This is a BBC documentary about North Korean gymnasts. If you have not seen it, I would highly recommend it. While it is somewhat different from the US propaganda, neither does it attempt to evade issues.
It is quite unusual because people in the west seldom get to see “inside North Korea,” with the exception of an occasional outburst of grainy footage intended to remind Americans just what a terrible place it is.
And I don’t think I have ever seen a documentary that takes you inside the homes of families in Pyong Yang, or gives you an opportunity to hear what people have to say.
The film focuses on two girls, both gymnasts, and their families. One family is of the intellectual class, one from the worker class, we do not get to meet a family from the peasant class, and it does not tell us if any peasant girls are gymnasts.
The people I watched the film with were surprised to see that both families lived in normal looking apartments, with normal looking furniture, no one was dressed in rags, they all had regular clothes, both western and korean style. One “different” feature was the speaker on the wall in the home of the worker class family, that played “state propaganda” 24 hours a day and could be turned down, but not off. We did not learn if the intellectual family had a speaker, if they did, it was not visible in any of the shots.
This family lived in a complex that was said to be quite the envy, but we were not shown the homes of the enviers.
There was a lot of expression of admiration and whatnot for Kim Jung Il, his father, etc. and my sense was that this was not entirely because they were being filmed. Most of this kind of talk was in the context of the country’s history, or the girls’ feelings about performing in the Mass Games, which the General (Kim Jung Il) was supposed to attend, and was, in my view, comparable to the kind of things people from any country might say about their history, and their heroes, etc, and the Mass Games talk could have been any Olympic athlete, except that instead of being proud to represent the US, these girls were proud to be selected in the group that would perform for the General.
The most striking aspect, from the remarks of my viewing companions, who came from a variety of places, was the opportunity to see North Korean people as “just like everybody else.” The girls confess to doing things like cutting school and gym practice, getting caught and scolded, the mother gently nags about breakfast and homework (you shouldn’t be watching movies all the time, should you?), the kids seem politer to their parents and grandparents than many American kids, but many countries have the custom of politely agreeing with the elder and then doing what one wishes.
By affluent American standards, the apartments were small for the number of family members. In both families, not everyone had a bedroom. However by the standards of many other places, this is not seen as anything remarkable. Ditto the nearly every night loss of power – which was another surprise, as Americans, I understand, are told that North Korea has almost no electricity ever. There is only 5 hours of TV programming a day, much of it referred to by the narrator as “propaganda.” In the US, of course, propaganda is available 24 hours a day.
The mother in the intellectual family talked very candidly about the “Arduous March,” the famine, and recalled that on her eldest daughter’s birthday, they had only grain, and gave half a bowl of porridge to all the children, the birthday girl received a whole bowl. Eggs and chicken are still very strictly rationed, but the meals that were seen in the film appeared to be quite plentiful. I could not tell if they contained eggs or chicken.
Some things are just expressed differently. A grandmother speaks of her granddaughter’s need to improve her group cooperation or solidarity or something, I can’t remember the words she used, but a western elder might have said “work well with others.”
The father of one of the girls is supposed to help her with homework, but is not much good helping her with English, which both girls study, and speak nearly unintelligibly. The best students shout out phrases as if they were military commands, while the teacher, from her accent, she learned English in England or from an English person, acknowledges that the girls’ academics do suffer a bit due to the long hours of gymnast practice.
The girl who is an only child wishes she had brothers and sisters like her friend, when one sister leaves home to join the army, she leaves her room to the younger, with strict instructions not to mess with her stuff. The girls get chocolate on their uniforms, lose their school badges, and generally behave like any school girls anywhere, and the families have the same hopes, worries for their children, the same pride in their accomplishments, the same little rivalries and secrets (the worker mother says, sometimes I lie to her father, she will tell me things she has done and I know he would scold her) as any family anywhere.
The North Koreans appear to have more holidays than Americans, and two hour lunch breaks seem to be the norm, at least for the students.
There are sirens that blow to wake people up (that is the workers’ siren) it is never specified if the three different classes have different rising times, and we don’t get to hear any of the other sirens.
The city looks a lot like other Asian cities, there are perhaps fewer private cars, more buses and bicycles, and I am sure if the crew had gone into the slums, they could have gotten footage similar to that played recently in the US, of children stealing fruit from street vendors, and being chased and kicked. Not an unusual scene in Asia, or in Latin America, or Africa, or even in some neighborhooes in European or American cities.
US atrocities in the Korean war are discussed, says one old man, I didn’t know back then whether imperialism was a good or bad thing, but after those three years, I saw them (Americans) do things no human could do.
Scarcity and problems are attributed to US policies and “blockades,” sometimes this is obviously the case, other times not.
Especially since the Arduous March, the value of self reliance has become an intensified cultural value, where as before maybe more on a national scale, now it is being inculcated also as an individual responsibility, if the state can’t provide it, says one man, we must make it for ourselves.
There is, quite reasonably, little admiration or enthusiasm for the US, and the state is extremely defensive. During the SARS outbreaks, North Korea closed its borders and stopped the flights to Beijing, opening them only several weeks after the danger was declared to be over. There were never any confirmed cases of SARS in North Korea.
I think this is a movie that anyone would enjoy, it might change your perspective on North Korea, or it might not. Either way, it will give you a chance to see North Koreans as regular people, and at least in the case of the families profiled, people living normal lives and doing normal things in normal surroundings.
And the group gymnastic performances themselves are spectacular. It’s worth your time to see it for this alone. It is an art that is practiced on such a scale and to such perfection nowhere else.
Thanks for this. People seem to do just fine when left to interact with each other absent political labels. Noted that as in most of the rest of the world, the children are required to learn a “foreign” language.
that said something to the effect of “Foreign language is the key to a secure nation and a strong future”
And while the kids in the documentary would have a tough time getting their pizza order understood when calling Papa John’s, I can’t really say that their English was any worse than the US school learned French and Japanese, etc that I have heard.
I don’t think that either North Korea (judging from the bit I saw in the film) nor US come anywhere close to the foreign language instruction in Europe, other parts of Asia, and of course ask an African how many languages he speaks and he will have to sit there for a minute, trying to count them up. 😉
My adopted grandson is from Korea- south I think. And I remember when my daughter got her first photos of him from the foster family over there. We were amazed at the apartment-big screen TV, a foster sister with blue punky hair, and all the amenities that we have here. Very modern. I sometimes still have a National Geographic image of foreign lands so am often surprised that the ‘forgotten’ world looks a lot like us.
From your description, I would be willing to bet that the photos are from a home in the south.
While the homes and people in the documentary were far from the grim picture portrayed in western media of North Korea as a dark, featureless landscape populated by ragged starving people, and one family did have a TV, which it was said was a gift or prize from the state, there were no big screen TVs and while the kids wore normal looking clothes, in none of the shots did I see anything that would be considered extremely fashionable in the west, or colored hair. 🙂
The standard of living appeared to me, and to my viewing companions, to be more along the line of a lower middle class apartment in a Latin American or South Asian city, not much luxury, but far from squalor or abject want.
South Korea on the other hand, has everything you would see in the US or in London, no one is blockading it, anyone from any western country can go there to visit, anyone from any western company can go there and sell things. In fact, South Korea, like other Asian nations, is actually somewhat ahead of the US in some areas of technology, people in Asia have much fancier cell phones, for instance, and are more likely to have large screen TVs and fancier Ipods etc than their American counterparts.
Thank you for posting this Ductape. It is one of my greatest annoyances (and one of the largest inhibitors of progress, IMHO) that so many of my fellow citizens allow imaginary lines on a map to confuse them into thinking that people of other regions and cultures are somehow inherently inferior.
Until 2004, all I knew of the Mexican American Culture was based on stereotypes and TV images. Then I was given the opportunity to spend a year in Laredo,right on the Mexican border.
The Northern part of Laredo seemed like the “nice area” of any midsized city, with all the familiar chain stores, a large fancy mall, and beautifully landscaped “upper class” neighborhoods.
We lived in South Laredo, in the “barios”, a different world entirely. Many of our neighbors lived in what would be called “shacks” here, drove junkers, and worked at very humble jobs. There are even areas of Laredo that still have no paved roads or running water, where US citizens live pretty much as people in many third world countries do. Interestingly, in that year, I was not able to convince any Laradoan to take me there.
I got to spend many hours at the border crossing, observing with my own eyes, the astonishing sight of young Mexican boys who, after swimming across, would furtively pop up among the tall grasses along the Rio, scanning for the border guards, before making their dash into the US. I sat in long stalled traffic lines on the International Bridge, held up by the nearly routine bomb threats, watching not hundreds, more like thousands of Mexicans on foot, waiting to enter the US on daily work passes. I learned that most of them leave home on foot before daylight, work hard all day and walk many miles back across the river to home every night. Would I ever have been willing or able to do this, day after day, I wondered, in order to feed my family?
I found, among my new neighbors, a welcome and a sense of safety among them that I never expected, and, as an older person with a disability, a was treated with level of respect and kindness that brought tears to my eyes, because it was so new to me.
On New Years Eve, we sat alone on our porch, watching the whole neigborhood light up with firecrackers and front porch celebrations of families all gathered together. I was startled and (sad to say) fearful at first, when one family we had not even met, marched together across the street to us, with plates loaded with food,to offer us warm greetings and hugs,simply including us in their celebration.
This year changed me permanently, as those other years long back, with the Native American People changed me. I wish everyone had the chance to see other cultures from the inside out, because once I did, I knew for certain that in all the most important ways, ordinary human beings are far more alike than we are different, regardless of race or cultural differences.
Ignorance (lack of accurate information about each other) separates us and causes us to fear each other. This ignorance is fostered and encouraged by all who benefit the most from keeping us separate and fearful of each other. War is not the chosen way of those who do not feel afraid.
I was once literally terrified by the threat of being “sent to the Indians” when I misbehaved, as a child. I was, admittedly, fearful of that Mexican American neighborhood at first. This is because of how well I was taught, by my own culture, to fear (thus come to hate) anyone who was “different than us.”
I am no idealist. I know full well there are bad people, greedy people, dangerous people in all cultures, including my own. I also know that the numbers of people with good hearts far, far out number the “bad”, in ALL cultures, not just our own.
Thank you for this Diary.