My week in North Korea: a Soviet-born American tours the Hermit Kingdom and finds humanity in a most inhumane place.

AuthorMalice, Michael
PositionTravel narrative

How Do YOU make a North Korean laugh?

To American ears that sounds like the set-up to a joke. The very idea of a North Korean giggling seems absurd. What can there possibly be to laugh about? The country has been ruled for more than half a century by absolute dictators who periodically threaten to blow up the world. It is populated by the children of a 1990s famine, malnourished orphans with oversized heads who never grew. It is forbidden to use the orphans' nickname: kotchebi, or "little sparrows," a reference to their habit of flitting around in the dirt looking for crumbs to eat.

Western impressions of North Korean culture are filtered through the prism of their totalitarian government and unrelieved misery. Day-to-day life is usually imagined as one of constant drudgery and fear. In 1965, Robert Jenkins was one of the few U.S. soldiers to defect into North Korea. Escaping four decades later, he wrote, "I did not understand that the country I was seeking temporary refuge in was literally a giant, demented prison."

But even prisons have culture, rules, and humanity, as do prisons within prisons (like, say, solitary confinement). Prisoners also have jokes. Humor can be the last tactic for staying sane in the face of unspeakable oppression, as the gallows humor of Eastern European Jewry can attest.

So making a North Korean laugh, it turns out, is actually quite easy. How do you do it? Take every racist joke you know--they will not have heard them, I assure you-and replace the target race, no matter what it is, with "Japanese." To wit: What do you call 100,000 Japanese men at the bottom of the ocean? A good start. How do you stop a Japanese man from drowning? Take your foot off his neck. It's just that easy to become the funniest person in the entire country of North Korea.

They have their own jokes too but, like the rest of their products, these can't compete on an international scale. To quote my guide during my five-day trip to the Hermit Kingdom late last year:

Knock, knock Who's there? Su. Su who? Su Pak (Korean for watermelon).

Some North Korean humor, though, is actually quite good. As I was driven into Pyongyang from the airport, our guide referred to the monolith Ryugyong Hotel as "our latest rocket launch," a quip that both acknowledged the tension between our respective nations and simultaneously defused it (pun intended, God help us), all while seeming quite daring to an outsider. It was the first of a constant series of surprises I experienced during my eye-opening visit to the world's darkest dictatorship.

Exciters Unwelcome

It's easy to get into North Korea as a tourist. The reason is the most capitalist one possible: They need money. In 1980, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) achieved the dubious honor of being the first Communist nation to default on its loans, ruining its credit rating to this day. The following three decades were hardly better for the DPRK'S international reputation. The 1990s collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe removed most of their strongest allies. President George W. Bush famously included North Korea on his "axis of evil," and despite Dennis Rodman's best efforts President Barack Obama will not be calling on Marshall Kim Jong Un any time soon. Like his father, Kim Jong Il, and his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, this dictator is a global oddity.

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China, the DPRK's closest ally, has been urging North Korea to follow its lead and liberalize the economy. The North Koreans steadfastly refuse. And though the DPRK still insists that the Korean peninsula is one nation riven in two by U.S. imperialists, South Korea is increasingly uninterested in having anything to do with its backward brother.

Pariahs on the world stage, North Koreans proclaim a philosophy of self-reliance and absolute autonomy they call "juche." But they've learned the hard way that it's really difficult to buy things when you don't have any money. Hence their tourism industry, a way to attract some much-needed hard currency from foreigners.

My reasons for traveling there were more personal. Like Kim Jong Il, I was born in the former Soviet Union. Visiting North Korea would be my best chance to see what my family had gone through before we fled to Brooklyn when I was 2 years old. There was also the issue of time: I suspect North Korea as we currently know it will not be around for much longer.

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It never occurred to me that you could visit North Korea until I logged into Facebook one day and saw photos of a friend flashing his dimwitted grin against the backdrop of the Korean People's Army tanks. "How the hell did you get into North Korea?" I asked him.

"It's easy," he told me. "I met a guy at Burning Man who runs a company. His role is to vouch for you."

A little Googling revealed that several firms offer to take outsiders into North Korea. It was easy, but not at all cheap. All you needed to do was get yourself into Beijing on the right date--and not be a journalist.

As background reading for my trip, I devoured several books about the nation (though Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader by Bradley K. Martin and Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick should be sufficient for anyone planning a visit). Like most other don't-call-me-a-hipster New Yorkers, I also watched The Vice Guide to North Korea on YouTube, in which Vice honcho Shane Smith claimed that in North Korea, "there's nothing normal that happens ever."

My experience ended up being completely different from Smith's--about the only thing we shared in common was that we coincidentally ended up staying in the same hotel room. I witnessed vast amounts of human normalcy in the most abnormal society on Earth. When I waved to teenage girls, they giggled. When I smiled at toddlers, their grandmothers beamed with pride. The people on the streets of Pyongyang are often alleged to be actors staffed for the benefit of tourists, but there is no amount of training in the world possible for a theater production of that scale.

The first step to entering North Korea is getting debriefed by the Western tour agency that acts as your liaison. I expected a long litany of do's and don'ts from Phil, our Western guide in Beijing, but his advice was actually quite...

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