Paranoid in the DPRK: The End
2018, huh? Who would have thought. I still feel like I'm trapped in a post-holiday haze, and yesterday felt like
the first real day back in the world. Oh yeah, this shit again, I found myself thinking throughout the day. You mean my life can't just be relaxing with family and drinking and eating all day, where your biggest decision is which book you'll pick up? You mean I still have to figure out what I want to do with my life? Ugh, it's exhausting. The comedown is particularly hard because the holidays were just so damn good this year. My little sister got engaged! I chopped off part of my thumb! And, am I forgetting something? I know there was something else. Oh yeah, I finally became an uncle, to my sister's perfect little Izzie, who I will meet in just a few days.
But there's still one piece of business from 2017 we need to deal with in this newsletter, so let's finish up the story of my time in North Korea. We left off on the second full day in the country, the day before the marathon, when things were only getting stranger. (It's a long finale, pour yourself a drink. And if your email cuts this letter short, you can read the whole thing in your browser here.)
PARANOID IN THE DPRK: RUNNING THE PYONGYANG MARATHON
PART 4 (previously in this series)
I woke up confused, after a night of dreams full of searching for lost things and people. I remembered where I was. I checked my phone and told Henry we had an hour left of breakfast downstairs. He checked his phone and said, no, we have an hour and a half. Somehow, our phones were a half-hour apart. Mine appeared to be on North Korean time, while Henry's still thought it was in Shanghai. My phone hadn't connected to any internet or even data since we boarded the North Korean plane, so I couldn't figure out how it could possibly know where in the world I was. I opened Google Maps and saw the blue dot that means me, plopped in the middle of Pyongyang. I started to get worried.
I checked our hotel room door, which I remembered locking before we got into bed. I turned the handle, and the door popped open, unlocked. "Holy shit, Henry," I said. "I think someone came into our room?"
In the half-second it took for the door to spring open as I turned the handle, my brain had already unrolled an elaborately complex image: Henry and I, dead asleep from sheer exhaustion, as the North Korean equivalent to a ninja crept into our room, crawled across the carpet, plugged a device into my phone, and downloaded everything on it before sneaking back out. Why didn't I put the phone somewhere harder to find, or at least not so close to the door? I thought back on the previous day and more doubt arose: did they wear us out on purpose, to lull us into a deep sleep?
I pictured the North Korean spies on the 10 hotel floors we were banned from accessing, hunched over a laptop, digging through my phone's data for something incriminating. I saw them opening Grindr. As Henry and I ate our breakfast downstairs, I imagined my weeping press conference as I was sentenced to 20 years' hard labor. I thought about my parents' distress as they lost their son to a concentration camp, his Grindr conversations broadcast by North Korea around the world, to prove what a degenerate I was, how I brought homosexuality into the country as part of a sinister American plot to warp the minds of patriotic Korean youth.
Below the breakfast table, I opened my phone and wiped everything. I deleted all my apps, erased my Whatsapp message history. I deleted all the notes I had been jotting down about the trip. I looked up at the ceiling to check for hidden cameras that may have caught me deleting the evidence.
Henry assured me I was being insane and that there had to be some logical explanation, but neither of us knew enough about iPhones to know how it could have happened (as you're probably already aware, iPhones still track us even when our data is off, because the world is a cynical techno-dystopian hellscape and even in the blacked-out state of North Korea you cannot escape the unblinking eyes of Google, Apple, and Facebook; oh, and our hotel door was just the kind that automatically unlocks when you turn the handle from the inside). Henry made fun of my paranoia, but later mentioned he had asked our tour guide Vicky about it, revealing he, too, was worried. North Korea — or just our perceptions of North Korea? — had utterly fucked with our heads.
The day before the marathon was spent touring the endless monuments and museums of Pyongyang, a city that appears to be 95% monuments and museums. North Korean museums come in two varieties: boring, or batshit insane. And, thankfully, there are much more of the latter.
We started at the Grand Monument on Monsudae, which famously boasts two enormous bronze statues of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il. It's polite — but not required! — to buy a bouquet of flowers and lay them at the feet of the statues. Henry and I both bought bouquets, because we were not taking any risks as the only Americans in our group. The five French guys in our group immediately began mocking us. "Oh, ze Amereecains! Laying flowers at ze Kims' feet? Say goodbye to your political career, eh?"
(Even in North Korea, the French are the worst people you will meet.)
Smug in their Frenchness, feeling invincible even in the DPRK, they laughed and jeered, refusing to buy flowers of their own. We got immediate payback, however, as the most obnoxious French guy was knocked over by a bicyclist on the sidewalk. He collapsed to the ground like a professional soccer player, holding his leg and writhing in agony.
"Uh, Vicky?" Henry called up into the bus. "I think this dude just got run over by a bike?"
Vicky, earning my eternal love, didn't even stand up from her seat on the bus. "For fuck's sake. 20 tours and no one's ever been this dumb."
The Frenchman pulled himself to his feet and shuffled back to the bus, his limp leg dragging behind him. "I think it is, uh, not very customary to ride your bikes on the sidewalk, huh?" he sneered at Vicky, at all North Koreans who have wronged him.
"It actually is," Vicky stated. "It's dangerous to bike on the road here. If you had looked, you would have seen the bike lanes on the sidewalk." After that, the Frenchman's limp cleared right up.
We drove up the hill, parked in the shadow of the statues, laid our flowers at their feet. (I'm still an anti-establishment child of the George W. Bush years, though, so I couldn't help but give the middle finger to my bouquet before offering it to the Kim patriarchs. You take your small victories where you get them in North Korea.) We formed two lines, as dictated, and walked backwards before bowing solemnly to the statues. The statue of Kim Jong-Il, I realized, may be the only massive bronze statue in the world featuring what appears to be a jacket from Old Navy. How many bronze statues have ever required the sculptor to recreate zippers and velcro?
Look at these guys with their super normal egos.
Next up: a ride on the Pyongyang Metro, with its vaulted ceilings, elaborate chandeliers, murals of the Kims leading peasants to glory or better fields of hay or whatever, and repurposed subway cars from East Germany (still featuring East German graffiti scratched into the windows, the only sign of public disobedience you'll find in the city). We were given free reign — to a point, of course — by our handlers, to speak to whomever we wished. "We know you think these are robots or actors," Ms. Kim said, surprising and embarrassing me with her call-out of what the rest of the world says about her people, "But they're just going to work. Please be polite."
A high school girl carrying a German textbook was excited to practice her language skills with the Germans of our group. By all appearances, it was an unscripted conversation. No actors in sight. But what constitutes "real" in a place like Pyongyang? As casual as our subway ride was presented, we still could only get on and off at selected stops, and any deviation from the plans would cause Ms. Kim's or Mr. Chae's phones to start ringing, presumably from an outside observer. So maybe everyone in the metro was warned that foreigners are coming, so be on your best behavior. Or maybe, if you're living in Pyongyang, even by high school you know the deal, and what to say or not to say. There would be no need to script any interactions, because everyone already knows what they must say to survive.
Outside the station, something unscripted did happen. Henry and I were the first to materialize out of the metro depths, and we waited near the curb for the rest of our group to assemble. As is his wont, Henry wandered a bit. Just down the curb was a food cart — an unexpected sight in communist, starving North Korea. As Henry and I inspected the food, Vicky sidled up next to us. "You want one?" she whispered, sliding North Korean money out of her fanny pack. I gasped, since we had been told it was illegal for foreigners to handle North Korean money. But, just like that, Vicky pointed at two things that looked like elongated sushi rolls and handed the money over. The man in the cart didn't even question it. "Here you go," Vicky said, giving us the rolls.
Before we could even thank her, Mr. Chae had gripped her arm and was dragging her away from the food cart. They yelled at each other for a few minutes in the square, before all of us were shuffled back on the bus. "I got in trouble," Vicky whispered to me, winking. The rice rolls had some sort of meat or tofu inside, and weren't very good.
It's remarkable how quickly Henry became a regular North Korean commuter.
On the way to the war museum, we passed a public square containing hundreds — maybe thousands — of
people doing choreographed marching, dancing, and chanting. Thousands of young people stood in orderly rows, facing two enormous portraits of the Kims leering from the side of a government building. The crowd chanted in unison, and sprinted to form elaborate geometric shapes with their bodies. We streamed off the bus, much to Mr. Chae's dismay, and gawked at the crowd. This was exactly what we had all wanted to see when we booked our trip to North Korea. This wasn't real, this was something from a movie. Mr. Chae, also awed at the display or maybe just giving up trying to control us, let us stand and watch for several minutes.
Our final stop of the day, and the most serious, was the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum. It was the only location of our entire trip in which cameras were banned, which is a shame because that place was NUTS. We began with a tour of the outside grounds, guided by a woman in military garb who cheerily greeted Henry and I with, "I hate American imperialist pigs but love civilians!" You know what? Same!
The museum grounds sported the wreckage of vehicles captured from American forces during the Korean War. It was an impressively raw glimpse at our brutal history, strolling alongside these 1950s vehicles pocketed with bullet holes and shrapnel. The vehicles were arranged from smallest to largest, from shot-up Jeeps all the way to downed planes — massive, twisted metal structures, as if they had just fallen out of the sky last week. It was genuinely jaw-dropping. And then I looked up.
Hanging above the wrecks were enlarged images, blown up to the size of a door, showing the moment each vehicle was captured. Some photos were unremarkable, just a broken-down Jeep in a jungle. But above the airplane hung a photo of an American soldier surrendering, his copilot a bloody, mangled corpse at his feet. The photo above the helicopter was a close-up of an American soldier's body in the cockpit, his face torn to shreds by bullets. I felt ill, and thought immediately of my grandfather, who was in the Korean War. How, if his luck had been much worse, his life could have ended as a sickening, gratuitously mocking photo in a North Korean museum. The perky museum guide grinned at us, leering in my mind. I felt like she was daring me to say anything. I looked at her and hated her and thought how we're both just dumb cogs in this stupid machine and felt dumb for hating her but still hated her nonetheless.
Inside, we journeyed deeper into the regime's single-minded madness. We sat to watch a documentary, a short film describing how the Americans lied and schemed to start the Korean War. The film was professionally produced, a pitch-perfect reproduction of anything you'd find on the History Channel, complete with archival footage, swelling music, and an accent-less narrator. It relied heavily on excerpts from redacted and declassified CIA documents to prove its case, that the Americans were responsible for all atrocities of the war and the Koreans were and are completely innocent. To drive the point home, the film showed grainy footage of happy Korean children playing on a playground before jump-cutting to footage of American planes dropping bombs.
Watching it, I snickered at its obvious bias. I didn't know much about the Korean War, but knew enough to know the war started when Kim Il-Sung invaded South Korea with the support of Stalin and Mao. But I also knew that we carpet-bombed the country, killing and destroying "everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another." To the Kim family, our war crimes were the gift that keeps giving. So, you know, the film was insane and biased and full of lies, but they also kind of, maybe, just a little bit, have a point? I couldn't shake the feeling that, in 50 years, a version of this film will exist in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and all the other countries in the world where the United States commits war crimes, kills civilians without mercy, and tries to wash our hands of all of it.
The lights came up, and we were hurried through the rest of the museum as we were running late, as always. Before leaving, we passed through a room titled, "The Defeat of the Americans." It was a life-size diorama of a burning battlefield, the walls painted as if a ruined city stretched into the horizon all around us. Scattered around the rooms were mannequins dressed like American soldiers, raising their arms in defeat or lying dead on the ground. I stifled a laugh, and Henry grabbed my arm, pointing at the ground behind me. Another mannequin dressed as an American lay there, as a taxidermied raven stood on his chest, plucking out the mannequin's eye. I really wished I had my camera.
On the way back to the hotel, Vicky announced we'd get a special treat: movie night! We'd be seeing the film Comrade Kim Goes Flying, which our tour company produced along with the North Korean government in one of their awkward partnerships. But before we could do that, we had to get our marathon clothes approved by our Korean tour guides, as no branding or country flags were allowed. As we played pool in the lobby while waiting to board our bus again, we stared at the absurd image of a flustered North Korean man sprinting around, holding up a neon green shirt that said "JUST DO IT", frantic to find a superior to approve it.
The movie itself was strangely charming, and surprisingly feminist. It tells the story of a young, female coal miner, who follows her dream of moving to Pyongyang to become a trapeze artist. There was relatively minor proselytizing ("Anything is possible when you're a member of the worker's party!") but the end message boils down to: don't be afraid to dream of a better life. Which feels surprisingly progressive! If I were running a totalitarian state, I might be afraid of telling people it's okay to push for a better quality of life. I also wouldn't tell coal miners their lives are shitty! But maybe they don't show this film to the coal miners? The movie ends with Comrade Kim flying on a plane, presumably to tell the rest of the world how amazing North Korea is, but a foreign viewer can't help but imagine she's flying to defect.
The next day: marathon day. We arrived at the May Day Stadium — the largest stadium in the world, apparently — where there was, of course, chaos. 1,800 foreigners stood in the long hallway that opens out into the stadium grounds. We were all anxious — about being in North Korea but also about having to run 26.2 miles in North Korea — so we did our best to stretch, limber up, and carboload while packed into the passageway like a clogged artery. But if I knew one thing about North Koreans by this point, I knew they valued appearance and uniformity above all else, so a swarm of anxious North Koreans pled, pushed, and cajoled all 1,800 foreigners to please, please, please get into rows of 8 evenly spaced runners before our march into the stadium.
We... were not about to do that shit. They grew more frustrated by the second, but time ran out and we heard the bands inside the stadium blare to life. Our cue! We surged out into the stadium, erupting into the daylight. The first tier of the stadium was packed all the way around, with a mass of black-hared, black-clothed Koreans clapping for us nearly in synch. It felt like a dystopian version of the Olympics opening ceremony. 60,000 strangers cheering for you, seven brass bands playing at once. I'll admit, I got teary-eyed.
EVERYONE'S HERE TO SEE ME
We were then forced to stand in the middle of the stadium, while an endless series of old military men gave speeches from a podium several miles above us, entirely in Korean. Every man looked exactly like the last one, and for all I knew, Kim Jong-Un could have been one of them, none of them, or all of them. The speeches ended, and we were pushed back into the hallway while the professional marathoners started their race.
I realized I should probably try to go to the bathroom before attempting to run a marathon (my first indication that I should have maybe done some actual marathon training), but there was only one bathroom. The line was packed. Beyond packed. Picture the line for the women's bathroom at a Beyonce stadium tour, and then triple it. But I had no choice, so I waited. Just as I reached the point in the line where I was actually entering the bathroom doorway, a Korean woman grabbed my forearm, frantic. "You have to run!" I turned around and saw the surging crowd of 1,800 foreigners pushing into the stadium to start the race. I let the crowd pass to avoid getting trampled and then took a thoroughly surreal lap around the May Day Stadium, completely by myself. The crowds stared down at me. And then, out another hallway, into the stadium parking lot, up a ramp, and I was set loose on the streets of Pyongyang.
It didn't take long for me to realize how badly my legs were going to feel. I hadn't gone for a run in over a week, and I had spent most of the past 5 days on either 10-hour flights or being carted around on a bus. But the adrenaline rush was like nothing I had ever felt. Crowds lined the streets of Pyongyang, screaming and cheering (for me, I imagined). I high-fived every kid I saw. I had brought headphones to listen to music, but I shoved them into my armband and never ended up using them. I wanted to hear Pyongyang.
The course consisted of four laps around the same route, to accommodate runners who weren't doing a full marathon. One lap was a 10K, a second was a half-marathon, and all four laps (plus another lap around the stadium) finished your marathon. Assuming you completed it in less than four hours, the official cut-off time for all marathon runners. My first lap was incredible: high-fives, whooping, massive crowds, eye-watering monuments. My second lap: CRAMPS. The crowd of runners had noticeably thinned, as had my breathing. My calf began seizing, the muscle writhing like it had been hit by a taser. I screamed, involuntarily, and the crowd of Koreans nearby yelled, "Ooooh!" and several people winced in sympathy or mockery. I hobbled to the curb and shoved my heel into the ground, trying to flex the muscle as I rubbed it. The crowd around me murmured. I waited until my leg was usable again and then hobbled back onto the course, noticeably slower.
It wasn't long before my greatest fear came to life: DIARRHEA. My body sent me warning signs, which I appreciated, but only enough to let me know that I had, at most, 3 minutes before it all went to... well, to shit. There were only about four bathrooms on the entire course, each of which was a long ways off the course. The day before, we had taken a quick lap of the course on our bus, as Vicky pointed out where each bathroom was located. Three were in buildings. One was in a park, up a hill. You couldn't even see it from the road. Vicky just pointed at a forested hill and said, "It's up there." We all laughed and joked about the unlucky fools who would have to use that bathroom.
Of course, I had to use that bathroom. I veered off the course and hobbled my way up the winding path. It was, as you can imagine, brutal. At the top of the path, a small concrete shed sat, with a woman standing outside it. She gestured in and bowed. I shut the door and barely got my shorts around my ankles before squatting over the hole. My legs screamed at me, cramping worse than before, unhappy with the 12 miles I had already run, with the impromptu hillside hike, with the squatting. I gripped the door handle in front of me, partly to keep it closed (there was no lock, of course), but mostly to stop from falling into the hole. I had no idea what horrors the woman standing guard outside could hear from inside my little concrete outhouse of death, but I didn't care. I still don't care. That was an unspeakable five minutes of my life.
The third lap was even more brutal. The vast majority of travelers had signed up for the 10K or the half-marathon, so only a few hundred of us were left on the streets. Most of the North Koreans had gone home, bored with the idiot foreigners running laps around their city for no reason. And I really did not care to see Pyongyang's to-scale version of the Arc de Triomphe for a third time (it's actually bigger, FYI, because the Kim family are the pettiest). I really, really wanted to be done running. Adding to the misery, the marathon organizers (if there even were such people) had not ordered enough water. At about the 16-mile mark, I started seeing people packing up the folding tables that formerly offered us merciful little cups of water. And I knew North Korea was going through a drought, and that my life is more privileged than anyone living there could ever dream of. But I was also running a marathon, and felt like I was dying. So I had no choice but to be an American running through the streets of Pyongyang gasping, "Water! Water!" at frightened passersby.
A Korean woman manning one of the tables marked PROFESSIONAL RUNNERS ONLY took pity on me, and handed me a cup of one of the professionals' mysterious orange superdrinks. I gasped, "Thank you!" and gulped it down. It was tiny, but I knew it would be the only drink I'd get for the next 10 miles, and I was unimaginably grateful. I wondered if even rule-breaking that small would be punishable in North Korea. I will always love that woman.
As I passed the stadium, ready to start my final lap, a man stepped in the middle of the road and waved his arms for me to stop. He held up four fingers and pointed at his wrist. "No!" I shouted. "Only three hours!" I knew for a fact it had only been three hours, and that I had one final, miserable lap to go, and still an hour left to complete it, giving me about 10 minutes per mile. I could actually, maybe, potentially finish my first marathon ever, under 4 hours, in North Korea. But: I stopped. Because I was tired, and because this guy gave me an excuse. I could just head back into the stadium and act confused and mad that my marathon was ruined by this guy. I would have finished, if it weren't for that meddling official!
Before I could commit to my scheme, another runner came jogging past me. "Is he saying it's lap four? It's only lap three, dude, no!" he shouted, and brushed past the official. So, wearily, I continued on, too. I could do one more lap. But god, that stadium was so frustratingly close.
Before it all went to shit.
For three miles, I didn't see a single other foreigner. The crowds had dispersed and the streets had quieted. Somewhere around Mile 21, I stopped in the middle of the road. I looked in front of me and behind me, and didn't see anyone. Not a single person. I was alone in the middle of Pyongyang. I stopped feeling my miserable legs, my knees threatening to pop, my labored breath: those few seconds standing in the middle of North Korea without anyone watching me were an unexpected gift. It was a moment few people like me have ever or will ever get to experience, and more than what I wanted from my trip.
I hobbled onward toward the finish line, passing Mile 23 with over 30 minutes left. I could do it! Three 10-minute miles didn't seem impossible. A bus pulled up in front of me and a Korean man climbed out. He put a hand up to stop me, and pointed into the bus. I protested, but he kept gesturing, obviously getting more angry. I dragged myself up the steps of the bus, and was greeted by a round of applause from the five other runners draped across the seats. Someone handed me a bottle of water and a banana and explained that the race was arbitrarily ending. "They probably just got bored with having their streets closed," someone joked, and it still seems like as good an excuse as any. I took a seat as my leg muscles continued to seize, and the bus continued along the route, picking up the rest of us stragglers. One older man simply refused to get on the bus, shoving the Koreans away and limping obstinately down the middle of the street, as those of us stuck on the bus cheered him on. Of course, they got him on the bus, too. My moment of isolated bliss in the middle of the street already seemed forever ago. North Korea will not let you forget you're in North Korea.
Limping into the stadium seats, I found Henry watching the medal ceremony for the professional runners (a North Korean won — we learned later that night from the coach of the African runners that they were all "mistakenly" led astray by false course signs near the end, giving the North Koreans the chance to pull ahead to win). Henry barely looked like he had broken a sweat, and had been one of the first amateurs to finish. I was
finding movement difficult, and hated him with what little strength I had left. In the middle of the medal ceremony, amateur runners who had somehow avoided our bus of failure broke through the gates closing off the stadium and took a victory lap, against the marathon organizer's wishes. All us foreigners burst into wild, roaring applause at the disobedient runners, thrilled to finally experience some unscripted chaos. The riders were corralled and order was restored quickly, of course. We all filed back to our buses as the Koreans returned to their lives via car, bus, bike, or anything else they could hitch a ride on.
Finally, we got our passports back, and headed to the still eerily deserted airport. As everyone anxiously lined up to board the plane, Henry and I lingered for one last North Korean beer in the gate area. Remembering what we had heard about poor Otto Warmbier, how they had let him continue with his trip unaware he was in trouble and arrested him as he boarded his flight out, I suggested we shouldn't be the last ones on the plane. We gulped the last of our beer and boarded. As the ancient Russian plane rumbled to life and the drop-screens began blaring propaganda music videos, we departed North Korea.
Back in China, I turned my phone on and connected to the rest of the world: iMessages, BBC News alerts, Facebook posts. I posted a sweaty selfie I took in the May Day Stadium just that morning. "Hi how was your weekend mine was good I ran a marathon in North Korea," I wrote, and the whole country started feeling less real with every passing minute.
The face of someone who will never run a marathon or go to North Korea again.
Danny Recommends!
And now, something special to wrap up the year: my 5 favorite pieces of art I experienced in 2017.
5. "Rain's Comin' In" by Chelsea Peretti
Chelsea's podcast used to be one of my favorite/least favorite things to listen to. It was infuriating and hilarious and I miss it dearly. So it was a shock when, out of nowhere last April, a new episode appeared on my phone. Chelsea, it turned out, had written a "rural family drama" in the style of August: Osage County. The audio performance of the play is beyond hysterical, from the self-importance of everyone involved to the hostility the cast has toward the audience during the Q&A. It's better than anything that's ever been on Broadway and I will not hear otherwise.
4. This Clickhole headline and article
3. Carly Rae Jepsen and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra Live
Justin and I dealt with 12 hours of Planes, Trains & Automobile drama just to get to Toronto for one night, to see Carly Rae Jepsen perform live with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and I'm still thinking about that concert. Her bubbly voice and meticulously crafted pop hits should not work with classical orchestral accompaniment, but boy did it ever. The beginning was slightly rough, in that none of us knew whether we should sit or stand (it's a Carly Rae concert, we need to dance! But it's a formal symphony hall! Let's split the difference and bop as hard as we can in our seats?), but by the time she burst into "Boy Problems" with the horns blaring behind her we all leapt to our feet. A twink in the front row popped open a fan and began aggressively fanning himself while dancing, a thousand gays went insane, and the entire world was perfect for one whole night.
2. Call Me By Your Name
I still don't know how to describe this movie. Words fail me now, just like they failed me when we left the theater, or when I finished the book earlier in the year. It'll leave you in the fetal position in the best way. It'll make you feel impossibly old and also like you're 15. It's the truest movie I've seen in a long time.
1. Sasha Velour's performance of "So Emotional"
There was simply nothing better, more original, more raw, more jaw-dropping, more instantly iconic than what Sasha Velour did on stage with nothing more than some gloves, a wig, some petals, and her face. I've watched it 4,000 times since it literally brought me to my feet during the Drag Race finale, and it never, ever fails to turn around a terrible day.
Did you like this? Forward to a friend to subscribe here.
Did you hate it? Every DannyLetter is about something different, so stay tuned! (And we're finally done with talking about my DPRK trip, may god have mercy.)
As always, feel free to reply with insults, compliments, dick pics.