A Capitalist in North Korea: My Seven Years in the Hermit Kingdom

by Felix Abt

  It made me feel good when my then-employer, ABB, agreed to offer free of charge electrical equipment such as transformer, switch gears and electric cables. To help the project break even, the group opened a restaurant and bakery to sell the bread, and then used the profits to buy spare cookery parts, flour and other items that needed to be expensively imported.

  Ambassador Ri Chol, in his typical affable fashion, worked his connections to land the eatery a central and visible location in Pyongyang, a short walk from the “foreigner hub” of Hotel Koryo. Their restaurant, the Pyolmuri Café, was a favorite of mine because of its range of European dishes. A couple of times, birthday parties for North Korean children were held in a side room while I was eating. Once I was invited to greet the kids, who hoped to practice their English. I obliged with pleasure.

  The bakery in the Pyolmuri restaurant in downtown Pyongyang. Here, both foreigners and Koreans could buy daily fresh bread.

  The North Korean manager, a gregarious and eager woman, asked me and other foreign guests how to improve the menu. I suggested that she invite an Italian chef from Beijing for a few weeks’ paid holidays, who could then train the kitchen staff to make pizza and pasta the Italian way. Unfortunately, this idea never went further, and the so-called European food lost its European taste over time. I dined at this restaurant sparingly over the next few months, and regretfully, so did other guests. I believed the manager agreed with the idea, but as in other cases I came across, perhaps her superior had never eaten in the restaurant and didn’t understand the request.

  North Korea may be isolated, but fast food is still popular in its capital. Fast food restaurants had all the typical traits of those around the world. The frugal equipment that included small, hard plastic chairs, the way people queued and the speed I got my meal had nothing that some would consider “typically” North Korean. The only noteworthy difference was the price, about $1 for a standard meal, and a kind of excitement among the many North Korean visitors.

  In Pyongyang, Koreans and foreigners hung out at a couple of Western-style fast food restaurants, where a meal went for around a dollar. Among the small choice of “exotic” foreign eateries and cafes, pizzerias were also popular with Koreans and foreigners. It started in the mid-2000s and the trend became stronger over the subsequent years.

  Other restaurants also offered “bread with minced beef” (hamburgers) and “carbonated sugar water” (a pseudonym for Coca-Cola). The drink was usually a generic Cola, and I was seldom offered a true brand-name Coke.

  Though my wife and I became fond of our daily kimchi, rice with vegetables (bibimbap) and cold noodles (nangmyun), we occasionally yearned for Western dishes that the bakery couldn’t live up to. But imported food was out of reach even for us “wealthy” foreigners. A liter of milk from China, for instance, cost three times as much as in China. Depending on its weight, a salami from Italy or Hungary cost between 35 and 55 Euros. French cheese hovered around 20 Euros.

  When traveling through counties and villages, I got the impression that every square meter was cultivated. The flat agricultural land is reserved to state farms. Northwards, near the Chinese border many “Sotoji,” or private plots, were emerging on slopes. It was a sign that authorities were begrudgingly tolerating privatization. These plots had been pretty much deforested to make way for farming, to get firewood for cooking and for heating in winter. But the deforestation, a result of the demand for firewood, caused dangerous landslides.

  At the diplomatic supermarket, full of foreign and North Korean customers who worked at embassies and foreign organizations, Swiss chocolates, gummy bears, French wines and many other non-essential items were on the offer. When I had to travel to China on business I took the opportunity, like other resident foreigners, to fill my suitcase with food items that were not available or much cheaper than in Pyongyang. There were no import restrictions and no import duty to be paid for food and household items.

  Korean Cuisine

  For those who want to learn more about Korean cuisine, my wife’s favorite cookbook is Eating Korean: From Barbecue to Kimchi, Recipes from My Home, by Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee.

  One North Korean cookbook, Best Recipes of Pyongyang, can be purchased on http://www.north-korea-books.com/servlet/the-387/BEST-RECIPES-OF-PYONGYANG/Detail

  The Korean cuisine was subject to many geographic and economic influences over thousands of years of history. Harsh winters and a demanding, hilly landscape was difficult for cultivating food. As such, Koreans engaged in very rigorous labor, making them consumers of hearty meals such as big bowls of soup with a side of white rice for breakfast. With a large coastline and many rivers, fish, both fresh and dried, became a regular staple.

  With its unkind winters, Koreans build a tradition of drying, salting and pickling their food to preserve it. The taste, to this day, is cherished in both North and South Korea. In the late autumn, Koreans all over prepare their winter kimchi made from Chinese cabbage. In North Korea, the entire country mobilizes its vehicles to bring enormous amounts of cabbage from the countryside to the cities. Families get their rations by turning in coupons.

  From the beginning, China has also exerted an enormous influence on Korean food. More than 4000 years ago, Chinese traders introduced rice to the peninsula, along with iron 2500 years ago that allowed for farmers to use more efficient equipment. This development gave farmers the means to more vigorously cultivate limited arable land, and many diversified to domesticate cows and pigs alongside cabbage and the wood to make chopsticks.

  After the Europeans conquered Central and South America in the 1500s, they found and began trading the sought-after chilis that were native to the region. Pepper commerce had a profound influence on Korean cuisine by way of Japan. After Japan acquired the peppers from Europeans, its warriors spread it to Korea via conquests in the 16th century. From the 18th century onwards, chilis became a main ingredient, smothered in some form or another on kimchi and used in jjigae, or soups.

  Although North and South Korean food is remarkably similar, North Korean food has a purer, cleaner taste. It is much less salty, fishy and spicy, even to the point of blandness for certain dishes. That’s in part, of course, because of the scarcities of some ingredients.

  With the exception of the soup, all dishes are served as one meal, like in many other Asian countries. On special occasions, 12 or more dishes are served. Common flavorings include soybean sauce and paste, along with ginger, garlic, rice vinegar, sesame oil and chili. Like other Asians, Koreans prefer to steam, stir-fry, grill, barbecue, and stew their meals.

  Kimchi is the most prominent and internationally recognizable Korean dish. It can either be a side dish or the main component of every meal (such as in stews like kimchi jjigae), including breakfast. It consists of grated or chopped vegetables – one of the most important ones being Chinese cabbage – which are mixed with various ingredients such as chili, garlic and ginger. Thereafter, it is stored in an earthenware pot where it is fermented. A number of tastes blend together to give kimchi its unique pungent taste: food critics have described it as raw, tangy, slightly sweet, and sometimes very spicy.

  Another popular dish is bibimbap, a bed of rice that uses kimchi as its main ingredient. The bowl also includes vegetables, meat and hot chilis served in a heated iron bowl. Before eating, Koreans stir it together with a spoon, turning it into a sort of “dirty rice” in Western terms.

  Bulgogi (fire meat) is a prevalent Korean-styled barbecued beef, marinated in soy sauce, garlic, chili and sesame. The concoction is grilled on a hot plate on a table for a group of two to four diners. Some restaurants add duck, short ribs and other meats.

  Pyongyang Onban (cooked rice served in chicken soup) is the traditional food for Chuseok, the Korean harvest holiday on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month in the traditional calendar. On this day, “many people visit national food restaurants in Pyongyang to taste this food”, as the governmental Korean Central News Agency once reported on a Chuseok day.
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  Sinsollo is the Korean version of the iconic Japanese shabu shabu. Diners throw in dozens of vegetables, mushrooms, seafoods, noodles, and red meats into a pot and boil them.

  Nokdujijim is a well-liked side dish, or a tasty snack when not part of a full meal. It consists of pickled vegetables and meat, mixed with green bean flour and pan fried.

  Naeng myon (cold noodles) is another highly popular Korean specialty. The noodles are made of buckwheat and are believed to cleanse the body. South Koreans, in fact, have told me repeatedly that Pyongyang is the most famous place to try the cold noodles. A variant of this dish, known as Hamhung cold noodles in South Korea, is known in North Korea as “potato starch noodles.” These thin noodles are thrown into a mild cold broth, and mixed with raw fish, pork and cucumbers and an egg.

  Tongchami kimchi, a milder form of white kimchi not smothered in the chili is tasty, too, and is often mixed in with the cold noodles.

  Both North and South Koreans are so fond of noodles, in fact, that they’re the world’s top per capita noodle consumers. Even Japan, China, and Italy can’t match them.

  The most famous cold noodles restaurant on the Korean peninsula is the Ongnyu Restaurant in Pyongyang, just north of the Ongnyu Bridge overlooking the Taedong River.

  North Koreans are also fond of all kinds of soup, known as both jjigae (stew) and kuk (a more standard, clear-broth soup). These can vary from all sorts of kimchi stews, hot spicy fish soups, and even dog soup—all of which are lathered over a bowl of white rice and eaten.

  Dog meat, or “sweet meat” as it is called in North Korea, is highly popular among men for its widely believed improvement of virility. The taste is bolder in North Korea than in South Korea, and it isn’t as greasy, suggesting less use of additives and a different way the dogs are fed. There are several dog meat restaurants in Pyongyang, the most famous one being on the sometimes crowded Tongil Street which offers only dog meat dishes. Another delicious “sweet meat” restaurant is nearby the Tongil market. The meal per person costs about $14 – a price affordable for foreigners but not for average North Koreans. A bowl of dog soup at the Kaesong folk hotel costs five Euros.

  In addition, ostrich meat can be found on the menus of Pyongyang’s most prestigious restaurants. To the surprise of many, North Korea is home to ostrich farms, one of which I visited.

  Koreans in the countryside went to great lengths showing generosity and hospitality to visitors during a meal.

  With their meals, Koreans usually drink water or barley tea. But other times they enjoy a wide variety of beverages made in North Korea, such as mineral water, soft drinks and beer. The fruit waters and the weak sodas reminded me of the ones I drank in Soviet Russia. The men like hefty drinks with the high alcohol content found in soju (a strong white liquor that is sometimes compared to vodka, though it doesn’t quite meet that definition). Soju is made from spring water, rice, and maize, and the strongest brands contain an alcohol content of up to 45 percent.

  While the soju in South Korea is often mixed with ethanol and chemical flavorings, North Koreans celebrate their soju as the real thing. Both North and South Korean men are heavy drinkers, a way of coping with long, stressful working hours.

  Red dry wines, made by the Daesong Group with grape varieties imported from Switzerland, have also been on the shelves for several years. It wasn’t the best bottle, to be honest. Aside from Western-inspired luxuries, North Koreans sometimes turned to a line-up of exotic drinks, such as rice beer (tongdongju) a somewhat cloudy beverage with a sour taste and a low alcohol content. Snake liquors were available as aphrodisiacs, similarly to in Vietnam and China. One particularly sweet drink was blueberry wine, a mauve that North Koreans enthusiastically recommended—because it supposedly came from the “holy mountain,” Mt. Paekdu, the location where they believe Dear Leader Kim Jong Il was born.

  1 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703864204576321193199255166.html

  2 http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/63216/andrei-lankov/staying-alive#

  Chapter 9:

  Flowers of the Nation

  “Women are flowers. Flowers for life. Flowers that take care of the family.” — A popular folksong in North Korea

  A young married woman, Mrs. Han, sighed to me at the buffet table, after we finished an official function in 2005. “I am not so happy that my husband has only little interest in our children and little time for them,” she lamented. “I have observed Western fathers who have a more intense relationship with their kids. Korean men are different and should change.”

  Both she and her husband came from politically influential families, living in an area of the central district of Pyongyang popular among senior cadres. One of their children goes to North Korea’s best kindergarten named after Kim Jong Suk, the most revered woman in the country. The older child of Mrs. Han made it to Pyongyang’s elite middle school.

  Because Mrs. Han and her spouse were well to do, and were loyal to their country and the leadership, I did not misinterpret her frustration as a criticism of the socialist system. On the contrary, the North Korean regime has overseen an improvement in the rights of women. In past centuries, only few women received a formal education and their social standing was low. Nowadays all boys and girls go to school.

  Women’s rights

  Years earlier, when I was living in Cairo, Egypt I put an ad in a newspaper for a maid who could cook and clean my house. Back then, I was a bachelor and a busy country director of a multinational group, and needed a helping hand.

  All the respondents had one experience in common: they had previously worked for Arab families in Saudi Arabia and Gulf countries. They all told me horrible stories of abuse. They were regularly beaten or sexually abused, deprived of sleep and free time, and refused payment.

  They all managed to escape their abusive employers, and ended up in Cairo as illegal immigrants. Unfortunately, given their gray status, they were vulnerable to police abuse and were desperate to look for some paid work.

  I hired one Filipina maid who even had a university degree and helped her regularize her status in Egypt. She was happy because her nightmare ended in Saudi Arabia, where women are repressed, and she was well treated in my home.

  The average North Korean woman is certainly better off than the average Saudi women or Filipina migrant.

  There is one relationship in North Korea, as with the rest of East Asia, that can be oppressive: that between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law. The Democratic Women’s Organization, as it is called, has been using its influence to instill more respect between these two. Daughters-in-law feeling oppressed by their mothers-in-law can file a complaint with the organization which, in turn, helps fix the problem, as one young married manager of a computer shop told me.

  But while the socialist system has certainly improved the position of women in society, it has unintentionally made it more difficult for them in other ways. It has, for instance, let tradition clash with socialist accommodation ideals. Indeed, an old tradition, still maintained in the DPRK, obliges the groom’s family to provide accommodation for the young couple, whereas the bride’s relatives have to supply the furniture and household items.

  Since the socialist state provided housing for free or against a trivial small rental fee, the burden has fallen almost exclusively on the bride’s family which usually has to start saving for the daughter’s wedding when the girl is in her early teens. It is another reason why families prefer sons to daughters.

  Like other socialist countries, North Korea promotes role models with ideal socialist characteristics: model workers, model students, model families, and of course model women. Though not legally enforced, women are taught from a young age to see immorality in skirts that end above the knee, long hair that is not bound to a ponytail, and too much make-up on their face.

  These morals were strictly respected by my own female employees and the many women I was dealing with. Not only did skirts cover knees, shirts were mostly buttoned
up the neck, often to the last button. Only the length of the hair seemed to give some room to express more femininity by letting it fall loose on the shoulders when they were no longer than that.

  The “flowers of the nation,” a label for women often found in DPRK propaganda, happen to be the hardest workers of the nation. I often saw women working on heavy labor, such as erecting buildings, paving countryside roads, and carrying around heavy construction equipment. Men, on the other hand, worked as supervisors and mostly watched from a distance. Mokran (Magnolia) is the national flower of the DPRK which the governmental news agency called on June 10, 2002 “a beautiful, solid and simple flower representing stamina of the resourceful Korean people.” I would call it something that represents the stamina of the resourceful Korean women.

  One “flower of the nation” once told me half-jokingly that men are particularly good at drinking, smoking and relaxing, whereas women are utilized for working and for taking care of the family alone. Women are holding up far more than half of North Korea’s skies, to play with the old dictum of Mao Zedong.