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| An Air Koryo plane sits on the tarmac at Shenyang Taoxian International Airport, waiting to take us to Pyongyang, in August 2010. / Courtesy of Jon Dunbar |
By Jon Dunbar
There've been many commentaries and sensationalistic photo essays produced from tourist trips to North Korea.
The people with anything interesting to say usually aren't willing to share it publicly, if they have any hope of ever visiting the isolated country again.
I fall somewhere in between both groups, having visited in August 2010 and September 2018, and I've been cautious in what I share. But due to political reasons related to China, it looks unlikely I'll be able to return to Pyongyang for the foreseeable future.
So this seems like the right time to share some of the stories from my holidays in North Korea, especially those moments of levity, the subtleties of interactions with North Koreans and the experiences that shook my world view.
The first big surprise I got was before we even landed in Pyongyang, on the flight in from China.
I'd heard Air Koryo was one of the world's worst, and I'd been warned our flight could be in some ancient Soviet-era propeller plane that skipped along through the sky. But we ended up with a fairly modern Tupolev Tu-154 or 204, or Ilyushin Il-18 or 62, which in my very amateur appraisal seemed nicer than the plane from Korea to China.
I was seated separately from my group ― there were four of us, all foreign and all living in the South at the time. Everyone else on the plane seemed to be Korean, not Chinese like these days.
The flight attendants were very pretty and spoke fluent English. One of them came around and sat with each of my companions, making small talk in English for a short while, and I was last. It was almost certainly part of her duties rather than an act of genuine kindness, a procedure to impress on us unwashed foreign barbarians the superiority of Korean culture and monitor for potential troublemakers. It was also my first time ever speaking to a North Korean.
She had learned English at Pyongyang Foreign Language High School, which judging by her abilities must have taught her well. She'd also lived in Dubai for a couple years, and claimed to be 20, but I thought she looked younger.
"So, are you 20 Western age or Korean age?" I asked her.
"What do you mean?" she said.
Of course, I thought, North Koreans wouldn't know if something they took for granted was different everywhere else in the world. If she didn't know the difference, she was probably sheltered.
I explained the whole "Korean age" thing: when you're born you're one year old, and on New Year's you advance a year. It's a weird system and it means if you were born on New Year's Eve, by the time you're a day old, you're already two years old.
"No, why would anyone ever do that?" she asked me, baffled and slightly alarmed by the absurdity of it.
According to her, North Koreans counted age by what we in the South would call the "Western" way.
I later learned that Kim Il-sung gave an order in 1986 to use only the modern method of calculating age, although it's unclear how widespread this practice has become. The new age reckoning system seems more prevalent among elite, urban and young North Koreans, while there are contradictory reports that many still use Korean age.
While it's possible the flight attendant was aware of the order from her nation's founder and was coached to disavow this archaic custom, I'm inclined to believe her sincerity in this spontaneous exchange.
Since then, I am always sure to ask people in South Korea if that is their "South Korean age," as we can't really call it "Korean age" anymore if there's an entirely different Korea that doesn't recognize it officially.
Jon Dunbar is a copy editor of The Korea Times.
