We live in an unclear world. The murkiest of times. It makes us long for the known. For clarity. But as we’re learning all over again, reality isn’t like that.
Consider my mother: She was 14 and living in North Korea before she escaped in 1945. So when I was invited as a faculty advisor to join a trip to North Korea in 2009, I asked my mother to come along.
Although my mother is a true trailblazer who found her voice by establishing a center for Korean immigrants—she is also a somewhat difficult woman. One of the traits that comes with my mother is her impulse to do the opposite of what is advised to her, even more so if it is by a loved one.
It wasn’t until after our visit that we received the state-produced video. Including the footage from atop the Juche Tower. In it, my mother is loudly denouncing Kim Jong Il: “He is a madman!” — you can see the student leader panicking and making the international “shhhh!” sign.
As you probably know, the number one thing not to do in North Korea is to disrespect Kim Jong II in any form. To this day, I’m still not sure how we made it out of alive.
Mothers teach us hard lessons some times. Reality does the same. Reality is constantly showing us it can not be tamed. I had an idea of how it would be when I took my mother to North Korea. But reality isn’t like that. It rarely is.
How has your mother taught you reality isn’t like that?
What is your “how your mom has embarrassed you,” or dare I say, had you on the verge of death story? Share your stories in the comments below.
And for more of my trip to North Korea, here is an excerpt from the article I wrote about our trip.
We were thus all discombobulated, in a place where, one of the first things North Korean officials did was take our passports “for safekeeping.” But I wasn’t even sure my mother understood the ramifications of what North Korea had become. It was she who quickly broke the rules. We weren’t supposed to call attention to the fact we were Korean — diasporic Koreans from America are the capitalist enemy — and we certainly weren’t supposed to ask about relatives. I hear her ask our guide/minder — in Korean — about our relatives. The guide doesn’t answer, but instead reaches into her purse and asks my mother to swap out an American hundred dollar bill because she says, it has a pinhole in it; this, I learn later, is a ploy to obtain hard currency using counterfeit money. As an academic group, we grudgingly pay the extortionary fees for the things we were here to see. But we find we are continually plied with electives, and therein comes the split.
The Juche Tower becomes the point of contention. “Juche” ironically means “self reliance,” and is the core of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s philosophy. The Tower is the centerpiece of Pyongyang. It’s Washington Monument-shaped, made of 25,550 blocks of concrete — one for every day of Great Leader Kim Il-Sung’s life — and is, deliberately, one full meter taller than the Washington Monument. We learned these facts as they herded us into an elevator, demanding fifty dollars in hard cash. About half the people stepped off, including me. The other half, including my mother and one of the student organizers, and the ubiquitous guy taking the souvenir-slash-surveillance video, ascended.
When they came back down, the student leader looked pale. “I kind of can’t believe,” he said. “Your mother…said…” He didn’t finish.
Our schedule was packed, we had to move on. For the rest of the trip, there was only one truly frightening incident, over an unauthorized photo. It was not my mother, and the student was a Chinese national, therefore quickly released back to us.
It was funny to compare our exit to our entrance to North Korea. On the way in, every bit of our luggage was scrutinized for contraband, students were pulled out of line to be checked for swine flu. Now, zero airport security. I peered to see what the official was monitoring on the vintage vacuum tube computer monitor: she was playing solitaire. In the air, the flight attendants did not require us to put on seatbelts, nor they take the slightest interest in our tray tables or electronic devices. There weren’t even doors on the overhead compartments, luggage fell out when we hit turbulence. We were really free.