Students Draw Crowd for Discussion of North Korea Trip
Six days with no cellphones or passports; little conversation lest they be overheard; an apparent lack of any poverty in the capital city; souvenir stores that had no foreign currency; the incongruity of thrilling rides at an amusement park in a country where some cars run on charcoal; the unexpected sight of young people holding hands.
For some of the students, being in North Korea was deeply resonant of their own pasts. For Emily Man Yee Siu MIA ’13, the trip was like a throwback to the Chinese cultural revolution. “What struck me the most about this trip was how much the North Korea I experienced resembled my parents’ stories about China during the cultural revolution. I felt I was somehow transported and living in my parents’ past.”
Pointing out that the university delegation could not reconcile what they saw in Pyongyang with what they had researched about it, Professor Lindenmayer, who directs the United Nations Studies Program at SIPA, said the students got to experience two North Koreas – the elite and the rest. “There is not a single trace of poverty in Pyongyang; it was the city of the elite,” she said. “But when we crossed the country and went to the East coast, the solitude and the poverty and the harsh life hit us.”
Not surprisingly then, the trip raised more questions than it answered. “I started to see that not only are there no answers to the things I wanted to know about, but even the things we saw were raising more questions,” said Samir Ashraf MIA ’13.
Tara Badri MIA ’13 said that visiting North Korea helped explain how the nation has a strong hold over its people. “It felt like we had gone back in time to Cold War-era Soviet Union. Everything from the information control to the propaganda made it clear how the regime had been able to control its people and survive for so long.”
The power of ideology in North Korea and the deeply-held belief among its officials that the Korean War was started by South Korea left TaeYoung Kim MIA ’13 “sad and frustrated.” Recounting a conversation between Professor Lindenmayer and a North Korean official who accompanied the students on the trip, Kim said that “witnessing the discourse that has divided Korea for more than half a century left me with a sense of emptiness and frustration.”
Seeing people go about their daily lives, beyond the headlines of human-rights abuses that are common in the media coverage of North Korea, helped Pushkar Sharma MPA ’13 put the country into perspective. “Just to be able to engage in an evening out in town and see thousands of families being able to celebrate the night in a very nice amusement park was very informative in the way I view the situation in North Korea.”
Professor Charles Armstrong, director of the Center of Korean Research at Columbia, said the trip was a test of willingness of both the North Korea and the U.S. sides. “The fact that North Korea allowed in students who were South Korean [by heritage] indicates a certain kind of openness and flexibility that is rare.”
Cautioning the students not to think of North Korea as a reproduction of the Soviet Union or China, Armstrong observed that, if North Korea endures just a few more years, it will have existed for a longer period of time than did the USSR. “We have to think about what is it that has made it last so long when all these systems have fallen by the wayside.”
Professor Jeong Ho Roh, the director of the Center for Korean Legal Studies at Columbia Law School, questioned the grip of North Korea’s young leader, Kim Jong-un, over his country. “His father [Kim Jong-il] did not exercise the supreme authority over North Korea as many people think. And now to suggest that Kim Jong-un does and whatever he does will be translated to policy is questionable.”
— Neha Tara Mehta, October 5, 2012
Previous coverage, including photos from North Korea: