My Holiday in North Korea

by Wendy E. Simmons

  I’ve had so many incredible life-altering moments when everything else just falls away—when all the back-and-forth in my head quiets down and all my questions and doubts recede, and I’m just there, sharing a moment. And for that moment, it’s about as real as it gets.

  When the tour ended, our troop of handlers and hangers-on filed back into the hallway. Fresh Handler and I made a quick stop in the bathroom, where for once there was running water—only this time it wouldn’t stop, so the bathroom floor was a stinky, wet mess. I pretended I wasn’t wearing flip-flops and took comfort in the fact that we would be heading back that afternoon to my second home, the Koryo Hotel, where I was lucky to have running water on demand.

  Later in the week we would visit two additional Children’s Palaces—a second, larger one in Pyongyang and one in Kaesong. Like the first one, these two were large, elaborate buildings; in the case of Kaesong, the largest and most beautiful building in town. And as with their predecessor, my visits to both were a sad yet weirdly entertaining reminder of what “all work and no fun” can do.

  I remarked to Older Handler at one point how “funny” it was that the students we’d seen at the Kim Jong-suk High School seemed so authentically jubilant and exultant, whereas all the children in the Children’s Palace seemed so dour and grim (unless they were “on” and performing; then there were giant smiles plastered on faces). Wouldn’t one expect students in school to be sullen and bored, I asked, and children at play to be high spirited and irrepressible, not the other way around?

  “The children can learn what they choose” was all she would say.

  Not content with her answer, I let my standard baby-talk, Martian-style interrogation roll, “So if I was a student, you’re saying I could decide to play guitar if I wanted to?”

  OLDER HANDLER: Yes, of course!

  ME: And then, if after a few months I decide I no longer like the guitar and I want to switch and be a singer instead, then I can just switch? Just like that?

  OLDER HANDLER: Yes! Of course!

  I had my doubts.

  ME: So if children are free to choose any activity they want, why would anyone choose to play the accordion? The accordion has to be for, like, the kids who can’t sing or dance, right?

  FRESH HANDLER, speaking playfully, but looking a little hurt: Hey! I played the accordion!

  Whoops. So much for diplomacy, thanks to my big mouth.

  ME, futilely trying to recover: Really? The accordion is great!

  I try to imagine adorable, pretty, smart, and I’m guessing popular Fresh Handler back in the day, stuck sitting on her chair, all smiles, legs spread, protective shoe covers with bows on, swaying back and forth as she pressed this key, then that key, of her giant squeeze box.

  FRESH HANDLER: Oh, they are very popular here. All teachers must play them.

  This sort of made sense, because Fresh Handler had at some point told me her mother or father was a schoolteacher.

  I asked Older Handler what activity she’d participated in while growing up. She, too, had played the accordion. Nothing ever made sense.

  Later in the week we visited an orphanage in Nampo. After putting on our filthy operating-theater safety-gear shoe covers, we walked through the hallways, peeking into rooms that were filled with children of different ages—from newborn to maybe three years old. It all seemed so natural and so right, in as much as any orphanage anywhere can be. There were nurses attentively watching over children as they slept or ate snacks or played freely.

  But then I was led to the end of the hall and into the main playroom, where Older Handler pointed out groups of triplets and twins who I’m guessing couldn’t have been more than three. I sat on the floor to say hello, but most of the kids were too reticent to even acknowledge me. Older Handler was eager to translate for the local guide how happy they were that their Great Dear Leader had come to visit and selected the children’s uniforms all by himself. This was one on-the-spot guidance visit where pointing had seemed to make a difference, as the orphans’ uniforms were super cute.

  As I sat there trying to make eye contact and convince any of the children to engage, I wondered what their daily lives must be like for them to be so completely disinterested in me, an American Imperialist.

  And as so often in the perfectly orchestrated musical North Korea had time and again proven itself to be, my question was answered, as if on cue, when the budding young thespians broke into a perfectly choreographed “spontaneous” song-and-dance routine, its grand finale a NoKo Bellamy Nazi salute.

  Reeling and writhing, of course, to begin with, the Mock Turtle replied: and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.

  —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  Chapter 12

  The Grand People’s Study House

  We are standing around a boom box circa early 1990s, listening to a bootleg Madonna cover of “American Pie” that she sang for the movie The Next Best Thing, in which she starred as a yoga teacher who has an out-of-wedlock baby with her gay best friend, played by Rupert Everett. That’s some racy stuff for North Korea.

  I’m in the audio/video room of the Grand People’s Study House. The local guide, who is also our DJ, has, in consultation with the local guide in charge of this particular room, chosen the “Madonna CD” as proof that the Study House is in possession of all music from every country in the world.

  While we listen to all four minutes and thirty-three seconds of the scratchy song play, I fruitlessly try to explain who Don McLean is and why one pirated song burned onto a blank CD that’s placed inside a plastic jewel case with a crappy, worn-out copy of a random black-and-white Madonna photo (that’s not even the right size) in place of actual authentic liner notes doesn’t really constitute adequate proof that they own all music from every country in the world, or at least not as far as America goes. If true, couldn’t they have chosen Holiday, or Like a Virgin, or one of her other hits? I mean the woman has had a lot of number ones.

  There are thirty or forty more of the exact same boom boxes sitting atop as many matching desks, but we’re the only ones using any. Just beyond the boom-box ghetto are more rows of matching desks, with a hodgepodge of old cathode-ray TVs atop. Clustered together are four Koreans with headphones on, each watching something different on their TVs. But once Madonna starts complaining about “taking her Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry,” all eyes are on me. Maybe they don’t like this song either, or maybe it’s just because the music is super loud, and they blame me.

  The Grand People’s Study House is North Korea’s massive 600-room national library and center for adult learning that dominates the center of Pyongyang. It’s also a monument to the first Dear Great dead Leader in honor of his seventieth birthday. The local guide (the one in charge of the overall building, not the audio/video room) has informed us that under the Dear Great One’s expert on-the-spot guidance, the 100,000-square-meter edifice (which equates to approximately 1,076,391 square feet) took a year and nine months to build. For comparison’s sake, the 104-story, three-million-square-foot, One World Trade Center (formerly known as the Freedom Tower)—presently the tallest skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere and fourth tallest in the world—took workers roughly fourteen years to build. And they had lots of power tools.

  As has been the case so many times during my stay in North Korea, I’m feeling a difficult mix of emotions. On the one hand, this couldn’t be any funnier. I’m in the audio/video room of the national library, one of the most important and learned buildings in town, listening to a fake, bargain-basement CD on a boom box as big as their TVs are ancient.

  On the other hand I feel bewildered and sad because I’m standing in the audio/video room of their national library, listening to a fake, bargain-basement CD, on a boom box as big as one of their ancient TVs.

  If this is what they’re showcasing as excellence, how bad must things be?

  In a reading room t
hat is twice as big as the audio/video room are two or three students sitting at individual desks, which—the local guide in charge of the reading room tells the local guide in charge of the building, who tells Fresh Handler, who then translates for me—are new desks replacing the long, communal tables people used to have to sit at when studying or reading in the room. Local-local guide goes on to say that when their Dear Great Leader visited the room for an on-the-spot-guidance visit and saw his fellow Koreans uncomfortably bent over the tables, “he wisely and kindly decide height of tables need to be adjustable to make more comfortable to study because our father love us.” So he invented adjustable desks.

  If only he could harness his powers for good.

  Purportedly, the Grand People’s Study House can house up to thirty million books. I’m not sure whether it actually has thirty million books, because by the time the local-local guide in charge of the you’re-not-allowed-to-see-the-library-library told the local guide in charge of the building, who told Fresh Handler, who told me, something may have been lost in translation.

  The local-local guide is on the other side of the marble counter we’re standing in front of, seated at a small, unadorned desk. Like most buildings we visit in NoKo, this one is built with a quarry’s worth of marble. Next to her is a tiny book-size conveyor belt, sticking out a few feet from a tiny, square, book-size hole cut through the wall behind her.

  Through our now well-established game of telephone, Fresh Handler invites me to name a book I’d like retrieved. “Any book?” I ask, astonished that this might actually be real! But it seems that Fresh Handler—being fresh and all—has misspoken ever so slightly, a teensy mistake she realizes she’s made when I request The Little Prince (a classic, and one of the best-selling books ever that’s been translated into a billion languages) and the buzzer says no way.

  DIS-CUSSIONS!

  “I mean Huckleberry Finn,” she tells me I told her.

  And whoosh! Out rolls a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a mini bin on the track. One look at the timeworn book, and I’m starting to think that the majority of the “millions” of books are out there in the ether with all the music.

  We step into a smaller room, this one crowded with maybe eighty or ninety people (four of whom are women, the rest men), seated at rows of tables poring over computer screens. They seem to be learning some kind of CAD application, but I’m not sure because all of their screens look different, and no one is moving a muscle or talking—not even the person I’m guessing is the teacher, who’s sort of half-slumped over at the head of the room (under, of course, large, smiling portraits of the Great Leaders), and particularly not the three men who have their heads on a table and appear to be sleeping.

  I joke with Fresh Handler that I don’t think the sleeping guys are going to be passing their exams any time soon, and that if those Great Leader portraits could see, there’d be trouble. She giggles. I ask Fresh Handler to ask the local building guide what the conscious students are studying, but she doesn’t know. That’s the local-local room guide’s domain, but he/she is either missing or is the one not teaching up front. In any case, time was up for the computer room, so we moved along.

  I don’t recall the order of things, but I do remember that all of the hallways were poorly lit, and we did not visit a single room that had more than a quarter of its available lights on. In the gift shop, it was lights out altogether.

  I also remember them telling me that more than 10,000 people use the Grand People’s Study House every day. But as I walked the dark corridors, stood in the dimly lit lobby, peeked into dark rooms that were off the itinerary (Older Handler or the local guide in charge of the building were quick to shoo me away), and visited the dimly lit rooms that were on the itinerary, I saw no one come, no one go, and no one waiting for anything…not for books, not for elevators, not even to use one of the nine reference (?) computers randomly placed in the lobby near the front door (no chairs), which patrons are allowed to use to make you think North Korea has the internet. (I kid. I don’t know what they use the computers for.) And I don’t think I’d be going out on a limb to say the tote bag I purchased was the gift shop’s sole sale for the day.

  I had beers with an Irish doctor the last night of my stay, and we com­-pared notes on our respective visits to the Grand People’s Study House. We’d both visited the same rooms and seen the exact same things, only he’d been treated to Irish folk music and an esoteric Irish medical textbook of some sort instead of Madonna and Huckleberry Finn, proving without a doubt that there are at least two books and two CDs in the Grand People’s Study House.

  If you knew Time as well as I do, said the Hatter, you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.

  —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  Chapter 13

  Go Green Go

  It was late in the day on Sunday when Older Handler gave me the news. My Monday-morning visit to the apogee of Great Leader love, the Kumsusan Palace—where Kim 1 and Kim 2 are kept on ice in their glass mausoleums/offices, since they’re still running things from beyond—had been canceled.

  Since, as instructed, I’d brought along a set of fancy clothes for the visit, necessitating me packing an extra pair of shoes, my disappointment was palpable. I was not taking this lying down:

  ME: Why is it canceled?

  OLDER HANDLER: It’s closed.

  ME: Why is it closed?

  OLDER HANDLER: Yes. It’s closed.

  Because every hour must have a scheduled activity, lest you forget how fabulous Korea is, my NoKo coterie was wasting no time trying to fill the next morning’s now vacant 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. slot.

  Older Handler proffered one lame substitution after another, but I am monumented out. I’ve seen so many American Imperialist exhibits over the past five days, I’m starting to actually believe some of it. So when she hesitantly spat out “football match?” (football meaning soccer, as opposed to American football), I instantly chirped “football match!” in violent agreement.

  She shot me a desperate, pleading look that said, “I beg you not to choose football match,” while concurrently asking aloud, “Are you sure? Are you sure?”

  I actually felt a tinge of guilt. But yes. I’m sure. And by the way, please modify the schedule so I can stay for the whole match.

  A flurry of phone calls—DISCUSSIONS—took place before Older Handler delivered the great news: There just happens to be a professional football match scheduled for just the time I need it: Monday morning at 9:00 a.m. How lucky!

  Arriving at nine on the dot (no traffic! never late!), we drove through the empty parking lot of the Kim Il-sung Stadium, the 50,000-seat home of NoKo’s national football team and former site of the Arirang Mass Games (a spectacularly-synchronized spectacle with over 100,000 participants, held annually) before the Rungrado May Day Stadium was built. Driver pulled the car curbside in front of the VIP entrance and parked.

  I was brought to a room with no lights on and left waiting next to an escalator (which was of course turned off, since everything that can be turned on in NoKo isn’t) while my handlers and the stadium staff who’d just greeted us walked up a short flight of stairs and commenced DISCUSSIONS.

  After ten minutes or so, my handlers returned to where Driver and I stood waiting, accompanied by the required local guides, an escalator operator, and my ticket to the game. The escalator operator walked over to the VIP escalator and turned it on, but no dice; it wasn’t moving. My cabal stood frozen, all smiles, as they considered the urgent need for further DISCUSSIONS. After another five minutes of everyone standing around pretending nothing was wrong while the escalator operator frantically scrambled to get the escalator moving, I asked why we couldn’t just walk up the (at most) fifteen escalator stairs? Frozen-tight smile-nods all around.

  To my great relief—since I couldn’t stand his embarrassment—the escalator operator finally nudged the escalator on, and we rode to the top, which took all of about
four seconds…well worth the twenty-five-minute wait. When we reached the top, he promptly turned the escalator off.

  As we walked through the corridor and out into the muted salmon-pink and mint-green stadium, Older Handler apologetically explained there wouldn’t be many local people there watching because it was 9:00 a.m. on a Monday morning, so “local people are working.”

  For once she was telling the truth: There were not many local people there. I counted about forty.

  As I was escorted through the empty stadium to my VIP seat—a folding chair that had seen better days—the rival teams, River Amrok (in green uniforms) and Light Industry (in white uniforms) had already taken the field and begun to play.

  I chose to root for River Amrok; my handlers chose to root for Light Industry. And although few in numbers, the paltry crowd made a valiant attempt at cheering, although for whom, I could not tell.

  Fresh Handler seemed genuinely enthralled by the match, shrieking when my team scored and when hers did not (earning a spot on my “Shit I Think Might Be Real” list). I taught her how to smack talk, so we spent the match alternating between calling one another “loo-hoo-sa-her” (holding up an L-shape hand) and telling each other to suck it, whenever our chosen team scored.

  Older Handler slept through most of the match. I guess football just wasn’t her thing. Coincidentally she woke up once at the exact moment her team had just lost an easy goal and without missing a beat shouted, with pitch-perfect delivery, “Dammit!”

  “Did you just say dammit?” I asked, spinning around to face her. I was so shocked, you could have scraped me up off the floor. It was a real reaction (probably to realizing she’d been asleep on the job), for which I’d never loved (read: sort of liked) her more; this moment, too, joined my “Shit I Think Might Be Real” list.