Insider sees North Korea’s intolerance as part of story
To a world watching in befuddlement, the on-again, off-again moves toward a historic meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may look like a diplomatic waltz gone awry.
But to those who have spent serious time in North Korea, the moves are typical of a country known for its contradictions.
Travis Jeppesen, a Berlinbased writer, chronicles life inside this closed world in his new book, “See You Again in Pyongyang: A Journey Into Kim Jong Un’s North Korea.”
With a penchant for travel — the more unusual, the better — Jeppesen accepts a chance to study Korean at Kim Hyong Jik University in North Korea’s capital. The experience gives him a close-up look at the cloistered country over weeks, not a few days like most outsiders.
What he finds is a land where you are almost always accompanied by escorts, a place so steeped in paranoia and leader worship that accidentally capturing a partial photo of Kim Jong Un’s father, Kim Jong Il, hanging on a wall poster and not deleting the image from your camera can land you in hot water.
While families fortunate enough to have a television tune in to watch newscasts that almost entirely feature Kim Jong Un in orchestrated actions — from touring a factory or a farm to reviewing a military unit — the real news is exchanged between neighbors at markets.
To North Koreans, the U.S. is portrayed as a brutal world menace. One museum, using dummies to depict wicked GIs and maimed Korean victims, has a display that blames America for a massacre that occurred during the Korean War. The truth may be more elusive.
What isn’t talked about is that the region was a hotbed of competing factions of Koreans, both from the left and right, that had their share of retaliatory killings.
Though he stays long enough in North Korea to get a deeper view, Jeppesen is still treated as a foreigner. He can’t travel freely without a minder. He has to be careful not to say or do the wrong thing. He eats at the often empty restaurants designated for foreigners. Even beaches are segregated — one side for North Koreans, one side for foreigners.
But Jeppesen does have his sympathies. While his book is hardly a love letter, he bemoans that almost all U.S. reporting on North Korea is negative, often colored by South Korea’s dislike of the North, and that few Western news operations have any Korean speakers who could help unfold a more balanced view of nuanced life in North Korea.
Those searching for clues as to whether Trump has a shot at ever forging a new relationship with North Korea may come away from this book as confounded as ever. There are no blacks and whites about North Korea — only grays.
“See You Again in Pyongyang” leaves you thinking that for all its absurdities, North Korea is a country that revels in the status quo.
Kim Jong Un may eventually meet with Trump. But given the North Korean psyche, will the Supreme Leader give up any real power or the nuclear weapons backing it up? Never.