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Over to You

As I mentioned previously, there isn’t going to be much blogging time this month, given the convergence of some personal and professional projects. Some of you have been sending me links in the meantime. That’s great, and I appreciate it, but don’t expect much in the way of reaction. Unfortunately, it will probably be old news before I even find the time to read it.

Instead, why not share them with everyone else in the comments here? Give us a a link, a brief and pithy quote, and if you’d like, add some comment of your own. It’s not exactly an open thread — not a concept I’m fond of, frankly — since I’ll stop in to moderate it and delete anything uncivil, not related to North Korea, or which otherwise runs afoul of my arbitrary plenary authority. Now go forth, link, and thank you.

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  2. So an obese man is rich, successful, powerful. If the conclusion had been, hungry North Koreans will despise an obese man, I would have been surprised. But accepting obesity as a sign of authority doesn’t surprise me at all.
    Now let’s change the subject. In “The World Is Bigger Now” Euna Lee admits that, even though she and Laura Ling damaged two of their tapes, the voice of a defector was clear, so that the North Koreans might have been able to identify him.

  3. Chris, Two comments about your story:

    1. Didn’t you really make a better case that in North Korea, fat man are respected and feared by Pyongyang apparatchiks? And what does that really tell us about the sentiments of ajummas in Chongjin, students in Wonsan, or young soldiers in Hoeryong?

    2. What scientific basis is there for “facial profiling?” It sounds about as scientific as phrenology. Did you put that in there just for the novelty of it?

  4. Joshua, funny but I always translated 관상 as “facial phrenology.” And yeah, there are some who still use it (well, at least in the 1990s they used it at a Korean Airlines hiring process I was roped into).

    As for Kim Jong-un, his size does not come across as the trappings of a well-lived life, but clumsy rollypollyness. The guy really does look freaked-out, as if he is painfully aware of how out of his league he is, and his fatness adds to a boyish look that probably doesn’t serve him well. He’s a North Korean version of Cartman or Jonah Hill, and neither one is advantageous for someone playing catch-up in a position of power.

  5. Joshua,

    Thanks for your comments.

    In response, I, personally, was utterly unimpressed by the facial profiling story as well. However, it ran in, I think, all the South Korean newspapers bar the Hankyoreh, and that was in itself interesting. We ran a Korean story on it, too, and some of that appeared in my piece.

    In a lot of cases, the story in Korean newspapers was not translated into English, either, or at least hadn’t been by the time I wrote that. It says a lot also about South Korea’s desperation to discover what kind of man KJE will be, too.

    Novelty value? No, of course not. As Kushibo said, there are a lot of “experts” in that “art” in South Korea (관상가), and belief in it can be found north of the 38th as well. Since it all feeds into how KJE will be seen where it really matters, we shouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.

    Meanwhile, Kushibo, in my direct conversation with a former cadre defector, the defector was quite clear. When another defector saw that footage, her response, was, verbatim, “와, 대게 멋있어.”

    On the other hand, when I saw that footage, my response was, like yours, “Wow, he looks scared and out of his depth.” But that was refuted by Koreans I spoke to, and I found that fact really interesting.

  6. Joshua said,

    1. Didn’t you really make a better case that in North Korea, fat man are respected and feared by Pyongyang apparatchiks? And what does that really tell us about the sentiments of ajummas in Chongjin, students in Wonsan, or young soldiers in Hoeryong?

    I didn’t address this above; my mistake. The answer is, not Pyongyang, and not a particularly high apparatchik in any case. Also, since apparatchiks have such sway over all corners of life in a lot of cases, for Party men and non-Party men alike, I imagine the feeling could be universal among those with something, anything, to lose. But i take your point.

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