fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
Of course, J hadn’t been gone a full week before I started to pursue the possibility of a trip to Pyongyang. The idea of going there had always intrigued me, but now I had a purpose. I still felt very skeptical, though, that J would end up as one of my tour guides. First, I…
He liked to be called J, so even his name remained a mystery. We had dinner together a few times. We saw a movie together. I asked teasingly if these things were outside the bounds of tolerance from his government. He only smiled. I actually referenced his peculiar homeland very infrequently. It sat in the…
His uniform and the strong sense of purpose with which he came at me caused an instinctual reaction. I no longer roamed freely around an open market in small-town Malaysia. I was back home in South Central, a frightened nappy-headed kid who knew he hadn’t done anything wrong, but felt a need to flee anyway….
April 15, 2012 was an auspicious day in North Korea. It saw the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of the country’s founder Kim Il-sung. North Korea is known for much spectacle and pomp and circumstance, so of course an event like this meant pulling out all the stops. Planning for this date actually began…
(Ed.’s note: This story is vaguely inspired by a dream.) A motley group of Americans found themselves wandering around a rail yard in the outskirts of Pyongyang, North Korea. They were captured and taken in for questioning. They didn’t know how they got there, so the story goes, and they were anxious to get home….
My voyage on the shortwaves, mentioned a couple of posts ago, long ago took me to the peculiar country of North Korea — or more formally the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. DPRK is sort of a bizarre anachronism, a microcosm of old school Stalinism living into the present day. So its shortwave station, Voice of Korea…
