Review: ‘North of the DMZ,’ by Andrei Lankov

[Update: I’ve since received some responses to specific questions I asked Prof. Lankov, so the discussion should begin either later tonight or tomorrow AM, depending on other stuff I need to do first.]

I first read Andrei Lankov’s work when both of us were blogging on NKZone, through his columns in the Korea Times, and through his more recent scholarly works. I imagine that most readers have also read something of those works.

The first time I met Prof. Lankov in person was in April of last year, when I invited him and a group of Korea bloggers out for dinner. Along with Lankov and myself, present were Andy Jackson and Robert Koehler, the Dram Man, and Oranckay (The Big Hominid, to my lasting regret, couldn’t make it; the lovely and charming Mrs. Koehler joined us later for drinks). Talk about your stimulating dinner conversation. And even within that group, I found myself struck silent by the stories told by the affable, funny, middle-aged professor from the former Leningrad who liked to make light of his heavy Russian accent. Not that I had any trouble understanding him. I don’t know when I’ve ever said less and listened more.

I’ve never seen Lankov’s office, but having met him and read his book, I can picture it: it must be crammed with papers jammed between books in three languages, others piled in crossways stacks on desks and on the floor to keep them separated. There’s probably little natural light because the window sill is also piled with books. Lankov has made himself a walking lexicon of North Korea, able to answer intelligently about everything from its relative scarcity of trees in its countryside to the availability of pineapple in its markets. Yet I can understand how he can be both the academic rival of Bruce Cumings — and man whose arguments Lankov’s research has done much to discredit — and his personal friend.

Andrei Lankov has written such a book for us in “” — entertaining, insightful, and stuffed with facts that somehow manage to be innocuous and highly significant. I’ve had very little time for leisure reading these days, so I read “North of the DMZ” in installments during my commutes on the Metro. This book will absorb you. It certainly absorbed me, for example, on the day when I so engrossed in reading it that I failed to notice my stop, the end of the line, or the fact that the train had reversed direction and gone halfway back down the line to Washington.

The fact that Lankov’s book reads the way he speaks makes it both entertaining and more insightful. There were times I could almost hear him saying “norss karrrEEya.” He paints in light, subdued strokes and tones of post-Soviet cynicism, sarcasm, and black humor. For a book about the ordinary lives of North Koreans, Lankov’s perspective has the inestimable advantage of seeing through the state’s procrustean choreography of the thoughts and words of the people. Any author can see that much, but Lankov can also see the doubts and the humanity that lie beneath.

Yet Andrei Lankov certainly isn’t Korean and doesn’t even claim to speak the language especially well. Not that it matters much; during his year of study at Kim Il Sung University, his access to the country and its people were tightly controlled. He had few opportunities to leave Pyongyang, see the countryside, or visit other North Korean cities. He was monitored everywhere he went, couldn’t strike up casual conversations on the streets, couldn’t form friendships with North Koreans, and couldn’t be a dinner guest in a North Korean home. He has returned to North Korea since then — enough to show him that things have changed dramatically since the 1980’s — but he surely didn’t acquire his encyclopedic knowledge of North Korea from travel alone. He has obviously interviewed many defectors, spoken to many other knowledgeable persons and read their works, and followed the news closely.

Rather than diving into the overcrowded field of books about its politics or diplomacy, Andrei Lankov set out to write a book about everyday life. In the beginning, he tells us,

[E]ven under the most repressive of social and political conditions, the vast majority of people still attempt to live normal lives and generally succeed at that. These lives include work and leisure, love and friendship ““ with not that much space left for the politics. There was a lot of political repression going on in 1984 North Korea to be sure, but this repression constituted only a relatively small part of this country’s daily life.

He then goes on to obliterate that part of his own argument by giving us a lengthy list of basic amenities of a “normal” life that are absent from the lives of North Koreans: the ability to bathe or shower in your own home, clean clothes, a refrigerator, meat or fish put put in said refrigerator, regular electricity, telephones and telephone books, trash collection, cell phones, mini skirts, construction equipment, a choice of hairstyle, passenger cars, domestic air travel, foreign travel, goods on the shelves, the freedom to date and fall in love, health care, ethnic minorities, apolitical music, old books, a radio with a tuner, the freedom to choose one’s spouse freely, leisure time, a full meal, mindless entertainment on the TV, the Internet, a peaceful night’s sleep.

Other than that, what have the Romans ever done for us?

Lankov tells us that most North Koreans who don’t live in Pyongyang will probably never see the place. Other things that we consider commonplace are rare luxuries in North Korea: a meal in a restaurant, a bath, new clothes, the stiff drink you’ll need to get through the next day, or a bicycle (unless you’re female, in which case you’ll have to ride around in drag; either way, there’s a good chance the bike was made in a prison camp at Chongjin).

Even more telling are the parts of this book that describe the things that are a part of life in North Korea: Maoist criticism sessions, midnight “home inspections” by the police, mandatory membership in a neighborhood “peoples’ group,” constant “ideological education,” mobilizations for public works labor, document checks for any guest you invite to your home, and the cable radio — which is probably the closest existing relative of Orwell’s telescreen and almost completely immune to outside monitoring. Then, for those who don’t happen to live in Pyongyang, famine and plague are constant threats. And wherever you live, there’s the fear that eventually in your lifetime, you’ll be accused of saying the wrong thing:

[I]n the 1970s a vet was treating a pig when he uttered something like “in this world only pigs can live happily”. This was interpreted as a counter-revolutionary statement; the culprit was arrested, tortured and shot, while his family was sent to a prison camp.

Danger often comes in the form of a neighbor who informs on you. He may inform for some small reward or benefit, or because the police expect him to. In the latter case, the neighbor would know that it would be no help to you (and a great risk to him) to defend your innocence. So ends your life; so ends your family. Hardly anyone’s definition of “normal” life.

Even this descrption is weighted toward the privileged life in Pyongyang. A few of those features of life might be familiar to people in parts of Indonesia or Cameroon simply because poverty exists in those countries, too, but any of them is a world away from life in nearby Pusan or Sapporo. One wonders if life in North Korea’s bleak northeast — places like Chongjin, Hoeryong, or Hamhung — is even the equal of life in Harare, Kinshasa, or Luanda. The state of things beyond the gilded gates of Pyongyang is the most consequential yet opaque measure of North Korea’s discontent. Lankov also distinguishes Pyongyang from the rest of North Korea, but life in the provinces is still mostly unknown to the outside world, and one senses that this is also true of Lankov.

If Lankov’s book might not persuade you the ordinariness of North Korean life, it will bolster another of his arguments — that knowing more of the outside world has been and will continue to be a powerful agent of subversion in the minds of North Koreans. I agree in in principle, if not necessarily in every application. But that is another story, and that is the subject of a debate I hope to host here at Andrei Lankov’s earliest convenience.