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Adam Johnson, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Orphan Master's Son,'' recently raised eyebrows among North Korean watchers when he described his first and only visit to Pyongyang to conduct research for his book.
"When I arrived at Pyongyang's Sunan Airport a few years ago, my head was still spinning from a landing on a runway lined with cattle, electric fences and the fuselages of other jets whose landings hadn't gone so well," he wrote.
The sentence created an image of a benighted city that appeared to be on a par with some backward outpost in central Africa, which no doubt confirmed the prejudices of his readers. The only problem was that those familiar with North Korea did not recognize the description.
"I never saw a cow, never saw a crashed aircraft and most airports are surrounded by protective barriers of some sort," said James Hoare, the former British ambassador to Pyongyang, in a website forum devoted to North Korea.
Perhaps Johnson was taking liberties because his novel, after all, combines a picaresque tale of North Korea combined with elements of magic realism. But as James Church, the former U.S. intelligence analyst who writes the North Korea-based Inspector O mysteries, commented, "For some reason someone decided somewhere along the line to sell the book as a window into North Korea. That, decidedly, it is not."
The trouble with North Korea is that there are so many of them. As noted by Jang Jin-sung, a defector who now edits the London-based New Focus International website on North Korea, there are at least three versions: a real North Korea, a fictional North Korea created by Pyongyang's propaganda machine, and a theoretical North Korea constructed by the outside world.
The international media routinely ignores the first version while using the second to portray the third, with the reporting on the recent nuclear crisis providing a nice illustrative example.
To support this point, no one has to look farther than to view BBC journalist John Sweeney's Panorama report, "North Korea Undercover," that was broadcast in mid-April.
The program created controversy because it was alleged that Sweeney had endangered a group of London School of Economics students he was traveling with to North Korea by posing as a doctoral student and failing to tell them that he was using the tour as a cover to prepare a documentary.
The ensuring debate struck me as silly, one reason being that the first time I went to North Korea in the mid-1990s our entire tour group consisted of journalists posing as ordinary foreigners and we even had a camera team with us.
But what I found appalling about Sweeney's report was its deceptive nature.
Sweeney claimed he had to use subterfuge to gain access because North Korea is closed to foreign journalists, which is not true. The promise of an unprecedented look at North Korea wound up being holiday snaps from a bog-standard tour of the country enhanced by spooky music and a shaky camera to add "undercover" authenticity. Sweeney told the BBC afterwards that he hoped his documentary would trigger a "Pyongyang Spring," a statement that struck me as both naive and preposterous.
Sweeney peppered his narrative with cliches and described the country as being populated by brainwashed automatons. "It's hard not to feel that we're trapped inside a doomsday cult like the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, or Jim Jones' Peoples Temple in Guyana. Only this is a cult nation, armed with nukes, and the clock is counting down to Armageddon," he intones. "The new boy-God (Kim Jong-un) holds his people in near-total mental enslavement."
Although I found aspects of North Korea bizarre during my two trips there, as a long-time resident of Seoul, I also discovered that it was comfortably very Korean, especially in social interactions. It is this element that is absent from Sweeny's documentary and many other accounts I have read about the country. There is often little attempt to place North Korea in the broader context of Korean history, society and culture.
North Korea is a real place inhabited by real people that don't often conform to stereotypes. I remember watching the driver of our tour bus arguing heatedly with a policeman about parking underneath the Arch of Triumph in Pyongyang, recalling similar altercations I'd seen in Seoul. I met one well-traveled (and I suspect disgruntled) North Korean who took me to ordinary shops and apartment blocks at my request. I interviewed one of the few Financial Times subscribers in Pyongyang. I drank late into the night with my guides and waved at the "traffic girls" to see if they waved back (they did). It is these little vignettes that I remember most about North Korea.
North Korea is portrayed by Sweeny and others of a similar ilk as a truly alien place, which troubles me because it leads to the dehumanization in the eyes of the world of the people that many of these journalists claim they want to save.
John Burton, a former Korea correspondent for the Financial Times, is now a Seoul-based independent journalist and media consultant. He can be reached at johnburtonft@yahoo.com.
"When I arrived at Pyongyang's Sunan Airport a few years ago, my head was still spinning from a landing on a runway lined with cattle, electric fences and the fuselages of other jets whose landings hadn't gone so well," he wrote.
The sentence created an image of a benighted city that appeared to be on a par with some backward outpost in central Africa, which no doubt confirmed the prejudices of his readers. The only problem was that those familiar with North Korea did not recognize the description.
"I never saw a cow, never saw a crashed aircraft and most airports are surrounded by protective barriers of some sort," said James Hoare, the former British ambassador to Pyongyang, in a website forum devoted to North Korea.
Perhaps Johnson was taking liberties because his novel, after all, combines a picaresque tale of North Korea combined with elements of magic realism. But as James Church, the former U.S. intelligence analyst who writes the North Korea-based Inspector O mysteries, commented, "For some reason someone decided somewhere along the line to sell the book as a window into North Korea. That, decidedly, it is not."
The trouble with North Korea is that there are so many of them. As noted by Jang Jin-sung, a defector who now edits the London-based New Focus International website on North Korea, there are at least three versions: a real North Korea, a fictional North Korea created by Pyongyang's propaganda machine, and a theoretical North Korea constructed by the outside world.
The international media routinely ignores the first version while using the second to portray the third, with the reporting on the recent nuclear crisis providing a nice illustrative example.
To support this point, no one has to look farther than to view BBC journalist John Sweeney's Panorama report, "North Korea Undercover," that was broadcast in mid-April.
The program created controversy because it was alleged that Sweeney had endangered a group of London School of Economics students he was traveling with to North Korea by posing as a doctoral student and failing to tell them that he was using the tour as a cover to prepare a documentary.
The ensuring debate struck me as silly, one reason being that the first time I went to North Korea in the mid-1990s our entire tour group consisted of journalists posing as ordinary foreigners and we even had a camera team with us.
But what I found appalling about Sweeney's report was its deceptive nature.
Sweeney claimed he had to use subterfuge to gain access because North Korea is closed to foreign journalists, which is not true. The promise of an unprecedented look at North Korea wound up being holiday snaps from a bog-standard tour of the country enhanced by spooky music and a shaky camera to add "undercover" authenticity. Sweeney told the BBC afterwards that he hoped his documentary would trigger a "Pyongyang Spring," a statement that struck me as both naive and preposterous.
Sweeney peppered his narrative with cliches and described the country as being populated by brainwashed automatons. "It's hard not to feel that we're trapped inside a doomsday cult like the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, or Jim Jones' Peoples Temple in Guyana. Only this is a cult nation, armed with nukes, and the clock is counting down to Armageddon," he intones. "The new boy-God (Kim Jong-un) holds his people in near-total mental enslavement."
Although I found aspects of North Korea bizarre during my two trips there, as a long-time resident of Seoul, I also discovered that it was comfortably very Korean, especially in social interactions. It is this element that is absent from Sweeny's documentary and many other accounts I have read about the country. There is often little attempt to place North Korea in the broader context of Korean history, society and culture.
North Korea is a real place inhabited by real people that don't often conform to stereotypes. I remember watching the driver of our tour bus arguing heatedly with a policeman about parking underneath the Arch of Triumph in Pyongyang, recalling similar altercations I'd seen in Seoul. I met one well-traveled (and I suspect disgruntled) North Korean who took me to ordinary shops and apartment blocks at my request. I interviewed one of the few Financial Times subscribers in Pyongyang. I drank late into the night with my guides and waved at the "traffic girls" to see if they waved back (they did). It is these little vignettes that I remember most about North Korea.
North Korea is portrayed by Sweeny and others of a similar ilk as a truly alien place, which troubles me because it leads to the dehumanization in the eyes of the world of the people that many of these journalists claim they want to save.
John Burton, a former Korea correspondent for the Financial Times, is now a Seoul-based independent journalist and media consultant. He can be reached at johnburtonft@yahoo.com.
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