water and sewage system. Any capital in the world, regardless of its political system, should have a sewage system that protects its residents from waterborne diseases like cholera, a scourge of the developing world. The project was funded by the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development, a financing body for development projects run by the Kuwaiti government. But certain types of software that were needed for the project were hit by sanctions from Washington. The American embargo was structured so that multinational companies that do business in North Korea could lose their stakes in the U.S., and could face future legal hurdles there. Because those companies were nervous, the Kuwaiti government awarded the contract to smaller Asian suppliers that didn’t need to fear the ire of Uncle Sam.
On another occasion in 2008, I had to fear for the survival of my pharmaceutical factory, PyongSu, a company into which I put my heart and soul. I was its managing director around the same time the United Nations slapped even more sanctions on North Korea in the mid-2000s in protest of its nuclear tests. Because of a very poorly timed move by international groups, I was no longer allowed to import certain chemicals for laboratory tests even though they were designed to bring better health care to the countryside.
It’s just one example of how sanctions, applied in a shortsighted way, can hurt regular people who need health care instead of the government they’re targeting. Though in theory health care and medicine is free for all in North Korea, the practice of bribe-taking means, in practice, that people depend on an irregular supply of pharmaceuticals from foreign donors and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
Despite all my efforts to cope with sanctions, my biggest headaches didn’t come from dealing with the nations that had blacklisted Pyongyang. Even more problems, to my surprise, came from ill-informed investors, employers, principals (a term for the business owners who appointed me as their agent), customers, suppliers, and journalists who, for the most part, didn’t make much of an effort to understand North Korean society, choosing to fall back into stereotypes. The country itself was, quite often, of marginal and contemptible importance to them. They showed up eager to invest in what they thought would be another emerging market that followed the rise of China. But they didn’t shake off the cookie-cutter views that all North Koreans were Stalinist ants. They sneered at my business queries and explanations as to how the country works and degraded the abilities of North Koreans to think for themselves.
Apart from the business side of things, I had a pleasant family life. My wife and my young daughter stayed for some time with me in Pyongyang, moving back and forth between there and our other home of Vietnam. We enjoyed ourselves despite the lack of running water and electricity, and managed to live with the absence of dairy products in the summertime. (The lack of refrigeration in hot summer months cut back the supply of these items.)
Still, with my long working hours, I very much regret not always spending enough time with my family. I therefore dedicate this book to my wife and daughter.
North Korea gave them great life experiences too. For some time, my Vietnamese spouse worked as a Swiss government-sponsored consultant to the Ministry of Light Industries. She led a project aimed at building up the small leather industry, using as its basis the valuable skins of the two million goats that were left unprocessed after being slaughtered. Unfortunately, the project did not materialize. Our toddler, who learned to walk in Pyongyang, spent about three hours every day at the kindergarten of the Korea International School. While there, foreign children were surprised to learn from their North Korean teachers that Kim Il Sung, the founding father of the nation, is also the symbolic father of all children in Korea.
Even with that propaganda, I realized that North Koreans are first and foremost human beings, not robots who follow the dictates of the Dear Leader. They experience the same sorrows and worries, happy and sad moments, and hopes and aspirations of humans all over the world.
In this book I will share with you my unforgettable experience. For some readers, my story will be an entertaining plunge into this strange, alien world, while for those of a scholarly bent, it could reveal much about the inner workings of this remote nation.
Regardless of what you take from this memoir, I hope you’ll be inspired to put aside the perceptions you may have about North Korea. Life in the hermit state is difficult, but it is not as outlandish as they say. The nation, unknown to many, is full of opportunities for curious foreigners, like business, tourism, teaching English, and even training sports teams in Pyongyang.
In the end, this “useful idiot” earned a comfortable living and happily shared his knowledge and skills for the good of regular North Koreans. He tried to be a sort of cultural translator, clearing up misunderstandings and building bridges between the state and the outside world. He was happy bringing good-quality but inexpensive medicine to this impoverished country and teaching North Koreans to do business in an ever globalizing world. And as the young Kim ascends to power, that globalization is taking a greater toll on a nation many think is stuck in the cold war. As with Deng Xiaoping before him, business is the way forward for Kim’s country; with that, we begin my story.
Felix Abt
Nha Trang, Vietnam
December 2012
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
