My Holiday in North Korea (10 page)

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

A
fter 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 countryside
  
• 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.”

We stop to visit a treatment room that is empty save for two paper-thin single beds that look more like examination tables. Each bed is made up with blue-and-white-striped sheets that are positively cheery in the otherwise drab and depressing room full of antiquated, chill-inducing medical equipment not seen since the start of the Cold War. Straddling the top half of either “bed” is a removable, plastic-looking contraption shaped like a half-dome, covered with the same matching sheets…a nice touch. When I ask Dr. So-and-So what the fortlike thingy is, she curtly replies, “Treat legs” and moves me along.

My love for Dr. So-and-So is beginning to fade a little.

In one “laboratory,” men and women who are dressed like pastry chefs sit dutifully staring at but not actually into microscopes that are still housed under their thick plastic covers.

It’s theater of the absurd, NoKo-hospital style.

When we stroll through the “patient” ward, door after door opens into one matching room after another, each as overflowing with antediluvian medical equipment as it is devoid of people. “The patients, they all go home,” Dr. So-and-So tells me, then adds—as if telling me one more time will somehow make it true—“Patients only come in morning.”

We take an elevator and emerge into a brightly lit hall, which I’m told is the lobby of a new hospital that’s been built adjacent to the old one next door. I feel like I’ve unwittingly entered and exited a time machine instead of an elevator. But that feeling doesn’t last for long, as it seems the upgrade is purely cosmetic.

We go down a flight of stairs, and I’m shown into a closet-size room, at the center of which is what looks like a modern mammogram machine. Dr. So-and-So tells me the machine is very expensive, more than 30,000 euros, but their Dear Great Leader wanted them to have it “for the health of our country.” Not too shabby of the big guy, I initially think, before it dawns on me: there’s only one machine to screen every woman in the country, and it’s not even plugged in.

I ask how one machine can possibly be sufficient? It’s like she’s not even trying to lie to me anymore when she blithely responds, “We do many exams.” Perhaps my concern is misplaced. After all, I haven’t seen a single female patient over the age of newly born, and I’ve been in the hospital for an hour.

While on the subject of preventing cancer, I asked Dr. So-and-So if doctors in North Korea collaborate or share research on breast cancer with doctors in other countries, since there’s been so much progress made. She has no idea what I’m talking about. I try again. “Do your doctors confer with other doctors or attend conferences, or read case studies about new treatments or results from clinical trials?”