Where Koreans Go to Reunify (Hint: It’s Not the Koreas)

January 18, 2012 NYT

By THOMAS FULLER

SIEM REAP, Cambodia — At a roadside restaurant here near the sprawling ancient ruins of Angkor Wat, busloads of South Korean tourists file in to witness an unexpectedly exotic spectacle: doll-faced North Korean women performing everything from saccharine ballads to a rousing number from Bizet’s “Carmen.”

On the frosty Korean Peninsula, relations between North and South are perennially tense. But here amid the balmy breezes of this Cambodian tourist town, Koreans from both sides of the border are enthusiastically fraternizing at the North Korean restaurant as if reunification were just days away.

“Everyone is very excited,” said Jung Myong-ho, a South Korean tour guide watching the show one recent evening. “Back in South Korea, we don’t have any opportunities to meet North Korean people.”

You would not know that North and South Korea were technically still at war by the beaming faces all around, the loud applause for the North Korean performers and the frenzy of picture-taking afterward. Northerners and Southerners pose shoulder to shoulder, a moment of cross-border kinship captured with the latest South Korean gadgetry.

The restaurant, called Pyongyang after the North Korean capital, is part of an ambitious expansion plan that has established outlets in some unlikely places, with branches in Bangladesh, Dubai, Laos and Nepal, said Bertil Lintner, the author of “Great Leader, Dear Leader: Demystifying North Korea Under the Kim Clan.”

He calls the restaurants, which have opened over the past decade, a “North Korean capitalist experiment,” where wine goes for $30 a bottle and meals can run $100 a person.

It is an awkward moment for such a venture. These are uncertain days in the real Pyongyang, where the death of the longtime leader, Kim Jong-il, and the succession of his son, Kim Jong-un, have raised fears of instability, creating an atmosphere in which the slightest deviation from hard-line Communist doctrine is an invitation to a lengthy prison term in a labor camp.

Mr. Lintner says the Pyongyang franchise is an attempt by the government to generate hard currency, a supplement to the country’s sales of missiles and nuclear technology. There is no doubt it is desperately needed, to cope with food and fuel shortages, and a socialist economy in a state of collapse.

Indeed, generating hard cash may be more critical now than at any time since the 1990s, when perhaps two million North Koreans died of famine. For along with endless economic woes, Kim Jong-il bequeathed to his son a propaganda campaign promising that 2012 would be, “a year when an era of prosperity is unfolding.”

South Koreans fly thousands of miles for the temples, the shopping — and a little political détente in one of the two branches of the restaurants here with the North Korean staff.

North Korean performers, dressed in hanbok, a billowing, traditional Korean dress, wear permanent smiles as they play a Western-style drum set, electric guitars and accordion — and demurely shuffle across the stage. When one performer spins like a dervish, her frilly polyester dress filling out like a parachute, the South Korean crowd erupts with cheers and passionate applause.

On the menu are specialties ranging from the obvious (kimchi) to the more obscure (dog meat casserole), all prepared by a team of five North Korean chefs.

The performers, who double as waitresses, say they come to the restaurant from North Korea for three-year stints. But when they are asked for details about the restaurant and its ownership, their faces turn vacant. They requested that a reporter and photographer, the only non-Asian clientele in the restaurant, delete photographs of the restaurant from their cameras.

There are reminders of North Korea throughout the place, which has the feel of a wedding banquet hall. The walls are covered with murals of what the staff says are scenes of North Korean mountains. Glass cases hold North Korean herbal remedies and tea.

But perhaps more notable is what is missing from the restaurant. There are no propaganda posters, no slogans and no portraits of Kim Jung-un, or his father or his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, the previous great leaders. The waitresses avoid any discussion of politics.

Mr. Jung, the South Korean tour guide, said the restaurant was a kind of neutral ground for North and South Koreans to meet. Inside the restaurant “politics disappear,” Mr. Jung said. “We are one family.”

The warm feelings seem to be helped along by ample orders of Cambodian beer and the fact that nearly all the South Korean patrons are in vacation mode.

South Koreans visit Siem Reap in greater numbers than any other nationality, according to the Cambodian Ministry of Tourism. Last year, more than 260,000 of them came here, accounting for 16 percent of all foreign visitors.

Cambodia offers sunshine during the drab Korean winter, and food, hotels and golf courses at cheap prices.

A meal at a Pyongyang restaurant is one of the more expensive in town. In a country where a bowl of noodles costs $1.50, a hungry customer can easily pay $100 for a simple meal of kimchi, beef shoulder, stir-fried squid and a bottle of wine.

As they depart the restaurant, South Korean patrons snap pictures with the waitresses and settle their bills with wads of dollar bills.

“Dashi man nap shida!” the North Korean performers say. “See you again!”

 North Korean waitresses and performers sang for South Korean tourists at Pyongyang Restaurant in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Siem Reap is a popular destination for South Koreans.

 A North Korean waitress and performer at the restaurant, which is called Pyongyang after the capital of North Korea.

                                                                The performers say they work for three-year stints.

SEOUL SALVATION

Seoul Salvation

By John Feffer, November 8, 2011 from FPIF

His name was on the lips of everyone I talked with in South Korea last week. As an underdog with little name recognition but a long history of progressive organizing, he came from behind late last month to become the new mayor of Seoul.

Remember his name. Park Won Soon is perhaps the first politician to win with an Occupy Wall Street platform.

A founder of the watchdog organization People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD), Park has been a key leader in Korea's vibrant civil society. After a couple decades as a political gadfly, he is now in a seat of considerable power. And people are talking about him not only for the positions he staked out as an independent candidate, which focused on social welfare issues, but for the potential of his victory to transform Korean politics in 2012. The implications for South Korea's relations with the North, with its other neighbors, and with the United States are enormous.

I met Park Won Soon more than a decade ago, when he was just starting to think beyond PSPD. Korean civil society activists are always working, always networking and multitasking, and they sometimes joke that they only take vacations when hospitalized for exhaustion. Park, on the other hand, always struck me as exceptionally serene. The names of the organizations he built after PSPD  — the grant-making Beautiful Foundation and a think tank called the Hope Institute — reflect his optimistic disposition and his desire not just to change Korean politics but to transform Korea's overall sago bangshik, or way of thinking. He also possesses tremendous powers of persuasion. Once he even convinced the top South Korean steel company POSCO to underwrite fellowships for civil society activists to study in the United States. Try to imagine a similar partnership between Chrysler and Moveon.org. 

This former watchdog now runs a city of over 10 million people, larger than Tokyo or Mexico City or any city in the United States. Seoul is responsible for almost 50 percent of the country's GDP (New York, by comparison, is responsible for about 8 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product, Beijing about 3 percent of China's). So, essentially, Park Won Soon is in charge of a mid-sized country, minus the foreign and military policy. Given Seoul's disproportionate weight, the mayoralty is a political stepping stone, and one of Park's predecessors in the job, Lee Myung-Bak, is now the conservative president of the country.

But Park Won Soon is not a career politician. He is more interested in the delivery of services, particularly to the less advantaged. “We must make sure no one is sleeping cold and hungry under the skies of Seoul,” he told his staff. On his first day in office, Park expanded the free lunch program to all elementary school children, a major commitment to universal entitlements that will ensure support across class lines. His effort to reduce university tuition at the publicly funded University of Seoul is a big thank-you to the huge number of young people that supported his campaign. He has been skeptical about a number of high-profile infrastructure programs in Seoul, preferring to focus on building more public housing. And he has pledged to increase social welfare spending in order to reduce economic inequality.

Rising inequality, which has spurred the growth of the Occupy Wall Street movement and its spread worldwide, has been a major problem in South Korea. For instance, the country ranks an impressive 15th in the world in the UN's Human Development Index. But if income inequality is factored in, it drops to the 32^ndposition, a loss in rank exceeded only by the United States and Colombia. By decrying this inequality and labeling his opponent a member of the 1 percent, Park may be the first politician to rise to power in the Occupy Wall Street era – and he won't be the last.

Park's election has upended political expectations in Korea. As a political outsider, he nevertheless trounced the ruling Grand National Party (GNP) candidate Na Kyung-won. Na had some powerful backers. The most prominent was the GNP's Park Geun-Hye, who is the daughter of former authoritarian leader Park Chung-Hee and a leading contender in the 2012 presidential race. That Na lost, and lost badly, reflects the unpopularity of President Lee Myung-Bak, whose approval rating hovers around 32 percent. The most popular podcast in Korea these days is a low-budget affair that features four guys sitting around a table slagging the president.

Next year South Korea will hold parliamentary elections in the spring and then presidential elections in the winter. The opposition Democratic Party smells blood. It has already shifted into high gear in the Korean parliament to defeat the recently signed free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States. But Park Won Soon's victory will not translate directly into a victory for the Democratic Party. After all, he initially ran as an independent before agreeing to a unified ticket. Crucial backing came from Ahn Cheol-soo, a maverick academic and software tycoon who has largely avoided political parties. Ahn's endorsement boosted the future mayor's approval rating from 5 percent to nearly 50 percent. Korean voters, like their counterparts all over the world, are rejecting politics as usual and the ritual do-se-doing of parties.

During the election, Park didn't say much about national policy, instead concentrating on municipal matters. But he has expressed concern about the FTA and criticized the current administration’s confrontational approach to North Korea. He has also indicated interest in joining the organization Mayors for Peace. These stands will embolden other politicians to follow suit. And they point to a repudiation of Lee Myung-Bak's foreign policy and a return to the more independent initiatives of previous leaders Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo-Hyun.

In a country where social hierarchy is deeply entrenched, where the language has multiple levels of address depending on social rank, Park Won Soon's most radical policies may well lie in his hands-on, bottom-up approach. When addressing his management team, he uses the humble form of address and has asked his subordinates not to rise when he walks into the room. And last week, the new mayor showed up at 6 a.m. in a fluorescent green uniform to clean the Seoul streets in the morning trash pick-up. This was no mere photo op. Park is genuinely interested in the perspectives of all the citizens of Seoul.

Park Won Soon is certainly not the first civil society organizer to win political office in Korea. But he may be the first to combine a reformist platform with a commitment to revolution – a revolution in social values.