The first American to go to college in North Korea
INthe summer of 2016, Travis Jeppesen became the e first American to study at a North Korean university — and he saw a lot that surprised him. At a zoo in the country’s capital of Pyongyang, he spotted domestic dogs and cats in cages, attracting visitors just as much as the wild animals.
Suddenly, he was interrupted by an even more incredible scene. An elderly woman selling ice cream and candy just outside the zoo’s entrance was interrupted by two tall policemen who swooped in, picked her up in a violent struggle and carried her off.
“I subtly tried to watch where they were taking her, but I lost sight of them,” says Jeppesen, author of the new book, “See You Again in Pyongyang: A Journey Into Kim Jong Un’s North Korea” (Hachette), out now.
“I don’t think it ended well for her.”
It was another strange day in the month that Jeppesen, an American journalist and author based in Berlin, spent in North Korea, studying the Korean language.
Jeppesen, a Charlotte, NC, native, had been to the country three times previously for short trips, writing about its art and architecture for magazines. But this visit, arranged by a company called Tongil Tours, allowed him to study the language in a genuine North Korean setting for a month. Aged 36 and already armed with a BA from The New School and a Ph.D. in critical writing, he jumped at the chance to enroll at Kim Hyong Jik University of Education, named for the father of the country’s founder, Kim Il-sung.
During his time there, Jeppesen stayed at the Sosan Hotel in Pyongyang.
“Situated on an incline overlooking a football stadium and the surrounding palaces devoted to tae kwon do and gymnastics,” Jeppesen writes, “the Sosan’s towering, 30- floor, salmon-colored presence unmistakably connotes ‘hotel’ in international functionalist lingo.”
Jeppesen describes the hotel’s lobby as “grand,” “palatial” and “empty,” which seemed to be a theme. He and the other two foreigners in his class — a French graduate student and the Australian head of Tongil Tours, who shared a room opposite his to cut costs — were the only guests on the hotel’s 28th floor.
“My room has two brand-new queen-sized beds and glittering made-in-China furnishings, a big closet, a balcony overlooking the city — and a leaking air conditioner,” he writes.
The hotel had a restaurant and bar that drew a business crowd. As such, the hotel’s food was surprisingly satisfactory, including a breakfast buffet with Chinese and Western dishes. Pyongyang boasted all sorts of restaurants — on their first night there, Jeppesen and his colleagues ate Italian.
Jeppesen attended class two hours each morning Monday to Friday, with “afternoons and weekends devoted to homework and excursions.” Foreigni tourists were given two mandatory “guides” whose assignment was to accompany and monitor their “guest” every minute they were in public. Jeppesen refers to his minders in the book as Min, a 26year-old woman, and Roe, an older man who worked under her, though he says he changed the identities of the North Koreans he writes about.
ONhis first morning, he heard an eerie sound outside his hotel room at 5 a.m., then heard it again every day after that.
The entire city, it turns out, is awakened by an instrumental version of the North Korean tune, “Where Are You, Dear General?” — a salute to Kim Il-sung.
“It’s very, very haunting, and very bizarre,” Jeppesen tells The Post. “It almost sounds like something out of a David Lynch movie. It’s one of the things that reminds you that Dear Leader is with you everywhere you go. At every moment.”
What North Koreans didn’t have at every moment was electricity, which Jeppesen’s prestigious university was usually without. “The hallways were dark. There was no plumbing really in the bathrooms,” he says. “It hit home that this is a really poor third-world country. Everything is very bare-bones.”
Also troubling is how every housing unit came with one official spy — usually a middle-aged or elderly woman — called the inminbanjang, whose job is to know everything about her residents and report back to the government.
“Her job is to ‘heighten revolutionary vigilance,’ as one propaganda poster has it,” Jeppesen writes in the book.
“[She keeps] a watchful eye over the comings and goings of her assigned unit, down to the smallest detail. A good inminbanjang knows exactly how many spoons and chopsticks are in each family’s kitchen and can spill that information on cue if the need should arise.
The inminbanjang is, in a sense, the nosy neighbor elevated to the status of official position.” Which is not to say the inminban
jang are always strict. Many let certain rules slide, such as the elderly woman Jeppesen met who was “known to rent out her second room as an hourly love hotel for extra income.”
This is just one example of how life is becoming slightly less regimented for North Koreans.
While virtually all citizens wore uniforms until recently, there is now a freer sense of fashion. Men wear “short-sleeve shirts of all colors and designs,” with Rolexes adorning their wrists for status (even if most are fakes from China).
Women mostly wear skirts, although jeans are permitted for some in certain positions. The hot foot-
'I’ve developed this weird affection for North Korea, even though I know it’s a horrific place.' — author Travis Jeppesen