Chapter One: Getting In

Author’s note: I didn’t tell this story when it happened. I couldn’t. Fifteen years later, I can—because he stayed when I fled.

Matt Douma rode shotgun in the 1998 Mercedes I called the Benzo. I slid a CD into the stereo and hit play.

Seized by the jangling guitar riff, he leaned over and turned up the volume. Iggy Pop’s ragged voice filled the car, singing about going places, about taking a ride.

Matt had never heard The Passenger, but it fit—two guys with bad instincts and too much freedom in a country he knew far better than I did.

I am the passenger. And I ride and I ride…

Years later, our wandering would end with police questions and criminal charges. I would flee Korea, leaving Matt in Seoul to take the brunt of it.

We met in the January cold of 2009. I’d just arrived in Seoul, an American reporter who didn’t speak the language. At 50, I was six-foot-three and already out of place—bleached blond hair, no suit, no tie.

Matt had grown up in Canada, just across the river from Detroit—half Dutch, a wanderer with a troubled family past. He spoke Korean fluently and rode a motorcycle across Seoul, teaching English between stops. A fourth-degree black belt in Taekwondo, he carried himself like someone who could take a hit. He’d married a Korean woman and was raising two young daughters. Money was tight.

He liked the stories I was chasing—about North Korean defectors struggling to adapt, beggars crawling the pavement with donation plates.

One night, at Broughton’s Pub in the basement of the British embassy, I groused about how I sometimes took photos with my smartphone to cut costs. 

“Why don’t I shoot for you?” Matt asked. “You wouldn’t even have to pay me.”

“Do you have a camera?”

“No. But I could get one.”

He’d always wanted a real camera, but his father had said no—too expensive, too impractical. 

A few days later, Matt’s wife Sunny handed him two million won—about fifteen hundred dollars. She’d canceled his cancer insurance—he hadn’t even known he had it. 

The next day, he bought a Canon. 

He stood in a shop for three hours, studying lenses, refusing to leave until he understood how everything worked. That night, he photographed his daughters—proof to his wife the camera was worth it.

Matt had no journalism experience—just energy, curiosity, and a tolerance for discomfort. My editors in Los Angeles agreed to look at his work. If they liked it, they’d pay him fifty dollars a photo. Barely enough to cover gas.

One of Seoul’s expat journalists once asked if I paid him in sandwiches. 

He never forgot it.

“But with you, I felt electric,” he said years later. “I felt like I belonged—in the field, in the mess, in the moment.”

He taped a mantra to his camera bag: I Eat Dirt.

To get the shot, Matt dangled from poles and crawled through mud. He rose at 4 a.m. and rode his motorcycle across the city hunting for a better angle.

“When I got in that car with you,” Matt said. “I knew something was going to happen—and it might be dangerous.” 

I had more than a photographer. I had an accomplice.

FRIDAY: The Benzo—We should have stopped there.