My Holiday in North Korea

by Wendy E. Simmons

  One movie was set in New York City, so our conversation shifted again. I whispered to her how New York City was full of people from all over the world, and how you could hear every language imaginable just walking down the street. I told her how every morning I take a taxi to work and have drivers from far-flung places like Sudan or Pakistan. I told her there were thousands of restaurants and stores within miles of my apartment, and cineplexes capable of showing twenty movies at a time. She soaked it all in like a child listening to a favorite story. Then I told her I thought she would love New York City and that if she ever wanted to visit, or live there, she was welcome to stay with me anytime. She looked at me and wistfully said, “Oh, yes, I really want to!” And I managed to forget for a minute that would never happen.

  Fresh Handler’s brother, father, and mother had gone to university, too, and were all professionals (doctor, teacher, and doctor, respectively). When I asked her to describe her home to me—if it was nice like the beautiful, modern apartment buildings in Pyongyang that no one seemed to live in, or not so nice, like most of the other buildings—she was honest, telling me she lived in a “so-so nice” building “with two rooms” that her whole family shared. When I posed the same question to Older Handler, she answered something along the lines of, “Yes of course! Very nice!”

  One afternoon we were in Manpok Valley for a scheduled walk. Fresh Hander had gone in search of a bathroom so Older Handler and I opted to sit down near a river to wait. During our brief time alone I told Older Handler she could ask me anything she wanted to—whether about me or America—whether about me or America or another country, anything, and if I knew the answer I would tell her the absolute honest truth.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, she asked me to explain the difference between hard currency and soft currency.

  “What? That’s it?” That’s all you want to know? In the whole wide world?” I was incredulous.

  She added, “And is the Chinese RMB hard currency?”

  Disappointed this was not to be a bonding moment, I took a breath and began explaining hard currency. Then a thought crossed my mind: maybe she was planning her escape. I smiled at Older Handler and continued.

  North Korea is a country of secrets, lies, and questions with no answers. It was as much a psychological journey as a tourist experience for me, and I was profoundly affected by my time there.

  North Korea is easy to hate and categorize as evil, because it is. And it’s particularly easy to make fun of because so many things about it are so fucking ridiculous. But assuming that North Koreans are the same as North Korea is a mistake. Just like us, they’re only human. Separate from the Party, and apart from their Dear Great Leaders, North Koreans are real people.

  And I could never stop wondering what kind of people my handlers could or would have been had they been born anywhere else. Or the person I might be had I been born there.

  Older Hander (left) and Fresh Handler (right).

  I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.

  —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  Postscript

  I departed Pyongyang International Airport the morning of Friday July 4, transiting through Beijing. And through the miracle of flight, even with a significant delay, I still arrived home that same evening, just in time to see New York City’s spectacular fireworks display illuminate the skies over Lower Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge, and One World Trade Center, right from the comfort of my living room couch.

  I cried silent tears of joy and gratitude for having been born into the life I was, and I cried, too, at the irony: I’d had North Korea for breakfast, one of the least free places on Earth, and the Fourth of July, N.Y.C., U.S.A., the apotheosis of freedom, for dinner.

  On Sunday while out running errands, I called my local mani-pedi place, Pau Hana, to see if they could squeeze me in. Unlike the thirty other places within walking distance of my house, Pau Hana is tiny, warm, and welcoming and decorated in a Hawaiian theme (I love Hawaii). They don’t usually take walk-ins, so I was shocked when they said they could squeeze me in. I rushed right over.

  As soon as I sat down and put my feet in the water, the super-nice, adorable nail tech who always takes care of me asked where I’d been the past few weeks. She’s from South Korea.

  When I told her North Korea, she was shocked but not as shocked as the woman in the chair next to mine. “Did I hear you right,” she asked, “that you just returned from North Korea?” When I replied yes, she excitedly pointed to the woman sitting next to her and said, “So did my friend.”

  “You just got back from North Korea?” I asked incredulously.

  “Yes!”

  Turns out she’d not only recently returned from North Korea, but in fact works for Koryo Tours, the very company through which I’d booked my independent tour. And even more serendipitously, she works in the exact same, very tucked away, little office in Beijing where, just weeks before, I’d been to pick up my visa.

  We’d literally just missed seeing each other by days in both North Korea and Beijing but were now sitting here one seat apart, in this tiny nail salon in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn (which is the smallest neighborhood in Brooklyn, by far, by the way). And I hadn’t even had an appointment.

  Even crazier, she didn’t live in Cobble Hill, or Brooklyn, or even the United States, for that matter. She lives in London and travels back and forth to NoKo but just happened to be getting a pedicure next to me—one of the few Americans to have been to NoKo—only a couple of days after she herself was there, thanks to her company.

  I’m well known to have a Ph.D. in knockout coincidences, but this was all pretty great, even by my standards.

  She asked me who my handlers were. When I told her Fresh Handler’s name, she said, “Never heard of her.” But when I gave her the name of Older Handler, I swear, the very first words out of her mouth were, “Oh, she’s crazy, and everybody knows it! You poor thing!” And then dropped other words along the lines of mean, bitter, strict, insane, and how in the world did you deal with her for ten straight days, to help round out her description.

  VIN-DI-CA-TION.

  I knew there had to be a reason that life with Older Handler was such a pain in my ass.

  As I’d suspected all along, she may have had her pride, but she wasn’t all that happy. She wanted to be a businesswoman not a guide. She loved her Dear Great Supreme dead Leaders, sure; but she also dug the life she’d been introduced to via people like me. She was no dummy. She’d had a taste and wanted more. And I had been a constant reminder of all she could not have—and everything she’d been told to revile.

  She liked me, and she hated me. And I felt the same. Only I kind of really liked her and admired her in a weird way. And actually I hadn’t hated her at all; she just annoyed the crap out of me. I still think about Older Handler all the time. She was a complicated character, a Gordian knot of a woman. And I wish I could have known her better.

  She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it)…

  —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  Author’s Note: Seeing Is not Believing

  Everything written herein is true, to the best of my memory. I took very few notes while in NoKo for fear that, if they were found, I or my handlers would get in trouble. But the main reason is that I went to North Korea simply as a tourist, with no intention of writing this book.

  As I’ve said, I love exploring the world and sharing what I see. I usually post photos to Instagram and Facebook while I’m traveling, along with thoughts or stories about my photos, funny or interesting things I see or that happen to me. And sometimes when I return home, I’ll transfer these stories into my poorly maintained blog.

  Of course this was impossible while I was in North Korea. But I knew I’d want to share things the second I got home, so I made a conscious effort to commit to memory the insanely funny, and just pl
ain insane, events and conversations that were happening every day.

  On those occasions when something was said or something happened that I knew I would want to recall verbatim, I would throw caution to the wind and write it down as a cryptic note on my iPhone, using a weird shorthand I’ve developed over a lifetime of scribbling notes as fast as I can (consonants only, incorrect spellings, and word substitutions known only to me, etc.). This, combined with the normal and inevitable iPhone typos and automatic word replacements made me reasonably confident my notes would be illegible. But just to be sure, I split individual notes up across different entries or applications (half in one note, half in another, with misleading headers; half in a note, half as a contact, and so forth). But having grown unreasonably paranoid, I still kept relatively few such notes.

  As soon as I cleared immigration in Beijing, I went straight to the airline lounge and started typing out everything I wanted to remember onto my iPhone notes application (an arduous task). The night I arrived home, I immediately appended much greater detail to my list (far more comfortably from my computer keyboard). I still had no intention of writing a book. However, I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older that I remember far less than I think I will, and this was one trip I never wanted to forget—and I couldn’t wait to begin sharing photos and stories on Facebook.

  The morning after I returned home, my photo assistant, Rachel, arrived. Normally I’ll tell her myriad stories as we sort through my photos, deciding which to post to Facebook and my website. This time, before saying a word, I turned on my voice recorder and then let it rip, transcribing our hours-long conversation (read: soliloquy) while everything was still very fresh in my mind, so I’d remember my trip for the rest of my life, plus have everything correct for Facebook and my blog.

  Then about a month later, having read my Facebook posts, James Altucher asked if I would do a podcast on “What’s really going on in North Korea” for his show, The James Altucher Show. I hadn’t stopped obsessing over my trip or talking about my experiences in North Korea since arriving home, so I jumped at the chance. Following the podcast, I was sent a transcript of my interview, which became the impetus and inspiration for this book.

  To further ensure I accurately remembered as much as I possibly could, I subjected several friends to hours of listening to me tell the same stories as I walked them through my photographs, taking notes then or immediately afterward to make sure I was remembering the same things the same way, as well as spending hours on the phone doing the same thing (again, read: monologues) with my dear friend and editor, Beth—conversations we also recorded and had transcribed.

  Where I could not recall specific facts about a place (for example, the size, or length, or number of objects), I have consulted Wikipedia, Wikitravel, Lonely Planet, the Koryo Tours website, my personal trip itinerary, and in some cases Tripadvisor.com to see if anyone else had the information. This being North Korea, land of subterfuge and misinformation, even things as simple as the names of buildings and Great Leaders are inconsistent, so I just chose whatever was most common or what I liked best.

  I’ve withheld all names for safety. No joke. Although it probably won’t help. This is something I feel very conflicted about. On the one hand, my handlers must know the inherent risks in their jobs. On the other hand, what choice do they have? And I have to believe the Party did some type of vetting before agreeing to let me in. I may not be a journalist or professional photographer, but my words and photographs are all over the internet, and it’s not hard to see that I pull no punches. Nevertheless I have a very heavy heart when it comes to Older Handler, Fresh Handler, Driver, and the others, and I sincerely wish them (really, truly hope for) no harm.

  I wrestled with whether I was qualified to write a book—or do a podcast, for that matter—about North Korea. After all, I was just a tourist who’d visited the country for ten days. But most people visit North Korea for three to five nights on a pre-arranged group tour, accompanied by a Western tour leader in addition to the North Korean guides, who accompany the group for the duration of their stay. Far fewer do what I did and go for longer, independently, on a fully customized tour, with no Western guide, accompanied only by North Korean guides (handlers) assigned to them by the KITC. This I believe gave me a far richer, more in-depth experience.

  More importantly, in the end, this isn’t a book about North Korea—not in an academic or reportage sense, anyway. It’s a book about me being in North Korea and what my experience was like there. I lay no claims to being an expert or even right about what I saw in North Korea. All I know is what I saw, and in North Korea, seeing is not believing.

  Here’s what I do know:

  I have great instincts, high emotional intelligence, and a tremendous amount of empathy.

  I tend to get what’s going on, even when no one else around me does.

  I have been all over the world—really traveled and explored it—and I’ve learned that the more you travel, the more patterns you recognize.

  Nine nights and ten days in North Korea is a relatively long amount of time, and I was not free to just be on this trip. I was never alone. I was on a structured, hour-by-hour tour, up early every day and dragged around for twelve to fourteen hours, from site to site, activity to activity. And I was lectured at throughout. My only breaks were when occasionally I was able to dine alone and when I was in my room sleeping. There was no going with the flow. No stopping in cafes to soak it all in. No “I think I’ll skip that and sleep in” days. It’s a sprint, and a marathon. So all in, I believe I saw a lot.

  I was with the same handlers the entire time. We never left each other’s sides. There were no shifts, no other tourists in our group to take the pressure off me or them. Just us. And people are people: after a while, you forget to keep your guard up all the time. Shit happens. They made mistakes. Said things they shouldn’t have said. Let me see things they probably shouldn’t have. Contradicted themselves. Let their emotions get the best of them. Were lazy. Were human. If you pay attention, you learn a lot.

  I asked a ton of questions, and I was relentless about it. I am tenacious and determined when something makes no sense. Ask a question many different ways, over the course of several different days, and you can tease out information.

  On the other hand, I often stopped talking altogether. Initially this was because I would be frustrated and worried that I’d push too far and say something that might cause trouble for me or for them. But it turned out that, as well prepared as my handlers were for questions, they were totally unprepared for silence. In the absence of asking questions, or me speaking, they simply over-talked.

  We were not confined to Pyongyang, North Korea’s “gleaming” capital city, meant to showcase the country’s wealth, abundance, and progress. The government does its level best to control everything inside of Pyongyang (and even then it fails), but cross the city line, as I did several times, and it’s Third World 101. Small cities and towns and the rural areas between them are primitive and run-down at best. Not even the Wizard of Oz could hide that. And spend enough time inside Pyongyang, and you see that all is not so shiny and new. I didn’t have to look hard to find the city’s cracks. I just had to look.

  I’ve been managing people my entire career. I know when people are lying to me.

  Everybody lies.

  Here one of the guinea-pigs cheered, and was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court.

  —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  The “Shit I Think Might Be Real” List

  In no particular order—except for the bride, who started it all:

  The bride’s unmistakable stink eye at the wedding reception I crashed.

  The wedding reception I crashed.

  Driver and I giving each other shit at meals for smoking and being vegetarian. And me hurting his feelings.

  The guard who was out of uniform, and asleep, when we arrived at the Paeksong Food Factory.

  Of the two w
orkers I saw at the Paeksong Food Factory, the one who gave me the stink eye.

  The little boy who was brave enough to break rank from his friends, risking ridicule and social suicide to stand in the same subway car with me, but who then caved seconds later and fled the train.

  The people on the subway who spontaneously laughed when an old woman and I both made a move at the same time and caused a millisecond of confusion. Normally, cause for DISCUSSIONS on the NoKo propaganda tour…not unmitigated joy.

  When Fresh Handler shrieked and squealed at the football match, and I taught her to talk smack.

  When Older Handler screamed “dammit” at the football match.

  When Fresh Handler giggled as Local Handler tried to explain that the Earth rotates around the Sun.

  My moment of utter clarity in the hot-not spa.

  While we were driving inside the DMZ, the look of disbelief on Older Handler’s face when I asked if they would pull the car over to shoo a bug out of it.

  The fact that I thought Non-General, our local guide at the DMZ, was cute, so I tried to fix Fresh Handler up with him because she’d told me her parents were pressuring her to get married. Older Handler intervened, letting us know that Non-General was (unfortunately, sadly) married, but not before Fresh Handler agreed he was cute.