A Capitalist in North Korea: My Seven Years in the Hermit Kingdom Read online

  Given the country’s troubled history and estranged political position, it would be fair to look at the isolationism and socialist red tape from the view of North Koreans. Few other countries have had to deal with the massive quarantines that Western and Asian powers have enclosed around its economy. These unjust penalties were upsetting for doing business and only worsened the country’s prospects to develop. One time, for instance, I lost a multi-million dollar contract for a project to rehabilitate Pyongyang’s water and sewage system. Any capital in the world, regardless of its political system, should have a sewage system that protects its residents from water-borne diseases like cholera, a scourge of the developing world.

  The project was funded by the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development, a financing body for development projects run by the Kuwaiti government. But certain types of software that were needed for the project were hit by sanctions from Washington. The American embargo was structured so that multinational companies that do business in North Korea could lose their stakes in the US, and could face future legal hurdles in the US. Because those companies were nervous, the Kuwaiti government awarded the contract to smaller Asian suppliers that didn’t need to fear the ire of Uncle Sam.

  On another occasion in 2008, I had to fear for the survival of my pharmaceutical factory, PyongSu, a company into which I put my heart and soul. I was its managing director around the same time the United Nations slapped even more sanctions on North Korea in the mid-2000s in protest of its nuclear tests. In a very poorly timed move by international groups, I was no longer allowed to import certain chemicals for laboratory tests even though they were designed to bring better health-care to the bucolic countryside. We were left without the chemicals we needed.

  It’s just one example of how sanctions, applied in a short-sighted way, can hurt regular people who need health-care instead of the government they’re targeting. Though in theory health care and medicine is free for all in North Korea, the practice of bribe-taking means, in practice, people depend on an irregular supply of pharmaceuticals from foreign donors and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

  Despite all my efforts to cope with sanctions, my biggest headaches didn’t come from dealing with the nations that had blacklisted Pyongyang. Even more problems, to my surprise, came from ill-informed investors, employers, principles (a term for the business owners who appointed me as their agent), customers, suppliers and journalists who, for the most part, didn’t make much of an effort to understand North Korean society.

  The country itself was, quite often, of marginal and contemptuous importance to them. They showed up eager to invest in what they thought would be another emerging market that followed the rise of China. But they didn’t shake off the cookie-cutter views that all North Koreans were Stalinist ants. They sneered at my business queries and explanations as to how the country works, and degraded the abilities of North Koreans to think for themselves.

  Apart from the business side of things, I had a pleasant family life. My wife and my young daughter stayed for some time with me in Pyongyang, moving back and forth between there and our other home of Vietnam. We enjoyed ourselves despite the lack of running water and electricity, and managed to live with the absence of dairy products in the summertime. (The lack of refrigeration in hot summer months cut back the supply of these items.)

  Still, with my long working hours, I very much regret not always spending enough time with my family. I therefore dedicate this book to my wife and daughter.

  North Korea gave them great life experiences too. For some time, my Vietnamese spouse worked as a Swiss government-sponsored consultant to the Ministry of Light Industries. She led a project aimed at building up the small leather industry, using as its basis the valuable skins of the two million goats that were left unprocessed after being slaughtered. The project did not materialize. Our toddler, who learned to walk in Pyongyang, spent about three hours every day at the kindergarten of the Korea International School. While there, foreign children were surprised to learn from their North Korean teachers that Kim Il Sung, the founding father of the nation, is also the symbolic father of all children in Korea.

  Even with that propaganda, I realized that North Koreans are first and foremost human beings, not robots who follow the dictates of the Dear Leader. They experience the sorrows and worries, the happy and sad moments, and the hopes and aspirations that humans yearn for all over the world.

  In this book I will share with you my unforgettable experience. For some readers, my story will be an entertaining plunge into this strange alien world, while for those of a scholarly retinue, it could reveal much about the inner workings of this remote nation.

  Regardless of what you take from this memoir, I hope you’ll be inspired to put aside the labels you’ve always heard about North Korea. Life in the hermit state is difficult, but it is not as outlandish as they say. The nation, unknown to many, is full of opportunities for curious foreigners, like business, tourism, teaching English, and even training sports teams in Pyongyang.

  In the end, this “useful idiot” earned a comfortable living and happily shared his knowledge and skills for the good of regular North Koreans. He tried to be a sort of cultural translator, clearing up misunderstandings and building bridges between the state and the outside world. He was happy bringing quality but cheap medicine to this impoverished country, and teaching North Koreans to do business in an ever globalizing world. And as the young Kim ascends to power, that globalization is taking a greater toll on a nation many think is stuck in the Cold War. Like with Deng Xiaoping before him, business is the way forward for Pyongyang; with that, we begin my story.

  Felix Abt

  Nha Trang, Vietnam

  December 2012

  The author, his wife and daughter and his staff enjoy a holiday at the beach in Wonsan, North Korea.

  PART I

  Chapter 1:

  Into the Heart of Darkness

  “After the rain, good weather.

  In the wink of an eye,

  the universe throws off its muddy clothes.”

  — Ho Chi Minh

  Sitting in the Beijing airport, I felt an eager and exciting tingle while awaiting my first flight with the North Korean national carrier, Air Koryo into North Korea. In an introduction to the country’s superstition, I waited at terminal 2, gate 16, an area reserved specifically for North Korean airplanes. The number, 2.16, is sacred in the so-called “hermit kingdom.” It signifies February 16, a national holiday and the official 1942 birthday of the late supreme leader Kim Jong Il.

  It was July 2002, the beginning of a seven-year journey into what the Western press has painted as Joseph Conrad’s “heart of darkness.” The experience would become the most fascinating period of my life. But it was a bittersweet time. I met all sorts of friendly North Koreans, even though the distance between them and me—the foreign “capitalist”—was wide. My approach of making a profit was something new to them. They had become so accustomed to meeting foreign donors from the fraternal socialist countries and Western non-governmental organizations, like the World Food Program and United Nations.

  I sat down, and the diversity of passengers immediately struck me. About a third of the people waiting were North Koreans, half were Korean-Americans, South Koreans, Chinese and other Asians, and the rest were Caucasians like myself. Looking around, the North Koreans stood out from all the other groups. Their ethnicity was obvious based on the pins they wore on their jackets, tiny portraits of the country’s founding father, Kim Il Sung. He’s eternal president who, under the Constitution, rules North Korea from his grave—making North Korea the world’s only necrocracy.

  I also realized the sad fact that foreign companies would treat my presence in North Korea as a crippling risk. Air Koryo was blacklisted from operating in the European Union because of its safety record, a measure partially lifted in 2010. But I didn’t worry about the safety of the airplane itself. Rather, I feared my health insurance provider could
have used this flight as a reason to deny me coverage in case of an accident.

  My trepidation was partly realized: years later, my life insurance company suddenly dropped my plan, arguing that my North Korean residency wasn’t appropriate. Then, after I opened a profile with a North Korean address on LinkedIn, the account was cancelled. A fellow expatriate, I should add, had his credit card revoked once he disclosed his Pyongyang address.

  Those companies weren’t seeing the entire picture; my first impression was that the country and its people, and even its airplanes, seemed quite “normal,” for lack of a better word, like when I was greeted by a warm smile.

  The airplane was one of several Ilyushin Il-62s that were bought in the Soviet Union in 1982. The seats were larger than those of other Asian airlines, which greatly added to the comfort of the tall and overweight Westerner that I was. The cabin looked clean and well-maintained. Though the model itself was the oldest aircraft I’ve ever flown, invented in 1963, it had a solid safety record compared to its later generations. Pilots today even note that it flies smoothly and is famous for steady mechanics alongside scarce electronics.

  The standards were indeed what would be expected with any global airline. When I opened my laptop aboard another flight, a nervous hostess immediately rushed over and ordered me to shut it down. She apparently feared the equipment would interfere with sensitive electronics that the airplane did not even have! Precaution was the name of the game here. I was also impressed by the flight skills of the pilots, especially in spring when they dealt with enormous high winds and dust storms from China. When the airplane was shaking in a storm that, at times, was quite a frightening experience, I always knew in the back of my mind that the pilots were highly professional in their work.

  Before take-off, revolutionary and patriotic music whistled over the loudspeakers. Instead of the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times or Time magazine, I was given a copy of the English-language government mouthpiece, the Pyongyang Times.

  I wasn’t surprised at the stories that were splashed all over the newspaper. The front page boldly carried a portrait of the then-leader Kim Jong Il, which is a daily ritual in the North Korean press. The papers themselves are markers of national glory that foreigners were expected not to step on or throw away—or else they’d take the next flight home. Below Kim’s likeness, the paper boasted, “Kim Jong Il, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, chairman of the DPRK National Defense Commission and supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army” was inspecting army units.

  Clearly, North Korea was a place where important things happened, I thought with a chuckle. And misguided foreigners like me still hadn’t learned of the worldwide significance of the Dear Leader’s grand inspections. Other news items of great excitement to any rational individual ranged from “Pyongyang to host Kimjongilia [flower] festival,” to “Young builders at power station construction site” and “Fodder additive developed” to “Company increases food output.” Other pieces raised hackles about the dangers of a militant Japan and the ghastly human rights records of the American government.

  I closed the newspaper. No more doubts about where I was heading.

  To its credit, Air Koryo was generous, and even Western airlines came off as stingier. The stewardesses, to name one example, served a full free meal with a beverage. The lunch was not exactly a feast, but it was edible. The fried fish, although cold, was tasty. It came in a dark salty sauce with rice, canned fruit, kimchi and sponge cake. Years later in the mid-2000s, when at long last fast food became popular in North Korea, Air Koryo gave me a sandwich that resembled a hamburger and, to Korean customers, minced meat bread. The burger joints that later emerged in Pyongyang used the same expression, “minced meat bread,” on their menus.

  All the flight attendants were young and attractive females. When I tried to engage in some conversation, I noticed that they got shy. Their vocabulary was limited to a few essential sentences that a North Korean flight attendant was supposed to know, and the airline probably didn’t want them to converse with outsiders beyond the politically correct lexicon they were given. After all, they could never be sure about who was sitting in the airplane, and what intentions they harbored.

  In business class, flight attendants wore bright red Chosŏn Ot, the traditional Korean dress known more popularly as in South Korea as a Hanbok. Other flight attendants were dressed in bright red jackets. Red had a strong meaning for North Koreans, since it was on their national flag. Their hair was pulled tightly back and they were all wearing white gloves. Their faces were powdered to make the skin appear white, a look that is considered pristine and proper all over East Asia because it distinguishes them from dark-skinned peasants.

  An Air Koryo flight attendant sells alcoholic beverages, ginseng tea and souvenirs (including copies of her hat), all made in North Korea.

  When the airplane crossed over the Yalu River—the geographic boundary that separates China from North Korea—a proud flight attendant joyously proclaimed that we were officially in the pure and revolutionary country. “Fifty-seven years ago, our President, Kim Il Sung, came across the river with great ambition for his country and to liberate his country from Japanese imperialism,” she said over the loudspeaker. Over the coming years I would hear that sentence spoken in North Korean airplanes so often that I learned it by heart.

  An hour and a half after take-off, we arrived at the Pyongyang Sunan International airport. The government always had the same routine: uniformed officers led the passengers to the bus which brought us to the airport hall. Immigration officers were sitting in three closed cabins, equipped with curtains, looking down on the person whose passport details they were checking. Years later, perhaps in a public-relations move, these cabins were replaced by friendlier, transparent cabins without roofs, allowing the officers better eye contact with their “customers.”

  Pyongyang Sunan International Airport was moderately busy with, on average, one to two international flights per day—a number that seems small, but is impressive given the political isolation of North Korea.

  After giving up my mobile phone and slogging through customs, three North Koreans welcomed me with winsome smiles. Two of them were my new staff members, and the other man was the director of the foreign relations department of the then-ministry of machinery and metal working industries (the organization that sponsored my visa). That role carried a heavy burden because, if I behaved poorly, he would be held responsible.

  The weight of my actions didn’t seem to bother them for now. The gleeful employees whisked me away in a minibus to Pyongyang. An exciting journey in this very special country was just beginning.

  On the road downtown, I was greeted with a banner that read, “Independence, peace, friendship.” These slogans were commonplace, but they give the impression to most foreign visitors that North Koreans are brainwashed. I knew all those clichés spread by the media, and arrived with healthy skepticism towards the news that pummels this country on the airwaves. As a matter of fact, my hosts didn’t carry a stash of fake American dollar notes and illegal drugs in one pocket, part of their scheme to fund the nuclear bombs and start the global apocalypse.

  Waking up to kimchi

  I will never forget my first breakfast bright and early, at 7 a.m. in Pyongyang. I munched on the staple of the Korean diet, kimchi, which is usually a pickled China cabbage mixed with chili, ginger, garlic and sugar. The vegetable came with rice, eggs and soup and tasted raw, sweet and spicy. Like many Westerners, I found the kimchi unbearably hot, and ordered another coffee to wash the chili down.

  Nevertheless, the taste grew on me, leading me to become something of a kimchi aficionado. My Vietnamese wife, Huong, also enjoyed the dish and learned to make it in all sorts of ways, both spicy and not spicy, from our North Korean maid, Ms. O.

  Ms. O was highly educated, and as a medical doctor by training spoke English and had many talents, such as fixing toilets and calming down fussy children. Ev
en though she was a doctor, working for a foreigner brought in a better income and working conditions. One perk was a daily warm shower in the employer’s house, which wasn’t available in most other workplaces. She kept our house in good order and was a lovely nanny to our child.

  After Huong learned to make kimchi, my family returned the favor to Ms. O by offering her, along with my other staff, some excellent (though foreigner-made) kimchi. They were surprised and delighted, claiming the taste was as good as theirs.

  A Western-style breakfast at North Korea’s top hotel, Koryo.

  Pyongyang does not know any street crime. It is the world’s only major city where parents do not need to have the slightest worry about the safety of their kids, like the girls on the left, or the boys on the right playing alone in the streets.

  The Pyongyang privileged

  Pyongyang is considered by its residents, known as “Pyongyangites,” to be the capital of the Korean revolution. Among North Korean cities, it’s the more privileged home town inhabited by former anti-Japanese guerilla fighters, soldiers and other Koreans that locals will tell you have done great deeds in the struggle against the Japanese colonial rule and the revolution. The Korean Workers’ Party calls this clique of former revolutionaries the “core class.” This honorific distinguishes them from the so-called “hostile class,” a bedeviled group that includes male ancestors who were landowners, entrepreneurs, and administrative staff working for the Japanese colonial regime (or, as the party would say, “pro-Japanese collaborators”).