people.
She liked to look out the window. She had spent a good part of her earlier life dearly wishing for a window that looked out onto anything. For over a decade at the labor camp her wish had not come true. Then things had changed. Dramatically.
And now look at me , she thought.
She put on her coat and boots with the four-inch heels that made her taller. She would never wear such footwear on a mission, but the women in Pyongyang were very much into their thin high heels. Even women in the military, working construction, and in the traffic police wore them. It was one of the few ways to feel, well, liberated, if that was even possible here.
The monsoon season, running from June to August, had passed. The cold, dry winter would begin in about a month. Yet now the air was mild, the breeze invigorating, and the skies clear. These were the days on which Chung-Cha liked to walk through her city. They were rare times, for her work carried her to many other parts of her country and the world. And there never was occasion for a leisurely walk during any of those times.
On the left breast of her jacket rode her Kim pin. All North Koreans wore this decoration, depicting either or both Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il, both dead, but both never to be forgotten. Chung-Cha did not want to always wear the pin, but if she did not her arrest would be imminent. Even she was not so important to the state that she could ever forgo this sign of respect.
As she walked she took in observations she had made long ago. In many ways the capital city was a twelve-hundred-square-mile tribute to the ruling Kim family on the banks of the Taedong that flowed southward into Korea Bay. Pyongyang translated into “flat land” in Korean, and it was well named. It was only ninety feet above sea level and stretched outward smooth as a bindaetteok , or Korean pancake. The main boulevards were broad and largely devoid of cars. What passed by on the roads were mostly trolleys or buses.
The city did not seem like it had millions of residents. While the sidewalks were fairly full with pedestrians, in her work Chung-Cha had visited cities of comparable size in other countries where far more people were out and about. Perhaps it was all the surveillance cameras and police watching that made the citizens want to hide from view.
She walked down the steps to the metro. Pyongyang had the deepest subway system in the world, over a hundred meters in the ground. It ran only on the west side of the Taedong, while all foreign residents lived on the east side. Whether this was intentional or not she didn’t know. But being North Korean, she assumed it was. Central planning combined with paranoia had been elevated to a high art here.
Citizens queuing up for the next train did so in precise straight lines. North Koreans were drilled from an early age to form pristine lines in under a minute. There were straight lines of humanity all over the capital city. It was part of the “single-hearted unity” for which the country was known.
Chung-Cha did not join the queue. She purposely waited apart from it until the train entered the station. She rode the train to another section of town and came back to the surface. The green spaces in Pyongyang were immense and many in number, but not as immense as the monuments.
There was the Arch of Triumph, a copy of the one in Paris, but far bigger. It commemorated the Korean resistance to Japan from the 1920s to the 1940s. There was the Washington Monument lookalike Juche Tower, which was one hundred and seventy meters tall and stood for the Korean philosophy of self-reliance.
As she passed it Chung-Cha nodded silently. She relied only on herself. She trusted only herself. No one here had to tell her that. She didn’t need a monument shooting into the sky to make her believe that .
There was the also the Arch of Reunification, one of the few that featured Korean women. Dressed in traditional Korean garb, they held between
She liked to look out the window. She had spent a good part of her earlier life dearly wishing for a window that looked out onto anything. For over a decade at the labor camp her wish had not come true. Then things had changed. Dramatically.
And now look at me , she thought.
She put on her coat and boots with the four-inch heels that made her taller. She would never wear such footwear on a mission, but the women in Pyongyang were very much into their thin high heels. Even women in the military, working construction, and in the traffic police wore them. It was one of the few ways to feel, well, liberated, if that was even possible here.
The monsoon season, running from June to August, had passed. The cold, dry winter would begin in about a month. Yet now the air was mild, the breeze invigorating, and the skies clear. These were the days on which Chung-Cha liked to walk through her city. They were rare times, for her work carried her to many other parts of her country and the world. And there never was occasion for a leisurely walk during any of those times.
On the left breast of her jacket rode her Kim pin. All North Koreans wore this decoration, depicting either or both Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il, both dead, but both never to be forgotten. Chung-Cha did not want to always wear the pin, but if she did not her arrest would be imminent. Even she was not so important to the state that she could ever forgo this sign of respect.
As she walked she took in observations she had made long ago. In many ways the capital city was a twelve-hundred-square-mile tribute to the ruling Kim family on the banks of the Taedong that flowed southward into Korea Bay. Pyongyang translated into “flat land” in Korean, and it was well named. It was only ninety feet above sea level and stretched outward smooth as a bindaetteok , or Korean pancake. The main boulevards were broad and largely devoid of cars. What passed by on the roads were mostly trolleys or buses.
The city did not seem like it had millions of residents. While the sidewalks were fairly full with pedestrians, in her work Chung-Cha had visited cities of comparable size in other countries where far more people were out and about. Perhaps it was all the surveillance cameras and police watching that made the citizens want to hide from view.
She walked down the steps to the metro. Pyongyang had the deepest subway system in the world, over a hundred meters in the ground. It ran only on the west side of the Taedong, while all foreign residents lived on the east side. Whether this was intentional or not she didn’t know. But being North Korean, she assumed it was. Central planning combined with paranoia had been elevated to a high art here.
Citizens queuing up for the next train did so in precise straight lines. North Koreans were drilled from an early age to form pristine lines in under a minute. There were straight lines of humanity all over the capital city. It was part of the “single-hearted unity” for which the country was known.
Chung-Cha did not join the queue. She purposely waited apart from it until the train entered the station. She rode the train to another section of town and came back to the surface. The green spaces in Pyongyang were immense and many in number, but not as immense as the monuments.
There was the Arch of Triumph, a copy of the one in Paris, but far bigger. It commemorated the Korean resistance to Japan from the 1920s to the 1940s. There was the Washington Monument lookalike Juche Tower, which was one hundred and seventy meters tall and stood for the Korean philosophy of self-reliance.
As she passed it Chung-Cha nodded silently. She relied only on herself. She trusted only herself. No one here had to tell her that. She didn’t need a monument shooting into the sky to make her believe that .
There was the also the Arch of Reunification, one of the few that featured Korean women. Dressed in traditional Korean garb, they held between
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