After Huong learned to make kimchi, my family returned the favor to Ms. O by offering her, along with my other staff, some excellent (though foreigner-made) kimchi. They were surprised and delighted, claiming the taste was as good as theirs.
THE PYONGYANG PRIVILEGED
Pyongyang is considered by its residents, known as “Pyongyangites,” to be the capital of the Korean revolution against the Japanese occupiers of the first half of the twentieth century. Among North Korean cities, it’s the more privileged hometown inhabited by former anti-Japanese guerilla fighters, soldiers, and other Koreans who locals will tell you performed great deeds in the struggle against the Japanese colonial rule and the revolution. The Korean Workers’ Party calls this clique of former revolutionaries the “core class.” This honorific distinguishes them from the so-called “hostile class,” a bedeviled group that includes male ancestors who were landowners, entrepreneurs, and administrative staff working for the Japanese colonial regime (or as the party would say, “pro-Japanese collaborators”).
The third social group in this class society is the “wavering class,” a sort of middle ground between the first two. This one isn’t quite loyal enough to the people’s government, making it highly suspect. When the new class system was introduced in 1970 at the Fifth Party Congress, they were officially banned from staying in Pyongyang as well.
Living in Pyongyang, then, is a privilege for the core class of North Koreans. The city itself is a symbol of revolutionary struggle, having been flattened during a fire-bombing campaign by some 1,400 American aircraft during the Korean War. In the 1950s, the capital was rebuilt from scratch with a massive, almost inhumane effort that sacrificed countless lives. The North Korean people were lucky in one way, though, when they began receiving generous economic and technical help from Soviet Russia and other fraternal socialist states. This legacy would continue through the cold war: the DPRK was the biggest recipient of aid from socialist countries until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Unlike most foreigners living in Pyongyang, I traveled through large parts of the country and realized that the Koreans living in the capital, who accounted for 10 percent of the country’s total population, were by comparison very lucky. Food, housing, and infrastructure were substantially better than what I came across throughout the rest of the country. The gap between Pyongyang and other cities was not huge, but distant rural areas had unpaved roads, no bridges, no cars, no railways, no power pylons, and no cell phone towers. Indeed, Pyongyang gave off a triumphant and stately air. It reminded me of the metropolises in Eastern Europe’s socialist nations in the 1960s. Like them, Pyongyang had wide alleyways and streets, blockish apartment buildings, and a welter of revolutionary monuments. Everywhere I looked, the stone faces of memorialized soldiers, workers, and farmers stared back at me, their faces etched with expressions that appeared self-confident about the future of their country. The atmosphere undoubtedly made people feel proud to be North Korean.
PYONGYANG’S BUILDINGS AND MONUMENTS
Pyongyang is a city of grandiosity, and the sheer ingenuity of the buildings and monuments overwhelmed me. The Grand Theater, with a surface area of 322,920 square feet (30,000 square meters)—an area larger than five American football fields—allows 700 artists to perform in front of 2,200 spectators. The Grand People’s Study House, one of the world’s largest libraries, extends across a space of 1,076,391 square feet (100,000 square meters) and can hold up to thirty million books.
North Korea is also known for its two circuses: one run by the military and another—and some would say even more impressive—troupe that performs on a surface area of 753,473 square feet (70,000 square meters), holding daily performances in front of up to 3,500 spectators. The Mansudae Assembly Hall, where North Korea’s parliament, known as the Supreme People’s Assembly, holds its sessions, has an area of 484,375 square feet (45,000 square meters). It’s a stretch equivalent to eight football fields. The Tower of the Juche Idea (Juche Tower), built on Kim Il Sung’s seventieth birthday, is covered with 25,550 pieces of granite, each representing a day in the life of the Great Leader.
The Mangyongdae Children’s Palace is a six-story building where youngsters can dabble in extracurricular activities like martial arts, music, and foreign languages. It’s at the Street of the Heroic Youth and contains hundreds of rooms that can accommodate 5,400 children. One iconic luxury building and the second-largest operating hotel in the country, the Koryo Hotel, sits in central Pyongyang with a total floor space of 904,170 square feet (84,000 square meters), comprising two 470-foot (143-meter)-high connected towers with revolving restaurants on top. Up to 1,000 guests can stay in 504 rooms on 45 floors—a height that some would consider an urban feat in Pyongyang.
The statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il stand before the mosaic of Paekdu Mountain. Kim Il Sung’s statue was built in 1972 in honor of his sixtieth birthday. According to Confucian tradition, the sixtieth birthday is a particularly celebrated event because it closes a cycle, at the end of which the names of the years are repeated in Chinese and Korean.
In addition to the behemoth buildings, I gasped at the surfeit of monuments. The most recognizable shrine—lined across foreign newspapers and photographs of this people’s republic—is the 60-foot (18-meter)-high bronze statue of the eternal president, Kim Il Sung. His figure stands triumphantly in front of a mosaic on a wall, a dense packing of stones that make up a panorama of Paekdu Mountain, known as the birthplace of the Korean people. That image also has a special meaning in North Korean culture because Kim Il Sung and his guerrillas fought the Japanese colonialists from this mountain. In April 2012, authorities revealed a second bronze figure of the late leader Kim Jong Il, positioned next to his father’s statue (please see illustration on previous page).
What strikes visitors here is the embellishment of the Kims’ features, making their statues look manlier and stronger—in a manner similar to how sculptors emphasized the rakish qualities of Roman emperors. North Korean publications call the Kims the “peerless leaders.” They are presented as benevolent rulers who, according to Confucian belief, have earned gratitude and loyalty. Confucianism was the dominant value system of the Chosun Dynasty from 1392 to 1910, before Korea was colonized by Japan until 1945.
Although the Korean Workers’ Party rejected the Confucian philosophy, which stemmed from feudal China, the authoritarian strain from Confucianism did not disappear. Rather, it was transformed by the wave of socialism and Juche, the ideology of self-reliance. In other words, the old Confucian tradition of repaying debts of gratitude with unquestioned devotion is firmly upheld today, as seen in the numerous visitors bowing in front of the statues.
Other effigies take on mythical qualities, drawing on the potency of Korean legend to uphold the glory of the state. The statue of the Chollima, the Korean equivalent of a winged horse or Pegasus and the largest of its kind in Pyongyang, is 50 feet (16 meters) high and stands on a 110-foot (34-meter)-tall granite footing in a 53,820 square foot (5,000-square meter) park. According to a Korean myth, this untamed horse could travel 245 miles (393 kilometers), about the equivalent of the north-south length of the entire Korean Peninsula, in a single day. On the back of the horse sits a worker with a message from the party Central Committee and a female farmer with rice, flying up to the skies to spread the party’s glorious message all over the country.
The Chollima symbol has also been used on other occasions, such as to promote rapid economic development with the slogan “Charge forward with the speed of the Chollima!” which is meant to inspire people to work hard. The Chollima movement in the 1960s was the Korean version of the Chinese Great Leap Forward movement in the late 1950s. But Kim Il Sung’s economic drive was more successful than the Chinese model. North Korea completed its 1957-61 five-year plan two years ahead of schedule, which it celebrated in 1961 by building the bronze Chollima statue.
