Reading Gone With The Wind in Pyongyang

To come across Margaret Mitchells 1936 Civil War epic in North Korea is to stumble over the unlikeliest of American cultural touchstones in the unlikeliest of places. What does antebellum plantation life have to do with North Korea? What appeal does Scarlett OHaras high-society ruthlessness hold for people only a few years past a horrific famine?

And yet here,in a country thought to have the worlds tightest censorship net,a place where the literary culture was largely inherited from Joseph Stalin,the government has published a novel that longs for the days of the slave-owning American south.

The reasons are several. In Gone With the Wind,North Koreans found echoes of their own history and insights into the US: bloody civil wars fought nearly a century apart; two cities Atlanta and Pyongyang reduced to rubble after attacks by the US; two cultures that still celebrate the way they stood up to the Yankees. If North Koreans have yet to find fortune,they havent given up.

Perhaps more than anything though,North Koreans found what readers everywhere ask of a good novel: an escape and a comfort. Ambitious young women,raised amid entrenched sexism,find inspiration in Scarletts rise from ruin. Men revel in the muscularity of her swashbuckling love,Rhett Butler. People struggling with a lack of heat in winter,or political infighting,can disappear into Mitchells story.

It also moved into official life. The movie,forbidden to the general public but beloved by the former dictator and movie buff Kim Jong Il,is sometimes used in English-language programmes to train elite government officials. North Korean negotiators meeting with US envoys would occasionally quote from it,once replying to American criticism with the quote: Frankly,Scarlett,I dont give a damn.

The book is thought to have largely disappeared from here by the end of the 1950-1953 Korean War. When the government suddenly ordered it translated and released in the mid-1990s,a time when Soviet support had disappeared and famine was looming,it swept like a literary firestorm through Pyongyang. For a while,you couldnt have a conversation without talking about Gone With the Wind, said a former Pyongyang TV trader. Why it was published,though,remains unclear. Some believe the decision was meant as a symbolic peace offering to the US. Others see it as an attempt by the government to teach its people about American culture.

Or perhaps it was an insult. Gone With the Wind is,in many ways,a celebration of how North Korea sees its own history: as a small,honourable nation that stood up to Washington.