My Holiday in North Korea (6 page)

No, no! The adventures first, said the Gryphon in an impatient tone: explanations take such a dreadful time.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

CHAPTER 4

JAMES FRANCO COULD HAVE KILLED ME

I
’m standing at the sink brushing my teeth in my hotel bathroom, which looks like a motel bathroom from any movie made in the 1970s that involved drugs and bell bottoms, but with worse lighting.

It’s my first morning in NoKo, and I’ve been instructed to meet my handlers downstairs in the lobby at precisely 7:50 a.m. I set my alarm for 7:00 a.m., but I hadn’t needed it. Turns out some kind of eerie patriotic-murmur-music starts playing out of loudspeakers every morning around 7:00 a.m. here in NoKo—I guess to cheer workers off to work. When I asked Older Handler about it, she told me she didn’t know what I was talking about.

The Koryo has cable TV with international news channels, a true luxury anywhere you travel, let alone in North Korea. Because the TV is in the other room, the sound is a little faint—but I’m pretty certain I hear the BBC broadcaster say that North Korea is threatening war against the U.S. over the forthcoming release of a Sony Pictures movie called
The Interview
, about two CIA spies plotting to kill Kim Jong-un, starring James Franco and Seth Rogen.

Umm, whaat?!

I dash into the other room to catch the story. Oh, THIS IS TOO GOOD! It’s hilarious! The Supreme Leader of North Korea has promised “merciless retaliation” against America over a James Franco movie fewer than 24 hours after I arrived!

I plop down on the bed and wait for the news cycle to loop through so I can watch the story again. When it comes back on, it includes actual clips from the movie that has pissed North Korea off so much that they’ve decided to declare war. I’m pretty sure this is ironic. It’s definitely funny, at least, with my being an American in North Korea and all. Because my mom watches the morning news, there’s little doubt in my mind she’s just shit herself.

Perplexed by why the Hermit Kingdom is allowing an American Imperialist to watch something on the hotel TV that is so egregiously offensive they’d declare war against America, I think to myself, huh, maybe these guys aren’t so bad after all. That thought doesn’t last long, though, since a second later the screen goes black, and I realize that a TV censor somewhere has probably “lost his job.”

UPDATE

I first heard the news about the James Franco/Seth Rogen movie and North Korea’s retaliation threat on the morning of June 26, 2014 while in North Korea. On the morning of November 24, 2014, a picture of a grinning skeleton with a warning message that said, in part, “We’ve already warned you” appeared on Sony employees’ computer screens. This would mark the onslaught of an unprecedented computer hack on Sony by a group calling themselves the Guardians of Peace (GOP). Within days of the hack, which cut Sony off at the knees, rumors began to circulate that the attack was in response to the forthcoming release of
The Interview.

Although there was no firm evidence yet, on June 26 NoKo warned that the film’s release represented an “act of war” that would lead to “merciless retaliation against the U.S.,” which I remembered hearing verbatim in my hotel room in Pyongyang. Crazy!

In the ensuing weeks the GOP leaked to the public vast amounts of crippling and embarrassing information stolen from Sony and issued a statement confirming that the hack was a result of the movie.

Following threats on theaters, several cinema chains decided not show the film, Sony announced it would cancel the Christmas Day release, and U.S. intelligence officials conclusively linked the GOP attacks to North Korea, which of course denied any involvement (but praised the Sony hack as a “righteous deed”).

Then all hell broke loose.

President Obama went on record saying “Sony made a mistake” by deciding to pull the film, and Americans were outraged that a two-bit dictator could successfully impose censorship on American society…over a comedy no less.

At first North Korea volunteered to help find the “real culprit” behind the hack but then decided the United States government was behind the making of the movie and threatened to attack the White House, the Pentagon, and the entire U.S. instead, which prompted President Obama to declare that the U.S. would “respond proportionally.”

Eventually Sony did an about-face (peer pressure? publicity stunt? dollar signs?) and released the film on Christmas Day to any theaters that wanted to screen it and to homes via video on demand. Obama praised Sony’s decision (the people were heard!), and the movie raked in over $15 million in online downloads in just four days, making it the number one online movie ever released.

Take that, NoKo.

Ironically, while millions of Americans were downloading
The Interview
, tens of North Koreans (okay, a thousand at most) lost access to the internet when NoKo’s service went down. In retaliation, Kim Jong-un called President Obama a monkey.

Many have questioned how a country with no electricity could pull off such a grand hack. To those people I say, because it’s a batshit-crazy country full of slaves.

The story broke on June 26, 2014, my first morning in NoKo. I started writing this book on November 6, 2014. I finished the first draft the morning of December 18, when the story couldn’t be any hotter, then boarded a flight for Sri Lanka. I missed the movie’s release because I was in Ella, Sri Lanka, where the power had gone out (as a result of excessive rain and landslides, not an evil dictatorship), so I couldn’t access the internet. And on January 3, at the end of my trip, when I arrived at the airport to fly home, the U.S. announced sanctions against NoKo in retaliation for the hack.

I see nobody on the road, said Alice. I only wish I had such eyes, the King remarked in a fretful tone. To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

CHAPTER 5

SHIT I THINK MIGHT BE REAL

F
akarant
(
noun
). Any location that resembles a restaurant in that it has tables and chairs and place settings and waitresses, and prepares and serves food, but is not a restaurant in the anywhere-else-in-the-world sense of the word because:

1. It seems only tourists eat there
   
2. All of these places seem to be operated by the KITC, a company whose express goal is convincing tourists that NoKo is normal. In this case, their job is to persuade visitors that there is a plethora of restaurants in Pyongyang and that normal Koreans can, and do, eat in them whenever they want to (which they can’t and don’t).
   

Only once did I see anyone other than tourists and their handlers in any of the fakarants. One night in Pyongyang we went to a fakarant for dinner that had several small, private dining rooms instead of one main room. As we were being shown to our room, we passed a group of Chinese tourists. Older Handler pointed and said, “They’re Korean.” (They were not. Or they were, but they were missing their telltale Great Leader pins, were speaking Chinese, and their KITC van was parked downstairs next to our car, which I saw with my own two eyes when we walked out.)

Anyway, we are on our way to a fakarant for lunch, and Older Handler turns to me and says that since I like to take photos, would I like to go to a real Korean wedding?

Are you kidding? Of course I would!

This is so nice of Older Handler, I think to myself. I’d like to believe she’s just being nice—even now I can barely type this next bit without my heart falling—but there’s
no way
she’s just being nice. Of course she’s ingratiating herself to manipulate me in some way. And it’s been a particularly boring, fascinating, disgusting, and hilarious morning of North Korea, WINNERS, America, SUCKS! So she may also be trying to throw me a bone.

But I don’t care about the reason. If she’s giving me the chance to see something even approximating her version of real, I’ll take it.

It turns out that the son or daughter of an employee of KITC (the story, as usual, was convoluted) was conveniently having his or her wedding reception that very day at 1:00 p.m. at the same fakarant where we were having lunch at noon. On a Thursday.

I was skeptical.

We arrived at the restaurant, which interestingly had a “shop” on the ground floor. Shops, like restaurants in North Korea, are confusing, and hard to come by. I hadn’t seen one yet, and we’d spent a lot of time driving around Pyongyang. I’d been peppering Older Handler with questions about shops—where are they, could she point one out to me, when are they open, who could go, what are the hours, do people walk up and down aisles, do people push carts, do people choose things from shelves or do they take whatever they‘re given…the same type of questions one might ask Martians or a three-year-old, to which Older Handler simply replied, “Yes.” So when she saw one, she took the opportunity to point it out:

OLDER HANDLER,
while pointing to the dark, closed, near-empty shop that from what I could see primarily sold large stuffed animals and very cheap fancy clothes
: See, there’s a shop.

We walked up the stairs, past the fakarant’s filthy, disgusting guest bathroom. Think worse than a dive-bar bathroom at the end of a long night, including unidentifiably wet floors, while remembering there is no running water in most bathrooms. I wasn’t concerned about myself; I’ve been going to the bathroom in literal shitholes (and worse) all over the world (including the U.S. of A.) my whole life. But all I could think about was, “We’re at a wedding! That poor bride! With her long dress! Or maybe she has a short dress? No, probably not. How will she go to the bathroom in that bathroom and not get her dress wet? Will she not go to the bathroom during the reception? How can she not have to go to the bathroom? Maybe it’s a short reception? What kind of reception is on a Thursday afternoon anyway?”

We’re immediately directed to our table (no crowds, no wait), and as we dine, several waitresses busily go about setting up the room for the reception. It’s fascinating; they manage to move fast and slow at the same time. They’re beautiful—(I read somewhere later, after getting home, that the Party selects the most fetching women from around the country to come live and work in Pyongyang so the city literally looks its best for foreigners), and they’re setting up one of the ugliest rooms I’ve ever seen. To start with, it was painted the color of Grey Poupon mustard.

There were also the wrong holiday lights of course, this time shaped like a Christmas tree I think, and pink balloons to match the pink-and-blue napkins, and gold-beige-covered chairs. There were pink-and-purple, cone-shaped, tulle-draped flower stands with giant bows around their skinny necks and snowman-size rose bouquets for heads. There was a large flat-screen TV—for entertainment, I suppose—and twenty or so cases of beer stacked along the wall next to the bridal table. The table was covered by an elaborate floral arrangement with a heart at its center, in which sat stuffed teddy bears (man and wife—guessing newlyweds) dressed like pilgrims. There was also a real, dead stuffed bird on the table next to the pilgrims. Which species of dead bird, I cannot guess.