Teaching Essay Writing in Pyongyang | Hacker News Reader

Teaching Essay Writing in Pyongyang

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51 pointsthrowaway34421 comments

If you liked this, you might want to take a look at Andrew Holloway's "A Year in Pyongyang", available free online at the link below. It describes the experience of a translator in 1987-88, but not all that much has changed in the years that have passed since.

http://www.aidanfc.net/a_year_in_pyongyang.html

That link is very interesting. It seems written from an unusual perspective. It doesn't seem outright dismissive, for example. Thanks for posting it!

It's an excellent book.

He's admittedly sympathetic to socialist ideals, but there are obvious visible problems in that state. So he generally does a nice job of "on the one hand, on the other hand..." (ie, On the one hand, some North Koreans would beg for cigarettes and alcohol off of foreigners, on the other hand, they are incredibly nice people and most of them would only take gifts after much insistence.)

His asides become steadily more bitter as the book (and his time in NK) goes on though. One of my favorite bits is after he's gotten pretty caustic, right after explaining how he saw a bunch of students using rocks to pulverize discarded pavement at a nearly futile pace:

It would be wrong of me to give the impression that the great socialist construction was uniformly stranded, literally, in the Stone Age. It was around this time that brand-new push-button automatic gates were installed at the entrance to the factory next door. These caused a sensation for the first few days. All day long the people's guard dolls were inundated with requests from the workers to give a demonstration of this miraculous innovation. They had read in Rodong Sinmun and heard on television and radio about the mythical robotisation and computerisation of Juche industry. Now before their very eyes the myth was being translated into reality, in their own humble factory. One could imagine them as they watched the gates glide open and shut at the press of a button, saying to one another, "If only our compatriots in the South could see how advanced we are becoming. Then they would be astonished and rise up as one to oust the puppet clique and drive out the US imperialist aggressor in order to share in our prosperity. But Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo tell lies about us and keep the people in darkness."

Without getting into politics or ideology, I find his initial comment from the second chapter tremendously insightful: that people see what they expect to see. So foreigners expecting North Korea to be rotting hell-hole full of unhappy people will see exactly that, and will express disbelief at any nicety they see: "surely they are hiding something horrible".

This made me think... a while ago, I saw this website by a Western photographer who took some recent pictures of North Korea (it's worth looking at the pictures, they are fascinating: http://instagram.com/dguttenfelder). The pictures allow comments, and predictably most people comment things like "how terrible this dictatorship must be, poor oppressed North Koreans!" When presented with pictures of workers commuting to work, they comment "look how unhappy everyone looks." And they comment the same for a picture showing a band of schoolchildren practicing music, presumably at school: "look how serious the children look, they must feel really unhappy."

In my opinion, regardless of the realities of the harsh life in North Korea, these commenters are projecting their own preconceptions of the country. They see what they expect to see. But I don't think their perceptions are necessarily accurate, because if I took a picture of commuters going to work in my country, they'd see similar unhappy faces. Almost no-one looks happy while taking the train to work. And regarding the schoolchildren... what people see in those pictures doesn't mesh with what the author of the book says: that regardless of everything else, children are truly happy in North Korea.

Maybe life is truly harsh in North Korea, their leaders lie to the population all the time, and it's a truly impoverished country, but still the people are happy, or at least not stereotypically depressed all the time?

Kids are happy anywhere, that's the beauty of it, and commuters look unhappy anywhere too. None of that is the problem with North Korea, the problem is much deeper.

If you want to understand why please watch the video from this wonderful lady, who at a very young age understood that her country wasn't a good one: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-feffer/an-injury-to-all_b...

Thanks, I'll watch it later.

Note I do not doubt NK is a dictatorship. I'm merely commenting on people's preconceptions strongly coloring what they see in this (or any) country. They expect to see deeply unhappy people (because that's the story that gets told in the West), and that's what they see.

> Writing inevitably consisted of an endless repetition of his achievements, none of which was ever verified, since they lacked the concept of backing up a claim with evidence.

Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is not unique to North Korea. It is present in every society to various degrees, and usually manifests itself in the incoherent tirades of those who almost invariably tout the benefits of "tradition".

The idea that claims need to be backed up with evidence is a relatively recent and rare occurrence in human societies. It needs to be taught, and it's often an uphill battle. In every "traditional" society, rote repetition is the most effective method of turning dubious claims into indisputable truth. The endless hand-copying of ancient texts in every medieval European monastery and Asian academy were not merely a low-tech way to make more books; much more importantly, such activities helped indoctrinate everyone who participated, both consciously and unconsciously. P is true because the Bible says so. Q is true because Confucius said so. R is true because, as the Dothraki say, "it is known." What more proof do you need? It is fucking known. Anyone who says otherwise is obviously delusional, a menace to civilization. And so the Athenians killed Socrates.

And this is the fundamental reason why merely "giving truth its day in court" will not be enough to get rid of the insanity that plagues the politics of every country. People like Snowden, Assange, and Manning helped bring important evidence into the light of day, and even at this very moment, people are working to smuggle evidence into regimes like North Korea. But producing evidence is only half of the battle. In order for evidence to actually serve its purpose, people's brains need to be wired to process it in the right way. We can only hope that homo sapiens has a natural proclivity to think critically, at least some of the time... despite a large body of evidence to the contrary.

I'd just point out that Suki Kim's book is really an ethical morass, as you can certainly make the argument that she put the people she used to work with in a terrible position.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/world/tales-told-out-of-sc...

Interesting. I think I will have to read this now, but I'm not sure I want to pay for it if it's funded by deception.

A couple of thoughts just from the article:

Bad deeds do not wipe out good, nor vice versa. If Christians are helping the impoverished or teaching English because they want to convert people, that doesn't make giving a hungry person food any less of a good thing to do (this is a general example).

When she says "it's another code word for what they're doing," she doesn't go on to explain what that means. What ARE they doing? I think if she had a concrete, non-easily-objected-to explanation of the problems with what she'd observed, she'd have come out and said it. She describes their general goals, as she sees them, earlier in the article, but provides no evidence or justification for those conclusions.

She did explain it, they are seeking to establish a foothold for Christianity in North Korea so that, at some point in the future when the regime falls or changes its mind about religion, they can "capture" the country. This isn't a very complicated idea, it's how missionaries operate in countries that frown on their work.

I understand the idea, but without any evidence, it seems kinda paranoid to just assume that is automatically the case. Hopefully the book explains why she reached that conclusion about her colleagues.

In any case, assuming it is true, I don't support it necessarily - but again, it is hard for me to say "no, bad!" when they are also making a legitimate effort to help North Koreans.

When the DPRK regime falls, these people are going to be beyond confused.

Probably not as much as you think. The author seems to be taking her students' comments and writings at face value, but her students have to praise the Great Leader and kimchi and whatnot in public, regardless of what they actually think. Remember, her students were the elite of DPRK, the kids of high-ranking party functionaries etc, who certainly have access to Western goods and South Korean TV and whatnot. They know full well that much of what they are taught and the line they have to parrot is a lie; but there is just no safe channel to express that, particularly to a foreigner like her.

Now they may not realize the full extent to which everything is a lie, and there's probably a few particularly dim true believers in the mix, but in the North Korea of the 2010s, post murderous famine and in an era of mushrooming black markets, the failure of Juche is pretty obvious.

So how does DPRK survive? How do they keep sending (or trying to send) missiles, exploding nukes, etc.? Surely there are _some_ people there who know that DPRK is all make-believe?

Also, I didn't get how she was able to access the 'net, but not her students?

In the article it mentioned the teachers were allowed internet access only, probably for research for class assignment or keeping up with family outside the country. I'm assuming they didn't allow the students to have access because they're a Google search away from finding information that could shatter their entire idea of the Supreme Leader.

The university was mentioned to be a private one, but it's hard to imagine the North Koreans didn't force them to use some kind of monitoring software to keep track of what the teacher's were looking up.

The computer with the net access is simply forbidden to them, and not accessible. Teachers may use it. They may not. It's that simple.

Even if they did find stuff on said computer somehow, they have been taught it is lies.

>Surely there are _some_ people there who know that DPRK is all make-believe?

According to the defector AMA on reddit recently, most people know all about the make believe and very few people actually beleive the official mythology.

What I know about the DPRK:

- There are North Korean work camps in Russia, where exported North Koreans perform slave labor such as cutting down trees, for literally nothing.

- They engage in weapons trade with foreign countries.

- If you are a dissenter of any sort, it's possible that your entire family can be threatened with punishment, such as working in a labor camp. If you skip the country, it's possible that they'll kill your whole family.

With the above, I can see how it floats.

Not familiar enough with geopolitics or global economics to comment on how the regime survives physically or financially but I can hazard a guess as to how they keep up the cultural and intellectual "blinders".

Reading this article I started to wonder how it would read if you replaced the North Korean students with fundamentalist Christians (or Muslims) in a majority-fundamentalist society. Then consider if the teacher was a secularist trying to find ways to sneak messages about evolution or atheism or even material that treated different belief systems with equal weight or validity.

While I don't know of anyplace in my own country where a fundamentalist ideology is as entrenched as the North Koreans' is in Pyongyang, it's still easy for me to conceptualize. In the U.S. there are no doubt schools where a teacher speaking about secularism would prompt students to resist and parents to complain.

With a country like DPRK, I just imagine it as if the most conservative, fundamentalist parts of the US were cut off from the rest of the country and never even had anyone try to argue that man probably didn't walk with the dinosaurs or that gay people didn't murder babies or whatever. Even if there were people who thought it was all bunk they'd probably keep quiet or risk getting fired.

Add to that the fact that in DPRK you run the actual risk of being sent to a prison camp for questioning the accepted ideology and I can see why it might just be easier to play along. Normal people anywhere are typically more concerned with making a living and taking care of their families, not raging against the machine.

Great idea. Someone has to write all 100,000 of Kim Jong-Un's essays.

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