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The library is a sacred place to us. No visitors are allowed, and once a book is closed, it never gets opened. Oh, sure, sometimes the boys from Propaganda will nose around for a feel-good story to play to the citizens over the loudspeakers, but we’re story takers, not storytellers. We’re a far cry from the old veterans who spin weepers to passersby in front of the Respect for Elders Retirement Home on Moranbong Street.

The Kwangbok station, with its beautiful mural of Lake Samji, is my stop. The city is filled with wood smoke when I emerge from the subway into my Pottongang neighborhood. An old woman is grilling green-onion tails on the sidewalk, and I catch the traffic girl switching her blue sunglasses for an amber-tinted nighttime pair. On the streets, I barter the professor’s gold pen for cucumbers, a kilo of U.N. rice, and some sesame paste. Apartment lights come to life above us as we bargain, and you can see that no one lives above the ninth floor of their apartment buildings. The elevators never work, and if they do, the power’s bound to go out when you’re between floors and trap you in a shaft. My building’s called the Glory of Mount Paektu, and I’m the sole occupant of the twenty-second floor, a height that makes sure my elderly parents never go out unattended. It doesn’t take as long as you’d think to climb the stairs—a person can get used to anything.

Inside, I’m assaulted by the evening propaganda broadcasts coming over the apartment’s hardwired loudspeaker. There’s one in every apartment and factory floor in Pyongyang, everywhere but where I work, as it was deemed the loudspeakers would give our subjects too much orienting information, like date and time, too much normalcy. When subjects come to us, they need to learn that the world of before no longer exists.

I cook my parents dinner. When they taste the food, they praise Kim Jong Il for its flavor, and when I ask after their day, they say it certainly wasn’t as hard as the day of the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, who carries the fate of a people on his back. Their eyesight failed at the same time, and they have become paranoid that there might be someone around they can’t perceive, ready to report them for anything they say. They listen to the loudspeaker all day, hail me as citizen! when I get home, and are careful to never reveal a personal feeling, lest it get them denounced by a stranger they can’t quite lay their eyes on. That’s why our biographies are important—instead of keeping things from your government by living a life of secrecy, they’re a model of how to share everything. I like to think I’m part of a different tomorrow in that regard.

I finish my bowl on the balcony. I look down upon the rooftops of smaller buildings, which have all been covered with grass as part of the Grass into Meat Campaign. All the goats on the roof across the street are bleating because dusk is when the eagle owls come down from the mountains to hunt. Yes, I thought, Ga’s would be quite a story to tell: an unknown man impersonates a famous one. He is now in possession of Sun Moon. He is now close to the Dear Leader. And when an American delegation comes to Pyongyang, this unknown man uses the distraction to slay the beautiful woman, at his own peril. He doesn’t even try to get away with it. Now that’s a biography.

I’ve attempted to write my own, just as a means of better understanding the subjects I ask to do so. The result is a catalog more banal than anything that comes from the guests of Division 42. My biography was filled with a thousand insignificances—the way the city fountains only turn on the couple of times a year when the capital has a foreign visitor, or how, despite the fact that cell phones are illegal and I’ve never seen a single person using one, the city’s main cellular tower is in my neighborhood, just across the Pottong Bridge, a grand tower painted green and trimmed in fake branches. Or the time I came home to find an entire platoon of KPA soldiers sitting on the sidewalk