In this Thursday, June 14, 2018, file photo, students wear virtual reality goggles during a science class at Pyongyang Teachers' University, a teacher training college, in Pyongyang, North Korea. (Photo by Dita Alangkara/AP Photo)

A model showcases designs on the runway at MGPIN 2015 Mao Geping Makeup Trends Launch show during Mercedes-Benz China Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2015 at Beijing Hotel on October 27, 2014 in Beijing, China. (Photo by Feng Li/Getty Images)

A guard secures gates of a catfish farm visited by a group of foreign reporters in Pyongyang, North Korea April 17, 2017. (Photo by Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

In this Friday, August. 17, 2018, photo, a North Korean waitress prepares to serve dinner to Chinese tourists at the Pegaebong hotel in Samjiyong in North Korea. Chinese businesspeople and tourists are once again flowing over the borders – several large tourist groups were in Samjiyon last week – and South Korean officials are seriously considering ways to help the North improve its roads and railways. (Photo by Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

Agricultural workers are rice-transplanting at the Namsa Co-op Farm of Rangnang District in Pyongyang, DPRK, on Tuesday, May 25, 2021. (Photo by Jon Chol Jin/AP Photo)

A man covered with mineral-rich mud smiles on a bank of lake Tus in Khakassia region, southwest of the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, Russia, July 16, 2016. (Photo by Ilya Naymushin/Reuters)

A traffic police woman whistles at a pedestrian, Monday, July 27, 2015, in Pyongyang, North Korea where its citizens are having a one-day national holiday to celebrate the country's 62nd anniversary of the armistice that ended the Korean War. (Photo by Wong Maye-E/AP Photo)

Associated Press photographer Wong Maye-E tries to get her North Korean subjects to open up as much as is possible in an authoritarian country with no tolerance for dissent and great distrust of foreigners. She has taken dozens of portraits of North Koreans over the past three years, often after breaking the ice by taking photos with an instant camera and sharing them. Her question for everyone she photographs: What is your motto? Their answers reflect both their varied lives and the government that looms incessantly over all of them. (Photo by Wong Maye-E/AP Photo)