My Holiday in North Korea (22 page)

It takes only microseconds for Driver’s hurt to turn to humiliation crossed with embarrassment, like the feeling you have when you tell a joke that doesn’t land. Then he transitions to mad. His face now inscrutable, he turns his back to me and walks into the fakarant.

Lunch rolls like a step-family dinner—that is, awkwardly. Driver isn’t making eye contact. Now I feel mad-bad and wish I could say something like, “I’m sorry that you killed an innocent bug, causing me to accidentally punch you on the arm, and now you won’t even look at me, let alone speak to me via Older Handler, even though I’ve apologized a billion times, and I feel
gutted
about this. Please don’t be mad.” I’m also
really happy
he’s so unabashedly hurt; that means he’s experiencing actual feelings, and there’s nothing the Party can do about it. Try as it might to present its citizens as perfect beings, Koreans are human, too.

Driver was an enigma: sometimes chivalrous and gallant, sometimes just plain trashy.

At the clam bake he pretended the cone-topped, plastic squeeze bottle was his penis, and that the oil spraying from it to kindle the gasoline flames into the fiery inferno needed to char our clams was his pee. He was chedah (we all were), so we were laughing as he “peed” in giant circles and figure eights with that ever-present cigarette dangling from his mouth. But even as we laughed, there was a sense of menace that so pervaded his demeanor it was hard to shake. As usual, I felt truly awful about judging him so harshly. He was probably just an aging bad boy, with misleadingly ugly shoes.

I always tried my best to correctly say “thank you” in Korean whenever he let me in or out of our car.
Gamsahamnida
. I got it right once. If you’re sounding it out loud right now and thinking to yourself, she must be an idiot, because that’s easy to say, try it without this book in front of you.

I didn’t have a cheat sheet. And even though I’d learned 169 new English words using Kaplan’s vocab app on my phone, I couldn’t get this single Korean word right.

Because we visited at least eight places each day—and he picked me up from and dropped me off at my hotel each day
and
let me in and out of the car for lunch, dinner, and bathroom stops—I estimate that I probably thanked him the wrong way twenty-two times per day. That had to annoy the shit out of him. But every time I pronounced
gamsahamnida
wrong—which, by the way, I managed to say the wrong way exactly the same way every time but could not manage the right way twice—he’d smile or laugh with me at my “oops!” Like he actually enjoyed my gaffes. He came off like a pro linebacker who shows up at the dog park with a Chihuahua instead of a pit bull.

I’d brought sunglasses with me as gifts for my NoKo team. You’re advised to bring gifts to give halfway through your trip, in addition to monetary tips at the end of your stay. Not knowing how many handlers I’d have or if they’d be male or female, I’d brought three different unisex styles and a fourth more feminine pair. I presented the sunglasses at lunch one day, inviting Older Handler, Fresh Handler, and Driver to each select the style that suited their taste best. Driver practically knocked Fresh Handler over lunging for the girlie one.

He was a tough guy in a cat eye. He wore the frames with pride.

Driver smoked at every opportunity, and he smelled rank as a result. Eventually I had to ask Older Handler to ask Driver not to smoke just before getting back in the car, that’s how bad he smelled. But he took the news like a gentleman and a champ. He immediately stopped smoking anywhere near me or our car. And soon his smoking became fodder for familial-like banter between the two of us—me teasing him about how his disgusting smoking habit was going to kill him, and him hurling back insults at meals about how weird I was for not eating meat. Our “Shit I Think Might Be Real” list teasing made me feel like we were becoming friends, or so I thought, and best of all required no Older Handler translating.

Sometimes when Driver and I were joking around and having fun, I would feel real affection for him, so I would tell him I was going to miss him, and he would tell me the same. And I meant it. And I do. Not the way you miss a best friend or your family or anything close. But there was something there. And I think he felt it too.

Neither of the others took the least notice of her going, though she looked back once or twice, half hoping that they would call after her: the last time she saw them, they were trying to put the dormouse into the teapot.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

CHAPTER 22

THE GYNECOLOGIST

I
am waiting alone in front of the made-to-order omelet station at the breakfast buffet in the Koryo Hotel. The station is a small, free-standing, electric frying pan/skillet thing that had to be thirty years old and resembled the brownish-colored aluminum one with the Teflon cooking surface that I used to illegally use in my college dorm room in the 1980s. Here the chef cooked only fried eggs that he somehow managed to serve cold, congealed, and covered in oil, even when freshly made.

Because I am lost in thought, pondering the unique cooking skills required to heat eggs enough to transmute them from raw to cooked while still keeping them cold, I fail to immediately notice the man standing by my side.

When I look up and over at him, I’m beyond surprised to see he’s young, cute, and not Chinese (unlike the overwhelming majority of tourists I’ve encountered).

“Hi,” he says. He’s obviously new in town, so not afraid to talk to strangers yet.

“Hi,” I whisper back.

We quickly exchange names, ranks, and serial numbers in a tone slightly above hushed, and I return to my assigned seat.

As I sit buttering my eggs with strawberry jelly (it was the only way to get them down), he walks over and asks if he’s allowed to sit with me instead of at his assigned table. We both look around the room, conducting a synchronized threat assessment of what might happen to us if we break the rules. Not much, we conclude, so down he sits.

We don’t have much time—we both have to meet our handlers downstairs in the lobby in eight minutes, at 8:00 a.m. on the dot—so we debrief each other quickly.

He’s a twenty-six-year-old Irishman who lives somewhere outside Dublin, is a pediatric surgeon, and incredibly, just like me, is traveling alone. He’s spent the past six months on holiday with his mates traveling around the world—but unlike him, they’ve wisely skipped this, his last stop and gone home. He just arrived the day before and will leave NoKo in just over a day on the same flight as I.

I calmly tell him I’m from New York, and feel like I’m about to lose my mind because Older Handler is a nut job, and all anyone’s done for the past eight days is lie to me and give me the stink eye, and that I’m dehydrated from not drinking enough water because it makes me have to pee too often, which is a pain in the ass because every time I have to pee they have to find me an approved bathroom, and poor Fresh Handler has to go with me, and that I’ve eaten nothing but chocolate bars and really bad eggs since I’ve been there. And then my projectile word vomiting really begins.

I can’t control myself. It’s like I haven’t seen another human being in a year. As it all pours out between bites of strawberry-jelly-covered eggs, his face registers a mix of sympathy and fear. I feel compelled to tell him that I’m not crazy (a claim that always sounds crazy), that I’m a normal person (ditto) with a good job where other people even work
for
me! I’m a homeowner! Not some lunatic who babbles uncontrollably about Older Handler and conspiracy theories to anyone who innocently says hello.

When I take a breath, he explains that his handlers, both young women, are really nice and really cool, and they joke around with him, and he jokes around with them, and they’re pretty lax about stuff and remiss with all the rules.

UMMM. Wait a minute! I didn’t even know this was a possibility!

And then I get it…they have a schoolgirl crush on Dr. Handsome. No twisted, bitter, envious, autocratic, despotic Older Handler craziness in his camp.

Oh and it also seems that for whatever reason—my guess, wishful thinking—his handlers are convinced he’s a gynecologist, not a pediatric surgeon, and thus have been querying him for tips on how they can have twins.

After my visits to the “multiples exhibit” at both the hospital and the orphanage—and after having pummeled Older Handler with questions about why the Dear Great Leader likes twins and triplets until I thought she was going to smack me—I’m feeling pretty much like an expert (it’s a conspiracy). I tell him everything I am one hundred percent convinced I definitely do or do not know.

The hands on the giant clock above the buffet tell us we better move it or lose it. Our handlers are expecting us now. My team is driving to Mount Myohyang, and his team is hanging in Pyongyang, so for the moment we say good-bye.

When I see Older Handler in the lobby, I have a giant smile on my face. My eggs may not have been tasty, but breakfast was cathartic.

I tell her I met another tourist traveling alone! Just like me! Who’s from Ireland! Whom I told all about how fucking nuts you are for eight straight minutes! (I left that last bit out.) And how now I feel as giddy as his handlers! (Same with that.)

OLDER HANDLER: You mean the gynecologist?

ME: He’s a pediatric surgeon. Not a gynecologist.

OLDER HANDLER: He delivers twins.

ME: No, he operates on babies.

OLDER HANDLER,
intractable, silence.

Late the next afternoon, on our drive from Mount Myohyang back to Pyongyang, Older Handler is apologizing to me. It’s my last night in NoKo, so she wants the four of us—Fresh Handler, Driver, her, and me—to have a fun dinner together and make chedah. But tonight’s restaurant is Korean BBQ style, so “only meat.”

I appreciate her sincerity. She’s made a concerted effort throughout my stay to ensure no one feeds me anything with meat in it, which I’m very grateful for (and further convinced that on the rotating schedule of fakarants, it must be this joint’s turn). I tell her not to worry, that it’s not a problem at all. Quite frankly, I think to myself, I’d literally eat the tablecloth if it ensured I’d be on the next plane out tomorrow.

Unconvinced I’ll be okay with only rice, she adds, “The gynecologist will be there, too.”

ME: He’s a pediatric surgeon.

When we arrive at the fakarant, Dr. Irish, his driver, and his two adoring fans are already seated and have started eating and drinking. We sit at the table next to theirs, and Older Handler immediately takes charge:

OLDER HANDLER: We make chedah! You drink wine! We get wine!

Older Handler loves wine.

Wine
is what Older Handler affectionately calls
Soju
, which is decidedly not wine but basically pure alcohol. I’m not sure if she actually thinks
Soju
is wine or if she’s using the word wine euphemistically to mask her fondness for the hard stuff, but I find her misnomer endearing.

The first time Older Handler offered me wine, I innocently took a generous sip, expecting it to taste more like Chardonnay than rubbing alcohol crossed with fire. Once I stopped coughing and tearing uncontrollably, I decided I liked it, and from then on Older Handler has made sure I’ve ordered—and paid for—wine whenever it’s available.

Several bottles of
Soju
arrive, and for the last time I also buy Driver a few beers (he’s a beer guy, not a wine guy). Within minutes we’re all sloshed. (Once, after Driver had enjoyed a two-Large Beer lunch, I asked Older Handler about drunk driving in Korea. Her response: “Yes, we have.”) We “chedah” each other, and we “chedah” Dr. Irish and his posse, and they “chedah” us back. Sitting there together, everyone drunk, smiling and laughing, it almost seems normal.

I feel overwhelmingly and irrationally sentimental. I can’t believe I’m leaving in the morning. I’ve spent so much time wishing it was over, and now it is. Only now I sort of wish it wasn’t, even though I still can’t wait to leave. It felt exactly like the one time I went to sleep-away camp, which I also hated and couldn’t wait to leave. But the last night, when the entire camp sat around a giant bonfire, singing songs and reminiscing about the summer’s events, I cried along with the others, not wanting it to end but desperate for it to be over.

In the two days that have passed since I first met Dr. Irish at breakfast, he’s been dragged around on his own propaganda tour. While his handlers have maintained their you’re-so-dreamy laissez-faire approach to his care and handling, they’ve failed to convince him that North Korea is anything other than repressed and insane. As we sit sharing stories and comparing notes under our breath, a giant wave of relief washes over me: for the first time since I arrived in Korea, someone else is confirming the crazy.

When Older Handler and Driver are engaged in conversation, I use the opportunity to pitch Fresh Handler on the idea of escape, having spent an entire week telling her why New York City is so great, why she’d love it so much, and what great friends we could be.