Notes Of Hope

By Bill Powell

Foreign correspondents can be a pretty jaded lot, full of a world-weariness that's partly feigned but partly real. But nobody was feeling--or even pretending to be--blase aboard the chartered Asiana Airlines 747 from Beijing as it bore down on Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, on Feb. 25 carrying the New York Philharmonic orchestra and 80 mostly U.S. journalists. For many of us, North Korea has long been as remote as the dark side of the moon, so we were more than eager to get a look at it. Television cameramen jostled for position in window seats to capture images of the brown, frozen landscape as it came into view below. Reporters took out small digital cameras, even as flight attendants tried to shoo people back to their seats.

For me, years of pent-up curiosity would finally be satiated--at least a little. I've covered this country on and off for almost two decades--from Tokyo, Moscow, Beijing and now Shanghai--but despite repeated requests for a visa, I'd never been allowed in. Perhaps this was because I'm a U.S. citizen, and we're still technically at war with North Korea. More likely it was because my stories about this little-known country had not exactly flattered its despotic rulers: the late Great Leader Kim Il Sung and his son, Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. Now, thanks to the Philharmonic's historic visit, I was finally going to see the place for myself.

It soon became clear that I would not be seeing very much of it. The North Koreans, to say the least, are control freaks. Hordes of government minders immediately surrounded us on the tarmac as we waited for the orchestra's music director, Lorin Maazel, and his musicians to have a group picture taken in front of a beaming mosaic of the Great Leader. The minders, whose forced conviviality didn't hide the tension in their faces, would not leave our side until about 44 hours later, when we got on a flight out of Pyongyang.

We boarded buses and headed into town--about a 1512-mile (25 km) journey--and some of the North Korea I'd read about and heard about from diplomats and refugees and defectors started to become real. In the late afternoon gloom, we passed row after row of apartment buildings and office buildings, almost all unlit. People either trudged along the side of the road or rode bikes, many stopping to stare at our convoy. And every mile or so, there stood in the middle of the road a female traffic cop in an aqua blue uniform and a fur-lined hat, holding herself ramrod straight and wielding a baton to point the way to drivers. She had one of the world's easier jobs, because there was no traffic to direct.

We were deposited in Yanggakdo International Hotel, a 47-story structure that sits on an island in Pyongyang's Taedong River and abuts a nine-hole golf course, where I imagine it's pretty easy to get a tee time. The hotel is in an isolated spot, far from the streets where we might encounter ordinary North Koreans. And that was the point: our hosts plainly didn't want us mingling. When I later groused about it to the Pyongyang correspondent for the Russian news agency ITAR TASS, he just chuckled. "Don't you know what foreigners here call your hotel?'' he asked. "Alcatraz. Difficult to get into--and even harder to leave."

While the orchestra rehearsed, our minders took the journalists on a whirlwind tour of Pyongyang. One highlight: a hill overlooking the city, where a gigantic bronze statue of the Great Leader stands in front of the Korean Revolutionary Museum. There was no one around as we snapped photos of one another in front of the Big Man, but as we were about to leave, a group of around 40 people walked up in orderly rows, approaching the statue reverentially and then bowing deeply. But before we could ask what, exactly, the Great Leader meant to them, their tour guide herded them off. When we were back on the bus, we got a tongue-lashing in Korean from a senior minder. My group's minder, Mr. Kim, sheepishly interpreted: "Stick to the schedule. Otherwise, you'll never be able to see everything, and you'll get in trouble."

As hard as the government tried to prevent it, little bits of reality kept seeping out from behind the curtain. At the Grand People's Study House, a sort of public library that conducts free classes in a variety of subjects, a colleague accidentally opened a door and found herself in a classroom that was dimly lit and at least 15DEGF (8DEGC) colder than the ones we had been shown. Some of the students wore winter jackets and hats. Earlier that morning, a member of the orchestra arrived late for a lavish breakfast buffet and found a couple of waitresses taking pictures of the mountains of unfinished food. It's been 10 years since the great famine ended, killing an estimated 2 million or more North Koreans, but the waitresses at Alcatraz had never seen a spread quite like the one served to us that morning.

The swings between humor and pathos ended that evening at the East Pyongyang Grand Theater, an ornate, three-tier orchestra hall whose stage had recently been fitted with a new acoustic shell to make the venue worthy of the New York Philharmonic. About 1,400 people jammed the hall--a few dozen foreign diplomats and business people, the rest North Koreans. When Maazel took the podium, it quickly became clear that the evening would be one of emotion. North Korean and U.S. flags stood at either end of the stage, and the audience rose as both nations' anthems were played. For the next two hours, it was easy to forget that during the afternoon's bus ride, we had passed a poster of a giant fist slamming a helpless little Uncle Sam that read, SMASH THE USA.

The musicians played compositions by Richard Wagner, Antonin Dvorak and George Gershwin, but it was the last piece that brought down the house. Arirang is a 600-year-old Korean folk anthem adored in both North and South, and the orchestra "played it beautifully," a beaming Mr. Kim pronounced. As the musicians left the stage, some turned and waved goodbye, and many in the audience reciprocated. The cheers then got louder and went on and on.

Associate principal bass player Jon Deak later said he was near tears. So too was assistant concertmaster Michelle Kim, a descendant of a North Korean family. "Tonight I didn't feel South Korean or North Korean, but Korean," she said. U.S. diplomats present were euphoric. Former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry, who once presented plans to President Bill Clinton for bombing the North's nuclear sites, gushed that the evening "may have pushed us over the top" when it comes to negotiating about the North's nuclear-weapons program.

But this is still Kim Jong Il's North Korea we're talking about--a rogue regime, with nukes that exports narcotics and possibly nuclear-weapons technology, that brutally suppresses its own people. It's not just our hotel that's Alcatraz; the entire country is a prison, and thousands risk their lives to escape. About a year and a half ago, I sat in a small apartment outside the town of Yanji in northeast China with two people who had recently fled the North. One, a young woman, told me how her mother had been hauled off to a political prison, where she had fallen ill and died. The other refugee, a young man, said he was simply tired of the poverty he faced in a small village. "There is no future in our country," he told me.

Can a concert, however scintillating, help change that? It's hard to know what ordinary North Koreans made of the event: the official newspaper buried the story on page 4. When he introduced Gershwin's An American in Paris, Maazel told the audience that perhaps one day another composer would write a famous symphony titled An American in Pyongyang. The crowd laughed--and applauded long and hard, endorsing the sentiment. But the possibility of that ever happening still lies with Kim Jong Il, and he didn't even turn up for the show.

Hermit Kingdom For more photos from the New York Philharmonic's trip to North Korea, go to time.com/philharmonic