The Best American Essays 2018

by Hilton Als

  How all this relates to North Korea might seem, I realize, abstract. I can’t say it provides direct explanation. Perhaps I traveled to the darkest place on earth because I empathized with its citizens, who are stuck in that darkness and cannot get out. Perhaps their voicelessness became mine because it reminded me of my own powerlessness. Or it’s possible that North Korea, in some ethereal way, became a kind of darkest night, the longest wait, the well from my childhood.

  I pursued coverage of the country for a decade, every step of the way nearly paralyzed with fear. I was not one of those intrepid foreign correspondents who jump into war zones, nor did I have a team of editors, fixers, and photographers working alongside to help figure out the logistics and arrange the precautionary backups. Although I signed a book contract long before 2011—when I finally dove into Pyongyang for those six months—my meager contract was just a piece of paper with a vague deadline, never a support network I could rely on for protection. In Pyongyang I was watched around the clock by the minders who lived directly below me in a dormitory under complete surveillance. My classes were recorded and reported on, and I had to get permission for every lesson from the North Korean staff. I saved my notes on USB sticks, which I kept on my body at all times. I made sure to delete my traces from my laptop every time I signed off. I saved a backup copy on an SD card, which I hid in different spots in the room, always with the light off. I created a document within a document, burying the notes in the middle of what looked like class lesson material. I was utterly on my own and knew no one who could come to my rescue if I were caught with the four hundred pages of notes I had taken in secret. The most likely scenario was that I would vanish in that bleak, dark unknown.

  North Korea is the most inaccessible country in the world, and its regime has committed human rights abuses at a scale, according to the United Nations, “without parallel in the contemporary world.” It is a society built entirely on fears. Its dictators have manipulated and exploited human frailties to incorporate them into its system of control and abuse. Its citizens cannot leave the country, and their movement within it is restricted. Information is censored, and every interaction is surveilled. Education is only about the cult of the Great Leader, as is the media, and the citizens are treated as slaves and soldiers to uphold the myth. Those who enter its borders without permission or who commit acts that are forbidden by the regime—even something as seemingly innocuous as ripping a poster of their Great Leader—can face sentences of more than a decade of hard labor. Public execution is sanctioned by the regime, which is also known for kidnapping foreigners. No one with any sense of self-preservation would sneak into North Korea to write a book.

  This leads people back home in the United States, or in South Korea or Europe, where I’ve traveled in recent years to give talks—the same people who like to call me fearless and brave—to ask the inevitable questions: Wasn’t I scared? And why did I go?

  These questions always give me pause. Perhaps it is a natural human instinct to look for a neat, rational motive for any story that seems incredible. Readers often want to identify with their narrator and the reasons for her action, or perhaps they just want to be assured that the author of a story is not out of her mind. Some years ago, when I published my first novel, there were readers who seemed to take personal offense at the story being open-ended. A few even told me I should write a sequel to redo the ending with a proper conclusion.

  Yet such an instinct is self-defeating; no true story worth anyone’s time operates according to a predictable pattern. Accepted plots are almost always contrived. It is entirely possible to be scared and not scared at the same time, though this idea is rarely allowed. Such a blurred line reminds us how limited our agency is to control our circumstances; this mathematics of fear leaves no such gray area. In our attempt to be satisfied with a story’s arc, we like to contain ourselves to a one-dimensional narrative of a hero fighting evil, although we know that life is almost always somewhere in between.

  One of the questions I am most frequently asked about North Korea is whether the people there are “brainwashed under their Great Leader.” The question strikes me as deeply patronizing; citizens there are not simplistic robots. They may believe and not believe all at once. My North Korean students would, in unison, swear against the imperialist America and its puppet South Korea as their chief enemies and say that if a war broke out, they would kill their enemies without hesitation. But when I asked them, “What about me? I’m both South Korean and American,” they looked embarrassed and laughed shyly, mumbling, “But you are our teacher. You are different.”

  Isn’t this the kind of paradox by which the human mind works? There is a place in our being that allows for simultaneous belief in something while knowing it not to be true—or for calmly speaking with students in a classroom while experiencing absolute terror about the consequences of being found out by authorities. I think of it as a kind of blind spot.

  Despite the differences in circumstances in America, we have seen plenty of examples of the blind spot operating through the recent election cycle. It appears that an overwhelming sector of the population became convinced that a real estate guy who played a boss firing people for eleven years on a popular reality TV show was uniquely qualified to lead the nation. Even in this country, where celebrity prestige seems to dictate the public conscience, it cannot be that people would confuse playing the boss on television with having anything to do with being the actual boss of a nation—but perhaps such was the comfort of indoctrinated habit. It’s of a piece with an American psychology that has allowed joking about the Great Leader to be our cultural norm. Movies like the animated Team America: World Police and the comedy The Interview are among the most popular reference points for North Korea; a country where twenty-five million people are currently being trapped and tortured has largely been figured into American mainstream culture as the butt of jokes.

  Every time someone in an audience asks me how and whether all North Koreans are brainwashed, I am struck by how unintelligible such a question is, and how much it assumes a fundamental difference between the operations of their own minds and the minds of North Koreans. I often feel I am watching an object of fear grow to dominate the audience member’s brain and arrest their understanding. Perhaps there is a comfort in denying North Koreans their humanity, distancing their experiences as unreal. To do so allows us to have no obligation and responsibility to them, and it frees us from the vague sense of our complicity. They cannot touch us. The blind spot allows a person in such a situation to feign an act of agency that masks a deeper lack of agency; it is at once willful ignorance and knee-jerk self-protection.

  Each time someone calls me fearless, I think of this blind spot, as I believe it helps explain my time in North Korea. I do not mean to suggest that I was naive to its dangers, but that each time I thought about being caught, I blocked the matching pangs of fear that came, attempted to usher them away from the front of my consciousness as well as I could.

  In Pyongyang I was allowed to leave the campus only in a group with minders for a few hours on weekends, and my days were meticulously mapped out, so the only break I got was to jog in a circle around the tiny campus. I wore the mini USB sticks containing the notes for my book on a necklace as pendants, and I always feared that the strand might loosen and slip off me while I was not paying attention. In those passing moments, when the possibility of being discovered struck me as an impending, inevitable doom, my breath would catch, and as a kind of survival mechanism, I would shut my eyes and push away the thought.

  It often seems to me that the desire to comprehend fear strikes at a mystery at the center of life. We breathe toward death; each moment alive is a clock tick toward not living any longer. There is no happy ending, and to help all this make sense to us, we repeat histories, fight needless wars, recite prayers, and fall in love, often more than once, with people who will break our hearts. Life is born from those blind spots, with each mishap, every accident.


  Because I identify with fear, I turned out to be, as much as one can be, well suited to pursue North Korea and to bear each frightening day there as if I were a researcher at a laboratory working on a case. I did not count on caring so much for my students, but I did, and that consequence was afforded to me by my own blind spot. Each interaction surprised me, shocked me from unknowing to knowing, gave me names and faces toward a deeper understanding of the North Korean horror. The dark stopped being dark for one illuminating second at a time, and even if night returned each time to blacken the sky completely, the darkness that followed was never quite the same.

  There is no full circle, tidy conclusion, or simple solution to any of this. I am still scared of North Korea. My inbox is full of unread emails. Mornings are hard, and I try to avoid reading breaking news from above the thirty-eighth parallel, which is inevitably negative; two Americans from the school where I was undercover are being held hostage by the regime. When I finally do glance at the news, I don’t look at photos because I am afraid that I might see the faces of my students, which would make me tumble and lose my precarious balance.

  Sometimes I still fear that it will all come to haunt me one day, that someone sent by the Great Leader will find me while I am traveling somewhere far away from home, and that I will either be taken back to Pyongyang or be punished for writing about what they did not want revealed. But each time my mind goes there, I stop myself, and though it is not clear where my thoughts retract to, there is often a lull; for a brief moment I am numb, and fear cannot get to me.

  David Wong Louie

  Eat, Memory

  from Harper’s Magazine

  The last time I ate real food, actually chewed and swallowed, was six years ago. During those final meals, I ordered a pastrami sandwich, a pork-belly bun, and vegetable soup. The sandwich needed more fat, the bun more seasoning, and the soup I barely touched, because by that point it had become too painful to swallow. More memorable than my soup was the lamb burger served to my wife. It was a thick, luscious disk of meat; she cut it in half to show me the perfect pinkness inside. I made a mental note that I wanted one of those, once I was cured.

  With the tip of a spoon I fished a cannellini—my favorite among the beans—out of the tomato broth, chewed until a fine paste was achieved, then swallowed, chasing the bolus like aspirin, with water and a jerk of the head. Everything in the bowl tasted like a blurry version of its vegetal self. A bite of carrot caught in my throat. I reached up reflexively and there it was, cancer at my fingertips, a hard bulge like an Adam’s apple, just left of the original.

  The neck is crowded real estate, dense with activity and structures; more systems of the body converge, commingle, here than anywhere else. It is the site of biological and social essentials such as breathing, speaking, and swallowing. The nurses had warned me that radiation to the throat area is the most painful of cancer therapies. It damages soft tissue, causing ulcers to erupt in the mouth. Food tastes strange. Appetite leaves you. Eating becomes hell. Previous patients, the nurses said, had quit treatment midway and taken their cancers home. My symptoms kicked in around the third week. Sores flourished. I lost weight. My throat swelled—evidence, I hoped, that the mass was in its death throes.

  A month earlier, my wife and I had been at dim sum with friends when my ENT, Dr. H, phoned with the pathology report. My wife took the call outside, turning her back to the restaurant as if to shield me from the inevitable. I could see her tilt her head into the phone and roll her shoulders inward, shrinking from the news. When my wife returned to the table she stared at the dishes: shumai, har gow, rice-noodle rolls, taro-root cake, jook with pork, and thousand-year-old egg, all getting cold or congealing. I pointed at her plate, urging her to eat the lotus-wrapped sticky rice, our favorite. She shook her head, too upset for food. Then she arched her eyebrows and said, “You eat it.” Which, being a pig, I did.

  Eating had been my one enduring talent. More gourmand than gourmet, I loved to chew and swallow. My desire for food had the urgency of lust; I was constantly horny. Breakfast. A second breakfast forty-five minutes later. Lunch. Snacks all afternoon: last night’s meat, cold cuts, a hard-boiled egg. Happy hour with my wife: drinks, chips, cheese, and salami; if she wasn’t home, just drinks and chips. Then dinner, with wine, until it hurt.

  When Dr. H discussed my tumor with another oncologist, I overheard him comparing its size to a plum. My first thought: What kind of plum? Italian, Santa Rosa, Greengage? But I didn’t need comparisons to stone fruit to know that cancer was flourishing. Every raspy breath, every hoarse word uttered, told me that it was in there. I was sent to Dr. L, a radiation oncologist who had a reputation for taking on the worst cases, for pushing the limits of what a body could tolerate. At the end of the appointment, Dr. L seemed gleeful; he was “very excited” about my tumor. My disease and I had stumbled beyond Stage 4. We had entered the realm of sport, had become a challenge like Everest.

  Three weeks after the vegetable soup, when even scrambled eggs were too much to bear, I told my wife that I was through with eating. She looked at me as if the cancer had spread to my brain. I clarified: I would go on a liquid diet. A friend had given me a smoothie recipe that her mother had sworn by (until breast cancer killed her): yogurt, milk, protein powder, banana, peanut butter, chocolate sauce, flaxseed oil, honey. At first, the intense sweetness and big flavors astonished me. My taste buds were zapped; I had become unused to recognizing what I tasted. But the moment the cool liquid hit my tongue, there was a burst of intelligibility.

  For the next two months I drank the same smoothie four times a day. Each feeding was a marathon. The lump in my throat—formerly the mass, now irradiated tissue—made swallowing a struggle. Treatments had ended weeks earlier, but the expected improvement in my physical condition never came. I felt as wretched as during the radiation’s worst days. The swelling was pressed up against my larynx, crimping the airway and paralyzing the vocal cords. I lost the ability to inflate my words to their proper dimensions. My breaths were no longer automatic, they were always on my mind.

  I was sent for a barium swallow, an X-ray of the pharynx and esophagus. A nurse served me a thick, chalky suspension of barium, a heavy metal that absorbs X-rays, making visible the passageways through which it travels. After swallowing the barium, I would graduate through a mise en place of green water, applesauce, and cookies, set up on a tray nearby. I shook my head. My wife, standing next to me, knew exactly what I meant: I didn’t stand a chance against those Lorna Doones.

  I never even got to the water. The test was called off when the barium, a thin black line on the monitor, veered off course toward my windpipe. My doctor had seen enough—food or drink inhaled into the lungs puts one in danger of myriad complications, including pneumonia. He said, unequivocally, “You’re getting a G-tube.”

  I balked. A G-tube was a sick man’s game. Sick like late-stage Parkinson’s. Advanced dementia. Comas.

  My doctor explained that the tube would be inserted through my abdomen, to deliver nutrition directly into my stomach. He said, reassuringly, that the tube would be manufactured from state-of-the-art silicone, installed by a state-of-the-art surgeon, at a state-of-the-art facility. But it was still a tube embedded in my gut. What’s more base than sustenance delivered directly to the stomach, like gavage to geese? I babbled to my wife about bodily integrity, how mine was, after these many years, unmarred, unpierced, un-broken-boned. Never mind the human condition. You are a body, first and last.

  In reality, though, I was relieved. My weight was down to 112 pounds, and I was sick of smoothies.

  Dr. H assured me that the G-tube was temporary, a few months, tops. Once the inflammation in my throat subsided and I passed a barium swallow, he would simply pull it out, no OR required; if I wanted, I could do it myself. What about the gaping hole that the disconnected tube would leave behind—the contents of my stomach leaking into my body cavity, septic shock? The doctor strapped on his profession’s You silly patien
ts look, then informed me: “Holes close, that’s what our bodies do.”

  Putting a G-tube in, he said, was as easy as taking one out. The first attempt failed. After sedation, prep, and anesthesia, the surgeon called off the procedure. He had seen my large intestine eclipsing my stomach, preventing a direct strike. He decided to wait for the bowel segment to retreat, and in the interim fitted me with a nasogastric (NG) tube, which was threaded up nostril, down throat, into stomach. I left the hospital with the tube bent into a U and taped to my face. It wasn’t until I sat down to feed the tube that I discovered it measured a mere six inches nostril to valve; in order to feed it I had to hold my hands high and off to the side, as if I were playing a flute. The tube wasn’t designed with self-feeding in mind, which made sense, given its target clientele: comatose patients, patients on ventilators, patients with broken faces, premature babies.

  Ultimately my wife had to feed me. For hours each day she painstakingly pushed enteral formula, called Jevity (as in “longevity”), through the tube as thin as uncooked spaghetti. The Jevity had the viscosity of heavy cream, further slowing the process. Each feeding lasted an episode and a half of Downton Abbey. I emailed my son a photo of my wife and me, my way of letting him know of my new acquisition. We’re smiling, a knit cap low on my brow, the NG tube curved across my cheek, the residual formula inside bright as neon, the purple valve taped exactly where an earring would dangle. The subject line: “Post-feeding bliss.”