Screens in the Samsung cafeteria are showing the Trump and Kim Show and Rutger Hauer in Bladerunner. I’m not sure which dystopian vision of Pacific Rim globalization is weirder. Maybe it’s best to focus on the pocketless billiards on the screen in between? Oh, wait, a person in a giant cat head is cleaning the billiards table now. Never mind.
It’s an odd day, lacking the solemnity and gravitas of Kim’s first meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in because nothing Trump does has solemnity or gravitas. The results, after all the pageantry and tears, were more or less what I expected: a vaguely worded agreement reaffirming commitment to peace and denuclearization, with plans for more negotiation down the line.
Peace games
Trump followed up the summit by declaring that the US would stop its war games on the Korean Peninsula, which has led some commentators to claim that the US gave up something while getting nothing. In the most literal terms, that’s true, if you focus only on the summit and not on what led to it or how it was reported in North Korea.
Taking a slightly wider view, North Korea prepared for the summit by dismantling some nuclear facilities to demonstrate its readiness for real denuclearization. How valuable the facilities really were is debatable, but these are at least irreversible steps, unlike Trump’s decision to suspend the war games. And ending the expensive, provocative war games is probably something the US should have done long ago, but the US felt constrained because it felt like a gift to North Korea, and there was never an occasion for giving them a gift until now. I’m not concerned that the joint US-ROK military command will forget how to invade North Korea for lack of practice. Meanwhile, the economic sanctions are still in place, and so are America’s troops in South Korea.
When I first lived in South Korea, in the era of the Sunshine Policy, the english-language Arirang network had a show called Peninsulascope that did soft news about North Korea, looking for areas of commonality and progress. They would end each episode with a North Korean cartoon. I remember there was one about a family of squirrels who live near a fox. When a flood comes, the fox offers to save them; the squirrels hesitate, afraid of the fox, but at last they accept the offer, and the fox does indeed rescue them — only to eat them later. The moral of the story is that you can never trust your enemies because they will never, ever change.
The fox is America. This is how North Koreans are taught to see us: as devious and bestial in our very natures. And now Kim Jong-un has sat down with the king of the foxes and cut some kind of a deal.
I think of that cartoon whenever I hear someone saying this summit is boosting Kim’s legitimacy. In some hypothetical, domino theoryish way, the summit’s acknowledgement that Kim is the leader of a nuclear North Korea — which is true, by the way — may be giving some other dictator ideas. Domestically, though, it’s not that simple.
Kim has been preparing his people for a shift. Showing Kim talking to the enemy, and showing Kim admiring Singapore’s shiny prosperity, is something new. It’s something of a gamble, even if Kim’s position is for now secure. What might have been seen as capitulation or even treason — seen that way not just by the people, who don’t matter, but by the generals and politburo members, who do — has to be seen instead as a bold path forward. Kim needs to make it clear to his domestic audience that he’s not surrendering. I’m not sure how easy that is.
In taking these risks, Kim seems to be demonstrating his desire for something genuinely new. And really, for all that Trump and Moon can set timetables and fiddle with the requirements, it’s up to Kim whether he wants to denuclearize and cut a new path.
I was very fortunate to be able to take time off and travel for 202 days in Southeast Asia in 2015-2016 — mostly in countries where the dollar stretches pretty far because of the disparity in wealth between the country where I happened to be born and the places I was visiting. I decided to give back, in a small way, by pledging a certain amount of money to charity for each day I spent in each country.
Thailand: 72 days
Because I spent the most days in Thailand, I split my donation between two charities.
My closest Thai friend was, like many Thais, reverent toward the royal family. I have my own outsider opinions about all that, but I respect my friend and her values for her own country. The Association for the Promotion of the Status of Women, under royal patronage, provides emergency shelter, health services, vocational training, and many other services to women in Thailand.
The SET Foundation gives scholarships to those in need, with the unique principle of supporting students for a full twelve years, from elementary through collegiate studies, rather than just for a semester or two.
Malaysia: 11 days
As you travel Malaysia, it’s hard not to notice the oil palms: acres and acres of them, a giant monoculture dominating the landscape. I didn’t visit Malaysian Borneo on my trip, but I went there recently, and I discovered the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre, which helps orangutans who’ve lost their mothers to recover and prepare for reintegration into the wild. Malaysia’s unique wildlife is precious and under threat — the oil palm plantations are pressing in, and the lumber industry wants what trees are left — but places like the Sepilok Centre have the potential to drive up the economic value of conservation and diversify the local economy by bringing tourism. And in the meantime, the preservation and restoration work they do is saving unique animals in a unique environment.
Vietnam: 44 days
I met my friend Christina Bui in Myanmar through a chain of travel connections, and ran into her again in Saigon and Hanoi. She works at Pacific Links Foundation, which helps to protect people in Vietnam from human trafficking — being forced into factory work, domestic work, and the like — and empowers women and communities in Vietnam. Slavery is bad and Christina is good, so this was a pretty easy choice.
Myanmar: 23 days
Yangon is a time capsule. Decades of misrule have had the perverse effect of preserving the older part of the city much as it was under British colonial rule. Yangon Heritage Trust is working to preserve and restore the city’s remarkable architecture before it all gets torn down and turned into KFCs, and I hope they succeed in making Yangon the gem of a city that it deserves to be, like today’s Hoi An or Penang but on a much larger scale. (Nothing specific against KFC, by the way. I threw up in the bathroom of the Yangon KFC and they were very polite about it.)
Cambodia: 8 days
Cambodia is rife with terrible NGOs and scammy voluntourism projects, so I wanted to find an organization with a good rating on Charity Navigator, and Cambodia Children’s Fund has that. They take “a holistic, family-based approach” to childhood education, which is sorely needed in this poor and damaged country. They recognize that there are root problems like hunger and violence that can undermine education, so they try to deal with all of these issues as they help young people get the schooling they need and deserve.
Laos: 23 days
Perhaps the most dangerous thing I did in Southeast Asia was go for a walk in Laos.
Laos has more unexploded ordnance (UXO) per capita than anywhere else on earth, a sorry result of a decade of American bombing during the Vietnam War. On a tour of the Plain of Jars, on a trail that was supposed to be cleared, my guide suddenly jumped back and pointed. “That’s a cluster bomb detonator.” He then told me how his brother died: he’d gone fishing and was cooking up his catch in a rice field when the heat triggered an old pineapple bomb that took his head off.
I split my Laos donations between two organizations that deal with the ongoing disaster my country left behind. COPE gives people their lives back by providing prosthetics and rehabilitation to UXO survivors and others with mobility-related disabilities, while the Mine Awareness Group (MAG) works to demine Laos (and other places) and educate the local people about how to avoid UXO accidents, thereby reducing COPE’s potential clientele. I saw both organizations at work in Laos, and at one point even had to stop driving while MAG blew up some UXO they’d found in a field — a field that, when cleared, could provide food and income to a Laotian family.
Indonesia: 18 days
Yayasan Usaha Mulia (YUM) – Foundation for Noble Work has been around a long time and does holistic community work focused on education and alleviating poverty. Finding a good charity in Indonesia — especially one that wasn’t religiously based — was a bit difficult, but YUM seems to have a decent track record.
Singapore: 3 days
For Singapore, I cheated. Singapore is a wealthy country, so there’s not a tremendous need to give there. Instead, I donated to Singapore-based Choson Exchange, an innovative NGO that supports North Koreans with hands-on entrepreneurship training, helping to create an ownership culture and a better standard of living for North Koreans. I’ve met the founder and some of the team, and they’re passionate but not naive about what they’re up against. I admire what they do and wish them success.
Much of what we think of as the real world is actually collective dreaming. Money, laws, social mores, nation states don’t exist in any absolute sense; they’re not real the way rocks and trees and gravity are real. They’re shared agreements that could evaporate in an instant, and sometimes do.
Confronted by a national border, we are suddenly reminded how arbitrary our shared agreements are: the money in my pocket can be exchanged for goods on this side of the imaginary line, but not that side; I can relax here in the shade of this tree, but if I try to rest in the shade of that tree over there, armed men will stop me unless I go through a particular ritual involving specially prepared documents.
The DMZ — the demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea — is an especially arbitrary border, the result of hasty decisions at the close of World War II and a military stalemate in 1953. It’s also the site of a bitter struggle between competing collective dreams, where each side has been preparing for 64 years for the other side to wake up and adopt the worldview of its opponent.
Dorasan Station
A full-day tour of the DMZ begins at Dorasan Station, the northernmost point on the South Korean railway system and a monument to a South Korean dream of unification. The fully functional station has been used exactly once, for a test run into North Korea during a thaw in relations. It sits waiting for the moment when rail service to points north becomes possible. You have to buy a ticket to go to the platform. On the way in, I noticed a South Korean tap his paper ticket to the top of the turnstile, the way you do with your digital transit card in an operational South Korean train station. Nothing happened. Nothing ever happens here.
The Third Tunnel
For all that borders and nation states are imaginary, certain things are all too real: the landmines that make the DMZ impassable, and the tunnels the North Koreans dug at various points in attempts to infiltrate into South Korea. We visited the Third Tunnel because it’s the closest to Panmunjom. Surreally, you enter the tunnel in a little open train that feels like a kiddie ride at an amusement park.
Like everything else along the DMZ, the tunnels are the subject of a propaganda war. The North Koreans first claimed they had nothing to do with the tunnel — discovered by the South Koreans in 1978 because of underground explosions — then later claimed it was a coal mining operation, though the walls are obviously granite and the odds of finding coal in such a location are exactly zero.
Outside the tunnel, big letters spelling out DMZ are a kitschy place to take a photo, while a statue of young people pushing a divided world back together unfortunately made me think of Humpty Dumpty.
In a small garden at the edge of the compound, you could hear music drifting in on the breeze: South Korean propaganda being blasted at the North. This audio war, in which the North and South played music and taunting messages at ever increasing volume, had fallen into an armistice during the period of the Sunshine Policy, but the South started it up again a couple of years ago in response to some North Korean provocation or other, and now any North or South Koreans close enough to the border are subject to the whimsical musical choices of whatever South Korean colonel is in charge. On this particular day, I caught a bit of an old pop tune from 1994. (Thank you, Shazam.)
Looking down
From the tunnel, you continue on to Dorasan Observatory, where you can finally peer down on North Korea itself and see its enormous flagpole — once the highest in the world — which was built to overtop a South Korean flagpole. There’s a village down there that US officials say is empty and always has been: a Potemkin village that would be more laughable if we hadn’t just visited South Korea’s Potemkin train station. And you can see out to Kaesong, the industrial complex that was once the site of South Korean businesses operating in North Korea but is now shuttered.
There’s a line of mounted binoculars at Dorasan Observatory, and for 500 won you can take a closer look at the mysterious country beyond. I managed to catch sight of some fieldworkers — most clad in white, a few on the edges in gray, maybe supervisors or guards or who knows what. There was a frisson to seeing actual North Koreans, like spotting a rare animal on safari, and also a kind of sickening feeling about such voyeurism. It’s true that I’ve taken photos of poor peasant farmers in Laos and Myanmar without feeling particularly weird about it, but at least those folks could engage with me if they had wanted to. I was looking down on North Koreans who had no way of looking back.
Human beings
A DMZ tour isn’t really about North Koreans as human beings. At no point did any of our tour guides, South Korean or American, mention North Korea’s awful human rights record or the recurring famines that continue to torment the North Korean people. One way the DMZ works as an imaginary space is by turning North Koreans from individuals into representatives of their state: Bob the soldier, or tiny little dots in the distance seen from Dorasan, or anonymous tunnel diggers. But I know about all these things. I have friends who grew up on the other side of that border, and I know some of the hardships they endured, some of the traumas they still carry with them.
Perhaps that’s why the most affecting moment of the tour, for me, was a brief stopover after lunch, at a kitschy little tourist trap in Paju, close to the border. There we saw the Bridge of No Return, where prisoners of war were exchanged and had the option of choosing one or the other Korea to stay in. To consider the bridge was to think about the individuals crossing it, the reasons they had for choosing one side or the other and the sacrifices this must have entailed. We also learned about a shrine where people with North Korean roots come to do ancestor worship on the major Korean festivals, when all the other Koreans are heading to their hometowns. The thought of those people cut off from their roots was ineffably sad, and it made me think of the Book of Lamentations and the suffering of Jews in exile who could no longer reach their beloved Jerusalem.
Panmunjom
The highlight of the tour was our visit to the Panmunjom Truce Village. South Koreans aren’t allowed to join this part of the tour, and it’s frankly weird that anyone else can go there. We switched from our tour bus to a different bus, leaving our bags behind, and now we were under the care of a young American infantryman with a pistol prominently at his side.
The truce village itself isn’t much to look at, just some military buildings and some sheds in the middle, but everything is formal and tense. First we were given an introductory slideshow, narrated by our American soldier. We learned about the incident in which North Koreans hacked to death with axes two Americans who were trying to cut down a tree that blocked their view. We learned of a firefight that broke out in the 1980s when a Soviet journalist bolted for the South Korean side. We learned that the North Koreans never give the South Koreans or the US any information about what they plan to do, but that the South Koreans announce the day’s schedule and activities through a bullhorn each day to try to minimize the chances of any incidents.
Then, as we marched out into the open, we were told not to stop for anything, not even to tie our shoes, and not to try to signal to the North Koreans in any way. We stood outside for a bit, gazing across at a lone North Korean soldier standing in front of their rather formal building. The Americans call him Bob because he likes to bob in and out of the columns when the tourists come. South Korean soldiers stood around here and there, facing both north and south, motionless and intense in their taekwondo stances. (Their shifts are three-and-a-half hours.)
Finally we had our turn to go inside the conference room. The American cheerfully said, “You’re in North Korea! You’re in North Korea!” as people began crossing the dividing line at the center of the room. Also in North Korea were two more of those motionless North Korean guards, there to prevent anyone from doing anything interesting. We stayed there for a few minutes, then filed out again.
Self-defense
Once we’d departed the truce village, I asked the American soldier about his life in Korea. He’s never been able to go down to Seoul, but sometimes he goes drinking in the nearest South Korean village. (Villagers near the border get free land and exemptions from taxes and military service, but you have to have North Korean roots to get the deal, and you also have to be back in your village before dark each night.)
He also said that being a tour guide made him the laughingstock of the infantry. “I got buddies who’re going to Syria, to Iraq, to Afghanistan,” he said. “At least they can defend themselves.” Then he paused. “I probably shouldn’t say anything.”
I wondered what he meant by that. Are American troops at the DMZ supposed to retreat or surrender if fighting breaks out? Maybe. I think the US would rather lose a few soldiers as prisoners and have time to negotiate or calculate a response rather than have an escalating military engagement in which North Korean soldiers are killed or wounded. This is probably not much fun for the US troops involved to contemplate, but it makes sense.
Back to our reality
And then, with one final visit to a gift shop, our tour came to an end. You can buy I Heart DMZ merchandize, which has a certain absurdist charm. I bought an armband like the ones the South Korean soldiers wear.
Then we rode the bus back down to Seoul, and my friends and I headed for Hongdae and its Saturday Night crowds. We ate barbecue and bingsu, watched buskers, bought some swanky new clothes at Aland. Some rampant capitalist indulgence felt good after a day spent contemplating one of the least compelling alternatives ever devised. But it also felt a little less real, a little more imaginary than usual.
Here on the Korean Peninsula, something big is happening and everyone knows it. What was once a stable regime now has an uncertain future. You see signs of the political changes everywhere.
Literal signs.
I’m talking, of course, about the South Korean election, which is the most significant thing happening here, at least from the perspective of most South Koreans. There are election signs everywhere!
Why, what you you thinking?
Nothing has changed
I’m aware that for better or worse (mostly worse), I’m the Korea expert for a lot of people I know. My credentials extend as far as a couple semesters of politics courses focused on the region plus a few years in a minor role in the South Korean government a decade ago, plus I read things and I live here. So read on with that in mind.
So yeah, the North Korea nuclear thing.
North Korea has nukes and has had them for a while. North Korea has missiles and has had them for a while. North Korea is developing longer-range missiles and has been developing them for a while. There’s nothing happening this week that’s substantively different from what was happening six weeks ago when no one was talking about North Korea. North Korea has had the ability to nuke Tokyo for maybe a decade, and we’ve lived with it, just as we live with Pakistan having both nuclear weapons and a very serious Islamist insurgent problem.
Tensions are high, but the US is going to great lengths to signal that we’re not going to war. The secretary of state and vice president assured South Korea that the US wouldn’t launch an attack without Seoul’s approval, which is not likely to be forthcoming. There’s zero panic in South Korea, and no real reported panic in North Korea either.
We’ve been here before. We’ll probably be here again. As it goes on, ignore right-wing cranks who insist that this is the red-line moment and that the situation demands action now. Ignore left-wing cranks who insist that this is all American provocation and North Korea is just misunderstood. None of that is true. North Korea’s regime is brutal and murderous, with a horrific human rights record. They just killed a guy in a Malaysian airport. They’re not nice. They’re also not nuking anyone next week. And the best solution to the situation is not outright war, just as you don’t resolve a hostage situation by blowing up the whole neighborhood (well, maybe Russia does).
So take a deep breath. If you’re American, calm down and keep protesting the president for the actual awful things he’s doing. If you’re South Korean, make sure to vote in the upcoming election. And if you’re president of a nearby country, please see if you can avoid starting a war.
An end to South Korea’s antiquated ActiveX security requirements, which keep this country stuck on IE even though Microsoft is no longer developing it.
Also, like, an end to endemic corruption, a balanced policy of limited engagement with North Korea, a social safety net that protects the elderly even if they have kids with money (South Korean welfare is based not just on your own wealth, but that of your children) and distributes the burden fairly. But cleaner air, an end to ActiveX, and public trash cans would go a long way toward improving my quality of life.
A quiet evening, listening to soft jazz as the rain falls outside. After work, I went to the office gym. Then I took the shuttle bus to Yangje Station and walked home from there, a couple of kilometers, stopping to pick up dinner at Mos Burger on the way. It was cool but not cold, and not yet raining, and it felt good to stretch my legs.
At home, I called the dry cleaner to get some shirts picked up, and then I watched a couple of episodes of Archer on Netflix while I ate my burger. After that I had a long phone conversation with a well-known North Korean defector. We have a bunch of friends in common, but we only finally met in person last night, and tonight I was helping her to clarify her thoughts on the work she wants to do — reassuring her that she doesn’t have to do everything herself, suggesting that she focus intently on one or two things she wants to achieve while leaving some of the other tasks to others, and also reminding her that the point of freedom, for her and for all of us, is that it gives us the opportunity to pursue happiness. North Korean defectors often feel a heavy burden of obligation to do something for their compatriots, and they are certainly not raised in a culture that prioritizes personal fulfilment or happiness. I’ve wondered what contribution I might make to North Koreans now that I’m in Seoul, and maybe one thing I can do is just give people permission to feel joy and comfort and peace.
After we got off the phone, I took a bath and read the New Yorker for a bit, and then I studied some Korean.
I’m tired. It was a long day, and I suppose a good one. This is my life now. In a lot of ways it’s not all that different from my life in New York, where I might well have met with a North Korean defector or stopped off at my Korean cleaners on the way home before studying some Korean language and listening to some jazz. For all the ups and downs and waves of culture shock, sometimes what’s most startling is how normal all of this feels: going to work at a tech office, coming home to my apartment, sitting on the sofa and blogging.
And then other things are strange and different. My friendships here are new, and many of them, I know, will be fleeting, especially with my fellow foreigners, who come and go. I’m still just 85 days in, and there’s much to get used to, connections to make, roots to put down. But I’m here. Ella is singing to Joe Pass as the rain pelts the penthouse windows on a cool night in Seocho-gu.
