There are two kinds of North Korea.

There are two faces of North Korea: one where hunger, poverty, tyranny, and oppression reign—the condemned totalitarian state; the other without the obsession with pop trends, without the social media culture, without anime ever having leaked in, without capitalism-centered superficial identities—the pure, secret paradise. There exists something the outside world cannot comprehend: a place untouched by the endless noise of consumerism, unpolluted by the global obsession with screens, brands, and hollow performances, where the fixation on career and “success” is rendered obsolete, and where muscular men and botoxed women do not market their bodies. The lack of digital fashions, anime fandoms, pornographic aesthetics, TikTok dances, or Instagram-addicted personas—this very absence is a hidden sanctuary from modernity’s endless rush and noise. I imagine walking through its streets, and the first thing I notice is that there are no cars occupying every corner, no advertisements covering every scene, no noise pollution, and no “zombies” rushing around with their heads buried in their phones. Because there are thousands of Seouls, but there is only one Pyongyang. Sometimes, I can’t help but feel the urge to escape there. It is not the United States, Germany, or Australia that adorns my dreams, but North Korea. I am so disgusted by the West—the so-called “pink utopia”—that at times I become utterly enraptured by whatever stands radically apart from it, so much so that I even find myself tolerating the savage aspects of those regimes and thinking, “To preserve such purity, oppression and secrecy, may be necessary.” And this, despite the fact that I hold no ideological loyalties—and by my very free nature, could never truly hold any. My only admiration for Kim Il-sung is not for some “heaven,” but for the fact that he managed to build a surreal simulation, a private laboratory on earth as if it had descended from outer space. Yet someone who has never listened to this nation’s songs, which all carry piety, coolness, and proud modesty, because they have never discovered them, will feel nothing from what I am saying; they will continue to corrupt themselves with American rap songs full of money, sex, and cursing, trying to mold themselves into the typical Western human type that views everything unflinching and determined as “authoritarian.”