A few years back I bought a pack of
555 cigarettes in a tiny convenience store in Harvard Square. 555 is/was a
British tobacco manufacturer whose product was as coveted as Dunhill, another
British brand. You don’t see 555 much in the US so I was rather excited to see
them in the store and bought one. My father who lived abroad smoked them when
he returned home for a brief stay once in a while. One of his fancy leather
bags would be full of 555 and I would pilfer them to smoke with my buddies. The
cigarettes had distinct smell when you opened a pack. That smell was deeply
ingrained in my memory as it was more than a smell but one of few small windows
through which I viewed and imagined the world beyond. The cigarettes I bought
in the store had a different look and were of poor quality in every way and
listed Singapore as the country of origin—the ones I smoked were made in
England. Anyway, I really bought the cigarettes for the smell but to my
disappointment the smell wasn’t there either. When I recently saw a headline on
NK News about a Singaporean conglomerate’s joint venture cigarette factory with
North Korea I immediately thought about the pack. Could that have been one of
those counterfeit cigarettes made in North Korea?
One of the things that defectors from
the border region mention is endless hours they spent shelling pine nuts at
home in the dark since normally there was no electricity. There are traders who
buy pine nuts in shell from the market (not sure where the nuts come from.
Russia, China?) and have the villagers shell them so that they can sell the
product to China. There was a point many years back when my neighborhood Whole
Foods store started selling pine nuts. It struck me odd at the time that pine
nuts were flooding Whole Foods stores in Cambridge so suddenly because until
then I had to go to a Korean grocery store named Reliable Market in Somerville
for them. I figured then that maybe some breakthrough in pine nut shelling
technology was responsible for it but maybe something else was at work?
