company suddenly dropped my plan, arguing that my North Korean residency wasn’t appropriate and couldn’t be covered. Then, after I opened a profile with a North Korean address on LinkedIn, the account was cancelled. A fellow expatriate, I should add, had his credit card revoked once he disclosed his Pyongyang address.
Those companies weren’t seeing the entire picture; my first impression was that the country and its people, and even its airplanes, seemed quite “normal,” for lack of a better word, like when I was greeted by a warm smile.
The airplane was one of several Ilyushin Il-62s that were bought in the Soviet Union in 1982. The seats were larger than those of other Asian airlines, which greatly added to the comfort of the tall and overweight Westerner that I was. The cabin looked clean and well maintained. Though the model itself was the oldest aircraft I’ve ever flown, invented in 1963, it had a solid safety record compared to its later generations. Pilots today even note that it flies smoothly and is famous for steady mechanics alongside scarce electronics.
The standards were indeed what would be expected with any global airline. When I opened my laptop aboard another flight, a nervous hostess immediately rushed over and ordered me to shut it down. She apparently feared the equipment would interfere with sensitive electronics that the airplane did not even have! Precaution was the name of the game here. I was also impressed by the flight skills of the pilots, especially in spring, when they dealt with enormous high winds and dust storms from China. When the airplane was shaking in a storm that, at times, was quite a frightening experience, I always knew in the back of my mind that the pilots were highly professional in their work.
Before takeoff, revolutionary and patriotic music whistled over the loudspeakers. Instead of the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times, or Time magazine, I was given a copy of the English-language government mouthpiece, the Pyongyang Times.
I wasn’t surprised at the stories that were splashed all over the newspaper. The front page boldly carried a portrait of the then-leader Kim Jong Il, which is a daily ritual in the North Korean press. The papers themselves are pillars of national glory that foreigners were expected not to step on or throw away—or else they’d take the next flight home. Below Kim’s likeness, the paper boasted, “Kim Jong Il, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, chairman of the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] National Defense Commission, and supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army,” was inspecting army units.
Clearly, North Korea was a place where important things happened, I thought with a chuckle. And misguided foreigners like me still hadn’t learned of the worldwide significance of the Dear Leader’s grand inspections. Other news items of great excitement to any rational individual ranged from “Pyongyang to host Kimjongilia [a flower species named after Kim Jong Il] festival,” to “Young builders at power station construction site” and “Fodder additive developed” to “Company increases food output.” Other pieces raised hackles about the dangers of a militant Japan and the ghastly human rights records of the American government.
I closed the newspaper. I had no more doubts about where I was heading.
To its credit, Air Koryo was generous, and even Western airlines came off as stingier. The stewardesses served a full free meal with a beverage. The lunch was not exactly a feast, but it was edible. The fried fish, although cold, was tasty. It came in a dark salty sauce with rice, canned fruit, kimchi, and sponge cake. Years later, in the mid-2000s, when at long last fast food became popular in North Korea, Air Koryo gave me a sandwich that resembled a hamburger and, to Korean customers, minced meat bread. The burger joints that later emerged in Pyongyang used the same expression, “minced meat bread,” on their menus in lieu of our Western “hamburger.”
All the flight attendants were young and attractive females. When I tried to engage in some conversation, I noticed that they got shy. Their vocabulary was limited to a few essential sentences that a North Korean flight attendant was supposed to know, and the airline probably didn’t want them to converse with outsiders beyond the politically correct lexicon they were given. After all, they could never be sure about who was sitting in the airplane and what intentions they harbored.
In business class, flight attendants wore the bright red chosŏn-ot, the traditional Korean dress known more popularly in South Korea as a hanbok. Other flight attendants were dressed in bright red jackets. Red had a strong meaning for North Koreans, since it was on their national flag. Their hair was pulled tightly back and they were all wearing white gloves. Their faces were powdered to make the skin appear white, a look that is considered pristine and proper all over East Asia.
When the airplane crossed over the Yalu River—the geographic boundary that separates China from North Korea—a proud flight attendant joyously proclaimed that we were officially in the pure and revolutionary country. “Fifty-seven years ago, our president, Kim Il Sung, came across the river with great ambition for his country and to liberate his country from Japanese imperialism,” she said over the loudspeaker. Over the coming years I would hear that sentence spoken in North Korean airplanes so often that I learned it by heart.
Pyongyang Sunan International Airport was moderately busy with, on average, one to two international flights per day—a number that seems small but is impressive given the political isolation of North Korea.
An hour and a half after takeoff, we arrived at the Pyongyang Sunan International Airport. The government always had the same routine. First, uniformed officers led the passengers to the bus that brought us to the airport hall. Immigration officers were sitting in three closed cabins, equipped with curtains, looking down on the person whose passport details they were checking. Years later, perhaps in a public relations move, these cabins were replaced by friendlier, transparent cabins without roofs, allowing the officers better eye contact with their “customers.”
After giving up my mobile phone and slogging through customs, I was welcomed by three North Koreans with winsome smiles. Two of them were my new staff members, and the other man was the director of the foreign relations department of the then-Ministry of Machinery and Metal-Working Industries (the organization that sponsored my visa). That role carried a heavy burden because if I behaved poorly, he would be held responsible.
The weight of my actions didn’t seem to bother them. The gleeful employees whisked me away in a minibus to Pyongyang. An exciting journey in this very special country was just beginning.
On the road downtown, I was greeted with a banner that read, “Independence, Peace, Friendship.” These slogans were commonplace, but they give the impression to most foreign visitors that North Koreans are brainwashed. I knew all the clichés spread by the media, and arrived with healthy skepticism toward claims that North Koreans are mindless henchmen.
WAKING UP TO KIMCHI
I will never forget my first breakfast, bright and early at 7 A.M. in Pyongyang. I munched on the staple of the Korean diet, kimchi, which is usually a pickled China cabbage mixed with chili, ginger, garlic, and sugar. It came with rice, eggs, and soup and tasted raw, sweet, and spicy. Like many Westerners, I found the kimchi unbearably hot and ordered another coffee to wash the chili down.
Nevertheless, the taste grew on me, leading me to become something of a kimchi aficionado. My Vietnamese wife, Huong, also enjoyed the dish and learned to make it in all sorts of ways, both spicy and not spicy, from our North Korean maid, Ms. O.
Ms. O was highly educated, and as a medical doctor by training she spoke English and had many talents, such as fixing toilets and calming down fussy children. Even though she was a doctor, working for a foreigner brought in a better income and working conditions. One perk was a daily warm shower in the employer’s house, which wasn’t available in
