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North Korean Propaganda
I am fifty miles from Seoul, South Korea, and it is midnight; dark frozen fields and snowy farms nestle in the countryside. English is a valuable commodity here and I teach it to rural Korean students at a public elementary school. I live well here with my husband, our bank accounts growing fat with every month. The transitions have been difficult but we are happy.
South Korea grows more prosperous by the day, especially noticeable here in the country. Humble restaurants sprout new second stories and rural back roads widen. Stables are knocked down and strip malls go up. Rice fields sell for millions of dollars to become the foundations of high-rise apartments. Here, the scenery is always changing.
In the city the young women wear miniskirts and go-go boots in minus weather. The men wear velvet jackets and embroidered jeans. Everyday is a shopping day and youthful crowds scramble up and down the narrow streets. Shops set speakers outside to play music and to clamor for the attention of the money-laden multitude. Here, no one thinks to buy a car, a DVD player or a furniture set until they can afford the most expensive model. Here, appearance counts and money is everything.
South-North Korean Border
It is not the case north of the border. South Korea’s parents, grandparents, cousins and siblings are starving. Manufactured goods are scare in North Korea and basic necessities are denied. The military receives the lion’s share of goods and foodstuffs. Refugees from North Korea in South Korea cannot return to their beloved villages or see the mountains and lakes beside which they grew up. Separated for decades, families may only reunite briefly once a year. South Koreans visit observatories to peer across the barbed wire fences with binoculars and to tour through museums memorializing the day the bridges closed, the trains stopped running and the fences went up between the two countries, the one living a dream and the other enduring a nightmare.
The countryside seems tranquil and the cities lively, but reminders of a country at war are everywhere and hard to ignore. Trenches run along the north-facing slopes of hills that are dotted with artillery bunkers. At night the shorelines close their gates - barbed fences twelve feet tall. Platoons of soldiers waving red glowsticks and carrying rifles march past our apartment building in the freezing night, silent but for the stamping of their boots.
South Korean Winter
The around-the-clock consumption of automobiles, electronics, makeup, shoes and clothing helps everyone forget such ominous signs of war, if only for a moment. The crowds, the youth culture and the blare of pop music lends a veneer of vitality to the streets of Seoul, the nation’s heart.. As a recent Korean film put it, Seoul is “a sad, cold city.” The feelings here are those of waiting, of forlorn hopes and of constant prayer. But as South Korea becomes wealthier I feel that when the two halves of these broken countries reunite, the riches will be shared among brother and sister and the heart of Korea will grow warm again.
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