hankyoreh

Staff at a North Korean restaurant in Beijing perform “Arirang.” The restaurant was operating as normal in the days after a group defection from elsewhere in China to South Korea.

Business was booming at a North Korean restaurant in downtown Beijing during the day on Apr. 10. For about an hour and a half, all but three or four of the 15 tables in the dining area on the first floor were occupied.

Most of the customers - there were more than 30, according to a rough estimate - were Chinese families. At one table, there were also two women in their 20s who were dressed for a weekend outing.

Korean was only being spoken by a group of five customers sitting at one table, while the rest of the guests were conversing in Chinese.

At one table where a Chinese family was eating, some Chinese beer was sitting next to Chamiseul soju, a South Korean brand of liquor.

Staff at the restaurant said that the lunchtime concert only takes place when the second floor has been reserved, but when the first floor filled up, an impromptu concert took place there.

North Korean employees who had been serving in white blouses and black skirts changed into the hanbok, traditional Korean attire, that they wear on the stage and began a rendition of the beloved Korean song “Arirang,” with some singing and others playing instruments.

Around the same time, another North Korean restaurant in Beijing was relatively empty. Throughout lunch, guests filled barely half of the tables at this restaurant, which is located on the outskirts of the city.

“Lunch on Sunday is when we have the fewest customers,” restaurant staff explained. “We have a lot of business on Thursday and Friday evenings and on Saturdays.” The restaurant was open for business as usual, however.

At North Korean restaurants in Beijing, no reaction could be seen to the group defection of employees at another overseas North Korean restaurant that South Korea’s Unification Ministry announced last week.

“I don’t know, and how could I know, about that kind of news?” one employee shot back. “I really don’t get it. People who turn their backs on the country [North Korea] that has been so good to them probably won’t do very well over there [South Korea] either.”

Another restaurant employee seemed uninterested in the news, smiling and saying she had not heard about it.

Staff at the Ryukyung Restaurant in the city of Ningbo in Zhejiang Province, China, which is thought to be where the group of defectors were working, told the Hankyoreh during a phone interview that the business was closed “for the time being.”

“We‘re not sure when we’ll reopen,” an employee said. “We‘ll need to have instructions from the management.”

The South Korean government has included overseas North Korean restaurants in its sanctions, asking South Koreans not to frequent them. The government is also claiming that these measures are working and that North Korean restaurants are feeling the pinch.

However, it appears that it will take some time to determine how much these restaurants are actually being affected.

“The anti-corruption drive under Chinese President Xi Jinping has led to a decline in entertainment at expensive restaurants,” a source in Beijing said. “Given that North Korean restaurants also tend to be pricey, it will take a while for us to know whether their sales have gone down, and if so by how much and whether that is because of the anti-corruption measures or because of Seoul’s sanctions against the North.”

Furthermore, the sanctions are likely to have a different effect on North Korean restaurants in large cities, where many of the clients are Chinese, and in smaller cities near famous tourist spots, which tend to cater to South Korean tourists.

Pyongyang reportedly runs restaurants in various parts of Southeast Asia including China, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam with the purpose of earning foreign currency.

According to estimates by the South Korean government, about 130 restaurants send US$10 million back to North Korea each year, with 90% of these restaurants located in China.

In 2013, the Washington Free Beacon, a US news website, cited US and other Western intelligence agencies in a report stating that overseas North Korean restaurants remit US$1.8 million to North Korea each year.

The employees who work at North Korean restaurants reportedly are chosen to be trained in dance, singing and art before being sent overseas. They are said to live in a group setting even when they are abroad.

During the early 2000s, the employees at these restaurants started catering to South Korean customers by singing their songs and using terminology familiar to them, leading the restaurants to be regarded as a symbol of inter-Korean exchange. Since North and South Korea‘s relations have chilled, however, they have come to be regarded as a means for Pyongyang to earn foreign currency.

By Kim Oi-hyun, Beijing correspondent

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]