"From the outside, everything about the community, from how it emerged, to how far it is willing to carry its commitment to North Korea, is puzzling. Roh and his followers, listening intently to the gospel delivered straight from Pyongyang, offer a window into how North Korea’s ideology spreads under the radar on U.S. soil, and, ultimately, just how people decide what to believe in...
[Roh] became a student activist against the Park dictatorship, but saw no hope for democratization in South Korea and, after a few years saving up money, decided to come to the United States. It was 1973.
“At that time I thought that United States was number one democratic country, number one social justice–oriented country,” Roh said. But during his years at the University of Texas as an urban sociology student, he changed his mind. "I started to know what is jingoism, what is the civil rights movement in the U.S.A.," he said in his somewhat stilted English, pointing to the struggle of black Americans and racist laws targeting Chinese immigrants in the 18th century. "I didn’t know before I came here. I started to open my consciousness [and] become critical," he said...
North Korea caught Roh’s attention for the first time in 1989, when he heard news that several high-profile South Korean dissidents had taken unauthorized trips to Pyongyang as an unofficial way to promote reunification... After the rally in Panmunjom, a village north of the 2.5-mile-wide demilitarized zone (DMZ) that separates the two countries and where the armistice that paused the Korean War was signed, 15 participants, including Roh and three other Korean émigrés, were unexpectedly whisked away and driven to a beautiful villa. Kim Il Sung walked out and greeted them personally; they had been chosen to share a meal with the Great Leader...
Roh recalled the moment when he began to sympathize with Kim, as the North Korean leader described how hard it was to establish the country, counting only “seven to eight intellectuals” among his leadership's ranks. By the end of the banquet, when a symbolic course of “black, rotten potatoes” like those that were the only thing available during World War II and the Korean War were served, Kim had won Roh over.
“My feeling is [that] he’s like a grandfather,” Roh said. “My grandfather.”...
While young people in South Korea worryabout a chaotic future brought on by the potential reunification, for some second-generation Koreans in the U.S., Roh’s work on North Korea provides a happy illusion of an alternate life that they’ve never lived: simple, pure, with worry-free access to housing, education, and medical treatment."
The subtext of this article: the way that North Korea is constructed allows people to place their fantasies on the country. And that's a different way to think about it.
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