FORTY-ONE

I’M ALWAYS TAKEN to the same restaurant in Wonsan, on the same street as the hotel stretching along the port. I remember well my first visit here in 2012 because it was also the night of Kim Jong Un’s first public address. The one in which he famously stated that the people should never have to tighten their belts again, subtly distancing himself from his father’s tarnished legacy of the Arduous March and implying a renewed focus on economic development. We walked into the main dining room, and there he was on the large screen, all the restaurant employees and customers standing around in complete silence. My guides stopped in their path and joined them. Kim Jong Il rarely spoke in public—this was something new indeed. The deification cult of Kim Jong Un had hardly gotten under way, and most North Koreans simply didn’t know anything about him, let alone what his voice sounded like. On my first night in the country, when I had asked one of my guides what she knew about the new leader, she stalled. “I heard he is very kind—very nice…” Then she asked carefully whether the Western media had reported anything about him. “Only that he was raised in Switzerland,” I said. She nodded her head, though that was clearly news to her. And now, there he was, live on television, for the entire nation to see—and hear. Speaking aloud. Telling them that it would all be okay. A new era had arrived.

After lunch, we stroll down the gingko-lined boulevard, past a typical shop selling everything from socks to household appliances, from televisions to antibiotics, to the provincial art gallery. Upon entering, you’re met with an array of mostly underwhelming stock images on canvas, a mixture of classical East Asian ink motifs but also Norkorealist oil paintings and Chosonhwa scenes of abundance and happiness in the Korean People’s Paradise. It has all become a bit stale and cliché by now. As I make my way further through the gallery’s corridors, however, I come upon something I have never seen before. I call the gallerist over. Who made these?

“Oh, the one of the waterfall, that’s Kuryong Falls. Have you been there? It’s very famous, in Mount Kumgang… The artist is Lee Ryong Hee. From Wonsan. He represents the newest style in Korean oil painting.”

The work in question is on a tiny canvas, the paint applied in such thick impasto in places that it borders on abstraction. The sludge forms two mountains delineated by extreme color contrast; on the left, a clump of rich dark greens occasionally coalesces into a dire blackness, while the mountain overtaking the right side of the canvas consists of competing tones of white and beige applied in hurried though delicate swaths—strokes that alternate between thick and thin—in some spots so thin, in fact, that the canvas material becomes apparent. The sliver of flowing water between the two mountains you have to strain to see—it is all but annihilated in the emotional swell of the paint. Follow it to the bottom, and it’s not the colors but the sculptural formation of the paint, a snaky swirl, that pronounces the ultimate landing of the falling water. But the pool, such as it is, isn’t actually there; for it is the same flesh tone of the rocky landscape hovering over it. And to the left, following the dark mountain’s descent toward the landing stream, a clash of violets arises amid the increasingly grassy green: the birth of springtime, of florescence, is witnessed here, at the bottom of it all.

Taking note of my enthusiasm, the gallerist disappears into the storage room and reemerges with a massive canvas. “This,” he exclaims, “is Lee Ryong Hee’s masterpiece—and it’s not for sale.” And it really is a Wonsan painting. A portrait of an old fisherman, seated on the rocks of the Jangdok jetty, not far from where I enjoyed that sushi breakfast once upon a time. He is an old man, his jacket rendered in mustard yellows. But it is the details of the wrinkles on his sun-battered face, the weathered, reserved glare of seriousness, of sadness, as he stares at the other end of the fishing rod, that gives the painting its rich melancholic atmosphere. Fishing is an activity typically enjoyed by older men upon retirement in North Korea, a time when there is little left to do in passing one’s final hours. But Lee’s painting would never make it into the Korean Art Gallery in Pyongyang. There is no joy in his subject’s face, no visible display of contentment with life’s rewards. No hackneyed signifiers of happiness under the Supreme Leader’s guidance. It is far too true to life, too lacking in idealism—too dangerous in its myriad potentialities of interpretation—to ever fit well into the Norkorealist canon.

I’m surprised to find a painter so deeply involved with the raw materiality of his art. As innocent as the painting may appear at first glance, such stylistic bluntness is as subversive as any I’ve encountered so far, in all my travels in the DPRK. It hearkens back to that moment so long ago, during the Japanese occupation of the country, when, north of the DMZ at least, Korea’s art historical evolution was effectively halted. I recall those Mun Hak Su landscapes in the gallery on Kim Il Sung Square and wonder if Lee has seen them as well, if he is conscious that he seems to be picking up where Mun left off. When Korea was occupied by Japan, ambitious Korean artists would go to Tokyo to study. Japan was the first place in East Asia to import Western styles of oil painting as early as the 1860s. French impressionism and academicism—a combination of romantic and neoclassical styles—became the overriding influences. When the Second World War came to an end and Japan was forced to give up Korea as a colony, these styles were among the most popular in both the northern and southern halves of the peninsula. Whereas art in South Korea would continue to grow and evolve on par with an increasingly globalized diversity of styles that eventually fell under the aegis of “contemporary art,” something else happened in North Korea—art’s evolution came to a halt with this style or else evolved according to its own new state-sanctioned dictates, depending on one’s point of view.

But Lee has taken painting further, into an even more individualistic mode of expression. The gallerist smiles at my excitement, leads me into the back room where he begins to lay out stacks of unstretched canvas across a small wooden table. More canvases by Lee but also similar works by two other Wonsan painters, Choi Ho In and Pak Ung Gwon. All of the canvases are quite small, like Lee’s. Still, I’m amazed to find, here in Wonsan, what amounts to a new school of expressionist landscape painting. None of these paintings can be found in Pyongyang; the artists are unheard-of there. It makes you realize the extent to which not only is North Korea as a country cut off from the rest of the world, but most of the cities and regions within the country are similarly cut off from one another.

In one of Choi’s paintings, a farmer is shown mending a fence. Unlike the standard propagandistic works in this genre, depicting agricultural effort as the collective endeavor it is officially meant to be, this farmer is solitary, alone—a clear reflection of the new era, where people have taken to growing their own food for both personal consumption and profit, a practice that began in desperation and defiance but that the government gradually had to legalize. As in Lee’s painting, it is the colors that make everything come alive, that transform what could otherwise be a rather grim scene (and probably is in actuality) into a captured moment of deep reflection and beauty. This is cerebral painting, melancholic in its finessed affect, miles away in distance and sensibility from the obvious kitsch of the capital. It signals a subtle pragmatism—everything may be broken here, but we will just repair it, as we always do, since nothing new, no replacements, will be on their way. We must make do with what we have, with what we’ve inherited.

Finally, there’s Pak Ung Gwon, who, the gallerist tells me, is the oldest of the three artists, already in his eighties. Unlike the other two, Pak gives more care to the human form in his painting of a narrow lane dividing a hillside village. Four small figures are seen making their way up and down the street—children on their way home from school, made obvious more by their colorful backpacks than their diminutive stature. More than the houses and network of telephone poles, the Cézannean strokes forming the mountains in the background, your eyes are drawn to the sunburnt face of the small girl coming toward us. Amid the beige white of the houses making up the side of the street, the eyes might nearly overlook the form of a distraught beggar woman—or grasshopper vendor—crouched against one of the houses, a shockingly revealing painting for any DPRK artist, which is likely why it is partly erased.

These paintings tellingly depict the lateness of the day, the hour—a quiet rebellion. For me, it is an invigorating moment of discovery. No one else has seen these works—the gallery is empty, after all; presumably not even locals care to visit. Probably no one else will see them for a very long time, if ever. It dawns on me just how truly isolated these artists, these people, are—but also I feel momentarily rescued from the well of cynicism I have lately fallen into by the realization that it is still possible to discover something wholly new in this world. Here, far from the prying eyes of officialdom, you have artists resisting state-sanctioned idealization in favor of a synesthetic, highly individualized perception of blunt reality. A small sign of resistance, perhaps, but one that cannot be underestimated: there is such a thing as expression here.

I climb back into the van with Hwa, who’s pulled up next to the gallery. Suddenly, the traffic cop from yesterday, the one we’d snubbed, appears. He demands Hwa roll down his window. Asks to see his license. Hwa produces it. The cop grabs it out of his hand and continues walking toward the square up ahead.

The rest of our entourage takes their seats in the van. Hwa tells Comrade Kim what just happened. The traffic cop is standing at the intersection up ahead, just at the entrance to the main square. Kim tells Hwa to drive up, park in the middle of the square, leave the engine running. Kim slams the door behind him and runs back toward the cop.

A lengthy argument ensues. The cop has no reason to disguise his repugnance. These arrogant assholes from Pyongyang think they can come to my town and piss all over it. You want your driver’s license back? Well, guess what. Your driver disobeyed a traffic cop, Comrade. Oh, I’m sorry, you’ve got foreigners in the car? Are you losing face here? Well, tough fucking shit. This is Wonsan, asshole, not some backwater stinkhole. The Supreme Leadership has a house here. Tourists don’t make you and your driver exempt from following the traffic laws of Choson.

As the argument wears on, the price in the officer’s mind increases. First Roe gets out, thinking he can pull some local sway. A true son of Wonsan, after all—maybe they know the same people. Min follows shortly thereafter. Hwa remains frozen in the driver’s seat, scared shitless. What can he do? He was just following the big boss’s orders when he accelerated past the cop. Now, it is up to the boss to get him out of this disaster.

He has a perfect driving record so far. He’s never had an accident, never a single traffic violation. North Korea operates on a three strikes system. You hit three, and your license is taken away—your driving career is over when that happens. Of course nowadays, you can bribe your way out of it. He is hoping that’s what Kim will do—worst-case scenario is that he emerges from all this with a strike on his license. He’ll get shit for it back at the office in Pyongyang, regardless of whose fault it is. But it’s out of his hands at this point.

Alek and Alexandre and I wait in the car with Hwa. The argument drags on for more than forty minutes. I study the huge ship docked at the port at the end of the square. The Man Gyong Bong 92. This is the passenger ship that used to go between Japan and North Korea. The 92 refers to its year of construction, a gift for Kim Il Sung’s eightieth birthday, built with funds raised by the Chongryon association in Japan. For a while, the ship would transport cargo as well as Zainichi Korean visitors between the shores of the two countries, until 2006, when Japan finally banned North Korea from entering its waters. After that, the vessel was briefly used as a tourist cruise ship between the Rason special economic zone in the far north of the country and Mount Kumgang. Since 2015, it’s been docked here, dormant. For Zainichi Korean repatriates living in Wonsan, it must serve as a painful daily reminder of their separation from the loved ones they left behind in Japan and the increasing unlikelihood of ever being permanently reunited.

It is not Comrade Kim’s first run-in with the authorities. But most North Koreans have had an encounter with the fuzz at one time or another—that’s just one of the inevitabilities of life in a police state. Local cops are little more than thugs in uniform, most of them looking for bribes of cash and cigarettes and nothing further. They are by far easier to deal with than the bowibu, the Ministry of State Security officers charged with investigating offenses of a political nature and who operate the country’s notorious prison camp system—once they become involved, it’s either far too late or else the amount of the bribe will increase a thousandfold, beyond most citizens’ ability to ever pay. With these lower-level cops, unless of course it is a very serious crime such as murder, an agreement can usually be reached. The trick is making sure it doesn’t escalate to the point of blows, as they won’t hesitate to deliver a severe beating on the spot in front of everyone who happens to be passing by. Which, if you’re unlucky enough to get caught up with one having a bad day, you might get anyway.

The presence of our foreign eyes, as well as Comrade Kim’s announced credentials as the son of a prominent Pyongyang officer, spares him from such a punishment. It’s getting the price down to an amount he is willing to pay, while securing the least repercussions for his driver, that forms the basis of the conflict.

Whereas the cop sees in Comrade Kim a bratty sense of Pyongyang entitlement, Kim merely suffers from the very same deep-seated hatred of authority that is inborn in all inhabitants of a police state. It is this bottled-up hatred that frequently erupts in manifestations of physical violence. Kim is too proud and sophisticated to engage in such skirmishes—and anyway, he was never much of a skilled fighter, having lived his life in comfy white-collar environs. And so he is more prone to committing these minor fuck-you infractions, like the traffic violation that has led us here.

Now, he will have to pay for it. Others have noticed Comrade Kim’s penchant for rebellion. It is one of the qualities that attracted Min to her boss. “He’s like my brother,” she once told me. It’s not hard to see why. They both spent a significant amount of their lives abroad and so have a good idea of how the outside world works; this tends to enlarge one’s perspective on things; it also makes them a minority, among the world’s sole cosmopolitan North Koreans.

Comrade Kim’s boss has noticed it as well. That the comrade seems to suffer from a potentially life-threatening malady: loose tongue syndrome. An affliction that can have deadly consequences not just for the individual but for all those around him. Kim is bright and a big earner, and his boss happens to like him on a personal level. He is, after all, a formidable personality, always cracking jokes and dispensing his worldly wisdom while at the same time running a tight ship of discipline and order around the office. An asset to the organization, as it were.

So after a particularly raucous night out at a restaurant, when his tongue got perhaps a little too loose, his boss invited him into the office the next morning and bluntly asked him to refrain from the consumption of alcohol from now on. Comrade Kim nodded his assent. But he never apologized. He hadn’t been reported. No point in expressing regret for things you may or may not have said when no one’s forcing you. And anyway, his boss is no one to feel threatened by; Kim’s protectors operate on a much higher level.

After three quarters of an hour, Kim returns, followed by Min and Roe, Hwa’s license in hand.

“Drive,” he commands. Hwa accelerates.

I wonder how many fifties he had to peel off that roll of US dollars he keeps in his front pocket.

We make our way out of Wonsan in silence.

We’re twenty-five miles outside the city when Min startles us with an announcement: “I forgot something.”

That something is an SD card. Bringing out her MP3 player, Min stuck her headphones in her ear, but when she hit play, nothing happened. The card must have fallen out somehow, somewhere… And so she begins combing through the contents of her purse, sorting through the hand sanitizer bottles, lipstick containers, eyeliner, phone charger, money clips grasping bills of different currencies, plus an array of gimmicky items she must have bought from sky shopping on her last flight: gold-plated credit card protectors, mini flashlight, a fitness tracker bracelet, container for anti-aging serum, pens with hidden USB sticks—but alas, no card.

A look of panic comes across her face as she mentally retraces her steps over the past two hours. “What’s wrong?” Kim calls out from the front passenger seat, awoken from slumber by the disturbed energies behind him. She tells him. He shrugs but tells Hwa to keep driving. We’ve nearly reached our destination.

Winding around a steep and twisting mountainside road, we arrive at the entrance to Ullim Falls. Roe gets out at the entrance to give the staff standing guard all the necessary details required at each stop of the journey—names, nationalities, passport numbers.

We pull into the parking lot, step out into the bloody orb of day. Day, cascading like a waterfall down into the lot, where a brown-uniformed old soldier man emerges to stand guard, silver-toothed grin accenting his tanned visage.

We tread along the creek-parallel path leading up to the falls. Roe accompanies Alek and Alexandre and me. Kim stays behind with Hwa to help Min look for the card in her luggage.

“You know what this means, right?” Alexandre whispers tersely. “This could be a big fucking problem for her. An SD card. There’s no way there’s nothing foreign on it.”

Roe’s approaching from close behind, so I shush him. Yes, it’s illegal, but now everyone does it, and every idiot knows. The big collective secret of the era: foreign media. This is why all the cinemas in the country are virtually barren now: people would rather watch what’s on the USB sticks, SD cards, and, now less often, DVDs they acquire through black-market trade. Even the famous Taedongmun cinema in central Pyongyang, right on Sungni Street, has resorted to showing a Bollywood film this month. There was a time when fights would break out in the lines of people struggling to get into a cinema when the latest flick was showing—people were desperate for entertainment, and films, though filled with clunky propaganda, were at least a diversion. Clearly, there’s no audience for the locally produced flicks any longer. The only time you watch one of those is when you’re forced.

As Alek and Alexandre skip ahead, Roe catches up with me. “Travis,” he says, “what about healthcare in Germany?”

“What about it?”

“Do you have to pay when you see a doctor?”

Well, yes and no, I tell him. There’s an insurance system. It’s complicated.

He pauses to consider this. “So you buy the insurance, and then the insurance company pays the doctor?”

“Yes. It’s like that,” I say.

“But is it expensive?”

“It can be, but it depends on a lot of factors. There’s the state insurance system, and then there’s private insurance, which can be cheaper, but only if you’re young and healthy. And women usually have to pay more for it, since there’s a good possibility that they might one day have maternity concerns, which gets expensive—or at least that’s the position of the private insurance companies.”

Roe considers all this carefully and then shrugs at the injustice of it all. “Here in Choson, healthcare is free for all citizens,” he pronounces.

I nod, silently congratulate him for following the script so well. In fact, save for a few hospitals in the capital catering to the elite, healthcare is now subject to the same graft as every other facet of life. Outside hospitals and clinics, cigarette merchants have set up shop. Patients going in buy packs with which to gift the doctors in exchange for treatment; the doctors resell them to the merchants and pocket the cash on their way out at the end of their shifts. Medicine for most ailments is in such short supply that only hard currency will get you any. But, of course, none of this is mentioned to foreigners.

It’s amusing at first, but as time wears on, the more you know about this place, the more annoyed you get when they lie to you. Because it reinforces the awareness that you, like they, are playing a role. And neither side has any choice in the matter—everything about the situation feels unnatural. As a tour guide, one of your primary duties is to lie to the foreigners in your charge, and as a foreigner, your role is to accept those lies unquestioningly. To give Roe and Min credit, they lie to us a lot less often than other tour guides I’ve had here. Roe barely speaks at all, but he generally follows Min’s lead. This has less to do with Min’s failure to abide by all she was taught during the long and rigorous training process that all tour guides have to undergo and more to do with her formative years spent abroad. From her own experience, she realizes that a lot of what she has been instructed to tell us we simply would not, could not believe.

Often they will lie about the most absurd things. On an architecture study trip I joined in 2014, we were given a tour of the Taedongmun Cinema House. Constructed in 1955, it was the first cinema erected in the country following the Korean War, and—with its columnar neoclassical facade, crowned with a triad statue of a gun-toting soldier, book-wielding peasant woman, and hoe-hoisting worker—is an architectural landmark of the capital. (The interior is a comparatively banal affair, owing to its refurbishment in 2008 with shiny marble flooring, following the “marblization” that similarly pervades official and commercial interiors throughout mainland China today: monkey see, monkey do.)

On this tour, we were accompanied by Simon from Koryo Tours, who asked our Korean guide, a middle-aged woman named Ms. O, whether we might be able to see the projection booth. Ms. O exchanged a few words with the manager of the cinema in Korean and then informed us that the booth was locked and no one on the premises had keys. Upon entering one of the two screening halls, Simon, his voice steeped in sarcasm, cried out, “Ms. O! Is that woman okay? Nobody has keys, so she must be trapped inside! Shouldn’t we call someone to get her out?” We turned to the back of the hall, and sure enough, a cleaning woman could be seen busily dusting the inside of the brightly illuminated projection booth. We watched as Ms. O’s face fell onto the shiny marble beneath us.

To be fair, the situation was outside Ms. O’s control. The manager of the cinema told us it was not possible, she relayed the message; whether the fib was his or hers matters little. As Simon would tell me later, “In most countries, you are generally permitted to do anything you want, unless there is a law forbidding it. In the DPRK, it is the opposite: everything is forbidden, until you are told that it is allowed.” Encountering these daily frustrations, the tendency is to ask your guides, “Why?” But in response, your guides will merely laugh at you. Because “Why?” is a question only a foreigner would ever ask.

The constant lying on those earlier visits only made me more curious. It was, after all, never an unfriendly lying; I always enjoyed cordial if somewhat stiff relations with my guides. And I’m certain that they never caught on that I knew I was being lied to. With the exception of Ms. O, who had worked in the 1980s at the DPRK Embassy in Vienna, none of my guides had ever been abroad. They had all heard of the internet and had a vague idea of what it was, owing to foreigners’ descriptions and access to their own highly limited local version, the Intranet. Because of the continuing information blockade, most—but not all—North Koreans have no idea how much we actually know about their country.

“Are North Koreans free to travel abroad?” someone asked one of our guides on my first visit to the country.

“Oh yes, we can travel anywhere we want, anytime.”

Of course, everyone knows that travel abroad is completely forbidden for all but the North Korean elite, who are only permitted to go on official business. Not only that, but North Koreans are not even permitted to leave their hometown unless they apply for and are granted a special travel pass that specifies their destination and the length of time they are permitted to remain there. Not only is there no freedom of speech, there is no freedom of movement.

Even when what your guide says blatantly contradicts the very scene before your eyes, they feel relatively unashamed about lying. “There are no special families here,” a twenty-seven-year-old resident of Pyongyang, the capital of the elite, once told me—shortly after visiting the tony club of the Ryugyong Health Complex, with its ground-floor shops hawking Rolex watches and designer-label clothing. The triumph of socialism, indeed.

Such lies, I realized, point to a profoundly unsettling aspect of the zeitgeist: while capitalism has come to encroach upon virtually every facet of life, these activities are still technically illegal, as the regime has yet to officially change its ideological tune. No wonder, then, that the guides haven’t changed theirs; they simply haven’t been told to, and it would be dangerous for them to even bring it up. And were the authorities to do so, it would be a tacit admission of these contradictions, which are not supposed to be discussed.

Anyway, psychologically, lying does not have the same taboo here as it does in most cultures. North Koreans are reared with the implicit understanding that lying is a very natural thing to do. It is a survival mechanism. Because in this highly specific version of reality, the fabric of truth is woven with lies. Often, the lies are unknown to the citizens themselves, so tightly knit are they in the embroidery, everything they have been taught about the world and their country’s place in it.

One of the most dreaded rituals of daily life—and arguably one of the more ingenious instruments of domestic psychological warfare installed by the regime—is self-criticism sessions, a practice commonly deployed in the Soviet Union and Maoist China. They begin in the classroom in elementary school and continue into the workplace in adulthood. In these exercises of self-diminution, you are expected to cite one of the teachings of the Great Leader, Dear Leader, or Respected Marshal and then illustrate how either you or, more usually, one of your comrades in the room has failed to live up to that high ideal. But like all aspects of daily life, self-criticism has come to be infused with a fair dose of the performative. As these sessions can result in permanently acrimonious relations between people—sowing the seeds of distrust is very much the underlying point—those who are a bit wiser tend to prepare for these sessions in advance by conferring with trusted friends and scripting slight offenses with which to accuse one another. Your turn this week, mine next week. In this way, you avoid igniting a feud that might inevitably develop into a more genuinely nasty series of back-and-forth accusations, which could potentially result in consequences far more serious and dangerous for both parties. By scripting the drama beforehand, the lie becomes a convenient truth for both accuser and accused.

So when my Korean guides would lie to my face, I didn’t feel exactly offended, as I might anywhere else in the world. After all, I was essentially lying to them about a lot of things, in my own awkward, likely equally unconvincing way—who I am, the nature of the work I do, what I really believe. The question then becomes: How far can things really develop in any kind of relationship between two humans when virtually everything framing the situation is false, rooted in a lie?

For me, this is a question from which I can retreat, a question I can ponder from a safe, comparatively cozy distance each time I leave the country. While for my North Korean friends—if it is even possible for a foreigner to be friends with a North Korean—it is a question that they inevitably have to spend their entire lives ignoring.

The result, I have come to believe, is that at times, they do not even realize they are lying. They live in a perpetual ontological quandary, where truth becomes increasingly difficult to discern.

There are economic corollaries to all of this, of course. Tourism, after all, is a hard-currency business. And idealism is one of the official currencies. But its devaluation, over time, matches that of the North Korean won. It is yet a further reflection of the double consciousness of the North Korean psyche, where what you say and what you see with your own eyes markedly contradict each other, where that inner war between public duty and private necessity quietly rages.

Like the hills of Wonsan, the mountainous crags surrounding the Ullim Falls are said to resemble a folding screen, that most refined of East Asian household accoutrements. You can hear the echo of the falling water even before the falls come into view. As you cross a short bridge that takes you over the creek, the falls come into focus behind the summer foliage. From two hundred forty-six feet above, water cascades down from some hidden source midway up the boulder before hitting a shelf that spills down a second stream into a small pond below. Next to the falls, the date 2001—oddly not the Juche year—has been carved into the mountain in red ink. That is the year the surrounding construction was completed and it was deemed touristable, the road leading up the mountain paved, and the construction finished of the triangular teahouse on the other side of the pond that provides pristine viewing conditions—although Roe tells us it is no longer in operation.

I catch up with Alek and Alexandre. Roe goes off to speak to the old soldier guard who’s been shadowing us the entire time.

“Maybe you should say something to Min,” I whisper to Alek.

“Yes, man,” says Alexandre, “this could be serious. What if the maid finds it in the room and turns it in to the security guys at the hotel?”

“We could say it’s ours,” I offer.

“So then what was it doing in her room?” Alexandre retorts. “Fuck that. I’m not getting involved. I don’t want to go to prison here.”

“It’s more likely the maid would keep it for herself,” says Alek. “You know, for personal consumption. Or to sell it on the Jangmadang or wherever.”

“But if Min gets caught,” Alexandre whispers, “you know what will happen. I feel sorry for her.”

Actually, it’s hard to know what would happen. Accounts vary as to the punishment doled out when caught with foreign media. It is still regarded as a crime, and a serious one at that. Though the punishment may no longer be as severe as the brutal incarceration Un Ju experienced in the early 2000s. Some defectors claim that nowadays, you can simply bribe your way out of the situation.

Back in the parking lot, Min has removed her suitcase from the back of the van, sprawled its contents across the pavement. Hwa and Kim stand by watching, smoking. Yes, even Kim—who quit years ago—is now smoking. The brown-suited guard stands at a distance, watching the scene suspiciously. This guy could cause us trouble if he wanted to. I remember I have a pack of Camels in my bag that I’d bought at duty-free in Beijing. I produce them and offer him one. He smiles and accepts, graciously. Alek follows my lead and, since he speaks the best Korean, proceeds to make small talk with the guy to distract him from Min’s panic scene.

Min stands before her ravaged luggage, at a loss for what to do next. Kim mutters something, throws his cigarette down, climbs back into the van. Hwa follows after him. I give the soldier three cigarettes from my pack and a smile. He stashes them in his front pocket, gives me the universal gratitude symbol with hands clasped before him.

We’re going back to Wonsan.

Could it be in the gallery? In the restaurant? No, there’s no way. It could only be in the hotel, in her room. That’s the only place it could have fallen out. Makes sense: a private space. There aren’t any other women on the trip, so she gets her own room. A call to the reception desk while we were observing the falls produced no answers. Min requested that they halt cleaning the room until we could return to look for her lost belongings. She has lost something very very tiny, she explains.

Meanwhile, Min has opened up the plastic bag containing our snacks and is busy stuffing her face. “This is called panic eating,” she deadpans.

Alexandre and I remain silent. The burden is on Alek. He’s in the uncomfortable position of having to pretend he doesn’t know the real reason why Min is panic eating while also wanting to offer his help out of genuine concern: the politics of friendship.

“So the card,” he begins, “is there just… music on it? Or is there also data?”

Min masticates a cookie thoughtfully. “Data.” She swallows.

“Hmm,” he says. “Maybe… if it would help, you can tell them that it belongs to me? You know, this dumb Australian guy, losing stuff wherever we go, you’re constantly having to pick up after him…”

His voice trails off.

Min looks at Alek, considering his offer. In that moment, she understands that he understands. That we understand. Through this secret nonverbal language of glances and gestural innuendo, mixed with all the events of the past hours, the past days, weeks—she recognizes the extent to which we are no longer innocent tourists.

“It’s alright,” she says. “I’ll handle it.”

Certainly no one is ecstatic about returning to Wonsan after Comrade Kim’s face-losing run-in with the traffic cop this morning. Get out of town was the parting message. There aren’t many backstreets to speak of in Wonsan, save for a few intended solely for pedestrians—but Hwa goes around the main square to lessen our chances of reencountering our white-uniformed friend and gets us back to the Tongmyong Hotel parking lot.

“Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help?” Alek asks a final time after Alexandre silently prods him.

“I’ll take care of it,” Min says. “You guys wait here.”

Roe and Kim follow Min into the hotel. Hwa sticks a USB into the passenger-side monitor. An old black-and-white war movie plays. I ask Alek, the DPRK film buff, if he’s seen this one. He shakes his head. Save for The Flower Girl and a couple others, the DPRK has canonized very few of its pre-1980 films with international DVD releases, though citizens can acquire domestic copies at DVD stalls that are off-limits to foreigners.

Suspense extends the length of the minutes through which we are forced to wait. Each time a car pulls into the lot, Hwa checks nervously to make sure it isn’t one of the dreaded black BMWs with tinted windows, preferred vehicle of the bowibu. I can’t stand the tension, so I step outside the van to smoke.

At the edge of the parking lot, behind a truck, is a large cage housing pigeons. Probably the source of the roast chicken we presumed we were eating at last night’s dinner.

The hotel’s ground floor is ringed by a wraparound terrace. I follow it past the lonely pile of stony rubble, the culmination of the morning’s masonry endeavor. Behind the hotel, a middle-aged man in an undershirt smokes, guarding the drying sheets and towels from thieves. Down below, just off the jetty, two young boys crawl on rocks, dipping their hands into the sea. They’re searching for shellfish, crabs, anything they can eat or sell. Among other treasures, they’ve fished out a fallen pack containing three cigarettes, which they lay on a rock to dry beneath the rays of the noontime sun. Circling my way back to the parking lot, a group of hardhatted construction workers carry wooden planks toward the shoreline. They’re in the early stages of building a new dock for the hotel. They stop to stare at the foreigner as I stroll past. I smile back at them, wave.

Finally, the Koreans reemerge from the hotel. They climb into the van. Without any exchange of words, Hwa turns the key in the ignition and pulls us out of the parking lot. Min stares sullenly out the window.

“Well,” says Alek, “any luck?”

“No. It’s not there.”

We drive on in silence.