Millennials: The word conjures the tired cliches of internet ragebait: avocado toast and participation trophies. For a long time, millennials were a stereotype of feckless, tech-addicted youth, yet the oldest of us are now in our early 40s. But what of millennials in North Korea? Here, stereotypes of a coddled generation do not apply, and reliable information is not easily accessed. How has North Korea reacted to the information age, the ubiquity of the mobile phone, and the millennial development of its neighbor to the south? These are the questions that Suk-young Kim, author of numerous books on the cultures of North and South Korea, sets out to answer in her most recent book.
Reliable information on North Korea is still hard to come by. High profile defectors like Yeonmi Park, now a US conservative commentator and author of the best selling memoir In Order to Live, operate in a highly polemicized context. Some (including Park) have been accused of offering exaggerated stories that obfuscate the truth about the nonetheless undeniably authoritarian and impoverished conditions in the North. In South Korea, article 7 of the National Security Act has often been used to suppress discourse around North Korea if deemed positive or supportive, further creating a situation where making a balanced assessment of conditions is difficult.
In an attempt to obtain more reliable information, Kim conducted interviews with 16 defectors, or resettlers, as Kim prefers to term them. About 33,000 resettled North Koreans currently live in South Korea, and although her sample size is small, she interviewed a wide cross-section of resettlers, and always specifies their particular background in terms of age, gender, education level etc. These interviews are supplemented with a wide range of secondary sources.
The book begins by outlining technological change in North Korea in the new millennium. Non-North Korea watchers may be surprised to learn that the country has developed internet protocol television, online commerce, and uses Youtube to promote itself abroad. The book then profiles North Korean millennials themselves: the generation that grew up during the widespread famines of the 1990s is becoming increasingly tech-savvy and interested in foreign—particularly South Korean—media. In order to pursue their interests in an extremely low trust society, one in which bribery and informing on fellow citizens is widespread, North Korean millennials have developed creative ways of living, sometimes using the technology intended to surveil them to access forbidden media.
Kim informs us that, in North Korea, knowing foreign tech-related terms such as “file” and “upload” can signify knowledge of foreign media. Furthermore, “do you want to watch a South Korean drama with me?” suggests more than just forbidden media and can be code for physical intimacy, in the same way as the slang term “Netflix and chill”.
Kim moves on to offer readings of several of the most popular South Korean dramas, their popularity being determined by a BBC News Korea poll of defectors conducted in 2019. Kim reads dramas such as Autumn in my Heart and Boys Over Flowers in a North Korean context. The shows all turn at crucial points on cell phones—Boys Over Flowers features heavy product placement of Samsung devices. In these dramas, North Koreans see cell phones making and breaking social relationships, acting as mediators to intimacy, and allowing characters to surveil each other.
The director of Boys over Flowers likened Northerners watching Southern dramas to “receiving an immunization shot”, an idea that was more fully realized with the drama Crash Landing on You. Realizing the clandestine success of these dramas in North Korea, the makers of the drama concocted a story heavy with North Korean content, offering ample opportunity for each society to view the other in a new light.
The book then discusses other forms of South Korean media prevalent in the North, primarily feature films and Korean pop music. A reading of the hit film Parasite in the light of North Korea is particularly informative and touches on subjects that have been much neglected in English language discourse around the film. The film not only directly references Kim Jong-un’s missile button, but also resonates with North Korean audiences due to the film’s emphasis on creeping around in subterranean passages and constant deception. Although these readings of dramas and films are Kim’s, they are supported with quotes and anecdotes from resettlers.
The picture that emerges across the book—as its subtitle suggests—is of a generation living creatively with authoritarianism: exploiting loopholes and developing elaborate schemes of language and behaviour—with much of it unfolding directly under authorities’ noses. North Korean wedding photographers emulate tropes and scenes from romantic South Korean dramas, audiences find gangster films cathartic in the context of the North’s disingenuous stance on organized crime.
Kim draws an interesting analogy between North Korean behaviour and crypto and blockchain—blockchain assumes distrust, but once this trust has been established (through digital verification) communication and exchange can begin. In the same way, North Koreans must establish themselves as a trustworthy member of the same group before the sharing of illicit media can commence. Kim illustrates just how low trust North Korean society is in the following passage:
“When I asked him what trust means in North Korea, he looked at me as if I was deranged or speaking of a word or concept that just does not exist in his world of experience.”
Following the linguist Michael Halliday, Kim uses the notion of an anti-language, an ambiguous and shifting form of slang used by a counterculture or anti-society. North Korean fans of South Korean dramas would substitute their favorite forbidden drama titles with the title of something state-approved. Only those in the know would understand that the participants are actually discussing forbidden media and not North Korean propaganda. Kim expands this notion of anti-language to anti -behavior—for example, signalling interest in western media through clothing and other behaviors.
While this book is refreshingly free from jargon and lengthy abstract passages, the theoretical idea of antibehavior is lightly-sketched and could be further expanded and elaborated. However, Kim is keen to focus on the reliable sources she has rather than extrapolating or speculating—and there just isn’t that much information on North Korea for her to build on. Nonetheless, Millennial North Korea does much to give us a picture of a more developed North Korea, one in which its citizens go to creative efforts to thwart authoritarianism in small but significant ways.
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