Meet North Korea's Number One Fan In The United States

LOS ANGELES — The heart of Koreatown was still hot as night fell in early June. Inside a ballroom on the second floor of a three-star hotel, a white banner with Korean words revealed the night’s theme: “Discussion between fellow countrymen in the U.S. on peace and unification.” Ken Roh, 72, was wearing an old, dark-striped suit and a bright scarlet-colored tie, and stood greeting the three dozen people who drove from all over the city to see him, a veteran reporter who built his career defending one of the most secretive countries in the world: North Korea.

The audience sat straight up, focused, eager to hear about what Roh had seen and heard during a recent four-month-long trip to the country and its neighboring areas in China — his 69th visit to the country officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

It’s become a tradition over the past decade — two to three times each year, the same group of Korean-American fans gather, eat Korean food, chat, and wait for the good news brought back firsthand from what they believe is the ideal society.

On that June night, Roh started off by triumphantly displaying on a TV screen a Washington Post article that told the story of the two Pyongyang-born sons of a former American GI who defected to North Korea in 1962. The article, which detailed their continued loyalty to North Korea, relied on a video of an interview that Roh had done with the two men while in North Korea and had uploaded to the YouTube channel of the news site he founded over a decade ago, Minjok Tongshin. Roh appeared in the video himself, and it has since garnered around 20,000 views, making it his most watched video ever. He shared his pride with the crowd twice, once in Korean, and another in his less-than-perfect English, telling them he regarded the interview and its subsequent appearance in a huge national newspaper as his “number one good job” during the visit. The audience applauded. “It was a moving interview,” Roh said, as someone stood on a chair and took a photo of the room.

While everyone else in the world sees North Korea as the home of gulags, starvation, and aggressive missile tests, the South Korean émigrés gathered in the ballroom see the country as a peace-loving, self-independent motherland, even if, technically, it’s still at war with South Korea despite an armistice signed in 1953. This is the pro–North Korea community in the U.S., whose interests are at odds with the country they’ve made their home — on Wednesday, July 6, for the first time, the U.S. sanctioned North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for human rights abuses. From the outside, everything about the community, from how it emerged, to how far it is willing to carry its commitment to North Korea, is puzzling. Roh and his followers, listening intently to the gospel delivered straight from Pyongyang, offer a window into how North Korea’s ideology spreads under the radar on U.S. soil, and, ultimately, just how people decide what to believe in.

A general view shows the Grand People's Study House and the Pyongyang city skyline from the Yanggakdo International Hotel on May 8, 2016.

Ed Jones / AFP / Getty Images

Roh’s house sits along a main road in Glendale, surrounded by vibrant flowers like daylilies and blue jacarandas with an open view of the low-lying Verdugo Mountains.

It’s nearly 6,000 miles away from Gangneung, the northeastern coastal city in South Korea where Roh was born in 1944, when the Korean Peninsula was in its last years of Japanese colonial rule.

The split that divided the two into a Soviet-backed north and U.S.-backed south was never meant to be permanent; both countries on the Korean Peninsula want to see an end to the status quo, and talks about reunification has been on top of the agenda for decades. The horror of the Korean War — and the inability of North and South to decide what a rejoined government would look like — set the divide firmly into place. These days, the biggest obstacle the tens of thousands of divided families face, according to the Brookings Institute, is “North Korea itself.” When Roh was young, though, the Cold War was still in full swing and neither side was particularly admirable.

“As soon as I graduated [from South Korea’s elite Yonsei University], I was trying to find a way to run away from the South Korean territory to pursue the freedom of expression,” Roh said, describing how publicly criticizing the government could lead to jailing under then-President Park Chung Hee. When Roh was still at school, however, he couldn’t stay away from politics — as the editor-in-chief of the campus English-language newspaper, he once surveyed his classmates on how they felt about the government. (Eighty-five percent responded negatively; he said the school cut his scholarship afterward.) He became a student activist against the Park dictatorship, but saw no hope for democratization in South Korea and, after a few years saving up money, decided to come to the United States. It was 1973.

“At that time I thought that United States was number one democratic country, number one social justice–oriented country,” Roh said. But during his years at the University of Texas as an urban sociology student, he changed his mind. "I started to know what is jingoism, what is the civil rights movement in the U.S.A.," he said in his somewhat stilted English, pointing to the struggle of black Americans and racist laws targeting Chinese immigrants in the 18th century. "I didn’t know before I came here. I started to open my consciousness [and] become critical," he said.

Even with the constant threat of renewed conflict, for a long time, Roh gave North Korea no thought, maintaining his focus on democratization in South Korea, where oppressive governments remained in power until the late 1980s through U.S. support as a counter to Pyongyang and communist China. “Just once in awhile [I thought to myself], Why divided?” he recalled. Upon completing his degree, he moved to L.A. and worked for a few local Korean community newspapers. After seeing his articles being thrown out, he says, he quit.

North Korea caught Roh’s attention for the first time in 1989, when he heard news that several high-profile South Korean dissidents had taken unauthorized trips to Pyongyang as an unofficial way to promote reunification. The trips sparked a new wave of national turmoil in South Korea — the country was dealing with the aftermath of its drastic social transition from an authoritarian state to a democracy. For Roh, the idea of entering North Korea at all seemed like a revelation. The next year, he traveled to North Korea for the first time as an organizing member of a “pan-national rally for reunification,” the first free border crossing agreed to by the two governments since their division in 1945. Until then, Roh said, he was under the influence of a “Western way of thinking” and thought Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s first leader, was a dictator. But the visit, he said, changed everything.

After the rally in Panmunjom, a village north of the 2.5-mile-wide demilitarized zone (DMZ) that separates the two countries and where the armistice that paused the Korean War was signed, 15 participants, including Roh and three other Korean émigrés, were unexpectedly whisked away and driven to a beautiful villa. Kim Il Sung walked out and greeted them personally; they had been chosen to share a meal with the Great Leader. Roh remembered Kim’s secretary saying, “This is the first time he came out in front of the house. Usually [he’s] inside — this is unusual.”

“I was scared,” Roh said, “but he made us very comfortable.”

Roh recalled the moment when he began to sympathize with Kim, as the North Korean leader described how hard it was to establish the country, counting only “seven to eight intellectuals” among his leadership's ranks. By the end of the banquet, when a symbolic course of “black, rotten potatoes” like those that were the only thing available during World War II and the Korean War were served, Kim had won Roh over.

“My feeling is [that] he’s like a grandfather,” Roh said. “My grandfather.”

Roh’s interest in North Korea continued once he got back to the U.S. Over the years, he collected the eight volumes of the elder Kim’s memoir, With the Century, and memorized them by heart. He’s a big believer in North Korea’s official ideology, juche, Korean for “self-reliance,” also known as Kimilsungism. And he took a more active role promoting reunification the way he knew best, by writing. But this time he wanted his own publication. He couldn’t afford to print a newspaper, but the younger brother of a friend, who was working as an internet developer at the time, offered him something he’d never thought of: a website.

“Mr. Roh, why don’t you operate internet news?” Roh said the young man asked him one day in 1998, when the internet wasn’t yet a popular primary news source (the websites of the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times had launched just three years earlier).

Minjok Tongshin, Korean for “National Communication,” debuted on Nov. 11, 1999.

Ken Roh at his home in Los Angeles.

Jessica Chou for BuzzFeed News