That night, the restaurant was packed with North Koreans sitting out in the open, in stark contrast to the Pyongyang pub I visited in 2005, where there were dividers between the tables for privacy and where a hush descended upon my arrival.
This time, no one batted an eyelid. They carried on drinking and laughing regardless of the Westerner in the mix. Still, some of the old Pyongyang remained. The electricity went out for a while, and we all sat in the dark as we waited for it to kick back in.
Another night, we took our minders to a barbecue restaurant over at the Sunrise complex, another new building that had popped up in Pyonghattan. It was so new that the driver of our minivan had trouble finding the entrance, and then our minders had trouble finding the restaurant.
This restaurant was much less crowded than the beer hall, but there were still groups of North Koreans enjoying the meat that was being grilled on the table in front of them. This outfit offered a more traditional kind of North Korean discretion. A couple sitting in a booth pulled the bamboo curtain across the front of their table when they heard us arrive.
The waitress recommended cuts of meat that were fifty dollars for a single portion, the most expensive on the menu. Clearly she had been schooled in the capitalist practice of upselling. We settled on a more modest array, washed down with beer and bottles of soju.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my travels in North Korea, it’s that the minders never say no to a drink. Over the years, I’ve watched North Koreans knock back glass after glass of soju—North Koreans in North Korea, North Koreans working outside North Korea, North Koreans in South Korea. It is a coping mechanism, a way of numbing themselves to what they have to endure.
North Koreans, including the elites in Pyongyang and abroad, also always leap at the chance to eat red meat. It’s a rare and expensive treat even for the 1 percent.
Across the lobby from the barbecue restaurant, the Sunrise complex has a fancy supermarket stocked with outrageously expensive imported products like Norwegian salmon, French cheese, and Swiss muesli. It was empty when I visited—at eight o’clock on a Saturday night—and local residents say they have only occasionally seen people in there. The supermarket appears to be more about propaganda than produce. But it exists.
There are other showpieces.
There’s also a nascent café culture, though in a country that doesn’t drink much coffee, it’s more about signaling sophistication than getting a caffeine fix. At the Kum Rung leisure center, among the treadmills and yoga classes, there’s a trendy café with décor and ambience that would not be out of place in Seoul or Beijing. The head barista even trained in China.
An iced mocha costs nine dollars—a price that would be steep anywhere in the world, let alone in one of the poorest countries on the planet—while an espresso is a still-astronomical four dollars, an absurdity in a country where a significant proportion of the population is malnourished.
The coffee shops don’t make much money, according to Andray Abrahamian, who ran financial training courses in North Korea for the Singapore-based NGO Choson Exchange. There just isn’t the customer base that likes coffee and is willing to pay such high prices.
“It’s just a signifier that you’re fancy and cosmopolitan,” he told me. Abrahamian, a Briton who speaks excellent Korean and has visited North Korea almost thirty times, has helped train a slew of entrepreneurs, including the woman who runs the Kum Rung coffee shop.
But there are signs of a real, if fledgling, consumer class.
The supermarket in the Kwangbok department store was bustling when I visited, with locals loading imported Ukrainian candy and Japanese mayonnaise, priced much higher than the local alternatives, into their baskets. It also carried local produce. Five-liter bottles of soju liquor were on sale for only $2.60.
Huge flat-screen televisions and top-of-the-line European vacuum cleaners are on sale in jangmadang markets in the capital—if you have a few thousand dollars to drop on such things.
More than 10 percent of North Koreans now have cell phones, and there are lots of taxis on the streets, with meters that start at a dollar. Some people even have pet dogs, an unimaginable luxury just a few years ago in a country where people struggle to feed the humans in their families.
Consumerism has been experienced in varying degrees around the country, but nowhere has benefited like the capital. “Even if you don’t have a great job, it’s a privilege to be in Pyongyang,” So-hyun told me. “So I’m sure lots of people were envious of us.”
Kang Nara did not live in the capital, but she didn’t do too badly up in Chongjin, the third-largest city in North Korea. It’s a place that has prospered, by North Korean standards, thanks to its port and its proximity to the borders with China and Russia.
“There was nothing that we needed that we couldn’t buy. They were people who were jealous and people who wanted to take some of his work,” Nara told me, speaking of her father’s work.
Her father was a master of money involved in the construction business. It was a booming sector to be in, and he was clearly reaping loads of cash.
She went to an arts high school where she was able to pursue her talent for music and acting, and she also had private singing lessons. “Of course there were some poor kids at my school, but I didn’t hang out with them,” she recalled.
She lived in a big standalone house in the center of Chongjin, where each of the three daughters had her own bedroom. Many people in North Korea still cook over fire, but Nara’s family had a gas cooker and a microwave oven. They had an electric fridge and an automatic washing machine. No one in this family needed to wash clothes in the river.
She got an allowance from her father of about $400 a month—or one hundred times the amount that a state factory worker or government bureaucrat made. Not bad for a teenager.
She spent her money on clothes and pearly lip gloss from China, perfume from France, cases for their cell phones, and little stickers to decorate them. She had a baseball cap with a Nike swoosh on it, although she didn’t know then that it was a Nike swoosh, just that it was cool. Everything came from a local market.
For fun on nice days, Nara and her friends would go to the skating rink in the center of Chongjin that opened in 2013, in the second year of Kim Jong Un’s reign. Rollerblading had become a huge trend, and rich kids like Nara had their own skates.
“We’d carry them slung over our shoulders—it was a status symbol, a sign that you have money—when we walked to the rink,” she told me. She bought her pink Rollerblades, as well as a helmet and knee and elbow pads, at the market for about thirty dollars. She shrugged. “That’s unthinkable for poor kids.” They had to settle for the cheap and uncomfortable rental Rollerblades if they wanted to join in—if they had the money even for that.
At night, Nara would go with friends to the markets, where there was now an array of cosmopolitan eateries. They could eat Peking duck or okonomiyaki, a thick, savory Japanese pancake often containing noodles and pork. There were more and more places for flashy types to entertain themselves and show off.
Other times, Nara and her friends would text each other on their smartphones and arrange to hang out at the ping-pong hall, a private operation started by a local entrepreneur. It was the cool place to be, she said. There was a bar area with stools, and the teenagers could buy beer and snacks. “Of course we didn’t go there to play table tennis. We went there to hang out with boys,” Nara said. “When boys came up to talk to me, I’d check out their phone. If they had one of those old-style phones with buttons, I wasn’t interested.” If a guy had one of North Korea’s Arirang smartphones, the kind that cost $400 to buy, then she would give him a second look.
“Shoes and cell phones were the big status symbols. To be able to afford a smartphone, you had to come from a rich family,” Nara told me, reminiscing about the lifestyle she once enjoyed.
“The other thing we looked at was their outfits. If they were wearing clothes made in North Korea, th
ey were a no. We were only interested in boys wearing foreign clothes.” Foreign usually meant Chinese, and that was fine. In the Western world, Chinese-made clothes might be considered cheap and inferior, but in North Korea, even Chinese clothes are a signifier of wealth and worldliness.
It was fun to be a rich kid in Kim Jong Un’s North Korea. The richest kid of all was making sure of it.
CHAPTER 11
PLAYING BALL WITH THE “JACKALS”
“Dennis Rodman went up to the auditorium to bow to Kim Jong Un. Warmly welcoming him, Kim Jong Un let him sit next to him.”
—KCNA, February 28, 2013
BEING AN ISOLATED AUTOCRAT CAN BE SOCIALLY LIMITING. KIM Jong Un has his brother and sister, attached to him by blood, and a wife, attached to him by his father. There is a fawning coterie who are extremely nice to him, telling him he’s the best and always letting him win. But do they really like him? Or do they just fear for their lives?
Yet no amount of social deprivation can fully explain Kim’s choice of celebrity friend that emerged in 2013: the six-foot-eight-inch former Chicago Bull and B-list celebrity Dennis Rodman.
That year, the one-time NBA star embarked on the first of three trips to North Korea, during which he and his entourage not only met but also partied with the leader. This nonconformist attention seeker was embraced by the leader of a country where conformity and reticence are essential for survival.
This was very annoying for the foreign policy establishment in Washington, experts and officials who had advanced degrees and language skills and had been analyzing this rogue state for their entire careers. They wanted to know everything they could about this mysterious menace, but they didn’t want to ask for information from someone who was definitely not an expert, someone who they viewed as a washed-up publicity seeker.
“We’re not like buddy buddies, but we do have a friendship where it’s not about politics. It’s about sports,” Rodman said a few years later, recounting time spent with the man he calls his “friend for life.” The basketballer’s verdict: “To me he was just a normal guy.”1
The trips happened because Kim Jong Un was a big Bulls fan. When he arrived in Switzerland in the summer of 1996, the Bulls had just won the NBA championship series. Michael Jordan was named MVP, but Rodman, with his knack for grabbing rebounds, was credited with a major role in securing the victory. The Bulls, with Jordan and Rodman, would go on to win the next two championships too.
When Madeleine Albright went to Pyongyang in 2000, she took a Wilson basketball signed by Jordan as a gift for Kim Jong Il. I’ve seen it several times, displayed in a glass case in the International Friendship Exhibition Hall north of Pyongyang, which consists of two palaces considered so sacred that visitors have to put covers over their shoes and pass through an air-blowing machine.
The idea of sending a Chicago Bull as an emissary to meet the new leader of North Korea began as a serious one. In 2009, when it became evident that Kim Jong Un had been designated his father’s successor, the CIA actively discussed trying to get Dennis Rodman to go to Pyongyang. But the idea didn’t go anywhere.
Then in 2012, not long after Kim Jong Un took over and before any American had met him, Barack Obama invited some North Korea experts to the Oval Office to seek their advice on how to deal with the new young leader.
One of them, an economist named Marcus Noland, who was an expert on the North Korean famine, suggested that the president conscript Steve Kerr into an unconventional diplomatic effort. Kerr had played for the Chicago Bulls during the 1990s. But more than that, Kerr had spent some of his childhood in the Middle East with his professor father, so he had some experience in tricky parts of the world.
Noland tried to convince Obama to take advantage of the new leader’s obsession with the Bulls. He suggested that the president ask Kerr, who had gone on to be an announcer and coach, to go to Pyongyang. Maybe he would play H-O-R-S-E with Kim. In the worst-case scenario, Obama’s advisors accompanying Kerr would get to observe the new leader.
“It was a semi-crazy idea, but it was better than Rodman,” Noland said. The idea went nowhere.
Up in New York, a team of hipster television producers at Vice was having the same idea. They wanted to make a program about North Korea, and they wanted to get to the leader. How better than to tap into his love of the Chicago Bulls?
The Vice team approached Jordan’s agent with the idea, but they went around in circles, and it became clear that it wasn’t going anywhere. That turned out to be a problem because the Vice crew, when they had floated the idea to the North Korean diplomats in New York, had dropped Jordan’s name. The North Koreans really wanted him. So Vice ended up telling them that the pro basketballer, the one forever associated with Air Jordans, was afraid of flying. It was the kind of excuse that had special resonance in North Korea, where Kim Jong Il was famously phobic about planes.
So instead they approached Rodman. The world-famous defensive player known as the Worm was also known to be up for the unusual.
He famously wore a wedding dress, complete with veil and long white gloves, and traveled in a horse-drawn carriage through the streets of the Big Apple to, as he said, “get married to the city of New York” in 1996. That just happened to coincide with the release of his autobiography, Bad as I Wanna Be. Nine years later, he made another strange journey, this time traveling in a hearse surrounded by black-clad beauties to participate in his own funeral. Like Lazarus on Halloween, he emerged like a zombie from a coffin liberally plastered with the logo of an online casino.
Rodman wasn’t just eccentric. He also appeared to be available for hire. After retiring from basketball, he had been promoting online gambling and had also been a contestant on a range of reality TV shows, including Celebrity Apprentice, hosted by one Donald J. Trump.
Would he be interested in a little paid “basketball diplomacy”? Yes, he was.
The Vice crew took the news back to the North Koreans in New York that they’d secured a Chicago Bull, and the North Koreans relayed the good news up the hierarchy in Pyongyang. They got a green light.
It was only then that the North Koreans realized that Vice wasn’t your average television news program, that it was staffed by millennials with tattoos who prided themselves on their disruptive approach to media.
But the North Korean diplomats couldn’t go back on this deal now. The Great Successor was expecting a Chicago Bull. So they insisted on having a meeting with executives at HBO, which had bought Vice’s show, to try to straighten out a few things.
There, in HBO’s office in Manhattan, the North Koreans told Nina Rosenstein, the network’s senior vice president, that they loved watching Homeland. Umm, Rosenstein responded, that’s on Showtime, a rival network. She asked them if they’d seen Game of Thrones. They gave her a blank look. They left the meeting with box sets.
Still, the North Koreans were apparently sufficiently reassured to allow the visit to go ahead. So on February 26, 2013, Dennis Rodman and his handlers flew from Beijing to Pyongyang, accompanied by three members of the Harlem Globetrotters, a team executive, and the Vice News crew. Vice wanted the Globetrotters because, with their hilarious on-court antics, they were “the most natural ambassadors of basketball in the game.”2
It was to be a trip like no other.
This dawned on Rodman when he arrived at Pyongyang airport to find a press scrum and a motorcade. It was a world away from the dental convention where he’d been signing autographs the previous week.
“It had been a long time since anyone cared that he existed, and he was amazed and excited to find that he mattered,” said Jason Mojica, a Vice producer and the impetus behind the trip. Then it sank in that if they met Kim Jong Un, they would be the first Americans to do so.
“He thought he was relevant again. There were dollar signs in his eyes,” Mojica told me when I went to see him in Brooklyn for a rundown of the trip.
Rodman later admitted that he loved the adulation he received. “Once I wen
t over there and saw the respect that they gave me, whoa, I got the red carpet,” he said.3
But the trip was not being celebrated in Washington, where the Obama administration tried to put as much distance as possible between them and Rodman.
Two months earlier, days before Kim Jong Un marked his first anniversary in power, North Korea launched a long-range rocket that put a satellite into orbit. This was a crucial technological advance for its related missile program.
Then, just two weeks before the basketball ambassadors’ arrival, the regime conducted its third nuclear test. When Rodman and the delegation got to the hotel in Pyongyang that morning, they encountered a huge banner in the lobby heralding the “success” of the test and watched as thousands of people streamed toward the main square for a celebratory rally.
The trip was not universally welcomed in Pyongyang, either. Soon after their arrival in the capital, a “hard-edged” woman pulled Mojica away from the rest of the delegation and into the back of a black limousine. She told him bluntly in English that she didn’t like him or his work—he’d previously reported on North Korean gulags—or Vice News, for that matter. She had argued against the visit taking place but had been overruled, she told him.4
After Mojica told me about this incident, we went through photos from the trip so he could point out the woman. When he showed me, I recognized her instantly. She was Choe Son Hui, a very influential person in the regime.
At the time, she was head of the Americas division at the foreign ministry, haven risen from being an interpreter during multilateral nuclear talks almost a decade earlier. Her stepfather had been the state’s premier, and her family was closely connected to the Kims. Within a few years, she would be a vice foreign minister. The fact that someone so senior was involved in the Rodman trip—and as an interpreter for some basketball players, no less—showed just how seriously the regime was treating the event.
The Great Successor Page 19