Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

by Suki Kim

  Seoul was captured three days later.

  The finality in my mother’s voice comes without emotion. “The end,” her voice seems to say, although this story has no end. The war ensues, and the family moves from town to town, staying in makeshift tents and in the homes of relatives and strangers. For three years, most of the country is on the move.

  My mother’s family stops in the city of Suwon to wait for my uncle, but he never arrives. Some days later, they run into neighbors who report seeing him dragged away by North Korean soldiers. His hands were tied behind him with a rope, they say. The road back to Seoul is blocked now, and my grandmother waits in vain.

  How long did you wait? I ask.

  How long is long enough?

  My mother is not sure. She was only four years old, after all, but the others, including my younger uncle, who lives in Seoul, are not clear on this either. What my mother recalls is the image of her mother, half-crazed and wailing, wearing her skirt over her head as though it were a scarf and roaming the neighborhood in the evenings. Every evening the older children would go out in search of her, and she would inevitably say that she had been looking for her son. This behavior never stops. Some days she wanders and searches, and other days she remains quiet and stares into space.

  Growing up, this story was repeated to me often, and each time, I wished for a different ending. A different plot. It was a story then, sad and yet morbidly exciting because my mother was a part of it. But later I came to see it was also a sort of therapy, the way my mother kept on telling it over and over, as her mother had done for years. And the storytelling continues as I type these words here in New York, in a language alien to those who lived through the division, a language that shields me from the worst of my grief. For even now, decades after I first adopted it, English does not pierce my heart the same way that my mother tongue does. The word division weighs less than bundan, and war is easier to say than junjeng.

  Years after the war was over, the only thing my grandmother liked to do was visit shamans. The eerily accurate shaman of Inwang-san (Mount Inwang), the baby girl shaman famed for locating the bones of the neighbor’s missing child, the virgin shaman, the old maid shaman, the fat matron shaman—she went to see them all. They all said the same thing: Yes, he’s alive. He’s up north. He’s in Pyongyang. I would like to believe this is true, as she must have. Their assurances kept her going, though by the time I was born, she had suffered a stroke and spent her days in bed. She was sixty-five. I would say that the stroke took her soul away, but by everyone’s testimony, her soul was already long gone.

  * * *

  * The United States plans to relocate its military base outside Seoul by 2016.

  5

  ON MY THIRD DAY, THE STUDENTS COLLECTIVELY SHOWED up at dinner around 7 p.m., far later than the scheduled 6:30 p.m. arrival. This was unusual since their timing had been exact until then. When I sat down with a few and asked why they were late, they looked nervous. Finally, one said they had had a social studies class for two hours in Korean. Although that still did not explain why the class had run over by thirty minutes, I did not probe further. From their letters, I knew that they spent afternoons studying Juche, though I had no idea where. Maybe the powers that be had decided they needed to counteract any brainwashing of their elite youth that we, the foreigners, might attempt.

  Then I saw six of my students wearing khaki army uniforms rather than shirts and ties, and asked the others why. “They’re on duty,” one said. The rest lowered their heads and stared at their food. I asked them what kind of duty, but they would not answer. So I made a joke of it and said, “They look older in uniform, like fine young gentlemen!” At this, their faces softened, and they seemed to forget whatever they might have done that afternoon to make them so tense. The word gentleman always made them blush and giggle.

  Katie came up to me after dinner and whispered brightly, “Don’t you think Choi Min-jun is the cutest boy you’ve ever seen?” It had not occurred to me until then that at twenty-three, she was not much older than the students. It was entirely possible that they might have crushes on one another. For the first time since we arrived, her face was filled with girlish giddiness, and for a moment, life seemed almost normal. Boys and girls. The stuff that makes the world go around, or at least a tad brighter. It was happening here in Pyongyang too, even across taboo lines.

  “He looks so nice in his military uniform, so I asked him why he was wearing it,” Katie continued. I was hoping she might have found out more than I had. “He wouldn’t say and just blushed.”

  Teachers in this tiny, locked compound were like superstars. The students competed to sit with us at all three meals. For them, we seemed to be everything—walking English dictionaries, a window to the outside world. Although we were forbidden to tell them anything, they knew we had the answers. Some were bold enough to approach me directly and ask, “Professor, would you care to join me?” Their English was often quite formal because, since middle school, they had been taught British English. Others were so shy that we had to assign them to eat with us.

  The question of seating could be complicated. Each table seated four people, but we had been warned that the counterparts discouraged sitting with the same students more than once. We were told it was so that the students would have an equal chance to practice their English, but it also appeared that they did not want us to get close to any particular one. However, we inevitably ended up sitting with the same students more than once.

  Breakfast was porridge and boiled eggs. Lunch and dinner were almost always the same too: rice and some sort of watery soup, often with just a couple of marinated vegetables such as kimchi, bean sprouts, or potatoes. Even kimchi, the Korean staple on both sides, was tasteless because it was made with hard green cabbage instead of traditional Napa cabbage, which was scarce that year, supposedly due to a bad harvest. There was hardly ever any meat.

  The students usually led the conversation. “How can I learn English better, Professor?” was the question I heard at almost every meal. Improving their English was our mutual concern, but also our cover, which is ironic, given how much they are taught to hate imperialist America. We both hid behind that question.

  They admitted to being a bit daunted by the different accents they heard at the school. For example, Joan, who was in her seventies and originally from Alabama, spoke with an accent that was very unfamiliar to them, and they found it quite difficult to understand her. Other teachers had New Zealand, Australian, or British accents. One student asked whether an American or British accent would be more advantageous for his future. It was a valid question, although I did not know in what capacity they were expected to use English when so few North Koreans were allowed to travel. I wanted to tell him that he should watch foreign news on the BBC and CNN and decide which accent he liked better. But I knew the only TV channels he had access to were the North Korean ones. I also wished he could watch Hollywood films so that he would be exposed to everyday English. Of course this was not an option, either.

  On rare occasions when questions strayed from the topic of how best to learn English, they usually went something like this:

  How long does it take to fly here from New York?

  Do you miss your mother?

  Who would you marry, an American or a Korean man?

  But they never deviated further than that.

  THE NEXT DAY was Park Jun-ho’s twentieth birthday, and he was in high spirits. He was popular and sharp, and could be playful, though his laughing eyes sometimes turned cold at a moment’s notice. He said very proudly that his family of four lived in the center of Pyongyang, and he was cocky enough to declare that his own speaking skill was excellent, since his father had spoken to him in Chinese and English from the time he was little. That day being his birthday, his mother would have made him noodles—a Chinese birthday tradition, but not a South Korean one—but since he was not at home, the students in his class had planned a celebration.

  “
Hong Mun-sup will play guitar, and Park Se-hoon is the class dancer! Then Kim Tae-hyun plays the girl in this skit, and Ri Jin-chul the boy,” Jun-ho explained. The plan was to gather in one of their rooms that evening and amuse the birthday boy with performances. One by one, they would sing him a song, and this would last a couple of hours. When I asked what kinds of songs, the students just shrugged and said, “Songs about friendship.” Here there were no bars, no girls, and no computer games. Other than soccer and basketball and weekly gatherings to watch the TV drama called The Nation of the Sun, about the heroic actions of their Great Leader, their only form of entertainment was one another. It was saddening that they had so few ways to amuse themselves, but also lovely. The last time I had made up stories and acted them out with friends was as a child in South Korea, during the seventies, and we did it because we too had little else to play with and no choice but to be creative. Memories of throwing on my mother’s clothes to playact a princess, a prince, a pirate rushed back to me, and I felt a yearning for a time long gone.

  Park Jun-ho began teasing Choi Min-jun, his roommate, at the dinner table. He told me that Min-jun was known among the boys as the serious one, and they often called him a “romantic.” Min-jun became embarrassed and waved his hands in denial. He said Jun-ho was always jesting, and that he regretted telling Jun-ho about his pretty younger sister, who was sixteen, because Jun-ho had said that if they ever met, he would say to her, “You just wait for me.”

  They all cracked up at this. After all, their only interaction with the opposite sex was with their foreign teachers or the guards who occupied the lower floors of their dormitory. Dr. Joseph told me that initially the school had wanted to bring in male guards, but they felt that they might appear too threatening to the foreigners. With female guards, there were instead concerns that the boys might be distracted, but it turned out that they were from such different social strata that the boys pretty much ignored them. Thus, for the moment, girls and casual dating were just a fantasy. Jun-ho said, “Maybe Min-jun’s sister is pretty, but I bet she’s too shy for me.” It was then that quiet Ryu Jung-min at the table leaned in and said, “But the really funny thing is that this boy talks like this, but he has never had a girlfriend in his life! He is a disaster with girls!”

  At the mention of Jun-ho’s disastrous ways with girls, all four of us burst out laughing. Disaster would become a favorite word for the boys that summer, almost a private joke. They loved saying it under any circumstances—sometimes they would say “disaster food,” or that an exam had been a disaster.

  At such moments, it was as though we were sitting in any school cafeteria anywhere. They were simply college students who were interested in the one thing most boys their age were interested in: girls. At moments like those, I forgot where I was. Or if I did remember, I quickly made myself forget. And my guard came down, and I felt a sudden freedom from the constraints that wound all of us so tight, and I looked across at their mischievous faces and felt such tenderness for them, and I became a momentary confidante for their gossip about girls and a well-wisher on the twentieth birthday of my charming student, and I felt pleased and relaxed until my eyes would catch the shining metal pins on their chests, the eternally present face of their Eternal President, there on each of their hearts, marking his territory, although they were just badges, and these young men could easily pull them off and throw them into the trash along with the uneaten grub on their trays, but then it would dawn on me that such a thing would never happen, and that this glimmer of hope was only a mirage.

  DURING THAT FIRST week, I kept noticing things that bothered me. Once we asked the students to put together a skit, and they chose to write about two Canadian teachers going to a local hospital. One of them was injured so the other offered to sell his blood to help him, but they discovered that medical care was free due to the solicitude of the Great General Kim Jong-il.

  Katie pointed out to them that this made no sense, since 1) a foreign teacher would be allowed only in a foreign hospital, which was not free, 2) people generally are not paid for donating blood, and 3) emergency rooms do not require patients to pay up front. The students became puzzled and said, “Well, okay, the friend who is not injured needs to tell the wife of the injured one, so he goes to the airport to fly to Canada to let her know.” Katie asked why he wouldn’t just call the wife instead of flying all the way to Canada. The students stumbled and said, “Okay, in that case, the friend could use the phone at the hospital, and maybe the doctor will call for them, but how would the doctor speak to the wife in Canada when he speaks no English?” Katie asked why the friend would not just talk to the wife directly. And on it went. Each answer depressed us further, because it was plain that a simple thing like calling a family member in a foreign country was inconceivable to them, at least not without special permission.

  Another time, we played a game of Truth or Lie. We asked students to come up with two true statements about themselves and one false one, and the rest of the class had to guess which was which. When one student got up and said, “I visited China last year on vacation,” the whole class burst out laughing and shouted, “False!” They all knew that this was impossible.

  Then another student said, “When I was a child, I ate tough beef,” and many students nodded and shouted out, “True!” I recalled a defector telling me that the first time he ate beef, it was strangely leathery. According to him, during the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, hardly anyone was buying beef, and the rumor was that instead of throwing the aged meat out, Australia had given it to the people of North Korea. It was entirely possible that my elite students had eaten this very beef, especially since that was soon after their great famine. I looked around the classroom and wondered what else they might have experienced as children, and how it had shaped them. So many of them already had at least a few gray hairs. Perhaps it was the lack of nutrition, even for these privileged young men.

  At times my students revealed a cluelessness that surprised me. Once a student asked me if it was true that everyone in the world spoke Korean. He had heard the Korean language was so superior that they spoke it in England, China, and America. I did not know what to say. Perhaps he was testing me to see if I would contradict all he had learned thus far and would later report me. Or maybe he was just curious. So I took the safe road: “Well, let me see, in China, they speak Chinese, and in England and the United States, they speak English, the way we speak Korean in Korea. However, I live in America and I speak Korean when I speak to my parents, so one might say that the Korean language does get spoken in America.” That took some very quick thinking. Even the simplest question could be a minefield.

  They emphatically insisted that Juche Tower was the tallest in the world; that their Arch of Triumph was the highest, certainly higher than the one in Paris (true); that their amusement park was the best in the world. They were always comparing themselves to the outside world, which none of them had ever seen, declaring themselves the best. This insistence on “best” seemed strangely childlike, and the words best and greatest were used so frequently that they gradually lost their meaning.

  Another time, a student asked me what my favorite food was. They often asked about my favorite flower, favorite sport, or favorite musical instrument. I wondered sometimes whether they had been given a list of safe questions. I soon learned to answer in the way I thought they expected. I liked tennis. I played piano. I enjoyed naengmyun, the Korean cold noodle that was popular in both Koreas but happened to be the regional specialty of Pyongyang. I did like naengmyun, but I could not tell them that I preferred pasta or soba noodles. Although I had seen one hamburger restaurant in Pyongyang, I did not know if any of my students had been there, and they certainly did not talk about international cuisine. So when asked about my favorite food, I stuck to naengmyun, which always brought smiles of approval as they inevitably said, “Yes, I hear naengmyun is enjoyed all over the world and is hailed as the best food.” I felt unable to break it to them
that that particular noodle dish had never taken off abroad the way spaghetti had.

  Sometimes a meal felt like an interrogation, either vocal or silent. Once, a student, who turned out to be a class secretary, motioned to another student to ask me a question. “Why must we write those letters?” the student asked. “We never learned them at our former university.” His tone was suspicious. I had been expecting such a question for some time, since I had turned the letter writing into a weekly exercise. I told them that a paragraph was the basis of any writing in English and that they must learn how to write it, and letters were a good place to practice them. I knew that the questions came from the counterparts.

  There were only a handful of times any student veered from the script. During our conversation about Park Jun-ho’s birthday party, one of the boys blurted out that he liked singing rock ’n’ roll, and then he turned red, quickly checking to see who might be listening. I had never seen anyone scan the room so fast, and the other students went quiet and looked down at their food. There was no explanation for such an instinctive reaction except for a sort of ingrained fear that I could never fathom. In that fleeting moment, I realized that I had been waiting for that slip. It was even possible that I had engineered it. And when the slip came, the truth was so pathetic, just the revelation of a nineteen-year-old boy singing songs in his dorm room, yet for admitting that in public, he might now be in serious trouble. I did my own nervous check to see who might have witnessed the slip and, just as quickly, I changed the topic of the conversation.