South Korean Makes Capital of Hip Northern Face
New York Times
By Stephanie Strom
August 23, 2000
Though even rotary phones are scarce in North Korea, its leader, Kim Jong Il, boldly advertises a touch-tone model. Or is it an impersonator?
INCHON, South Korea -- About 15 years ago, Bai Eun Shik swallowed his pride and got himself a permanent wave.
"I started noticing that I didn't have a lot of hair, and what was left wasn't so thick or strong," Mr. Bai said. "I thought a perm would help."
Today that perm, carefully maintained over the years, has helped in ways Mr. Bai never dreamed of, although his colleagues at the insurance company where he used to work picked up on the potential of his hairdo long ago. With it Mr. Bai, 53, is a dead ringer for the 58-year-old Kim Jong Il of North Korea, who over the six years since the death of his autocratic father, Kim Il Sung, has emerged to become the unlikely darling of the global media.
"Actually, I think I'm better looking," Mr. Bai said.
He batted his eyelashes behind the tinted sunglasses that, together with a simple, dun worker's suit, are the hallmarks of the Kim Jong Il look. "I have prettier eyes," he said.
He's slimmer, too, but is trying to beef up a bit around the middle, the better to replicate Kim Jong Il's slight paunch.
Just before the landmark summit meeting in June between Kim Jong Il and South Korea's president, Kim Dae Jung, Mr. Bai won a Kim Jong Il look-alike contest sponsored by the Sun Woo Corporation, which was using the meeting to drum up business for its matchmaking services.
Since then, the resemblance has led to lucrative advertising contracts for Mr. Bai, a paradox of the first order, as advertising is such a blatantly capitalist concept.
He can currently be seen hawking a high-tech phone service that Kim Jong Il's subjects would very likely find otherworldly, given that North Korea's communications system has not been upgraded since the 1950's and its people have virtually no access even to rotary dial telephones.
He has also signed deals to do ads for therapeutic mattresses, a security company and a computer manufacturer.
Mr. Bai has taken his newly popular role to heart, turning down work he finds offensive or too deliberately tongue in cheek -- although he clearly finds his uncanny resemblance to the Dear Leader, as Kim Jong Il is called in North Korea, amusing.
"I want to appear in a way that inspires respect," he said, "because I want to contribute to the thaw in relations between our two countries and support it."
His Kim Jong Il suit, with its distinctive zip-front jacket, is tailor-made. The pants are slightly too long because Kim Jong Il reportedly wears his pants long to cover the lifts in his shoes, which Mr. Bai has heard are almost three inches high.
Mr. Bai drew the line at lifts, however. "I'm the same height as him without the platform shoes," he said.
The outfit puts him on the cutting edge of fashion here. An average of six people a day buy Kim-Jong-Il-style sunglasses at the Midopa Department Store in Seoul, according to a spokeswoman, who said the store was planning to offer other Kim-Jong-Il-related items.
"We're talking platform shoes and khaki workers' uniforms," the spokeswoman, Jung So Yeun, said. "The only problem is whether we can get hold of enough of them."
Next month Mr. Bai is scheduled to begin work on a movie, tentatively titled "1004 Days," in which he will play Mr. Kim. "I've been very busy," Mr. Bai said.
The movie is set in 2003, with North and South in a federation suddenly confronted with a financial crisis somewhat similar to the one that rocked the South Korean economy less than three years ago. As the federation slides toward economic disaster, hard-liners on both sides start agitating to split it apart.
Kim Jong Il and Kim Dae Jung must fight to keep the peninsula united.
Somewhere along the way, the movie is supposed to remind viewers of the Three Kingdoms disputes, a bit of Dark Ages Korean history that Kim Jong Il would no doubt approve as an apt lesson in the evils of feudalism, imperialism and aristocratic ambition.
"It's a bit confusing," Mr. Bai conceded. "But what's interesting is that it's coming true -- although, of course, we don't want to have any coups d'etat or anything like that now."
If the plot was indeed conceived seven years ago, as Mr. Bai asserted, it seems prescient, both in its depiction of a united North and South Korea and in its convolutedness.
With the first across-the-border family gathering aimed at healing the human wounds wrought by the Korean War, eventual reunification of the peninsula is not as far-fetched as it was even three months ago.
Since the June summit meeting, Kim Jong Il has embarked on a shrewd campaign to burnish his image, proving himself deft at the sharp, witty retort and a master at affable but intelligent rapports. Once regarded as one of the most reclusive and insular leaders, he has become an overnight sensation.
"I've always wanted to beat him to death with my bare hands," said Kim Kyung Ho, a taxi driver in Seoul, "but over the last several weeks that feeling has faded. Now it seems that one word from Kim Jong Il can make anything happen."
Beyond his startling mastery of spin, Mr. Kim continues to reveal himself as a shrewd politician. His mercurial joviality and on-again, off-again proposals for ending the state of war that has persisted here for half a century bring an "Alice in Wonderland" quality to the efforts to bring the countries together.
Recently, for instance, he surprised many around the world when he told a delegation of visitors from the South Korean media that he had been joking when he told the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, that he would scrap North Korea's missile development if the United States helped his country launch satellites.
He seemed to relish the notion that the proposal might have given the United States "a bad headache," the South Korean media reported.
Such cavalier treatment of a major foreign policy issue served as a reminder that Kim Jong Il is, in spite of all the good press, still the same Kim Jong Il he was a few months ago, if just a little more openly so.
South Korea has a history of slighting citizens who resemble its own political leaders, as Mr. Bai well knows, having recently met an actor who looks like the former South Korean strongman Chun Doo Hwan. "He told me he has sometimes had difficulty getting work," Mr. Bai said.
Men resembling other former South Korean autocrats, Roh Tae Woo and Park Chung Hee, have had similar complaints. But Mr. Bai does not worry that Mr. Kim's capriciousness could hurt him.
"I don't know how he is perceived in political circles," Mr. Bai said, "but among ordinary people, he's been very well received, and these family reunions only enhance that. I can feel it when I walk down the street. Little children come up to me on the street and ask for my autograph, and older people smile at me and address me as 'National Defense Committee Chairman.' " (That is Kim Jong Il's official title.)
Mr. Bai has his own plans for fostering continuing reconciliation. He is certain that travel between the countries will become far easier, and when it does he would like to begin cultivating environmental awareness in his North Korean neighbors.
"I've heard there's deforestation there," he said, "and that's a problem we can help address."
He said North Korean agents seeking a stand-in for the Dear Leader had never contacted him, but he confessed a desire for a meeting.
"I feel I have to meet him, at least once," Mr. Bai said. "And judging from his style, I feel sure he'll call me."
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