After the final encore, an arrangement of a wistful Korean folk song, ‘Arirang,’

the audience stood, cheered and even waved farewell to the musicians. Many

of the players visibly choked up, waved back.

                                                                                               Anthony Tommasini, New York Times

It was a US diplomat who suggested the New York Philharmonic play a piece of music known to all Koreans north and south of the demilitarised zone that has divided the peninsula since a ceasefire was declared in the Korean War in 1953. The violins led the way, at first sounding sentimental then picking up the other strings and bringing in cymbals and percussion to a crescendo that lifted the audience in Pyongyang’s Grand Theatre from their seats. “Arirang” is personal, about the trials and tribulations and ultimate victory over an unnamed enemy. The US diplomat knew “Arirang” was the way to a Korean’s heart and musical director Lorin Maazel knew it too, his selection of pieces and how they should be performed all directed at this final moment of the orchestra’s performance when the seemingly emotionless elite of a closed and strictly controlled society was reduced to tears.

     Maazel had played fair before the “Arirang”, peppering the performance with diplomatic niceties, prefacing Gershwin’s upbeat “An American in Paris” with a comment that, perhaps, someday, someone will compose a piece called “Americans in Pyongyang”. His other selections were just as calculated – Dvorak’s New World Symphony, which was commissioned by the Philharmonic, the Czech composer’s ode to America. New York Times’ critic Anthony Tommasini, reviewing the performance via a live Internet stream feeding into his home computer in the US, wrote the next day that ‘the image of a major American orchestra as a sleek machine under the control of an imposing conductor was nicely countered by the second encore: the overture to Bernstein’s “Candide” ’.

     Still, Tommasini was unhappy with Maazel’s selection. ‘If only he had chosen to include even one short work by a living American composer, perhaps an Asian-American composer. Because the orchestra stuck to staples, the classical music art form came off as unthreatening. New music, by definition, is destabilising. To have a composer taking part in the programme would have been a reminder that the heritage is living, breathing and unpredictable.’

     But there in the Grand Theatre, a misnomer of drab modernist construction stripped of anything ornate, I turned to look up at the balconies filled with dour and dull dark-suited men and their occasionally colourful wives in traditional garb, as the hall’s acoustics amplified manifold a thunderous applause led by a men folk consumed by appreciation. Deny the naysayer; the New York Philharmonic was a hit. Granted, the cynical may judge the collective leap from seats at the end of “Arirang” and the eruption of rapturous applause to be just another choreographed display of North Korean precision, such is the propaganda generated on both sides of the Bamboo Curtain. It looked pretty real to me.

From the perspective of a window of the chartered Asiana Airlines Boeing 747 en route from Beijing to Pyongyang with the musicians, crew and support staff of the New York Philharmonic and a press corps of eighty, North Korea looks as blighted as the media makes out: a bleak brown land patched with retreating snow and ice, all deserted farmland and desolate landscape. The cabin was silent as the captain made his final approach, touched down and taxied to a single free-standing terminal building uncluttered by such commonplace conveniences as air bridges. Beneath a portrait of the late Kim Il Sung high on the façade stood several dozen local reporters and officials in civilian and military winter attire, the day cold and overcast grey. A set of stairs wheeled up to the aircraft, which dwarfed the scattered fleet of old Soviet-made Tupolevs, and the media was deplaned and sorted into the custody of waiting minders, whose job it would be to know the exact whereabouts of each in their charge. It was here I made the acquaintance of Mr Pak, a handsome man in his mid-forties wearing a long navy wool overcoat and an oddly snappy red scarf, worn more perhaps for the convenience of identification than as a mark of eccentricity. He would, he said, be my guide. ‘If we move, we move in our assigned groups,’ he explained. Henceforth I would be ‘Miss Deborah, Bus 8’.

Passing through uniformly grey and empty streets lined with characterless apartment buildings in the neo-Soviet style, the only splashes of colour were provided by huge portraits of ‘Dear Leader’ Kim Jong Il or agitprop on poster boards. Our hugely conspicuous convoy provoked scarcely a stolen glance from head-down eyes-front pedestrians as it delivered us to one of Pyongyang’s top two hotels, the Yanggakdo Hotel, which sits on an island in the Taedong River, thus isolated from the city centre. It is the sole hotel of choice for foreigners.

Pyongyang is not a normal city, perhaps not even by comparison with other cities in North Korea, if such things could be confirmed. It is home to anywhere between 2.6 and 3.8 million people – there is no official number – and they are understood to comprise various ranks of the country’s elite, be they high-ranking officials or common soldiers, bureaucrats or acrobats. There is much that is odd. East Berlin before the Wall fell goes only so far if one is seeking an analogy. What to make of a city without traffic lights, in their place at each intersection a pretty woman in heavy makeup and sky-blue snowsuit with fur-trimmed hood? Vehicles proceed according to a tick of her head – left, centre, right and back again in a metronomic beat that has nothing to do with the presence or otherwise of waiting drivers halted by a plastic wand held up with a fixed smile. What must occupy the mind to survive such a robotically repetitive job as traffic-light woman in a city with no traffic?

     No taxis either, as we discovered when an attempt to find Naengmyeon – the local “comfort food” of cold noodles made from ground-up sweet potato, greyish-purple in colour and with a leathery texture, uniquely delicious, if potentially fatal when eaten in a hurry without a tablemate who knows the Heimlich manoeuvre – landed us back in the hotel restaurant.

     Like most capitals, Pyongyang is littered with gigantic monuments, not least the gold statue of Kim Il Sung, which features in near-identical television reports of weeping mourners laying bouquets of flowers at its base. How much is internally real and how much is staged for the benefit of the outsider? At the larger-than-life monument on our tour of Pyongyang, a group of some twenty farmers appeared out of nowhere to shed tears, among them grandparents and children no older than five. As the group approached the statue to lay a bouquet, it moved as one, its constituent members in perfect mini-step synchronisation.

* * *

‘When you move, you must move with the group,’ Mr Pak reproached me after I strayed from Bus 8 to talk to some colleagues assigned to other buses. Several minders were already calling my name and Mr Pak was red faced when he found me, muttering his mantra as he shepherded me back to our check-in. On the twentieth floor, the hallways were dim and the carpets smelled damp and had that reek of stale cigarette smoke, but my room was comfortable in that it had hot water and clean sheets, was spacious, equipped with refrigerators and the television carried the BBC. However, I felt uncomfortable being alone with an entire floor to myself in the forty-seven-storey tower and requested a room change, easily enough arranged as there was no evidence anyone but the New York Philharmonic was using the hotel. It didn’t occur to me to tell Mr Pak that I had moved to the twenty-ninth floor to be closer to friends until a 3am phone call from reception confirmed in broken English that I was not in my originally assigned room. Mr Pak was unhappy. I had not moved with the group.

     For the first night a lavish banquet was laid on for the musicians and their entourage at one of the many grand halls dotted around the city, the sea of tablecloths a hybrid of salmon pink, each featuring a centrepiece of Korean sodas, beer and rice wine and to which was delivered in grotesque portions our hosts’ interpretation of western cuisine: fish chopped up and blended with mayonnaise piled atop its perfectly cleaned skeleton and garnished with tomato and parsley; roasted quail or some other small bird; unidentifiable croquette-like dishes. Clearly, no one was starving in this little part of North Korea. I had a craving for kimchi as, I later learned, did most of the New Yorkers. The musicians were impressed by the efforts being made on their behalf and remarked to each other on the absence of the anti-American posters said to be plastered all over the city, and the enormous star-shaped lights hanging on flagpoles lining the main boulevards leading to the hotel. The precinct around the Yanggakdo had been starved of electricity for two months to ensure the lights came on after dark.

* * *

As is my habit, I intended to go on an early morning run and a woman from violas and a man from the oboes asked if they could come along. Before turning in we arranged to meet at 6:45 the next morning near the front entrance, but, still drowsy after my unscheduled wake-up call, I overslept and by the time I had scurried to the lobby my Philharmonic friends were nowhere to be seen. I recognised some of the minders positioned at the door but avoided eye contact and walked outside.

Images of running along New York’s Hudson River and the distinct beauty it affords those who jog its tree-lined paths and draw meditative inspiration from the reflections of buildings in its waters and the big and little boats travelling up and down its length are quickly banished by Pyongyang. As I ran across a bridge over the Taedong River, the pedestrian pathway separated by a low cement wall from lanes empty of morning traffic save the occasional military vehicle, the people looked just like I had been told they would look – robots. Men all wearing similar clothes of dark pants, white button-down shirt, drab woollen jacket, their greyness matching the muddy water below. Everyone walks or bicycles with purpose, though toward what is unclear without the clues one takes for granted in any other metropolis: the cut and colour of a business suit, the jeans and sneakers that immediately betray economic and social status in spite of their apparent uniformity, the labelled cardboard coffee cups, the hue of earbud headphone cabling back to some hidden audio gadget. Here, it is hard to tell the factory worker from the professional. Then again, are there professionals in North Korea?

* * *

While the orchestra rehearsed and the crew ran through its set routines – the New York Philharmonic was on a three-week regional tour and so retained a degree of routine normality – the foreign media was given a good dose of propaganda with a tour of the city that touted photo ops at “points of interest”, first stop the Grand People’s Study House where, according to the running commentary, adults come to take classes in everything from English to engineering. There was a roomful of personal computers, each occupied and apparently trawling the Net, a newspaper article posted on a neatly ordered bulletin board showing a picture of the Philharmonic’s arrival at the airport. Classrooms were open for inspection and in one room thirty pupils were studying textbooks at individual wooden desks that would not have been out of place in any US grade school circa 1972. Not a head moved as cameras clicked and whirred. ‘The students are busy studying,’ explained the extremely helpful junior minder assigned by Mr Pak not to let me out of his sight. I asked junior minder what he did when not minding, but he was evasive. How old are you? I asked. He told me to guess. Thirty-two, I said. He smiled and said nothing. I asked him to guess my age. Junior minder pulled a sheet of paper from his inside pocket and said, ‘You are forty years old.’ Where do I live? ‘You live in Hong Kong,’ he translated from his paper. From another room came snatches of English dialogue. ‘Susan and Harry are on a date. What kind of date are they having?’ the teacher asked.

     ‘A dinner date,’ the students chorused.

     ‘Harry is a single man now, but has a daughter. How old is that daughter?’

     ‘Seven.’

     Who is Harry? Is his wife dead or did they divorce? Is Harry sleeping with Susan? And does the daughter know? Decadent Western Values 101. But there was no time for such questions as the itinerary demanded a ride on the subway, which costs foreigners three euros, the euro being the currency of preference in Pyongyang, withering US dollars and major credit cards not accepted here. It was a five-minute escalator ride down into the ornate, green-tiled and carved-sconce bowels to the platform, which was crowded with city workers. At the approach of a train, the minders herded their foreigners onto a central carriage. The locals shied off to other parts of the train.

* * *

I ran again on my second morning in Pyongyang, going past the walkway this time and following some steps down to the Taedong River. It is not a pretty river.

     My pace was slow, cautious even, as I ran down a treeless dirt path along the riverbank devoid of park benches or the elderly doing their early morning exercises. I tried to make eye contact with others walking along the river, smiling at a few, even excusing myself for getting in the way of commuters on foot. No reaction; a protection mechanism, perhaps, of plausible deniability. If they did not see me, there was no obligation to act if it turned out later there was some rule about running along the riverbank. Acknowledgement implies knowledge, and knowledge leads to complicity, and complicity leads to … leads to … something they did not wish to contemplate. The three wise monkeys have a point.

* * *

‘Deborah, I want to talk to you,’ said Mr Pak.

     ‘Sure.’ I was expecting someone had reported my illicit running, and it was his duty to explain to the foreigner what was and was not acceptable in North Korean society. He motioned for me to follow down a quiet corridor off the lobby, stopping at a discreet intersection.

     ‘Do you have any books?’ he finally asked.

     Books? What kind of books? ‘Political books?’

     ‘Any books,’ he said.

     I recalled a sign in a Pyongyang bookshop. ‘The book is a silent teacher and a companion in life. Young people should carry books with them at all times and read and read various good books zealously – Kim Il Sung.’ That the only books on the shelves seemed to be by or about Kim Il Sung, or that other literary master and renowned auteur Kim Jong Il, made clear what constituted “good books” here.

     All I could offer Mr Pak was the carton of Marlboro cigarettes and some women’s pantyhose packed on the urgings of a friend who had insisted they were considered prestigious gifts in North Korea. For reading matter, all I could give him were few Time magazines. Something was better than nothing. We went to my room where we chatted, the door propped open to the corridor, about his family as I rummaged in my luggage. He told me his fifteen-year-old son’s English was not as good as his own, but he was taking extra lessons. When he asked for my business card, I proffered one with both hands and the ubiquitous East Asian bow. And how might I keep in touch with him?

     ‘OK, uh huh, let’s go outside now.’ He stuttered.

     ‘But let me first take down your phone number.’

     ‘Outside, outside, NOW.’

     We stepped out into the hallway.

     ‘I am just uncomfortable in your room,’ he said.

     It had been a common conversation at meal time about the rooms being bugged – North Korea is the last great dictatorship and we’d all read our fair share of John le Carré – but Mr Pak would never admit to such discourtesy. Nonetheless, he clarified in a voice louder than necessary for the narrow corridor he wanted to read books from the outside to expand his mind, all the while expounding a well-rehearsed patriotism.

* * *

Children figure prominently in North Korean society, and in North Korean propaganda, with performances of dances such as “We are Faithful Only to General Kim Jong Il” a compulsory feature on every foreigner’s itinerary. Hundreds of heavily made-up children, some as young as six, in garishly bright costumes singing and dancing with clock-like precision, all wore the same stage-smile expression. Perhaps it was the mother in me, but some appeared too thin, and I told Mr Pak so, how disturbing it looked and how sad it made me feel that they had to practise seven days a week, five hours a day. By comparison, my own three children lived lives of privilege simply because they were free to choose the way they would lead their lives. I found myself hoping at least one would make a mistake to make the spectacle seem more human.

     ‘That’s a very western perspective.’ Mr Pak said, and maybe he had a point; I remembered my father complaining that children in the West don’t work as hard as they did in his day, coddled for more years than can be healthy, that even some adults behave as if they are still children, soft and weak and full of self-importance.

     ‘Yes,’ I tried, searching as I did with my father to counter his criticism, ‘but at least I am free to like or dislike my leader.’ It was lame, especially so considering the maturity of recent leaders.

      ‘But the children love our dear leader Kim Jong Il.’ He paused. ‘That is what makes it beautiful.’

Mr Pak and I took breakfast coffee in the dining hall set up by the hotel for the group, a banquet room with table after table of elaborately displayed food offering the imagined gamut of western fare, from omelettes to sugar-crusted cereal, even fried fish and macaroni and cheese. Hotel employees took photographs of the displays and of each other holding up heaped platters.

     ‘Can you help my friend?’ asked Mr Pak at a table well away from the traffic of hotel staff. ‘He wants to find a business partner to import expensive chocolates.’

     ‘But who would be able to buy them, except government officials and Chinese businessmen?’

     ‘A lot of people,’ he said.

* * *

The choice of Gershwin seemed almost out of place in a concert designed to thaw the ice created by North Korea’s inclusion in an “axis of evil” at the start of the Bush administration nearly seven years ago. Maazel’s idea was to use music the way Daniel Barenboim has done in the Middle East to find a common language through which Israel and Palestine might find a way to live together. Here music could cut through all the propaganda and reveal something new to a people who know only what they are told, to hate Americans and everything for which they stand. Most of us are really no different from them; for me, even after doing countless stories on North Korea’s nuclear threat and the kidnapping of Japanese, the stereotype of a dishonest government in control of its people remained foremost in my mind in the absence of evidence to the contrary. Fear of the unknown is perhaps universal, no matter how often we are told that we have nothing to fear but fear. Mr Pak was right to be afraid – knowing someone might come for you in the night in response to what you say, do, or even think is, well, frightening. Isn’t that what freedom is about? But then, how free are we? Mr Pak’s curiosity seemed intact, and as we sat next to each other in the Grand Theatre listening to the music of the New York Philharmonic we were for the first time on common ground. Lorin Maazel was right to play “Arirang”, just as he was right to play the “Star-Spangled Banner” – both in their own way about the trials and tribulations and ultimate victory over an unnamed enemy.