My last passport, I had North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Liberia, Guinea... I had, like, every war-torn country in there.

All of North Korea is a jail.

North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world.

Inside, I’m assaulted by the evening propaganda broadcasts coming over the apartment’s hardwired loudspeaker. There’s one in every apartment and factory floor in Pyongyang

I felt like a frog that had just come out of its pit, from which it had contemplated the circle of sky outlined by the rim, and taken it for the whole of the world. I had passed through to the other side of the mirror. (162)

So this is the way we live now: conditioned by the awareness that no North Korean provocation, however egregious, can be confronted, lest it furnish the occasion or pretext for something truly barbarous and insane.