CHAPTER 8
I don’t leave anything out.
It was my first trip here, the only time I voluntarily entered this country. Everything was perfectly legit. Through a travel agency, I managed to get my hands on a tourist visa, and I flew to North Korea. The countryside was still reeling after the devastating floods and subsequent famine from a few years earlier, and I’d been told not to expect to travel anywhere outside of Pyongyang. Even then, wherever our tour group went, we had two minders assigned to us. Think tour guide, chaperone, spy, and babysitter all wrapped up into one role. That’s what the minders did. The reason there were two? Easy. So they could keep an eye on each other as well as on us foreigners.
The first few days of my trip were very rote. Proud visits to shopping malls that l
