Last weekend I crossed the DMZ.
The road is perfectly paved. There are street lights and a trademark South Korean lime green fence lining the way. No explosions, the mines are safely buried out of view. The barbed wire and electric fences briefly reduced to obscure lines ahead and behind. I was safely inside a large tour bus, itself safely inside a caravan of some 20 of the same.
And yet, as safe as I knew I was, once the last fit, young South Korean soldiers were passed behind, I could not resist an eerie, vulnerable sense of free fall. For those few short minutes, carelessly rolling through what is very officially not part of any nation, it was quiet. The plants have taken over everything. The DMZ stretched green and wild off into the mountains to the West, and it felt horribly claustrophobic. Quickly, with a shiver of excitement and fear, the pair of frontmost North Korean soldiers came into view. They were older, skinnier, shabbier, meaner, and their rifles sharply bayoneted. I was profoundly relieved to see them.
From there, on both embankments, North Korean soldiers were stood every 200 meters equipped with red flags and whistles. Any visible cameras or other inappropriateness and up goes the flag. All the buses would then stop, someone would probably get fined and their camera possibly confiscated. I was told that at any point, if any soldier’s red flag goes all the way up in the air, that’s it. Trip’s over for everyone. On this weekend that would be 2,000 people going home early.
Another few minutes and plenty of twitchy, but thankfully unraised red flags later, we arrived at immigration. The big South Korean immigration building, right next to the shiny new railway station, is an ultramodern spacy tubular glass and white steel deal with mechanized curtains and all the latest from x-ray to infrared and a few spectra between. North Korean immigration is a large tent with some portapotties next to it, a good contingent of the Red Army looking over it, and speakers with exposed wiring drowning it with the same jaunty patriotic song over, and over, and over again. I was told the processing used to be much faster, but several of the border agents have started studying English and have turned the arrival of a group of foreigners into practice time.
I was at nearly the end of the line, and by my turn I think the guard was bored already. He just gave me a smile, a very polite “good morning,” a stamp on my I.D. card and not in my passport, and a quiet “you’re welcome” to my “thank you.” (The crew-cutted Ministry of Homeland Security guys could learn a thing or two in manners.)
Once properly in the North, we continued down the South Korean-built road. The scenery changes dramatically as soon as you enter the North. For several miles behind the DMZ, they’ve literally cut down all the trees. I have read reports of disastrous deforestation in North Korea for fuel, but this was clearly purposeful total arboreal annihilation. In fact, officially a defense policy, I suspect it’s much more to keep the North in rather than the South out. However many decades of erosion later, and it’s actually a very pretty landscape (if you don’t think about it too much) with big boulders and sandy soil to contrast the deep green rice fields.
Knee-deep in those rice fields, just a few hundred meters from the road, was the real, live North Korean proletariat planting rice. I did not imagine we would be allowed to see rural peasants. They were mostly working by hand, and a few oxen helped plow the fields. The conspicuous scattering of newish tractors lay conspicuously idle. Above each side of the valley were bunkers with tanks and some trucks that I presume to have been carrying surface-to-air missiles. We passed by a few small villages, all one larger dirty white building surrounded by a number of identical little dirty white houses. If these were purely for show they could have looked a lot nicer, but as they were I do wonder just how much they’re fixed up for our eyes. The North Koreans’ eyes, for their part, were very much fixed down. Not a single one looked up at our caravan of buses. I think there are only two caravans a day, so I do not imagine this was due to lack of interest, to say the least. I wanted terribly to photograph what was in fact a very idyllic scene on this late spring morning, but the continued cordon of alert, flag-equipped soldiers very easily deterred me.
The well-paved capitalist tendril on which we traveled is the specially administered Kŭmgangsan Tourist Region. The ostensible purpose of this tour is to see and hike Geumgangsan (as it’s spelled in revised romanization), or Diamond Mountain. Sacred to Koreans North and South, it is the second tallest mountain in North Korea and the tallest in the same mountain range what I call home, the Taebaek Range.
Since 1998 the South Korean Hyundai-Asan conglomerate has effectively leased the area around Geumgangsan. Originally, tours to the mountain meant taking a ferry past the DMZ. In 2003 the road I took across the DMZ was built and tours are now mostly conducted by land. Parallel to this road runs a rail line, one of the two to make international news a few weeks ago when they ran a test run on it. There are shiny new train stations at both ends. The South Korean one is right next to the immigration building and I was able to walk right up to it. The new North Korean train station I could only see in passing, shining, unused in the distance. Architecturally, the only North Korean looking part of it was the large portrait of Kim Il-sung.
This train station is just short of the town of Onjeonggak. What limited views I had of the place made it seem a village, but Google Earth reveals it’s actually a largish town. The tourists’ version of Onjeonggak is a small area with two hotels, a bunch of little condos, restaurants, two duty-free shops, a theater, a super plush mineral spa, two Family Marts, and a bank.
All of this is safely separated from Onjeonggak proper by a small river and a few well armed members of the Red Army. Everything is officially US dollars, though most places happily accepted won. However creepy the little red Kim Il-sung pins may be, they do make it very easy to tell who is what. All the workers I saw around the Onjeonggak tourist area were South Korean or Chinese. Our hotel staff, however, were entirely North Korean.
Justifying its exterior, the Hotel Kumgangsan was built by the North Koreans in 1958 and much more recently refurbished by Hyundai-Asan. I for one did not particularly come to Geumgangsan for hiking. The hiking was really the most beautiful I’ve seen in Korea and as such very nice, but I shelled out the $370 for this tour to see whatever obscured glimpses of proper North Korea they might let slip by.
In the end, the deepest sight into the North was here, at the hotel, meeting the staff. The waitresses were clearly carefully picked for beauty and very well groomed for interacting with foreign imperialists. I imagine they must also fare from some very special families to be privy to all the Western extravagance on display among the guests – not to mention the LG TVs in every room showing South Korean programming.
While one is allowed to walk around within the tourist zone, everything closes at 9:00 p.m. effectively keeping one in one’s hotel. A number of new friends from our group joined on the second floor patio bar from some North Korean beer and general revelry. The waitresses were generally very busy, but some South Koreans convinced one of them to sing.
Some singing continued, with various nations representing themselves. I spoke a little with one of the waitresses. The prettiest of the bunch, she had a modern-looking set of braces – this when almost all of the North Korean teeth I came close enough to see were generally very bad. She was too busy for me to talk to very long, as the beer continued and people came and went. This bar closed at midnight, and tiring of a group far louder and drunker than I wanted to be, I struck off exploring. Soon I ended up at the posh (or much more expensive, anyway) 12th floor bar. At this hour, there was only a group of several South Koreans at a back table, and one Canadian speaking in Korean with a couple waitresses. I sat down, and he and I ended up speaking with them for more than an hour.
As much as I wanted to sit for hours and learn about every facet of their lives, I refused to make an interview of this opportunity for two reasons. Firstly, while truly specimens of a different world, out of personal decency I was loathe to treat them accordingly. Second, and more importantly, I didn’t know who was listening how; nobody wants to get a pretty girl sent to the gulag. So we kept it simple and wholly not so different than any conversation any two guys might have at one in the morning in a 12th floor hotel bar speaking a second language with a couple nice yet politely reserved waitresses. The real feeling of just how different their world was merely seeped through between the lines.
Its main substance inferences and impressions, this was nevertheless one of the most interesting conversations of my life. There is no way to put it but to say that these girls – for as hard a life I can’t even imagine they might have had – seemed truly innocent. They spoke a mesmerizing mixture of confidence, ignorance, and guarded curiosity that betrayed a life of relative privilege. They were just as amazed by our hairy forearms and big hands as my eight year-old students. They didn’t know that California was in the United States, and yet amazingly asked if California was the origin of CNN. None of them let on that they spoke more than a few words of English, but the one girl who spoke to us for the duration had studied Russian. She wrote Cyrillic like a natural and read the roman alphabet perfectly well when we were sharing ways to say “I love you” in different languages, implying a decent level of schooling. She said she’d been working at the hotel for 10 years, since she was fifteen or sixteen (she claimed to be 27, Korean age).
We asked about hobbies, but it seemed they have little time away from work. She had never heard of snowboarding and was honestly dismayed at the concept, regarding me as a moderate lunatic upon explaining it. (Hyundai-Asan plans a ski resort at Geumgangsan in the future which, if it has night skiing like High1, will be the brightest thing in the country.)
Everybody present claimed to be unmarried. After learning we lived alone, one girl asked, with a look of anticipated disapproval, how often we did our laundry. Both our responses were “about once a week”. Her jaw literally dropped (a little) and they both looked at us with a look of such condescension as to go beyond disgust into the realm of pity. Simply astounded at how “dirty” we were she slowly enunciated a double check to see if they had understood correctly.
“But we have many clothes and washing machines!” we defended ourselves. The defense was useless. Her face showed she did not want to admit not quite knowing what a washing machine was.
With unconcealed righteousness she told us “but I do laundry four or five times a day!” My jaw didn’t drop, but I was almost as astounded as they had been.
“Are you washing other people’s clothes, or just yours?” I asked.
“Just mine. I do different clothes at different times. First socks, later maybe a shirt. Like that, you see.”
And that makes sense, really. When you have little clothes and even less time, but need to always look good for a job you cannot afford to lose, I imagine there is no more reasonable way to do your laundry. But for this to be so hard to conceive without reflection, consideration, and imagination, speaks volumes about how little I could ever really understand her life. And that they could imagine neither the luxury of enough clothes for a week, nor a machine that washes those clothes for you, is really the same volumes translated into North Korean.
Perhaps it is only such quotidian somethings we take so for granted that can express our lives in so honest a way.
Back in the Free World, I put on damp socks this morning. I had washed them all together last night.
If you want to read some different impressions of the trip, try Riley’s blog, or Susie’s blog.
Many of these are so small I would have previously thought them entirely unsuited for the snow, yet they defy at every turn everything I thought I knew about the laws of physics and the force of friction. (“vectors! break for the vectors! I duwanna die!”) The public buses are all Korean; Russia drives on the right side of the road (when it bothers to pick a side at all) and it wouldn’t do to have people walking into the middle of the icy street to board Japanese ones. Unlike colorful Central American reincarnations of American school buses no one other than the weather bothers to repaint Kamchatka’s second-hand Korean buses. Destinations never to be reached again are still written on the sides, secret to all but me. Ads for Busan beauty academies and faded instructions on how to use those newfangled RFID transit cards gave me something better to look at than fogged up windows and darkly-dressed, unsmiling Russian commuters, while I clutched my snowboard and felt out-of-place.
There are of course also some vectors of the frictions of the snow, the resistence of the air, photons bouncing off my goggles, the rotation of the Earth, and the pull of all that dark matter that I don’t believe in. But nevermind those. Mind, instead, the vectors involved with being pulled up the volcano by an accelerating snowmobile. There is again the vector of gravity, but this time it is being more than canceled out by the 
