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Authors: Wendy E. Simmons
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cancer in North Korea,” or perhaps, “No, cancer…” but then you decided to stop speaking? I’m feeling impatient but try to keep my mouth shut.
I can’t.
I decide to dumb things down a bit. After all, she’s an ob-gyn, not an oncologist, and I hate myself when I don’t play nice. “How many babies do you deliver per week?”
“Babies? No.” Dr. So-and-So blankly replies. I’m seriously going to fucking lose it. And now I have to go to the bathroom to boot.
“Yes. Babies. You know, the tiny little new people we just saw upstairs,” I say while making a gesture to indicate small , then up. “Did you not introduce yourself as an obstetrician/gynecologist? Obstetricians deliver babies, do they not? Therefore, how many babies do you deliver per week?”
“No,” the pretty one stubbornly repeats.
Okay…questioning over. I am choosing to remain my best self. And besides, it’s not her fault; the elevator time-machine probably erased her mind.
We’re back in the bright-white lobby—but I can’t remember how, because now I’m preoccupied by my newly shifting reality that Doctor Pretty is likely not a hot doctor at all but rather a well-played stratagem, and I her dewy-eyed fool.
I ask for the bathroom, figuring that at least there will be toilet paper and running water for a change, since we’re in a state-of-the-art hospital, after all. On the way to the bathroom, we pause in front of a staircase so Older Handler can quiz me as to whether I notice anything about it.
ME: Umm, it’s pretty?
That seemed a safe bet.
OLDER HANDLER: The center is green!
She’s right. It’s a marble staircase overlaid with green jade.
OLDER HANDLER, proudly : To be honest, green looks like waterfall flowing down because when our Dear Great Leader visited for on-the-spot guidance, he pointed and said, “The color green makes pregnant women feel all better! No more pain!”
So with that, the staircase in the brand-new hospital building was ripped out, and rebuilt with green jade. No expense spared.
ME: That’s awesome. May I please go to the bathroom now?
Older Handler took me to the VIP bathroom inside a presentation room where I would be forced to sit through a 400,000-hour-long presentation detailing everything about the same hospital I’d just toured during the past hour.
The bathroom, by the way, had lights but no running water or toilet paper. Progress!
Before leaving I was asked to write my impressions of the hospital in a guest book. I was tempted to write “Hot doctor, dimly lit” but decided this was probably funnier in my own head.
Instead I wrote “It was lovely. Thank you,” and signed a fake name, lest I do anything to personally contribute to Korea’s version of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest . Then I turned and walked out of the hospital, my “sterile” lab coat and shoe covers still in place.
For she had read several nice little stories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts, and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them…
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
CHAPTER 11
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
I have been traumatized by a Children’s Palace.
Once I figured out that it is not the awesome, free, “Great Leader rocks” after-school program for arts and sports that welcomes any child who feels like going (“Because our Dear Leader loves us and says the children are our future.” No, Older Handler, Whitney Houston said that) but is instead a center for extracurricular excellence to be achieved through years of mandated and rigorous study—and is restricted to the country’s most talented children and those of the Party elite—I no longer know which way is up.
I gravitate to children when I travel. It may sound overly simple, but children have always struck me as the soul of a country. There’s usually no pretense with them. No matter what’s going on in a nation politically
I can’t.
I decide to dumb things down a bit. After all, she’s an ob-gyn, not an oncologist, and I hate myself when I don’t play nice. “How many babies do you deliver per week?”
“Babies? No.” Dr. So-and-So blankly replies. I’m seriously going to fucking lose it. And now I have to go to the bathroom to boot.
“Yes. Babies. You know, the tiny little new people we just saw upstairs,” I say while making a gesture to indicate small , then up. “Did you not introduce yourself as an obstetrician/gynecologist? Obstetricians deliver babies, do they not? Therefore, how many babies do you deliver per week?”
“No,” the pretty one stubbornly repeats.
Okay…questioning over. I am choosing to remain my best self. And besides, it’s not her fault; the elevator time-machine probably erased her mind.
We’re back in the bright-white lobby—but I can’t remember how, because now I’m preoccupied by my newly shifting reality that Doctor Pretty is likely not a hot doctor at all but rather a well-played stratagem, and I her dewy-eyed fool.
I ask for the bathroom, figuring that at least there will be toilet paper and running water for a change, since we’re in a state-of-the-art hospital, after all. On the way to the bathroom, we pause in front of a staircase so Older Handler can quiz me as to whether I notice anything about it.
ME: Umm, it’s pretty?
That seemed a safe bet.
OLDER HANDLER: The center is green!
She’s right. It’s a marble staircase overlaid with green jade.
OLDER HANDLER, proudly : To be honest, green looks like waterfall flowing down because when our Dear Great Leader visited for on-the-spot guidance, he pointed and said, “The color green makes pregnant women feel all better! No more pain!”
So with that, the staircase in the brand-new hospital building was ripped out, and rebuilt with green jade. No expense spared.
ME: That’s awesome. May I please go to the bathroom now?
Older Handler took me to the VIP bathroom inside a presentation room where I would be forced to sit through a 400,000-hour-long presentation detailing everything about the same hospital I’d just toured during the past hour.
The bathroom, by the way, had lights but no running water or toilet paper. Progress!
Before leaving I was asked to write my impressions of the hospital in a guest book. I was tempted to write “Hot doctor, dimly lit” but decided this was probably funnier in my own head.
Instead I wrote “It was lovely. Thank you,” and signed a fake name, lest I do anything to personally contribute to Korea’s version of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest . Then I turned and walked out of the hospital, my “sterile” lab coat and shoe covers still in place.
For she had read several nice little stories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts, and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them…
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
CHAPTER 11
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
I have been traumatized by a Children’s Palace.
Once I figured out that it is not the awesome, free, “Great Leader rocks” after-school program for arts and sports that welcomes any child who feels like going (“Because our Dear Leader loves us and says the children are our future.” No, Older Handler, Whitney Houston said that) but is instead a center for extracurricular excellence to be achieved through years of mandated and rigorous study—and is restricted to the country’s most talented children and those of the Party elite—I no longer know which way is up.
I gravitate to children when I travel. It may sound overly simple, but children have always struck me as the soul of a country. There’s usually no pretense with them. No matter what’s going on in a nation politically
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