The Door and the Bridge

Yesterday, North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un crossed the New Yalu River Bridge into China, nine days after it opened to traffic and twelve years after it was finished.¹ In Dandong he met one of China’s most senior officials, visited a Korean War memorial, and toured a car factory.

»A door opens a way through a separation we made; a bridge carries us across one we didn’t«

We assume that a bridge connects and a door separates, but according to sociologist Georg Simmel’s 1909 essay »Bridge and Door«, connecting and separating are two sides of the same act: to join two things we must first treat them as being apart.² The common view has something to it. Take a door out of its frame and moving from one side of a wall to another gets easier; take a bridge out of its river or ravine and getting from one side to the other gets harder. A door opens a way through a separation we made; a bridge carries us across one we didn’t.

A border brings the two kinds of separation together. The Yalu is a river. The frontier is the line that divides China from North Korea. To cross, you need a bridge over the river and permission to cross the border. China finished the bridge in 2014. The door – the access roads and customs facilities on North Korea’s side – was Pyongyang’s to build, and it came much later. Several things contributed to the delay, including the execution in 2013 of Kim’s uncle Jang Song Thaek, who had been closely involved in the project, the pandemic, and North Korea’s growing ties with Russia. We still don’t know whether Pyongyang deliberately kept the crossing closed.³

Doors have a long symbolic history. A door can be open or locked; someone decides which, and that decision settles who gets through. Two words we still use come from doors and crossings. »Passover« is named for the angel of death passing over the houses marked with blood on their doorposts, and »shibboleth« was the test word at a crossing of the river Jordan: those who pronounced it differently were identified as enemies and killed.⁴ The door isn’t necessarily made of wood, or even visible – it can be a test that only certain people can pass.

Bridges are equally charged. At the end of the Korean War in 1953, prisoners of war were given a choice: return to their own side or stay with their captors. The Bridge of No Return at Panmunjom was where they crossed to make that choice final. Once across, they couldn’t go back.⁵ Sometimes, though, those who control a crossing close it on people already using it. In June 1950, as North Korean forces advanced on Seoul, South Korean troops blew up the main bridge across the Han River to slow them down. People were still crossing and hadn’t been warned. Hundreds died.⁶ A bridge closed by its owner, with people still on it.

The sociologist Susan Leigh Star argued that infrastructure is relational: it becomes infrastructure through the practices of those who use it, so the question is not what it is but when.⁷ So when is the New Yalu Bridge really a bridge? For freight trucks, now. For Kim Jong Un, yesterday. For ordinary North Koreans, not yet. China talks of expanding exchanges between the two countries, but North Korea hasn’t resumed tourist visas for Chinese visitors.⁸ Something is a bridge to the extent that nobody has to ask to use it. It becomes a door the moment someone can refuse; a door becomes a bridge when the refusal lapses. A drawbridge makes the point clear: raised, it blocks the way; lowered, it lets people across. The difference is who controls it.

But doors aren’t just obstacles. A closed door is how anyone gets to be alone. In 1927, in his studio at 11 rue Larrey in Paris, artist Marcel Duchamp hung a single door between two doorways, so that opening one room shut the other.⁹ It solved an awkward corner and joked at the proverb that a door must be either open or shut. But it also showed what the proverb leaves out: opening one door always closes another. North Korea opened a road bridge to Russia on 7 September and one to China on 15 October, and yesterday Kim chose which one to cross.¹⁰

Duchamp had a word for what happens at the very hinge of the door: he called it infrathin, the almost imperceptible difference between two things. One of his examples was the warmth left in a seat by someone who just got up.¹¹ A border can be like that. Halfway across a bridge, nothing changes in the structure beneath your feet. One step later, you’re in another country. The difference is invisible; what it means is real.

The bridge joins the banks. The door determines who gets to cross.

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