song in a beautiful voice. The foreign tourists all learned the song and surprised her by singing it to her near the end of the trip.

“She broke down and cried,” Mr. Walker said.

A visit to a high school was strictly choreographed down to responses to the tourists’ questions. “We asked them what their ambitions were and they said, “’To grow up to make weapons for world peace,’” Mr. Walker said.

But it turned fun, he added, when protocol was broken and they asked questions about dating.

After taking in an exhibition of taekwondo — “the athletes were the friendliest Koreans we met” — the group had an awesome, in the old fashioned sense of the word,
experience.

With only a few minutes notice they were taken to an enormous stadium packed for a rally celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the state. The YPO group members were the only foreign tourists. The event was three years in the planning and “there were 600,000 people there,” Mr. Walker said.

It took three-and-a-half hours, dominated by tens of thousands of uniformed men and women goose-stepping past a podium where DPRK and foreign officials watched.

But it was the memories of a subway encounter with a mother and child, spending time with some students, and a guide’s tearful emotions that have stayed with him of his journey to the hermit kingdom.