Life behind a mosquito net: foreign student experiences of North Korea’s backstage

Abstract

North Korea-based foreign students enjoy unique circumstances as long-term foreign residents of Pyongyang. In contrast to short-term outside visitors such as international tourists, they partake in freedoms and privileges that the xenophobic North Korean state seldom grants to foreigners, such as the ability to walk the streets of Pyongyang unaccompanied. They also interact extensively with local Koreans such as the North Korean students who live alongside them in the dormitory, and their teachers at university. However, like other classes of foreigners in North Korea, they too are monitored and presented a propaganda front. Drawing upon interviews with foreigners who studied at Kim Il Sung University, this article utilizes Goffman’s dramaturgical framework to tease out ways in which the closer proximity and longer exposure to North Koreans that North Korea-based foreign students enjoy affords them opportunities to witness dramaturgical failure, thereby affording them glimpses into the North Korean backstage.

Keywords:

• North Korea
• Pyongyang
• foreign students
• Kim Il Sung University
• dramaturgy

Disclosure statement

I, the author of this essay, Alek Sigley, report no financial conflict or conflict of interest resulting from this research.

Research note

Research approved by The University of Western Australia Human Research Ethics Committee. Approval #: RA/4/1/6850

Notes

1 This report is adapted from my Honours thesis, “Sojourn in Paradise,” submitted to the University of Western Australia in October 2020. I would like to extend a heartfelt thanks to Dr. Joanna Elfving-Hwang for her meticulous mentorship both during and after my time at UWA. I would also like to express my gratitude to those other researchers at UWA who helped me flesh out this project, as well as towards the two anonymous reviewers at Asian Anthropology for their thoughtful comments on the draft of this report. Last but not least I’d like to thank the foreign student interlocuters who I interviewed for this study, and all the other friends I made at Kim Il Sung University, both foreign and Korean.

2 For romanisation of Korean I adopt McCune–Reischauer, and for Chinese, the pinyin system.

3 I follow North Korean practice in rendering ryuhaksaeng into English as “foreign students,” and oegukin as “foreigners.”

4 Memoirs such as Harrold’s Comrades and Strangers (2004), and Everard’s Only Beautiful Please (2012) give a picture of the privileges enjoyed by foreign long-term residents of Pyongyang when it comes to movement and access to the city. Another category of long-term foreign resident worth addressing would be foreign teaching staff at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), an institution unique for being the only privately owned, foreign-backed university in the country. These foreign teachers live a sequestered life on the PUST campus, which is situated in the countryside on the very edge of Pyongyang. Other than periodic shopping trips to Tongil Market, and prearranged sight-seeing trips (which are the same as those tourists take and conducted by the same Korean companies running tours for foreign guests, such as Korea International Travel Company/KITC), PUST teachers must apply in advance to visit Pyongyang. When they do, they are required to have a minder accompany them. Therefore, I would consider them to be an intermediary category, lying somewhere in the middle of guest and sojourner. For a memoir account of life as a foreign instructor at PUST, see Suki Kim’s Without You, There Is No Us (2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alek Sigley

Alek Sigley is a PhD student in the Stanford University program for Modern Thought and Literature. From 2018–2019, he pursued postgraduate research on North Korean fiction in Pyongyang at the College of Literature, Kim Il Sung University.