High tech and hot pot, p.11
High Tech and Hot Pot, page 11
“Now that they like you, we can begin the classes,” says Nora.
We relocate to room 194 in the three-story school building. “Be honest and work hard” is written in large red characters on the back wall. I introduce myself, speak a bit about my job and explain why I like the English language so much. Then comes the round of questions: “How old are you?” “What is your favorite animal?” “Do you like Chinese food?” “Do you like large and small worms crawling all over you?” Uh-oh, I wasn’t prepared for that one, but the answer isn’t too difficult.
Then the teacher asks them to write me a letter in English or Chinese, and while they do this I go to the neighboring classroom and go through my program once more.
On leaving, I get almost a hundred letters, as well as presents: paper airplanes, paper birds, origami hearts; a Plasticine figure with blue eyes and yellow hair; a pencil with a dragon’s head eraser; a cuddly toy monkey and a stuffed dog. In China, you can be whatever you want—Yang’s words reappear in my mind. I am truly overwhelmed and declare that my mission to be famous has been accomplished. I’m like a celebrity for those kids. It won’t get any better than this.
• • • • • •
ON THE DRIVE back to the city Nora tells me something about her strong connection to the villages. She now speaks unusually quietly, almost whispering, because she has caught a cold and is a bit hoarse.
“When I was five, my family’s old wooden house was demolished for a road building project. We didn’t get any compensation.” The artist holds her hand; he can feel that she is upset, even though he doesn’t know what she is saying. “Today I am fighting to preserve these cultural assets. The Chinese must finally learn that ‘old’ does not necessarily mean ‘poor.’ Old can also mean great richness.”
I suddenly realize the great injustice I had done Nora when I was in a bad mood at the beginning of our trip. In truth, her harmless, entertaining online TV format is the most intelligent way of reaching as many people as possible. If she were to report on the cultural uniqueness of the Tujia people in the tone of an ethnologist, she would only reach a fraction of viewers. If she were to condemn in a sharper tone the modernization as a scandal, she wouldn’t be able to broadcast much longer. By featuring a foreigner on her show, on the one hand, she is telling the villagers how interesting their culture is for travelers from all corners of the world, and on the other, she is making the program a bit funnier and more unusual for the public. Nora is a genius, and I’m an idiot because I only realized it on the return journey.
“How do you finance the program?” I ask her.
“I work as an English teacher and translator. I’ve also won a couple of competitions. With my degree in journalism from the USA I could start a very successful career elsewhere. But I think I’ve found my purpose here.”
“Beautiful,” says her husband, pointing at an old wooden house and a rice paddy in the mist.
DANDONG
Population: 2.4 million
Province: Liaoning
THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE WORLD
NORA AND HER companion drop me off at Zhangjiajie Hehua International Airport. My journey continues now to Dandong in the northeast. My host, Sung, lives twenty miles farther north but is busy tonight, which is why I will spend my first night in the middle of the city. Not the worst option, as the Zhonglian hotel offers one of the most interesting views in all of China, so interesting, in fact, that high-performance binoculars come with every room. “For your convenience of exotic scenery,” says a note, along with the information that there will be a five-hundred-yuan (seventy-U.S.-dollar) fine in the event of loss.
From the eighth floor, the first view is of a busy street with two lanes in one direction and three in the other. To the right stands a sand-colored high-rise with a massive billboard advertising a real estate project called Seventh Mansion. Beyond the road flows the Yalu, meaning “green duck,” as the curving course of the river is thought to resemble a duck’s neck. A pleasure boat is docked at a pier, and to the left, one and a half bridges stretch towards the other bank.
The half bridge just goes to the middle of the river since it was destroyed by U.S. Air Force bombs in 1950. Today, the remains are a tourist attraction with red Chinese flags fluttering from all the stays of the truss bridge.
The complete bridge, the Friendship Bridge, links to Sinuiju in North Korea. It is the most important land connection for trade between the two countries. When North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, traveled to Beijing for a state visit in March 2018, his train crossed the border here behind specially erected screens. It is only 100 miles from Dandong to Pyongyang and a good 250 miles to Punggye-ri, the nuclear test site that was in operation until 2018.
I pick up the binoculars and take a look at the opposite bank. I can see two cranes and a couple of high-rises that are of conspicuously plainer construction than their Chinese counterparts. I can also see the white framework of a roller coaster and a Ferris wheel, both of which look as if they haven’t been used for a long while.
A border of more than 620 miles links China and North Korea: two different worlds but with only a couple hundred yards of water between them, here the Yalu and farther north the Tumen. This proximity is one of the reasons for the close cooperation between the two regimes. If there was a coup in North Korea, a refugee crisis would be unavoidable. In the Korean War of the early 1950s, China supported their Communist brothers in the north. However, since Pyongyang carried out the first nuclear test in October 2006, the relationship has taken a knock. Beijing is not too thrilled about having a nuclear-armed neighbor. Nevertheless, China is by far North Korea’s most important economic partner, accounting for 90 percent of their foreign trade.
• • • • • •
A CAB WITH cute stuffed dogs on the dashboard takes me north the next day, always following the course of the border river. The bleak fields on the far bank are various pastel shades of brown and yellow. On the Chinese side, however, there are modern apartment blocks, patriotic sculptures with red scarves and warning signs with cartoonlike illustrations that proclaim: “Appreciate the good life! Abide by the border regulations!” Here, the threat of a prison sentence is disguised as a calendar motto.
I ask the young driver whether he would rather live here or on the other side of the river, expecting a patriotic affirmation of China. Instead, he answers philosophically: “Every life has joys and suffering. If I were born over there, I would probably also find reasons to be happy.”
Human-sized soapstone sculptures of the twelve signs of the zodiac mark my objective: the Korean restaurant of Sung and his family.
Sung greets me with a North Korean “Dragon and Phoenix” cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth. “These are better than the Chinese: very strong and only eighty-five yuan [twelve U.S. dollars] per pack,” he says.
He is thirty-six years old, a little over six feet tall, with thick bangs, chubby cheeks and the fashionable Adidas chic of a Korean pop star. At the same time, however, he seems sensitive and almost aristocratic, like a lord of the manor receiving me in his realm. We cross the front garden, in which there is a statue of harubang, a Korean fertility god, and enter a dining room with a fine view of the river and the neighboring country. Sung originally comes from South Korea and, with his passport, has no chance of entering North Korea. Every day, he looks out of his window at a no-go zone, only 430 yards away but unreachable.
In the background water splutters in an aquarium where three fish are spending their last hours. Opposite the window are tall glass cylinders with pickled ginseng roots inside.
“When my father came here twenty years ago, he was mostly dealing in ginseng,” says Sung. “The more the shape of the root resembles the human anatomy, the stronger its healing properties are supposed to be.” He tells me that some ginseng products can apparently make gray hair black again.
He then points out a container filled with a reddish rice wine and a dead snake. It seems to be looking out the window towards North Korea. “Six feet long. We found it here in the garden,” he explains. “We put it into the alcohol while it was alive; otherwise, its effects become weaker.” Such a drink is supposed to fortify and increase potency. Kim Jong-un is believed to have experimented with snake wine to help him with his wishes for a second son. Now he is thought to have three children, but nobody knows for sure.
Sung offers to drive me to the little riverside harbor, and soon we are sitting in his parents’ decrepit station wagon and listening to North Korean music on the radio: pompous violins, sentimental melodies and patriotic lyrics accompanied by static. To the left of the road we spot a brand-new fortress-like entrance with a ticket office leading to the easternmost remains of the Great Wall. This is the only part of the gigantic structure still located at a state border today. There isn’t a single tourist on the site, though there is room for thousands.
Sung translates one of the songs on the radio: “At the moment it is about how much the singer misses Kim Jong-un’s grandfather. She hopes to see him in a dream,” he explains. The next song is about the hardship of a soldier’s life, which can only be tolerated because the “supreme leader” is keeping an eye on his loyal troops.
We reach a jetty with white pleasure crafts with Chinese flags fluttering at their sterns. Sung says good-bye, as he has to work in the restaurant. I buy a ticket and go straight to the upper deck, where I mingle with quite a number of baseball-capped, outdoor-jacketed fellow travelers, with 600 mm zoom lenses on their cameras. They look like they’re on safari.
A vendor offers grilled shrimp on a skewer. A loudspeaker announcement from the captain emphasizes that photos of small fishing boats and soldiers are forbidden, and anyone who disobeys the rule is personally responsible for the consequences.
As the boat sets off on the Green Duck River, the oncoming wind smells of brackish water and industrial dust. The boat is tilted slightly, as all the passengers on the deck are standing on the port side.
There, two farmers roughly five hundred yards away are working a field with pickaxes. Dozens of shutters click, some of them audibly on continuous shooting mode, taking eight or twelve photos per second.
Then we see two oxcarts at the riverbank, with the driver, dressed in rags, gathering seaweed. The scene, like a historical reenactment in an open-air museum, is photographed extensively. It’s hard to imagine, but just twenty-five years ago, the per capita income in North Korea was higher than in China. For some of the older tourists, this trip must seem like a journey into their own past.
From the deck, one of the Chinese passengers waves and whistles, trying to attract attention. No reaction; the socialist brothers don’t wave back. Until recently, the tour operators sold packages with bread and cookies to throw overboard but this has stopped.
Maybe you don’t have to travel all the way to the border with North Korea to discover how absurd tourism can be, but this excursion of dictatorship voyeurs paying nine dollars for a ninety-minute trip is a prime example. We get to see a crumbling military fortress, a man riding a motorbike on a dirt track, two rowboats, two solar panels, three light green watchtowers, a couple of other people working in the fields and three soldiers on their way back to the barracks. What on earth do they think of the ships that do their rounds here every day? Are they told that people are curious because North Korea is the model socialist state, an example to others? Or do they feel like they’re part of a folklore program in a human zoo as soon as they make an appearance on the riverbank? And what goes through their heads when they see that the roads and buildings on the other side of the river are in much better condition?
Nobody reacts to the repeated whistles of the man so keen to make contact. I find his behavior outrageous, but I have to ask myself why I find this photo safari so fascinating, even though there is nothing spectacular to see and it feels very wrong to be gaping at poor people from a safe distance, without making contact, without meeting them face-to-face. The answer is probably because the experience is so exclusive, because I have read enough about Kim Jong-un’s unusual country that even the sight of the dullest of riverbanks has an aura of something special. But maybe it’s also because I’m surprised by the archaic simplicity. From all I know about the egos of autocratic leaders, I would have expected more effort to show off a positive picture of the hermit kingdom.
• • • • • •
“I ONCE HAD a guest from France who was desperate to sleep with a North Korean because he knew that it would impress people back home,” Sung tells me two hours later, when I meet him at the restaurant. “He didn’t succeed, as they are all pretty well sealed off here.”
A couple of thousand North Koreans work in Dandong: in restaurants where they serve and present karaoke shows, or in the textile or electronics industries. The usual wage is three thousand yuan (US$425) a month, with half of it going to the North Korean state. They reside in isolated living quarters and are under constant surveillance. People who try to escape can get their families at home into serious trouble, as they are liable for the workers. North Korean refugees caught in China are repatriated and face prison sentences and torture.
Nevertheless, people still try to reach southwest China without using public transport, on foot, with human smugglers or by hitchhiking. One common route is via Myanmar to Thailand and from there to South Korea, where they have a chance of being recognized as refugees.
“And some Chinese men buy North Korean wives,” Sung tells me, while turning on an electric grill on a round table and draping pieces of pork belly over it. “They have no passports and no rights. They’re totally dependent on their husbands.”
He opens a bottle of Yalu River beer and pours two glasses. “I don’t like refugees,” he says suddenly. “Everything they say is a lie. Well, that applies to at least ninety-nine percent of them. How many of them actually have problems for political reasons? Most of them just have something to hide. Maybe they have committed a crime. There might even be murderers among them.”
“Aren’t there thousands of reasons for wanting to leave North Korea? Starvation. Oppression. Lack of freedom?” I ask.
“If you don’t like the system, you have to work from the inside to change it, not simply run away.” He lights up a North Korean cigarette.
“That’s easy to say. In Western countries people can demonstrate, or change things at the next election. In dictatorships things don’t work like that.”
“Yeah, and then they elect someone like the current American president. There, too, people’s opinions are manipulated. I think things are much better in North Korea than they were ten years ago. Less famine, and the economy is picking up.”
“Look out of the window. The way they are farming—it’s like the beginning of the last century.”
“They don’t see anything of the outside world, so they have nothing to compare to. I think the North Koreans are happy.”
This is a remarkable statement from someone who has lived in a pretty house with a view of the border river for six years. Every morning at seven he hears the distorted loudspeaker propaganda announcements extolling the “supreme leader,” and in the afternoons he sees people washing their clothes in the gray-brown waters.
Sung himself has seen quite a bit of the aforementioned “outside world.” During his philosophy studies, he lived in the Philippines. He worked in Australia for a year and went on a European tour with a church choir to Germany, Italy and France. A year ago he married a Chinese woman who lives around forty miles farther north. They see each other on the weekends. Sung is here to stay, and he has great plans for a twenty-seven-room hotel next door with a view of North Korea—the foundation is already in place.
“We want to open in two or three years, but there’s still lots to do. And plenty of bureaucracy,” he says, refilling the beer glasses. The pork belly is as tender as can be, sizzling and filling the room with its mouth-watering smell. There are side dishes of kimchi, bean sprouts and pickled cucumbers.
For his hotel, Sung needs a commercial license, approvals from the health and hygiene authorities, a fire protection permit and tax registration. Additionally, he must comply with various environmental requirements, be considered harmless by the secret services and, every now and then, allow functionaries to feast there for free.
“Compared to opening a hotel in China, my three years of military service was a piece of cake! Do you feel like a footbath?”
A short while later we are sitting in his room with our pant legs rolled up and our feet in plastic buckets filled with hot water, and I ask him whether he is happy. He considers this a while.
“For me, happiness is my family, being with my parents, with my wife. We want to have a child soon. People have different amounts of money, but everyone has a similar amount of time. I decided to spend most of mine with my family. Can’t be beat. That’s why it really doesn’t matter what I’m doing in five or ten years—I know that I will be happy.”
• • • • • •
THE NEXT MORNING, Sung and I are sitting together again in the restaurant and talking about Kim Jong-un’s remarkable career. For years, he has been isolated as the outsider of global politics. Xi Jinping refused to meet with him, and obviously, Barack Obama and other Western leaders did too. But in 2018, he shook hands with Donald Trump in Singapore and had three meetings with Xi in Beijing and two with South Korea’s head of state, Moon Jae-in.
“The situation is in flux. China would not be happy with a North Korean shift towards the USA,” says Sung. “Even though both superpowers are in favor of nuclear disarmament. Kim Jong-un, in turn, knows that ending nuclear testing could endanger his power.”
“What are the chances of a reunification of north and south?” I ask.
“There are a number of problems, in particular the enormous difference in economic strength. One country looks down on the other, even more so than was the case with the reunification of Germany.”
