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We are always interested in news on cultural as well as political and economic developments in the North, in part because they are frequently indicative of the propaganda machinery. Slate’s Sebastian Strangio had a recent feature on North Korean comics that includes a slide show including materials dating back to the 1990s. The Strangio article draws on the work of Heinz Insu Fenkl, a professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, who has done a number of translations.
Among the many interesting things on his website, one of particular interest to us is the story of Mighty Wing, which appeared in 1994—a tumultuous time in North Korea that included the onset of the famine and the death of Kim Il Sung. From Fenkl’s introduction to a volume, posted on his site:
“[In the story], the Queen Bee refers to a drought that has been ongoing, and the plot of the story features a traitor among the honeybees who willfully misallocates labor resources to build the Queen a country house instead of applying it to the construction of a much-needed aqueduct. Mighty Wing, the hero of the story, is the one who comes up with the idea of building an irrigation system to save "The Garden of One Thousand Flowers" to help replenish the supplies of honey.”
The terrible irony, of course, was that the regime was precisely building palaces and misallocating labor while the country starved. Hats off to Prof. Fenkly; definitely worth a look.
