[custom_adv] The Children’s Palace, a massive, 2-million-square-foot building on the southwestern edge of the North Korean capital, is billed by the reclusive regime as a temple to youth, a testament to the care and devotion of the nation’s rulers to its future generations. [custom_adv] A North Korean guide, pointing out the sweeping, half-circle design of the entryway, says it signifies the “loving embrace of a mother.”A near-mandatory stop for all tourists and journalists allowed into the country on carefully scripted trips, the Children’s Palace was recently refurbished, at apparently great expense, on orders of Kim Jong Un, who became supreme leader in 2011 following his father’s death. [custom_adv] On Friday, Kim is convening a Workers’ Party Congress, the highest-level political gathering in the one-party state and the first such event since 1980. Some 130 reporters from overseas have been invited to witness the happenings, each assigned a personal minder/interpreter and shuttled to carefully selected sites to keep them occupied until the proceedings begin. [custom_adv] There are no opportunities for unmediated glimpses of North Korean society; we can only draw impressions from the showplaces that reflect, presumably, the highest aspirations of the country. [custom_adv] So it was that the minders arranged an excursion to the palace on Thursday afternoon to have us see, first-hand, the top-rate extracurricular activities offered to the capital’s most gifted children between 11 and 16 years old. [custom_adv] I have no doubt that the talented North Korean youngsters granted access to this facility are enjoying the best their impoverished country has to offer, materially at least. [custom_adv] There’s a pool building with a multi-tiered diving platform. Indoor basketball and volleyball courts. Classes in ballet, musical instruments, singing, embroidery and calligraphy. A computer lab. [custom_adv] The walls are decorated with flowers, sailboats and stars. Whimsical light fixtures, looking like brightly colored balloons on a stick, stretch from floor to ceiling.But for such a supposedly joyous place, the Children’s Palace can feel deeply depressing, an institution where adults have tried to mask life’s cruel realities with some brightly colored paint and some rainbows and unicorns. [custom_adv] The same might be said of schools everywhere, but the youngsters here seem to be in the process of metamorphosing into robotic grown-ups, learning how to subsume their creative spirits to the all-encompassing cult of personality and party that three generations of the Kim dynasty have created.
