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“Man, you would not believe some of the characters I met in my bunk,” Lee told a group of vaguely disinterested neighbors. “Crazy Ray, Stinky Pete, Harry and that prison guard who used to beat him if he talked after 1 p.m.—some pretty wild stuff. Nothing like what goes on outside of camp.”
Last October, North Korean dissident Lee Hyun-Bak was granted amnesty and resettled in Connecticut by the federal government. The goodwill toward Lee has quickly evaporated, however, as Lee will simply not shut up about his “totally nuts” summer at prison camp.
“Harry and I came up with some top-notch pranks,” continued Lee. “Like, this one time, we snuck into the quartermaster’s den and we jacked off right into his army rations. When Harry got caught on the electric fence, man, I thought he was in for it. They shot him, of course. But it was hilarious.”
Prison camp was hard at first, explained Lee. “I was worried at first that the older guys at the camp would be stuck up and all,” he said, “but they were pretty cool about it. There were these two guys who’d been there for decades, we called them One-Eye Ralph and Scar-Bottomed Sam. See, we called them that because—you know what, you really had to be there.”
Even as his neighbors politely tried to steer Lee back onto larger questions about North Korean society, he continued to focus on a seemingly endless supply of prison camp stories. “Kim Jong-un’s succession was pretty weird, yeah,” said Lee. “I remember back in the prison commissary, Buck did the best Kim impressions. He’d be like, ‘A people united under the party is now and always resilient!’ Guys, listen. It sounded just like him when Buck did it.”
Added Lee, “They shot him too.”
His neighbors, for their part, wish only for Lee to give the camp talk a rest. “Lee’s the worst,” said neighbor Ryan Peterman. “It’s like, we get it, Lee. Your camp friends were awesome. But we all know they’re all going to lose touch in, like, a month. I’ve heard enough out of him to know people don’t last long in the camps.”
Said Peterman, “And I think it’s kind of pathetic how jealous he is that his little brother still gets to go.”
