Somewhere Inside Read online

  Mr. Yee then put forward a question I had been dreading. “Have you ever been to North Korea before?” he asked.

  I assumed it wouldn’t be long before they learned about a visit I had made to Pyongyang in 2002 while working for Channel One News. I, along with Mitch Koss and a Korean-American correspondent, applied for tourist visas during the North’s Arirang Festival, a gymnastics and artistic production celebrating the late leader Kim Il Sung. The show features thousands of children, each holding up and flipping colored cards in unison to create massive mosaic pictures. In one instance, the entire side of North Korea’s May Day Stadium might show a scene with North Korean soldiers standing victorious, but with a quick flip of thousands of cards, the picture might change to a gleaming portrait of Kim Il Sung. All the while, tens of thousands of dancers perform intricate routines set to patriotic music on the stadium grounds. Along with attending the highly choreographed performance, our tour group was taken to some of the main monuments, statues, museums, and sights that are the country’s pride. During the five-day tour, we were never allowed to roam around alone; even walking across the street from our hotel was forbidden.

  “Yes, I have been to Pyongyang,” I answered despondently. I explained that we were working for an educational program and wanted to introduce Channel One’s student audience to the culture of North Korea.

  “So you lied and came here as a tourist, not as a journalist?” he asked.

  “We knew we wouldn’t be admitted as journalists. I know it doesn’t make it right, but I am aware of many journalists who have applied to come here posing as tourists,” I explained. “You have such an impressive intelligence network here,” I said, trying to be flattering, but also trying to make a point about how lax their security was. “You must know that journalists apply for these tours.” I could tell that he was slightly flummoxed by my comment.

  Just then, Min-Jin came into the room and asked what size clothes I wear. She said she was going to get me some underwear. I told her I wear a small, perhaps even extra small, and that made her look me up and down with a skeptical eye. The thought of them buying me clothes made me feel ill, particularly because it seemed to indicate that I would not be leaving North Korea anytime soon. Then Mr. Yee reinforced my fears.

  “The guard is going to get you some underwear because this is where you may be staying for a while,” he said. “How many pairs do you think she should buy? If you do not cooperate with me, I may need to tell her to buy you ten pairs because you may be here for a very long time!”

  Later that evening, Min-Jin came into my room carrying some underwear. Recalling Mr. Yee’s threat to keep me in North Korea, I was relieved when she handed me just two pairs. I looked at the tag and saw they were size large. But when I tried them on, they were a little snug on my thin frame. I then realized why the guard had given me a skeptical look earlier when I told her my size. My measurements might be small by Western standards, but compared with the average North Korean, I am enormous. I was also given some long cotton leggings and a top to wear as pajamas. I wore these underneath my clothing throughout the day to help keep warm. Although receiving these items seemed to be a sign that I was going to be held captive for a while longer, I was happy to have some clean garments.

  I was also grateful to be given three meals a day. Normally, each meal consisted of a bowl of rice, a small plate of vegetables, and a little piece of fried or steamed fish. Sometimes they brought me a bowl of noodles, goulash, or dumplings. While the portions were a fraction of a normal Western meal, I felt lucky to have something to eat when millions of North Koreans are reportedly going hungry. Malnutrition has led to stunting and mental retardation. Studies done on escapees from North Korea have shown that, on average, teenage boys in North Korea are five inches shorter and weigh twenty-five pounds less than their South Korean counterparts. What I was being served was probably elaborate compared with normal standards for North Koreans, particularly those living outside the capital.

  I ate in the guards’ area at a wooden coffee table. During the first few days of my confinement, I ate in silence. But slowly I began to feel more comfortable with my guards, and I was desperate for some human interaction beyond the investigation. I wanted to talk to them, and after several days, they seemed to loosen up. During one dinner, I tried to strike up a conversation with Min-Jin.

  “You’re very pretty,” I said. Her cheeks turned a rosy hue.

  “No,” she replied. “I’m too short.”

  We started making small talk and chitchatting about everyday things. I stayed away from politics or anything that might be viewed as subversive. Like most twenty-something women anywhere in the world, she seemed most interested in talking about guys and relationships. She asked if it was true that Western men and women like to get drunk at bars and go home and sleep with one another.

  “Um, yes, that does happen,” I responded with an amused grin. “Where did you hear this?”

  “A foreign tourist told me,” she replied with a smile.

  “Does that ever happen here?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” she said wide-eyed. “We are not like you in the West.”

  She then proceeded to mimic a man in a bar by licking her tongue over her lips with a perverted grin. I returned the expression with my own salacious imitation. We both burst into giggles.

  She wanted to know what my husband looked like, how long we’d been married, and how we met. It was hard for me to talk about Iain without getting emotional. He was the love of my life. In the twelve years we’d known each other, we’d argued maybe five times. We still were excited to see each other every day. I thought about the last meal we had together. We’d just bought a house so we were trying to save money and eat at home more often. Iain normally did the cooking because, frankly, I’m just not good at it. To surprise him, I had struggled to put together a dinner of beef vegetable soup. I spent the whole day laboring over it, only to miscalculate the amount of salt needed. When we sat down that night to eat dinner, I watched nervously as Iain took the first spoonful. He tried to hide an obvious gag and ended up choking from the excessive salt. He didn’t want to make me feel bad and told me it was delicious. When I took a taste, I had to spit it out because it was horrible. It was typical of Iain not to hurt my feelings because he knew how hard I had worked. I insisted that we toss out the soup and head over to Henry’s Tacos instead.

  I told Min-Jin that Iain and I met at a concert while in college. I couldn’t figure out how to describe the sounds of the Chemical Brothers. Just then, Min-Jin started singing some Western songs, beginning with “My Heart Will Go On,” by Celine Dion. It seemed that everyone, no matter how isolated their society is, knows the movie Titanic and the song that goes with it.

  “Do you know what hip-hop is?” I asked. She looked confused. “It’s like rap music,” I continued.

  “Oh, yes!” she replied and jumped up from the couch where she was sprawled out. “Is this rap music?” she asked and began to bounce up and down with her arms spread out. “Yo, yo, yo!” she chanted before keeling over laughing.

  We were two young women from opposite worlds sharing a moment of levity. It was the first time I had felt anything other than fear and sadness during my captivity. But then Kyung-Hee walked into the room. Her cold, bemused expression extinguished any bit of cheerfulness in the air. I proceeded to pick at the remainder of my meal in silence as Min-Jin slumped back into her chair.

  The next day Min-Jin was noticeably more reserved. When I tried to talk to her, she was curt and unresponsive. I figured she must have overstepped her bounds with me and had either been reprimanded by Kyung-Hee or didn’t want to cross the line again for fear of being punished.

  EACH DAY I DREADED the daily questioning from Mr. Yee. I would sit on my bed in nervous anticipation of his visits. My stomach began to churn anytime I heard footsteps approaching my room, and I prepared myself to be grilled. With his tape recorder and red notebook in hand, he wanted to know every det
ail about the story we were covering along the border, including whom I interviewed, what questions I asked, and what was said. Even though it was grueling, I found myself thinking of trivial details that could prolong the process and give my family and government more time to act.

  One day, about a week into the investigation, Mr. Yee asked me the question I feared the most. “So you have been to North Korea before. What about your sister? Has she ever been here?”

  LISA

  LAURA’S CAPTIVITY IN NORTH KOREA was hugely alarming for me for another reason. She was being held inside a country that considered me an enemy. In 2003, after three and a half years as a cohost for the daily talk show The View, I left the show and started working for an organization that was committed to sending me all over the world to cover stories: National Geographic Television. It was a dream job. In my first few years at National Geographic, I traveled everywhere from Nepal to China, Colombia to Egypt. But there was one country I wanted to visit the most: the place considered the most isolated in the world. Little had ever been reported from inside North Korea. And in my wildest dreams, I never thought I would get a chance to actually go there.

  In June 2007, a friend from Nepal, Dr. Sanduk Ruit, a world-renowned cataract surgeon, was invited by the North Korean government to set up medical camps in three North Korean cities. Knowing that I had always wanted to go there, Dr. Ruit asked me if I’d like to be part of his team. The catch was that I was never to say I was a journalist. Ruit convinced the North Korean embassy in Nepal that I was a vital part of his group and that he needed me to document the surgical procedures for training purposes on video. I was therefore permitted to bring a camera and the necessary equipment. I was told I would be the only American inside North Korea at the time, as all foreign nongovernmental organizations and food groups had recently been expelled from the country.

  Upon arrival in Pyongyang, we all had to turn our cell phones over to the authorities for storage during our stay in the country. I was told that because North Korea considers itself still at war with the United States and South Korea, cell-phone activity could be detected by satellite. Therefore, no one in the country was permitted to have one. That’s what we were told anyway. We had between six and eight government officials assigned to us to monitor our every move—they even stayed in the guesthouses where we were lodged. It didn’t take long before I fully understood how the North Korean government maintained its stranglehold over its people. I felt as if everyone was watching me, and it seemed everyone was watching one another.

  For the twelve days we were in North Korea, we worked in hospitals in the cities of Pyongyang, Pyongsong, and Sariwon. Though we were in operating rooms for most of our visit, we were given a unique window into North Korea’s health-care system and medical facilities. I would have to describe the latter as antiquated and basic. Dr. Ruit had to bring all of the equipment he needed, including generators to deal with the frequent power outages that occurred throughout our visit.

  Cataracts develop for many reasons, but the most common are those induced by old age, malnourishment, and excessive exposure to ultraviolet light. Although the camps were set up to treat cataracts, the number of people who showed up with other maladies like head pain, body aches, and dizziness, among other things, was an indication of the extreme conditions and lack of proper treatment.

  In the developed world, cataract operations are common-place—people typically have cataracts removed in the very early stages before they start to impede vision. In poor countries where medical treatment and technology are not readily available, people with severe cataracts can go totally blind. When this happens, they cease being productive members of society and become a strain on their families and communities. Often that leads them to be cast out and ostracized.

  While we were in the country, thousands of people came to have their eyes checked, including young children. Dr. Ruit or one of his trainees performed the twenty-five-minute operation on those with bona fide cataracts. In the end, a thousand surgeries were performed over twelve days. People who had been blind for as long as ten years had their sight entirely restored. It was miraculous. But it wasn’t Dr. Ruit and his team who were thanked for performing the work necessary to give people their vision back.

  Once their operation was complete, patients were asked to go into the large waiting room to rest for at least twelve hours. Two hundred people would be in the room waiting for their eye patches to be removed. One by one, Dr. Ruit’s staff peeled away the bandages from the formerly blind patients’ eyes. Once the bandages were removed, every single person would become hysterical and rush to the gigantic portrait of North Korea’s despotic leader, Kim Jong Il, to thank him for curing them of blindness. Like robots, hundreds of people collapsed in tears before the image of Chairman Kim, whom the North Korean people affectionately call “Dear Leader.” It was as if the doctor weren’t even there.

  I was purportedly documenting the teaching process, and I asked the North Korean officials if I could follow a recovered patient home to see how she navigated with her sight restored. Initially, my inquiry was met with looks of confusion. Everyone seemed to be wondering, Why would she want to do that? But to my surprise, after a lengthy discussion, they agreed.

  I was taken to the home of an older woman who lived with her son, his wife, and their two young daughters. It was a decent-sized one-bedroom apartment in a three-story walk-up. There were no beds in the home because everyone in the family slept on the heated floor in the living room. I was told that this was typical. They had a television and a large stereo system that looked like a boom box with big speakers. There wasn’t a family photo to be seen, only those of the Dear Leader and his father, the “Great Leader,” Kim Il Sung. All over the apartment, there were small photos and large photos of them, some translated into watercolor paintings and others into oils. There was the Dear One riding horses, leading a parade, and walking among flowers. I asked if they thought the Dear Leader ever did anything wrong. The entire family seemed stupefied, and my North Korean government escorts looked completely befuddled. It was obvious that my question had never been asked before, so they just sat and stared at me for five of the most uncomfortable minutes of my life.

  Sariwon was the last stop on our three-city medical mission. Several hours south of Pyongyang by car, it was a nice, well-maintained city with clean, wide streets, parks, and large sprawling fields. In the first two cities we’d been in, I was told that I could only jog laps around the inside perimeter of the guesthouse property. Sariwon was less populated, so the government officials said I could jog on the road around the hotel as long as I didn’t veer off onto other streets.

  It was about 7:00 A.M., and the air was brisk. I could smell smoke from the fires that people burned to heat their homes at night. At this early hour, people were walking to school and to work. Even though the streets were wide and vast, the whole time I was there I saw few bicycles and even fewer cars. I jogged past three girls who were clearly fascinated by me. They wore monochromatic tracksuits and their haircuts were short and boyish. They looked like athletes.

  On my third lap around the hotel, the girls started following me as I ran. All three kept up with me for about ten minutes until two of them dropped off. The tallest of the three girls maintained a decent pace, even passing me a few times. I started running faster, and then she picked up the pace and passed me. Whenever I’d step ahead, the girl would speed up. And as soon as I passed her, she’d run past me. At a certain point, we were running at full speed. We were going so fast that people in the town rushed to watch us, and then it became a race. The whole time I was thinking, I’m running for America! I could see in her face that she was running for her country. Neither of us would give in—except at a certain point, after completing an entire lap at full speed, we both stopped simultaneously. We were panting so ferociously we could hardly stand up straight. Between breaths, we caught each other’s eyes, and all of a sudden the two of us burst into laughter. For a mo
ment we were just two young women having a funny moment. It was nice.

  On the night before leaving the country, I was asked to hand over all the tapes I had shot of the “training,” so they could be individually screened by government officers. I had anticipated this, so I hid a couple of tapes in the underwear pouch of my suitcase. The resulting documentary revealed an unprecedented and critical look into North Korea’s crippled health-care system and the extreme indoctrination under which the people there live.

  After breakfast on the morning of my departure, I got into a conversation with one of the North Korean official minders assigned to watch over us. Of all of them, he was the sternest and most defiant about North Korea’s strength in the face of hardship. He was nearly six feet tall, with sharp cheekbones and a military-style crew cut. He was called Kwon.

  “We are a small country, but we are all we need,” he explained.

  He told me that as soon as we left the country, he and the rest of the minders would join their brothers and sisters and head to the countryside to harvest rice. Every citizen of North Korea, whether a government official, bus driver, or street cleaner, is obligated to work in the fields during harvest season. Kwon said it was “for the good of our nation.”

  “In your country, all you think of is yourself,” Kwon continued, then launching into a tirade about the sorry state of affairs in America.

  “Your president [it was George W. Bush at the time] invades other countries for their oil so Americans can drive their big fancy cars, and then he calls other countries ‘evil.’” Kwon was referring to President Bush’s characterization of North Korea as part of an “Axis of Evil” with Iran and Iraq in his 2002 State of the Union Address. Kwon went on to ask, “Who is the evil one?”

  I think I surprised him when I told him that, though I was an American, I was very much opposed to the war in Iraq. But at least, I said, “I can express that publicly in my country.”