WOT’S RONG WID NORTH KOREA?
I’ve spent so much of my life travelling the planet that writing about all the countries I’ve visited would take up far too much room, but I have to say a little about one of the strangest places I’ve been to: North Korea. People think it’s really difficult to get there, but it’s not. Well, it wasn’t when I visited in May 2012. There’s an agency in Beijing that specialises in sending Westerners there, and they quite quickly fixed my trip. There’s no visa needed, there were no long forms to fill in, you just go.
On arrival I was met by a person who would be my minder for the whole time I was there. Of course I was shown only the best bits, and a lot of the time it was like walking around a film set, but it was eye-opening to see a totalitarian state first-hand. Everybody talked about the Great Leader. I asked them who was the first man on the moon and they said King Jong-un. When I asked who invented the typewriter they said King Jong-il. I enquired who were the happiest people in the world, and they answered, ‘North Koreans’. It was incredible. I asked people whether they really believed the things they were saying and they said they did. I couldn’t tell if they were acting or if they did really believe it, but I didn’t push them on things. What might have been a little push for knowledge from me could mean death for them.
After one girl showed me around an arts complex, I shook her hand and, as I did so, I discreetly palmed some money to her and she almost screamed. She thought I was handing her something illegal, and she feared the state so much that she nearly freaked out. I was only giving her a tip. But I must say that visiting North Korea helped me to understand it better than I had before.
I look at North Korea as an entity that has been abused and is now very paranoid. The country was occupied by the Japanese for thirty-five years, and it was a brutal occupation. And then other people, including the Soviet Union, came in until they felt as though they’d been brutalised and hated by everyone, so they wanted to be on their own. Visiting was important for me because I got to understand the way they thought about the world. That doesn’t mean I agree with them. If an abused child goes on to be an abuser, or has bad behaviour, you don’t condone it or agree with it but you can understand how it happened.
I was really lucky in that my guide was the daughter of the head of the nuclear programme. She’d been well educated in Austria and had also been to England. She said she knew my point of view, but she wanted me to understand her point of view as well. She knew how worried people were about North Korea having a bomb, but then she went off the tourist route and took me to a place where, using fancy vision equipment, you could see bomb launch sites in South Korea that were owned by the Americans and were pointing towards North Korea. She knew exactly how many bombs there were, and in Japan.
She said: ‘If they fire at us, we want at least one to fire back. We’re not very advanced, I know, but there are so many pointing towards us that we want to have some kind of reply.’
I couldn’t agree with everything she said, but I did understand. My empathy is with the people who, like most people in the world, aren’t thinking about history or philosophising about the merits or the ethics of a nuclear-free state. They just want food on the table.
After visiting North Korea I genuinely felt like kissing the ground when I arrived back in China. It’s strange that in China I have never felt I couldn’t go anywhere that any other Chinese citizen could go. Yes, there are restrictions on what you can read online, and the news you get, wherever it comes from, is government-approved, but the only time I was ever stopped and questioned was at the airport when I was leaving for Tibet, somewhere I’d always wanted to visit.
I was getting ready to board the plane when the police pulled me to one side. They told me they knew who I was and asked if I was going to write something while I was there. I told them I wasn’t, that I just wanted a holiday. I kept saying I wanted to see all of China. I told them I loved China. Once I’d used the word China, rather than Tibet, they decided I was okay. I’d stuck to the script and was allowed to board the plane.
My guide was Tibetan and very anti-Chinese. He refused to speak to me in Chinese, so we spoke in English and Urdu. He really told it as it was, insisting it was a real occupation. The Chinese there are much more privileged than the locals; they get all the top jobs and drive around in Range Rovers while the locals have very little and are poor.
The people are very religious. They pray on the streets, and in town squares, and walk endlessly around, seemingly going nowhere. If I left my hotel and turned right there was a vegan restaurant, but outside this restaurant there was always an old lady standing, massaging her prayer beads. One day as I was leaving the restaurant I offered her some food, which she refused.
‘I’m not hungry,’ she said.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.
She looked directly into my eyes, and said with a hint of a smile. ‘I’m waiting for the Dalai Lama to come back. I was standing right here the last time I saw him. It was very different then.’
I later took an internal flight in China, sitting in what was business class. It was a small plane, so business class was just the first three rows of seats, but I guess it must have made me look important. People were still getting on the plane when a man in his mid-thirties came up to me brimming with excitement, holding a pen and notebook.
‘Autograph,’ he said in broken English.
‘No problem,’ I replied. One of the reasons I took to China was that no one knew me there, so I was pretty surprised by this. I didn’t really want it to happen again, and I didn’t want to encourage others. I signed it and sat down. But the man didn’t go away. At first he stared at me, and then he shouted.
‘Give me your real autograph. This is not real.’
‘It is,’ I said. ‘That’s my autograph.’
‘No,’ he shouted, ‘you must write “Bob Marley”!’
I burst into laughter. ‘I am not Bob Marley,’ I said.
‘You are Bob Marley. You cannot trick me. So now, Bob Marley, give me your autograph,’ he demanded.
I really didn’t know what to say or do. Then another man, slightly older, came to my rescue.
‘Hey,’ he said, in a deep, reassuring voice. ‘Don’t be silly. This is not Bob Marley. Bob Marley is no longer with us. I know exactly who this is,’ he said confidently. ‘This is Kofi Annan.’
I looked around in despair to see if there was anyone else who could help me, but alas there wasn’t. I signed one autograph as Bob Marley, another as Kofi Annan, and then I sat down to ponder the meaning of me.