Jo on Ho Hwang

An Ambivalent Gaze at North Koreans

in Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang
I. North Korea, Graphic Travelogue, Otherness
Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea (2003) records
his daily observations and experiences in the capital city of North Korea,
where he stayed for two months in 2001 to supervise the production
of an outsourced French animated film.1 Pyongyang has been critically
acclaimed, as is demonstrated by a list of forty-three international reviews
inside the book, but its topic alone is compelling enough to deserve wider
attention. The travelogue is about North Korea, a territory of “others” that
has not opened its doors to the world like “normal” nations.2 As David
Shim notes, North Korea has been represented as “a timeless ‘mystery,’”
an “enigma,” “terra incognita,” and a kind of “blackhole” (1-3). Yet these
representations do not mean that the outside world has no inkling of the
nation at all. North Korea is known for its totalitarianism, centralized
economy, human rights violations, and its development of nuclear
programs. These characteristics are not particular to North Korea alone,
but lack of access to the nation means that North Korean lives remain
mysterious to the outside world. Since North Korea seems inaccessible and
travel to the nation unusual, Pyongyang demands critical scrutiny. Delisle’s
text produces ambivalent effects, as colonial writings about non-Western
regions have often historically demonstrated. Writing from a position of
privilege, Delisle has the opportunity to extend knowledge of North Korea
to Western readers. However, his text runs the risk of merely legitimizing
Western presuppositions about North Koreans.
Pyongyang is not just a travelogue of a “strange” land. It is “the first
graphic novel of North Korea in English (or in its original language,
French)” (Armstrong 366).3 To retell his past experience with dramatic
effect, Delisle presents the protagonist in his own image, whom North
Koreans call “Mister Guy,” and depicts him grappling with local people and
their culture in the panels. Pyongyang allows Delisle to visually represent
the interior spaces of a city that he was not allowed to photograph or film
during his stay. Pyongyang features visual tropes that are predictable and
familiar as they depict North Koreans as eccentric, impoverished, and
indoctrinated, if not brainwashed. In “(Dis)Orienting North Korea,” Suzy
 An Ambivalent Gaze 75

Kim writes that despite the wide influence of Edward Said and postcolonial
critique, “places like North Korea continue to be refracted through the
Orientalist lens in the West today” (481). Nevertheless, Pyongyang is
not another text that simply reinforces stereotypes about North Korea.
Although Deslisle’s protagonist, Mister Guy, searches for and reaffirms
the “otherness” of North Koreans, a close reading of Pyongyang calls into
question the legitimacy of this affirmation.
The meaning of otherness and the way it highlights certain qualities of
particular people cannot be discussed without considering power relations.
In Jean-François Staszak’s definition,
[o]therness is the result of a discursive process by which
a dominant in-group (“Us,” the Self) constructs one or
many dominated out-groups (“Them,” the Other) by
stigmatizing a difference—real or imagined—presented
as a negation of identity and thus a motive for potential
discrimination. (43)

Otherness has been recontextualized, redefined, and reconstructed to

identify who “we” are. Let me give two examples. In his discussion about
Europe as an idea, an identity, and a geopolitical reality, Gerard Delanty
pays attention to the way that “[identities] are constructed against a
category of otherness” (5). The “we” is identified not by what “we” share
or experience in common but rather “through the imposition of otherness
in the formation of a binary typology of ‘Us’ and ‘Them.’ The purity
and stability of the ‘We’ is guaranteed first in the naming, then in the
demonisation and finally in the cleansing of otherness” (5). In this process,
otherness is categorized as either “recognition” or “negation” based on
whether or not it works for “self-identity”; otherness can be accepted
when others are not regarded as “threatening stranger[s],” but if they are,
their otherness will be excluded (5). Delanty’s analysis overlaps with Sara
Ahmed’s view of how difference is treated in the construction of national
identity. Taking the United Kingdom as a case study, Ahmed argues
that the multicultural nation uses two types of others to present its ideal
image “as ‘being’ plural, open and diverse; as being loving and welcoming
to others” (133). On the one hand, some others “‘give’ their difference
to the nation, by mixing with others” (139), thus assisting the nation to
“[construct] itself as ideal in its capacity to assimilate others into itself”
(137); on the other hand, other others who fail to do so “become the sign
of disturbance” (139) that presents “this national ideal . . . as all the more
76 Canadian Literature 2 48

ideal” (137). Under these circumstances, the status of incoming others is

determined by whether they “meet ‘our’ conditions” to love the nation as
“an ideal object” (135).
Although Delanty and Ahmed focus on different geopolitical contexts,
they both recognize that othering particular people, especially those who
are inferior in power, involves defining “us” as un-othered at the expense
of the complexity of diverse social relations. The dualism founded on a
simplified “us” and “them” is detected in the Cold War construction of
“North Korea as a problem of security and a failed state” (Choi 2). As Shine
Choi explains,
North Korea is a product of encounters between various
“us’s” and various “North Koreas”, but this various,
diverse, fragmented, ambiguous “us” remains a particular
“us” on one side of politics along the line reified by the
Cold War binaries of (neo)liberal US–Western Europe
versus the communist-socialist Soviet bloc. (2)

During the Cold War, the United States pursued a “policy of ‘containing’
the Soviet system” (NSC). Paraphrasing the Americanist Donald Pease,
Alan Nadel notes how “American cold war foreign policy is marked by a
complex narrative of Other and Same” (14). Consequently, North Korea,
aligned with the Soviet Union, was predictably othered in the West during
the Cold War. But the Western representation of North Korea as “them”
persists even in the post-Cold War era geopolitically and culturally.
The image of North Korea is thus not simply a Cold War legacy but an
ongoing cultural issue that, as Choi argues, leads to the discussion of “how
a particular position (e.g. the culture, subjectivity, perspective of the ‘self’)
gets privileged and how the figure of the ‘Other’ operates in these cases” (3).
Given the above examples of how to treat otherness in different
contexts and the historical status of North Korea, Mister Guy’s view of
the North Koreans expresses a desire to adhere to the historical division
between “us” and “them” rather than an attempt to view the local people
from a new perspective. As a result, Pyongyang, even if inadvertently,
reveals the discrepancy between the North Korea that Mister Guy expects
to see and the actual situations that he observes but does not fully perceive.
While Delisle’s cultural identity as a Canadian living in France requires
consideration, my examination of otherness in Pyongyang does not
intend to rearticulate the reductive dualism of East and West. It is hard to
overlook the negative perception of North Korea in South Korea despite
 An Ambivalent Gaze 77

their shared history, culture, and language. Han S. Park, for example, notes,
“preconceptions and prejudices about North Korea are frequently used as
common sense” (39), and Jin Woong Kang admits, “misconceptions and
prejudices about North Korea show that the remnants of the Cold War are
not entirely overcome” (14) in South Korean society.4 With this in mind,
a critical approach to Delisle’s text provides an opportunity to discern not
only the Western visitor’s gaze but also various other gazes that want to see
North Korea as “we” believe it to be. From such a perspective, Pyongyang
allows readers to consider difference and sameness, rather than otherness,
in the people whose nation was once labelled as part of “the axis of evil.”

II. Inside the World of the Soldier and the Toy

Like Delisle’s other travelogues, Shenzhen (2000) and Burma
Chronicles (2007), Pyongyang is neither in colour nor exactly black-and-
white but instead filled with greyness of different degrees. The colour grey
works effectively in Pyongyang for visualizing the opacity, if not obscurity,
of North Korea, which is not easy for an outsider to penetrate at first. The
difficulty is adumbrated at the beginning of the book. When Mister Guy
meets his guide Mr. Kyu at the airport, the panel represents Mr. Kyu as
a thick grey silhouette. The interior of the airport is dark due to a power
shortage, and Mr. Kyu is standing indoors with his back to the sunlight.
Upon closer examination, however, Mr. Kyu’s face and clothes are not
completely obliterated; they are dimly outlined in dark grey. Mr. Kyu’s
blurred appearance underscores why readers should scrutinize Pyongyang;
otherwise, they may only find the Western stereotype that sees North
Koreans as unknowable.
The first few pages of Pyongyang appear to reinforce Western
stereotypes about the absurdity and eccentricity of North Korea. The
awkward formalities for entry, the mandatory company of attendants,
and the foreign visitors’ obligatory floral tribute to the gigantic statue
of the nation’s founder, Kim Il-sung, are all peculiarities of the North
Korean nation. Pyongyang highlights two national features of North
Korea: economic deprivation and dictatorship. The economic difficulties
are epitomized by low quality meals, non-functional elevators, buses
manufactured in Hungary in the 1950s, an empty grand ballroom in a hotel,
lack of goods at a department store, and so forth. The local conditions are
dreadful, but Mister Guy’s humorous, if not sarcastic, reactions serve to
lighten the mood without minimizing the seriousness of the economic
78 Canadian Literature 2 48

problems. While looking at an empty dish in his hotel, a metaphor for the
food shortage in North Korea, for example, Mister Guy abruptly picks up a
toothpick and says, “[T]he toothpicks must be handcarved” (43). Similarly,
when his translator Mr. Sin keeps refusing to explain the reason for citizen
labourers, referring to them instead as “volunteers,” Mister Guy blithely
responds, “Ah!” (57).
Likewise, Mister Guy makes jokes about even politically sensitive
issues. In a passage that mocks North Korea’s surveillance culture, for
example, he expresses shock at discovering the face of Kim Il-sung’s son,
Kim Jong-il, in the mirror on his desk. After realizing that the mirror
reflects Kim’s photograph attached to the wall, Mister Guy remarks, “Ha
ha . . . What a joke!” and adds, counting his days left in Pyongyang, “I’ve
gotta get outta here” (132). Mister Guy does not hide his cynicism toward
the North Koreans’ worship of Kim Il-sung either. One day, he and a group
of North Korean soldiers bow to Kim’s statue together at the International
Friendship Exhibition, a holy place for the dead leader. While the soldiers
have “tears in their eyes,” Mister Guy narrates, “[I was] biting my tongue to
keep from laughing out loud,” because the statue seems ridiculously alive
due to certain special effects (105).
The inseparability of North Korea’s economic backwardness and the
idolization of its former leader is inferred in a splash page. It shows Kim Il-
sung’s gigantic portrait on the top of a building as the only lighted spot in
the darkness of the city (49). In Pyongyang, visual imagery in splash pages
serves to underscore the otherness of the nation. Delisle’s illustrations
of monolithic public structures like the Tower of the Juche Idea (65), the
Monument to Party Founding (97), and the incomplete Ryugyong Hotel
(113) embody lifelessness and stagnation. On other splash pages, a huge
propaganda billboard (17), a young girls’ accordion band (145), and mass
games (161) illustrate nationhood and collectiveness as the top priority
of North Korea. The splash pages sometimes include factual information
about the nation, but this seeing is not simply objective; it also conveys
information about the observer. As John Berger puts it, “[t]he way we see
things is affected by what we know or what we believe . . . To look is an act
of choice” (8). The subtitle of David Shim’s Visual Politics and North Korea:
Seeing Is Believing indicates a similar perspective. Examining photographic
representations of North Korea, Shim argues that
the depiction of something like, for instance, “real” life
in North Korea is not initially a copy of the real, as many
 An Ambivalent Gaze 79

observes would contend, but rather a reflection of the

photographer’s own interest and prejudices. In this vein,
a photograph is an act of visual imagination. Hence, the
taking of a picture is as revealing of the photographer as it
is of the subject depicted. (28)

Choi discusses Delisle’s Pyongyang via reference to what she describes as “a

detective mode of seeing” (77). “This mode of seeing,” Choi writes, “creates
a distance between the self and the Other, where the Other is evaluated
from a higher moral position.” The problematic aspects of seeing are legible
in Delisle’s splash pages and in his representation of North Koreans. For
readers who uncritically take Delisle’s travelogue as a source of factual
information, Pyongyang functions primarily to reinforce the otherness of
North Korea and its citizens.
It is necessary to remember, however, that all societies contain
complexities that are difficult to grasp. North Korea is no exception. In the
introduction to Ask a North Korean, Daniel Tudor cautions his readers not
to generalize information or knowledge about North Korea: “If you asked
a wealthy Manhattanite and a rural Arkansan to describe life in the United
States, you’d likely get divergent answers. The same is true of North Korea”
(10). It is thus no accident that Pyongyang reveals the multifaceted or even
self-conflicting aspects of North Korea. Take isolation, for example, which
Westerners frequently regard as a definitive feature of the nation. Delisle
emphasizes the isolation of North Korea not only by means of Mister Guy’s
comment (“North Korea is the world’s most isolated country,” 10) but also
by depicting North Korea as a fort protruding on a map, with a caption
telling the reader that the Communist Party “sealed off the country to all
sides” after the Korean War (26). Nancy Pedri reads this image of North
Korea as an example of how “Delisle’s cartoon maps . . . adopt a number
of discursive strategies—appraisive, evaluative, persuasive strategies—to
present a very particular view of North Korea” (101). Using Mister Guy’s
comment and the cartoon map, Pedri argues that Delisle presents the two
kinds of isolation in North Korea: that of the nation as well as the people
(Pedri 104). The confinement of North Koreans is also represented by a
reappearing image of a lonely tortoise in an aquarium (Delisle 35, 81, 174).
In an interview with Kenan Kocak, Delisle says that the tortoise symbolizes
his “trapped” condition as well as that of the North Korean people (110-11).
North Korea is not portrayed as completely “sealed off” in Pyongyang,
however.5 The presence of Mister Guy in North Korea evinces the
80 Canadian Literature 2 48

connection, though anemic, between the nation and global capitalism.

He is not the only Western animator in town either. Over the course of
two months, Mister Guy meets various French colleagues: Sandrine, his
predecessor; Richard, who started working in Pyongyang one week earlier;
David, an old acquaintance; Henri, who is a producer at a small French
studio that Mister Guy once worked for; and Fabrice, who later replaces
Richard. North Korea is the French version of “an animation Who’s Who”
(134), in Mister Guy’s own words. On his flight to North Korea, Mister Guy
also sees a “French Alcatel employee,” a “German mineral water exporter,”
and a “young Italian foreign aid worker” (9). He later discovers other
foreign visitors, including French telecom engineers, Chinese tourists,
a Libyan long-term resident, a Turkish delegation, and even Americans
who came to retrieve the remains of US soldiers. Moreover, the city has
a small “expat microcosm” (116) that hosts parties at which Mister Guy
sees foreigners who have come to Pyongyang from different nations
for different purposes. As the caption says in the scene of the reunion
between Mister Guy and his acquaintance David, Pyongyang ensures that
“globalization is global” (82).
Mister Guy’s claim that “meeting Koreans is next to impossible” (10)
is an exaggeration. It is nevertheless true that he is not allowed to freely
engage with North Koreans in North Korea. He only manages to encounter
a small number of them, such as an animation technician, a chambermaid
in his hotel, and local animators at the Scientific and Educational Film
Studio of Korea (SEK), not to mention the attendants who always
accompany him. The cultural and language barriers prevent both sides
from communicating with each other. The technician, for example, keeps
annoying Mister Guy by singing or playing propaganda songs (28, 131),
and the chambermaid keeps interrupting his sleep early in the morning to
switch water bottles in the refrigerator, even disregarding the
“do-not-disturb” sign on the door (35, 44). Mister Guy also fails twice to
help the North Korean animators to understand the meaning of a cartoon
bear character’s “typically French gesture” (128), which they need to draw.
He explains that people make this gesture when experiencing an electric
shock. He even strangely appears to rejoice in the hypothetical situation:
“Yes, ha ha ha ha! That’s exactly it, an electric shock! Dzzt! Dzzt!” (77). In
another instance, he vaguely responds that the gesture means “Ooh la la”
while mimicking the cartoon bear’s speech and hand movements (128).
Differences of language and culture cannot be resolved in a short period
 An Ambivalent Gaze 81

of time. Yet these anecdotes suggest that the nation’s isolation is a major
cause of the North Koreans’ ignorance of manners and cultures widely
acknowledged in the outside world.
The North Koreans in Pyongyang remain anonymous except for Mr.
Kyu and Mr. Sin. Mr. Sin is the North Korean with whom Mister Guy most
often talks. The disagreements between them signify not only individual
but also geopolitical division. When Mister Guy raises the issue of Korean
reunification, for example, Mr. Sin points out the responsibility of the
United States for the division against the aspirations of both North and
South Koreans. Mister Guy responds, “Hmm . . . I see” (63), but in his
mind, he says with a playful smile, “Dream on, pal!” and rebuts that after
the German reunification and the Asian financial crisis, South Koreans are
no longer enthusiastic about reunification with “a country 46 times poorer
than their own” (62). South Korean positions on reunification are open
to debate. Pyongyang does not intend to seek these out, but Mister Guy’s
comments in his mind have the effect of aligning South Korea with the rest
of world and against the North Koreans.
Mr. Sin is presented not simply as an unknowledgeable civilian. When
speaking of the military tension in the Korean peninsula, Mr. Sin is
transformed into a military commander (63). The visual change
suggestively identifies his voice with the military’s, thereby blurring the line
between North Korean civilian and soldier. This is not the first time
Mr. Sin’s civilian-military identity is illuminated. When he is first
introduced, two panels show the same figure of Mr. Sin, but his attire
switches from civilian clothing to military uniform, and each caption
implies that it is not easy for him to free himself from the military way
of life: “Mister Sin. Fresh out of eight years of military service” (34).
Commander Sin reappears as the captain of “a battalion of animators”
(159) in Mister Guy’s imagination, following panels that illustrate North
Korea’s military forces and North Koreans’ preparedness for military drills.
Another image attached to Mr. Sin and the North Koreans is a smiling
clockwork toy that has a Kim Il-sung badge on the left side of its chest. The
toy first appears, alongside the caption “[b]ody and soul serve the regime”
(59), when Mr. Sin explains the North Koreans’ duties to prepare for
national events. The toy reappears later when Mister Guy visits the Tower
of Juche with his attendants (75).
These images of North Koreans as both soldiers and clockwork toys
are consistent with “the often-stereotypical ways in which North Korea is
82 Canadian Literature 2 48

looked at, thus establishing boundaries and difference” (Shim and Nabers
295). In “Imagining North Korea,” David Shim and Dirk Nabers discuss
two kinds of photographs of North Koreans from the Western media
and analyze their “political and ethical significance” (296). On the one
hand, Western photographs of North Koreans in “distress, depression,
and desperation” or in suffering from malnutrition stereotype the nation
as a “wimp” (Shim and Nabers 297). On the other hands, official North
Korean photographs of military parades, displaying North Koreans as a
“homogeneous, brain-washed, and robot-like mass” (301), offer evidence
that the nation is a “menace” (300-01). The representation of North
Koreans in military parades also appears in Suki Kim’s travelogue, Without
You, There Is No Us (2015). Kim infiltrated North Korea in 2011 as an
English teacher and documented her observations of students from the
ruling class, whom she describes as follows: “My little soldiers were also
little robots” (278-79).
While Mr. Sin represents a stereotypical North Korean, the way he
reifies the otherness of his people is not inherently “North Korean.” When
Mr. Sin or any other attendant expresses admiration for the achievement of
North Korea at local attractions, his performance is not different from that
of non-Western local tour guides outside North Korea, who mythologize
the distinctions of their inheritance for Western tourists. In “Imagineering
Otherness,” Noel B. Salazar notes how “global tourism is the quintessential
business of difference projection and the interpretive vehicle of Othering
par excellence (with many peoples now cleverly Othering themselves)”
(690). The primary purpose of tour guides is not to provide factual
information but rather, as Salazar argues, “to satisfy the tourist’s wish to see
and experience the Other (as imagined since colonial times)” (691).
Mr. Sin does not commercialize his knowledge or language capacity, and
Mister Guy is never impressed by Mr. Sin’s presentation. Nevertheless, it
is hard to miss that Mr. Sin willingly embellishes his nation by othering
himself for the Western visitor. As a result, like the narratives of other non-
Western tour guides, his narrative of national glory inevitably participates
in “the constant (re)production of stereotypes and categories of ethnic and
cultural difference across the globe” (Salazar 690).
The attendants’ explanations, therefore, should not always be taken at
face value. Yet Mister Guy assumes that the North Koreans believe in their
words. When an attendant says that there are no disabled people in North
Korea because “all North Koreans are born strong, intelligent and healthy,”
 An Ambivalent Gaze 83

for example, Mister Guy thinks to himself, “And from the way he says it,
I think he believes it” (136). Mister Guy questions the authenticity of what
he hears, but he often does not discuss it with the North Koreans. Mister
Guy is silent as often as he is talkative. By his silence, he shares his thoughts
about North Korea with readers, but not with the local people, thereby
further distancing himself from North Koreans, as well as “them” from “us.”
The same attitude is witnessed when Mr. Sin and Mr. Kyu inform
Mister Guy about the global spread of Juche, the official ideology of North
Korea, which the attendants promote as “the source of life that invigorates
the spirit of all people, transcending latitude and longitude” (73). Mister
Guy expresses repulsion but again only to himself: “Do they really believe
the bullshit that’s being forced down their throats?” (74). He believes that
his attendants should know the position of North Korea in the world
“[b]ecause they are among the privileged few who are able to leave the
country” (75). Their status raises questions about North Korea’s isolation
again; the borders are not completely closed for North Koreans either.
Mister Guy is speechless, however, when Mr. Sin denies the attractions of
Paris: “It’s full of beggars and it isn’t very clean” (75).
To illuminate the reason for Mr. Sin’s pretense, Delisle deploys a comic
technique called closure, which Scott McCloud defines as the “phenomenon
of observing the parts but perceiving the whole” (63). The first panel,
showing Mr. Sin silently looking out of the window with his arms folded,
is juxtaposed with a panel in which the clockwork toy reappears. While the
first toy has only one spring in its back, the second toy has an additional
spring in its head, connoting North Koreans’ lack of critical thinking
towards the regime. The image of the toy is followed by another panel
showing the location of North Korea’s political prison camps. According
to McCloud’s notion of closure, Delisle’s ordering of these panels compels
readers to fill the gaps (“gutters”) between them, thereby reaching the
conclusion that Mr. Sin may end up facing “life imprisonment” if he
happens to “let on” about his personal thoughts to Mister Guy (75).
The logic underlying the arrangement of these three panels accords
with the dominant “cultural representations” of North Korea widely
circulated in the West. As Christine Kim elaborates, “these cultural
representations function as a cultural fantasy of the inhuman for the rest
of the world, one wherein the spectacular and macabre are pitched as the
North Korean everyday” (223). In “Figuring North Korean Lives,” Kim
argues that the problem with post-World War II human rights discourses
84 Canadian Literature 2 48

concerns how they “imagin[e] the subject of human rights in Western

terms” (222). As a result, she argues that “North Korea functions alternately
as a metaphor for the inhuman and as a metonym for Asian incivility” (221)
and thereby its historical achievement has been disregarded (224). Bruce
Cumings corroborates the latter part of Kim’s argument:
An internal CIA study almost grudgingly acknowledged
various achievements of the regime: compassionate care
for children in general and war orphans in particular;
“radical change” in the position of women; genuinely free
housing, free health care, and preventive medicine; and
infant mortality and life expectancy rates comparable to
the most advanced countries until the recent famine.
(viii-ix)

Mister Guy’s adherence to a traditionally Western view of North Korean

society causes him to overlook the complex subjectivity of Mr. Sin and
other people of the same class. They are not simply native informants; as
Mister Guy admits (Delisle 75), they are also travelers like himself, who
may have “hybrid, cosmopolitan experiences as much as . . . rooted, native
ones” (Clifford, “Traveling” 101). As Ulrich Beck writes, “Transnational is
not conceptually opposed to indigenous. Transnationals are local people”
(445). Moreover, Mister Guy is not the only one who acts as an observer.
To Mr. Sin and his colleagues, Mister Guy is only a short-term visitor
whom they should take turns watching. While performing his duties, Mr.
Sin thus does not need to tell a foreign stranger what is on his mind at the
risk of undermining his position. Mutual distrust is then sensed by both
sides. Mister Guy, however, can hardly understand the significance of the
local people’s unheard voices, which are acknowledged even in Suki Kim’s
travelogue, a text that rarely deviates from its general skepticism about
North Korea: “In groups, [my students] inevitably mouthed the right
answer, which would then be reviewed in weekly Daily Life Unity critiques,
but in private, their voices resonated” (279).
Even North Koreans with no opportunity to travel abroad were not
completely “sealed off” (26) at the time when Delisle visited Pyongyang.
During his reign from 1994 to 2011, Kim Jong-il’s leadership was tested
against “three crises”: famine, the emergence of a market economy, and
nuclear development (Buzo 247). The “Arduous March” (1994-1996), a
catastrophic famine, is estimated to have “claimed the lives of between
200,000 and three million North Koreans” (Tudor and Pearson 18). The
 An Ambivalent Gaze 85

government’s inability to supply food and protect their people precipitated

a market economy (jangmadang) in which daily necessities and foreign
products were traded, including smuggled South Korean goods (Tudor
and Pearson 25-29, 34-39). The markets that burgeoned in the late 1990s
have continued to grow; according to Travis Jeppesen, who has visited
North Korea five times since 2012, “[f]ar from being cut off from the rest
of the world, the markets have put North Koreans directly in the middle of
it” (114). North Korean markets did not only circulate material necessities
from the outside in the early 2000s. As North Korean refugee Ji-min
Kang recalls, “At first, it was Western culture that initially swept across
Pyongyang. After that, Chinese and Hong Kong culture was the next
to reach the big cities. Then South Korean dramas and music started to
arrive” (qtd. in Tudor 69). Another refugee, Jinyuok Park, shares Kang’s
observation and underscores the popularity of South Korean television
programs: “When I was still in North Korea, I only watched South Korean
TV occasionally, and out of sheer curiosity. But these days North Koreans
watch it almost every day” (qtd. in Tudor 76). Despite the North Korean
government’s control, South Korean popular culture had spread even
among the elite. Referring to the work of Hye-il Ho, a former North
Korean security guard, Ka Young Chung states: “during inspections in
2002, 600kg of South Korean videos, compact discs, and other publications
were collected from students at Kim Il Sung University” (141). North
Koreans were already aware that South Korea was materially richer and
politically freer. Restrictions on information and mobility limit normal
cultural flows. But North Koreans are no exception in terms of their
connectivity with the world, as an anonymous translator demonstrates in
Pyongyang with questions about Microsoft Windows and HTML (144).
Mister Guy is not impressed, however; he instead stresses the absence of
the Internet in North Korea. Upon discovering Autodesk 3ds Max graphics
programs installed on computers at a school for gifted children, Mister Guy
focuses on something else again: “I bet they didn’t buy the licenses” (156).
Despite the legitimacy of his concern about license, Mister Guy’s remarks
ignoring the local economic situation can pose a potential problem, which
Michael Faber points out in a review of Pyongyang and Shenzhen: “There’s
always a risk that disdain for an oppressive regime can cross the line into
disdain for people too poor to be cosmopolitans.”
The recognition of the North Koreans in Pyongyang as social and
cultural subjects interacting with their surroundings can change readers’
86 Canadian Literature 2 48

reception of Mister Guy’s perspective. In “Travelling Culture,” James

Clifford suggests that the reconsideration of “indigenous collaborators”
as “writers/inscribers” can help “to loosen the monological control of the
executive writer/anthropologist and to open for discussion ethnography’s
hierarchy and negotiation of discourses in power-changed, unequal
situations” (100). Clifford’s argument can caution readers of Pyongyang to
not entirely rely on Mister Guy’s view and to recognize him as the outsider
who fails to converse with the local people. Mister Guy is similar to his
attendants in that his opinion of North Korea never varies over the course
of his visit, thereby continuing to affirm the distance between North Korea
and the West. Later in his stay, when a translator brings up US opposition
to Korean reunification, Mister Guy breaks his silence to disagree with him,
insisting that “the real problem . . . is that you’ve got only one source of
information: the regime” (154). To support his position, Mister Guy picks
up a French newspaper cartoon that satirizes President Jacques René Chirac
and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, arguing that when “people are free to
criticize . . . at least you can base your opinions on more than one point of
view.” Turning his back on the translator, Mister Guy then concludes his
outburst by remarking, “[D]’you know what we say about democracy and
dictatorship? Dictatorship means shut up, democracy means keep talking!
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!” (155; emphasis mine). Mister Guy’s skepticism about
the potential for change in North Korea is intimated at the end of the book.
In an interview, Delisle chooses Pyongyang as his favourite work and says,
“I really like the ending of the book,” though without providing further
explanation (112). In Pyongyang, there are two scenes in which Mister Guy
makes paper planes from recycled storyboard sheets and flies them from
his hotel room on the fifteenth floor (114, 176). Mister Guy says, “I don’t
know why, but it makes me feel satisfied. Especially when I make it [a
paper plane] to the river” (114). Here the paper airplane can symbolize the
freedom of mobility, which Mister Guy believes does not exist for North
Koreans or, temporarily, for him either. Interestingly, the storyboard
sheet used for the paper plane on the last page has an image of the bear
character making the “typically French gesture” (128) that the animators
at SEK did not understand. In this sense, the ending can be interpreted as
implying that establishing freedom in North Korea may be as hard, if not as
impossible, as overcoming cultural barriers.
Despite essentializing North Korean “otherness,” Pyongyang, like
Delisle’s other travelogues, is a complex text that includes representations
 An Ambivalent Gaze 87

of North Koreans as ordinary people, which do not corroborate with

Mister Guy’s perspective. Ironically, Mr. Sin serves as a good example of
this. After visiting a tae kwondo demonstration, Mr. Sin and Mr. Kyu bring
Mister Guy to a shooting facility. Lacking military experience, he wildly
fires his gun, mimicking Corto Maltese, Hugo Pratt’s comic character
(142). Mister Guy believes that Mr. Sin and Mr. Kyu “have the advantage
of a few years of military training,” but he surprisingly obtains the highest
score. The subsequent panel shows Mister Guy celebrating by putting his
hands up and saying, “Yes!” while Mr. Sin’s sullen face silently looks down
at his score sheet (142). Mr. Sin’s reaction may not seem special; it can be
observed in any person whose self-esteem has been hurt. But considering
the portrayal of his identity as a clockwork toy and a soldier, Mr. Sin’s
expression of emotion, not to mention the comical atmosphere of the
situation, makes him appear more human, like people in “normal” nations.
At another moment, Mister Guy asks Mr. Sin to identify a propaganda
song in which “Kim Jong-il” is the only Korean word that Mister Guy
recognizes. After Mister Guy imitates the song as “Pa-Pa-Pam / Pa-Pa-
Pa-Pa / Kim Jong-Il! / Pa-Pa-Pa” (125), Mr. Sin sings a song that sounds
like “Ani-Yooooo-Na / To Yo Suuuu-ki / / Sun-Yo Chouu,” and smiles,
believing that he has figured it out (126). Yet Mister Guy responds, “No,
not that one. Mine was slower,” and imitates the song again. Mr. Sin sings
five different songs in a row, but Mister Guy keeps saying, “That’s not it,”
“Nope,” “Not at all,” “Don’t think so,” and “Uh-uh.” The last panel on the
page shows Mr. Sin’s singing face with the caption, “If we hadn’t arrived
at work, we could have spent the day going through the repertoire” (126).
The propaganda songs undoubtedly praise the glory of Kim Jong-il and his
regime. Nevertheless, Mr. Sin is not portrayed as an impenetrable other as
in other anecdotes; the onomatopoeic representation of his singing and the
sequence of his various faces create a comic effect. At this moment, Mr. Sin
is seen as a local person willingly helping a foreign colleague, who cannot
identify a local song due to the language barrier.
Furthermore, not all North Koreans in Pyongyang are portrayed as
homogenous and collective. In the later part of the book, Mister Guy is
happy to learn that the current animation director is being replaced by a
more skillful animator who “comes from a village near the Chinese border”
(151). Considering the new director’s success, Mister Guy admits that it is
possible to gain social status in North Korea through individual ability,
although Mister Guy’s admissions are not without reservation:
88 Canadian Literature 2 48

[I]n a way, I’m glad to know his drawing skills let him
leave his remote village to make a better life for himself
and his family. Come to think of it, it’s probably the only
upside to the whole Asian subcontracting system. The
others who wind up in Pyongyang take a far less glorious
path. (151)

Later, Mister Guy encounters a young animator who does not join the
mandatory screening of a propaganda film in his workplace. When Mister
Guy asks for the reason, the young animator asserts, “I don’t like movies
made here. They’re boring” (153). Mister Guy is so impressed that he
describes the young animator’s words as “the most subversive thing I heard
a North Korean say” and “as incredibly bold” (153). No further depiction
of the new director or of the young animator follows; nevertheless, the
fragmentary anecdotes indicate that North Koreans also desire success and
individuality, the same as in Western societies. Mister Guy may not have
imagined finding such universality in North Korea, but his encounter with
these two North Koreans, along with the anecdotes of Mr. Sin, present
moments, albeit brief and transient, when North Koreans are un-othered
and seen as fellow human beings living in a different society.
The young animator’s attitude may preview what the following
generations of North Koreans could be like. At the end of his North Korean
travelogue, See You Again in Pyongyang (2018), Jeppesen describes the
soldier who guided him to the Demilitarized Zone and nearby areas during
his first visit to the nation in 2012. Jeppesen finds the soldier to be almost
the same age as him (early thirties), likely from an affluent family, and
“full of questions” (300), about which they have a conversation. Here is
Jeppesen’s reminiscence of the young North Korean about ten years after
Delisle left Pyongyang:
[W]e find ourselves on common ground, and we both
know it, without having to say it. I’m from where I’m
from, he’s from this place, and there’s nothing we can
do about it. We are both the products of countries
determined to do their own thing, to pursue their agendas
and interests with cunning and aggression. Maybe there’s
a part of both of us that tends to look at the worlds we
come from and wonder what’s real and what’s not.
He looks at me, and I look at him. He smiles and shrugs,
says something in Korean. My guide laughs.
“What did he say?” I ask her.
 An Ambivalent Gaze 89

“Countries are countries,” she translates, “But people are

people.” (300-01)

III. Negotiation between “Our” Belief and “Their” Reality

Pyongyang reinscribes the effect of “our” conventional perspectives
on “others” even in the era of globalization. It also evinces that travelling
does not necessarily prompt visitors to question “our” previous knowledge
of local “others.” To stop othering North Koreans, however, is not “to
‘whitewash’ the behavior of the regime” (Tudor 10). It is a first step toward
“an affirmation of the other as both different and the same” (Beck 439).
Cumings arrives at a similar point of view and writes, “I have no sympathy
for the North, which is the author of most of its troubles” (xi). “But on my
infrequent visits to the country,” he continues,
I have been happy—in trying to fathom an undeniable
difference, in getting to know ordinary people who say
and do the same things ordinary people do in the South,
in meeting highly skilled officials who have taken the
measure of our leaders more than once (xi).

These experiences lead Cumings to conclude, “It is their country, for better
or worse—another country.” Rüdiger Frank, a German economist, shares
Cuming’s view, based on his multiple visits to North Korea between
1991 and 2018. In the preface to the Korean translation of Unterwegs in
Nordkorea, he writes:
North Korea is certainly not paradise, but it is not hell
either. Many people are successful, and many are not
. . . We should not have delusions about the North Korean
regime and the intentions of its leaders, but we should also
avoid blind hatred and stereotypical thinking. The North
Koreans are not stupid, simple, uneducated, uncivilized,
or cruel. At least in such special circumstances, we can do
the same, but nothing more. (10)

The views above presuppose the recognition of both differences and

commonalities between “us” and “them.” Pyongyang presents the
possibility of identifying North Koreans by negotiating between two
conflicting representations of them: On one hand the North Koreans who
correspond with Mister Guy’s preconceived notion of otherness, and on the
other hand, the North Koreans who do not appear like “them.” Both appear
in Delisle’s text, and it is up to readers which of the two representations
90 Canadian Literature 2 48

they will primarily take into account.

Notes

1. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea
and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018S1A5A2A02070219).
2. According to Philipp Wassler and Markus Schuckert, North Korea has opened its
gates to foreign tourists “gradually, during the last decade,” for the purpose of
obtaining foreign currency, although the tourism program is “still far from
developed” (123). The government aimed to host one hundred thousand tourists
in 2014 and two million in 2020, but the goal does not seem to have been
achieved. About six thousand Westerners are estimated to have visited North
Korea per year until 2017, when the US government banned Americans from
visiting due to the death of Otto Warmbier, who visited North Korea but
returned in a vegetative condition (Frank 29).
3. As a French-speaking Canadian, Delisle published Pyongyang in French in 2003,
with the English translation appearing in 2005. Another notable graphic
travelogue of North Korea is Yeong Jin Oh’s A Visitor from the South, which was
published in Korean in 2004 and translated into French in 2008 under the title of
Le Visiteur du Sud. It won the Prix Asie-ACBD in France in the same year. The
travelogue portrays Oh’s daily life in Sinpo, North Korea over 548 days (2000-
2001), when he worked as an engineer on the construction of a light-water
reactor.
4. Park’s and Kang’s books are published only in Korean. The translations are mine.
5. In 2011, Charles K. Armstrong notes, “The study of North Korea is no longer
terra incognita in the English language world” (357). He presents as evidence
scholarly works, refugee testimonies, journalism, expatriate accounts, films,
photographs, and other uncategorized texts about North Korea, including
Delisle’s Pyongyang, published in English in the first decade of the twenty-first
century. As Armstrong demonstrates, these publications were made possible
because of internal changes within North Korean society, the migration of North
Korean refugees, and released Chinese, Japanese, and Soviet archives. Despite the
ongoing opaqueness of North Korea, Armstrong argues that the production of
further works is “not a problem of insufficient information, but rather
insufficient motivation and imagination” (369). In 2017, Tudor notes in Ask a
North Korean that “North Korea is well represented in English language articles
and books,” although topics are concentrated on politics and refugee “horror
stories” (7).

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Joon Ho Hwang is Professor in the Division of English Language and Literature

at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea. He teaches British and American
modern poetry, American short stories, and popular culture, and has published articles on
modern poems, comics/graphic novels, Hollywood films, and South Korean popular culture.