We entered a long, curving driveway to stop in front of a colonnaded hall, where a man in military uniform hastened to open our door. I trailed Jonny as we made our way through a cavernous banquet room, the assembled cadres and military brass standing to greet us, hands blurring in frenetic applause, eyes pinned with fanatical adoration on their leader, then fastening on me as soon as he had passed by, staring with frank curiosity. Jonny, it seemed, was the only person in North Korea who was allowed to walk slowly, and though he didn’t stop to shake anyone’s hand, he did slap some of his favorites on the back as we strolled to the front of the room, leaving whispers of speculation about me in our wake.
“These are my inner circle, the allies who I will rely upon to fight off the traitorous jackals. It is for perks such as this that they are loyal to me,” Jonny confided.
We sat alone at a table close to the stage, far enough from the other tables that we could not be overheard, each with our own pretty server to pour our drinks, serve our food, and, occasionally, wipe our mouths.
The musicians, youthful beauties in slinky black dresses, began to take their places onstage to thunderous applause that stuttered into a bewildered silence as the singers followed them. “They have never seen so much leg before,” Jonny squealed with delight to me, his hands describing an hourglass to approximate the way the singers’ sequined dresses clung to their every curve, the hems just barely covering the globes of their rear ends.
While the generals gaped with drop-jawed fascination as the singers wiggled and gyrated through their first song, Jonny kept looking back at them, aping their shocked expressions and roaring with laughter. Dead silence followed the last notes of the song, the girls giving one final titty shake. Jonny leapt to his feet, clapping so that his cheeks quaked, and then all hell broke loose as the men rose up with a sex-fevered howl.
“No one in this room is ever going to forget tonight as the moment that they realized it’s no longer their father’s North Korea,” Jonny crowed.
As the performers continued to bump and grind and the liquor flowed, the banqueters began to spin their servers onto their laps and put their hands up their skirts.
Jonny gazed happily at the scene, taking obvious delight in the revelry of his men, and I felt a surge of affection for him, my only known blood sibling. Sure, he was a bloodthirsty half-blood sibling, but he was flesh of my flesh, and most important, he really seemed to like me. I knew that because he had his arm slung about my shoulders, gently hugging me to him as he said, “You and I are as close to each other as teeth and lips, Lisa. You know, I too was raised by a woman who was not my own mother. I understand that about you, how it has wounded your heart and warped your mind. But I see it has also made you strong, because you realize you only have yourself to rely upon. It’s you against the world. They’ve taken away your mother, and nothing that happens after that will ever hurt as much. It either destroys you or makes you invincible.”
Chapter 11
“I think that is the fear and why I didn’t search [for my birth parents] earlier. I was afraid that I’d find somebody or something worse than what I knew.”
–Christina Crawford
I was Cinderella fleeing the ball at the stroke of midnight, my elegant coach turned into a humble Toyota sedan, a crochet doily covering the headrest and grubby curtains hanging over the rear passenger seat windows, the air tinged with stale cigarette smoke and midlevel cadre flop sweat, but in my inebriation I barely noticed, the soft hum of the engine and the gentle undulations of the vehicle rocking me to sleep before we had even left Pyongyang. Next thing I knew, Frankenstein’s monster was ushering me down the rabbit hole and back to my room, where I toppled into bed and didn’t open my eyes again until Ting brought in my breakfast, the same two soft-boiled eggs, buttered toast cut into strips, and French press pot of coffee as always. Hopeful that this meant that Honey had not noticed my absence, I tried to get an answer from Ting, asking, “All good here, yes or no?” in my broken Chinese. Normally, she would have continued picking up my clothes from the floor as if she hadn’t heard me, but this time she paused, clutching the black polyester Paradise skirt to her chest, and gave me a wide-eyed glance of… warning? Fear? Disgust? I couldn’t tell. The egg I had just scooped up turned into a slimy gob of spit at the back of my throat.
During the days of lockdown that ensued, Ting retreated into cringing servant mode, looking down at all times, black wings of hair falling over her face like blinders. When I tried to confront her by standing in her path or putting my foot in the way of the vacuum nozzle, she merely cleaned around me, like a worker ant with an instinctual compulsion to complete the task at hand. One day, I grabbed her arm and shook her, but still she refused to look at me, her thin arm slippery like steel, glissading from my grasp.
To get my mind off its did-she-or-didn’t-she-notice-I-was-gone merry-go-round, I devoured the modern Korean history books that Honey had sent me, which read like the goriest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, the kind where everybody dies in the end. What a blighted and hard-used country I had been born in, a tonsil off the immense and voracious gullet of Asia, a tiny pawn to the imperialistic ambitions of its neighbors, each one harboring its own crazed dreams of total world domination. There were no heroes, only villains. The Kims were the mirror image of their corrupt and despotic South Korean counterparts—one left and the other right, one serving a red master and the other a red, white, and blue one—each the very profile in greed, arrogance, and bloodlust. The Americans, Stalin, and Mao just trying to add points to the scoreboard, splitting the country like an atom, into the yin and the yang, the East and the West, until never the twain can meet.
The day after I started reading The Two Koreas for a second time, Ting brought me a missive from Honey. My fingers trembled as I struggled to remove the thick linen paper from the envelope.
Baby,
I’ve missed you sooo much! But finally I am free to spend time with you. The Gang is here, and we have an afternoon of fun and games planned. Dress accordingly. Ting will bring you after lunch.
XOXO,
Honey
Clutching the note to my lips, I crumpled jelly-spined onto my bed. All was well. She wasn’t punishing me; she had just been completely consumed with tending to Jong Il, and then maybe after he left she got a celebratory nip-tuck from Dr. Panzov. She was blissfully ignorant about my short visit—less than twenty-four hours!—to Pyongyang. The bit about the Gang niggled at me—how long had they been here?—but I got busy making myself into the spackle-faced, blow-dried, poreless me that Honey wanted me to be, pushing all doubt from my mind.
Eyebrows freshly plucked, moles hidden under a plaster mask of foundation and powder, my hair in a high ponytail with artful wisps framing my face, I bounced after Ting as she guided me through a series of corridors into a gently declining tunnel that ended in a bright emerald field of fake grass, which permeated the air with the synthetic smell of plastic. Under the blare of stadium-bright LED lights that hung from the ceiling, we walked across the field toward a swimming pool, the reflection of the lights off the water glinting and swirling across the ceiling, which was painted the same blue as the pool. The walls were also painted blue, giving the arena the aura of an undersea aquarium, we the creatures on display. A gentle, constant stream of air wafted across the cavernous room, filling my nostrils and pushing air into my lungs as if to do my breathing for me.
Bobbing like a melting iceberg in the pool, the pale crown of his belly poking out of the water, Harvey shouted, “Look who it is everyone! Lisa’s back!”
As the others shouted their greetings, Patience, wearing a muu-muu that looked like it was sewn from bedsheets, greeted me with a hug.
Wendell sidled up to slap me on the back. “We’ve missed you!” he shouted. Then, leaning in close so that his sharp nose prodded my ear, he whispered, “Find a moment to talk with me before Madam arrives.”
Lahela, in a pair of saggy bloomer-like shorts that looked like they h
ad been excavated from the 1850s, took my hand in hers and touched it to her forehead. They all scattered like backyard birds the moment Yolanda swooped in.
“Hello, Lisa,” Yolanda greeted me coolly, taking me in from head to toe before delivering a curt nod of approval, her ponytails, sprouting from the top of her head like horns, sparking red in the light. “Not bad.”
This was the first time I had seen her out of business or cocktail attire, and in sports bra and capri leggings, she looked like a cover girl for a hard-body health magazine, sinewy shoulders rippling, stomach flat and plated with muscle, legs shapely and well defined. Until you got to her face, the warped rictus of her features and the lumpiness of her skin delivering a shock that any horror-movie auteur would envy. “Madam wishes me to inform everyone that she will join us poolside this afternoon. She said she feels like a bit of volleyball.”
“Ooh,” everyone said, turning to look at Patience.
“Volleyball? Oh, no, Mma!” she wailed, to general laughter.
Her husband stretched his neck out of the water to yell over the mound of his stomach, “I’m rooting for ya, baby!’
“What, do Patience and Honey have a rivalry?” I asked Yolanda.
“Let’s just say Patience is scared of the ball.” Yolanda winked. I pictured her in the dead of night somewhere deep in the bowels of the compound ruthlessly working the StairMaster, spinning the miles away on the Exercycle, pushing past the pain for that one extra sit-up, giving herself to Madam mind, body, and soul.
Joining Patience and Lahela, who were stretched out on plastic-slatted chaise longues, I casually inquired of them how long they had been at the villa, relieved when Patience answered that they had arrived only the day before. Alert for any hint of change in their attitude toward me, I chatted them up and was further mollified when they responded with their customary shy, or maybe reticent, friendliness, Patience doing the talking for the two of them, as Lahela was slow and halting with her English. I learned that she had never heard a word of English spoken until she met and married Wendell. When I asked how she had come to North Korea from Laos, she blushed and looked down at her lap, whispering, “Sec.”
Reaching a hand to place it over Lahela’s, Patience explained, “She entertained officers in the army.”
“Oh, Lahela!” I murmured, taking up her other hand. Startled, she glanced at me with her velvety brown doe eyes, and when she saw the tears limning my lower lids, let me hold her hand.
“What’s up, ladies?” Wendell interrupted us. Noticing that Lahela and I were holding hands—Patience had heard him coming and yanked hers away—his wet lips spread like a grease slick over teeth that were one size too big for his mouth. “Hey, Lisa, no one gets to hold Lahela’s hand unless I can watch.”
“We were just having some girl talk, Wendell. Don’t worry, it wasn’t about you,” I said, giving Lahela’s hand a squeeze before I let go.
“Oh, darn, I love it when the ladies talk about me,” Wendell brayed, before bending to press his spitty lips to the top of Lahela’s head. “OK, girls, I’m going to set up the volleyball net. Would you like to help me, Lisa?”
Though my skin crawled at being on the receiving end of his leering attention, I went with him, Harvey lifting his menhir head from the water to follow our progress around the pool. As we crossed the field, Wendell pointed out the sockets that were set into the turf, explaining at full volume that they were for poles, goal posts, and croquet hoops, before ushering me inside the equipment shed, where he asked sotto voce, “Do you still want my help?”
Looking around to see if there was something I could knock him over the head with if he tried anything on me, I nodded.
“Good. I’ve got a plan. You want to hear it?”
Edging toward the croquet mallets, I nodded again.
“Where are those damn volleyballs?” he suddenly yelled in my face, lips exuding into a smile when I startled backward into the croquet mallets, knocking the stand over. As I scrabbled around for the scattered mallets, he described his plan, words hissing from his mouth like air escaping a punctured tire. “The fellow who’s in charge of delivering the food and supplies here was a student of mine, and now he’s a fishing buddy. I’ve done plenty of favors for him, and so he’s agreed to personally drive the supply truck here and smuggle you back to Pyongyang hidden in one of the garbage bins.” He began to rummage among the equipment. “Look for the net, will you?”
“What’ll happen to me in Pyongyang?”
“He’ll give you a change of clothes and a disguise, a wig and maybe a pair of glasses, something like that, and you’ll walk out of the warehouse and I’ll meet you, take you somewhere safe.” Then he screeched, “Come on, Lisa, find the damn net!”
“Stop screaming, you’re just making it more obvious! Where will you take me?”
“I can’t tell you, but I swear you’ll be safe.” His eyes goggled about, not meeting my own.
“Why can’t you tell me?”
“Because it wouldn’t be safe!” he snapped. “Come on, find that net unless you want Yolanda coming in here.”
“This?” I grabbed up some webbed nylon.
“No, that’s the tennis net. The blue one below it. We can carry it off, Lisa, but I’m going to need five thousand dollars.”
“Five thousand dollars? Are you crazy? Where the fuck would I get five thousand dollars? I haven’t seen a single greenback since I’ve been here.”
“This guy’s not going to do it for free, Lisa. And I’ll need another thousand for Cookie.”
“Cookie?!”
“Yeah, all deliveries come in through the kitchen, and all the garbage goes out from there. You need his buy-in. I can help you raise money by selling things you swipe from the villa—small trinkets, clothes, and whatnot.”
I shook my head skeptically. “That would never work. Honey would be sure to notice.”
He shrugged as if that was a minor and unimportant detail. “It’s been working for years now.”
“You’ve been stealing from Honey for years?”
“I haven’t. Other people do the stealing. I am merely the person who turns the goods into money. You just have to be careful to take the things that she won’t miss. For instance, never try to steal the booze; she and Yolanda keep a pretty sharp eye over the cellar. But maybe a silver candlestick here, a crystal tumbler there. Fancy ashtrays are in high demand, as are drugs, if you ever happen to be able to get your hands on any.”
“You’re a fence!” I accused him.
But to him it was not an accusation, just simple reality. “We all have to get by, Lisa. I’m only trying to help you. I help you, you help me—that’s the way things work here. Think about it and give me an answer tomorrow. Or the next day. Or next month. There’s no hurry. We’ve got the rest of our lives.” He put the poles under his arm and shouldered a bag of volleyballs before stepping out of the shed.
We were just about done setting up the net when Honey floated in. “Wheeeere’s my baaaaby?” she shrieked.
“Hi, Honey.” I gave her an embarrassed little wave.
Folding me in her arms, she pressed my face down to her chest. “I’ve missed you, Lisa! Did you miss me?”
“Of course, Honey.” I rubbed a cheek on the soft valley of her cleavage.
She held me at arm’s length, pretending to get a good look at me but, of course, wanting me to get a good look at her, to notice how radiant she looked, how the low-cut sports shirt hugged her fabulous curves, how her arms were toned, the skin taut and smooth. I gushed, “Oh my god, Honey, you look amazing!”
“You look…” She bathed me with her aquamarine gaze. “…a little different. I can’t put my finger on it.” She reached out and briefly cupped my breast, but before I could pull away, she lifted the hand to cradle my chin. “Oh, Lisa, you’re growing into a beautiful woman before my eyes. Yolanda tells me you’re putting your makeup on all by yourself. If only you’d agree to a little…” She curved her hand in a gen
erous arc over her own generous bosom.
As if summoned by her thoughts, there was Dr. Panzov behind her, surprisingly trim and muscular in a tight tank top and short shorts, striped tube socks sheathing rock-hard calves. “Lisa! You are looking well.”
“Isn’t she, Vlad? I was just telling her she could look even more fabulous with a little help from you. Imagine how much more flattering that adorable Fendi T-shirt would look if it had more to cling to!”
Dr. Panzov trained the small blue dots of his eyes on my chest, and I quickly zipped up my hoodie. Honey summoned Yolanda to stand with us on our side of the net, before quavering to the others, “Let’s play ball!”
It was the four of us versus Wendell, Harvey, Patience, and Lahela. And though Wendell and Harvey had a definite height advantage, Lahela batted ineffectually at the ball with open-handed slaps, and Patience ran away from the ball instead of toward it. Whenever she got the layup, Honey drove the ball as hard as she could at Patience, whooping with delight when the ball found its target with a painful smack. I was no star on the volleyball court, but buoyed by my teammates, I managed to make a few good shots as well as a lot of lousy ones, some of which Honey insisted were in bounds when they were out, which caused Wendell’s sunken cheeks to redden with rage, though he dared say nothing in protest. We beat them 32–18.
The activities that ensued seemed designed as an exercise in humiliation for one or the other of the Gang. There was a men’s swimming competition, with Dr. Panzov thrashing through the water, beating Harvey handily while practically drowning Wendell, who sputtered and choked on his churning wake. Then followed a round robin of badminton, during which Yolanda made Lahela chase the birdie so much that she slipped and scraped up her knee, and a croquet match, where Honey continually ruled Yolanda’s ball out of bounds while looking the other way for me. The Gang would obediently taunt and belittle the weakest player, alliances and enmities eddying and pooling, unceasing and changeable as the tides. Because I enjoyed Honey’s favor, no one dared heckle me, even when I really sucked, like in horseshoes, where I almost clocked Harvey when a shoe slipped from my hand prematurely. Bathing in the warm glow of Honey’s favor, beholden to her for either ignoring or being ignorant of my Pyongyang field trip, I enthusiastically played my part as jeerer in chief, peanut in her gallery, sharp-toothed cog in her machine.
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