Fried Sparrows, North Korea, and the Island of Hokkaido

Two Short Travel Snapshots

Almost North Korea

Make a note of this: if someone serves you a bowl of deep-fried sparrows, the best thing to do is to quickly pick one up and eat it head first. There are two reasons for this: one, the head is the most psychologically squirrelly part of any animal, so it’s best to get that part into your mouth as fast as possible; and two, it’s also the crunchiest part of the sparrow, and as everybody knows, if something is deep fried and crunchy, how bad could it be?

Not bad, really. Especially with a dipping sauce.

I tucked into a bowl of fried sparrows once, in the small river town of Ji’an, in the northern part of China. Ji’an is a border town, and the river that flows through it, the Yalu, has bustling, cheerful China on one side, and creepy, silent North Korea on the other. I had come to Ji’an on the unlikely chance that I could get into North Korea by walking across the railroad bridge from Ji’an to Manpo – there’s no other way across the river, though it’s only 25 or 30 meters wide – and presenting myself and my cash and my disarming smile to the emaciated character who (I imagined) was guarding the border and who would (I imagined) let me stroll the streets of Manpo for the price of a jumbo Kit Kat bar. I’ll cut to the chase: it didn’t happen.

I had planned a more elaborate visit, of course. I joined a group that was going to Pyongyang and a few other parts of North Korea. The North Koreans, apparently, are willing to accept small groups of escorted tourists, which is a lucky coincidence, because small groups of tourists are pretty much all they can hope for, especially in August, when Pyongyang has to compete with Edgartown and Castine for the summer tourist dollar. We were prepared for the propaganda, the ceaseless surveillance, told we would eat “but not well,” and in general braced to be barraged by the kind of nonsense that used to irritate travelers to the old Soviet Union – trips to cement factories and spotless hospitals and cheerfully robotic elementary school classrooms.

Personally, I love that stuff. I have a collection of Chinese propaganda posters from the Cultural Revolution, and I’ve collected some of the writings of the fiendishly nuts Turkmenbashi, the leader of Turkmenistan, who upon taking power after the collapse of the Soviet Union changed his name to Turkmenbashi (“The Leader of All Turkmen”) and named a month after his mother. But North Korea eluded and tantalized. I have a wonderful propaganda poster of recent vintage that came to me, via a few handoffs and back-channels, directly from Pyongyang. On the right side, shouting, defiant faces of women of all races and creeds – North Korean, African, vaguely third-worldy looking headbands, that sort of thing. And on the left, crouching in the lower corner, the mousey, terrified figures of a US and Japanese soldier. And across the center, the word “No!” in giant English letters, and in forceful Korean script: “21st Century Without Sexual Harrassment!”

How perfect is that?

But the North Koreans, apparently, don’t much care if my jones for totalitarian tourism is satisfied. Word came before I left for Beijing that the flight to Pyongyang was cancelled, and our visit was officially off. There was trouble, we were told, with the recent rains. Flooding, water damage, homelessness – the kinds of things it’s hard to explain away.

But I flew to Beijing anyway, and headed north. You know, just in case.

In Ji’an, I walked across the railroad bridge until I came to a painted white line on the tracks: the official border between roaring China and its decrepit neighbor. A smiling barely teen-aged Chinese guard slouched against the rail, using a bright pink “China Mobile” umbrella to shield away the sun. He laughed as I crouched low to take a dramatic picture of the white line, the railroad tracks, and the grim buildings of Manpo beyond. He laughed and pointed to the North Korean side and shrugged.

I took a bunch of pictures of the bridge, and of the North Korean children swimming in the river. Two men appeared on bicycles on the opposite bank as I was snapping photos and waving, and my Chinese guide loudly patted his stomach and suggested we go for lunch.

“So who were those two guys?” I asked, crunching into a sparrow’s head.

“Army,” my guide said. “They don’t like so much photos.”

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

“But what could they do if they wanted me to stop taking them?” I asked.

“Fire into the air,” he said, dipping a sparrow in the sauce.

Makes sense, I thought. That’s sort of the North Korean solution to things: fire something into the air – a bullet, a Taepodong missile, whatever’s handy.

My Container

A few years ago, I spent most of December on a container ship, heading from Seattle to Shanghai, across the roof of the Pacific. Bad weather to the south forced us to hug the Alaskan coast, slip through the Unimak Pass, cross over into Russian waters, then drift south, battling 10 meter swells, into the Sea of Japan.

It was bumpy. And rough in spots. And cold. Huge expanses of water. Snowcapped mountains barely visible in the stormy mist. Snow falling on whitecaps, which is really something to see. I grew a beard. It came in alarmingly grey.

In other words, a voyage.

I did this because this is what it’s come to: I’m a writer – what I’m supposed to do is write. But what I really do is email and have lunch and go to meetings and scribble notes and talk about writing – in other words, I’m not really a writer, I’m portraying a writer in a movie, called, I’m afraid, “The Writer Who Goes Broke.” Or something worse, although I’d rather not think about it. I’d rather come up with a different title.

So I put myself on a container ship – you can do that, you know: you just contact one of the three or four agencies that broker spots in the rather nice (but Spartan) cabins that all of these big container ships have and book yourself across the Pacific, or the Atlantic, or through the Suez and over to Asia – anywhere you want to go, really, as long as you’re not particular about what you eat – you eat with the officers, who are mostly German, mostly German-ish food – and as long as you don’t need much entertainment – well, any entertainment. What you do is stare out into the sea, and when you’re done with that, you write.

And I wrote. A couple of projects I’ve been meaning to finish, polish, get started. I was a flurry of productive, beard-growing, coffee drinking work. It’s amazing how much you can get done in one day, when the iPhone doesn’t work and you can’t get email and no one’s sending you tickles or pokes on Facebook.

It’s also more than a little shaming. I know writers who will drive to remote wilderness areas for a week, and I know some who check into rustic hotels to finish a project. I even know one or two who rely on that mythically unattainable thing called “self-discipline.” But I don’t know any who have gone to the extremes I went to, putting themselves out to sea, surrounding themselves with thousands of miles of ocean, just to get away from email.

What’s worse: it worked. I finished a script I’ve been wanting to finish for months. I outlined a new project and started work on it. And I came up with another project to pitch when I get back. Three weeks into the voyage, I looked myself in the mirror and congratulated myself.

And then, one night, late, asleep in my cabin – propped up on one side by pillows to keep from tumbling out of bed during the pitch and yaw of the high seas – I heard a familiar sound. Like a bell. What was it? I know that sound! A chime, a bell, a…text message.

A text message?

We were sliding through the narrow pass between Hokkaido and mainland Japan. The iPhone had connected. It began to chime and ring and buzz and hop around the desk getting the two weeks’ worth of voicemails and emails and texts, downloading Facebook updates and Twitter messages, and I sprang out of bed like the sick addict I am, scrolling and emailing and texting and calling and checking the Variety website for news about the entertainment industry, and in general taking the two weeks of zen-like detachment and total focus and tossing them away so I could find out who had friended whom on Facebook, and which holiday film releases were doing better than expected.

Through my cabin window, I could see the lights of the Hokkaido coast slipping by. They were thick when the phone started chirping, but now I could see them thinning out, getting fewer and farther between. We were passing through, into the Sea of Japan.

The phone went from four bars to three, then to two, then one. Mainland drifted away, but I kept tapping, kept sending useless signals: thanks for the funny joke, will call when I get back, on boat to Shanghai, FYI got this today, can’t make it sorry am on a boat, weather cold, dinner when I get back?

And then, nothing. No service. But I didn’t give up: I kept bouncing around the cabin – maybe over here? No. Over here? If I hold it this way? If I press it against the glass? Junkies will ransack their hovels, searching for a few grains, a forgotten packet of whatever they’re jonesing for. That’s what I did, in the Sea of Japan, at three in the morning. For cell coverage.

And I sat in that cabin in my underwear, holding my iPhone, thinking, “This is what it’s come to? Look at yourself. Look at yourself.”

I may need to find a longer voyage next time. Crossing the Pacific, apparently, isn’t enough.