It’s like the East Berlin of our time — isolated, difficult to visit, and a larger presence in our imagination than anywhere else — North Korea. So I was fascinated to read an account of one woman’s visit to the locked-down country. Ostensibly part of a business delegation, Sarah Wang made it her own business to dodge her minders as often as possible, and escape into the North Korean street.
She captured a number of interesting pictures, and had a few unscripted encounters, which I found gripping. She also smuggled 125 chocolate bars into the country, and handed them out whenever she had the chance. Now that’s my kind of journalist!
Her descriptions of the deprivation in ordinary North Korean life really hit home, though:
The men in the streets usually wore black or dark blue uniforms that looked like Mao suits, and the women wore cheap white or gray blouses with black or dark blue skirts. The most popular shoes were made of dark blue cloth, with white shoelaces and white plastic soles. The blue color ran and stained the laces when it rained.
…
Once I walked into a grocery store on the ground floor of a residential building. The store was empty except for three 10-foot-tall heaps on the ground—one of cabbage, one of tomatoes, and one of turnips. There were no price tags and no customers. A middle-aged woman in a black uniform stood behind the counter, which held small piles of peanuts and pine seeds that looked as though they had been there for a long time.
Our guides repeatedly reassured us that the people had enough food and that each Pyongyang resident receives a ration of vegetables and rice every day. They didn’t mention meat or fruit. When a member of the tour group spat out the tasteless meat that was a rare treat at one of our meals, the waitress standing behind him visibly stiffened. On one occasion, I drew a banana on a piece of paper and showed it to a waitress; she had never seen one. She knew about apples, but she had never eaten one.
Grant Hamilton
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