All Monsters Must Die

by Magnus Bärtås

  The roads are wide but there are few bicycles and cars. We notice that some of the cars are Volvo 144s. They have driven here for nearly forty years. They were shipped from Sweden in 1973 together with drilling equipment from Atlas Copco. The North Koreans didn’t bother paying the $503,743,731 bill for the drills, the 600 cars, and a number of other things. The Swedish Export Credit Corporation hasn’t given up hope yet; they’ve come up with a payment plan. If they make their half-yearly payments, the North Korean government will have paid them back by 2019. But why should North Korea repay the money to Sweden? They’ve had gigantic debts since the start of the 1970s, when they frantically bought goods from Europe and Japan. When foreign businessmen and diplomats asked when these bills would be paid, they were met with blank looks: shouldn’t the rest of the world be grateful to do business with North Korea?

  WE PASS A pyramid-like structure in the distance and are amazed at its enormous size. At 371 metres tall, with 101 floors above ground and 4 below, the Ryugyong Hotel is only ten metres shorter than the Empire State Building. Construction began in 1987 and was halted in 1992. Since then the building has been abandoned, like an epic monument to failure. Our guide Mr. Song says its slogan was: “If a newborn checks into the hotel with the intention of spending one night in each room, that person will be twenty-seven years old by the time they check out.” On second thought, this seems like an unlikely slogan.

  Mr. Song also tells us that an Egyptian telephone company has invested money in the hotel, and it is hoped that renovations will be completed by the centenary of Kim Il-sung’s birth in 2012.* In the past, Ryugyong Hotel was often Photoshopped out of official pictures of Pyongyang, but the authorities have since decided that it does indeed exist, and we can attest to the fact that the building’s sheer size asserts its existence with tectonic force. The North Korean press has already started setting the tone for the reopening, calling the hotel “a phoenix ceaselessly reaching for the sky.”

  At once massive and ethereal, the hotel rises up and towers over all the other buildings. It inspires fantasies, new terms, and virtual representations around the world. The Italian architect Stefano Boeri once said that the design had “forced it to reveal its icy nature, its irresistible fascination as a fragile alien meteorite.” Ryugyong Hotel is, according to Boeri, “the only built piece of science fiction in the contemporary world.” Other epithets are just as fantastic: the “white elephant,” the “Hotel of Doom,” the “ghost hotel,” and the “Death Star.”

  THE BUS DRIVES us back to the airport. It’s a bit disappointing to be leaving Pyongyang so soon after we’ve arrived, but according to the itinerary we’re supposed to fly to Chongjin in North Hamgyong Province to experience the coastal landscape near the Russian border.

  The airport is completely deserted. The arrival and departure screens don’t display any destinations; they are blank. Apparently, we’re the only people flying out of Pyongyang today. Average North Koreans aren’t allowed to travel domestically without special dispensation. And if they are given permission, then their mode of transport is a bus or train. That’s why there are no regularly scheduled domestic flights in the country.

  A fog hangs over the airport. The Air Koryo planes are lined up in a row on the endless runway that disappears into the haze. A Russian Antonov from the 1950s has taxied out: this is our plane.

  Climbing the stairs into the aircraft, most of us look like regular tourists, wearing T-shirts and shorts and holding cameras. Bruno, the Swiss man, is as big as a house. When he speaks, he sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger. But his isn’t a gym-built body, we imagine; it’s an Alpine body shaped by butter, fresh air, and mountain treks. The blond Swedish fighter pilot follows Bruno. At almost six feet, five inches tall, he towers over the rest of us. But compared to Bruno, he looks small.

  Ari, the young Dutch KLM employee with a flat cap and a drowsy look, has a more sophisticated camera than the rest of us. He uses different lenses and is always looking for fresh angles. It was clear from the moment we landed that this group trip would include an inferno of photography. However, Mr. Song has given us strict instructions: Photography is only permitted of approved subject matter. Do not photograph people and absolutely do not photograph military personnel. In the countryside you basically can’t take a picture of anything. Still, the group is not discouraged and we are happily taking pictures of each other. As we climb aboard, flashbulbs pop as if we were on the red carpet.

  * * *

  THROUGH THE WINDOW of the plane, the North Korean landscape seems frighteningly inaccessible: barren, rippling mountains the colour of granite; clusters of brown barracks forming villages and compounds. Other images are burned in the mind’s eye — satellite pictures, scenes from Google Earth, photographs from the Cold War of parachuting spies landing on the ground, never to return. The aircraft’s windshield is like a monitor. The sound of the propellers intensifies this notion. You could disappear in this landscape.

  But when we alight at the military airport in Orang, south of Chongjin, a pleasant, balmy wind is coursing gently over the runway. Built by the Imperial Japanese Army, the airbase is hemmed in by green fields that stretch as far as the eye can see. In the distance, we see people following paths over the terrain.

  Sacks of rice and crates of beer are carried from the plane. Two small buses await us; the drivers are in the process of swabbing up fish waste in one of them. As soon as we have disembarked, Elias bends down and presses his hand to the ground. He then whips out his notebook, jots something down, and moves restlessly about on the runway.

  Mr. Song is watching him with a troubled gaze. Elias doesn’t know which way to turn. Everything — every bush and every person — is interesting. Everything demands his attention at once. We understand. What we’re seeing has been a restricted zone for so long that the country is like a social biosphere with its own conditions for life. The idea of North Korea as a living laboratory — especially when compared to South Korea, its “twin,” separated at birth — is shared by many political researchers, economists, and sociologists. But it has been impossible to conduct any studies here.

  THE NEAREST CITY, Chongjin, is Shin Sang-ok’s birthplace. Madame’s husband, the famous film director, grew up here in the 1930s, when there wasn’t a North or a South Korea. From 1910 until 1945, Korea was a Japanese colony. It was an unrelenting occupation, in which every tactic was used to Japanify the country.

  Shin travelled to Tokyo when he was a teenager to attend art school. The country was first divided after the Second World War. He was nineteen when the Japanese were forced to leave Korea. He then returned to the South to work as a scenographer on Choi In-kyu’s Long Live Freedom, the first Korean film made after independence. During the occupation Choi had made films that celebrated the colonial power, but the first film he made once the oppressors retreated was an epic about the resistance movement.

  Chongjin today is a stricken place. What was once a small fishing village became an industrial port city during the Japanese occupation, when a giant steelworks was erected in the area. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the factories have been in poor condition and are poisoning the city air. Some of the buildings have been abandoned and are no more than giant, dilapidated monuments of rust. In 1997 Tun Myat, one of the first senior UN officials to visit Chongjin, described the place as a “forest of scrap metal,” unique in its decay.

  From 1995 to 1998, Chongjin was hit hard by the country’s great famine. During the “Arduous March,” as the catastrophe was dubbed by officials, the region suffered one of the highest death tolls in the country. In Nothing to Envy, author Barbara Demick states that the population in Chongjin — which in the 1970s was North Korea’s second-biggest city after Pyongyang — had nearly halved after the famine. This drop in the region’s population was not only the result of severe malnourishment, but also of an organized relocation of residents to other areas of the country.


  WE LEAVE THE airport through an archway that bears a sign saying: LET US FIGHT TO THE DEATH FOR KIM JONG-IL. Outside we see two gaunt boys squatting at the side of the road. They’re picking something out of the grass and putting it into plastic bags.

  The fish smell has seeped into the floor of the bus. The odour ripens in the warmth and will linger for hours. Along the dusty gravel roads, people are sweeping, creating small swirls of yellow clouds that are illuminated by the sun. We pass rice paddies and salt pools right next to the sea. Large letters spelling out a Kim Il-sung quote (KOREA IS THE BEST COUNTRY) and a nationalistic invocation (PROCEED JOYFULLY IN SPITE OF HARDSHIP) have been placed in the fields.

  It’s going to be a long trip on this bumpy road. Oksana, the Ukrainian woman, talks uninterrupted for two hours about life at the South Korean company where she works. We nod dutifully, though we’d prefer to take in the landscape. In certain places along the coast, electric fences have been erected on foundations in the water. We see villages in the distance, poor but not destitute. People walk along roads that aren’t a far cry from those built in pre-industrial Europe. Even bicycles aren’t a given. We pass the odd truck with its bed full of people, the occasional military vehicle, and now and then an ox-drawn cart. Mr. Song says we’re not allowed to take pictures of anything here.

  Toward the afternoon, as the road starts to climb, we are allowed to take our cameras out. The mountains and the pine forests remind us of Chinese landscape paintings. As we drive on, we see a number of people gathered by a stream in a small ravine. Two women are dancing on a large boulder. It’s almost too idyllic. Have they been placed here on this heavily regulated route as a folkloric feature? Or are we being far too wary of falling into the propaganda trap?

  In Illusive Utopia, the scholar Kim Suk-young recounts the story of a U.S. statesman who was studying Pyongyang’s street life from his hotel window. The American realized that the same people kept coming out of the subway station outside his hotel, and he came to the conclusion that they were actors, hired by the state, who somewhere had a costume repository where they traded overcoats, bags, and umbrellas with each other. All in order to convincingly play commuters at a subway station that might even be defunct.

  Defectors have spoken of actors who appear on the streets where foreign dignitaries are driven. Military personnel dress up in civilian clothes to play pedestrians, drivers, and shoppers. On these streets, a thousand people can be assembled for a performance. Kim Suk-young describes North Korea as a theatrical nation, “directing its citizens as if they were actors playing stereotypical roles found in revolutionary operas.”

  This artifice may recall a childhood fantasy that everything around you is an illusion; that the world is one big set-up, carefully engineered each day so that you’ll be lulled into believing in the status quo; that all the strangers you meet are instructed not to let on about the set-up, and their nonchalance is an act in the same way that nearby neighbourhoods are no more than impermanent sets. Sometimes you try to expose the trick with a sudden turn of your head, hoping to catch a glimpse of the stagehands at the edge of the set. Sometimes when you go into town you stop on a dime, tear yourself from your parent’s hand so you can rush back around the corner in hope of catching out the machinery in motion.

  * * *

  THE BUS HAS taken us high up in the terrain. We have stopped to admire the notable cliff formations on Mount Chilbo. We are now very close to where a nuclear weapons test was carried out on October 9, 2006 — a fact that no one in the group mentions, if they happen to be aware of it. We are told that very few tourists visit here, only around thirty people per year.

  As we take in the untouched, pine-clad mountain, we have a hard time imagining that only tens of miles away, an atom bomb was detonated just two years ago. The underground test was conducted in Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site, a system of tunnels built beneath a glen outside of Kilju County, in the southern part of North Hamgyong Province. The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported that the action “brought happiness to our military and people” and was “a great leap forward in the building of a great, prosperous, powerful socialist nation.” The event sent waves of fear across Asia and around the world.

  Two weeks later, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice travelled to China, Japan, and South Korea to advocate the complete isolation of North Korea. The United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1718, the strictest international measure against North Korea since the Korean War. The resolution stated that the international community was to block all sales and transfer of material related to North Korea’s nuclear capabilities, from missile systems to unconventional weapons programs. Perhaps because the power of the measure wasn’t trusted, nor the ability to monitor North Korea’s exchange of weapons technology with countries like Iran, Yemen, and Syria, a condition was added that pointed the sharp end of the stick at what was assumed to be Kim Jong-il’s weak spot — his consumption of luxury goods. This was the end of the importation of Hennessy Paradis — one of Hennessy’s most expensive cognacs — iPods, Fender Stratocasters, snowmobiles, and flat-screen televisions wider than twenty-nine inches. There was also an embargo on cosmetics, perfumes, luxury carpets, tapestries, fine bone china, designer apparel, and gemstones such as diamonds, sapphires, rubies, and emeralds. This list of luxury goods may seem randomly chosen, but it was precise. It is Kim Jong-il’s usual shopping list turned into a UN resolution.

  A LOCAL GUIDE — a gaunt man with a flat chest and endearing charm — arrives to tell us about the boulders in the landscape before us. His English is far from perfect, but he is intent on making himself understood. He says that he will inform us of the history of the stones, but he doesn’t impart any geological or historical data — instead, he tells us nationalist myths.

  And the myths aren’t even old. They go back only one generation to the fight against the Japanese colonizers. The guide recounts that the boulders depict two people tenderly leaning against each other, representing the brave Korean soldier returning from the war against Japan to a loving reunion with his wife. Indeed, it looks like one of the stones in the formation is clutching the other. The guide gives us a sly look and tells us that the wife has longed so much for her husband that she can’t help but reach out her hand. He doesn’t say it outright, but he implies that she has a tight grip on his private parts.

  “Can you imagine?” he says, smiling and looking at each of us. “Can you imagine?”

  A bit farther south, a giant boulder lies horizontally on a number of smaller rocks. The guide tells us that when Kim Jong-il came here, he immediately renamed the formation. It was originally called the Stone Table, but in the dictator’s eyes it wasn’t a table, it was a piano. Since then, it’s been called Piano Rock.

  “Can you imagine?” he says again.

  No matter how much we try to picture it, we don’t see a piano. But because this is the image that sprung up in the leader’s head, it will be a piano for all eternity.

  ON OUR WAY back down the mountain, we stop at a Buddhist monastery. Mr. Song says that the monks are away, but it’s doubtful that any religious activity takes place here at all. Andrei, the Russian chemist, uses a plastic bottle to draw a water sample from the monastery’s well. Then he is given a tiny taste of the matsutake mushrooms that the guide has picked nearby. Matsutake are incredibly valuable delicacies that are said to improve virility, and they are exported to Japan for as much as 1,300 dollars per kilo.

  Travelling with us is a cameraman who is filming everything that’s happening. We’re told it’s a service, that we’ll be given the opportunity to buy a souvenir DVD of the journey we can show when we get back home, but we know that this is also about surveillance and having pictures that can be used for propaganda. Andrei poses holding a matsutake, and the cameraman eagerly moves around him.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME we are quartered outside a coastal village, nig
ht has fallen. We are near the Sea of Japan, which in Korea is called the East Sea. Something that looks like an idyllic village built in a semi-traditional style sits away from a neighbouring settlement. But it was constructed in 2006, the same year as the nuclear weapons test. The guide calls this part of the trip a “home stay” and says that now we’re going to make contact with regular North Korean citizens.

  Sitting on the veranda of the home of the elderly woman we have been assigned to stay with, we see small wooden boats returning from sea. In the garden, there is an open fire where fish are drying on suspended chicken wire; there is a vegetable plot; a pair of puppies are nipping at each other’s ears. The woman squats at the workbench next to the fire and prepares dinner.

  We’re allocated rooms in a separate part of the house. The woman smiles as she shows us our rooms, but she doesn’t speak a word of English. By North Korean standards, these homes are luxurious. Ours has a refrigerator and television, but no running water. A hose runs from a water tank outside the house to the washbasin inside. The smell of fish permeates everything.

  We wonder if our hosts always live here, if this is their normal life, or if they are just actors. Why would an elderly woman live in a spacious house alone? This could be the North Korean version of The Truman Show, a film where the main character grows up in a small town that’s really a giant studio set and he is always followed by a camera. All the houses and buildings are sets, and everyone but Truman is an actor.

  In the evening, there’s a power outage and everything goes pitch black. When the electricity comes back on after a few hours, a group of military men arrive. We catch a glimpse of them when they sit down in the kitchen, smoking and watching TV.