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I said no way, since I thought it was too close an ally of the U.S. Finally, someone said, "How about Indonesia?" Indonesia sounded like a fine choice to me.
During this time, Brinda was already bugging me to leave and not come back. Whenever we were alone, she would tug on my arm and say, "Let's go. Let's get out of here. Let's go to Japan." I would always tell her to be quiet, that she couldn't say such things out loud. Mika was different. She believed more of the propaganda back then. I don't know why, but she was a bit more indoctrinated at that point, so I had to be careful about what I said around her.
I tried to prepare for both possibilities. I had to make it look like I was coming back, yet also be ready if we didn't. The trick was to bring things that were important but didn't look important. In the end, all I was really able to bring were my wedding license and a few dozen photographs. The night before we left, I had dinner with a high cadre at guesthouse in Pyongyang. He gave me five bottles of ginseng liquor to give away as gifts, a carton of Marlboro cigarettes and $2,000 cash in U.S. dollars. The next morning they woke me and my daughters and we paid our respects to the giant statue of Kim Il Sung. We then went to the airport and got on the Boeing 767. Onboard, there were Japanese and Korean government people. They had set up a smoking section about mid-way back of the plane. One of the Japanese diplomats said it was a special concession for the chain-smoking Koreans. About halfway through the flight, I was smoking and one of the leaders joined me. "It will be good to see your wife," he said. "Yes, it will," I said. "You have a lot of family in Japan," he said. "I suppose I do," I said. "It is good to have family," he said. "Yes, I suppose it is," I said. I didn't know exactly where he was heading with this, but I had a feeling. The ashtray was a plastic cup half-filled with water. As he leaned over to drop the butt into the cup, he said to me very quietly, "If you don't come back, there is nothing we can do."
Once we touched down in Jakarta, my wife was there on the tarmac, along with throngs of media. She met me on the stairs of the plane and, as I stumbled down the steps, I fell into her arms and she planted a big kiss on me. I was a little surprised, but not as much as I have been told the Japanese were, who it seems found this extreme display of affection a little shocking. As a joke these days, she denies she did this, saying that I grabbed her, but my daughters always interject, "Mama, that's a lie! They have pictures! The whole world saw it! You grabbed him!" The bus ride into the city took two hours. I did not wait long before getting down to business with my wife. We sat side by side, not looking at each other while we talked. "Why didn't you want to have this meeting in China?" I asked. "If we met in China," she said, "I may have been sent back to North Korea." So I asked, "You don't want to go back to North Korea?" "No," she said quietly but firmly. "But I thought you did," I said. "The Organization told me that you have been trying and wanting to come back this whole time." "Gae-so-ri," she said. "That is dog talk." Well, I thought, that's it, then. The decision has been made. We are not going back.