Word: sung
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Houses & Long Hair. La Sung Duk is 59 years old and an elder in Pyongyang's West Gate Presbyterian Church. Elder La met his first Russian in September 1945. The Russian was a cheerful, blond young soldier, and he asked Elder La's help in haggling for an apple with a fruit vendor. Elder La tried to ask the soldier the meaning of the green hatbands worn by some of the Russian officers, but he couldn't seem to make the soldier understand his question...
Elder La began to notice the men with the green hatbands again when Kim II Sung set up the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea and installed a new national police chief. The difference was that now the men with the green hatbands were Koreans instead of Russians...
...chief of the green hatbands was Park II Woo, a tall man who wore his hair long in the fashion that Koreans call a "high collar cut." Kim II Sung and Park II Woo lived in downtown Pyongyang for a while, but soon they moved up into Ocean Village, the old Presbyterian missionary compound. Here their American-style red brick houses were next door to the residence of General Terenty Shtykov, who called himself the Soviet ambassador but was, in fact, Russian governor of North Korea. This move did not escape the attention of Pyongyang's 50,000 Christians...
Cultural Clubs & Stewards. Some of Pyongyang's Christians think that the reason such changes passed unnoticed was that Kim II Sung and his friends had given almost everybody something to do. The workers in the city's shoe and textile factories now had labor unions and an eight-hour day. For the intellectuals there was an imposing collection of Russian cultural clubs, Russian friendship societies and Russian-Korean study circles. It was true that the workers' salaries didn't buy as much as they had before, and the labor union stewards were appointed by the government...
Active & Passive. Not all of Pyongyang's Christians were opposed to the Communist oppression. Many of them-probably 30% to 40%-cooperated at least passively with Kim II Sung's Russian-run regime. Real anti-Communists had a system of vegetable classification for degrees of collaboration. Active Communists were called "carrots"; passive supporters of the government were known as "radishes," and genuine anti-Communists simply as "the white ones...