About this series

Background

On Friday, 4 August 2006, in celebration of the sixth anniversary of the publication of the CanKor Report, a weekly Canada-Korea electronic news and information service, Editor-in-chief Erich Weingartner wrote a fictional profile entitled Portrait of a Patriot.

“If any DPR Korean happens to read this story,” says Weingartner, “I want to underline that the person I am describing does not actually exist. He is a fiction, a figment of my imagination, a composite crafted from a quarter century experience interacting with Koreans.”  Even the name of the character is fake, explains Weingartner, as will be immediately obvious to all Koreans. Breaking all naming rules, Pak Kim Li is a combination of the three most popular family names in Korea.

Erich Weingartner is uniquely qualified to tell this story. He has visited Korea on many occasions since 1978. His first visit to the DPRK was on behalf of the World Council of Churches in 1985. In 1986 he arranged the first encounter since the Korean War between church delegations of both sides of Korea in Switzerland. Until 1995 he organized three more such inter-Korean non-governmental conferences. From 1997 to 1999 he headed the Food Aid Liaison Unit of the UN World Food Programme in Pyongyang, traveling by land cruiser throughout all provinces of the DPRK, visiting ports, rail yards, warehouses, nurseries, kindergartens, boarding schools, orphanages, hospitals, factories, farms and many families in their homes, both in rural and urban settings.

Praise for Portrait of a Patriot

The piece of fiction in the 6th anniversary edition of the CanKor Report was a great hit, it seems, with several readers calling it "brilliant". The majority of the quotes below were reported in CanKor Report 258, 11 August 2006.

"Just brilliant! You have hit the nail on the head!"

 David Morton, former United Nations Coordinator in Pyongyang, Country Director of the UN World Food Programme.

"Brilliant piece of hermeneutics. Bravo. Wholly believable."

Aidan Foster-Carter, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Sociology & Modern Korea, Leeds University.

"That story about Pak Kim Li is brilliant."

"Your piece of not so fictional fiction is brilliant!"

Nigel Cowie, General Manager of Daedong Credit Bank, Pyongyang.

"I do think that you have really captured the inner life of that fictional 'patriot' very well. It is really a brilliant piece."

Charles Burton, Associate Professor of Political Science, Brock University, Canada.

"Inspector O's many fans - and those yet to meet him - might also enjoy a less well known exercise in what may be deemed a similar genre. Not literally so, but a parallel hermeneutic exercise in the all-important quest to understand what and how North Koreans think.

"I refer to Erich Weingartner's imaginary conversations - a fine form, pioneered by Walter Savage Landor but now sadly fallen into desuetude for the most part - published from time to time on CanKor.

"As many will know, this was a very useful weekly clippings service on North Korea. Lack of funding has regrettably made its appearance only intermittent now.

"But the silver lining, at least for readers, is that this has enabled Erich to give us more of Pak Kim Li: his (of course) deliberately malnamed composite of a DPRK official like many he met when living in Pyongyang."