Across the river, but a world away

Mark Mullen Correspondent

DANDONG, China — I now know that North Korea is almost as much of a mystery to the Chinese as it is to America — even if it’s as close as the other side of a river. The measure is the number of Chinese tourists pressing onto the same tour boat we recently boarded on the banks of the Chinese city of Dandong.

As we cast off moderately overloaded, the captain angled his boat just across the Yalu River on a well-practiced run along the bank of North Korea. Since North Korea’s nuclear weapons test, business is up.

Tourists lifted binoculars and cameras as the boat glided along this strange, sad and many would say scary country — as if seeing the people and the land would provide some explanation for the behavior of its leader Kim Jong Il.

But we were curious too. Our photographer, with a smaller-sized video camera, was already rolling on what would be the first of three boat rides we would take: the first with the tourists, the others on a private charter skirting and flirting as close to the shore as we could get and still be just out of range of rocks the North Korean soldiers are fond of throwing at camera crews.

I was thinking to myself about what would happen if the motor stalled and we drifted onto their shore. It didn’t happen, but we did see a lot. It was not pretty.

You try to observe things objectively, but the preconceptions bully. The place looks desperate. Locals were at the shore washing their hair and clothes in the cold river. Rusted ships and boats littered the shore. There were some construction workers building houses that looked like they will never be occupied. And then, amid the male soldiers walking along as if they had no purpose or destination, there were two conspicuously attractive female soldiers near the elevated bow of one abandoned ship smiling and waving at the Chinese tour boats cruising by.

We knew it was not random because we saw them a few times.

Not totally isolated
In the West, we rely on occasional press visits, refugee accounts and visitor reports to detail the life of North Koreans who seem totally isolated.

NBC VIDEO Undercover Oct. 13: National Geographic’s Lisa Ling had a rare opportunity to not only travel through North Korea, but document her experiences on film. MSNBC

One entrepreneur looking to capitalize on that perception approached us dockside and offered to smuggle us in to see “military installations” for a fee. We asked around and confirmed it was a local scam. The truth is North Korea is isolated but not totally.
At Dandong’s commercial corridor there are some North Koreans with enough money to travel across the so called “Friendship Bridge” which connects the two countries and shops for Chinese goods. Why go back if you’re a North Korean? Kim’s government has that figured out. As many as three generations of one’s family members can be jailed for defecting.

That’s a fact not lost on the young women who work at a restaurant across from our hotel that is partially owned by the North Korean government.

Intended as cultural outreach, the restaurant is more of a curiosity. The young North Korea women who work there wait and bus tables in between singing, dancing and playing instruments in a one-hour North Korean musical review. Video cameras are not allowed, but thanks to some local friends at the table with us who must have made us appear like tourists, we are able to document it.

Two North Korean waitresses and performers tell us at closing time the women are allowed to stay a maximum of three years in this Chinese border town, but they must adhere to strict rules including not dating Chinese men. We didn’t ask what the policy was for dating Americans. All said they would return to their North Korean families: all three generations.

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