My Holiday in North Korea by Wendy E. Simmons

rushing from the room and forgetting their flag (or something like that), and some equally cockamamy explanation for why the U.N. flag is a shambles, while the NoKo flag is almost perfectly preserved.

    I trust my gut implicitly, and I’m a good judge of character, so I just can’t reconcile what’s coming out of Non-General’s mouth with the intelligent, kind, and genuine man he seems to be. Does he really believe the stories he’s telling me? It’s as if the U.S. president took to the airwaves one day to warn us that apples and oranges have finally reached common ground and are staging a coup…and meant it. I’m confounded.
    The retelling of history retold, our motorcade proceeds south to the Thirty-Eighth Parallel, where we pull into a sizeable parking lot—which is, of course, devoid of cars. We walk down a small slope and around a corner, past a monument with a copy of Kim Il-sung’s final signature (he died the next day). The local guide stops us so we can stare at the copy of his signature on a rock for a few minutes, in deference to the Dear Great Supreme Leader, because that’s what you do in NoKo.
    Older Handler breaks the silence by saying something about NoKo’s flagpole being taller than SoKo’s flagpole, in a tone so boastful it sounds like “nah nah nah nah nah nah,” while directing my attention to one flagpole then the other. Good god, I think to myself, if we’re fighting over flagpole height at the DMZ, mankind is doomed, and then shake off the thought as we move on to the main attraction.
    Save for the dozen or so NoKo soldiers escorting my gang, the Joint Security Area is a ghost town—as deserted as a suburban office park on a Sunday afternoon. There is no one there, and nothing going on. “Where is everyone?” I ask, my confusion and disappointment palpable, “I thought this would be scarier.” No one answers. Ask a stupid question, and everyone just thinks you’re an idiot.
    One main blue building straddles North and South Korea. Like all other tourists to the DMZ, I enter it from the side I’m on—in my case, the North. Inside, I sit in the translator’s seat, my left side in the South, my right side in the North—a stupid, silly border, the source of so much pain and death, crossed just like that. North Korean soldiers stared at South Korean soldiers while Fresh Handler snapped photos of me shaking hands across the border with Non-General and I snapped photos of Non-General with his military friends. I’d been told that photographing anyone in the military was strictly forbidden, but for whatever reason, no one at the Thirty-Eighth Parallel seemed to care.

    Back outside and in North Korea, I have the weirdest sensation of being on the wrong side of the tracks. I feel like a traitor, or a Potemkin trophy being paraded around like a hostage by his or her captors. I ask Fresh Handler what would happen if I made a break for it and ran to the other side.
    “They’ll shoot you,” was all she said.
    I wanted a photo of me alone in front of the infamous blue buildings that separate North from South, so I hung back a moment and gave Fresh Handler a chance to snap my photo. The soldiers and other handlers had walked at most three giant steps ahead before noticing I’d fallen eleven seconds behind, which as you can see by the soldier coming to fetch me, was eleven seconds too many. Turns out the DMZ is no joke, even though it felt like one.
    Inside the austere Panmungak Hall, the main building on the North Korean side, the lights are all off, so the hallways and stairwells are dim. As in the rest of the DMZ, aside from our group there’s not another soul in sight. Maybe everyone’s downstairs in a bunker or somewhere in the building out of view, but a bustling intelligence center this is not.
    Fresh Handler and I need to use the bathroom. As this is not a scheduled event, it takes them forever to decide which bathroom we should use and then forever again to find the key. The