My Holiday in North Korea (15 page)

As someone seriously disinclined to take anything too seriously, particularly things I should probably take seriously, I try hard to stifle my laugher while a gaggle of military soldiers and my handlers go batshit when I accidentally walk to the right of some stanchion instead of the left of it, as we walk from the gift shop to the car that will take us to the actual border. It’s made all the more funny—to me at least—when I’m forced to retrace my steps on the offending side, just so I can walk the same five feet, only two feet over to the left.

I’m off to a great start.

My handlers, the aforementioned Non-General, some other soldiers, and I get into one car, while a couple of other soldiers get into cars in front of and behind us. That
is
an awful lot of soldiers. And everyone’s so serious. Maybe this place
is
dangerous? But how dangerous could it be when all the soldiers are wearing the same giant, upside-down salad bowls for helmets that they were sporting during the Korean War?

As usual, I am stuck in a self-inflicted, mental-sinkhole-generated maelstrom of doubt, surrounded by so much pomp and circumstance, and so little substance.

Unless…it’s the other way around?

As my DMZ phalanx and I begin the three-mile drive south from the gift shop to the literal Thirty-Eighth Parallel, some kind of flying North Korean insect—which heretofore had lain dormant in the fake flowers and vines decorating the inside of the back window—began violently buzzing around the car in what felt like a concerted effort to kill one of us. Neither Older Handler nor any of the soldiers even flinch. Fresh Handler and I, on the other hand, both scream. Arguably, our overwrought reaction to what was probably a big fly is a bit disproportionate, particularly when we are (supposedly) in one of the world’s most dangerous places. But that still didn’t stop me for one minute from asking if they’d pull the car over to shoo it out.

The look of disbelief crossed with annoyance on Older Handler’s face was priceless and immediately earned a spot on my “Shit I Think Might Be Real” list. Needless to say they did not pull the car over.

Older Handler resumes propaganda-talking at me (a new verb I have, by now, invented and adopted into my vocabulary, then quickly shortened to the more affectionate
proptalking
). She’s saying something about how the American Imperialists have filled the three-mile zone on their side of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel with weapons and bombs and all things bad, while on North Korea’s side exists “nothing for war, only the beautiful farmland,” she dreamily tells me.

This, she prattles on, “is because when our Great, Kind, Eternal Leader, who is our Sun and our Father, visited here, he told us he cared more about his people than about weapons, so he gave us advice about how to have the farmland for the growing of food. You see village?”

As usual, I quite literally have no idea what she is talking about. But this is turning out to be one of the greatest days of my life.

Our next stop is a small wooden stand-alone building, painted white on the inside, with low-hung blue windows where walls should be. It’s so quiet, calm, peaceful, and full of natural light, I start feeling as if there is an inverse ratio between proximity to the Thirty-Eighth Parallel and danger.

Inside, Non-General explains the history of the room as Fresh Handler translates. Older Handler calls all the shots, including who gets to translate for me when, and it’s Fresh Handler’s turn.

Fresh Handler is somewhat lacking as a translator. Her English is good enough, but she’s exceedingly nervous and doesn’t trust herself, so she’s convinced she’s making mistakes even when she’s not. But I really like her. She truly seems sweet. And on the North Korean scale of cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs bullshit—with crazy, ignoramus cult member rating a ten, and
The Truman Show’s
Truman Burbank realizing his entire life has been a giant lie a one—I’m guessing Fresh Handler is a solid five. I often think to myself that turning her would be pretty easy, were we not in a country where extraction was anything more than a pipe dream.

So whenever it’s her turn, I try to listen encouragingly, smiling and nodding along as she speaks, doing my best to focus on what she’s saying. But it’s really no use. Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes, and instead I soon find myself focusing on trying to telepathically communicate everything I want her to know but can’t say: Your country’s a sham, and your Great Dear dead Leaders are neither the sun nor god, nor can they rule your country from their graves; and the only genius advice any of them are providing during their on-the-spot-guidance visits is how to point.

As she stands there proptalking and I stand there trying to listen, I feel an overwhelming need to comfort her and tell her it’s okay. That she needn’t try so hard. Older Handler is outside flirting with some military guy, and I don’t care.

When my posse exits the building for our next stop, I ask if I can take a few more photos of the room before I leave. Instead I sneak a photo of nice Non-General and a man I can’t identify, who exit before me. The man has his hands crossed behind his back, and for a few seconds Non-General takes his arm. It looks like Non-General has arrested the man and is carting him off to jail. I’m saddened by the irony…since, for all intents and purposes, the man’s already there.

I catch up to the others as we enter the Peace Museum, where the armistice agreement was signed. Non-General tells me the American Imperialists had wanted to sign the agreement in a tent, but the Great Supreme Leader insisted it be signed in a building, so there’d be a permanent monument to the NoKo victory over the United States. Non-General says the North Koreans managed to build the building the night before (of course) and something about the American Imperialists being so ashamed by their humiliating loss at the hands of the Great Supreme Leader that they got down on their knees and apologized before rushing from the room and forgetting their flag (or something like that), and some equally cockamamy explanation for why the U.N. flag is a shambles, while the NoKo flag is almost perfectly preserved.

I trust my gut implicitly, and I’m a good judge of character, so I just can’t reconcile what’s coming out of Non-General’s mouth with the intelligent, kind, and genuine man he seems to be. Does he really believe the stories he’s telling me? It’s as if the U.S. president took to the airwaves one day to warn us that apples and oranges have finally reached common ground and are staging a coup…and meant it. I’m confounded.

The retelling of history retold, our motorcade proceeds south to the Thirty-Eighth Parallel, where we pull into a sizeable parking lot—which is, of course, devoid of cars. We walk down a small slope and around a corner, past a monument with a copy of Kim Il-sung’s final signature (he died the next day). The local guide stops us so we can stare at the copy of his signature on a rock for a few minutes, in deference to the Dear Great Supreme Leader, because that’s what you do in NoKo.

Older Handler breaks the silence by saying something about NoKo’s flagpole being taller than SoKo’s flagpole, in a tone so boastful it sounds like “nah nah nah nah nah nah,” while directing my attention to one flagpole then the other. Good god, I think to myself, if we’re fighting over flagpole height at the DMZ, mankind is doomed, and then shake off the thought as we move on to the main attraction.

Save for the dozen or so NoKo soldiers escorting my gang, the Joint Security Area is a ghost town—as deserted as a suburban office park on a Sunday afternoon. There is no one there, and nothing going on. “Where is everyone?” I ask, my confusion and disappointment palpable, “I thought this would be scarier.” No one answers. Ask a stupid question, and everyone just thinks you’re an idiot.

One main blue building straddles North and South Korea. Like all other tourists to the DMZ, I enter it from the side I’m on—in my case, the North. Inside, I sit in the translator’s seat, my left side in the South, my right side in the North—a stupid, silly border, the source of so much pain and death, crossed just like that. North Korean soldiers stared at South Korean soldiers while Fresh Handler snapped photos of me shaking hands across the border with Non-General and I snapped photos of Non-General with his military friends. I’d been told that photographing anyone in the military was strictly forbidden, but for whatever reason, no one at the Thirty-Eighth Parallel seemed to care.

Back outside and in North Korea, I have the weirdest sensation of being on the wrong side of the tracks. I feel like a traitor, or a Potemkin trophy being paraded around like a hostage by his or her captors. I ask Fresh Handler what would happen if I made a break for it and ran to the other side.

“They’ll shoot you,” was all she said.

I wanted a photo of me alone in front of the infamous blue buildings that separate North from South, so I hung back a moment and gave Fresh Handler a chance to snap my photo. The soldiers and other handlers had walked at most three giant steps ahead before noticing I’d fallen eleven seconds behind, which as you can see by the soldier coming to fetch me, was eleven seconds too many. Turns out the DMZ is no joke, even though it felt like one.

Inside the austere Panmungak Hall, the main building on the North Korean side, the lights are all off, so the hallways and stairwells are dim. As in the rest of the DMZ, aside from our group there’s not another soul in sight. Maybe everyone’s downstairs in a bunker or somewhere in the building out of view, but a bustling intelligence center this is not.