TWENTY-EIGHT

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.

—George Orwell, 1984

OUR FINAL STOP on this busy Victory Day tour is on the outskirts of Pyongyang, in a rural area. It’s newly opened, and none of us—including Min and Roe—have been here before. We know nothing about it, other than its status as a “revolutionary site,” which designates any place where one of the leaders carried out activities of national importance. These sites play a pivotal role in fomenting state mythography. One such revolutionary site is Kim Il Sung’s native home in Manyongdae, near the Schoolchildren’s Palace. Another is Kim Jong Il’s fake birthplace on Mount Paekdu.

Our van makes its way down a long, narrow drive surrounded by immaculately manicured lawns and ornate landscape architecture, every rock polished, each flowerbed formation enunciated in perfect geometrical flourish. “What the fuck is this? The wonderful land of Oz?” I whisper to Alek. He shakes his head. Alexandre has no idea, either.

We get out of the van. Soldiers everywhere, most of them manual labor units at menial tasks, putting the final perfecting touch on the accumulated sheen. The echoed commands of a battle drill can be heard in the distance. A unit marches past singing the chorus of “Let’s Go to Mount Paekdu!”

“Is there a military base nearby?” I ask innocently.

“That’s not… a question I would feel comfortable asking,” Min warns with an awkward smile. “Don’t know and don’t want to know!”

Okay then.

A young female soldier and older male officer approach our vehicle. She’ll be our guide, and he’s there to monitor all that is said and done until we vacate the premises. It’s one of those places. Sensitive.

“Comrade Min,” the guide exclaims with surprise.

“Comrade Li Gyong Sim,” Min responds, emitting a bolt of laughter.

Turns out they were in the same class at the University of Foreign Studies, though they hardly knew each other. Still, something about this chance meeting has them both stifling giggles.

“So I guess you don’t need me to interpret,” Min says to her former classmate. “You can do the tour in English yourself. Your English is probably even better than mine!”

Comrade Li shakes her head firmly in the negative, a brief sideways glance acknowledging the presence of the senior officer next to her. She launches into her introductory spiel, leaving Min no choice but to translate for us.

We are welcomed to the Gonjiri Revolutionary Site, where Kim Il Sung spent late 1950 to 1953 commanding the Korean War. Or so they would like us to believe. I raise my camera to take a photo of the artificial hillside grass cave entrance. Min raises her arm in front of my lens just as fast. “You can leave your camera in the van, Travis.” She smiles. No photos here.

Inside the cave, an open-floor museum has been created. We are led through a series of installations, the highlight of which is Kim Il Sung’s office, where, we are told, he held more than two hundred meetings. Fake stars glimmer from the night-blue ceiling above. The office is a theatrical stage set with desks and chairs that look like restored high-end antiques, gleaming with a fresh paint job.

“Is this the original office?” I ask. “Or a re-creation?”

“It’s the original office.” Comrade Li and the senior officer study my face, as though trying to gauge whether I’m buying it.

“Oh wow.” I give them a wide-eyed nod.

The guide points to a bullet hole in the wall, evidence from the day “the enemy attempted to assassinate our General.” Well, it looks as real as anything else here.

The path takes us through a series of military tunnels out the back, where we are shown a small classroom. “This is where the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il took his lessons while his father worked in his office.” Out of the corner of my eye, I spy Roe trailing behind us, typically silent but attempting to stifle his laughter.

“This was the bedroom of the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il from June 25, 1952, to August 16, 1952.” A simple affair, with a tiny child-sized bed covered in a pink-and-white-striped sheet, garish red carpeting, and a small table with a tablecloth of a clashing shade of red. Like the office, this sacred ground is roped off to prevent visitors from sullying it with footprints.

As we circle our way back toward the parking lot, we meet an arriving tour group, this one composed wholly of soldiers. They seem more interested in us than the introductory spiel their guide is presenting.

We pause between four chairs arranged in a circle in front of the cave’s entrance. “This is where Kim Il Sung met with the first three hero soldiers of the Fatherland Liberation War.” I study the chairs, puzzled by a sense of déjà vu. That’s when it hits me. I have the same chair at home in Berlin. Who knew IKEA exported its designs to Korea in the 1950s?

The day ends with another sporadic appearance by Comrade Kim, eager to check on the status of his latest pet project. “I want to show you my favorite bar in Pyongyang,” he tells us in the van.

The joint he takes us to is brand-new, hidden down an alleyway behind the Tower of the Juche Idea on the eastern banks of the Taedong River. On the ground floor is a shop vending the usual miscellany and a pharmacy selling a range of imported medicine, from Tylenol to antibiotics, behind a glass display case. Upstairs, the bar is rendered in exquisite oak paneling and varnished wood tables. Everything glistens and, save for the Moranbong girls on TV, you could easily be in an upmarket sports bar in Chicago or Boston. The tables are filled with donju and Chinese businesspeople. They stare at us with bemusement, unaccustomed to seeing Western foreigners here.

Comrade Kim orders beers and kimchi pancakes for the table. “So,” he says, “I heard you went to Gonjiri today. Now you know the true history behind the Korean War!”

As he smiles at me, he gives me a sly wink.

Kim, as we have learned, is the son of a prominent officer. It suddenly dawns on me: of course he must know the truth. They all must know. All the prominent families here, they are the descendants of the people who fought in the war. People who were actually there, who must have passed down the stories from generation to generation. Pyongyang was bombed to near total annihilation; the entire city was destroyed. Kim Il Sung and his closest advisers, the entire Politburo, had to be evacuated to the border with China, where they remained until the war came to an end and they could safely return to Pyongyang. Gonjiri, like Kim Jong Il’s birthplace on Mount Paekdu, is a total stage set.

“Let’s talk,” says Alexandre as we make our way down the hall to our rooms. These nightly chats are a means for both of us to retain our sanity as the days wear on.

Alexandre starts venting right away, in the whisper we’ve taken to adapting as a measure of safety whenever we’re alone. “Do they really think anyone believes this shit? They are all mentally ill. They have to be.”

From my balcony, we look out onto the lights of the city before their nightly extinguishment. I’ve been having my own mental travails of late, though that’s not something I’m eager to share. They’ve manifested themselves, in the past days, in difficulty getting to sleep at night. Thankfully, I prepared for this inevitability in advance by bringing a stash of sleeping pills.

“Fucking crazy,” he continues, “this whole system. A system of ass-kissing is what it is. It started with Kim Il Sung, his sick fetish for Stalin. And the next one, who exacerbated it all to get in his father’s good graces. And this one now—he has no choice but to continue it and doesn’t have the brains to do it any other way.”

“But what about what Simon told us?” I ask.

“Simon who?”

“Businessman Simon. The Chinese guy. He implied that…Number Three wanted to change the system. It’s the old men surrounding him, his advisers, the old guard, who won’t let that happen.”

“I don’t buy that.”

“Then… what’s going on in his head? Is it that he grew up so sheltered in his Swiss chalet that he doesn’t know what’s real and what’s not?”

“It’s partly that he doesn’t know,” Alexandre speculates, “and partly that he doesn’t care. They’re afraid of him, so they have to hide certain things from him. But the reality they do show can be just as deceiving. The songs they sing for him. The constant reminders of who he is—which is who his father and grandfather were.

“But here’s my theory. It’s the tears that get him the most. Tears are a powerful thing. The people sobbing with joy wherever he goes. I think he must see them and think to himself, ‘Hey, those are real tears. Not something you can fake. Sure, I do some bad things. But when the people see me, they cry because they love me. They really love me.’”

“And those bad things”—I contribute to this exercise in armchair psychology—“he can rationalize those. Things he has to do. That he’s been forced into doing. Because of his position in life. Who he is, what he was born into.”

“The ones I feel the most sorry for are the people on the ground who have to deal with the foreigners,” says Alexandre. “Not guides like Min and Roe. They have some distance from it all. I’m talking about the minders who get tasked with accompanying the NGO workers, the foreign embassy officials. They’re the ones who really have to live the contradiction. The ones who see the truth and know what’s really going on and then have to lie on the spot. Going out into the countryside to find out what happened to all the food or medicine, seeing what really happened, and then having to invent a lie to tell the foreigners. Having to deny that what is there in front of them is real. At the end of the day, imagine how fucked up their heads must be. It reminds me of something my teacher said the other day in class. We were learning some new vocabulary, something to do with food and drink. The teacher was giving an example of a sentence: ‘When I have a headache, I drink alcohol.’ I thought, wait, that doesn’t make sense—he must mean something like when he drinks too much, he gets a headache. Then I realized, no, I had understood the sentence correctly. He drinks when he gets a headache. Your head must ache at night, with all this bullshit, all these lies you can’t even begin to unravel. This fake victory, this triumph of socialism that is really a triumph of oppression. Your head aches from it all, and you want nothing more than to have a drink, to annihilate all the wreckage in your mind.”

Alexandre studies the dim glare of the city blanketed before us.

“What were the North Koreans you met in Dubai like?” I ask. “Did they still believe in the system? In any of it?”

“Some do, some don’t,” Alexandre replies. “They’ve seen the outside world. And they’re torn. They suffer from… let’s call it an inner conflict.”

“Double consciousness,” I offer. “Chinese intellectuals talk about this.”

“What it comes down to is dedication and belief. Those are two different things. There are some who genuinely believe in the system. Then there are those who are dedicated to it without necessarily believing in it. I met both types in Dubai. As foreigners, of course, we will never, ever meet someone who is not benefiting from the system in some way or other. That’s what makes it hard to gauge what it is they actually believe. That’s where the dedication comes in: you might think it’s all bullshit, a lie. But you don’t want it to end if you know how it works and it’s rewarding you.”

“So I guess you weren’t serious about Kimchi Baguette.”

“No! Of course not,” Alexandre spits. “These joint ventures, ha! This is how it works: they take your expertise, they use it, you teach them until they’ve mastered it. Then they see they have no further use for you, and you—and your investment—are shuttled out of the picture. It’s happened to a lot of businessmen who have tried to do joint ventures here. ‘Oh, sorry, because of the political situation, we can’t get you a visa. And your funds? They are frozen in the bank here. We can’t get them out. Sorry, and have a nice day.’

“A childlike criminality pervades this entire system. The people’s sense of right and wrong is completely perverted. This government that defaults on its foreign loans and then brags about it in the state media to its own people. What a great business model! That’s why the economy is in the dumps, has been for so long. They can’t get any credit from anyone, anywhere. The only way they can do business is the criminal way. To do business here as a foreigner is to set yourself up to get robbed!”

“But don’t you think the donju are the ones who are going to change the system? People like Min and Kim—these are enlightened people. They know how it works in the outside world.”

“I don’t think anyone can change the system,” Alexandre says. “It’s too late for that. And you want to know why? It’s because the people who designed the system are dead.”

The last syllable, though whispered, cuts a resonant swath through the night air, sending a chill up my neck. A factory on the Potong River suddenly emits a strange fiery light into the night sky. The thought that all this has been solidified into an inalterable permanency—that nothing, no imaginable shift in the narrative, can ever arise, no hope on the horizon—in my exhausted state, it is too much to take. Alexandre sees from the expression on my face that he has gone too far, wishes me good night, and retreats to his room.

Belief and dedication. One can be expressed through words, the other only through action. There is, of course, an entire spectrum that lies between. I want to believe there are more directions in this moral compass than what has been sketched out, beyond the dumb naïveté of blind obedience and the pure selfishness of cynically upholding it for personal gain. I close my blinds to the creepy solitude of my empty hotel room. As muddy as the facts are, as impenetrable as something that’s supposed to be crystal clear as truth is in this confused place, there is still something that we cannot access, a togetherness spawned by these mad and perilous conditions, a unity that we will never fully have access to. Those ties that bind, that cannot be expressed in language—for it is far too dangerous—but make themselves apparent in other ways. A sly grin. A wink. It is, after all, a kind of victory. Not in any war, whether real or imagined. But victory in the sense of endurance. Of survival.