North Koreans perform during a mass game of “The Land of the People” at the May Day Stadium in Pyongyang, North Korea, Tuesday, June 25, 2019. (Photo by Jon Chol Jin/AP Photo)

People wear clothing to protect them from the heat while riding along a street in Hanoi, Vietnam, 24 April 2019. North and central Vietnam was recently affected by extreme hot weather, with the highest temperatures reaching over 40 degrees Celcius, according to the National Centre for Hydro-meteorological Forecasting. (Photo by Luong Thai Linh/EPA/EFE)

A traffic police officer directs vehicles at a street junction during sunset in Pyongyang, North Korea, Thursday, August 25, 2016. (Photo by Dita Alangkara/AP Photo)

A soldier eats ice cream as she visits a zoo in Pyongyang, North Korea, September 12, 2018. (Photo by Danish Siddiqui/Reuters)

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)

In a photo taken on September 11, 2019, North Korean students pose for photos in Chonji lake, or “Heaven lake”, as they visit the crater of Mount Paektu, near Samjiyon. Mount Paektu has long been considered the spiritual birthplace of the Korean nation and is a place of pilgrimage for tens of thousands of North Koreans every year, who are trained from birth to revere their leaders. (Photo by Ed Jones/AFP Photo)

This picture taken on January 3, 2019 shows a Vietnamese woman collecting incense sticks in a courtyard in the village of Quang Phu Cau on the outskirts of Hanoi. In Vietnam's “incense village”, hundreds of workers are hard at work dying, drying and whittling down bamboo bark to make the fragrant sticks ahead of the busy lunar new year holiday. (Photo by Manan Vatsyayana/AFP 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)