News & Stories

Student Perspectives on Research Trip to North Korea

Posted Jul 12 2012

In May 2012, 15 SIPA students traveled on a five-day research trip to North Korea, regarded as the most closed-off nation in the modern world. (An introductory article about the trip appears here.)

Today we highlight a selection of thoughts shared by some of the participating students, as well as additional photographs taken in and around Pyongyang.

To complete their project, students will present findings and otherwise discuss their experience this fall. The special event is slated for October 2 at 6 p.m.

“As we visited museums, cultural heritage sites, universities, and farms in Pyongyang and Wonsan, the divergence between depictions of the DPRK vis-à-vis what I was experiencing firsthand became more pronounced. Discerning the truth behind the stories we were told at the war museum or the USS Pueblo, or the extent to which the universities we visited were legitimately educating students was and is impossible to know. What I learned before arriving was that everything I would be told in the DPRK was likely to be either fabricated or greatly embellished. What I felt while listening to our guides was that they were honest, kind, and genuine human beings, although their political leanings could not be more different than mine.”

Samir Ashraf (MIA ’13, USA)

 

“I have returned from the DPRK, and still cannot measure why every North Korean I have seen wears a small red pin over their heart, depicting the same image of the “Dear Leader.” Whether it is worn out of love, fear, pride, or nostalgia in remembrance of more prosperous times, I cannot say. In a country where the truth seems to exist in small hints and subtleties, rather than large gestures or rehearsed rhetoric however, it’s easy to find yourself seeking further answers in the fog.”

Tarik Carney (MIA ’13, Jamaica)

 

“On the road outside Pyongyang, I saw a Korea similar to the province my mother had been raised in the south. On the foot of the mountains and on either side of the road our bus travelled on, there were farmland for rice paddies and other crops. There were a number of people traveling on foot between the roads connecting cities and children roaming in groups unaccompanied. No field was left unattended to by the laborers who were heavily represented by the elderly population.”

Sandra Choi (MIA ’13, USA)

 

“I approached our trip with the expectation of visiting a communist regime similar to Eastern Germany prior to reunification.... DPRK is an extremely controlled country, but it was also peaceful and is one of the most organized countries that I have visited. It is clearly a communist country, but it might not be worthy of all the negative press received throughout the world.”

Michelle Hanf (MPA ’13, Germany)

 

“The isolation, loneliness, together with the huge pride, strength and resilience DPRK demonstrated are all too similar to China in the past.”

Jin Zhou (MIA ’13, China)

 

“As we visited the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) the stationed soldiers told us repeatedly that this was the most dangerous place in the world. And yet it was a tourist attraction, we spent several moments taking group photos, and the western tourists in front of us had even brought their baby. It is hard to image that happening in Somalia or Syria.”

Mara Ladewig (MPA ’12, USA)

 

“The pictures of large groups of people walking what looked like very long distances due to the lack of fuel, the nearly omnipresent scenes of “collectives” of individuals working gigantic fields with their bare hands, sunk in deeply.... Even though we could not directly interact with these people, this second experience made me realize how truly resilient and hard-working a people North Koreans are.”

Patrick Martin-Menard (MIA ’12, Canada)

 

“There is an inherent pressure to craft a memory of the DPRK that fits into the narrative Western media has created about the nation; to articulate a horrifying and trying experience. The more wrenching of an image the narrator creates the more attention the narrator commands, the more the listener feels they are hearing the ‘truth,’ and the more praise the narrator receives from the listener for having ‘survived’ a trying experience. Monsters and monstrous behavior make the most compelling (and simplest) headlines. And so it may come as a disappointment to some when I write that the biggest surprise for me in my trip to the DPRK was simply that I had fun.”

Pushkar Sharma (MPA ’13, USA)