In 2017, an international train bound for Sinuiju was waiting to depart from a station in Pyongyang.
“In ten minutes, this train will depart from Pyongyang, the revolutionary heart and capital city of North Korea. We ask all passengers to please take their seats.”
The announcer’s voice rang out inside one of the passenger cars where a man and woman sat huddled off to one side. The man in his early 30s – who anyone, with just a glance, could guess was Chinese – spoke urgently with the woman sitting primly beside him.
The woman, dressed in hanbok with a white cropped jacket and black skirt, was Ms. Lee, an employee at Pyongyang Hotel. She had graduated from the hotel business administration department of Pyongyang Tourism College and was subsequently sent to work as a hotelier at Pyongyang Hotel. Why then did she follow a Chinese man onto a train, and just what were they discussing so urgently?
The man on the train happened to be Mr. Peng, a Chinese national who had visited North Korea as a tourist and previously caught the attention of North Korea’s Ministry of State Security as the owner of a large ore company based in China. Upon confirming Mr. Peng’s North Korea-friendly disposition, the Ministry of State Security called up Ms. Lee and tasked her with the secret mission to “charm Mr. Peng and get him to stay in North Korea.” The mission was a strategy to try to attract foreign capital to North Korea by tying wealthy foreigners to the country.
Ms. Lee, chosen for the task based on the basis of her Chinese language proficiency, intentionally approached Mr. Peng at the hotel and became a constant companion on his sightseeing trips. After a day’s sightseeing was over, Mr. Peng would return alone to the hotel and Ms. Lee then joined him in his hotel room to share a drink to assuage his loneliness.
Then, on the day before Mr. Peng was scheduled to leave the country, Ms. Lee suggested that “as it was [their] final night, [they] should drink together and have the kind of conversations you can only have in the dark of night.” Mr. Peng did not object. That night, Ms. Lee made her confession, asking Mr. Peng, “What do you think about me? We’ve only known each other a few days, but you’ve already made your way into my heart.”
Mr. Peng, who seemed to reciprocate Ms. Lee’s feelings, suggested that she “go with [him] to live together in China.” In response, Ms. Lee quickly ended the conversation, rebutting “What’s so important about where you live so long as you’re in love?” The two of them soon turned out the lights in the room.
This conversation was picked up by the Ministry of State Security’s listening devices inside the hotel room. The next day, the ministry had Ms. Lee send Mr. Peng off at the train station.
On board the train with Mr. Peng at Pyongyang Station, Ms. Lee tearfully beseeched her lover, “If you go now, when will I see you again? I love you. Can’t you just live with me here?” Mr. Peng answered her plea with tears in his own eyes. “I’ll go to China to get my parents’ permission and then return for you. This isn’t goodbye, so don’t worry,” he told her as he wrote down his Chinese cell phone number.
Ms. Lee continued to cling to Mr. Peng. She pleaded ardently with him, sending him off with a final request that “the trip to Sinuiju takes a little over four hours, so contact me if you change your mind on the way.” However, no call came when the train arrived in Sinuiju. Even after the year ended, no call ever came.
In the end, the scheme to entice the Chinese businessman into staying in North Korea failed, and the female hotel employee responsible – Ms. Lee – was ultimately disappeared by the Ministry of State Security.
Her story has since regularly appeared as part of Ministry of State Security training for hotel employees who interact with foreign guests. The educational training explains her case as one where “she was unable to act sufficiently genuine, her target noticed this, and she was exposed,” and that those who “can make foreigners or citizens of enemy states stay in the fatherland [North Korea] will be heroes.”
It was later learned that Mr. Peng had actually returned to China and asked his parents for permission to return to North Korea to do business and take Ms. Lee as his wife. However, a member of China’s Ministry of State Security who was close to Mr. Peng’s parents happened to overhear the story and tipped them off that it was a North Korean government scheme, thus revealing the truth of Ms. Lee’s “fake love” to a heartbroken Mr. Peng.
She brought Mr. Peng to tears twice, but was Ms. Lee’s love real? While it remains a mystery as to whether anyone working at a Pyongyang hotel believes that they will be heroes if they can successfully seduce foreign tourists into staying in North Korea, the question also remains as to how many foreign tourists could really be fooled into staying in North Korea out of “fake love.”
Translated by Rose Adams. Edited by Robert Lauler.
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