Pyongyang is different from what I anticipated. Recent accounts make it sound like a Potemkin city where every trace of poverty, hunger or infirmity has been carefully shipped off to the countryside. That’s not precisely true: the old and infirm are here, and plenty of human suffering is visible. Yet, even so, you don’t see quite as much of it in Pyongyang as you do in most other Asian cities.
No one gets away from the giant statues of the country’s first dictator, Kim Il Sung, and his son and heir, Kim Jong Il. My first morning in town, my North Korean guides take me on an obligatory tour of the city’s imposing monuments. At the Mansudae Grand Monument, commemorating the father’s 60th birthday, two young women pop up with flowers for me to put at the statue’s feet. I flirt with the girls; one of my guides, translating, joins in. The girls reciprocate–a surprise: North Koreans are willing to flirt.
Other discoveries are more unsettling. One day we visit the International Friendship Museum in Hyangsan, a marble palace built to hold what may be the world’s greatest collection of kitsch: thousands of gifts that have been presented to the Kims by foreign dignitaries. It’s hard to keep from laughing at the ugly vases, carpet slippers, House of Commons whisky glasses and other junk on display until I notice a peculiar detail. In the past few years, one gift after another has been credited to high-ranking defense officials from Iran and Pakistan. Is it coincidence that all three countries are widely suspected of trafficking in nuclear secrets? Whatever the envoys talked about, it probably wasn’t train schedules.
