A Year
in Pyongyang
by Andrew Holloway
Chapter Twenty One
My final weeks in Pyongyang's timeless grip
slipped by sluggishly. I remained semi-employed. Most weeks I only
received enough texts from the publishing house to occupy me for
two or three days. I went for walks, read books and drank heavily
in the evenings. I was fortunate with the weather. It was a hotter
summer than usual with temperatures consistently well into the eighties
and few days of heavy rain.
Around me the two-hundred-day campaign drew
towards its close. In the early evenings there were more and more
people out on the streets practising marching for an hour after
work, this on top of their already protracted working day, in preparation
for September 9th.
I was allowed to have one more weekend excursion
before I left Korea. Sami had often told me how much he liked the
northern industrial city of Hamhung and mentioned that a trip there
always incorporated a day on the beach as well as guided tours of
major factories such as the Ryongsang heavy Machine Factory and
the February 8th Vindon Complex. I couched my request to go to Hamhung
in terms of desire to see something of North Korea's brilliant heavy
industry in action and, although I had already had more excursions
than any other reviser that summer, I was able to go to Hamhung
as well.
For some strange reason, once I got to Hamhung,
the only factory I was taken to see was the Ryongsong Heavy Machine
Factory. I can only speculate that the North Koreans have recently
woken up to the fact that their industry is now lagging behind the
rest of the world, and they have come to realise that taking foreigners
to see their industrial installations is likely to give them an
adverse rather than a positive impression of the country. Certainly
the Ryongsong heavy Machine Factory, which is one of the country's
most important industrial bases, presented a sad spectacle of well
maintained plant and machinery which would no doubt have been quite
impressive for a third world country twenty years ago, but is now
obsolete. The official who showed us round admitted as such. All
the machines, he said, had been built in the sixties and seventies.
However, he assured us, in three years' time they would be using
these machines to make new machines which would take their place.
As very little had been arranged for me
on this trip I spent quite a lot of time randomly wandering the
streets. As in Pyongyang, and I imagine every other town and city
in North Korea, the town was built to a pattern of modern apartment
blocks fronting the main thoroughfares and concealing warrens of
traditional cottages behind. There was far less traffic on the roads
than in Pyongyang, but more than in Kaesong. As one would expect
of a centre of heavy industry, Hamhung was a greyer, shabbier place
than Pyongyang, but for me the most striking difference between
the two cities was that here the people did not stare at me nearly
as much, not even when I was roaming among the traditional cottages,
although Europeans were obviously a far rarer phenomenon here than
in Pyongyang. I was particularly grateful for this aspect of the
people of the Hamhung area on the Sunday, when we went to the beach
twenty kilometres away. This was not a beach reserved for high officials
and pampered foreigners. It was a place of recreation for thousands
of Korean families on a day's furlough from the two-hundred-day
campaign, and I was the only white man on it. It had a lovely day
sunbathing and swimming, which could easily have been married if
the people had stared at me as if I had just escaped from a zoo.
The Saturday evening was interesting. Instead
of staying in the hotel, I bought cans of beer and went off with
my interpreters to the local park. In their society which offers
so few pleasures, one thing that Koreans love to do is to sit out
under the stars on summer evenings. We climbed up to a pretty wooden
pavilion, overlooking the city, and sat among the local people gossiping
in the balmy night air, attracting I dare say a little envy at our
cans of Japanese beer. On our way up we passed the city's principal
statue of the great leader. The bronze statue was illuminated by
floodlights. A number of young devotees were gathered around the
statue and studying the thoughts of the prophet by the beam of the
floodlights in the presence of his brazen image. This is indubitably
extremely silly, but when you are actually there it is also rather
touching. I found it so anyway. "Do people in your country stand
under statues of Margaret Thatcher and study her works?" asked Chang
Yong ingenuously.
I was promised that before I left I would
be taken to visit a number of places of interest around Pyongyang.
I asked to visit a school, a kindergarten, a factory, and to see
one of the rehearsals for the mass game. None of these outings were
ever arranged but I did get to see the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital
and the Students' and Children's Palace.
The Pyongyang Maternity Hospital is the
jewel in the crown of North Korea's national health service. Its
importance is attested to by the number of plaques commemorating
occasions when the fuhrer or his heir have been round to deliver
on-the-spot guidance. Needless to say, I was not taken to the actual
wards where the patients were. What they wanted me to see was the
jewel-inlaid mosaic floor in the entrance hall and the hi-tech hardware
that they had there. I was shown the closed-circuit TV system on
which visiting husbands could see and talk to their wives. I said
it was very impressive but would it not be easier for the husband
just to go upstairs and visit his wife and new-born infant on the
ward? Oh no, that would be unhygienic. I asked if fathers could
be present at their children's birth. The doctor who was showing
me round was aware that this is now common practice in the West.
He replied that such an idea was so alien to his culture that although
it would be permissible, no father had ever yet made such a request.
I was then escorted round the theatres and
laboratories which contained some sophisticated-looking obstetric
hardware, much of it bearing the imprint of Siemens of West Germany.
A very embarrassed pregnant lady was obliged to expose herself to
me to demonstrate an electronic scanner which the doctor said could
determine the sex of an unborn infant and show if the foetus was
imperfect in any way. I asked what happened if the scanner did detect
a deformed infant. Then, the doctor told me quite blithely, the
pregnancy would be terminated. I inferred from the tone of his response
that the mother was given no choice in the matter.
When I inquired about the incidence of post-natal
depression, the doctor replied that he had never seen an instance
of this condition. Naturally I was somewhat sceptical about this
statement until I was shown a ward full of babies without a mother
in sight. He explained that some women preferred to rest after giving
birth and to leave the care of their infants to the nurses. Presumably
if they still do not feel able or willing to look after their offspring
when they leave the hospital, they can pass on the responsibility
within the extended family. It can be assumed than that, unless
there is a fully fledged puerperal psychosis, depressed mothers
are perceived merely as tired rather than ill, and do not feel the
full consequences of their condition because they can evade the
pressures of actually having to try and care for the child.
Pyongyang's Students' and Children's Palace
is a huge building in which students and children can pursue a wide
range of worthwhile hobbies, from music, dance and drama to physics
and electronics, under expert supervision. From what I saw the standards
of achievement attained by the children in the various fields were
very high. There are similar, smaller establishments in all the
DPRK's main centres of population.
I would have been much more impressed than
I was if Chang Yong had not in his naivety told me that the Students'
and Children's palaces were the exclusive preserve of the honours
students and that, as a lazy, underachieving schoolboy, he had been
envious of the youngsters who had access to these facilities. He
also told me that for the same reason he never went as a child to
the Children's Camp on Mount Myohyant. It had never occurred to
him that such discrimination might be regarded as other than entirely
fair and reasonable. Consequently he was astonished when I told
him about a text that I had revised in which the president criticised
such practices and maintained that all the children of the capital
should be given the opportunity to go to Mount Myohyant, so that
all should feel that the Party's love was extended equally to everyone.
Copyright Ross Holloway 2003. All Rights Reserved. ross.holloway@virgin.net
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