My Holiday in North Korea (14 page)

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

I
t 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.

A military general sharing our VIP area castigated his team from the stands whenever players made mistakes. He was sitting with one foot resting on his opposite thigh, pants rolled up to his knees, revealing white tube socks that didn’t quite go with the rest of his uniform. After one particularly bad play, he took off his hat and cast it aside. I tried to catch his eye since we both seemed to be rooting for the team in green, but he wouldn’t make eye contact with me no matter how long I stared.

A lone cameraman was nearby in the stands. I spent a few minutes ruminating on what year his camera was manufactured, and whether he was actually recording or broadcasting anything. Answer: the year cameras were invented, and no.

Then during the second half of the game, like a downpour on a sunny day, a crowd suddenly materialized. A swarm of several hundred people marched in NoKo style—in close formation, in lines of five or six people across and as many deep, and all dressed in military or other uniforms or matching outfits so chronologically out of place they seemed like costumes—and took their seats. I noticed most were watching me instead of the match, as confounded by my presence as I was by their arrival.

Maybe all the local people were suddenly allowed to leave work. Or maybe all those earlier DISCUSSIONS had paid off, and the powers that be realized that a “regularly scheduled” 9 a.m. Monday-morning football match would be more convincing if there were actual fans in the stands. As usual, I had no idea.

In yet another day that will live in infamy for the American Imperialists, the team I was rooting for won.

So was this a real, previously scheduled, Monday-morning-at-9:00-a.m. football match? And had I just been super lucky to have a Monday-morning-at-9:00-a.m. slot on my schedule that needed filling? Possibly, given the damned good luck (knock wood) and propensity for remarkable coincidences I tend to have.

Or had a country just pulled together an entire football match (minus a few thousand fans) in less than twelve hours solely for my benefit? It was a thought too absurd, too egomaniacal, too lunatic, and too paranoid, to even consider…right?

That’s the paradox that is North Korea. It’s unfathomable that a country without electricity (among other things) could orchestrate a scene this way. But at the same time, the people basically belong to the government/Party, so it’s also completely feasible that some higher-up could just say, “You five thousand hoi polloi, come to the stadium now: We need a crowd to form.”

Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

CHAPTER 14

“SAY CHEESE”

T
he local guide, whom I’ve mistaken for a general for some reason, is explaining the “history” of the Korean War. His story is as follows: the American Imperialists started it, the American Imperialists lost it, the American Imperialists were so embarrassed they lost that they forgot their flag. Or something like that.

It hardly matters anyway. It’s not accurate, and besides, all I can think to myself is, “He’s cute. I wonder if he’s single. I should try to fix him up with Fresh Handler.”

I’m at the Korean Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, the swath of land that has divided North from South Korea at the Thirty-Eighth Parallel since the signing of the armistice agreement in 1953. And while I don’t doubt that, as the most heavily militarized border in the world, it’s inherently dangerous (since the two countries are technically still at war with one another), I am having a little trouble taking the whole thing too seriously when there are posters for sale in the gift shop that look like this: