Across from my apartment, across the street, across the park, just to the left, lies the North Korean embassy in Phnom Penh. It's about a minute walk from my place. A huge house behind a huge gate with not-so-huge guards guarding it. (Cambodians are pretty short.) Outside, on the Clearasil coloured walls, there are a collection of pictures of that kind, sweet, lovable dictator known as Kim Jong Ill. (Oh, and I spelled 'coloured' with a 'u' in it because that's the way that Canadians spell it, and I felt very patriotic for a second there. Flaunting my heritage and all.)
The former Cambodian king, Sihanouk, is good buddies with Kim Jong, graduate of the Don King School of Hair Design. Literally hangs out with him in North Korea three, four months out of the year. The current king, Sihamoni, actually studied filmmaking in North Korea in the 1970's. (How bizarre is that? NYU film school, maybe. USC film school, sure. North Korea?)
Yes, bizarre is the word for that hermetic kingdown.
Sometimes, when I'm walking or running by the North Korean embassy, I glance at those framed photos of the dictator and notice the lackadaisical attitude of the Khmer guards, and the gate to the place that is sometimes swinging open, and I wonder what would happen if I just ran inside.
Not that I would do it. I'm crazy enough to live in Cambodia, true, but not crazy enough to force my way into the North Korean embassy.
But still. I genuinely want to know: What goes on in there? Is there a need for a North Korean embassy here, and a rather big one to boot? I know that there are two North Korean restaurants in Cambodia; I wrote about my visit to the one in Phnom Penh in an earlier blog, as it's owned by the father of an old North Korean student of mine. (I think he's gone back to North Korea, that student, to join the army. Good grief.) So maybe the employees of the restaurant need the facilities of the embassy, 'cause they sure as hell aren't allowed out much on their own, if at all, to wander around the 'democracy' that is Cambodia. Maybe they're training spies -- for who or where or what, I couldn't tell you.
But I want to know.
What do they do in there? Are the North Koreans that are living here sending back secret information to Pyongyang? Hell, I have cable here, and last night I watched an episode of 'Models Fear Factor'. The North Korean embassy has a satellite dish, so maybe everyone inside there was chillin' and watching that, too. Do they go back home and say to their sheltered brethren: "Look yo, you would not believe what's going down in the outside world."
There are so many closed doors in the world. I don't want all of them opened, no, but I do want some of them pried ajar. Just for a moment. Just so I can take a peek.
We pass by them every day, these buildings that guide and shape our world, and there's one right across the street from me, a strange, forbidding one, a North Korean one, and I want to climb that fence, drop to the ground, rush the doors, see what happens. I want one less mystery in the world, just for a day, a moment.
I want all those closed doors to open.
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