Books of the Month Northern accent

摘要

Pyongyang is commonly imagined as the ultimate Potemkin city. A supercharged amalgamation of Mao's Beijing, Stalin's Moscow and Walt's Disneyland, arranged around stupefying axes leading to enormous monuments to the Kims, and to the 'Juche Idea' (roughly translated as 'Self-Reliance', Juche replaced Marxism-Leninism as North Korea's official ideology at the end of the 1970s), with people starving behind the curtain. Explanations have to be sought for the apparent splendour of this capital in a country which is assumed to be economically dysfunctional. Urban myths are reinforced by the tight regulation of foreign visits for instance, it was widely (and wrongly) believed that Pyongyang's palatial Moscow-style Metro only had two stops, as these were the only stations tourists were allowed to see. Two new books try to go beyond the ultra-totalitarian surface, to give a more multi-faceted sense of what Pyongyang is actually like.