Passing Pyongyang

A recent article in The Atlantic by Matt Schiavenza (see link below) brings to mind my shared experience with an aging North Korean couple enroute home from Harbin, China, where I'd been teaching and working for two years. Here is an excerpt from my book Inside the New China above (Chapter 31: The Korean Connection):

The flight from Harbin to South Korea was two hours, although the distance was less than a thousand miles, mainly because a certain inhospitable “Evil Axis” country lay directly in the path of the route from Harbin to Seoul: North Korea. We had to fly around it with 200 miles to spare. This, even though China and South Korea were business partners in all sorts of ways, and China was North Korea’s last and only friend. I saw the relationship between China and the two Koreas like this: South Korea was the brash, successful nephew. North Korea was the black sheep. But from a pan-Asian perspective, both were family.

On the flight I was seated next to a shopworn-looking older couple who looked and acted as though they’d never been anywhere near an airplane before. As the jet taxied to the runway, both were hyperventilating and holding their ears with wads of tissue. They didn’t respond to my journeyman Chinese, so, using body language, I showed them how to yawn and pop their ears. It was the cabin pressure that was bothering them, and we weren’t even airborne yet. They gratefully adopted me on the spot, and incorporated me into their mobile family. When lunch was served, the woman reached over and began piling food on my plate. I’d already had lunch before leaving Harbin, plus my own lunch, plus I was trying to lose some of the weight too much of a good thing had packed on my midsection in the past year, but once more I found no way to refuse. This was a first, needless to say: a stranger on a plane doing something that familial and personal, sort of like combing your hair or straightening your buttons. It just wasn't done, at least with strangers, especially on an airplane. Still, no harm, no foul and she certainly meant well. So I smiled, nodded, but for once violated my mother’s long-standing orders, still eternally enforced from the grave, and didn’t clean my plate. After a while, using more sign language, we replicated my favorite scene from my Chinese students’ favorite movie this past term: Dances With Wolves: a film I once reviewed on Tampa Bay TV. It was the scene in which the white soldier, played by Kevin Costner, is showing some Sioux visitors how to drink coffee. The couple next to me had never seen coffee before either, nor tasted it, nor sugar, nor creamer, nor salt, nor pepper. I was getting a little suspicious. Who were these people?

Three Chinese students sitting across the aisle, who all spoke excellent English and were on their way to Australia for a year of study clued me in, although I had already guessed. My neighbors and adoptive relations sharing my meal were Korean. North Korean. The hardship and poverty of their lives was etched in their faces, for all their warmth and kindness. So how had they managed to be in China, let alone on a jet plane to South Korea? The students were as baffled as I. Officially speaking, China is on friendly terms with its impoverished black sheep nephew, both being ostensibly Communist countries. But that didn’t mean China wanted those folks tromping all over its daisies or putting a damper on its economy by flooding its countryside, messing up its Olympic plans or building nuclear weapons in its back yard either. North Koreans were as welcome in China as Mexicans in Tucson, and on about the same terms, with an equally heavily guarded border that was a lot less porous than ours.

Then it dawned on me. South Korea, as I was reading in the very newspaper I’d been given on the plane, had been opening more and more channels to its northern neighbors. Even the trains were about to run again between the long estranged halves of what was once one country. So it was possible these two old folks were on their way home from a visit to China by way of the South. But who sprang for the air fare? And how did they get visas to China to begin with?

I knew the answer to that, from my own recent experience. Several of my university students were from the Chinese countryside, from impoverished farm families, much like the two next to me (who nonetheless were spotlessly clean and dressed in nice new clothes, I should mention). My rural students had been newly awarded opportunities to better themselves, their families, and their communities through higher education: the first in sixty or so generations of their family lines ever to have such an opportunity. My elderly seat-mates, then, were the parents of one such student from their country who’d been given just such an opportunity in China, and had made the most of it. I knew of several North Korean students on my campus, including those that were living upstairs for a time, during my first semester. He or she had graduated, gotten a job in Harbin, and arranged for the folks from home to come for a visit. And now, proud and happy, they were homeward bound, unmindful of the misery they were returning to or perhaps fully mindful of it. Plus, the Chinese students across the aisle assured me, the Chinese government probably had helped them along their way, with a financial nudge or two in the direction of showing them the door.

Here is a link to the article:

http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/10/how-north-korean-propaganda-artists-imagine-beijing/280687/