As we stood on one station’s platform, an old wooden train rattled into the station, and people who I guess were commuters opened the manual doors.
ME: So that guy over there who just opened the door…is he just like a normal guy, going to or from work?
OLDER HANDLER: Yes, work.
We step into the car, which is nearly dark, illuminated by a single
fluorescent bulb at the other end (and of course by the smiling portraits of the two Great dead Leaders), and stand right in front of the doors. A group of what must be at least a billion Young Pioneers (schoolchildren who are members of the Children’s Party, easily identified by their red kerchiefs), who I guess are taking a field trip, come running for our car but stop comically short at the door when they spot me. They stare at me, giggling, too afraid to board. Is it because I’m a MILF?
Oh right, I’m an American Imperialist.
One brave Pioneer finally breaks rank and boards our car, to the ceaseless laughs and jeers of his friends. The pressure too great, he alights seconds later, he and his troop choosing to forgo the ride rather than stand next to me. I feel like a pariah. He makes my “Shit I Think Might Be Real” list.
When the train stops at another station, I encounter yet another billion Young Pioneers, and a King-Kong-size, illuminated statue of a Dear dead Great Leader (a King Kim?) beckoning all of his children to exit the platform to his left.
The Pyongyang Metro has twenty-one (known) stations, configured in two bisecting lines that form a simple X.
ME: Why can’t we see any of the other stations?
OLDER HANDLER: I show you map.
ME: Yes, but why did you choose these four stations to show me?
OLDER HANDLER: To be honest, these are the stations our Great Leader has visit.
ME: Do all the other stations look the same as these? Do they have the same type of fancy lights and decorations?
OLDER HANDLER: Only under construction.
At yet another station, men and women were gathered around stands protruding from the floor that looked like flagpoles, but with newspapers instead of flags. Older Handler explained that they were reading the news (Party-issued propaganda intended to convince the people that their Great Dear Supreme Leader is great).
The train that ferried us to our last station was crowded. We actually had to push ourselves on and into the car, like normal people do on any normal subway, in any normal city, on any normal workday.
ME: I just don’t understand who all these people are. Like why would those three teenagers be on here alone instead of in sch---…. You know what, forget it. (I decided to sit this one out.)
Standing there, squeezed between real people—one of the rare times I encountered them during my entire trip—I make eye contact with an old woman. She grins and makes that universal half-nod, half-stand, wave gesture that means, “Please take my seat.” I decline, smiling, and nod silently to say, “No, no, you sit, please.”
But we’d both made our move at the same time (I’ll go left. No, I’ll go left.), and the millisecond of confusion was a crowd pleaser. The people surrounding us burst out in laughter! I mean three people giggled, and a couple of people covered their mouths and smiled. BAM! Pull out the “Shit I Think Might Be Real” list again.
And even though the metro is the first place in all of NoKo where I encounter what I consider to be free-roaming people (they’re weirdly dressed, yes, but they’re not walking in a veritable spreadsheet of persons, four people across by eight people down, like I’ve seen elsewhere/everywhere on my trip), and they appear to be taking normal rides, I can’t shake the feeling that something’s off.
The Party tries to control one hundred percent of what you see and do in NoKo, so most of what you see is at least mostly staged, and anything completely real wasn’t supposed to happen. So things that seem normal or should be normal, just aren’t. And normal-looking things are fucked up in the weirdest way, or weird in a really fucked-up way.
There’s what the powers that be want you to see in North Korea, and what they want you to think (or believe—and are these the same things?), and it’s all gray territory from there. So unless you’re taking it all at face value or dismissing everything out of hand, you spend an inordinate amount of time mentally navigating the gray areas.
And I was finding it exhausting. So exhausting, I thought to myself, I should have taken that old woman’s seat.
I think I should understand that better, Alice said very politely, if I had it written down: but I can’t quite follow it as you say it.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Chapter 9
It Takes a Hero
Weird-looking yet oddly beautiful trees caught my attention while we drove the length of the Youth Hero Highway from Pyongyang to Nampo. Both my handlers had dozed off, and I had my headphones plugged into my phone, which meant I could sneak a few photos through the window without making a sound.
The Youth Hero Highway, Older Handler had eagerly explained before dozing off, is so called because it was built by “youths”—that is, DPRK citizens under the age of 30—who had “heroically” built the highway in service to their Party and Great Leader. Sounded pretty good so far.
Then she added, almost as an afterthought, “and many, many youths went blind.” Now the story had taken that familiar NoKo turn.
Wait, what?
“Did you say blind?”
She smiled tightly, “Of course.” (Read: Clearly, Wendy is an idiot.)
Alarmed but undeterred, I pressed ahead with what I thought was a fairly logical rejoinder, “Why did so many youths go blind building the highway?”
“Because of the dynamite (you fucking moron),” she replied with her trademark tight smile.
Riiiight…my bad.
Actually by now this was my bad. Why wouldn’t the youths go blind from the dynamite while building the highway? It’s not like I’d seen any power tools or eighteen-wheelers or men wearing safety goggles, or whatever else we’ve come to expect in construction zones. Hell, even the men I saw building roads in the middle of Congo wore hard hats, and they lived in huts made of cow dung and straw.
She continued, “To be honest, our Dear Great Leader was so proud of the youths who sacrificed so much for the good of our country, he visited the highway and decided to make the men heroes and name the highway in their honor.”
But that’s not all!
“When our Leader make the youths heroes, all the women want to take care of them or marry them.”
Win! Win!
She beamed and said, “The Youth Hero Highway is Korea’s crowning achievement!”
From where I sat, I would say the Youth Hero Highway was definitely better than an unpaved road.
According to Older Handler, “The Youth Hero Highway was built from 2000 to 2002 and is 260 ri long.” It was intentionally built that length because “2/60 is the birth of our Great Leader,” she explained, adding that 260 ri “is being equal to 88 kilometers.”
According to Wikipedia the Youth Hero Highway was built from 1998 to 2000 and is just 46.3 kilometers long.
No sense quibbling over facts, given the reliability of both sources.
Here is what I observed: the Youth Hero Highway is ten to twelve lanes wide and is an unmarked, uneven, pothole-ridden asphalt blacktop (reminiscent of elementary-school playgrounds circa 1974–1979) that has, of course, no vehicles.
Well, there were a few other vehicles, but from what I could see, they were either filled with other tourists or with people in uniform who I assume were military or important enough to be on the road. Otherwise the highway was empty on both “sides” and on our drives both to and from Nampo.
When I asked why there were no cars on the highway, Older Handler smiled tightly and said nothing.
Maybeeeee…abject lack of freedom of movement, and checkpoints at either end of the highway (and one in between) to enforce said lack of freedom of movement (at each ch
eckpoint, guards scrutinized credentials that my handlers and driver were asked to provide, which Older Handler told me proved they were allowed to travel). And—for the win—no one is allowed to own cars.
And that’s not even the weirdest part.
All along the 46.3 kilometers (I’m going with Wiki) were thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of men on both sides of the highway, dressed in either military uniforms or clothing styles from the 1940s and ’50s, cutting down trees by hand. By that I mean they were using things like small saws and axes, and saws where one guy holds one end and another guy holds the other end, and picks that look like the mallets doctors use to test your reflexes…cutting down trees. No electric saws or large machines—because they don’t have any.
So there are thousands and thousands of men using their might to cut down 46.3 kilometers’ (times two) worth of trees that are just flopping into the middle of the highway. Because it doesn’t matter, because there are no cars. And it’s a football field wide.
And as many men as there were cutting down trees, there were two to three times as many napping on the fallen trees and surrounding grass. Maybe the Dear Great Leader had come for one of his famous on-the-spot-guidance visits and declared that more naps on the job would make it suck less. Or maybe they knew that no matter how hard they worked or how much they accomplished, their low position in North Korea’s rigid and unforgiving Songbun caste system had banished them to tree-cutter status for life…so, why not take a little nap?
Many to most of the trees looked recently planted. Confused, I asked Older Handler if the trees were being planted or cut down.
“Cut down,” she said, smiling.
“Why are they cutting down so many thousands of trees?” I asked, having seen the exact same thing—trees being cut down by the shit ton—on a different highway the day before.
Her response: a tight smile.
A large rose-tree stood near the entrance of the garden: the roses growing on it were white, but there were three gardeners at it, busily painting them red.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Chapter 10
Hot Doctor, Dimly Lit
After donning our ill-fitting, heavily soiled lab coats and our never- before-washed shoe covers—which for once are actually appropriate, given that we’re standing inside the Pyongyang Women’s Maternity Hospital instead of, say, the 3-D Simulation Cinema—we are allowed inside the front door.
As we stand in the not-bustling, or lit, or warm (even in summer) lobby, dressed like children who are dressed up like doctors, waiting for our local guide who will conduct our tour, Older Handler boasts that more than six million women have given birth in the hospital, including more than 8,000 foreigners. “Many foreigners have praised our Great Leaders for their care, because here treatment is free for our people with special medicine, and many foreigners are famous people.” I’ll have to take her word for it, since I’m having trouble believing that “many” famous foreigners, let alone one, would choose to give birth here.
When our local guide arrives, I fall in love immediately. It’s a girl crush. She’s literally the prettiest person I’ve seen in Korea, and possibly ever. She’s maybe in her early twenties, with a model-worthy face and a perfect pout. She’s wearing a fairly standard, bright-white, fitted nursing uniform, including a very old-school nurse’s cap. When she introduces herself as Dr. So-and-So, an ob-gyn, I’m a bit surprised, if not duly impressed. She’s hot, and smart. So what if she’s wearing the wrong uniform?
Our tour commences: my ragtag team of handlers and I, partially dressed as poorly kempt doctors, plus the gorgeous Dr. So-and-So disguised as a nurse.
Our first stop is the lobby where we’ve been standing, to admire a ballroom-size, gold-colored chandelier above us, and the elaborate red-and-green-marble, flower-patterned floor below. “One hundred and sixty-five tons of rare stones were used to create the pattern,” one of the handlers tells me. I guess the Great Leader, who I’m told has on-the-spot guidance-d all aspects of the hospital, thought these medically necessary accoutrements were well worth the spend. They definitely explain why all of the lights in the lobby are off. Budgets can be a bitch.
We stop next to admire a life-size painting of the smiling Dear Leader and his Great Leader son, both standing on the edge of what looks like Crater Lake. When I ask why their Dear Great Leader is pointing while standing Crater Lake-side instead of pointing while standing near, say, a gleaming iron-lung machine, they ignore me, and we move along.
I’m hard pressed to accurately describe what comes next. We enter a room lined with tiny booths like the kind you see on TV or in movies when the visitor talks to a prisoner who is sitting behind glass, only minus the glass. The trapezoid-shaped booths’ stark, dank, floor-to-ceiling Arylide-yellow bleakness cannot be overstated.
I am directed to booth number seven, where I’m invited to sit at a desk in a clown-nose-red chair. Above me dangles a single bare bulb, which was probably turned off, but I can’t recall.
I’m told to pick up the rotary-telephone-style handset hanging next to me on the wall. “This is for father communicating with new mom and see baby,” Dr. So-and-So explains, as an ancient CCTV surveillance camera on the far wall clicks on and a black-and-white, midcentury-looking television encased in the wall below it gradually sputters to life.
“I don’t understand,” I say confused, “Can’t the dad just go upstairs to see his wife and new baby? Surely the baby’s father and family and friends can visit Mom and her new baby up in her room?” Dr. So-and-So lets me know that would be a no, no, no, and a no, due to “unhygiene” reasons.
“How long before the father is allowed in the same room as his wife and new baby?” I ask, trying to make sense of the news. Dr. So-and-So’s exact response escapes me now, but I remember thinking it was more time than a typical American vacation but less than the twelve to fifteen weeks before puppies are fully vaccinated and finally allowed to go to the dog park to play.
I pick up the handset when I see a nurse on the TV screen. She’s purportedly sitting someplace upstairs but looks instead like she’s on the far end of a short, wide tunnel. Nurse picks up a colorless handset on her end, but instead of speaking into (and over) the pervasive low static I hear, she simply waves. I wave back, and she hangs up her phone. Then the screen goes dead.
Dr. So-and-So next leads us through a door into a truncated hallway, on the right side of which are a few rooms behind windowed walls. In one room we observe teeny-tiny premature babies in glass incubators, watched over by a woman dressed like Nurse Ratched. In the room next door, I see a neat row of ten babies clothed in matching onesies and tightly bundled in matching blankets, lying face up on matching striped mattresses, all of which have been placed inside what looks like the large wire bagel baskets you see hanging on the walls of bagel shops in New York. The baby bagel baskets are on wheeled stands but seem to somehow also hang from a matching metal bar attached to the wall. Neither room is illuminated by anything but the sun.
A third room has three matching babies in baskets half-hanging from one wall—triplets, Dr. So-and-So tells me, before directing my attention to two sets of twins in incubators parked along the other wall. I watch two nurses inside the room coo and smile at the matching babies for a few minutes, before Dr. So-and-So redirects my attention to a low wooden table in the hallway outside the door. Two small, gold-colored cases sit atop a cloth doily neatly placed in the center of the table: in one, a gold ring for girls; in the other, a miniature gold dagger for boys. Both are “congratulations on being born a twin or triplet” gifts given by the Party to the lucky children.
It turns out twins and triplets are a big deal in North Korea, and families of both are therefore accorded certain privileges, which as best I can understand are thus:
Mothers carrying twins or triplets or who have just given birth are flown to the Pyongyang Women’s Hospital by helicopter from anywhere in the countrys
ide
One free gold ring or dagger per child is given at birth
One free glass of milk per child per day until age 17
One free glass of oil per child per day until age 17
Something about how because triplets are considered lucky they are taken into the state’s care and will live someplace else, without being a burden to their own families. I had no idea what Dr. So-and-So was talking about. But later in the week when we visited an orphanage in Nampo that was chock full of twins and triplets, her words would become disturbingly clear.
When I arrived back home in New York City I read online in several places that triplets are remanded to orphanages at the Great Leader’s behest. An unfortunate convergence of superstition, paranoia, and the Confucian reverence for triplets—believed destined for great power—has the Kims convinced that today’s baby triumvirate may be tomorrow’s defenestration.
My tour with twins and triplets now finished, we move on to the really weird stuff in the hospital.
Inside the “Dentist Room” were three empty dental chairs, each surrounded by fairly modern-looking dental equipment, at least as far as I could tell. Dr. So-and-So explained that the Great Leader himself insisted the room be built because “pregnant women want get teeth cleaned.” I guess women on the verge of giving birth, and those who have just done so, want nothing more than a cavity filled or a root canal performed. I asked how many women per day had their teeth cleaned in the room. “Many hundreds, but all come in the morning before you arrive,” Dr. So-and-So responded.
Next I’m shown the “Tanning Bed Room,” wide enough to hold two first-generation tanning beds and little else. Unlike the modern, cocoon-style beds where the “roof” is attached, the roofs of these beds hung down from the ceiling, high above their bottom halves. One bed was turned off or broken. The other, inexplicably turned on, cast an eerie purple-pink light across the otherwise dark room. Before I could ask, Dr. So-and-So quickly explained that their Dear Great Leader had the Tanning Bed Room installed because “pregnant women need Vitamin D when they must stay inside too long.”
My Holiday in North Korea Page 5
