7. Little Pyongyang
Guang-ho claimed to have found a North Korean restaurant in Paris; Sang-hoon, who prided himself on knowing the city like the inside of his pocket, said that such a thing was impossible. And that was how it began, with neither wanting to be proven wrong. After all, in Amsterdam there was one, the first on European soil. It had appeared rather inconspicuously, like mushrooms after a rainfall, then closed its doors a few months later, only to reopen them, in a new location, under a different name. Then again, that was Amsterdam, where it was known to rain a lot. In the end, Guang-ho grudgingly agreed to take us there so that we could see for ourselves. He had his pride, after all. I knew that he was doing it mainly for Sang-hoon; I accompanied them because I had nothing better to do. It was a bright spring morning and the streets had already started to come to life. The people who passed us had straw baskets slung over their shoulders; others pushed strollers, and I could only surmise that there was an open-air market nearby. Their obliviousness to our unlikely mission—finding a North Korean restaurant in Montmartre—made them seem unreal to me, like figurants in a movie. During the train ride, Guang-ho had recounted in detail what had happened: he had stumbled across the restaurant by accident while on his way to see someone. (“A girl,” Sang-hoon said, half asking. “A girl,” Guang-ho said, half answering.) He was already running late, and on top of that it had started to rain, but he found himself stopping in front of the restaurant for a second glance. Even then, it wasn’t immediately clear to him what he was seeing. Most Korean restaurants—including the one Guang-ho himself worked at—were in the fifth and sixth arrondissements; he’d never heard of one in the eighteenth, where he rarely ventured, though that wasn’t why he had stopped. Here he paused in his story to roll himself a cigarette so that it would be ready once we got off. Inside the restaurant, Guang-ho went on, spitting out a shard of tobacco stuck to his tongue, the servers were all women, dressed in traditional hanbok. There was something off about the colors, the reds and greens and yellows a bit too garish, verging on neon. At the end of the room was a small stage, with a keyboard and several microphone stands—the typical setup for karaoke (or “noraebang” in Korean, Sang-hoon informed me). The customers facing the stage with their backs to Guang-ho were all Westerners. And then it finally hit him. The feeling.
It was similar to what he’d experienced, years earlier, during a visit to Germany. There had been a period, shortly after he arrived in France, when his papers weren’t in order, and this required him to leave the country temporarily every three months before his tourist visa ran out. He usually spent a weekend in London, and on his return, the counter back to zero again, he had another three months of peace of mind. In any case, the little subterfuge seemed to work; he never had any trouble at the border. Sometimes—finances permitting—he would even make a little detour along the way. On one such trip, he had stayed at a youth hostel in what had once been East Berlin. It was the off season, and he’d had a dormitory room all to himself. Sometime during the night he had woken from a dream to notice that, across the room, there was someone sitting up in one of the upper bunk beds. For a long time, he lay there in the dark, staring at the silhouette, terrified but unable to move. At some point, exhaustion overcame him and he fell back asleep. When he woke the next morning—much later than he had planned—he was alone in the room. Later, after his situation was regularized, he met someone at the Cité U, an Irish student and resident of the Collège franco-britannique, who had spent several months at the same hostel as Guang-ho in Berlin. He told Guang-ho that, even if the staff was German, the building itself was owned by the North Koreans, and that it had once been a residence for diplomats from Pyongyang. All of this was apparently something of an open secret among the people of the neighborhood. The memory of the hostel—he hadn’t thought about it in years—came back to him as he stood in front of the restaurant, the rain starting to come down harder and harder.
“Did you go in?” Sang-hoon asked.
“Would you have gone in?” Guang-ho made as if to light his cigarette, then seemed to remember where he was.
Instead of answering, Sang-hoon turned to me and explained that, under the National Security Law, it was illegal for a South Korean to enter into contact with North Koreans. Knowingly walking into a North Korean restaurant would fall into the aforementioned category.
“Like I said,” Guang-ho muttered, “I was in a hurry that night.”
My Korean companions were unusually quiet as we made our way down the street in the morning light. By then, we were in the Goutte d’Or; to our left was the boulevard Barbès. It was, I thought, an unlikely place for a restaurant, amid the noise and the odors, far from the areas frequented by tourists. Sang-hoon insisted that Guang-ho had been mistaken, but Guang-ho didn’t reply, drawing pensively on his cigarette. Nearby, he informed us, was a tobacconist, one of the few in Paris that sold Chesterfields, though he’d gone back to rolling his own paper because it was cheaper. Every few hundred feet, Sang-hoon declared us lost, all the while commenting like a tour guide on the graffiti-covered façades, the trash strewn everywhere, a streak of canine excrement that seemed to go on for several blocks. Guang-ho made us double back and retrace our steps. For the first time, he seemed unsure of himself.
“It was here, I’m telling you…”
“Admit it. You have no idea where you’re going!”
“Just shut up and let me think!”
I wondered why Sang-hoon was so eager to prove Guang-ho wrong. Was it his professional pride at stake here? Granted, a segment of his Paris tour included what he called North Korean sites of interest, another hidden facet of the city that he enjoyed sharing with his clients, Korean tourists who came to Paris looking for a different experience, something off the beaten path. Many of them didn’t even want to see the Eiffel Tower and had no interest in climbing the crowded steps of the Sacré-Coeur while fighting off African street vendors trying to palm off bracelets and other trinkets. They were younger, more savvy and disillusioned: they’d read accounts of Japanese tourists coming home traumatized after discovering that their beloved City of Light—the backdrop of so many mangas and TV series—was in reality a City of Darkness; they’d heard stories of Chinese tourists being mugged in front of their hotels by thugs from the suburbs who came into the city by RER with the express intention of targeting Chinese—or anyone who looked Chinese—because, q.e.d., all Chinese were rich and defenseless, easy targets. They had found out about Sang-hoon’s tour from outraged clients who had complained that, instead of going up the Champs-Élysées, Sang-hoon had taken them up a “side street” with nothing but motorcycle dealerships. Others had written reviews on the Internet, as detailed as they were scathing, and that was how word had spread about “Little Pyongyang.”
Typically, it started in the fifth arrondissement, at the hotel where the daughter of Chang Sung-taek, Kim Jong-il’s brother-in-law, had committed suicide. After bringing his tour group to the street where the hotel was located—a cul-de-sac—he would launch into the story of how Chang Kum-song, a film student at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, had become romantically involved with a dark and brooding French classmate (whose name was Sébastien on some days, Stéphane on other days). Then the fatidic order to return to Pyongyang had come … If there was nobody behind the desk, Sang-hoon would sneak everyone upstairs and point out the door of the very room where the lovesick student had, after failing to overdose on sleeping pills, hanged herself with the curtains. The tour continued at Censier, where, during happier days, she had attended lectures on the art of cinema. Afterwards, Sang-hoon would take his group down to the thirteenth arrondissement, first to the Tolbiac center, where Kim Sul-song, Kim Jong-il’s daughter, had studied for a time, then to the Institut d’études politiques, where several of North Korea’s elite were discreetly enrolled. If he could convince the guard at the entrance to let them in, there would be a tour of the grounds, including the English garden with its brick-laned walkways. Other sites
of interest included the Salpêtrière hospital, where Ko Yong-hui, Kim Jong-il’s consort, had died (breast cancer), and the hideout house where Yi Han-yong had stayed before defecting to South Korea. (His mother had been the nanny to one of Kim Jong-il’s illegitimate children and was also a defector, whose whereabouts were currently unknown, though she had lived for a time in Geneva with a Japanese assistant, kept a diary and read Chekhov in Russian.) Sang-hoon would also make a stop at the house of Amélie Nothomb, for no other reason than because it was nearby and he knew how to get there. The last stop of the tour was the architecture school at Paris–La Villette, up in the nineteenth arrondissement, where more of the Dear Leader’s elite were studying to build the new Pyongyang (the real one back home). Sang-hoon would have his group stand with him in front of one of the impersonal residence halls and point out a row of windows chosen by him at random. The effect of the setting sun against the glass was a nice little bonus. Depending on his mood, he might take them to the architecture school at Paris-Belleville, also nearby, instead. The North Korean segment had become so popular that he was thinking of turning it into a stand-alone tour.
“This is it,” Guang-ho said at last. “It’s just around this corner…”
I’m not sure how long we stood in front of the storefront’s iron curtain covered with graffiti. There were pylons, an empty wine bottle, temporary fencing plastered with old posters for bygone municipal elections (22 AVRIL, VOTEZ ARLETTE LAGUILLER). Was this really it? Or something else altogether? It looked like no one had been by in months, maybe even years.
Was it me, or did Sang-hoon seem relieved? Guang-ho too seemed mollified, despite all of his efforts to find the restaurant, and I saw him mechanically start rolling another cigarette. It was a habit he’d acquired in France (no one rolled cigarettes in Seoul); he’d gotten so proficient that, walking down the street on a rainy day, he could do it with one hand while holding an umbrella in the other. We started moving again. It was almost noon, and I suggested a kébab followed by a cheap beer at the nearby McDonald’s.
On our way back to the métro station we came across the Passe-muraille, a statue of a man emerging from a brick wall, only his head, an arm and part of a leg visible. Someone had painted his nails red. It depicted a scene from a short story by Marcel Aymé, about a functionary named Dutilleul who is able to pass unimpeded through walls. One night, as he’s leaving the abode of a woman he’s secretly seeing (a married woman, an unhappily married woman), his powers abandon him, and he finds himself trapped in the wall forever.
Guang-ho put out the cigarette he’d been smoking while Sang-hoon continued to stare at the stone wall where the Passe-muraille was eternally trapped.
“I got it,” he said at last. “A secret monument erected by the North Koreans.”
It took me a moment to understand that he was referring to the statue.
“Just think about the beauty and horror of it. Everyone thinks it’s an homage to a dead French writer, but in reality it was commissioned by the North Koreans, a little reminder to all the comrades residing in Paris, lest they think about defecting. Fitting, isn’t it? But the real mark of genius, of course, is that the memorial to our fallen hero is only a stone’s throw from the two architecture schools.”
8. A Ghost in Paris
For some time now, I had been trying to see my thesis supervisor. It was true that, at first, I hadn’t been trying all that hard. In Denmark, there was a get-to-know-one-another cocktail, a chance to meet professors outside of the auditorium and in a more casual setting. Here, in France, one had to flush them out, hunt them down. It was like a game of cat-and-mouse, in which I was the mouse hunting the cat. Each time I came by, I found her door shut. On one occasion, there was a sheet of paper taped to the door: “Mme Tousez est souffrante.” She was ill, indisposed, and all of her courses had been canceled. I couldn’t have said why, but suddenly I was convinced that it was a lie, a subterfuge, and that in reality she was standing behind the door, ready to pounce. I placed a hand against the hard, unyielding wood and tried to imagine her on the other side. We’d started out communicating exclusively by post, then electronically, and for the first several months she had been little more than a name, words on paper, lines on a page. Even now—after a handful of visits to her office—a vague mental image, partially obscured by the stacks of papers on her bureau, was the best I could muster.
Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost Page 11