The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [27]
At the time of writing (autumn 2009), a so-called “100 Day Battle” is in progress. Enthusiasm campaigns to boost production were a fixture in the socialist bloc too, but in North Korea economic growth is less an end in itself than a means to strengthen the country. (The parallel to the German Wehrwirtschaft and the Japanese “self-defense state” of the 1930s is obvious.)40 To get the masses in the proper spirit, the regime compares workers to warriors, and, if the nightly news is anything to go by, hangs signs reading “battleground” in factories.
Whether soldiers, workers or farmers, the heroes in official narratives differ from other characters only in degree: they are that little bit more Korean—more virtuous and pure—than everyone else. Despite the growing focus on the armed forces, which remain predominantly male, young females are still more common in propaganda stories than men. This is not because women are considered fully equal, let alone superior, to men, but because they are more natural symbols of chastity and purity and thus of Koreanness. The most popular character in the peninsula’s folk tradition is Ch’unhyang, a girl punished for refusing to yield to a lecherous official. Her story has been filmed several times in North as in South Korea.41 Girls have the added advantage of being able to embody both the childlike attitude of the model subject and the nurturing, maternal attitude expected from authority figures. Nurses and female doctors are common heroines. The Text usually shows them as having grown up in fatherless and therefore more spontaneous surroundings. They behave girlishly even in adulthood, blushing at the drop of a hat and covering their mouths when they smile. Squeaky-clean teasing about boyfriends results in giggling mock-chases.42 One could not be further removed from the tough, emancipated heroines of socialist realist fiction.
Soviet narratives made much of the exertions and austerities of work life, the better to show “the new man” triumphing over his baser urges, but being inherently unselfish, Koreans take pleasure even in the hardest work. Kim Il Sung spoke of the nation’s workers as “laboring for the nation and society as well as for their own happiness, taking joy in their labor.”43 Collective farming is presented as the continuation and intensification of the (highly mythologized) Korean tradition of village labor pools.44 Whether baking in front of a smelting furnace or gripping shovels in the icy cold, workers are usually shown smiling or laughing.45
Obligatory in tales of work life are invocations of the campaign slogans of the day, but these tend to be extraneous to variations of the same morality tale about a model worker inspiring his or her comrades, surmounting this or that bureaucratic obstacle or material shortage, and perhaps shaming a mildly bad egg into reform. Since the latter half of the 1980s a whole genre of “hidden hero” narratives has arisen to celebrate those who toil in unglamorous jobs in remote locales. This propaganda is also meant to reconcile the provincial populace to country life and to encourage city women to marry rural husbands. In City Girl, Come and Get Married (Tosi ch’ǒ’nyǒ sijip wayo, 1993), for example, a beauty from Pyongyang falls in love with a duck farmer.46 But the Text’s glorification of country life as the repository of pure ethnic values undoubtedly has much to do with the fact that Korea experienced urbanization at foreign hands; similar tendencies, are obvious in South Korean culture. In Soviet and Chinese narrative, in contrast, the countryside was often depicted as a place of ignorance and reaction.47
The explicit ideological content of North Korean narratives has always been much lower than foreigners have assumed. Though often praised in passing, Juche Thought is rarely espoused or explained;