Our group was briefed several times about the things we could and couldn’t do. We were not allowed to bring Bibles, satellite phones, cameras with telephoto lenses, notebooks, pornography. We were told to expect that our group would probably be spied on and to not bad-mouth any of the regime’s leaders, past or present, even in private.

Once your Russian-made Air Koryo jet lands and you are in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, you lose control. You hand over your passport “for security reasons.” You are taken where the government wants you to go, you eat what’s given, you are not allowed to seek out unscripted encounters. The 47-story Yanggakdo Hotel, the one place where all the foreigners stay, is on an island, physically separated from the rest of the capital.

But even so, there is a warping effect that being an American gives you. My mother, who suffers from anxiety, insisted that I call my brother to make sure she’d locked her door back home. When I told her we were in North Korea and couldn’t call, she suggested email — and I had to remind her that we couldn’t use the Internet either.

North Korea is also kitschy in a way that only a country that has little contact with the outside world and yet wants to impress the outside world can be. The subway has chandeliers that Louis Comfort Tiffany would have deemed too baroque. In our hotel, one of the clear pillars in the lobby had a sad shark swimming in it.

The secretiveness of North Korea has made it an easy target for America to project various stereotypes, about Asians and about dictators. American tourists often don’t take the country seriously; reports of “drunken high jinks” on tours are becoming more common. The travel agency Mr. Warmbier used advertises itself as “tours to destinations your mother would rather you stayed away from,” mentioning “fun, thrill-seeking and adventure at a great price!”