Shivetya
Feb 3, 2010, 01:50 PM
http://www.slate.com/id/2243112/
Visiting North Korea some years ago, I was lucky to have a fairly genial "minder" whom I'll call Mr. Chae. He guided me patiently around the ruined and starving country, explaining things away by means of a sort of denial mechanism and never seeming to lose interest in the gargantuan monuments to the world's most hysterical and operatic leader-cult. One evening, as we tried to dine on some gristly bits of duck, he mentioned yet another reason why the day should not long be postponed when the whole peninsula was united under the beaming rule of the Dear Leader. The people of South Korea, he pointed out, were becoming mongrelized. They wedded foreigners—even black American soldiers, or so he'd heard to his evident disgust—and were losing their purity and distinction. Not for Mr. Chae the charm of the ethnic mosaic, but rather a rigid and unpolluted uniformity.
The more we learn of this country the more I wonder how long it will take to integrate their people back into the modern world. I have a friend from Cambodia, he is one of a handful of his family that escaped, and even now it is painful to return to his birth home and those few of his relatives left there do their best to forget.
It will happen one day, either in the aftermath of a nuclear firestorm from a dieing regime or the coup which turns the country over to China or even South Korea for integration. Still the damage is frightening.
Visiting North Korea some years ago, I was lucky to have a fairly genial "minder" whom I'll call Mr. Chae. He guided me patiently around the ruined and starving country, explaining things away by means of a sort of denial mechanism and never seeming to lose interest in the gargantuan monuments to the world's most hysterical and operatic leader-cult. One evening, as we tried to dine on some gristly bits of duck, he mentioned yet another reason why the day should not long be postponed when the whole peninsula was united under the beaming rule of the Dear Leader. The people of South Korea, he pointed out, were becoming mongrelized. They wedded foreigners—even black American soldiers, or so he'd heard to his evident disgust—and were losing their purity and distinction. Not for Mr. Chae the charm of the ethnic mosaic, but rather a rigid and unpolluted uniformity.
The more we learn of this country the more I wonder how long it will take to integrate their people back into the modern world. I have a friend from Cambodia, he is one of a handful of his family that escaped, and even now it is painful to return to his birth home and those few of his relatives left there do their best to forget.
It will happen one day, either in the aftermath of a nuclear firestorm from a dieing regime or the coup which turns the country over to China or even South Korea for integration. Still the damage is frightening.
