“Potemkin villages,” I scribble onto a scrap of paper for the interpreter, Mr. Kim. “What does that mean?” he asks. “It means that you are just showing us facades here to feign growth and progress, just as the Russian Prince Potemkin once did,” I reply. “You should google it. “That, though, is not an option available to Mr. Kim. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the only country on earth in which the people have no connection to the World Wide Web.
The 21-year-old interpreter has never left North Korea. He believes in the imminent victory of the socialist revolution and is now trying to show us the achievements of his native country: The capital, cleaned up for the 100th birthday of the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung, and a new high-rise development that looks like something the Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser might have designed, albeit in concrete. Western diplomats in Pyongyang sardonically refer to the development as the city’s new “Manhattan skyline.”
looking beyond borders 