Having just returned from a somber afternoon walking through prison cells at Robben Island, the idea of attending a talk about the gastro-history of Nelson Mandela’s life seemed curious – superfluous, even. But at the launch of the Cape Town Globalist’s Seeds of Change issue, anthropologist and chef Anna Trapido revealed, through food, a few truly poignant moments in Mandela’s life.

More than anything, Anna enlightened us to a new way to look at journalism and relating to your subjects. Talking about food, she found, brought an ease and comfort to her interviewees that allowed them to recall moments that had long since floated to the back of their mental space. Food and its associated emotions is a powerful common human experience.

We knew already that Nelson Mandela’s 27-year imprisonment was tough on his family life, but nothing brought this more to life than the story about how Winnie Mandela saved a layer of their wedding cake for 15 years (how? it was a fruit cake) only to have it crushed during a move to Soweto. They were together for exactly eight days before Mandela returned to prison; the cake was something real and tangible for Winnie to hold on to.

Food is more than just an emotional trigger. Anna also spoke about the highly political role that food can play. For instance, the inauguration dinner for Mandela’s 1994 election, planned by the outgoing administration, was so awful that it could be seen as “a literal act of aggression,” as Anna put it. Or, how telling it was that Mandela’s second inauguration dinner served sparkling wine, while Mbeki’s served Möet.

Our own gastronomic memories of Cape Town are slightly less historically significant, but nonetheless meaningful. We’ll remember the night we ordered R900 worth of food from Nando’s and enjoyed ½ chickens while discussing the pros and cons of township tourism. And the time we enjoyed a braai lunch with Shane, the HIV-positive documentary film star and host of Mzoli’s. And simply… cheers to Savannah cider!

Ashley Wu ’15 is in Morse College. Contact her at ashley.wu@yale.edu.

As we stepped into the classroom, thirty young children burst into song. Two of the children began to dance for us, wriggling their bodies and kicking their legs in the air.
“Feel free to photograph the children if you’d like,” our tour guide told us.
The nine Glotrippers on the tour exchanged uncomfortable glances. On our way out of the school the tour guide assured us that the children don’t mind when tourists stop by to oggle and photograph them, but our discomfort remained. I wondered whether the township children could sense the worlds that divided us even when they ran up to give us hugs and high fives.
This morning we experienced an entirely new side of South Africa when we went on a tour of three nearby townships. We saw the houses that residents live in – called informal settlements – which were often nothing more than ramshackle wood sheds, that our tour guide told us burn down easily in the winter. We visited an orphanage for HIV positive children, and walked roads that are piled with garbage, neglected by South African sanitation workers.
But it wasn’t just the poverty and suffering we witnessed that felt so unsettling. It was really our presence in the townships – our poverty tourism – that left me with a sense of deep discomfort. I wondered how the residents of the townships felt as we walked through their streets snapping photos of their homes, gawking at a lifestyle so radically different from our own. At one point our tour guide led us directly into somebody’s home in the Langa township. One of the men who lived there was walking through the living room and when he saw us he bowed his head and murmured, “excuse me,” ducking quickly out of our way. Why should he have to step aside and make room for us in his own home?
We asked our tour guide about the practice of poverty tourism, questioning whether it signaled disrespect to the people of the townships. Our tour guide responded that the residents of local townships depend on the tourism industry. Tourism, he told us, is the number one industry for job creation and poverty alleviation. The industry employs township residents as tour guides and bus drivers, and some Langa residents even profit from selling tourists T-shirts with the township’s postal code printed on the front.
“You can take home a souvenier of your visit to the townships,” our tour guide told us, pointing to the brightly-colored apparel.
He also maintained that the benefits of poverty tourism go deeper than money. Tourism, he explained, allows people from the outside world to understand the lifestyle of the impoverished in South Africa. It allows for rich interactions between people living in townships and people living abroad, something that might not otherwise happen.
“Tourism isn’t just about gourmet food and wine,” he told us. “It’s about meeting people and learning their challenges, hopes, dreams, and triumphs.”
I definitely feel that I deepened my understanding of the South African population today—it didn’t feel right to spend all my time here in posh neighborhoods, only exposing myself to the lifestyles of a very particular segment of the population. And yet I wonder if the township tourist industry is promoting the right sort of interactions between visitors and the township locals. I wonder how it feels to be a child growing up in Langa, constantly oggled by groups of white foreigners, snapping photos and laughing and talking in a language that you don’t understand. I wonder how our tour guide felt, watching our bus pull away toward Cape Town as he retreated home to the informal settlement where he lives. I hope someday we’ll be able to visit the townships without needing the security of a clunky white tourist van.

Emma Goldberg ’16 is in Saybrook College. Contact her at emma.goldberg@yale.edu.

In a blooming city of business and culture, the lack of racial integration is not only astonishing, but disappointing, and frankly uncomfortable, because I…am black. After being in Cape Town for only a few days the separation of races is immediately clear, the people who live in this city are white, and the people who work in this city are not. The restaurants and shops only have patrons that are usually white, and the waiters, cashiers, taxi drivers, and construction workers are black.

After being here for only three days the weight of being the sole black person in my group of peers has begun to bear down on me. I am the only black person around whenever we are in shops, bars, or any other public places of enjoyment, and that is not something that goes unnoticed. The whites are the people who truly enjoy and experience Cape Town while the majority of black South Africans are poor and unemployed. The economic disparity in the city is clear and apparent—mansions are next to slums. While driving on the highways it is not unusual to see a cluster of slums backdroped by nice houses in the distance.

Tonight we went to a very “posh” bar in an area of Cape Town called Camps Bay. First off, with beachfront bars and seaside mansions leading up to the hills, Camps Bay is a town that resembles Laguna Beach in California. The bars and clubs are hip and overflowing with young, fashionable, good looking people… who are white. I took this as just another “token black girl” experience to add to my list, and wasn’t going to let this stop me from having a good time among a fantastic group of people.

To my surprise two black girls were also at this bar, but in my opinion they clearly looked uncomfortable. We ended up having to leave this posh bar to find a less crowded place but I made it a point to go back and speak to these girls myself, so as to not be presumptuous about their take of the environment. It turned out that these two girls were from Angola and simply vacationing in Cape Town. I think this only serves to reiterate my point that the people who actually “enjoy” Cape Town are not South African Blacks. The only black people in this bar where myself, these two girls vacationing from Angola, and a few bartenders and workers.

I asked the girls about how they felt about the racial atmosphere in Cape Town and whether or not it was uncomfortable for them. Only one of them spoke English and she explained to me that they hadn’t been paying attention to it too much because they were just trying to have a good time on their vacation but when she explained my question to her friend who didn’t speak English, her eyes lit up and she started shaking her head. She looked at me, rubbed her finger on her skin, lifted it up, and shook it, symbolizing “no blacks here.” We laughed because we all understood; this wasn’t something that needed to be translated.

Before I left them the girls told me that overall they didn’t feel as if the whites here were very friendly, especially because they were black. I felt their discomfort, empathized with them, and wished them well on the rest of their vacation. The rest of night was joyful, and filled with laughter and good conversation, but as we walked outside and gathered in front of the posh bar I got the slap in the face that had been waiting to hit me this whole time, the slap that had been eager to burst my bubble of privileged racial integration and equality. This slap came in the form of a middle aged white man, who had no place creeping about in front of this bar of young people. I could tell from the moment he spotted me that this man was intent on sharing some words. He approached me and said with a creepy smile on his face, “You look lost among these people.”

It all seemed to happen so quickly so I simply turned away and tried to laugh it off, but then I actually realized what this crazy old man had said, “you look lost among these people.” It would have been easy for me to excuse this racist jab because of the type of person this was, but I took another second to really look at the man and honestly he wasn’t that crazy and he wasn’t that old. He had on a nice grey sweater and jeans folded up at the ankles to highlight his bright new Converse high tops.

This man told me what every other white person has probably been thinking whenever I enter their spaces with my group of friends; I look lost among these people, because I am black. This experience will in no way poison the rest of this trip for me, but it’s important that I take these moments to reflect on the fact that in some places equality is a privilege and being black is a condition that I have to live with proudly and courageously.

Dianne Lake ’16 is in Ezra Stiles College. Contact her at dianne.lake@yale.edu.

As we drove into Cape Town from the airport on Thursday afternoon, one billboard loudly proclaimed “Escape Town,” using a pun off of the city’s name to hawk a company’s vacation condos outside the city. We had just arrived after being in transit for 24+ hours (New Haven –> JFK –> Johannesburg –> Cape Town), so escaping town wasn’t a top priority. But the sign was a reminder of one of the reasons fueling what my parents like to call my “incurable wanderlust.” Travelling is a chance to escape from the familiar, escape from routines and experience something that is entirely new — whether it is a new country or city (no one in our group had been to South Africa or Cape Town before) or meeting new people (we were delighted to meet our counterparts from the University of Cape Town Globalist last night). At best travelling also provides a chance to escape one’s preconceived notions about what a place or an issue through first-hand exploration.

The idea of escaping, however, fails to entirely capture what I love about Globalist trips. After all, escape, connotes a degree of disengaging oneself from the world and that is exactly the opposite of what we hope to do on our reporting trips. Rather, the great thing about GloTrips is that they are all about engagement. The members of our group will be engaging with and immersing themselves in the topic they are writing on, whether it is the effects of gentrification in a formerly-industrial neighborhood in Cape Town, controversies surrounding affirmative action policies at South Africa’s universities, or an array of other topics. This engagement happens not only through a number of meetings and interviews that each participant has arranged, but also through discussions among group members after these meetings that spill into dinner and lunch conversations. While the topics that we choose to tackle are sometimes small in scope, we hope that that they will also serve as lens through which to engage and grapple with (at least to some degree) current affairs in South Africa and the challenges and successes the nation has faced.

Rachel Brown ’15 is in Saybrook College. Contact her at rachel.brown@yale.edu.

One of the best things about being in a new city is having the opportunity to wander the streets, meeting new people and encountering all of the colorful sites that Cape Town has to offer.

Yesterday we walked around a neighborhood called Woodstock, a heavily gentrified open market that one of the Glotrippers will actually be investigating in her article for the fall issue, so stay tuned! Woodstock is a fascinating blend of low-income housing and artistic, communal spaces. Walking the streets, we had the opportunity to take in all of the creativity the artists have brought to the neighborhood. Their work spills out of studios and galleries and onto the streets, manifested in the murals and graffiti all throughout the area. We stumbled across one building covered in boldfaced print that read:

“Removing the grayness from the soul of the city is the job of musicians, artists and poets.”

And yet, despite the walls covered in intricate portraits and swirling neon murals, some grayness persisted. We saw children running up and down the streets begging for change, their eyes following us as we guiltily dug into candy bars and trail mix. One artist told us that when she once left her car parked out on the street past dark, beggars broke into it and took everything of value, including the car battery. Even as we wandered the streets in wonder of the brightly-colored graffiti, we noted the neighborhood’s poverty and desperation. Despite the artists’ best efforts, some of the city’s grayness has yet to be removed.

After exploring Woodstock, we walked through the winding streets of the city center and ended up at the Victorian Alfred Waterfront. Aptly described by one of the Glotrippers as “Cape Town’s Disneyland,” the V & A waterfront is filled with posh restaurants, resort-style hotels, and even a large ferris wheel (which, after a bit of debate, we decided not to ride). We speculated that some of the area’s high-end development might have sprung up to accomodate tourists during the World Cup. In particular, one street near the waterfront had a large pedestrian bridge with no apparent purpose. It’s fascinating to see how profoundly a city changes after just one summer-long tournament.

Overall the day offered us a lens into the many different sides of Cape Town. Walking from the spectacular artistry of Woodstock to the resorts of the waterfront felt like a trip from Brooklyn to Orlando, Florida. We’ll see what other worlds we stumble into tomorrow.

Emma Goldberg ’16 is in Saybrook College. Contact her at emma.goldberg@yale.edu.

This is the third Globalist trip for the two of us and it’s going very smoothly so far! We’ve gone on two interviews at vineyards (we might be writing about South African wine!), hiked to the top of Table Mountain, explored Stellenbosch and the University of Capetown campus, and met members of the Capetown Globalist.

While we’ve enjoyed our wine (the Pinotage at Bergkelder and the Shiraz at Soms Delta, in particular) and the “chilled out” atmosphere of hip-to-the-bone Long Street, we can’t help but to notice the giant gap between the beauty and coolness of what Capetown wants us to see, and the 40% unemployment rate/straight inequality that we know pervades the conversation about South Africa. For example, today, we took an hour long train ride to Stellenbosch, a beautiful vineyard city that also happens to be the second oldest European settlement in South Africa. The city itself, which looks quite a bit like Palo Alto, is home to several wineries and a large university and has become a major international tourist attraction. As we walked around the town we saw chic German and French tourists sitting in the wine bars and gelaterias that lined the streets, tourists who, as our waitress explained, often come to Stellenbosch looking for the “real Africa.”

One stop away from Stellnbosch, however, was a shantytown region of very evident poverty. As we’ve seen in Cape Town in general, the socioeconomic divides often lineup with racial ones, so while the tourists were largely white, the waitstaff, cooks, and those people getting on and off the earlier stops were largely non-white. In fact, our intention to ride the train to Stellenbosch was greeted by several University of Cape Town students with shock and words of warning. We splurged on first class tickets (34R or about $4 round trip), but couldn’t help but notice that in spite of the large numbers of white, international tourists, most of whom use Cape Town as their base, we were the only white and Asian passengers.

Neither of us expected to find a South Africa free from racial divides and the remnants of a long, painful history of apartheid that only ended during our lifetime, yet we feel somewhat surprised–even unnerved–by what seems to us to be such a strong, inescapable legacy of that era. Though tempted to unpack the cultural and anthropological implications of using South Africa to create a tourist friendly, “real Africa,” we’ve decided to hold off on final judgments, at least for now. We head to Robbens Island, the famous prison where Nelson Mandela remained for nearly 20 years, later today. As our trusty LPs explain, the tour guides are predominantly non-white former political prisoners…so we will, no doubt, have something to say about that. We’ll keep you posted.

Emily Ullman ‘14 is in Timothy Dwight College and Margaret Zhang ’14 is in Berkeley College. Con­tact them at emily.ullman@yale.edu and margaret.zhang@yale.edu.

About three months before my family’s Christmas vacation to Egypt, the questions started.

“Are you sure it’s safe?”

“Is there still time to change your plans? It just doesn’t seem prudent.”

“You said you’d wait it out, but the political situation there doesn’t seem to be improving.”

In the weeks before I left, the comments only got more frequent, more insistent— and not without reason. On November 22, newly-elected president and Muslim Brother­hood leader Mohamed Morsi granted himself sweeping powers, beyond the scope of judi­cial review. The move was allegedly designed to “protect the revolution and achieve justice,” but critics around the world labeled it mar­tial law. The nightly news showed images of violence in Tahrir Square that echoed those of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Front-page stories told of a hastily-written Constitution and deep divisions within Egyptian society. All coverage of Egypt seemed negative, the most frequent words “anger,” “opposition,” and “violence.” On December 12, 2012, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman raised the stakes even further when he posed a ques­tion to his readers: “Can God Save Egypt?”

But my family went anyway, ignor­ing all warnings from friends and rela­tives and boarding a plane almost

completely devoid of tourists.

From above, the first thing you see of Egypt is the Nile, snaking its way through empty desert. As you approach the ground, you see miles of barbed wire, its purpose unclear and its presence intimidating. And even closer, you see the piles of trash. Trash is everywhere: In the canals, in heaps by the road, randomly scat­tered in the desert. Oftentimes it is burning. The Egypt we saw was not violent. We didn’t see any protests or street fights, but we did see the more mundane effects of a fundamen­tally weak and inefficient government, strug­gling to replace an autocratic predecessor.

On a highway circling the Cairo city lim­its, I see roads choked with expensive BMWs, cars that might be considered vintage if seen in Connecticut, beat-up sedans, and donkeys. The only women I see are smiling white-skinned models on billboards adver­tising pizza. Although our guide, Mahmoud, one of several guides and drivers our fam­ily hired, vehemently denies that there is any taboo against female drivers here, this seems unlikely. As our van weaves in and out of traf­fic, we pass new luxury developments on the outskirts of the city and the unfinished, illegally-constructed skeletons of houses. There are brightly colored tablecloths drying in the wind, men smoking shisha in cafes on every street, falafel for one Egyptian Pound (about 15 cents), and not a single street sign.

Although I’d promised by mom back home that I’d avoid anything potentially danger­ous—especially Tahrir Square—my siblings and I went there the first night, figuring any tour of Egyptian history would be incom­plete without it. The tour company wouldn’t let us go unaccompanied, so we took a guide along. On the way there, we saw the dusty streets, dusty plants, dusty piles of trash become a canvass for the colored glow of nightclubs and the little LEDs jauntily ringing car taillights. The square itself is now a tent city, and although the guide had been solici­tous up until that point, he refused to let us near the tents. “There’s crime there. You can buy anything, drugs, women, weapons.” My stepsister says that’s what they said about Occupy Wall Street, but I’m not sure anyone ever said you could buy guns in Zuccotti Park.

In the car, my siblings and I start asking about the revolution, and the guide, who asked not to be identified by name, calls the Muslim Brotherhood “liars.” My brother doesn’t hear him, so he rolls up the window and says it again, louder, with more force. “They are liars!” I ask if he was involved in the original anti-Morsi protests, and after a pause he says, “I was involved.” He’s tired and he doesn’t want to talk about it. He wants to talk about the dance hall we’re passing where he was married a few years ago and the house where he takes care of his ailing mother.

Many of the guides I met would use the word “liars” to describe politicians in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular. Lat­er, Mahmoud would stand in front of a statue from the Ptolemaic Kingdom—the period in which Egypt was ruled by Greeks who won popular support by adopting local Egyptian customs—and say that members of the Broth­erhood didn’t truly believe in God, that they just used it to manipulate people. “If they do something wrong and you can’t question it be­cause it’s allegedly the word of God, then our politicians are no longer men.” Mahmoud and the other guides I met had clearly spent consid­erable time thinking about and debating the future, the nature of democracy, and the role of religion. Given the consequences for young, educated, liberal citizens like them, living on the front lines of the revolution, it’s no wonder. Another guide, Eman, once told me that her friend is permanently disabled after being shot in the face. “He was so handsome,” she said.

And although no guide ever mentioned it, there is a risk that if the Muslim Brotherhood or another Islamic group radicalizes Egypt, tour­ists won’t come anymore. My family would not have visited Egypt if bathing suits or alcohol were forbidden, not so much for the specific inconveniences as for the general implica­tion of such bans. At a New Year’s Eve party in Sharm el-Sheikh, a resort city along the Red Sea, I saw the governor of South Sinai, Khaled Fouda, watch a performance of what were billed as “Vegas showgirls” dance onstage. Would he accept a turn toward Sharia law?

We fly upriver to Aswan and board a boat downstream to Luxor, hitting all the major tourist sites along the way. We see pyramids and temples and tombs. Although our itiner­ary crisscrosses that of the Minister of Tourism himself (on a mission of inspection), we face preventable problems every step of the way. At the Pyramids of Giza, we can’t go inside the Great Pyramid because the lights are out all day. The taxis are unmetered and you have to tip every time you want to use the bathroom. The streets are blocked in many parts of Cairo because no one bothers to regulate the set-up of the markets. Vendors, suffering from a lack of tourism and still forced to pay for government leases on their stalls, push their merchandise aggressively, even desperately.

The number of tourists is unclear. The min­istry says tourist levels are at 86 percent of the country’s capacity, a strong number, but the tour guides we met laughed at that figure. They hear stories of cruise ships built for 130 departing with only nine passengers. They see carriage drivers who cannot afford to feed their horses. I personally met few tourists, or at least classic vacationers. One British woman visited because her mother had surprised her with the trip only days before they were to leave– there wasn’t time to worry about security risks. One man from Ottawa used to visit regularly for business, and was comfortable with the country. An elderly British woman, who came looking for adventure, reminisced with me about her mid-century time with the Masai.

But maybe because they are surrounded by millennia of history, the guides see this revolu­tion as just one part of a larger picture. When I asked the guide that took us to Tahrir Square about “the revolution,” he asked “Which one?” The guide Mahmoud said he saw tourism drop almost as much when swine flu hit. Eman, the guide from Cairo, said it was worse after the 1997 Luxor Massacre, when terrorist gunman killed 62 tourists at the Temple of Hatshepsut, and the 2004 Sinai bombing, which targeted tourist hotels and killed 34 people. Mah­moud said that even the Iraq War affected tourism, and a tour was cancelled after the conflict between Israel and Gaza just this year because of a perceived increase in risk.

There seems to be a mismatch between the actual and supposed danger of a journey to Egypt. My trip was peaceful and interest­ing, but the guides I met are suffering. Mah­moud left the country last year for an intern­ship in America. He says that if he could, he’d want to be a guide for the rest of his life, but he doesn’t know if he can wait out the stag­nation. He’s tired of waiting: For Mubarak to fall, for the parliament to form, for the presi­dent to be elected, for the constitution. He believes that it will get better. He believes that his country has a bright future. But he doesn’t know how much longer he can wait.

Elizabeth Villarreal ’16 is in Saybrook College. Contact her at elizabeth.villarreal@yale.edu. 

When my friends and I arrived in Dandong, the largest border city in China, our first destina­tion was duanqiao: The Broken Bridge. The bridge, which connects Dandong and Sinu­jiu, North Korea over the Yalu River, is a relic of the Korean War. Bombed by American air­craft, it serves as a reminder—or proof—of “American aggression,” and, according to the propaganda poster by the bridge, is a symbol of the “greatest achievement of [Chi­nese] voluntary army…to aid [North] Korea.”

The Broken Bridge is also one of the few spots in China where you can see North Ko­rea, the most corrupt nation in the world ac­cording to Transparency International’s 2011 corruption index. North Korea, a totalitarian communist regime, maintains an extreme dis­parity between the rich and the poor: While Kim Jong-Un, supreme leader since Decem­ber 2011, enjoys a rollercoaster ride in a new amusement park, more than 30 percent of the population suffers from undernourishment.

Eager to see North Korea with our own eyes, my friends and I hopped in a battered cab that reeked of gas and cigarettes and headed to­ward the Broken Bridge. Within 20 minutes, we had left the city center and were driving on a deserted mountain. Amidst the trees I spotted a decrepit motel named Taiyangdao, island of the sun. Who would stay in such a place? I thought to myself as we continued down the dark, one-way road. Where is the sun?

After an hour and a half of driving, our cab finally halted at a sign that read Hekou Duanqiao, the Broken Bridge at River Mouth. Excited, we burst out of the cab and ran toward the empty bridge.

An eerie silence hung over the site—there was no one else there, except for the old Chinese woman at the ticket booth and the bronze bust of Mao Anying, the eldest son of Mao Zedong. On October 23, 1950, Any­ing crossed the bridge to join the Korean War.

As I tiptoed down the bridge, I passed posters explaining the brief history of the bridge and the Korean War. One of them read:

On March 29, 1951, American war­planes bombed Qingcheng Bridge. It was finally destroyed. The remained parts of the bridge are called as “broken bridge” today…

To commemorate the great “war to re­sist U.S. aggression and aid Korea” and the great achievement of voluntary army, the relevant departments of Dandong City built the statue of MAO Anying… The statue at the bridge will be looked at by people with reverence forever.

Suddenly, I hit a dead-end: A metal fence blocked my way. I leaned over the fence; just a few feet away the bridge ended abruptly, its jagged, splintered edge hanging awk­wardly over the water. I tore my eyes off from the drop-off, and looked up. North Korea was just a few hundred feet away. Gray haze hovered over the shore, mask­ing what was on the other end of the Yalu River. I reached out my arm then clasped my fingers, as if to grab and clear the fog away.

Standing there, halfway between North Korea and China, I felt as if stranded between two worlds. On the right on the Chinese shore, stood tall office buildings. On the left on the North Korean shore, stood trees. Lamps lit up the city of Dandong, bustling with activ­ity; Sinujiu lay in lifeless darkness, with no power to defy the night, helpless before the sinking sun. Staring at the other side, it was if the bridge disappeared into a black hole.

After a while we left the bridge and headed to Hushan (Tiger Mountain), the eastern-most known section of the Great Wall of China. As we climbed up the steps, fighting against the piercingly cold wind, a panorama view of Dandong, the Yalu River, and Sinujiu spread before our eyes: Hills lush with red and yel­low foliage on the Chinese side and, just across the river, barren, hay-coloured farm­land. Even the few grey clouds that hung over Dandong were crawling toward the other side; as the Chinese land emerged under the sunlight, shadows shrouded North Korea.

When we reached the watchtower on the Wall, we found a pair of mounted binoculars. Attached was a piece of paper that said, “5 RMB (80 cents).” As I stepped toward the binoculars, a Chinese man appeared at my side. I gave him a 5 RMB bill and began to examine North Korea. Through the binoculars, I saw huts built with wood and straw dotting the farmland. Nothing moved. I continued to scan the shore. Finally, I spotted a lone truck driv­ing down a one-way road: The first sign of activity. “Look, there’s a truck!” I shouted. Then, I saw a dot moving nearby. I squint­ed: “There’s a man running in front of it!”

I shouted excitedly, pointing out each little thing that I saw. “A propa­ganda billboard! It’s red with white let­ters, just like in China!” “Look, farmers!”

The farmers fascinated me; ten or twenty North Koreans, all wearing the same black clothes, bent down in unison to harvest their crops. Every few minutes, they left their posi­tions in the field to dump armfuls of potatoes onto a wheel-cart. Amongst the black-clad farmers strolled one old woman, dressed in red. Who is that woman? Why is she wearing red? Questions continued to run through my mind.

One North Korean left the line of farmers and descended to the shore, growing big­ger in my view. He wore loose black pants, a black jacket, and black rubber boots. Despite the biting northern wind, his hands were ex­posed. He stood at the edge of the shore, the farthest he could go, facing me. With still a tuft of black hair on his head he seemed relatively young, perhaps in his early middle age. I could almost make out his face but he turned away, and the image I pieced to­gether in my mind turned into a faceless blur.

I stepped away from the binoculars and re­alized that I could see the North Koreans with my bare eyes. And it hit me: If I can see them, they can see me—and everything behind me. The lush mountains; the neon-lit restaurants and hotels. The cars; the buildings; the lights on the streets. They see Taiyangdao—island of the sun, so bright and close, yet so far away.

As I stared at the desolate land, I could not help but remember what the cab driver had told me on our way to the Bro­ken Bridge. “When North Koreans come to Dandong, they stuff themselves with our apples and dumplings.” He laughed and added, “They say the food here is cheap and good—they get so excited when they see that the dumplings are stuffed with meat.”

I asked the only other person at the watch­tower—the man renting binoculars—what he thought about the life he saw on the other side of the river. “I think it’s pretty good,” he answered leisurely as he smoked his cigarette. “No stress. Everything is organized. You just have to farm.”

“What do you think about the life here?” I asked. “It’s fine. Not too much stress here, either.”

After climbing down the Great Wall, we headed toward the narrowest section of the Yalu River known as yi bu kua, “one step across.” This thirty-foot long “step” was per­haps too wide to hop over, but you could still easily wade your way over to the other side.

There, I found one sign titled: “National Border of P.R.C. and D.P.R.K. Reminder.” The sign requests people not to “climb or cross separation obstacles such as barbed wires,” “throw any objects over the border,” “con­verse or exchange objects with people on the other side of the border,” or “take pic­tures or videos of the military installations.”

Such warnings, however, do little to stop people from crossing the river. In 2009, North Korean guards detained two Ameri­can journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, at the Dandong-Sinujiu border. In 1999, Evan C. Hunziker, also an American citizen, swam across the river while inebriated and was detained in North Korea for three months.

“Do many North Koreans try to cross the border?” I asked the Chinese worker at the ticket booth. “During the winter, when the river freezes and you can walk over to the other side,” he answered. “But not too many try,” he added, “They know they will just get caught and be sent back.”

After talking to the Chinese worker, I walked down to the border. I spotted an­other sign by the barbed wires that read: “Compete to be a civilized border resident; construct a harmonious border.” On the sign were six cartoon illustrations. In one of them, two children dressed in traditional North Ko­rean clothes stand at the shore, smiling. Across from the two North Korean children is a Chi­nese backpacker on a boat, who is throwing a package labelled “Food” toward them. At the bottom of the picture, the sign warns, “Forbidden to throw things to North Korea.”

Why did the Chinese government spe­cifically choose “food” as an example of what not to throw to North Korea? This policy may stem from political and practical considerations on both sides.

In 2005, the North Korean government denied the presence of famine within its borders and expelled aid organizations from the country to decrease its dependence on foreign aid. Despite such moves, however, it continued to rely on outside food aid. The warning against throwing food, among other things, to North Korea may be a mani­festation of such contradicting stances.

Perhaps it is another desperate attempt by Pyongyang to convince the world of its “self-sufficiency” and, in extension, the le­gitimacy of the current communist system.

This, however, could not be further from the truth. In January 2013, “citizen journal­ists” in North Korea reported incidents of starvation-induced cannibalism. One jour­nalist told Asia Press, a news agency based in Osaka, Japan: “In my village in May, a man who killed his own two children and tried to eat them was executed by a firing squad…While his wife was away on business he killed his eldest daughter and, because his son saw what he had done, he killed his son as well. When the wife came home, he offered her food, saying: ‘We have meat.’”

China is North Korea’s largest trading part­ner and strongest political ally. Last October, the government of China’s Liaoning Prov­ince hosted the 2012 China-DPRK Economic, Trade, Cultural and Tourism Expo in Dandong. The theme was “friendship, cooperation and development.” Why, then, does China for­bid people from throwing food—among other things—to North Korea? Perhaps it is as simple as this: China, with 1.3 billion people and serious demographic issues of its own, does not need starving North Kore­ans, lured by food, to swim over to its side.

But as I gazed at the Chinese tourists clustered on a motorboat on the Yalu River, obsessively taking photos of North Koreans, I could not help but wonder if the Chinese people, by doing so, were trying to forget their painful past as well. For the older Chi­nese generations, the North Korean famine in the 1990s perhaps stirs memories of the 1957-1961 Great Leap Forward, a disastrous economic and social campaign led by Mao Zedong that caused 18 to 45 million famine-induced deaths. During the Great Leap For­ward, almost all property belonged to the state, just as is the case in North Korea now.

For China, North Korea is, in a way, a phantom of its traumatic past. When faced by North Korea, an eerie shadow of what China used to be, what do many Chinese citizens do? They take photos.

Tourists take photos of what to them seems unusual or fascinating. By transform­ing North Korea into a tourist site and by taking photos of North Koreans, Chinese people can objectify them as “foreign” speci­mens that they can observe through their lenses. With high-tech smart phones and DSLRs in their hands, they perhaps feel how far their country has come, and how for­tunate they are to be living in China today.

And they have the numbers to confirm their sense of pride. China, according to World Bank Development Indicators, reduced its poverty rate from 85 percent to 15.9 per­cent in less than twenty years. In 2010 its GDP surpassed Japan’s, and China emerged as the world’s second largest economy.

Despite such economic feats, however, China is not an “island of the sun.” Shadows of the Maoist era still haunt Chinese society to­day, and issues such as corruption, inequality, and human rights abuse darken China’s glory.

But this country—where the government imprisons ordinary citizens at re-education labour camps for “online speech crime,” where officials drive around in BMWs while elemen­tary school children, seeking warmth, crawl into a dumpster, light some matches, and as a result, die of carbon monoxide poisoning—is, for those on the other side of the Yalu River, a land of hope, prosperity, light, and freedom.

Before leaving Dandong, my friends and I went to see the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge, which, like the Broken Bridge, was also bombed by American aircraft but has since been repaired. As I stood by the bridge— one of North Korea’s few links to the outside world—I saw a truck heading toward the other side. The sun had already sunk; the truck became smaller and smaller until, fi­nally, darkness sucked it in. What is that man I saw on the shore doing now, I wondered. Will he find some food to eat tonight? The land remained unlit and silent as before.

Minami Funakoshi ’14 is a Literature major in Berkeley College. Contact her at minami. funakoshi@yale.edu. 

On the table between us lies a small photo ID of a five-year-old boy, blonde and smiling. We’re sitting at the reception desk of the Sokos Center, a volunteer-run health clinic in Bologna, Italy, dedicated to serving the city’s undocumented immigrant population, and Boris is here to ap­ply for his son’s health card. Rosanna, the sec­retary that I’ve been volunteering with during my semester abroad, peers over her glasses at the photo: “Oh, what a handsome little guy. Does he go to preschool?”

“No,” replies Boris, who shares his son’s blonde hair and blue eyes. “He doesn’t go to preschool.” As Romanian citizens, Boris and his son are guaranteed freedom of movement to any EU member state, but not much else. To access Italian social services, Boris must enroll in the civil registry, which he cannot do with­out a job. Boris hopes to enroll in the registry soon, but first, he needs a formal work con­tract from his employer, for whom he works unofficially as a blacksmith. “He keeps telling me he’ll give me the contract,” Boris tells us, shaking his head, “but he still hasn’t given me anything.”

In theory, their EU citizenship should en­sure Boris and his son a health card and there­fore access to care regardless of Boris’ employ­ment status, but in practice, the system for “unregistered” EU citizens like Boris and his son fosters discrimination and exclusion. Yet Boris and his son have a paradoxical advan­tage: Both were born in Moldova, a small non- EU country sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine that formed after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and both have dual Ro­manian and Moldovan citizenship.

Although their Romanian citizenship made it possible for Boris and his son to get to Italy, it now stands in their way. The health costs of unemployed EU citizens who are unable to en­roll in the registry should be covered by their home country’s social security program. The E.N.I. card (Europeo Non-Iscritto, or Unregis­tered European), allows them to be treated by regular Italian physicians, relying on reim­bursement of medical spending by the home country. This reimbursement system works for immigrants from wealthier European coun­tries such as France or Germany, but Italian doctors rarely accept an E.N.I. card presented by a Bulgarian or Romanian, assuming that the reimbursements will not arrive due to the corruption and incompetence of their home health care systems. Thus, many Romanians and Bulgarians are left without care.

Unemployed non-EU members, on the other hand—such as Moldovans—can apply for the S.T.P. (Straniero Temporaneamente Pre­sente, or Temporarily Present Foreigner) card. Each region addresses the needs of patients with S.T.P. health cards differently, and in Bolo­gna, these needs are met through Sokos, and other similar medical volunteer organizations, which offer both general care and specialized care such as gynecology and psychiatry.

Patients with the E.N.I. card, however, are not supposed to be treated at Sokos. But sometimes, there is nowhere else to go. The volunteers at Sokos offer more than just healthcare: They also help people like Boris put together the documents necessary to ap­ply for their health cards, providing many im­migrants with the only document that attests to their presence in the city. “We are the only ones that acknowledge them,” pointed out Dr. Natalia Ciccarelli, the Center’s Health Director.

Rosanna calls over Dr. Ciccarelli to discuss Boris and his son’s situation, and the two women consult Boris from across the desk. Although it would have been more advanta­geous for both Boris and his son to use their Moldovan identity to apply for the S.T.P. card, Boris had already acquired an E.N.I. card at an­other center. If father and son have cards asso­ciated with different citizenship and different legal residences, they may run into problems with the government. So Rosanna applies for the E.N.I. card for Boris’ son, knowing that al­though it will attest to his presence in Bolo­gna, it will likely not ensure healthcare. She tells Boris to come back and apply for the S.T.P. card as soon as his current card expires.

The current system, bureaucratically com­plex and circuitous, clearly yet insidiously dis­criminates against Romanians. Only a fortu­nate few have the ability to negotiate between identities, sometimes presenting themselves as Romanian, sometimes Moldovan, for better care. Encouraging white lies and hidden iden­tities, the system puts the most vulnerable at even greater risk.

Angelica Calabrese ‘14 is in Morse College. Contact her at angelica.calabrese@yale.edu.