Hello, Shadowlands by Patrick Winn

Author:Patrick Winn [Patrick Winn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785783487
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2018-06-09T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IV

Pyongyang’s

Dancing Queens

Location: Bangkok, Thailand and Seoul, South Korea

Where customers pay to cavort with North Korea’s regime-trained hostesses

Her fingers feel delicate in my grasp. Her palms are cool as porcelain. We are waltzing and, when she lifts my hand into the air, I pirouette sloppily.

My North Korean dance partner is a portrait of composure. Sadly, she is leading around an inebriated klutz. I’m flush with soju, my face splotched pink, feet scraping the floor.

I hadn’t meant to get this sozzled. But the other waitresses, her colleagues, kept up-selling bottles of Pyongyang-manufactured rice wine. It’s high-octane stuff, flavored with acorns, that torches your esophagus.

As we waltz or foxtrot or whatever we’re doing – all I know is that she’s playing the male lead, spinning me around like a debutante – I can feel the booze sloshing around my insides.

I am frankly astonished to be here, in a North Korean restaurant in Bangkok, holding hands with a representative of the planet’s most anti-social regime. On past visits to North Korea’s state-owned eateries – which are scattered from Myanmar to China to Vietnam – my interaction with staff has been terse.

Once seated, I’m inevitably asked: ‘Where are you from, sir? Germany? Russia?’ Some pointless sense of principle always compels me to tell the truth. I immediately out myself as an American, a citizen of the imperial United States, some Yankee dog whose cities, we are told, deserve nuclear immolation in a ‘sea of fire’.

It’s usually downhill from there. The waitresses’ spines reflexively stiffen. Their lips curl downward ever so slightly. This is often the only spontaneous emotion I can coax from a North Korean waitress – a minor betrayal of her inner thoughts. They are otherwise perfectly composed.

But tonight, in the Pyongyang Arirang Restaurant in Bangkok, the waitresses don’t seem fazed by the Yankee barbarians in their midst. It just so happens that I’ve brought along my father and his partner – on their first trip outside of North America – along with a large group of friends: a few Thais, one Bangladeshi and several other Yankee jackals.

Sequestered in a gated compound, this restaurant is quite small. Other than a few beer-buzzed Chinese guys, we’re the only customers. I’ve actually never been to this particular North Korean joint. But before we arrived, I felt safe in promising my dad a spectacle of maximum kitsch.

As I explained to him earlier, you don’t come to these restaurants for the overpriced bibimbap and noodle soup, which can be charitably described as mediocre.

The waitresses are the star attraction. After dishing out sizzling beef, they don spangly gowns and twirl about the dining hall, moving in perfect concert like a school of fish. Then they converge into rock bands – one on guitar, another on bass, a third on electronic drums – and jam out Western pop and rock ’n’ roll.

You might hear the schmaltzy Titanic theme song. Or ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ by The Beatles, sometimes punched up with an accordion solo.

They also do John Denver’s ‘Country Roads’, sung in soaring operatic vocals.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.