They lived the good life in Kim Jong Un’s Pyonghattan, a cosmopolitan capital within the capital created by the Great Successor.
Marketization may have led to a slight improvement in living standards for many North Koreans, but no one has seen an improvement like those in the rings that run closest around Kim Jong Un. It’s a strategic bribe: the regime hopes that it can persuade the Pyongyang brat pack—the children of the masters of money, who know that life outside the country is much better—that for them, at least, there is no need to leave North Korea.
On my first visit to Pyongyang in 2005, I saw women dressed very conservatively and with decidedly communist aesthetics: drab browns and grays and black, long skirts, shapeless jackets, functional shoes.
By 2018, an entirely different fashion was dominant, in Pyongyang at least. North Koreans, just a few years younger than Kim Jong Un, wear clothes from stores like H&M, Zara, and Uniqlo. Women wear more colorful and fitted clothes, sparkly jewelry, and look-at-me high heels. Conspicuous consumption is clearly no longer a crime against socialism.
Young North Koreans who could travel particularly love to buy workout gear while abroad, something that was not so readily available in the capital—at least not the kind of workout gear they wanted. It’s not that these millennials are exercise freaks; their love of workout gear stems from the fact that the gym is the only place they can flaunt their bodies.
“We’re supposed to dress conservatively in North Korea, so people like going to the gym so they can show off their bodies, show some skin,” said So-hyun, describing how women like to wear leggings and tight tops.
Those who could go abroad would shop for themselves and their friends back in Pyongyang, who provided very specific shopping lists. The sportswear brand Elle was popular among women, while men preferred Adidas and Nike. “Everyone would bring stuff like this back when they went abroad,” Hyun-sung told me.
The first time I met the siblings So-hyun and Hyun-sung was at an upscale mall not far from their home in Virginia. We went to an Italian restaurant and ate pasta and steak outside on the patio. Even in the United States, they exuded privilege and ambition. I was struck by how poised and immaculately dressed they were, very neat and formal but discreet, nothing flashy. They were both impressively savvy, skillfully managing their media appearances and discussing only the things that will increase their family’s standing or their chances of getting into a good university. And they were clearly used to life in the fast lane.
But while they were still part of the North Korean elite, the siblings went back and forth between Dalian in China, where they were studying while their father raised money for the regime, and Pyonghattan.
Whenever they were back home, they’d often hang out at the Kum Rung leisure complex in the middle of Pyongyang, a modern place by the standards of the capital. It has three squash courts and a gym where the treadmills show Disney cartoons on the screens. Women prance around in revealing yoga gear long after their class is finished.
Going to an indoor swimming pool is also popular—for the same reason. “It’s all about the fashion,” So-hyun said. In conservative North Korea, some women are even wearing bikinis, although they are very modest bikinis with a skirt for the bottom part.
Plastic surgery has also arrived. Double-eyelid operations—a relatively simple procedure to give Asian eyes a more Western look, already as commonplace as putting on makeup for young women in South Korea—are now de rigueur among the North Korean elite too. Doing your eyelids costs between $50 and $200, depending on the skill of the surgeon.
“Being beautiful and being handsome are considered a competitive advantage,” So-hyun told me, sounding just like an ambitious twentysomething South Korean.
The ultimate proof of this sentiment came in the form of Ri Sol Ju, a pretty, talented singer who hailed from an elite family and literally cheered for the regime as a member of various musical groups. She has been catapulted to the top of the regime. She is Kim Jong Un’s wife.
A glamorous young woman with a common touch, she has single-handedly become an aspirational figure for millennials and someone who adds to the regime a feeling of modernity. She’s the North Korean Kate Middleton, rejuvenating the monarchy and humanizing her husband.
Her arrival was designed to show that North Korea had now entered a new era, one in which young people could enjoy themselves and have ambitions—the young people who were in the elite, at least.
Ri was all smiles when she made her first public appearance as Kim Jong Un’s companion in the middle of 2012. They were attending a concert in Pyongyang, sitting on bright-red VIP armchairs. Kim was in his standard black Mao suit, and Ri, who sported a short haircut, was wearing a fitted black skirt suit with white stitching. Both wore red Kim pins over their hearts.
They both stood and cheered at the performance of the Moranbong Band, an all-female singing group. Citizens used to musical troupes featuring women in tent-like dresses or in olive-green soldiers’ uniforms were suddenly treated to glamorous women in tight, sparkly outfits.
The state media didn’t name the woman who was at Kim Jong Il’s side that night, which drove the South Korean press into a frenzy of speculation.
Was it Kim Jong Un’s younger sister? Was it Hyon Song Wol, the singer in the popular Pochonbo Electronic Orchestra, best known for its hit song “Lady Riding a Fine Horse”? The majority of the South Korean press decided that it was indeed Hyon and that she was pregnant. This was, as is often the case, completely off the mark (like the later speculation that Kim had Hyon executed).
The real story soon came out. A few weeks later, North Korean state media reported on the opening of the Rungra People’s Pleasure Ground in Pyongyang, one of the new leisure complexes that Kim had ordered to show his “loving care” for citizens of all ages. Built on an island in the middle of the Taedong River, it included an amusement park, swimming pools and water slides, a dolphinarium, and a mini golf course.
Kim Jong Un attended the opening of this amusement park with a woman who was simply introduced as Comrade Ri Sol Ju. Everyone “enthusiastically welcomed them, loudly shouting ‘Hurrah!’” according to the official account of the event.1
Kim and Ri shook hands with the foreign diplomats who’d been brought in for the opening. One, a British diplomat called Barnaby Jones, even went on one of the rides with Kim, locked into the row in front of the Great Successor.
It had never been disclosed that Kim Jong Un had married, and Ri was not officially identified as his wife. But the relationship, with Ri looping her arm through Kim Jong Un’s, was clear for all to see. The public acknowledgment of a leader’s wife was unprecedented in North Korea. Kim Il Sung’s first wife, the revolutionary hero Kim Jong Suk, was immortalized after her death in 1949, and his second wife was already a public figure because she held political office. Kim Jong Il certainly never took any of his numerous consorts to public events.
But it wasn’t just the appearance of Ri that was a break from the past; it was her whole demeanor and approach.
Ri could hardly have looked more different from other North Korean women, even from other twentysomething women in Pyongyang. That day at the amusement park, she was wearing a fitted green-and-black dress with short sleeves and a hemline above the knee, hardly considered revealing in other parts of the world but daring in North Korea and absolutely unprecedented for a political consort.
In a country where even the wives of top cadres wore the shapeless socialist outfits that made everyone equally drab, Ri cut a strikingly modern figure. She would soon go on to wear smart business suits in bold colors—even a jacket with red polka dots—and often sported a pearl brooch instead of the mandatory Kim pin worn by everyone else in North Korea. She wore platform peep-toe pumps and often carried a Chanel- or Dior-style clutch purse under her arm. Her hair changed frequently, sometimes styled short, sometimes in long waves.
But even more striking than her outfits was her demeanor. That day at the amusemen
t park, she walked alongside Kim, smiling and twining her arm through his. She would continue to walk arm in arm with him over the coming years, a shocking public display of affection and social equality. It would have been considered embarrassing and even rash for an ordinary husband and wife to walk in the streets this way.2
As first lady, Ri appeared to have a moderating influence on her husband—within the constraints of his total power. The day that they went to the funfair together, one of the rides suddenly stopped while Kim and the British diplomat were on it. The stressed workers hurried to fix the problem, but the leader was furious.
The workers, shaking in terror, apologized. The diplomats looked concerned. Then Ri approached Kim Jong Un and quietly spoke to him, apparently calming him. It worked. Kim cooled down, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
Ri Sol Ju was not a typical North Korean. Before their marriage, she was a captivating performer in a leading artistic troupe—just like Kim’s own mother.
She came from an elite family that has helped keep the Kims in power. Her father served in the air force, and Ri Pyong Chol, a former top air force general who is always at Kim’s side during missile launches, is a close relative, perhaps an uncle.
Ri is five years younger than her husband and was born on September 28, 1989, according to passport information supplied when she traveled to Japan as a teenager.3
As a child in Pyongyang, she was sent to the Mangyongdae Children’s Palace, a showcase arts school where highly made-up kids perform propaganda songs with robotic precision for foreign visitors. She attended a musical high school—photos from the school show a clearly identifiable Ri standing with her classmates, wearing a bright red-and-yellow traditional dress—and then studied in neighboring China after graduation. Communist Party–controlled China was the closest and friendliest place for North Korean students, not to mention the cheapest.
Certainly, she traveled—a privilege afforded to only the most elite North Koreans. She went to the Japanese city of Fukuoka in 2002, when she was twelve, to participate in UNESCO’s East Asian Children’s Art Festival.
Then, when North Korea sent a team to the Asian Athletics Championship in South Korea in 2005, Ri Sol Ju was part of the cheering squad that accompanied the athletes. They all wore the puritanical black-and-white traditional dresses of North Korea and waved flags showing a unified Korean Peninsula.
Photos from that time show Ri with short hair and a teenager’s plump cheeks. She is smiling and waving to the hordes of South Korean photographers who had come to snap pictures of a squad that South Koreans called North Korea’s “army of beauties.”
They stayed in South Korea for six days, boosting their team and performing North Korean songs such as “Blue Sky of My Country.” South Korean intelligence would have certainly been keeping close tabs on all the North Koreans who arrived for the games—as would the North Korean authorities, careful to make sure none of them had an opportunity to defect. But at the time, the South Korean spooks could not have known that they had the future leader’s future wife in their midst. She was just another pretty face.
After graduating, Ri became a singer with the Unhasu Orchestra, a Western-style ensemble with singers that is a mainstay of North Korean music. They perform songs such as “Peace Is Guaranteed by Our Arms.”
Ri became one of its stars. She would appear in bright traditional Korean dresses—which form a kind of tent around the body, giving no sense of shape—and with big hair and false eyelashes. At a New Year’s concert in 2010, she sang a rousing revolutionary solo called “Burn High, Bonfire.” The following year, the one in which Kim Jong Un would become leader, she appeared onstage in a sparkling blue dress to sing a solo of “Soldier’s Footsteps.” In the year between the two performances, she had had some expensive dentistry to correct her smile.
When she emerged as Kim Jong Un’s wife, many North Koreans would have recognized her as the glamorous woman from the propaganda concerts.
At some stage, she appears to have caught the eye of Kim Jong Il, a man who had a habit of marrying performers. He decided Ri should marry his youngest son and heir apparent and secure a path to future dynastic succession. “Father looked at me and told me to marry that woman, so I trusted him,” Kim Jong Un told the South Korean president during their first meeting some years later.4
As Kim Jong Il’s health deteriorated, Kim and Ri tied the knot. It was an important component of the succession plan. They are thought to have two or three children, and Kim Jong Un is no doubt grooming them to be leadership material too.
From the very beginning, Kim and Ri were the epitome of a modern couple—the young dictator and his attractive wife.
During his first September as leader, in 2012, they paid a highly publicized visit to Changjon Street, an apartment complex for the elites that stood out in the capital’s skyline because the buildings were rounded and lit up at night in an array of colors.
They visited Pak Sung Il, who was reported to be a worker of the City Beautification Office and who supposedly lived with his family in a five-room apartment on the second floor. It’s often difficult to tell where the line between fact and fiction lies in state media reports, but in the apartment, Kim and Ri behaved as if they were long-lost relatives. Kim had one of Pak’s sons in his lap, patting his cheek, while Ri presented dishes that she said she had personally cooked. At every stop in the building, there were toasts, with Kim Jong Un doing the pouring. North Korea may have its own bizarre ideology, but it still remains bound by the Confucian hierarchical order that came from China centuries ago. Those rules stipulate that junior serves to senior—and no one in North Korea is more senior than Kim Jong Un. But with Ri at his side, Kim was presenting a totally different kind of leader than his father: a tactile, warm figure with a soft side who was close to the people (at least for the duration of his carefully staged visit).
That whiff of generational change was apparent in other ways. The concert where Ri made her first public appearance with the leader seemed at first a traditional North Korean offering. It was held in the Mansudae Art Theatre in Pyongyang, one of the main venues for events celebrating the regime. Military officials in olive-green uniforms and women in black-and-white traditional dresses stood and cheered as Kim Jong Un walked in.
He shook hands but otherwise looked stern as he sat down in a prime spot with the then-unidentified woman.
When the curtains drew back, to a flash of fireworks from the front of the stage, it showed a group of women in shiny, revealing evening dresses playing electric violins and guitars. The first song may have been a traditional choice—“Arirang,” the song of longing that remains emotional in both North and South Korea to this day—as were the backdrops featuring Mount Paektu and the Communist Party logo. But the performance was like nothing North Koreans had ever seen before. The tempo was fast and upbeat, and the women were doing the North Korean equivalent of rocking out to it. The show would only become more unusual.
Singers in very short, sparkling dresses and high heels sang North Korean propaganda songs, and then violinists in short black dresses performed the theme from Rocky, complete with a solo from a woman with a bright-red electric guitar and wearing what looked like a wedding dress.
Then things took a surreal turn. Singers performed “It’s a Small World” in Korean, and out onto the stage came people in costumes: Winnie the Pooh and Tigger were there, along with Minnie and Mickey Mouse, one of the seven dwarfs, and a random green dragon. The dwarf did weird hip gyrations while Tom and Jerry cartoons played in the background. Mickey had a laugh, pretending to conduct the musicians. They played the Winnie the Pooh theme song (“Tubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff”) and capped it all off with Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”
The finale seemed fitting. Kim Jong Un was certainly doing things his way.
On one of my trips to North Korea, I set out to experience the privileged world of Pyonghattan, the world of Kim Jong Un’s and Ri Sol Ju’s peers.
/> My first stop was the Italian restaurant with the catchy name Italian Restaurant in the Mirae Scientists Street complex. The entrance was through a lobby of a shop that sold everything from liquor to power generators—although there were no customers when I visited. There was also a fancy coffee shop selling expensive mocha creations with whipped cream. It, too, was empty.
The restaurant had a few customers though, and we settled in to try the pizza, which had been cooked in an imported wood-fired oven by specially trained staff. I chatted with a North Korean who told me that the Respected Leader wanted the people of Pyongyang to be able to enjoy food from all over the world.
He probably developed a taste for pizza during his teenage years in Europe, I said mischievously. The man’s head swung around. He looked at me quizzically. “You know, while he was at school in Switzerland? He took trips to Italy. He probably ate pizza.” The North Korean tried to process what I had just said. Then he replied to me, very quietly, “How can you know more about our leader than we do?”
Another night, I went to a German-themed beer hall near the Juche Tower, on the southern side of the Taedong River, which bisects Pyongyang. The beer hall had exposed brick walls, dark wooden tables, and seven kinds of North Korean beer on tap lined up behind the bar. Like an American sports bar, it also had a huge television screen flickering from one wall. It was showing ice-skating.
On the menu, there was a prime steak with a baked potato for forty-eight dollars—the same price as the filet mignon at the steak restaurant in New York where the North Korean diplomats assigned to the United Nations like to go. The Weiner schnitzel was an altogether more reasonable seven dollars. But most of the North Koreans in the restaurant seemed to be opting for the local food, although at seven dollars for a bowl of bibimbap—the kind of price you’d pay in Seoul for rice mixed with vegetables and meat—it was hardly cheap.
“If it weren’t for the little badges, they could be South Koreans,” my dinner mate, a foreign aid worker who lived in Pyongyang, told me as we ate in the beer hall. “They’re paying ten to fifteen euros for a meal,” he said.
The Great Successor Page 18