North Korea, Little Imp of a Nation,Why Won't You Behave?

North Korea is said to be a desolate, frozen, land, with a terrain like a charcoal briquette, and populated by an angry, starving, dwarf-like people, led by a demented, overweight son-of-a-despot. Can it be so different from its southern neighbor?

The Imperial Spa, located north of Sahara Avenue and east of the Las Vegas Strip, is my entryway to Korean life. Tiled and gleaming, a stark opulence its hallmark, it is where I go when I need to get clean and shiny, body, mind, and spirit. 

Television screens present happy, singing south Korean teens in musical competition, or frumpy, misunderstood south Korean housewives yearning for good marriages for their beautiful daughters and wayward sons. Both singing and soap operas are suited for a place devoted to bathing, I think.

In the year that I have been visiting the Imperial Spa,  I have learned nothing of the Korean language. But I have learned Korean. I have learned a Korean love for music, for cleanliness, for laughter. I have learned a Korean comfort with nakedness, watching daughters work lather over their mother's backs, and the mothers do the same for them, chatting or silent, but deeply matter-of-fact. I like these people, whose nods "hello" have a truncated quality, as if they are keeping themselves from bowing hello to me. I nod back. I like it here. 

I like kim-chee and K-pop, Gangam Style or not. I like the hush of the steam room and the giggling of the small girls, sleek as eels, who come to the spa with their mothers on Sunday afternoons. I like to let my fingers turn pruney as I soak in the tub and watch the evil Mr. Jae-hun plot to keep his son from marring the poor girl he loves. 

I think I would like Korea. Maybe not the frightening, bellicose north. I was born in 1953; North Korea has always been in my mind. Cuba, Russia, North Korea.

Maybe Dennis Rodman was right. Maybe I should just go there.