I used to think that North Korea jokes were funny. I didn’t bother watching "The Interview," but I definitely had a good laugh at all of the jokes about the country in other media like "Team America: World Police" and the TV show "Archer." Yet, as I found out, what really makes us laugh about those jokes is that they make us uncomfortable, which I found out one day in Beijing this past summer.
My friends and I had decided on a whim to go to a Beijing outpost of the North Korean government —a state-owned North Korean restaurant. According to a Slate article by Sebastian Strangio, these restaurants are run by the North Korean government as a way of funneling foreign currency back to the country. Walking in, my friends and I nervously joked that it was probably the closest we could get to the “hermit kingdom” without being arrested for treason and that it might be best to imitate innocuous Canadians. We decided that we would avoid talking about any kind of world politics, lest we displease the restaurant hosts and be thrown out.
Walking in was like taking a trip back in time to the 1970s; there was even a disco ball hanging from the ceiling. Plastic flowers and vines coated the walls. Yet, the restaurant was packed with Chinese people scrambling for the chance to take a selfie with the beautiful female servers, who were performing traditional North Korean dances and songs, including “The Reunification of North and South Korea is the Korean People’s Dream.”
The restaurant felt artificial, calculated to earn the most money possible for the North Korean state. The waitresses all spoke perfect Mandarin, but conversation with them simply felt fake. Any attempt to talk about North Korea with the waitresses was met with a terse, dogmatic answer that sounded like a propaganda release – “Life in North Korea is wonderful, end of story.” Yet, to any of the rather inebriated patrons, that was not an issue. They were just concerned with consuming more of the expensive food and drink at the restaurant.
Furthermore, you had the feeling of constantly being watched in the restaurant. At one point, in order to try to get us to consume more, the waitresses brought out a stamp album for us to look at and hopefully buy from them. One of my friends took out her iPhone to take a picture of a particularly amusing stamp, but then the waitresses quickly snatched the book away. In that moment, the atmosphere in our corner of the restaurant suddenly turned very cold. We paid the bill and quickly fled the restaurant’s mini surveillance state to run to a fried chicken restaurant down the street, owned by South Koreans.
I would like to draw attention to the immensely tragic setup of the restaurants themselves. The Slate article that I mentioned earlier describes how the waitresses at the restaurants are selected by the North Korean government for their political loyalty, but in spite of that screening, several of the North Korean restaurants in China have actually closed after incidents in which the waitresses tried to defect to China and escape the reach of the North Korean state. It seemed like the waitresses’ ever-present robot-like smiles were forced, as if their lives depended on the job.
There came the horrifying realization after leaving the restaurant that the entire experience really wasn’t funny in the lighthearted way that many Americans talk about North Korea, as evidenced by movies like "The Interview." There’s a conversation to be had here about these kinds of jokes. Going to and consuming at that restaurant quite literally had abetted one of the most monstrous regimes on the planet, as each restaurant is required to remit anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000 USD a year back to the North Korean government under penalty of repatriation. This is money that is then used to oppress the country’s population and fund a nuclear program that the country uses to threaten the entire region. Jokes about North Korea, which generally involve a certain degree of schadenfreude, are eminently tragic because of the 25 million people suffering under the tyranny of that regime.
This is a regime that I don’t want to support, let alone give monetary aid to. I won’t go back to these restaurants. The food wasn’t very good anyway.
Nicholas Wu isa sophomore from Grosse Pointe Shores, Mich. He can be reached at nmwu@princeton.edu.
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