North Korea on Parade Article #: 14741   Section: LIFE - TRAVEL File Size: 4,832 words Issue Date: 1 / 1996 Start Page: 150 Author: Sheila McNulty Sheila McNulty, formerly of the Associated Press in Bangkok, now works for AP-Dow Jones in New York. The world's least-traveled country, one of the last communist outposts, opens its doors for a regimented tour.        Thousands of children performed a flawless routine of splits, cartwheels, and back flips in alarmingly perfect formation to the beat of a revolutionary opera. As the last song ended, the girls and boys shouted, "We miss the smile of the Great Leader," and then each of them burst into tears. They quickly raced from the field to the deafening applause of a hundred thousand stony-faced North Koreans.                I felt sick to my stomach. I could not help thinking that the government had invited us to North Korea specifically to witness this daunting display of human conditioning, to flaunt its power over the people--a power that obviously could be marshaled against the outside world, should the international pressure against North Korea become too strong. A Japanese tourist was as disturbed as I was. "Totalitarian demonstration. Propaganda," spat Yoshinobu Mori, thirty-six, of Kogoshima, as the North Koreans--the men in dark blue suits, the women in long traditional dresses--simply stood up and quietly filed out of the stadium.                I went to North Korea as a tourist, to see what I could of the most isolated country in the world. Pyongyang had thrown open its doors to twenty thousand foreigners for the April-May International Sports and Culture Festival for Peace as part of a broader policy of welcoming tourists and their hard currency, for a short time, into what is perhaps the world's least-traveled nation.                The main event was a Hulk Hoganesque pro wrestling match in which the event's sponsor, Antonio Inoki, founder of the New Japan Professional Wrestling Federation and a member of the Japanese House of Counselors, took on Rick Flair, the World Wrestling Federation heavyweight world champion from the United States. Inoki, clad in black briefs and matching boots, stomped on Flair, decked out in a purple bikini and boots, as rap music and rock and roll boomed from loudspeakers under the painted gaze of the late Great Leader Kim Il Sung.                As Muhammad Ali, behind sunglasses, watched with us from his seat in the VIP section, the tightly wound North Koreans, all with tiny portraits of the Great Leader pinned to their chests, really let loose. They stamped their feet in delight on the stands of the May Day Stadium until the pounding drowned out their own cheers at the spectacle in the ring below. I couldn't help but wonder how they could simply retreat into the night after this without demanding to know what other delights were out there, just beyond their heavily guarded borders.                For North Korea is truly in a world of its own. Indeed, I remember that as the Air Koryo jet took off from Bangkok, I was nervous about flying to a country that was taunting the international community with its capacity to create nuclear weapons. The country had few allies, so, should something happen to the aircraft, we would be barred throughout most of the five-hour trip from making an emergency landing. The cabin being hot and stuffy, I pulled out the wooden fan in the seat pocket in front of me and swished it back and forth, trying to cool off. The stewardesses handed out colored sugar water to drink and hard-covered coffee-table books exalting Kim Il Sung and North Korea for in-flight reading. I was given a book on the revolutionary opera The Sea of Blood, which I paged through to the beat of the martial music from the speakers above me.                As we descended upon Pyongyang, the night was pitch black, save for a few flickering pinpricks of light in the distance. The captain extinguished the lights in the cabin as we pulled up to the terminal, leaving us fumbling around in the darkness for our belongings. Several dozen unsmiling men and women stood waiting for us outside the terminal, under a yards-high portrait of the Great Leader, who had died in July 1994. Beyond them, the cavernous terminal was lit up by chandeliers in the cold night air. One man stood out from the crowd, his blue-and-white polka-dotted shirt signaling a splash of individuality I would not see again in North Korea. He stepped forward to help me get past the customs agents, who were emptying the pockets of the Briton in front of me. Our tour's English-speaking guide, a young university student, then stepped forward and introduced himself as Comrade Ri. He led us, in the same dark blue business suit he would wear for a week, to the bus, and we headed for our hotel.                The capital was as deserted as the Khmer Rouge's Cambodia at 10 p.m. Comrade Ri chattered nervously to us about nothing in particular while the bus quietly made the half-hour journey, through two armed checkpoints, to the hotel. He assured us we were "lucky to see the beauty of Pyongyang by night." We struggled to catch a glimpse of it, but, pressed up against the windows, we saw only darkness until we pulled up at a hotel in the sports complex, on the outskirts of the city.                The lobby shop boasted an array of peculiar souvenirs: pure gold commemorative coins of the Great Leader, a smattering of translated books penned personally by Kim Il Sung, postcards of the capital's blocklike architecture, even canned watermelon from China. We decided to see what else was out there before buying anything and headed up to the rotating rooftop restaurant for a drink.                As we looked out the windows into the black night, sipping Japanese beer and American soft drinks, we tried to ignore the restaurant's rusty engine, which stuck every few minutes as it slowly jolted the room around in a circle. Comrade Ri promised us that, come morning, there would be much to see of the country Kim Il Sung had built on the ruins of the Korean War. "Our people put the ashes away," he said. "And on the ashes they built this modern Pyongyang, the most beautiful city in the world."                With visions of that utopian city floating in my mind, I headed down to my room. The television and radio did not work. I opened the window to listen to the sounds of the city, but there was only a heavy silence--not even a cricket could be heard in the distance. After unsticking myself from the freshly painted toilet seat, I stepped into the warm shower, doing my best to tune out the jarring sounds of the rasping pipes. The wake-up call was just five hours away.                Kimchi for breakfast                 Our tour was eager for coffee when we came down for breakfast, but we were told the restaurant did not serve it. One intrepid member of our group, who had been to North Korea before, quietly opened a jar of instant that he had brought with him from home. As we eyed it greedily, he said he had noticed some on sale in the lobby shop. Everyone scrambled out to buy enough grounds to get through the week of fourteen-hour days. And the waitresses brought us hot water so we could enjoy a cup with breakfast, which included a plate of cold fried eggs, a pot of flavorless rice gruel, and a dish of spicy kimchi. It was only the beginning of the $215-per-day tour, so everyone tucked into the food with good humor. We were on the bus by 7 a.m. and finally out on the streets.                But the streets were eerily empty. Oh, there were sporadic clusters of people: a rigid line of adults waiting patiently for a bus; red-scarved children shouting patriotic songs as they marched to school; men in business suits fishing in the river. But these sightings were few and far between. The four-and six-lane thoroughfares were completely empty for blocks at a time. No laundry hung on lines or in windows. No TV antennas sprouted from roofs. And there were none of the hawkers or vendors that flavor most Asian cities. Just wide, spotless, cement sidewalks; mammoth whitewashed apartment blocks; and a scattering of people clearly bent on getting wherever they were going. Playgrounds were virtually empty, shops lifeless through their spotless glass windows.                It was as if we were driving through a prototype communist city, with all the Soviet-style towering apartment blocks, manicured parks, freshly built sidewalks, and perfectly paved streets waiting expectantly for a rush of new card-carrying tenants. We debated whether most of the apartments--dark through their curtainless windows--were inhabited at all or whether they were simply shells, constructed to impress visitors with their modern appearance in a country that had been left with few trading partners after the fall of the Soviet Union and was decades behind the outside world.                We never did learn the answer. For even though our itinerary was chock-full of attractions (and Comrade Ri made sure we saw all of them), he also made sure there was much we did not see, like the up-close lives of the people of North Korea. In addition to keeping us away from the homes, offices, and playgrounds, the authorities went a step further by embellishing several key sights with "performers," making us wonder just how severe this regimented system was if the truth was too harsh for our eyes.                At the multistory Department Store No. 1 in Pyongyang, for example, the government staged a surreal shopping frenzy to disguise, we could only presume, that not everyone is allowed--or can afford--to buy there. Comrade Ri had never even been to this Western-style oasis in a city seemingly bereft of stores. Yet it was fully stocked with everything from bicycles and clothing to televisions and pianos, all made, the saleswomen said, in North Korea. Whenever one of us approached a counter, up to a dozen people crushed in around us, waving money they clutched openly in their hands, perhaps for our cameras, instead of pulling it from pockets or purses. Some overpaid for items and received no change before walking off. Others were seen empty-handed several minutes after we watched them buy something without so much as trying it on or taking a second look at it.                The moving theater continued at the Grand People's Study House. There the guide, Rhee Un Chol, said about eight thousand people visited the place every day, but many of those we saw were clearly there for our benefit. The only man we were given time enough to question--the one in the Pyongyang-brand running shoes--was poring over Time-Life's The Chipmakers, but he couldn't even speak English. I could only guess that access to the library must be so limited that it would have stood empty without the cast.                Despite these distractions, reality stared us straight in the face at the Children's Palace, where the five hundred--room building was empty of giggles, or even the footsteps of a child out of class, when we were taken to see its unnaturally disciplined pupils, aged eight to sixteen, doing embroidery, taking one another's blood pressure, and playing the accordion. The most compelling sight was of the tiny ballerinas who danced perfectly, with jarring, robotlike movements; frozen smiles; and vacant eyes. We clapped at their prowess. And some members of our tour praised the government for channeling the energy of its youth into such practical pursuits, whereas children in countries like the United States were often left to their own devices--be it television or cocaine--after school. But I could barely muster up a smile for the young pupils, overcome with pity for the childhood they were being forced to yield to this all-consuming, regimented training program.                A losing showdown                 Our group included three Americans, one Frenchman, one Briton, a Sri Lankan, and four Japanese. We Westerners, used to exercising our freedom to dally in strange countries, quickly tired of being led from stop to stop each day without any time to roam around on our own and analyze what we were seeing. We began taking longer to get back on the bus, wandering farther away from the attractions than permitted, and then asking to add more interactive stops on our itinerary. All of this strained the patience of Comrade Ri, who was clearly dumbfounded by our requests to modify the "program" that, for him it seemed, had been carved in stone. It was the classic clash of East meets West.                The tension came to a head one night when we arrived at our hotel at 10 p.m. only to be told the single rooms paid for by most of the group had not been reserved and that we all would have to double up. We refused to give in and Comrade Ri disappeared, to secure the rooms, we presumed. But when there was still no sign of him an hour later the Frenchman began bellowing for the guide at the top of his lungs and then turned up the volume when he emerged without having solved the dilemma. Comrade Ri cradled his head in his hands and began humming a popular song about the Great Leader's son, Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, before finally gathering the strength to demand, and secure, the rooms.                Although we won that battle, and each slept soundly that night in his own room, we did not win the war. Comrade Ri kept the bus rolling through the rest of the trip, stopping only at designated tourist attractions, where he gave us just enough time to see the sights before marshaling us back onto the bus to rush to the next stop.                We spent several days traveling on six-lane highways through the countryside, driving for miles without seeing a single vehicle. The brown, unplowed fields were well tended but empty of the buffalo, pigs, chickens, or even dogs that roam the villages of the poorest Asian countries--a sure sign of the rampant starvation refugees fleeing the country have spoken about for years. There weren't even any birds. A half hour or more at a time would pass before we saw a single person. And then, if they were near the road, they sometimes turned their backs to us and headed back into fields or to the one-story brick homes that stood far off the road, obviously trying to stay out of our sight.                We couldn't comprehend this overwhelming lack of life. "Where are all the people?" we kept asking. Comrade Ri said they were busy, working in the fields. But when we countered that the miles of fields we were passing were largely empty, he said the people were working in other, more distant fields. "Don't the people have any animals to eat?" we persisted. Comrade Ri said the government raised them on a farm in the north and distributed them. When we suggested that the people might get hungry waiting, for there were no vehicles delivering them along the road, Comrade Ri remained silent.                He put a stop to the penetrating questions by singing catchy ditties by the Great Leader and about his son and heir apparent, Kim Jong Il, on the bus microphone. Then he asked us each to sing a song, and the Japanese, who dabble regularly in karaoke, quickly obliged. The rest of us felt like we were in high school as Comrade Ri wore us down with peer pressure and forced us to the front of the bus. One American matched Comrade Ri's patriotic songs with "America the Beautiful." We were all shocked when the guide not only knew the words, but sang along. The rest of us rushed through the shortest songs we could think of, and the Briton wound up the entertainment with "Old McDonald Had a Farm," to which we obligingly oinked, mooed, and quacked to the amazement of Comrade Ri.                That done, we kept Comrade Ri busy translating signs along the way, lest he launch into another round of karaoke. Most arresting were the red-and-white ones perched on the rolling hills along the highway (as billboards in the West are), above the clusters of whitewashed homes in villages, and on top of buildings in the capital. They were selling government propaganda with slogans such as "Our country is the paradise of the people!" or "We are happy!"--each of them punctuated with exclamation marks, as if screaming to convince the people below.                Interspersed with the signs were life-sized portraits of the Great Leader hanging above villages, in the subway, and even in hotel rooms in a hauntingly accurate portrayal of George Orwell's Big Brother. And three times we were treated to visits to the towering statues of Kim Il Sung that stand watch over cities. At one statue, dozens of women filed up in orderly lines to pay their respects. After bowing before the bronze figure, several of them sniffled as they shuffled off. A cluster of schoolboys followed, with equally somber expressions. At another statue, two women began sobbing, wiping their eyes with their dresses. The cult of personality with which the late president ruled the country for forty-seven years had obviously remained firmly in place and, we soon learned, was something we, too, were expected to take seriously.                A Japanese member of our tour suggested I lift up my right arm to mimic the Great Leader's revolutionary pose at one statue, and without giving it a second thought, I raised it. Within seconds the government agents who had been trying to melt into the crowd rushed forward to confiscate the film and reprimand Comrade Ri about his "disrespectful" charge. I tried to explain that in the United States we often mock our leaders, but I don't think he believed me.                "President Kim Il Sung is God in our country," said Li Song Suk, a missionary at the country's showcase Protestant church, where about a hundred North Koreans--not a single child among them--prayed on Sunday morning. "There are few young people who learn religion," she explained. "They believe in Kim Il Sung, who liberated our country and provided our people with the best life in the world." Even her two children, she said, refused to follow her faith. "They believe in the Juche idea." That idea is Kim Il Sung's philosophy of self-reliance, and though hailed at the center of the capital with a 500-foot-tall monument, it certainly was not adhered to during our visit. Everything from Coca-Cola to Nestlé Crunch was available from time to time, at an extra charge, to our group; the hotels boasted Japanese televisions and refrigerators, and the cadre rode around in shiny new Mercedes-Benzes. The big joke among us became "Self-reliance, or self-deception?"                A history lesson                 The feeling that the North Koreans were deceiving themselves grew stronger as we continued on the circuit. At the Great Leader's family home on the outskirts of the capital, the guide told how Kim Il Sung was born into a poor family in the low-roofed clay house standing there, despite outside reports that his mother gave birth in China. Near the 38th Parallel dividing North Korea from the South, propaganda posters praised the Great Leader for leading the country to victory in the Korean War that nobody won.                Yegyong Kim, our guide at the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, told the same story amid the blackened shells of bombed-out U.S. aircraft, American Army uniforms, and captured weapons. She insisted that the United States and South Korea had attacked North Korea to start the 1950--53 fighting, instead of the generally accepted version of history that blames the North. And she pointed to a museum drawing of a priest knifing a Korean, as if to prove that the United States sent in missionaries as early as the 1860s as part of its plot to seize North Korea.                I discussed this later with Comrade Ri, who was surprised to hear that we had been taught a different version of history. "One day, perhaps, you will know the truth," he said smugly. Yegyong Kim was just as secure in her knowledge. When she recounted how four North Korean guns single-handedly stopped U.S. warships, tanks, and planes for three days, we asked, skeptically, whether she had misspoken. "Don't you believe it?" she asked. We said that what was more important was whether she believed it. "Of course," she answered with a smile, before moving along. We all hoped Yegyong was just saying what she had been taught and didn't really believe such an outlandish tale, but it was impossible to know. She was twenty-three and therefore had grown up behind the Bamboo Curtain that Kim Il Sung had pulled against the outside world decades ago. Such myths might well be all anyone her age ever knew.                Still, even the middle-aged stood firmly behind their anti-U.S. rhetoric. At the Pueblo, a U.S. naval vessel captured in 1968 while allegedly spying in North Korean waters, we were given the grand tour of the spit-shined, freshly painted steel-gray ship. The North Koreans said they had killed one of the eighty-three Americans on board and freed the rest a year later. The current captain, who refused to give his name, couldn't have been angrier about the whole affair. "They still continue the espionage in our country," he snapped at us. "Recently, a U.S. helicopter was shot down by our army because it was in our airspace. If they did not learn their lesson from the helicopter, and if they touch one inch of our land, the Korean army will not put up with it and we will destroy them to the last." The threat rang hollow to me, for the country couldn't be that strong if it was forced to take the great pains it had to hide the reality that lurked in the shadows.                One of the few times I managed to stray behind the whitewashed cement blocks in Wonsan, a resident ran to physically block me from entering a barren office building and then rushed inside and locked it behind her. She then tapped on the window to people resting on a bench outside and waved them inside, as if to protect them from me.                Around the corner, a woman dropped her water cans upon seeing me and rushed back into her house. Both adults and children crossed the street to avoid passing me. Scruffy toddlers--never seen on the main streets--played in a courtyard of small homes hidden behind the larger, freshly painted ones we had seen from the bus. Comrade Ri suddenly raced around the corner, panic on his face, and ordered me back to the bus. His reaction, and the peculiar responses of the people I had seen, convinced me that the authorities had built their carefully planned tour around the harsh reality of life in North Korea and had taught the people to fear foreigners, lest they give away the secret.                Once, in Pyongyang, I got far enough away to peer inside the skyscrapers that line the streets and saw a dozen of the normally stiffly reserved women crushed inside a tiny room, shoving their shoes through a hole in the wall for a cobbler to fix. The scene would seem normal to me in any other place, yet the government had felt it necessary to hide it, to show us instead only the calm, cool, and restrained women we had seen walking purposefully on the streets. In the government's push to put on a happy face, an agent once went down the line of people getting off a ferry and told them to smile as they passed before our cameras.                As we tried to digest all of this, Comrade Ri led us to a giant, pyramid-shaped building at the center of the capital that he boasted was 105 stories tall and had taken just one and a half years to complete. When we asked why, six years after construction ended, the cement carcass of what was to be the luxurious Ryugyong Hotel stood empty, Comrade Ri said he didn't know. Then we told him we had heard that the building's poor design left it too unstable to open and pointed to the crane perched on top as its crowning glory. Comrade Ri didn't respond. We hoped reality had begun to sink in through his nationalistic shell, but more likely, we had hurt his feelings with our bluntness.                Great, but not dear                 Sensing his vulnerability, I asked the question analysts had been speculating about for almost a year--where the body of the Great Leader was, long months after his death? But although Comrade Ri could recite to us just about everything Kim Il Sung did during his reign, he did not know the answer. Nor did he know why the Dear Leader, groomed for years to take over, had yet to become president. "We regard the Dear Leader as our leader, and he is in our hearts," he said simply, apparently undisturbed by the inconsistencies.                He led us off to Kumgang Mountain one day to unwind with a hike up the towering stone cliffs, split by canyons of clear, cool water. We soon realized, however, that even out there, in the middle of nowhere, Big Brother was with us. At the foot of the mountain, characters carved deep into a boulder said, "On this stone, the Great Leader Kim II Sung sat and gave us instructions." Patriotic slogans carved into the rocks kept us company as we climbed. At the top, we were confronted by a yards-high carving that urged, "Korea, let us convey forever the glory of our nation in having the Great Leader President Kim Il Sung in highest esteem as the greatest leader in our history, for the past 5,000 years." It was as if the authorities feared that the people might forget their allegiances if they weren't spoon-fed it at every turn.                We did find refreshingly pure entertainment one night, however, at the Pyongyang circus, where we sat amid a sea of North Koreans and watched a man jump-rope while lying on his back, a woman juggle live doves while ice skating, and a young girl spring yards into the air and through a hoop before landing on her feet. And then there was the day spent at the Lake Sijung "sludge treatment" center, where doctors failed to talk all but a few daredevils into slathering some heated black muck from the bottom of the lake over their bodies as a cure-all. The rest of us wiled away the allotted hours at the center in the paddle boats on the lake, content to enjoy the sunset amid the crisp, clean air and quiet, unspoiled beauty.                Toward the end of the tour, Comrade Ri's sidekick called about 5:30 a.m. with a round of "Happy Birthday" for my American colleague. It wasn't his birthday, however, and when we went down to breakfast, we discovered that everyone but the birthday boy had received the same untimely call. When the Briton finally arrived at the table, refreshed by an extra hour of sleep, he was pleasantly surprised by the white, frosted cake at his place, a welcome diversion from the kimchi and gruel we were coming to dread. The Thai tour company chipped in a case of beer.                The meals, as repetitive as they became, were actually more plentiful and varied than we had expected. We always had rice, kimchi, and soup, and occasionally had fried fish, barbecued beef, and a variety of vegetables. Nevertheless, the industrious Japanese, always in search of a taste of home, discovered in the middle of the countryside one night a tiny sushi shop run by a Japanese Korean. They eagerly spent more than $100 on a midnight snack and took away rice rolls in doggie bags to get them through the rest of the tour.                On our last night, the capital hosted a ball at which thousands of North Koreans waltzed for two hours under the painted stares of Kim Il Sung and his comrades, Marx and Lenin, in the people's square. As the dancing ended, the students in front began chanting, "Korea is one," and "Reunification." But the weeklong tour had made it painfully clear that the country was too far lost in its own world to permanently end its isolation.                As the Air Koryo jet lifted off from Pyongyang and the martial music poured forth from the speakers above my head, I shut my eyes. The sheer multitudes of regimented children crying for their Great Leader at the mass gymnastics show sprang to mind.                Then I thought of the thousands of other schoolchildren who repeatedly praised the Great Leader's son, Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, during a meticulously orchestrated show of military and industrial might they created by lifting giant, colored cards from their laps to create images of rockets, fields, factories, and the Great Leader's face. "Comrade Kim Jong Il is the same as Comrade Kim Il Sung," and "Our people are happy to have leadership continue from generation to generation," they spelled out with the cards, as tens of thousands of their peers--in brilliant red, yellow, and blue gymsuits danced, goose-stepped, and flipped on the field in front of them, not a single one out of step.                The North Koreans were clearly telling us they were prepared to continue marching, with Kim Jong Il now at the head of the line, to the commanding beat the Great Leader had drummed into their heads for decades in the world's most nightmarish undertaking in social engineering.