My Holiday in North Korea (24 page)

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 plain 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.