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

by Suki Kim

  “Were there students like us? University students?” he asked.

  Now that I thought about it, I did not recall seeing a single student their age there.

  “No, everyone looked a bit older,” I said slowly. “Maybe the young people were in their mid-twenties? So I guess no university students.” He looked down with something akin to resignation.

  “When were you there?” another student piped up. “Perhaps it was morning, and university students were all in classes there instead. They give classes at the Grand People’s Study House, and those classes are free, all because of the solicitude of our Great General Kim Jong-il.”

  Although we had been shown two lively classes in session, I could not remember seeing any college students there, except perhaps a few young women. When I said this, it seemed to make everyone at the table anxious.

  Later that night, I thought I understood why the students had been so inquisitive, and so tense. Jung-min and the others probably had so little communication with anyone outside the university that they had no idea where their friends were. Whenever I asked them if they corresponded with their family and friends, they never answered directly. One student said that he called his parents when he missed them, but when I asked whether there was a phone in the dormitory, he did not answer. Another student said that he was waiting for a package from his sister, and when I asked him if he wrote letters to his parents too, he also did not answer. My suspicion was that contact was rare. Or if they had a way of contacting home—some of them might have owned cell phones—perhaps they could not converse freely without fear of being listened in on.

  But something else struck me about Jung-min’s question. He wanted to know if we had seen any university students in the one place in Pyongyang where they usually congregated. We had seen none. Could it be that PUST really was the only university open in all of North Korea, as President Kim had told us? And did the closing of the universities have anything to do with the fact that Kim Jong-il’s health was failing and that a change of regime might be imminent? Our students were the crème de la crème of this society. Of course they would not be sent to construction fields like the rest, but instead sent here, to a boarding school within their own city, where they could practice their English and wait for the political storm to pass. Was it our job, then, to provide the sons of the North Korean elite with a temporary sanctuary?

  * * *

  * In 2012, when Kim Jong-un brought his wife out in public, it was considered a radical break with tradition.

  7

  ONE AFTERNOON I WAS HAVING LUNCH WITH THREE STUDENTS as usual, and just as I was finishing, Katie rushed over to my table and asked to talk in private. There was nowhere we could go where we would not be overheard, so we decided to take a walk around the campus, hoping it would look as though we were strolling and discussing the day’s lesson. Taking a walk was the only way we could speak freely. So as not to appear suspicious, we stopped occasionally to take pictures of each other.

  Katie was panicked about a conversation with one of the students at her table. The student had asked to sit with her, even though he did not belong to either of our classes. Sometimes students were so eager to practice their English that when they could not sit with their own teachers, they approached any teacher they saw nearby. There was no clear rule about eating only with those you taught, so occasionally we ended up sitting with students we did not know.

  It had started innocently enough when the student asked her why higher education in the United States was not free as it was in North Korea, as made possible by their Great Leader. This was not a surprising question. During previous visits, I had been asked the same thing, which made me think the regime must use the costly higher education system in America as an example of the failure of capitalism.

  Katie said that she did her best to explain scholarships and loans, as well as the meaning of private and public education, but she knew that she was not supposed to discuss any of it and became nervous. This particular student, however, probed further. He had never even heard the word tax until he came to PUST, where it was mentioned in one of his textbooks, and he found it impossible to understand.

  “What are these things called ‘tax’?” he wanted to know. “Why do people pay this money to the government?”

  Katie tried to explain, but she felt stuck on what she should and should not say. She was worried that perhaps the student had been testing her and would write up a report on her. We circled the campus a couple of times, discussing how to best deal with the situation.

  Finally, we decided that I should eat with him to see if she should worry about any of it. So, at the next meal, Katie pointed him out to me, and I approached him and asked if I might join him. He seemed surprised and pleased and introduced himself. His name was Ryu Ji-hoon. His English was good, so maybe he was a sophomore.

  He was not interested in small talk. As soon as we sat down, he told me that one of his teachers had insisted that both humans and animals were capable of creativity. However, he thought that only humans could be creative. What were my thoughts? I had never thought about the topic until that moment and told him as much. I said I could not be sure, but dolphins, for example, were known for being very intelligent. But I felt that he was not really interested in my answer, as he moved on quickly.

  “Have you heard of ‘The Song of General Kim Jong-il’?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said cautiously.

  “What do you think of it?” he asked me, point blank.

  I froze. Complete honesty was out of the question, but I wanted to answer as truthfully as I could. So I said, “You and I come from different systems. Americans have their national anthem. Britain has theirs. South Korea has theirs, too. I understand that that particular song is basically your national anthem, and I respect that.”

  He seemed to reflect on my answer for a while. Meanwhile, the other two at the table looked nervous and remained quiet until one of them blurted out a question about soccer. But this particular student was not deterred, and he shot out another question.

  “National assembly … tell me about it.”

  “National assembly? Which national assembly? Whose national assembly?” I said, slightly panicked. “You mean in South Korea? Or the U.S. Congress? They’re all different, so it’s impossible to say.”

  He was not so easily dissuaded. “Any country, doesn’t matter. Tell me the general idea. You are American, so tell me about how it works in America,” he said, meeting my eyes.

  Uncertain how much I was allowed to reveal, I took a deep breath and answered in the simplest way I knew. I told him that the United States is made up of fifty states and that the people in those states elect representatives to Congress. We have an elected president, too, I said, and that the president and representatives have to work with one another to pass laws. So in fact it is the people who make decisions.

  “But I think the president is the one who should make decisions,” he fired back. “He has the power, no?”

  I believe I closed my eyes in that moment. I felt weak in the knees. Perhaps living among such devout missionaries had made me religious because I broke into a mental prayer then to anyone anywhere to give me the strength to tell the truth. This was the exact kind of discussion we had been warned against. I knew that this student might be trying to trap me, or worse, that I might get him in serious trouble.

  “It’s like this,” I said cautiously. “For example, at this school, President James Kim is the face of PUST, but the real power is not his, nor should it be his. This entire school is about the students, not President Kim. It’s the same in our system. Our country is not for the president but the people. The president is just the face, the symbol, but the real power belongs to the people. The people make the decisions.”

  What I had just described was, more or less, democracy. I could not read the expression on his face, but almost immediately afterward he said, “Thank you, Professor. I do not want to take up too much of your
time. It was my pleasure to have dinner with you.”

  That evening, Katie and I circled the campus a few times again, discussing our growing fears about his motives. Perhaps he was on a mission to earn some sort of reward by trading information about us.

  “So what?” Katie said. “The most they could do is deport us. So we get deported and get sent home, which would be just fine. But what if that’s not the case? What if he’s genuinely curious?”

  The second scenario made us both grim. What if we were the instigators of his doubt, what if he was beginning to realize that everything he had known thus far was a lie, and that we were the ones who held the key to truth? We agreed that we would never sit with him again, not even if he asked. “A dinner with us might get him killed,” Katie said. I wanted to dismiss the comment as the melodrama of a twenty-three-year-old, but I knew it wasn’t that. In North Korea, such a consequence was entirely possible.

  THE NEXT DAY, I was almost done with dinner when a student approached and pulled up a chair. He had heard from a group of students that I had said animals demonstrated creativity, and he wanted to refute the idea. I burst out laughing and told him that I had never studied animal intelligence or behavior and had only been guessing. I told him I had simply pointed out that among the millions of species of animals, some, like dolphins, were known to be smarter than others. He seemed greatly disturbed by this and pointed out that clever and creative were two different things, and then proceeded to tell a long story involving a monkey, to illustrate the point that animals could not think creatively. Other students gathered around us and chimed in. They had all majored in some discipline within science and technology and had a lot to say about the creativity of animals versus the creativity of humans.

  “Well, you are all philosophers, and so to each his own,” I finally said. “We as humans are imperfect. We are changing so rapidly, every second, every month, every year. Look at the way technology is altering the way we think about everything. Perhaps the study of animals is changing too, and we can’t really rely on discoveries that are many years old. I think being human, with an infinitely expanding mind, means being open-minded. I’d like to be open-minded about this question.”

  They seemed amused by my answer, and mildly satisfied. Then one of them leaned in and said, “I am Ji-hoon’s roommate, and he is with you.” This was so unexpected that at first I was not sure if I had heard him right.

  “Ji-hoon’s with me?” I said, haltingly.

  “Yes, he thinks like you,” he said shyly.

  That night I lay awake, unable to fall asleep. I was anxious and scared. Our fears and hopes were justified: Ji-hoon was thirsty for information, not trapping us to make a report. Perhaps this was why the regime had shut down universities across the country. Perhaps some small efforts to overthrow the dictatorship of the Great Leader had begun percolating in some corners of this oblique country—the beginnings of a North Korean Spring.

  Katie had said that we could get him killed, and that we shouldn’t talk to him anymore. But if we did not talk to him and avoided giving him any more information, then what was I doing here?

  It was the parents of our students who were at the helm of this country, responsible for making it the way it was, and these very young men would inherit that task. Most of them were being groomed to hold top positions and to help their Precious Leader suppress and isolate the people, which would ensure that he remained in power. Such was the prescribed course of their futures as the offspring of the privileged class. Such was the best-case scenario. And, as their teachers, we were the ones who would arm these young men with enough English to combat the world they were conditioned to view as the enemy.

  Until then I had hoped that perhaps I could change one student, open up one path of understanding. But what kind of a future did I envision for the one student I reached? Opening up this country would mean sacrificing these lives. Opening up this country would mean the blood of my beautiful students. I recalled Ji-hoon’s face and tried not to think of the terrible consequences, and that night, and many nights afterward, passed like this in Pyongyang. This particular night there was an endless, mournful rain. Fear can creep up on you anywhere, but when it does in North Korea it is a lonely feeling.

  I gave up trying to sleep and turned on the TV. CNN Asia reported heavy rain in all of East Asia, eastern China, and most of South Korea. “How about North Korea?” the anchor asked. The question sounded almost cheeky, and the weather woman replied, “Probably. It was raining last week, but that information alone took four days for us to obtain, so we just don’t know!”

  From that night on, when I looked at the faces of my boys, I would think—and then try not to think—of what lay ahead for them. One of the vocabulary words I had to teach them was fleeting. I would use the phrase “Youth is fleeting,” and while gazing at them, repeating the phrase aloud, I would think how much briefer their youth was than that of young men their age back home. But I did not like to reflect on this. Anytime I imagined the gloom of their future I shook it off as quickly as I could so that I could stand being there, in that time, teaching them the English language to the best of my ability.

  Now, a few years later, their faces still come to me, one by one, and this motherly feeling overwhelms me. I taught them how to speak, this strange breed of children, unaware of the world outside. Yet I hope they have forgotten everything I inspired in them and have simply grown to become soldiers of the regime. I do not want to imagine what might happen if they retained my lessons, remembered me, began questioning the system. I cannot bear the idea that any of my students—my boys who so eagerly shouted, “Good morning, Professor Kim! How are you?” every time I walked into the classroom—might end up somewhere dark and cold, in one of the gulags that exist all over North Korea. The thought keeps me awake at night still.

  8

  AFTER TWO WEEKS, THE TEACHERS WERE ELATED TO BE taken on our first excursion outside the city, to an apple farm thirty minutes away. It was a weekend, yet on either side of us we saw people working in fields so lusciously green that they looked as though they had been painted. For a moment, the stories of bare land and bare mountains and the SOS from the World Food Program and the sanctions from the United Nations condemning the DPRK for human rights violations seemed like stuff that people had made up out of boredom or malice. For a moment, I wanted to believe what was before my eyes—an immaculate landscape and clean air. I could almost imagine families with picnic baskets in tow on their way to pick apples, but the road remained empty the whole way there.

  At one point, in the distance, we saw what looked like dark straw houses. The minders told us they were part of a model folk village for tourists that was under construction, and that this land had once belonged to the capital of Koguryo Kingdom from Korea’s Three Kingdom Era. For a moment I felt excited, remembering how, as a schoolchild in South Korea, I’d learned about this fantastic kingdom famed for its horse-riding warriors and exotic costumes for much of the first millennium. And here it was, this land still here with the low mountains shadowing the horizon, and green patches of land stretching in front of us.

  Then the bus swerved closer to the edge of the road, and I saw a few people walking alongside it. Their faces were ghastly, as though they had not been fed in years. A skeletal woman held out a pack of cigarettes as though offering it for sale to any passing bus, although there was none but ours. When we passed closer to one of the construction sites, the workers became visible, with hollowed eyes and sunken cheeks, clothing tattered, heads shaved, looking like Nazi concentration camp victims. The sight was so shocking that both Katie and I drew in sharp breaths. We could not say anything or show our feelings, since the minder sat nearby, but we exchanged glances and Katie mouthed the exact word that struck me at that moment: “Slaves.”

  It was clear to me that there was one set of people in Pyongyang—among them my students, the party leaders, the minders—who were well fed and had healthy complexions and were of regular h
eight, and then there were all the other people, the ones I glimpsed through the windows of the bus. On weekend shopping trips, I had seen them on the streets, cutting trees or sweeping the sidewalk or riding trams. They were often bony, their faces almost dark green from overexposure to the sun or malnutrition or something worse. They were generally shorter and markedly smaller in every way, with haunted eyes. The old ones almost always walked stooped, and I always wondered whether any of them could be my mother’s brother. He would have been seventy-five years old if he were still alive, but the more I saw of North Korea, the more certain I was that he could not have survived. They seemed to belong to almost an entirely different race than my students. Yet these people we had just passed appeared even more emaciated.

  We were barely twenty minutes out of Pyongyang. One of the slogans posted everywhere at the school and on the buildings in the city was Kim Jong-il’s dictum “Let’s Live Our Way.” Juche meant exactly that: to live on your own without relying on anyone else. But “our way” did not seem to me much like living on your own; it seemed more like living off the blood of the rest of the country without having to see them. And not relying on anyone else seemed more like total isolation. I thought of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” in which the princes and nobles lock themselves in a castle to avoid the plague, but of course the plague knows no boundaries and all of them succumb to its “darkness and decay.”

  Just thirty minutes outside the city, we pulled up at the apple farm, endless fields of fledgling trees in perfect rows spread out before us. Our minder told us that these hundreds of thousands of apple trees were so special that they bore fruit within a year, while trees everywhere else took several years to produce apples. The farm was about fifteen hundred acres, he continued, and produced thirty thousand tons of 106 varieties of apples. We were becoming used to North Korean hyperbole. A student had once told me that his former college, Pyongyang University of Printing Engineering, was the only such college in all of Asia, and one of only two such universities in the world, the other one being in Germany. Several other students insisted that their former universities were the best in the world for this or that. The idea that North Korea alone excelled while all other nations were falling behind seemed a near obsession.