South Korea goes gaga over Northern singer
Camera teams in hot pursuit of Hyon Song Wol during inspection of Olympic sites
TOKYO— Koreans on both halves of the divided peninsula are fond of the phrase “Nam nam buk nyeo,” literally “Southern man, Northern woman.”
South Korean men use it to assert that they are the most handsome, while North Koreans claim that their women are the most beautiful. (South Korean women and North Korean men are, understandably, less fond of the phrase.)
South Koreans are now the midst of a North Korean beauty blitz — and, well, they’re gaga.
A frenzied media posse, the kind usually associated with K-pop stars, has been chasing Hyon Song Wol, a singer in North Korea’s all-female Moranbong Band and a rising political star in Kim Jong Un’s regime, on her two-day visit to the South.
She has been leading a seven-member delegation to inspect facilities in the South where the North’s Samjiyon Orchestra will play on its visit during the Winter Olympics next month, in which 22 North Korean athletes will compete.
She spent Sunday in Gangneung, an Olympic venue on the east coast, then on Monday went to the National Theatre in Seoul — a brutalist-style building that would not be out of place in Pyongyang — and asked to check the lights and sound system.
Television networks carried live coverage of the delegation’s arrival in the South and camera teams were in hot pursuit every step of the way from then on. Hyon’s face graced the front pages of almost every newspaper in South Korea on Monday morning. As she made stops Sunday and Monday, breathless local journalists have reported, paparazzi style, on what she’s wearing — is that fox fur around her neck? — and what she’s been eating. Fish soup and abalone porridge for breakfast Monday morning, in case you’re wondering.
They’ve lobbed questions at her to try to break through her poise, but she continued smiling like the Mona Lisa throughout.
North Korean authorities, however, complained about the media scrum around Hyon, and South Korea’s unification ministry Monday reprimanded local reporters for making her feel “uncomfortable” by “repeatedly” asking questions.
Hyon, who is 35, is the focus of so much curiosity partly because of her role at the centre of one of North Korea’s biggest cultural exports, the Moranbong Band.
The band was established on Kim’s orders in 2012 and was like nothing North Korea had ever seen before. Instead of women in tent-like traditional dresses with a repertoire made up entirely of songs about revolutionary fervour, Hyon and her fellow singers made their debut in sparkly short dresses and performed the theme from Rocky and Disney’s “It’s a Small World.”
The band, led by Hyon, was due to play in Beijing at the end of 2015, but abruptly returned home just hours before they were set to go on stage. This was apparently because China objected to the high propaganda quotient in the band’s lineup.