Inside North Korea

For a glimpse into the daily lives of ordinary North Koreans, it is instructive to read the accounts of Moon Hae-sung - a North Korean who had escaped from North Korea to South Korea via China.

Moon noted that while it is normal for South Korean children to play on their own, "the idea of playing alone, or even spending time alone, is pretty alien" in the Hermit Kingdom.

"We always had at least 10 kids gathered together, usually more; I can't remember even playing with just one other kid. It's as if the tenets of communal living were pounded into our very bones."

As for the leadership cult, Moon pointed out that if a house in North Korea is on fire, the first thing its citizens have to rescue is the portrait of the Dear Leader. If the portrait is burnt down with the rest of the house, the family might be put on trial at one of the "weekly general assemblies."

Moon also revealed that every school has an office whose task is to research the ideological history of Great Leader Kim Il-sung and Dear Leader Kim Jong-il.

"These offices are sacred places and have perfectly ironed white carpeting, and you can only go in after you've put on bright white slippers."

In his account in Richard Harris' Faces of Korea, The Foreign Experience in the Land of the Morning Calm (Hollym International, 2004), Moon also pointed out "one interesting thing" he observed when he arrived in South Korea.

"I discovered that America is written with the Chinese character for beauty, mi (美) but in the North it's written with the character for rice (米)."

So the United Stares cannot be portrayed as "beautiful." But using the second character conjures in its impoverished and hungry people's mind that rice (read: food) is abundant in America? No?