Part I

Somewhere over China

I’d come well-prepared.

A brother, friends and roommates on three continents and appropriate western authorities within the country were aware of this journey. Insurance was purchased. All the necessary papers and tickets were purchased. The flights and trains were all booked, and everything within the country was taken care of.

I was as prepared as I could be for every and any possibility within North Korea.

At this point, being on a bullet train speeding through the Manchurian desert, felt like an astronaut on a journey through space controlled by computers and ground operators. All the help I could get was there – but if things went wrong it might never be enough. There was no more responsibility for me, other than to sit tight.

And stay calm.

Looking toward Shenyang

As the destination approached, I ran over and over the notes from the meeting the day before in Beijing, where, after giving Koryo Tours a month’s pay, I listened to an hour of do’s and don’t’s with the rest of the travel group: Do tip your tour guides. Don’t crease a newspaper over the face or body of one of the Kims. Do ask permission to take photos. Don’t ask your tour guides deliberately stupid questions but what about unintentionally stupid questions?

The itinerary was somewhat risky. The international flight to Pyongyang was to officially depart two hours after the train’s arrival at Shenyang Station.  “Air Koryo is aware of Mr. Nasif’s itinerary” I was told in a cryptic email.  They were sending a driver.

Shenyang, China

Emerging in the heart of yet another enormous Chinese city after sleeping for almost the entire journey would have been exhilarating – if the subsequent destination wasn’t so much more daunting.

I set about looking for some kind of hint amidst the storm of taxi drivers soliciting a ride from me, for ‘Mr. Kim.’  What an awkwardly common name.

Finally, after just long enough for me to start panicking, I spotted “MR. GREGORY” scrawled on cardboard. Mr. Kim, who spoke no English, put me in his car, naively parked at the back of the station lot, and curiously adorned with a Chinese Mao Zedong amulet – “Kim” seemed like a Korean name – I was confused as ever. And confusion gave way to a resumption of panic as Mr. Kim took an hour to navigate out of a parking lot chock full of honking Chinese drivers.  Anyone who has ever been to China has no problem calling them the worst drivers on Earth.

Arriving at the airport with only a half an hour should have terrified me. But keeping to the theme of every phase of the journey feeling like a plot twist in a toxically violent drama, it was completely empty. I mean, Shenyang is a city of six million people. And the massive airport hall was absolutely deserted. No people. No one behind the desks. No security guards.  A weird silence set in. Again, I felt like I was in outer space.

Running after signs to my gate, through major halls and chambers, I saw two people – one man in one booth checking my passport and visa, and one man giving me a brief security scan.

The nails were scratching somewhere. It was an ominous transfer through this empty complex. But nothing was quite like emerging into the gate. Suddenly, there were people.

The gate was settled by ninety people wearing the exact same tieless black suits, broken up by ten awkwardly dressed Chinese tourists. No one was in line, even though it was 1:30 PM, twenty minutes past when boarding was to begin.

From my journal, in mysteriously coded language:

They’re here. Wearing things. Things I got obsessed with in college (lapel pins). Things our leader at home didn’t wear and got in trouble for (again, lapel pins). But these aren’t flags. These are faces.

Faces of the hostel owner.

The airline employee at the desk by the boarding gate smiled as I tumbled towards her, breathing heavily, still under the impression I was 20 minutes late. She was on the phone, and from the other side of the desk I could hear heavy shouting.

She spoke back calmly, in what I recognized as Korean, grabbed a scrap ticket stub, and scrawled a time on the back of it. Then she paused, as the man on the other end of the line shouted again, shouted so loud, I could hear it, and even discern that it was also Korean.

She crossed out the time, wrote a new one, and slid the stub over to me.

From my journal:

The boarding time for Flight JS156 is 13:45. At the moment.

Whoever was on the other end of that phone was in charge. I was in North Korean hands now.

Part II

I sat, pretending my hardest to be normal, amongst 100 mildly bored North Koreans all doing a better job than me. On their chests were badges with the Kims’ faces on them, and those Kims and the Chinese tourists all stared at me, the one who didn’t belong.

But the North Koreans didn’t. And it somehow felt obvious that ignoring me had little to do with strict rules and more to do with a combination of disinterest and general politeness.

This general politeness continued oddly as we were bussed onto the tarmac and loaded onto the small plane. The pilot, a head taller than every other North Korean, smiled and bowed shyly to me. When I was sat on the plane, which looked quite normal for a one-star airline, the stewardess passing out newspapers stared at me for a moment, before blurting out in a single breath, “Excuse-me-are-you-speaking-English?”

“Yes,” I answered, boiling over with desperate curiosity for an English copy of the legendary Pyongyang Times.

The fact that they were all treating me with unchecked politeness felt like an incomplete story.  Where’s the hostility?

The moment was increasingly surreal.  The video being shown to all passengers – with no accompanying audio – was quite clearly some A-grade propaganda. When the video switched to a map, I noted how the roads and city labels trailed off in South Korea, as if the country to the south were some rural backwood. Surrounding the Korean Peninsula on the map, alternating in Korean and English, were labeled the East Sea of Korea, the South Sea of Korea, and West Sea of Korea. It was increasingly aware the plane was entering a bubble.

Sandwiches came out. My first North Korean meal. I toyed with nuance in my journal.

Didn’t expect to find cheese here. Oh wait.

?

Cheese isn’t common in East Asia, let alone in a country that doesn’t trade globally. Reading this two weeks later, it took me a moment to realize what I was alluding to – the hilarious story a few years ago of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un nearly dying from overconsumption of cheese.  Linguistic nuance was my citadel.

I didn’t sleep a wink on the flight.

The plane was descending. It seemed even North Korean pilots were perfectly good flyers. The last thing I scrawled in my journal before confronting North Korean customs enforcement:

Descent begins. They wouldn’t take my trash. 

While struggling to accept the reality of my bizarre situation, it seemed only fitting to panic about something so routine.

They also never brought me a newspaper.

Part III: The entry

Heading into a landing, one could see only farms.

We left the plane as we boarded it, directly onto the tarmac. And I took my first ground level look at a North Korean building: Pyongyang International Airport. It looks weirdly normal I thought. Yeah, from this side. And maybe it would for a city one-tenth the size of Pyongyang.

Two soldiers stood at the gate, ushering us over. They looked like they’d just stepped out of a YouTube video, a TV screen, or a textbook – since those were the only places I’d ever seen them before. They were wearing those big, round green hats. First lesson: the military runs North Korea’s TSA.

Second lesson: they run everything else.

There was a robust fruit basket by the door.  My first thought was that in a land notorious for famine, somebody was getting well-fed.

Given three whole forms to fill out for each section of customs, I tried to take my time and fill them all out properly, not wanting to make a mistake or appear dishonest. But the soldiers were rushing me.

It added to a prior sense of foreboding – it was hard to believe that, about two years earlier, a 24-year-old American man had torn up his visa in this very airport, screaming for asylum. In my diligent preparations for this trip, I read about Matthew Miller, and many other Americans who’d found a way to be arrested in North Korea. Learning about their relatively humane treatment emboldened me in my intentions. But when North Korean soldiers are telling you to hurry up in Korean, even if they’re doing it relatively politely, it’s still nerve-wracking.

After a maddening ten minutes at baggage claim, there emerged one naked, lone, black standard travel bag, amongst a fleet of 200 boxes which I realized may well be full of illicit goods from China. In a way our whole flight was summed up by this black market parade: one western tourist in a sea of Asians doing shady business.

One in a million

With my now completed forms I moved toward the security screening. The soldiers promptly confiscated my book and camera – which was chock full of useless pictures I had taken in the hopes of frustrating a potential screening. Non-political books were considered acceptable.  One inflexible rule – no Bibles.

Within a minute, I was searched and given my book and camera back.

It seemed I was breezing through security. The last checkpoint required me to hand over my visa, printed separately from my passport.

Uh oh.

It was gone.

I don’t know how much time passed in that moment – maybe 30 seconds, maybe 10 minutes.  My space journey was approaching a black hole. Rifling through my bags in front of the exit, I wonderied how much/if to tell the North Korean authorities, while other Koreans and foreigners moved around me.

I’m going to jail.

I honestly couldn’t even remember, perhaps from panic, if they had already taken my visa. I didn’t even know if I was supposed to have it anymore.

WHY DID I COME HERE?

My clothes and gifts for tour guides were swirling in a tornado, tumbling onto the floor.

What is matter? Who is me? Yes?

Found it. In my backpack.

…

At an incredibly unfitting moment to feel relieved, I handed over my visa and waltzed into North Korea.

The hard part was over. I entered the hermit kingdom alone.

To be continued.

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All photos property of Gregory A Nasif. Available for licensing.