Take a Peek Behind the Curtain in North Korea

I’ve been obsessed with North Korea for years.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) — to give it its proper name —is a strange rockpool of communist ideology that’s ruled by a dynasty of tyrants with weird haircuts. It treads an odd line between comic and terrifying, threatening its neighbours with nuclear weapons and calling the US President a ‘mentally deranged dotard’. The difficulty of visiting and the rumours that swirled around the place only added to its mystique for me. The only way in is on tightly controlled package tours — there’s no such thing as independent travel.

And then an opportunity for a visit arose: a travel agent was organising a trip for foreign journalists. As part of a tentative opening to the outside world, North Korea welcomed us in.

When we arrived at the gleaming new airport terminal outside the capital, Pyongyang, we were met by a trio of smartly dressed English-speaking minders, Mr Ri, Mr Kim and Mr Yu. Like every adult I would meet, they wore badges with a picture of one of the ruling family, the Kims, over their hearts. They remained by our sides constantly, greeting us at breakfast each morning and not leaving us until we were ready for bed. There was never a possibility of going out unaccompanied.

Pyongyang reminded me of a more functional, orderly version of the USSR in the 1980s: brutalist architecture, propaganda posters, pedestrians walking as though marshalled by an invisible conductor. I had read so much about the famines, political prisoners and ideological indoctrination, I was taken aback by the air of apparent normality.

We visited a fish farm, a library, the ancestral village of the Kim dynasty, Kim Il Sung University and enormous statues of the Kims. We climbed a monument called the Tower of the Juche Idea, from which Pyongyang looked bizarrely lovely: a sweep of colourful, geometric buildings beside the glittering water of the Taedong River. It was a socialist utopia filtered through the sensibility of Wes Anderson.

The minders were somewhere on the continuum between guides and captors, but they were friendly, even gently teasing. We enjoyed long, boozy meals with them in rather formal restaurants patronised by North Korea’s elite. One night, we went to a pizza restaurant where the waitresses performed patriotic songs while we ate pizzas made with North Korean mozzarella. We toasted each other with Soju spirit. Another evening we did karaoke. People find this hard to believe, but Mr Ri’s party piece was Barbie Girl by Aqua. Yet no crack ever appeared in his ideological commitment to the regime.

On long bus trips to the demilitarized zone on the border with South Korea and to the seaside town of Wonsan, I could see enough through the windows to be certain the capital was a bubble of relative prosperity enjoyed by a tiny elite. Much of the agriculture was unmechanised. People hoed and tended crops by hand; laundry was washed in rivers; produce moved by ox cart. For all the patriotic talk, the DPRK was clearly much poorer than its high-tech twin to the south. There were many surprises, too: the ubiquity of mobile phones; the fact that North Koreans had homegrown apps for e-commerce and video-sharing and to play their own versions of Candy Crush; the amount and quality of the food we ate. But I left knowing there were huge gaps in my understanding.

The work of filling them in took me on another journey: through the memoirs of defectors; to meetings with the tiny numbers of North Koreans who’ve sought refuge abroad; to the strange worlds of North Korean poetry, fiction, graphic novels, TV programmes and pop music. Somewhat to my surprise, this obsession eventually bore fruit in a novel, The Sorcerer of Pyongyang.

But I still have a feeling of unfinished business and the fascination remains. I’m keen to make a return trip, to hear the eerie strains of Where Are You, Dear General? playing through loudspeakers around the capital each morning, to eat cold noodles and to do some more karaoke with Mr Ri.