No matter where you are in the world, a classroom of 35 15-year-old boys is going to get pretty excited over the unusual sight and sound of two fighter jets screaming overhead. But this wasn’t just anywhere, and it wasn’t just any day: it was Busan, South Korea, and two days earlier the world had learned that Kim Jong-Il was dead.
I’d been living in South Korea for five months to the day when the news was announced. It was the first time I ever had a conversation about the North with any of my Korean friends or colleagues. Until now, the presence of the rogue neighbor was an absolute nonfactor in daily life in Busan, a bustling port city of 3.5 million at the far southeastern tip of the Korean peninsula — 70 miles closer to Japan than to Seoul, in fact.
I asked a coworker if she had any family in the North.
“I don’t, but I feel so sad for those poor people,” she said. I asked her how she felt.
“Nervous,” she admitted. “We never know what they’ll do.”
“I’m more worried about the impact on the economy,” another coworker told me. “I have my retirement fund to think about!” She laughed, but — like most attitudes that day — it sounded a little forced and a little nervous (the KOSPI, the South Korean equivalent of the New York Stock Exchange, took a temporary dip but has since recovered, much to her relief).
Another friend filled me in on what it was like in 1994, when Kim Jong-Il’s father (Kim Il-Sung) died.
“Here in Busan, not too bad. But in Seoul, lots of people were buying as much rice and bottled water and stuff like that as they could. Everybody gets nervous, because we never know what will happen with them.”
Before moving to South Korea to take a job as an English teacher, I had always been able to think of North Korea from a healthy remove. They were an abstraction — thousands of miles away, unlikely to reach far enough beyond their borders to affect me.
In South Korea, though, news from the North takes on an eerie and discomforting tone. I watched the footage of hordes of North Koreans weeping hysterically and I thought about how the young men in those clips could have been — had they just been fortunate enough to be born a few miles further south — my students, spending their days playing Angry Birds rather than being forced to fake tears at a monument to a madman.
After Kim’s death, I read an outstanding book called “Nothing to Envy,” by Barbara
Demick. She interviewed a number of defectors from the North about their lives there.
Some talked about forcing themselves to cry when Kim Il-Sung died, but for others the tears were legitimate. North Korean textbooks phrase math questions around calculating the killing of “American imperialist bastards.”
Satellite footage of the world by night shows absolute darkness in North Korea. They are indoctrinated to believe that their neighbors in South Korea live in abject poverty and despair: In fact, South Korea is a blisteringly modern country where 85 percent of homes have broadband access and (by some estimates) 98 percent of all residents have a cell phone.
When West and East Germany reunified, per capita income in West Germany was about three times higher than their neighbors. Today, South Korea has a per capita income 17 times higher than the North. How does a place like that still exist in today’s world?
It’s been nearly a month now, and it doesn’t seem that anything dramatic is going to happen. Do I feel less safe now than I did before? Nope. I slept fine the night before; I’ve slept fine since. But as I said, I’m closer to Japan than I am to North Korea. I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a little comforting.
After all, when it comes to North Korea, you just never know.
Steve Butterfield was born and raised in Maine. He served as a representative to the Legislature from Bangor (House District 16) from 2008-2010. He studied international affairs with concentrations in East Asia and conflict and security studies at the George Washington University and the University of Maine.
Ah, The Peoples Republic of Korea–a workers paradise, like all communist countries.
Shouldn’t we try to be more like them?
North Korea is the result of the collectivist, nanny-state mentality as well as the suppression of incentive and individualism. Why does that appear so attractive to “educated” liberal elites?
Sorry neighbor, liberals in this country have no affinity for the North Korean system or anything about it for that matter.
For the record, speaking as an educated liberal, there is no will for collectivism or suppression of incentive. I am a progressive because I believe in fostering the full achievement of human potential through education and opportunity.
It is possible to be partisan and remain honest about the opposition. You show seething contempt for those who have different views and are willing to misrepresent them to make your case.
One of the few things that the liberals and radical righties agree on is that North Korea is a dark, oppressive nation that rules with despotism and propaganda.
I saw that the Associated Press is opening a Pyongyang news bureau. Is North Korea going to undergo a major cultural shift? I don’t think so. This is symbolic. The news bureau is a propagandist ploy to make the country look more respectable than its record on human rights indicates.
Eventually, the wall that keeps North Koreans in the dark will be breached and the people will come to know the reality of what their neighbors to the south enjoy. Deprived of technological advances, this will take a long time to happen. In the mean time, it is probably wise to keep the DMZ heavily fortified as it has been for decades.
I was stationed in South Korea in the 1980’s. It is a beautiful nation with wonderful people. A North Korean soldier defected while I was there. He said in an interview that if the North Koreans could see the marketplace in Seoul, they would kill their leaders.
The South Koreans are the most connected people in the world, they enjoy better internet access than most of us. The North Koreans are the most isolated, paranoid people in the world. They even have to fear what emotions they exhibit.